Wow, just wow - where have the last 20 years gone?

It is rather amazing that on this day, 20 years ago, I passed my assessment for Health Kinesiology and started a journey that I had never foreseen when I was having conversations with career counsellors in school about what I wanted to do when I grew up.

I had some indications that some kind of developmental work was where my interests lay. I thought these were going to be realised as a primary school teacher, which is what I spent my four years of university studying to become. But by the end of those four years, it was clear that it was an unsuitable path for me to take and I was at a loss as to what to do next.

I moved to Weymouth, to be close to Portland for rock climbing in 1999 and discovered two things by the end of that year. The first was NLP, which I did a 9-month residential program with Reg Connelly, and kinesiology, after hearing Sue Lilly give a talk on "Hacking the body's computer", speaking to Sue after the talk gave me my first practical taste of kinesiology and within 12 months I was having regular sessions with Franky Kossy in Shrewsbury, 6 months later I started my training.

But why did I choose to go this route? My attempts at working with young people in both conventional and less conventional settings just hadn't really worked out for me and I needed something that was more fulfilling and suited my unique brain style. For those who don't know, I was dyspraxic and dyslexic and struggled with dysgraphia as well, so academic pathways were very difficult for me, and I felt it wasn't fair to expose children to such poor education.

There was something about kinesiology though that made absolute sense to me and by the time I had attended my first Health Kinesiology training with Ann Parker, I knew this was a route for me. It made sense to my brain, which I now know does very well looking at patterns and following flow diagrams and logic sequences (for example Flat-packed furniture is straightforward for me).

So I worked hard, gave up my job to study full time and just did enough part-time work to make ends meet (kinda, I made a few big debts, but they felt like a fair exchange) and even as a student, I started working for donations by the autumn of 2002 in Health Comes First with Joy Holden, my first clinic experience. 

The rest, as we might expect, is history, kind of. I went on and did more training than I can shake a stick at. If I stuck all my certificates on a wall, it would be a little like this joke scene from the Dr. Cohen scene from the Zach Braff movie Garden State.

Something about this just tickles my sense of humour.

So anyway, over the last 20 years, there has been a lot of development, both of myself, the culture of holistic health and of the people I work with, which currently stands at around 19,000 clinic hours (excluding teaching time and work done for family/friends etc), another thing which amazes me, just the amount of time I have spent listening and sharing the health journies of my clients.

Nothing has given me more honour, humility, sadness and gratitude than to be able to sit with people as we find ways of dealing with the effects of life on their physical, mental, emotional and relational health. 

I can remember reaching a point 2 years after I qualified, having done a fair amount of work, having become a Kinesiology Federation Registered Professional, a significant standard in UK kinesiology circles, one that opened up more clinical opportunities to me, and thinking that wow, I really did have some experience and I could deal with so many things. 

Oh, how wrong we can be and how naive. 

In the process of getting to where I am now, I have learned by making mistakes. I have definitely gone through the fires to cut my teeth in the realm of supporting others, something that without being introduced to Shadow Work (you can check this out in my e-learning platform), I would have never survived and been able to continue working and growing.

One of the great things about time is it allows for experience. One of my favourite sayings is "The Master has failed more times than the Beginner has ever tried!" We simply cannot know how much we do not know until we continue to learn more and see how far we come. One of the things I love about shadow work is that it comes with the concept that the shadow is unconscious, therefore we cannot ever know if we have completed that work, because it exists in a void that we cannot see into, only catch glimpses of when it's in action.

I think perhaps the biggest lesson in getting to where I have got to, is that there is no destination, there is no point where I could say that I've got it, it's done, and there is no more to be done. I might get to a point where I don't want to continue the journey, but that is not the same as there being no journey left to continue.

In an interview, I did last year for Lachlan Dunn (you can listen to the full series in my blogs), he asked me what it was like to wake up. My answer was, which time? There are so many moments of awakening to a deeper version of ourselves, to greater complexity and possibility, that it is never just a single event. Something that was always impressed upon me, was that healing is a process, not an event. And as a process I still walk my own journey, gaining new insights and understanding, which hopefully become useful in the right moments for my clients too.

My advice, after 20 years of working with a full range of people with their health, is to keep going, you never know what is around the next corner.

Step by step, moment by moment, practice by practice, just keep going (or just keep swimming if you are a Doree fan). Keep taking the steps that need to be taken in each moment, keep adjusting to the world around you, find your relative state of balance and alignment, finding what the win-win, for you and everyone is, in each situation. Adjust to the weather around you, like wearing the right clothes for the season, what is the right diet, work, relationship, state of mind, state of being, and attitude that suits where you are exactly now. Accept that it is ok for that to change in a  minute, a month or a year. The road leads on and until it doesn't, there is space for you to do something different that will make your life better than what it was before the change.

And lastly, if you got this far in my ramblings, thank you. 

Thank you to all the teachers, students, clients, colleagues, books, courses, retreats, venues, mistakes, frustrations, insights, transformations, moments of peace and bliss, moments of doubt and uncertainty, moments of breakthrough and understanding and for all the moments yet to come. 

Thank you

You've made my world for the last 20 years and it would have been nothing without you all.

Here is hoping that the next time I write one of these, it will be from an even better and healthier perspective than this one now.

Yours in Health

Ben