For those who want to know more about me and my approach to health.


My twenties were mostly spent in a Christian youth and community work organisation called Fusion Australia (www.fusion.org.au). They are still one of the two or three Christian organisations that I respect.

Fusion cared about its staff. It invested a great deal in training us. And the training was of a very high standard. When I discovered the high prices that people were charging for training that was not a patch on what I had had from Fusion I was stunned. People were charging a hundred dollars a day for what we covered in an hours session in Fusion’s training.

Fusion was then headed by Mal Garvin. He was then the most listened to Radio personality in Australia. While running a national youth and community organisation at the same time! He is an extraordinary individual and still I think the most mature individual I have ever known.

My two longest jobs in Fusion were in Brisbane and Sydney. In Brisbane a small group of us were youthworkers. Doing Religious Education in schools, running a training course for Christians and being involved in the youth housing field, as well as much else. It was while in Brisbane that I read Perls, Hefferline and Goodman’s Gestalt Therapy: excitement and growth in the human personality. (Fusion had introduced me to gestalt.) Working through this book (by no means a light read) changed my life. It is still for me the standard for all other psychotherapy books. The theory is still well ahead of current practice (it is now 50 years old) and the exercises are very worth doing. The only book that comes close to being as good (and is much more readable) is James and Jongeward’s Born to Win (Transactional Analysis theory with gestalt experiments).

In Sydney I was in Fusion’s national office. I was basically doing admin. This was OK and led to big changes for me. Perhaps in reaction to being in an office or perhaps because of my Myers-Briggs personality type I started getting interested in physicality. I started wanting to do things with my hands. Eventually I enrolled in a massage course in the evenings in a local school. As I tried to understand how my body fitted in with my spirituality, I formulated a question: if aerobics helps us to be more resilient what movements would help us be more compassionate? At this time I discovered Shintaido (http://www.shintaido-australia.org) which I pursued while in Sydney but largely stopped practising after moving to Brisbane. You may still be able to find the book (just called Shintaido) if you do a google search.

This massage course was the beginning for me of my fascination with the ‘physical’ side of healing (I was already fascinated with psychotherapy). It was from here that I studied more massage (both eastern and western) which later led me into acupunture.

At the end of my time in Sydney it was clear that my interests were changing. I had started taking time out to re-evaluate my spirituality, my interest in a christian physical spirituality was a long way from youth and community work and I had also met the woman I would eventually marry. Everything was changing and it was only through this process that I eventually found what I wanted to do with my life. I mean my own unique contribution, I had already been doing stuff and looking back I was surprised what we in Brisbane had achieved. But now I thought I had found what would be, if not what I would spend most of my time doing, at least the thing that was distinctly me. This was to formulate a christian physical spirituality. I found this on a Taize retreat when I was 32.