I'm David welcome to my website. I've spent the last 23 years involved in the field of energetic medicine. I realised, quite early that health isn't something that can be studied, taught or practiced but is in fact the body's own instinct to wholeness, that was my interest. Very early on in life we are totally natural, we move and express naturally. However, very quickly in the dynamic of standing-up, energy rushes up to the head and there becomes an over focus on the mind and senses. This quickly creates a unique problem for the human animal in that we lose our naturalness, becoming a decidedly different and alien creature relative to everything else around us.
Most of the time we have to find ways of re-entering the natural, so everything I have become interested in are ways of remembering or re-sensing something that we lost in early childhood, this too is the quality of not feeling separate from the world around us.
Health from the old English; hǣlth, means "whole", so there is a feeling of brokenness/ separateness in all dis-ease processes that define a person's identity. The identity acts like a resistor in a circuit. It impedes natural expression and flow of energy. When that feeling of separateness shifts, even for a moment, people spontaneously recover or spontaneously allow the body to do what it does without resistance. From this, my interest became about relaxation and how the deepest forms of that relaxation can take place and how people can return to their senses, guided by their own innate reflex to be free of the feeling of separation. This is a process of re-discovery or remembering, the courses I provide, my love of Qi Gong (Nei Gong/ Dao-yin) and Taiji and information I have gleaned helps to trigger the senses to return. All aspects of what I do come from this same source, just seen from numerous different angles.
This website offers several things;
- Firstly this website provides a place I can offer online and person-to-person consultation in "innate-health recovery" where through one or a number of sessions I can aid you to find your way to your own instinctive patterns of diet, movement, relating, career/ work and everything in between . I call this process "instinct-mirroring". This has been the focus of my own journey into finding resolution of my own issues as well as hundreds of others, so the recommendations I make now are honed.
- Secondly, it is a portal that I may run a number of online courses from. The courses have been created over many years of study and practice. They are all energetic "maps" to help you navigate through a number of different subjects, all associated with a return to the instinctive and away from the tension based religious and scientific world we live in. The nature of what I offer is sense based energetics, it may seem that there is allot of "information" offered in the courses but this is all resolving questions to relax back to sensing, if we can do that already there is no need for further investigation. These courses are for those of us who find it hard to navigate the world as it is at the moment where instinctive-energetics is mostly not given the time of day.
- Thirdly this website is a place I can connect the other parts of my interests together. I offer Taiji and Nei Gong as a means of unlearning tension patterns and reconnecting to natural expression and am also forming community projects.
- Lastly this website offers my video, books, links and other information of people that the work I do or interests I have are connected to. I am extremely rigorous in the links I have so I hope you find further study and interest and this site becomes a hub for anything that resonates with a return to instinct.
While I write my story here for anyone interested, I do so without attempting to validate it. It's just an expression of a struggle to find solace from the one root addiction; that of "myself". A battle that "I" will always loose because, instinctively something feels, that there isn't actually anyone to fight...
I was born in september 1978. My father had multiple sclerosis from before my birth and this was a huge factor of difficulty in my life, but also something that has allowed me to see many things I never would before, in the process of attempting to understand dis-ease and my own depression. I found that I had practical skills with craft work and interests in music, but my drive delivered by my family's situation was very much towards medicine. I went towards Chinese medicine after finding the non-dual philosophy of Yinyang something that helped me out of a depressive breakdown time during my late teens. After this I focused heavily in healing, getting confused as to whether it was I that needed healing or focusing on others. I had always been a carer since I was a toddler to my father, so the carer-healer job seemed to fit. I started practicing Tai Chi at nineteen, then food energetics and Shiatsu and started to learn Xuan Kong Feng Shui and I Ching at this time. I also connected to the message of radical non-duality via UG Krishnamutri from age eighteen through my brother's research, which profoundly touched me and still does now via Tony Parsons. It is a message totally different from all self-enquiry, Advaita Vedanta and other teachings which seem similar but aren't. Something beyond "me" knows this is the message of Tao/ Nature.
The skills I'd learned improved and I started a practice and started treating people. I then decided to study further; acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. After realising that many of the pictures of medicine I had learned were confused by misinterpretations and separations through the history of Chinese medicine, I went to Tokyo to study for three years in apprenticeship to small lineage of the key line of Chinese medicine transmitted through the Zen monasteries to the modern practitioners of "Meridian Therapy". The lineage I found there was as close as there is to the ancient medicine of the Han dynasty, the root of Chinese medicine, where there is a uniform and connected origin that is complete and based in instinctive understanding.
While this picture of medicine was clarified for me, the practice of Chinese medicine is a process of gradual deepening over time and quality and quantity of practice. I understood the direction to follow if I wanted to have uniform success in treating patients. On returning to the UK I started my own practice again and documented a combination of what I'd learned and what was a result of personal research into several books over a seven-year period.
I continued to practice Tai Chi and Qi Gong having had contact with advanced practitioners who came to Japan to teach. This practice was deeper in some ways than what I had been doing previously in the UK.
After some time, I hit one of the biggest walls I have faced in my life; that of extreme grief from the death of my father and then my partner from breast cancer. The effect of both these events began the process of the last few years of my life which was about me finally realising that I had never been shown or given a way to really look at the pain I was carrying emotionally.
I went towards various forms of herbal medicine treatment that I hoped would alleviate my “depression”. This feeling I later discovered could be better described as “Caregiver's Syndrome” and burnout; patterns based around chronic stress at needing to be like a parent in my early youth. Many of the treatments I went towards were psychotropic plant medicines. I felt like I needed something that would simply help me to overcome years of grief that had mounded up due to my life circumstances. I experienced many states on these medicines, but really only once that was so profound it broke the identity I had of myself as a carer, something that was with me from before my earliest memory. It was devastating, and I was launched into an extremely vulnerable state which I did not realise until a long time afterwards. Most of the people associated with the medicines I was in connection with, had very little or no education with traditional herbalists or root energetic medicine and so knew little of the plants they were using. As such, there was very little understanding of my state and more just a hope for the best. In a very open place and drawn into this seemingly magical world of the "plant medicine community", I was encouraged by various people to use my abilities again and so I moved quickly back into a role of carer/ helper and healer, so bypassing the pain I had; a pattern I had done all my life. Without the base energetics of indigenous methods, I encountered whole host of problems over the next few years leaving me and others totally unprotected.
During this time I investigated herbal medicine cultures. I started to find and ask questions to people with actual experience and realised that the people I trusted themselves did not understand the key basics of working with the herbal medicines they used and so put me and others at risk, psychologically and otherwise. At that time I even believed that somehow forming a community around these plants, which did alleviate the depression for short periods, would be a good move. However these ideas gradually crumbled as I felt a deeper and deeper discomfort at the emotional pain I had been unable to let go of because of the rekindling of the carer role. I realised that while these herbal medicines in natural-authentic context could be powerful openers, the confusing roller-coaster ride of the modern "plant medicine" world was another addictive behaviour plus an avoidance of the roots of issues, which I realised, was something I and many others around me were doing, but could not see. Also the total lack of understanding of integration from such work was astonishing, including the complex requirements and time length for each person involved, especially for people with a lifetime of repetitive or chronic stress/ trauma. Once I saw these things, I couldn't continue.
I was however able to understand the nature of many herbal medicines that are quite rare and important for healing but only in the hands of people that really are able to know the root energetic understanding and herbalism of the area of the world that the plant comes from. I have spent some time helping to secure indigenous rights to the plant medicine Iboga for this reason and so some of my time is spent as a co-director to a community interest company called "Blessings of the Forest".
In the last few years finally I have been able to meet the key people and the key plants that have helped me to heal and so to redirect life. I now am happy to say that no I longer consider myself a practitioner of medicine in that I do no physical treatments in acupuncture, massage etc. I’m interested in offering what I like to do, in the form of reflecting/ assessing what is happening for people and suggesting them to feel their own instinctive senses again. This happens in the form of consultations and courses associated with food, movement, and advice on a broad range of subjects covered by Daoyin/ Nei Gong and Tai Chi, Chinese medicine, Feng Shui and I Ching. This more indirect way feels better to me, suggesting what is deeply true from my sense that healing is an instinct rather than it being from the seeming power or ability of a practitioner, "space-holder", “conduit” or any other such hidden hierarchy. This feels more natural to me too and finally I feel like I am gradually more settled and healthier in myself and able to see clearly what I've been through and let it go.
My experiences in life often centred round a feeling of victimisation that I'd had from my upbringing as a carer, bullying in school and the same in my time as a student in Japan and many other places. For many years I saw these things as the reality of my life, that I assuredly was “a victim”. This identity has been the slowest to die aspect but as this lets-go I start to relax and various aspects of myself fall away: hierarchical divisions of "master"-student, practitioner-patient, etc. the breaking down of patriarchal and matriarchal ideology to natural neutral unity, and fundamentally non-treatment based remembering of the instinctive self-healing of the autonomic human animal, underneath the illusion of separateness. This is the natural responses returning to the body, which in itself, breaks the belief structures in the way that come about through various life events. This also means that the process of victim-bully doesn’t repeat any longer as it too falls away.
My depression has alleviated due to three main things: my continued connection and hearing the rarely spoken message of nature via Tony Parsons, my interest in Daoyin particularly, as well at last finding the rare natural essence of Nei Gong and Taiji through my dear teacher and friend Mark Leonard, and lastly through the use of micro-dosing of psilocybin mushrooms.
(Written: April 17th 2020, updated May 23rd 2023)
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