On Becoming - this one really is all about ME!
A True(ish) Tale of Thought, Lost and Refound Imagination and Care
Authenticity, once a watchword for integrity and truthfulness in my inner and outer life, has become for me a much more demanding and radical pursuit. I used to think it meant simply aligning actions with values, resisting conformity, and standing by my principles. But I have come to see that this is only the surface layer.
To live authentically, I have had to begin paying attention not only to the social and cultural conditions that shaped me, but to the nature of my thought itself. Not just the assumptions of my upbringing or education, but every thought that passes through me, every half-formed judgement, every fleeting desire, every mental reflex.
This inquiry has been both liberating and disorienting. It has taken me from the intellectualised frameworks of my formal education into something far less certain, but far more alive: a processual understanding of the self as always unfolding, always in relation, always more than can be grasped in any single moment or model. The route to that insight has passed, curiously, through both philosophy and myth; through politics and parenting; through resistance and return. It has bought me to where I am now, and the work that I am doing.
I spent 7 years at Strode’s Grammar School for Boys, in the company of minds and Masters honed by mathematics, physics, chemistry and an unapologetically conceptual curriculum. Religious education, Latin, art and music were tolerated as tokens of a broader education, perhaps, but not the main event. Football, cricket, cross-country and rowing, were the rightful counterweight to cognitive rigour. Somewhere to place our boyish energies before settling back to our studies. My degree in biophysics and continued sporting achievement later cemented the primacy of mind and body as the twin, and only, pillars of achievement.
Soul and spirit, if they were mentioned at all, came dressed in the clothes of superstition, sentimentality, or irrelevance. They were not to be trusted. They were not, as far as I could tell, real.
And yet, as I look back, there were cracks in that edifice, small points of light in the shadows.
I grew up in Virginia Water, a London suburb split along lines of class so stark they barely acknowledged one another. The Wentworth Estate and its famous Golf Club, home to the materially wealthy, the world-famous, and the politically connected, (Margaret Thatcher held General Pinochet there under 'house arrest' for a while in a splendid multi-million pound mansion) sat adjacent to Trumps Green, the housing estate originally built for the servants, cooks, greenkeepers and gardeners of the Wentworth Estate. I was born in the servants quarters of Trumps Green, yet surrounded by the wealth of the Estate. I had little or no access to that world of wealth, but it loomed large, shaping my sense of possibility, desire, and exclusion. Its symbols were everywhere: gates, uniforms, accents, foreign holidays, polo matches and ‘names’.
One place, small, human, and quietly radical, offered me a bridge. A bookshop, owned by the film director Brian Forbes and his wife, the actress Nanette Newman, became a sanctuary. Under the guidance of Brian and his shop manager, I was slowly steered from the non-fiction section, with its certainties and facts, into fiction, science fiction, and the imaginal realms. These early encounters with narrative possibility offered a glimpse of something other than the rational, material worldview I was being schooled into. But eventually, the bookshop closed, Grammar school pressed in and my curiosity dimmed under the weight of results and reason. The imaginal drifted to the edges.
In the late 1970s, I found rebellion in punk. A sudden, cathartic refusal of the ‘recorder and hymn book’ repertoire of school assemblies. Punk’s raw energy gave me a temporary way out of conformity, but it was rage with shallow roots, and I carried on, through the expected motions of a life shaped by discipline, rationality, and effort.
Masculine energy dominated much of my youth; on the field, in the lab, in the subtle demands of performance and control. And yet, in a formative paradox, my early childhood was shaped in the company of six girls from three closely-connected families. I was the only boy, from birth to primary school, immersed in a world where emotion, care, and relation were not yet coded and theorised as feminine or marginal. That world, which had shaped me before I had the concepts to understand it, was slowly eclipsed by the more dominant models of masculinity I inherited later. Independence, toughness, analysis, achievement.
Looking back now I recognise how the concepts I have picked up that allow me to look back and reflect on that time are incomplete, partial and offer a false clarity of what was back then. The concepts, plucked from an ineffable ocean of non-concepts, had an explanatory power that was comforting but woefully incomplete. This recognition of the very real frailty of conceptual thought, has led to a deep commitment to developing an intellectual humility and superstition of what is 'known'. I see epistemic over-reach nearly everywhere, and believe it is perhaps the single biggest threat we face. As a boy I was often bought to task by the sharp phrase ‘you are not as clever as you think you are’. Half a century later that is truer than ever.
In recent years have I come to see that the feminine energies of that early and formative time, the relational, the intuitive, the imaginal, had not disappeared. They had simply been cast into shadow. I had not lost them; I had banished them.
Just before the first lockdown, in March 2019 I visited High Trenhouse for the first time and met John Varney. John had been a student of JG Bennett who in turn had been a student of Gurdjieff. John gently goaded me into seeing that the flatlands of body and mind were not enough! This re-encounter with soul and spirit, that John enabled was further facilitated by thinkers like James Hillman (1975), Joseph Campbell (1949), and Sharon Blackie (2016) and has begun to reweave my life in ways I could not have imagined. Hillman challenges us to “see through” the literal and re-enter the imaginal. Campbell reminds us that myth is not a retreat from the world but a symbolic guide to its deeper currents. Blackie insists that belonging must be rooted not just in place but in a living sense of participation in, and coherence with, the more-than-human world.
Psychologically, I now understand my journey as one of reintegration. From trying to read Jung, I’ve come to see the process of individuation not as the triumph of the ego, but the ongoing reconciliation of the conscious and unconscious, the masculine and the feminine, the rational and the poetic (Jung, 1953). My evolving self is not a linear narrative but a cyclical movement, marked by ruptures and returns. The 'self' is not a noun, but a verb, always becoming, always contingent always shifting.
This evolution has also drawn me into the ethics of care, particularly through the work of Joan Tronto (1993) and Lynn Segal (2013). Their writing has helped me question the dominance of abstract, universalist ethics, in favour of an approach rooted in attentiveness, responsibility, and responsiveness to context. Care, in this view, is not a secondary moral concern, but a primary way of being in the world. It is a moral posture that begins with the body and ends with the spirit. Indeed this simple version of the great chain of being is something I will return to; Body - Mind - Soul - Spirit. Currently I aspire to personal development for myself and those who work with me, across all four domains.
I find myself drawing on the active imagination not as a form of escapism, but as a means of integration. It allows me to build what James Hillman might call a “poetic basis of mind”, a way of seeing the world not merely as object, but as a symbol, as meaning. In this imaginal world, I find the missing pieces of myself, archetypes, images, feelings, that have waited, patiently, to be re-membered.
And so, this is the tale of my becoming: a journey from the masculine certainties of sport and science, through rebellion and reason, toward the uncertain but vital terrain of soul, spirit, and care. It is not a return to childhood, but a reclamation of what was once lost. It is a movement toward wholeness, not through dominance or understanding, but through listening, feeling, and imagining otherwise.
References
Blackie, S.D. (2016). If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-Changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging. September Publishing.
Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press.
Hillman, J. (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper & Row.
Jung, C.G. (1953). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Routledge.
Segal, L. (2013). Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing. Verso.
Tronto, J.C. (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge.
Whitehead, A.N. (1929). Process and Reality. Macmillan.
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