This is a personal update I recorded in April 2024, reflecting on where I was at that point in my life and work.
Resting in Devon
I was staying in Devon, close to my parents, taking a few days to rest before travelling on to further teaching commitments. Devon in spring is a beautiful place to slow down. I went for long walks along the Jurassic Coast, barefoot most mornings, and spent long stretches napping and simply being with family. I feel fortunate to have a family system that still feels wholesome and welcoming. Going home doesn't feel stressful for me the way it seems to for some people, it feels like a genuine delight.
Returning from Colorado
I'd just come back from the United States, still shaking off some jet lag. I'd spent a couple of weeks at Sunrise Ranch in Colorado running a Somatic Shadow and Circle Work foundations training, co-facilitating with my colleague Sumir. Twenty five of us worked together there, and it was one of the more delightful groups I've held in a long time. It had been years since I'd done a full seven day deep dive in the US, partly because so much of my focus in recent years had gone into building New Eden, our retreat centre in the Netherlands.
Shadow work asks you to look at what doesn't belong, what wasn't allowed, what isn't welcome in you, the parts you deny, exile or make wrong, and to reintegrate those in an embodied, somatic way. What I notice, again and again, is that I can't separate myself from the material I'm teaching. In the days before that training I found myself confronted by my own shadows, the very themes I was about to guide others through. There's a kind of honesty in that. Preparing to teach something often means living it first.
A personal ending
Alongside the professional side of things, I was also sitting with something more personal. I'd been in a relationship since the previous October that had recently come to an end. It wasn't a bitter ending, there was a real beauty to how it closed, but it still left me bruised, genuinely heartbroken. For a long time I hadn't let myself feel my deep yes around family, children and partnering in the way I did during that relationship, and losing that left a kind of residue I was still digesting when I recorded this update. I described myself as a little more internal, a little more introverted than usual, holding the wound close.
Separating my needs from the facilitator role
The update also explores the complexity of working within a community where professional and personal relationships can overlap. I was reflecting on the responsibility that comes with those roles, and on my need for places to receive support outside the groups I facilitate.
What has shifted, over the years of navigating that tension, is that I've built clearer places to do my own work outside of my retreats and events, whether that's one to one therapeutic work or an intensive container of my own. For a long time I got so much from the role of facilitator that I could hide inside it, growing and opening through the work I was offering others without necessarily living a full life of my own outside it. Building that separate space for my own healing has been an important development.
An ordinary life alongside the work
I also spoke honestly about wanting more of an ordinary life alongside the work. I feel genuinely fortunate in my career, able to make an impact doing something I love, and I know that isn't the position most people get to be in. But I was also aware, at that point, of wanting to settle down, to have a family, a place to stay put in, room for hobbies and a slower kind of life alongside the teaching. That last relationship taught me something about needing to take life by the horns personally as well as professionally.
This update didn't have a single teaching point so much as a snapshot of where things stood that spring: full professionally, tender personally, and trying to hold both honestly rather than performing one at the expense of the other.
