I got into spiritual practices as a teenager in the mid 1990’s. My first ‘spiritual experience’ was taking LSD as a 15 year old in 1993. This led to a sustained search for other similar 1st person experiences that took me beyond the sense of identity I had grown up with, such as lucid dreaming. Soon afterwards I was introduced to Meditation in my GCSE drama class. I got hooked and have meditated since then to this day. I was fascinated by psychedelics and did about another 30 years of experiments with a wide variety of substances from around the world. 

After leaving school I travelled widely in Indonesia, India, Nepal, and Thailand which contributed to a fundamental shift in identity. I came back feeling like a citizen of the world and not just English. I was deeply inspired by Eastern spirituality, in particular Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, Zen and Magik. I chose to do a BA undergraduate joint degree in Religions and World music at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. As well as a deep exploration of Central Asian and ancient Indian religions I undertook a thorough exploration of the world’s shamanic traditions. 

After university I visited India another 2 times and went on a 6 month solo wild camping trip to Scotland and Wales as I had a profound yearning for solitude and wild spaces at the time.