Softness is when your physicality no longer resists your energy. John Kells

I have always loved working with vitalism from an early age, searching for meaning and experience. I started in the martial art discipline of Shotokan Karate as a young man, but soon found Tai Chi with a marvellous teacher called Richard Druitt.  I moved to London in 1988 and carried on with an inspirational teacher called Osman Philips and met some of my long-term friends. Osman had studied heavily with John Kells and also Dr Chi Chiang one of Cheng Man Ching’s main students. I taught beginners in Osman’s class and went on to run my own class at Clapham Yoga Centre a few years later. Whilst in London I decided to study a healing art. Tai Chi for me has always been about “chi” or energy, so I decided to study Homeopathy, which has also become a major part of my life. I moved to Cornwall in 1999 and studied at the School of Homeopathy under the expert tutelage of Misha Norland graduating in 2003, the year my daughter was born. I have been practising Homeopathy ever since and am a Registered Member of the Society of Homeopaths. I am also a Naturopathic Nutrition Advisor  and Counsellor. 

I am accredited as an Senior Instructor with the Tai Chi Union of Great Britain. Over the last 10 years, I have practiced with Angus Clark of Living Movement with lots of work on San Shou, Push – Hands and Sword Form. Angus studied with Alan Peck and also Dr Chi Chiang. I have studied and attended push hands workshops with Andrew Heckert, a student of Tao Sing Ping and his teacher Fred Hao from Taiwan. I have also studied with teachers from the Master Huang lineage and have had numerous other teachers over the years but am now practising Tai Chi Ruler and Fajin with Simon Wyard, a student of some excellent Chinese Tai Chi teachers such as Wu Hao style Master Lui Jishin. Ultimately, it is the Chi itself which becomes the Teacher and the Opponent is simply ourselves.

I find Tai Chi is an essential, vital part of my life and I have a passion for teaching it.  Personally, Tai Chi has given me;  vitality, balance, calmness and connection with nature and the flow of my life plus very strong legs and a strange substantial type quality. 

I am married with two wonderful children who inspire me every day with their vitality. Living in Cornwall I am also inspired by nature and by the sea. I love walking, bird watching and surfing as well as daily practice of Tai Chi and QiGong.

Currently, this poem is really inspiring me:

Book of Hours II, 16 

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing –
each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong too
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

-Rainer Maria Rilke from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Updated 7/7/23..