Integral Counselling:
Conversations with Gregg

My passion for nearly 30 years has been to animate and support myself and those around me in living a life of depth, integrity, love, artistry and enlivenment. My vocation, (or 'mission') during these years has been to become an environment where healing, grounding and regeneration-in-spirit would occur organically among the people who genuinely sought my support, practices and counsel.

As a younger man I was fascinated with transcendence and a desire to know 'source' — and in this quest I have been significantly blessed. Now at 50-something I am finding the greatest freedom through liberating my relationships — not only with my partner and friends but with 'all that is'. I have learned (generally from being down on my hands and knees) that the trans/personal abides in the interpersonal. For me the loftiest spiritual events revealed the sanctity of embodied relationship. I enjoy, indeed take great pleasure, in passing this knowing on through the intentional co-creation of charismatic presence which I believe is the rarest and sweetest and perfume of relationship and intimacy.

Biography

Since the mid 1980s I've worked and trained as a psychotherapist, encounter group facilitator, breathwork/body worker, charismatic trainer and ritual specialist (I have a PhD in social anthropology and graduate degrees in psychotherapy and a long time interest in clinical spirituality and counselling). I have extensive training in creative psychotherapies, among them - psychodrama, gestalt therapy; provocative therapy, NLP, Eriksonian hypnosis, action methods, co-operative, Primary Theatre, and Boal's Theatre of Desire.

I also have experience in group work training, leaderless groups, and community building group, collaborative groups, Tavistock groups and dozens of encounter groups on several continents. I have been involved in men's spirituality, wonky New Age healing groups, and various shamanistic practices (the most central being with plant teachers), two long-term charismatic groups (15 and 5 years), and for twenty years I facilitated close to two hundred Holotropic Breathwork groups ranging from 2 to 14 days long.

I have lived for several years on several gestalt communities and as an anthropologist researched the history of the transpersonal movement; and women's traumatic and transpersonal events in childbirth; as well as a small project in Buddhist approaches to addiction at a monastery in Thailand. I have given transpersonal training workshops to the staff at a famous addiction hospital. I count myself has a humanistic and transpersonal psychotherapist and a teacher of relational spirituality - I am engaged in private practice in Byron Bay.

I also love to write and research ... and I have written about a dozen academic journal articles on transpersonal theory, practice and history; participatory spirituality; spiritual psychology and childbirth (the subject of my PhD) and a chapter in The Handbook of Action Research with John Heron on charismatic inquiry. I am working on two books at the moment - one on Relational Spirituality and the other on Healing the Wounds of Birth Giving. I was also invited to edit a special two part monograph for REVISION Journal of Consciousness and Transformation (2007) on the subject of participatory and relational spirituality. These editions were compiled as a companion to Jorge Ferrer and Jake Sherman's The Participatory Turn in Religious Studies, Mysticism and Spirituality (2008).