Having chosen to undertake an advanced degree at Oxford University, the experience proved to be neither what I expected nor hoped for. Rather than being inspired by my new location and pursuit, I soon found myself feeling depressed, isolated and unsure of what, if anything, the meaning and purpose of my life was. While I had a highly developed ability to rationalise and think, however, I seemed unable to achieve any kind of mastery over these debilitating emotions. As a result, I began to seek means by which I might transmute these painful feelings, both in myself and in others with a similar ambition.

To this end, I became involved with the Oxford Muse, and found immense benefit and clarity came from writing, over the course of a six-month period, a self-portrait. As useful as this was, though, in providing insight and perspective into what it was that was causing my heavy emotions, I felt I still wanted to go further and learn practices and techniques through which I could actually shift them, and thereby achieve self-mastery. Knowing that I did not want to be medicated, and having ambivalent feelings about my experiences of counselling, I decided to investigate what I might learn from the different spiritual traditions of the world.

Initially, I attended a few meetings and practices of an Oxford-based Buddhist group. However, I did not feel a particularly strong connection with them, and what was on offer did not seem to fit with what I was personally looking for. Then, in September 2004, I heard Alberto Villoldo, founder of The Four Winds Society, speak at a conference in Oxford. Inspired by his wisdom, derived predominantly from South America, where I had felt a desire to visit for a number of years, I decided to enrol in the two-year Healing the Light Body School (HLBS).

Having taken the four core courses of the Medicine Wheel, completed master classes in Walking With Protection and Working With The Sacred, and joined an expedition to Peru in June 2005, I graduated from the HLBS in August 2006. In addition, I have also completed the Destiny and Soul Retrieval track, as a result of having taken classes in Advanced Divination and Seeing, Soul Retrieval, and Advanced Soul Retrieval and Destiny Retrieval.

The approach in all these classes, each of which is a week long in duration, is to learn by working both on oneself and on other people. To this end, the last 15 years of my life have been dedicated not only to learning, and achieving professional competency in, different techniques with which to subsequently work with clients, but also to my own healing. Gradually clearing the legacy of wounds of the past, personal and ancestral, embracing my shadow, and relinquishing roles has both helped develop the empathy necessary to assist people with their issues and ensured that in a session there is no agenda or prejudice on my part. My work is thus guided entirely by the client's needs.

To further my knowledge and continue my personal development after completion of my training with The Four Winds Society, I subsequently completed the Sound Healer's Intensive offered by Tom Kenyon in Seattle, in 2006. In the same year I also participated in a Sound Healing experiential that he facilitated in Chiemsee, Germany. I have similarly found several of his CDs, which I have used extensively myself in the past, to be powerful tools for personal transformation. Besides all this, I have also worked with medicine men and women in the Altai Republic, Ecuador, Peru and in the Philippines, as well as participated in ceremonies with Dr Ayahuasca in both the Ecuadorian and the Peruvian Amazon. Many benefits and blessings have also come from visiting sacred sites in the Altai Republic, Arizona, Bosnia, California, Croatia, England, Egypt, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Jordan, Kosovo, Malta, Montenegro, New Mexico, the Outer Hebrides, Poland, Scotland, Serbia, South Dakota, Switzerland, Taiwan, Utah, Wales and Wyoming.

My experiences and healing in the course of training in Energy Medicine gave me the confidence, courage and stamina to complete my D.Phil. in Modern History degree, which I finally did in September 2007. For this I submitted a hundred thousand-word thesis in which the nature and evolution of the transnational cultural relationship that existed between the Irish in the United States and Ireland and its people, in the period between 1891 and 1916, is examined. The factual basis for my argument was archival research I conducted in Dublin, London, and in, over an eight-month period, thirteen locations across the continental United States.

I currently live in Hamburg, Germany, where I work with clients locally, elsewhere in Europe (particularly Switzerland) and around the world.