Neil

I am a child of the 60s, reaching my teenage years during that heady decade when everything in the world changed. After an emotionally traumatic childhood I began to find my own feet: music was so powerful, and remains one of my main sources of inspiration and emotional response. I set off on my own, aged 17, to the Isle of Wight festival to see my hero Jimmy Hendrix, and had my first experience of taking LSD - lots of it, for three or four days of the festival. That changed me, introducing me to a whole new world, and I left home a few months later and moved to London, getting into lots of drugs and two very difficult experiences, but also some good ones. I changed, moved to Scotland, moved from being an urban dweller to a nature lover, and now, fifty years later, I still live rurally and need the intimate engagement with spirit of my organic vegetable garden.

How would you like people to call you (any nicknames/shortening of your name)?
Neil

Preferred pronouns
he / him

What kind of work have you done/do you do?
I trained as a nurse and worked for five years in a cardio-thoracic Intensive Care Unit.looking after people who were often on life support. After five years I was questioning what we were doing, and asking myself some philosophical questions. I recognised the power of self-healing that is born with us, which seemed to have no place in orthodox (allopathic) medicine. After five years I was burned out, and worried about many of the practices, especially the ubiquitous use of morphine as an analgesic which also shortens life, I resigned, travelled with my new wife overland from Glasgow to Cape Town. 18 months later we returned to Glasgow and founded a vegetarian restaurant. Again, after about five years I burned out and had to move on. That is when I did my training as.a homeopath. I still work as a classical homeopath, using the principle 'treat the person, not the illness' and finding treatments that can trigger the self-healing response.

What kind of things do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I maintain an organic vegetable garden, growing most of the vegetables my wife and I eat. Spirit becomes plant, becomes human, becomes sustenance for new growth. My heart and my soul are connected to the Universal spirit through this simple practice of gardening. When I am not doing homeopathy or tending the soil, I walk in the beautiful land of Scotland. I love mountains, beaches and wild camping. I love photography - painting with light - and recording that light in my journal. I love creative writing and have recently begun to (tentatively) write poetry.

What, if any, psychedelic experience do you have?
As a teenager and young adult I took a lot of LSD. After moving to Scotland we picked the little Liberty Caps that grew around us, and often walked in the mountains or along the coast tripped out. I have always had a sense, perhaps through these experiences, that there is more to us than this little human: ignorant, trapped on the surface of our beautiful planet by gravity. I am connecting with my soul and the Universal spirit; this has brought me to Numinous Ways.

What else would be helpful for people to know about you?
My self-confidence has grown recently but can still be a little fragile. I used cannabis for all of my life after leaving London, promising myself I would never do hard drugs again, and since I signed up to this retreat I have been able to give it up. A huge life change for me, and now, two months later, a good one. I am finding parts of myself that I knew in childhood, and will explore deeper during our experience together.

What animal, if any, do you feel most connected to/do you feel best represents you?
I connect intimately with all animals, they are our co-dwellers in consciousness and I need animals in my life, to help me know myself. Which animal represents me? a hard one, If I were an animal I would perhaps be a wanderer, a hunter, an animal that knows the security of the lair. A Scottish wildcat, perhaps - yes, that seems right.

What’s your earliest memory?
Crying myself to sleep. I have been told I was not an easy baby, crying a lot and not sleeping well. I have not changed much in that respect!

Tell us about something you love
I love this Universe in all of its glory. I love travelling and being with different people, understanding their lives and their struggles. I love my wife and our cat (who died three weeks ago) and all living things. I speak to them in my mind, even the stones in the garden know the spirit of being.

Tell us about something which you find difficult
My relationships with my wife and my friends. I am a passionate soul who can love, but it is not always whole-hearted. I hope that will become more whole after this experience with psilocybin. Frustration with the human race can eat at me, the stupidity of war, fear of nuclear annihilation. Anger is not always welcome, and I need to learn to let go, to allow my ego to dissolve into a more harmonious relationship with others. We do not have children and I regret this, and yet I also recognise the freedom this has brought me to explore more widely this world I live in. Two experiences of sexual exploitaton and aggression, from the early days in London, have brought many challenges to overcome throughout my life. I am overcoming their hold on me, initially through psychotherapy, and more recently through my dreams. I can have powerful dreams that come from deep within my mind, these can be challenging but can also bring a huge release.