Gerry is an Integrative Arts Psychotherapist, a lecturer in transpersonal psychology and a teacher of non-dual wisdom from the ‘perennial philosophy’ of Western contemplative spirituality along with earlier and contemporary Eastern perspectives with the aim of supporting the seeker who is searching to understand their true and ultimate nature in order to overcome the disturbance of suffering, false beliefs of deficiency and embrace a life of liberation, connectedness and delight.
When I was a very young child, I had a number of awakenings where the sense of being a ‘me’, a body/mind based finite entity, evaporated in an instance and I became the totality of both the world and the universe (a number of times it ‘happened’ when looking up at the clear star filled night sky). The total dropping away of everything I knew myself to be, as primitive as that was in me as a child, was to become instantly inseparable, at no distance at all, from the infinity I was observing moments before.
I knew that this wonder and awe was God. (God being the only expression or word that was available to me in a very religious Catholic culture at the time when my mind later tried to grasp these openings or epiphanies). It seemed as natural as pursuing art, which was a gift and a passion, I had as soon as I could pick up a pen or a pencil, to become a spiritual pilgrim. The forms of such spiritual seeking took me to studying theology and philosophy as well as living in spiritual community with like minded idealistic souls as well as getting involved in social justice projects such as working and living with people with learning disabilities in community.
Along the way, I was inspired by spiritual teachers from the contemplative Christian wisdom tradition such as; Thomas Merton, Tony de Mello, Richard Rohr, John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart. Discovering the Non-Duality scene, I met teachers such Tom Das and David Bingham who were instrumental in clarifying a lot of my questions and wonderings about self-realisation or awakening. However, the teacher who gave me the final push, so to speak, off the cliff edge of personal identification into the full light of clear, infinite, boundless Seeing was Douglas Harding. I was first introduced to the writings of Douglas Harding in the 80s but it was only three decades or so later that I began to immerse myself again in his teachings, which he termed ‘Headlessness’, when the penny finally dropped, so to speak, as regards my true identity one day sitting quietly on my sofa at home, as non-dual, unconditioned, timeless Awareness.
That realisation or seeing into the simple presence and total boundless emptiness of pure Amness or Unitive Consciousness, described succinctly and elegantly in Yahweh’s words from the middle of the Burning Bush ‘I am, who am’, is so obvious now that all those years of striving and seeking was only a distraction from the obviousness of what had been constant and always ever present as ‘my’ Original Nature. What that has meant for the character of Gerry going about his business from day to day is that letting go fixations of thought, personal doership and the usual preoccupations with self-narrative and commentary is that however life arises now, in whatever form of suffering it manifests, the tranquillity and ease of Pure Being or Presence is constant and undisturbed by such passing ‘windstorms’ of the world’s ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’.