The Foundation and the Flight

There’s a quote from Joe Griffin, co-founder of the Human Givens psychotherapy model I trained in, that I still remember:

“The secret to life’s difficulties is not endless therapy, but a life that works.”

And another line I keep returning to is:

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but an adventure to be experienced.”

At first glance, these can sound like opposing philosophies.

One is grounded, practical, almost defiant in its simplicity. The other is expansive, a little wild, pointing toward something beyond the measurable.

But I don’t think they’re opposites at all.

I think they’re two poles of the same human task. And a lot of us suffer when we collapse into one and abandon the other.

The day the DSM became irrelevant

In my Human Givens training, Ivan (the other co-founder) walked into the room with the DSM-3R — the diagnostic bible with hundreds of categories and thousands of pages for labelling human suffering.

He dropped it on the table and said something I’ve never forgotten:

“This is how we categorise people. But under it all, there’s only three ways people get into trouble.”

One: their needs aren’t being met. Physical, emotional, social. They’re not safe. They don’t have autonomy or respect. They’re not sleeping, not eating properly, not connected.

Two: their capacities for meeting those needs are damaged or being misused. Trauma. Organic issues. Or imagination — a powerful tool — being hijacked for catastrophising instead of creating.

Three: they’re missing information or skills.

That’s it.

Three roots under a thousand symptoms.

It was revelatory. Not because it was complex, but because it was clean. And clarity, I’ve learned, isn’t adding more. It’s finding the deeper pattern beneath the noise.

This is the “life that works” pole.

And it matters enormously.

Because if your foundations are cracked, the whole structure is unstable. And no amount of insight or enlightenment is going to magically turn that into a solid floor.

The mystic who almost quit physics

Nicola came to me with a problem that was a success story from the outside.

A PhD in physics from Cambridge. Young Scientist of the Year. Head of a research team with millions in grant money to solve important problems. Invited to speak and collaborate around the world.

She had arrived.

But she was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choices and opportunities.

And underneath that, something else was stirring: a mystical awakening she couldn’t explain and didn’t know what to do with.

The physicist in her was terrified.

If the mystic gets exposed, I’ll lose all credibility. I’ll be laughed out of my profession.

And the mystic was saying:

We have to quit physics and become a yoga teacher.

She was being torn apart by two parts of herself that seemed irreconcilable.

What we did together wasn’t choosing one over the other. It was integration.

Over six months, she learned to use shamanic tools to access expanded states of consciousness. And tap into an inner knowing her rational mind couldn’t reach on its own.

And something remarkable happened.

She began meeting, in these journeying states, with what presented as the spirits of Einstein and Tesla, discussing her research. She connected with the spirits of the materials her lab was studying.

And far from undermining her scientific work, this gave her tremendous insight, direction, and a felt sense that her research was part of something much larger than career advancement.

She didn’t quit physics.

She deepened it.

Her team grew from six to eighteen people. And she stopped feeling torn apart.

You need an ego before you can transcend it

My meditation teacher used to say something that’s stuck with me: the goal of meditation is to transcend our limited personalities and anchor in something larger.

But you need a functional, intact self to start with.

You can’t dismantle a foundation you never built.

This is where I see people get into trouble.

Spiritual seekers who are so ungrounded, so detached from the basics of functioning in the world, that their seeking becomes another form of avoidance. They’ve done every workshop, read every book, sat every retreat… and still strugggle with jobs, relationships, or having a stable living situation.

The flight without the foundation isn’t freedom.

It’s floating.

And to be honest: I don’t work with many people in that position. Partly because they often can’t afford to hire someone like me.

But more importantly, if someone comes to me in active crisis, with untreated trauma, addiction, or health challenges destabilising their life, I’ll use my tools to help with immediate symptoms.

But I’m clear: they also need the right kind of practical, professional support to build stability.

What I offer is unusual enough that it requires a certain level of groundedness to actually use.

disappointments that saved me

I’ve been lucky and privileged in many ways. And more than once, I’ve found myself in places where the world said: This is it. This is as good as it gets.

And my internal response was always a quiet disappointment.

A sense of: There has to be more to life than this.

That feeling drove me out of business school as an undergraduate and into St. John’s College, where I could dive deep into a liberal arts education that gave me a big-picture understanding of the world.

It drew me to Christopher Alexander’s work in architecture — his focus on the creation of beauty and the nature of order as organising principles.

And it eventually led me to shamanic journeying.

I remember one of my first journeys. It was only ten or fifteen minutes long.

But it was so full of exotic landscapes, beings, and insights into my life that I came back laughing at myself for all the time and money I’d spent over the years on adventure travel and tourism.

This was the real adventure.

Not out there.

In here. And beyond.

The wound beneath the wound

My own path wasn’t a clean path from material to spiritual. For most of my early life, I wasn’t over-indexed on either pole.

I was struggling to function at all.

There was so much trauma and dysfunction in my childhood — which I thought was completely normal — that I was fragile and fragmented internally even while looking reasonably together on the outside.

I was never fully living up to my potential, and I didn’t understand why.

It was only in my early forties that I began to recognise the emotional vulnerabilities and pain I’d been carrying. I did the work. Years of therapy. Eventually became a psychotherapist myself.

I felt like I’d resolved my issues.

And then, in 2008, my life blew up again.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was a therapist. I’d done the work.

But that crisis showed there was something deeper than psychology operating. Something at the soul level that years of conventional therapy hadn’t touched.

That’s when I found the shamanic tools.

And in a matter of fourteen, roughly twenty-minute meditations, using the destiny retrieval process, I uncovered, worked with, and resolved a story in my soul’s history that all those years of psychotherapy hadn’t even identified.

It was humbling.

And it opened everything up.

Both poles, held together

So here’s what I’ve come to understand:

A life that works is not the destination.

But it is the foundation. Without it, you’re building on sand.

And a life of adventure — of meaning, of connection to something larger than your biography — that’s not a luxury.

It’s oxygen.

Without it, you’re surviving, not living.

The question isn’t which pole matters more.

The question is: which one are you neglecting?

If you’re a high achiever who’s ticked every box but feels a quiet hunger for something deeper — something your spreadsheets and strategies can’t touch — that’s not a malfunction.

That’s a signal.

And if you’ve been seeking for years but your practical life is in chaos, that’s not spirituality “not working.”

That’s avoidance sitting on a meditation cushion.

The invitation is integration.

Not choosing.

Not collapsing into one or the other.

Both feet on the ground.

And your eyes on the stars.

What’s your next move?

So I’m curious: which pole have you been neglecting?

Are you the one who’s got the life that works but feels something missing?

Or are you the seeker who needs to come back down to earth?

And more importantly:

What would it look like to hold both?