During the Wild Goose Gathering to celebrate Michael’s life in Energy World, during the summer of 2022, in one of the sessions we were asked to take some time to consider how our spiritual paths had developed through or lives.
Through this exercise, I realised that in many ways I have always been drawn to the spiritual and the experience of oneness.
I grew up in the Christian tradition and in my late teens my parents introduced me to the Taizé community, and the pilgrimages organised by Brother Roger, where the prayer hymns and connection with pilgrims from across Europe gave me my first experience of unity.
After that, my search to replicate the experience led me to explore many traditions including Tai Chi, Chi Gong, yoga and early forays into body work. While living in Japan, I was invited to practice Zazen at a local temple and once again I was dropped into a meditative space that changed my life.
From a teleological perspective that attraction was pulling me to the work of Michael Barnett. On my travels, I kept ‘bumping into’ followers of Osho and meeting teachers of Shiatsu and Reiki all pointing me towards energy work and the exploration of authenticity. I could not have known it at the time, but as they say ’all roads lead to Rome’. And Michael was my Rome.
A meeting with Michael Barnett could change your life, it certainly did mine, and from my first meeting with him in 1992, he took me on a long journey and taught me how to explore and teach his work with cosmic energy. In the following thirty years, I would study deep tissue massage, myofascial release and develop a strong yoga practice, but it was all underpinned by the study and practice of Michael’s work.
At first, I was a reluctant student. Naturally, he and his work challenged the structures and opinions that I held on spirituality and enlightenment, and it took a profound energetic experience to shift my perspective. He was both a fearsome Zen master and the most gentle and inspired teacher, and my experiences in his groups were just so radical that I had to keep coming back for more.
When I finally committed, he gave me my spiritual name ‘Abava’, which means ‘Dance your way to God’, and told me that dancing was once way to achieve enlightenment, but what he was really encouraging me to do was to get all of my cells dancing!
Through Michael, I met Tiago, who also had many tricks up her sleeve to get my cells dancing. Eventually, she asked to me to join her in teaching energy work on trainings in the Czech Republic, Ukraine and my home patch in the UK. After ten years of working together, Michael asked us to join his teaching team for the Onelife Personal Trainings, which we did until his death in 2019.
During that time, I started to take my own groups and a new way of presenting Michael’s work and in particular his Body Flow meditation began to emerge. Not surprisingly, it combined the practice of connecting to the cosmos while applying it to a practical earthly situation.
Michael was very particular about how his work was presented, but he gave his blessing for me to use this new way of presenting Body Flow in his trainings and as the basis for my future work.
I also began to explore the connection between my energy work and the work I do in my everyday life, which involves trees, and continue to develop ways of introducing people to mindful nature connectedness and all the benefits that can bring.
After Michael’s transition, we were all thrown into lockdown, but I continued to develop and share his and my work online. It has been amazing what a profound experience this has been for me and the participants, due mainly to the ability of connecting in the zero space that Michael taught us all. And while the online space will continue, it is now time to return to taking the work out into the world again with in person groups.
And this is where the session was pointing to, an understanding that our path is a progression, a continuation of what went before and a step into the unknown, or as Michael would say a ‘jump!’
So, in the summer of 2023, I find myself deepening the Energy Explorations online, exploring the connection between mindfulness and nature connectedness and about to jump back into the world of taking my own groups in the autumn, albeit this time in collaboration with my friend, Supatra.
One step at a time …