Soul Work is a Long Haul Flight
Dear Friend and Fellow Traveller,
I’m starting a whole new chapter of Tribe in Transition and I’ll be covering the whole range of experiences that you and I may be having as we navigate our way through the transformational journey – spiritual awakening, the soul journey, moving through the shadowlands and the dark nights of loss and grief, to choose life, engage the creative process, live our passion, do our soul work and co-create a new culture based on the values of authenticity, unity, diversity and embodying the life-love force.
My intention is to explore with you how we can transmute the heartbreak and overwhelm of living in these fragmented and chaotic times by kindling the kind of connection that brings with it a sense of identification and belonging within a like-hearted tribe.
Today I’ll give you a potted history of how the soul work of Tribe in Transition has evolved over the years and why I’ve decided to begin a new chapter now. I’ll be writing about my own journey as an example of a bigger collective unfolding. We are in a process of conscious evolution in which our experiences are both unique and personal and a reflection of a transpersonal story. I’ve come to realise how making the effort to put words to what can be intense or subtle inner experiences always touches in to this bigger collective process and creates a resonance others can identify with, albeit in your own unique ways. That’s why I love this work. Writing and meeting with people in intentional group spaces reveals me to myself just as it reveals our shared journey and the bigger worlds and universes we are part of. We all long for belonging and part of my mission is to keep remembering the mysteries in which we belong.
It Starts with a Vision
In 2005, I published my first book, Migration to the Heartland, A Soul Journey in the Land of the Awakening Dawn. 1 The book ends with this vision:
“ We are inspired by the vision of healing our world and of belonging within ourselves and with each other. We see that we are all perfect fragments of a shattered mirror and that through self-acceptance and acceptance of each other we can heal the cracks, reflect back each other’s beauty and radiate it out as a shining light to illuminate the world. Together we can become the One Hearted People.”
My visions were for the creation of a Soul Sanctuary and a Transformational Learning Community as “experiments in creating the new paradigm of unity consciousness and developing the skills for living on earth in co-operation, co- creation and resourcefulness.”
I’ve carried those visions ever since. They haven’t manifested in the ways I’d imagined – my soul work has had a life and direction of its own – but as you will soon discover they are both very much still alive. Part of my motivation for continuing now is to more fully realise these aspects of my soul’s mission. I’ve also come to understand that it’s not a failure if visions don’t appear in physical reality exactly as we planned. My soul friend Maggie and I spent many hours drawing up a blueprint for a Transformational Learning Community back in 2005 and none of that effort was wasted. In the act of creation, or what we called “bringing down the music”, we are inspired by the evolutionary impulse and bring thought forms through from the imaginal realm to seed them into the collective consciousness where others can find them and take the ideas further. An example of how a vision can move into the mainstream is the Glastonbury Festival held in England every summer. It started in 1970 with 1500 people attending and for a long time was a gathering of hippies and travellers. Now, in 2024, it’s a mainstream event televised around the world by the BBC, with 210,000 people participating and includes diverse artistic and creative projects as well as music.
We are a Global Movement of Conscious Evolution
I made my first online offerings under the banner of A Whole New World in 2007. Those first meetings were thrilling. Back then, skype and zoom hadn’t yet been invented and groups met on the telephone, so we could hear but not see each other. Apparently we were strangers drawn together from different parts of the world but within minutes of speaking there was a resonance, a kindredness, a sense of being cells in a global movement of conscious evolution. Those were inspiring and expansive times. I was living in the USA with my soul friend, Woods Elliott, and we lived and breathed our visions for A Whole New World. All around us the outer world of politics and economics was distressed. The impact of the economic crash, in 2008, was shocking to behold in the USA – a lightning bolt destroying people’s lives – sudden and inhumane. And of course the destruction of the nature and other species, the climate emergency and genocide were well under way. For those of us on a conscious healing and creative path our inner work and different forms of spiritual activism kept us sane and buoyant. The new consciousness – which I came to call Whole Mind-Whole World – is an inspiring, uplifting, creative energy which naturally gives rise to experimentation, different forms of community and co-creation. The people I was meeting felt deep in our hearts that no matter how bad the outer appearances, a whole new world was coming and many of us were already living there. My next book, Living Your Passion- How Love-in-action is Seeding a Whole New World,2 was built around conversations with ordinary extra-ordinary people, mostly from New Zealand, who were changing their communities and the world by living their passion. The new paradigm culture was already alive and well.
In 2010 I returned from the USA back to live in New Zealand and shortly after I arrived earthquakes in Christchurch devastated the city. The following year, Maggie and I were made homeless by hard rain called “weather bombs” which caused landslides and flooding. Both of these were wake-up calls and, despite the shock and the losses, we were held in the arms of community and the faith that this shaking of our world was a birth as well as a death.
In 2012, A Whole New World became Tribe in Transition. I can’t remember now what caused me to make that change but the image of the tightrope walker I use on my banner from a painting, by artist Roberto Weigand, 3 captures the sense I have that walking a conscious path through global devastation and change is a continual balancing act and a series of small daily steps, as we hang suspended above the light and the dark, choosing the light.
Deep Healing and the Collective Shadow
In 2015, I returned after twenty years away, to my homeland the UK, to support my brother through a difficult transition. At the end of that year Woods died and then six months later, my brother David also died, leaving me alone and bereft. Thus began what I came to call my seven years of grief during which I sat with death, and my own personal grief and loss. During this time I also began creating some of the courses which I will soon be offering you, the first being Build Your Soul Sanctuary 4 and I wrote my book, Whole Mind-Whole World, The Power of Wise Choices.5 Then, in 2020 the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown initiated a period of collective grief which included grief for our devastated world as well as for those dying of the virus. I received a call from Soul to put all my educational and therapeutic skills to work in creating grief education and The Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme 6 was born. It grew over the next three years into an ecosystem of courses offered within intentional groups in which we found words for our own grief and listened deeply to the collective process, slowly picking our way through the mud of despair to find the redemptive power in grief.
Integration
In 2023, the creation and piloting of Sitting with Death and Choosing Life seemed complete and I stepped back from community life and spent the next 18 months in a mostly solitary creative process of soul weaving (although during this time I began the Transformational Practice Community 7.) Writing A Story of Transformation, How grieving my brother’s death brought gifts of healing and awakened our power to renew the world 8 was my way of integrating the grief, the loss, the shadow, and harvesting the gifts. This is an essential stage of the transformational process. We need to face into our grief and give it space but not to get stuck there.
Birthing, Breakthroughs and Building
The publication of my book coincided with my 75th birthday and I thought, now perhaps I’ve done enough, now perhaps I can walk away from my computer and spend more time in my garden, with my hands in the earth, up on the headlands or on the beach, or sitting with my back against an old oak tree writing poetry.
I yearned for that more simple state of being but Soul had other plans for me and urged me build on the foundations I had laid over the previous decades. I’ve created a body of work that moves through the process of spiritual awakening and the soul journey, through grief and loss and shadow, towards empowered creative action in the world and the co-creation of a new culture aligned with life. 2024 is a pivotal year in our conscious evolutionary process and it’s time for all hands on deck. I truly believe that each one of us makes a difference and that, despite all the doom and gloom and carnage, as we liberate ourselves internally and become integrated, compassionate human beings, we contribute to the melting away of the old paradigm, patriarchal, power-over world and enable the seeds for a more unified, just, respectful world to grow.
And so I’ve embarked on a steep learning curve – finding clarity and putting together the technological infrastructure to enable me to reach out to more people and extend the wisdom and skills I’ve gathered under the banner of Tribe in Transition. This has empowered me to clear away lots of old cobwebs and doubts that were holding me back. I’m ready to give it my best shot and I’m also planning to get my hands in the earth and lean against that old oak tree as well as being here at my computer talking with you. It is a relief to be finally here, at the beginning again, writing, communicating and connecting.
“We are each a fractal of the greater whole which is always attempting to make itself known through us.
This is a time for gathering in our deepest wisdom.
A time for sitting with death and finding the courage to rest in the unknown.
A time for connecting with our sources of renewal, and with each other.
A time for choosing life. “
“Each one of us makes a difference and together we can do what seems impossible.”
- Migration to the Heartland, A Soul Journey in the Land of the Awakening Dawn, was published in 2005 and is currently out of print. I intend to reprint all of my books over the coming year.
- Living Your Passion- How Love-in-action is Seeding a Whole New World, published in 2008 is also currently out of print and will be republished in 2025.
- Roberto Weigand, artist, https://roberto-weigand.pixels.com/
- Build Your Soul Sanctuary, is a 22-day Transformational Practice offering
simple daily practices and support to connect with your innermost well-being, wisdom and creative vitality. It will be available in August 2024. - Whole Mind-Whole World, The Power of Wise Choices, is available on amazon.
- The Sitting with Death and Choosing Life Programme comprises a ecosystem of six courses: The Foundation Course, The Essential Skills for Grieving Well, Grieving for Our World, Write Your Way Through Grief, Deep Discovery Conversations and the Facilitator Training. I am not currently running the programme as a whole but I will be integrating it into the work of Tribe in Transition and most of the courses will become available over the coming year.
- The Transformational Practice Community currently includes a four month group and a one year group, called The Final Year. I will be offering an introductory session for the next four month group in late August.
- A Story of Transformation, How grieving my brother’s death brought gifts of healing and awakened our power to renew the world, available from me as a signed copy if you live in the UK, on amazon, or Balboa Press.
Image by Henrique Araujo
