My spiritual story…
My father was a free-thinking Christian, and a man who made his own passport as a citizen of the world. He was very open to discussing matters of the meaning of life with anyone. My mother had a profound spiritual experience early in her life and retained the sense that life is miraculous. We lived in the Pacific Islands when I was a child, in a world in which everything was alive with spirit. So I was born into a world where the numinous was an accepted part of life.
My parents separated and I lived amongst Mum’s friends who ranged from Communists, scientists, Presbyterians, Anthroposophists, and followers of Krishnamurti, Gurdjieff and Ospensky. These women met on a Sunday morning and being an only child, I was allowed to sit in and listen until I got bored. I learned that ideas could influence not only how we see and think about life, but also how we live it. More importantly I saw my mother take these ideas and begin to change her behaviour.
I studied Krishnamurti because of the intellectual challenge of following his ideas, his insistence that truth is a pathless land, that we find our own way through asking the hard questions and listening past our conventional responses to new answers.
I got a complete set of the Maurice Nicoll’s commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Oespensky for my 21st and studied them ever since. At university I studied comparative religion and philosophy.
I became a Christian on the grounds that I needed to belong to some faith so as to avoid creating a religion of my own and falling into the trap of never being called to account by others. I was baptised and confirmed in the Anglican faith and got engaged to a young man studying to be an Anglican minister. Within the space of months I moved from the immense freedom of inquiry I had experienced to a narrow and rigid expression of Christianity when my fiancé became a born-again Christian. I rebelled against the narrowness and misogyny of his faith and left organised religions for life.
In Europe I went to a Tibetan Buddhist retreat for a week where a speaker challenged us by saying, “When we are given an easy life we must use it; for so many all their time is spent in simple survival.” So what was I going to do that was worthy of my easy life?
I met the Map of Meaning the year after its creator, Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, published it in her PhD.
In my work with the Map I found a way to bring my spiritual world and my work together. Twenty-five years later, after co-authoring two books with Marjo, and establishing a small organisation, Map of Meaning International, and having fulfilled my goal of establishing it as a robust organisation I have moved from the position of CEO to working in my own practice, in which the focus of my work is the exploration of the inner journey and the spiritual life, especially as we age.