About

You have certainly had a very full professional life, starting off as a plant scientist, gaining a PhD, then changing tack completely and becoming a qualified Chartered Accountant, Tax and Investment Consultant, finally building your own successful Practice, as well as now being verger at your local church. Phew! That is quite a range of experiences, clearly put to good use in the book. So how did it come about? What inspired you?

The idea first came to me while I was on holiday in Turkey in 2004. I guess I was one of those career women who thought I could have it all, both successful career and family. Perhaps many can do this successfully. With me something had to give, and I was forced into early retirement by mental breakdown and burnout. This turned my life upside down for a while, and I was convalescing by the side of the swimming pool in that Turkish villa wondering what to do next to occupy my time and keep my brain working!

A friend had lent me some of the contemplative books by the Roman Catholic priest Henri Nouwen, including his short bestselling gem, The Wounded Healer. The idea here is that through suffering his own physical and mental wounds the Wounded Healer acquires a special empathy for recognizing and healing the wounds of others. This is embodied not only in the life of Jesus Christ, (probably the most famous Wounded Healer of all time), but in the story of the healing centaur Chiron and the work of the indigenous shaman.

It was the Jungian psychoanalysts who probably first started referring to the Wounded Healer archetype as a recognized tool in the healing process. But it was Nouwen who really popularized the term within a wider spiritual and pastoral healing context when he wrote that book in 1979. And then I came upon Nouwen's biography, Wounded Prophet, written by Michael Ford. And that is what I was reading by the side of that pool.

So where did that lead you?

As I thought more about what I was reading it seemed to me that the compassion and vulnerability of the Wounded Healer could have significance for healing our dangerously fractured world far beyond the realms of the pastoral and medical professions. Because that is where it is primarily researched and understood as a means of healing and where most of the literature is to be found. Where else, I mused, can we find the Wounded Healer in our lives? How, I thought, could we hope to heal this world when so many of us have our own unhealed spiritual and mental wounds, and so much of our destructive behavior is because of those wounds; when for so many of us it is not regarded as appropriate in our working lives to show too much compassion, let alone vulnerability.
But then I realised that the scope of my book needed to be broader, that the motif of the Wounded Healer is but part of the greater need for more spirituality in our lives.
And I really had not realized the enormity of the project I had started. Perhaps if I had known I wouldn't have started it! Who knows?! But I did make a start as soon as I came back to the UK. My researches then took me deeper and wider into so very many other fields, and my varied work life and experiences certainly gave me a head start.

Then I found a quote from a speech Robert Kennedy made in Cape Town in 1966:

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

I liked that idea very much, the idea that we can all start those ripples of hope with some action, however small and insignificant that action may at first seem. In fact the working title of the book was Ripples of Hope. I wanted that title but my publisher O Books didn't like it!

Where did you write the book?

I wrote the book mostly in a really quiet hideaway in Dorset, that I visited for two weeks at a time, and when I was stuck for ideas I would go for a swim or take long walks along the coastal footpaths, often in wild weather, to find further inspiration.

How long did you take to write it?

The book required loads of research. I made many visits to Guildford University library to start with. Then more information gradually became available on the Internet and this enabled me to take my laptop to Dorset as I could always connect up to the Internet for more information if I needed to. And of course communication at a distance is so very much easier now - and getting easier all the time!
So I suppose in answer to your question it was researched and written over 6 years, although not on a fulltime basis. I had my gardens to look after as well.

When I started there was nothing like the media concern we see today over global warming and climate change. But that was never my sole preoccupation and takes up only one chapter of the book. I am more concerned with the need for spirituality in all aspects of our lives - and there is an increasing recognition of a new spiritual consciousness in the world - into which my ideas neatly slot.

Are you following your own recommendations?

Oh gosh I'm no saint and I don't expect others to be saints. Look, the point is we can all at least start ripples�I write in the book about reasons why we do nothing when it is clear that action is needed - ignorance, futility, that sort of thing. Yes I do support my own favourite organizations that work to relieve worldwide poverty, hunger, suffering, or promote interfaith dialogue, for example. I support and follow Sojourners, for example, but everyone will have different personal preferences and that is fine. There are lots of ideas in the book.
The green initiatives for tackling climate change are only part of my thesis, and yes I do try hard to recycle as much as possible, conserve energy, buy the best rated electrical consumer goods like washing machine, dishwasher (yes I know!), kettle, (only boil the exact amount I need), use timer programs to come on overnight at cheap rate, hang out washing when weather allows, avoid packaging and try to shop on the basis of need not greed, buy fair trade goods, all that sort of stuff, and I do consciously combine loads of different errands into each car journey. I did go vegetarian straightaway - I had felt strongly for a long while about the cruelties of farming, and there is no way we can feed the world if we insist on converting plant fodder into meat instead of eating it directly�the waste in food energy is huge if we all eat meat.

Are there other books like yours?

Well yes there are a few on similar lines, but none takes the spiritual and vulnerability idea quite as far as I do. In fact I can find no other book with the same emphasis on exploring the healing idea as catalyst for social change, whilst taking the reader through specific work and leisure situations, appealing to anyone who cares about the future of our planet to reassess aspects of their own lives.

Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' bestselling book To Heal a Fractured World - the Ethics of Responsibility is an in depth exploration of our individual responsibilities to shape the world, but from a reasonably specialised and Jewish theological base, rather than from the perspective of healing (in spite of the title). Mine offers that healing perspective, woven around the image of the Wounded Healer.

There is an increasing interest in all books that consider the future of the world and our place within it, and there are some very good ones, but mostly they concentrate on climate change, not looking at the other issues in society that need healing. Some are doom laden, as with James Lovelock's latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. From a scientific viewpoint I feel quite sure that Lovelock is on the right lines, but my book emphasises the hope that can be found in a spiritual, vulnerable and compassionate approach to life. Jim Wallis in God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It similarly argues for a new spiritual revival to transform society but from a political standpoint rather than in the context and emphasis of individual healing. His latest book, Rediscovering Values: a Moral Compass for the New Economy, supports my views, but as indicated by the title it has a narrower scope than my own book.

So how would you summarise your main message?

The basic message is how we will steer the world's future through personal responsibility and healing using ancient spiritual wisdoms.

But let me expand on that. The world is seriously wounded, threatened by violence, egocentricity and mass consumerism. Government intervention alone will never solve society's problems. We need a bottom up approach, taking personal responsibility for healing on a global scale.

I show in my book how Carl Jung, Carl Rogers, Scott Peck and Aldous Huxley all came from different philosophies and backgrounds but nevertheless they shared a common vision and understanding: they all appreciated the significance, and the potential social impact, of the spiritual growth and health of the individual for the future health of the world.

Never have spirituality and faith and the ancient wisdoms of all the great religions been more relevant than in today's fractured world and we need to appreciate these in a spirit of mutual respect and understanding. More than that, I believe there is an urgent need to integrate ancient spiritual wisdom and philosophy with modern scientific endeavors and rediscover the spiritual in all our material experiences. This is our responsibility and we have no choice if we are to halt the destruction all around us. This is a matter of faith for many and an obligation for all humankind.

Throughout the book I therefore try to weave science and spirituality with philosophy and ancient wisdom, using this potent imagery of the Wounded Healer.

Most importantly I write the book around a message of hope as it speaks to a palpable global shift towards holistic and spiritual values. The hope theme was I suppose inspired by Barack Obama's best seller, The Audacity of Hope, in which he shares personal views on faith and values and offers a vision of the future. Through the healing needs of relationship, our economy, our environment and the living Gaia, creativity in all its forms, and finally the curing professions of pastoral and medical care, I aim to show how we may all become catalysts for social change, for a happier and more peaceful world.
The book has plenty of footnotes and references reflecting the background research, and supporting action. In the final Appendix I provide a comprehensive resource for the reader to use for further action. This tells the story of how I was influenced and inspired to write this book, my own Journey of Hope. It then brings in a few more ideas and fills in a few details on others, and leaves us all fully equipped to start our own mission to heal this fractured world.

What will people take away from reading this book?

Of course if the world benefits then we all benefit.

I really hope that anyone genuinely concerned for the future healing needs of this world will read this. If only more of us would heed these messages, ponder them in our hearts and understand the significance of our actions and our healing; the world would become a better place for us all. Surely we all have this responsibility.
Meanwhile, while we decide what to do, the wounds of the world become ever more serious and the healing needs more urgent.

When you are not writing - what do you like to do?

I just love being outdoors - almost certainly a response to my childhood spent on my father's dairy farm. I was always outside working or playing around that farm.
I had riding lessons recently but wish I had started those as a kid!! It is not, I found, as easy as it looks!
I cycled recently for two Marie Curie Cancer care fundraising events, one from London to Paris and then from Vilnius in Lithuania to Warsaw in Poland, but I broke my elbow at the end of the second day and had to spend the remaining 3 days in the escort van accompanying the ride. That did put me off a little, and anyway there is a limit as to how often you can ask the same people to sponsor you.
I also love gardening, at home and at the allotment and helping out a few others with their own gardens - and I love going back to Dorset, to my writing hideaway, and to La Gomera, where I can write in the sun!!