My strategy led me to a career path I thought would earn me respect, working in London for a reputable charity. I had a 15-year relationship that I invested heavily in, and everyone thought we’d be together forever, most of all me. I had a life that looked worthwhile from the outside by conventional measures… but I lived on the distant edges of Life.

For me, and for many I work with, it came down to two things that had been running me in the background. I'd become so finely tuned to everyone else, their moods, their needs, what they wanted from me, that I'd never developed a centre of my own. I could feel almost everyone except myself, and I didn't know how to withdraw to find my own perspective without disappearing.

Later, I would discover that a lot of what I thought I was feeling in others was mine. Fury. Grief. Disgust. And even joy.

As I grew increasingly tired of holding myself together, the strategies slowly stopped working. Eventually, I had no idea who I was.

All I was left with was a legacy defined by my work achievements, past relationships, failures, inherited beliefs, and what I was for or against.

The problem was twofold: I had developed strategies to cope with what happened in my childhood and mechanisms to make up for what didn't.

What didn't happen was the hardest gap to fill because I literally had no reference point, and largely filled that hole with being liked… and I was good at getting that supply. But the problem of creating strategies for being liked is that it's all about being somebody else. And that takes a lot of energy.

So I decided to become myself, and that was frightening at the start because I really didn't know who I was, and that brought up loneliness, and beyond that, terror. I began to meet the survival strategies I had installed to deal with the absence of love and the heavy sense that I wasn't good enough and wouldn't make it if I was myself.

With a lot of high-stakes trial and error, I would encounter The Pearl Beyond Price (to borrow an expression from A.H. Almaas) or my core nature. You may wish to refer to it as soul.

The key that unlocked the door I'd been hiding behind was connection. I developed the capacity to be with myself at ever deeper levels. To meet myself in the underworld, layer after layer. And, most important of all, someone else was with me while I did.

And what I discovered was so pure, innocent, and electric. In that place, I no longer needed to practice gratitude because it would naturally upwell. Empathy wasn't a concept, and I could feel it for myself. Aliveness didn't require external conditions but an internal commitment. Longing became the driving force of the way I live my life.

It was so simple yet so hard to find, and it still goes missing down the back of the sofa from time to time.

It has absolutely nothing to do with proving your worth, though it may bring greater status, success, and a feeling of belonging as a natural byproduct.

But pearls don't just wash up on the beach. You have to descend deeply, twisting through the black water. And like a diver, you have no way of knowing where the pearl is, but you dive anyway. In a sense, you have to give up a lot to get yourself.

Diving down is the part nobody can do on your behalf. And it's worth having someone dive with you.

If you want support discovering your pearl beyond price, I can dive with you, sometimes sharing oxygen, and sometimes shining a light, so we can see what's getting in the way of you being You.

There are three ways we can do this together: one-to-one NARM-informed coaching, transformational men's work, and medicine-assisted therapy.

Find our more about what I offer Here.