I have followed this work through many doors — fourteen years of service, years of study, a long professional formation. But the moment that changed the direction of my life was not academic. It was two sessions of biodynamic craniosacral therapy, in the difficult years after I returned from Afghanistan.

I came home from that deployment carrying more than I had left with. Hypervigilance, PTSD, a nervous system that did not know how to stop scanning for threat. I tried what was available — conventional psychology, yoga, the usual attempts to think or move my way through it. Nothing shifted in any lasting way. What I mostly did was work hard and use alcohol to keep the feeling at a distance.

But I had always carried a curiosity about the body — about doing things differently, about what might lie beneath the surface of what was presenting. And somewhere in that difficult period, I encountered biodynamic craniosacral therapy for the first time.

“After two sessions, something had moved. Not explained, not resolved — but genuinely different. There was room for hope where there had not been before.”

I signed up for a two-year training. That decision changed everything.

The early world

It was in that training that I first encountered the territory that has held my deepest attention ever since: the prenatal world, the birth experience, and the extraordinary reality of the sentient embryo unfolding within a field of intelligence that precedes structure and gives rise to it.

Pre and perinatal psychology proposes something most of us were never taught — that consciousness begins before birth, that the experiences of the womb and the birth passage leave imprints that shape a lifetime, and that the patterns we carry in our bodies have their origins in experiences we cannot consciously remember but have never stopped responding to. The way we love, fear, trust, and reach toward others. The way we contract or open under pressure. The sense of belonging or not belonging that colours everything. All of it has a beginning.

For me, this was not only intellectual discovery. It was recognition. The hypervigilance I had carried home from Afghanistan had earlier origins. The body had been trying to complete something for a very long time. Biodynamic craniosacral therapy had created the conditions in which that completion could begin — not by analysing the past, but by tending the field from which it had emerged.

That understanding has never left me. It has only deepened.

Fields within fields within fields

Since that training I have been a devoted student of the fields we incarnate into — the prenatal field, the birth field, the ancestral field, the relational field, the field of the natural world, and the larger cosmological field in which all of these are held. From the embryological to the cosmological, the human being is never separate from the larger web of life — only, sometimes, forgetful of it.

I have studied these fields theoretically — through extensive training across the full range of early life material, from embryology and birth psychology to somatic attachment, ancestral patterns, and the spaces between — but more importantly, I have met them experientially. In my own body, in my own history, and in the profound privilege of witnessing others move through them.

This is not a journey toward a credential or a completed expertise. It is a devotion. The prenatal and ancestral fields are inexhaustible — there are always further layers, always deeper ground. I hold what I hold for others from within an ongoing exploration of my own. The work never ends, and I would not want it to.

“I am close enough to the source to be able to guide others toward it — and honest enough to know that I am still, always, on the way.”

The thread of story

Alongside all of this, and perhaps underneath all of it, is the thing that brings me most alive: oral storytelling. Not reading from a text, but the pure oral tradition — where the teller becomes a vessel and the story uses the teller to find its way into the room. This is not performance. It is transmission. The story moves something in the field that explanation cannot reach — that is its oldest function, and why every healing tradition that has ever held human beings through transformation has used it.

Story opens the field before anything else arrives. It moves psychic energy in a room — carries the listener into a different register, a different quality of presence — and from that opened field the rest of the work becomes possible. In this sense, oral storytelling is not something I do alongside the therapeutic and organisational work. It is the breath that animates it.

This is work that sits closer to the shamanic and bardic traditions than to conventional therapy. The practitioner as vessel. The field as the real therapist. The story, the breath, the quality of presence — these are the primary instruments. Technique follows after.

The wider thread

That thread has also moved through the natural world — through ecotherapy, through vision quest undertaken and guided, through ceremony and wilderness threshold. Through years of working in kaupapa Māori mental health and addiction services, where the ancestral and relational dimensions of healing were not abstractions but living clinical realities. And more recently through enterprise risk management and organisational consulting — because the invisible fields that shape individuals and families are unmistakably present in institutions too.

The same intelligence that organises the embryo organises the living system. The same breath of life that animates the body animates the organisation. The same paradox that holds in the therapy room — the tension between the wound and the resource, the seen and the unseen, the formed and the still-forming — holds in the boardroom too. When that tension is held rather than resolved, something new emerges. That emergence is what all of this work is tending.

What I carry into this work

I believe that what is most formative is most often unseen. That the body holds the whole of our history, including the parts that happened before we had language for any of it. That healing is not the elimination of what has been difficult, but the completion of what was left unfinished — in us, and often in those who came before us.

I believe that we are relational beings from the very beginning — that the embryo is already in relationship with the field it is forming within, already shaped by the emotional and ancestral currents moving through the mother and her lineage. And that we are held, at every scale, within a larger field of intelligence that precedes and exceeds us. From the embryological to the cosmological. Fields within fields within fields.

The work is personal before it is professional. Everything I hold for others I have, in some form, been held through myself. That does not make me a finished article. It makes me someone who knows the territory from the inside — and who continues to be shaped by it.

“The practitioner's own field is the first field anyone who comes to this work will encounter. Coherence recognises coherence. The work begins in the one who holds it.”

Formation and credentials

CLINICAL, SOMATIC AND FIELD-BASED PRACTICE

—  Biodynamic craniosacral therapy — practitioner and trainer

—  Pre and perinatal psychology — advanced and postgraduate training

—  Group process work in early life and pre and perinatal experience

—  Somatic attachment and interpersonal neurobiology

—  Field consciousness, ancestral patterns, and intergenerational work

—  Embryology, birth imprinting, and developmental movement

—  Oral storytelling and bardic transmission

NATURE-BASED AND CEREMONIAL

—  Ecotherapy — trained practitioner

—  Wilderness rites of passage — participant and guide

—  Vision quest facilitation in Aotearoa

—  Bardic and Druidic traditions