As a ceremony maker, I take inspiration from the Earth’s cycles of life and death and look to nature’s way of providing a container for every important threshold.
Seeds, eggs, chrysalises, wombs … they each protect their delicate contents while great, invisible transformation takes place.
Within our human lives come similar moments of huge change, like loved ones dying, couples committing to share their lives, babies being born and given names.
In creating ceremonies with people approaching these and other thresholds, I aim to fashion an ark in which to make the crossing, full of nourishment, beauty, mystery and meaning.
As a psychodynamic counsellor, deeply informed by Jung, I specialise in bereavement work when, just occasionally, something gets in the way of the funeral ceremony mobilising a person’s own inner healing resources to enable recovery and creative re-engagement with life.
As an organisational consultant, the focus of my consultancy work is sustainability. My prior long-term career in the NGO sector and as a mentoring consultant focused mainly on diversity; working now towards sustainability extends my interest in inclusion to all forms of life sharing this planet as home.
Ecopsychology underpins all of my work. I wish to foster greater understanding of and re-connection with our real place as human beings within the whole community of life on Earth. Alongside turning to nature for inspiration, nourishment, calm, wildness and reflection, my approach emphasises greater balance and dialogue between the diverse human qualities of cognitive, rational thought, imagination, and rootedness in the body.
In this way, the centre of gravity of our response to the challenges ahead may shift out of the current dominant ‘technological fix’ approach (rooted in our cognitive, rational aspect) and into the heart.
It seems to me that our appreciation of biodiversity, our desire for the rest of life on Earth to flourish alongside us, and our ability to translate that appreciation and desire into how we practically live and work, all relate to how well our inner diversity is flourishing. My proposition echoes that of many ancient and modern philosophers throughout the world: the inner and the outer reflect and feed each other.
For my website, see www.ceremonymaking.co.uk.