I am involved in setting up our local transition town. I became involved because I thought it might be a good way to make a difference and meet people. 6 months later, I am still hopeful, but much of the time is spent wasted in bluster trying to sort out DQ-ER issues rather than ER-FS issues. It has really brought home for me just how hard it is to work in a genuinely FS way when the mainstream is oriented much more towards ER. For example, there has been a lot of discussion about whether we should call ourselves Transition Town Hebden Bridge or Transition Calderdale Valley. As a compromise we are currently calling ourselves Transition Hebden Bridge. This is a really good example of DQ at work rather than FS. Community at DQ is based on divisions and hierarchy, it is all about who you belong to. Community at FS is all about knowing people and as a result every person has their own community of the people they know. For some who come to the transition town meetings, they know more people throughout the Calderdale valley and so they see it as Transition Calderdale valley, for others, they mostly know people in Hebden Bridge so they see it as Transition Town Hebden Bridge. The point is that at FS, it is different for everyone and that is fine. It is more than fine. It is desired. I am not saying that a name doesn’t have importance. It is important to DQ, and many operate from DQ and need DQ structure and it is important that people forming an FS community/society include this, but it is not so important that a big issue should be made of it. It is important that the group discussing and deciding on the name understand this issue.

The whole point of the the transition town movement is to respond to global warming and peak oil. These are two meta problems have been caused by ER values though a disregard for the resource and waste stream and can only effectively be responded to through a move to FS values, which have evolved to deal with the shortcomings of ER values. The transition town movement will thus only be successful if it can embrace FS in an open way.

It might be better if the transition movement moved away from town based nomenclature. At first, this seems counter intuitive to me because using the town name allows people to reclaim their identity and it allows people to locate their town easily, this greatly aids the movement by making it seem to be spreading very quickly as more and more towns turn up on the transition town list.  On reflection though, I think these are appealing to DQ and ER values and are working with DQ-ER psychology not FS and as a result are encouraging a DQ-ER system rather than a FS one. FS spreads virally through grass roots word of mouth, it does not rely on trendy names (ER) or membership (DQ). The group still needs to appeal to ER and FS mindsets, but the way in which it does this should encourage movement to FS organisation. I am not sure how to practically realise this. A part of this would be to organise the website list via a postcode search so that the nearest transition group can be found without relying on boundaried names.

There are other things that give me cause for concern, such as the identity of the transition town movement being fixed in a set of rules rather than being a flexible evolving peer group discussed and edited identity.  Membership requiring filling in a form that is decided on privately rather than openly by a peer group of interested people. There are also many good things about the transition town movement, it encourages grass roots networking and the organisational methods described in the handbook lean strongly towards FS. The website is even based on a wiki. Only time will tell if the movement can resist the urge towards codification and top down organisation.

(See spiral dynamics introduction to understand DQ, ER, FS terminology.)

After a while I realised that my work as a website developer was not really satisfying me. It was strange, here I was working with good people in the eco-sector, yet for some reason I was not satisfied. I felt as if I was on a perpetual treadmill, solving one programing problem after another.

At this point, another strand in my life came to the forefront…

I had been meditating regularly for several years and had become very interested in spiritual healing. I did not really fit into the typical mould of a spiritual healer. I was in my mid twenties and very rational. In the US and other places spiritual healing is often used synonymously with faith healing. If you are from the US then read bio-energetic healing. Spiritual healing is not faith healing; it is not necessary to believe in a particular savouir or religion. Spiritual healing is usually practiced with the client sitting in a chair or lying down on a therapy table while the healer moves around the client with their hands, ‘imagining’ healing energy streaming from a ‘universal source’ into the client. Sometimes the hands hover over the person, especially in sensitive areas, in other cases they may rest on the client. Most spiritual healers do at the least believe in ‘energy’ and ‘auras’ etc, for a short while I believed; the language used by spiritual healers works well within its own world to explain the experience of spiritual healing from a subjective standpoint. I decided to train, and signed up with the National Federation of Spiritual Healers. The training consisted of attending four courses, signing up with a mentor and attending a guided peer group once a month for two years. By a strange quirk of fate the mentor I contacted turned out to no longer be a mentor for the NFSH, instead she was affiliated with the World Federation of Healing. I ended up training simultaneously with both the NFSH and the WFH. I enjoyed this very much, I tend to thrive on resolving differences. The NFSH is a larger organsation, so the courses were more professional and very well led by Daphne Johnson, who was also my NFSH mentor and peer group leader. However it was a large group so I did not receive a great deal of one on one attention. With the WFH I trained with Doreen Fare, a very experienced healer who took me under her wing; I worked with her, at her Thursday clinic for two years, totaling more than 200 hours of one on one tuition. It was a real honour.

Even in my training I was uncomfortable with the physics terminology that was used inaccurately to explain the experience of ‘healing’. Yet at the same time it was a wonderful experience that taught me a lot about myself and others. One moment in particular stands out, it was after a session with Doreen. She said something like ‘There are three important things to remember with spiritual healing.’ She paused. ‘Attunement , attunement and attunement.’ What she meant by this was that the inner process a healer goes through to connect with the ‘universal source’ is of utmost importance. This understanding helped lead me in reinterpreting what spiritual healing means to me in a language that fits alongside my rational understanding of the world in which I want to test everything with a falsifiable hypotheses.

I now describe myself as a non-theist healer and essentially describe my practice as sitting with clients in a deep state of peace, acceptance and stillness. As I sit with the client, I allow them to be, and am accepting them wherever they are in their lives. I find this is the core of how spiritual healing helped me and how I believe it helps others. I do not know how effective ‘healing’ is with physical ailments, although my subjective experience is that in some cases it can be. I could theorise about how in finding peace with whatever the client is struggling with, their body relaxes in deep ways that it does not normally and this in turn allows the immune system to work more effectively. I strongly suspect that it is a very useful therapy for helping people find emotional peace, especially for otherwise unresolvable conditions. I am a coeliac ( I can not eat gluten) and spiritual healing has certainly not cured me of that. However, on the occasions that I have eaten some gluten, healing has helped a great deal in easing the pain, both physically and emotionally.

I say ’sit with the client’, but in reality it is not always easy for a client to sit quietly, so we may be talking, or I may be leading some kind of guided visualisation, or I may go through the traditional motions of ‘laying on hands’; not because I think it is imparting any special energy, but because it provides a safely bounded way of physically touching someone or being near to someone without the client needing to exert themselves emotionally in return. There is no pressure on the client to be a particular way, instead they can be in whatever space they find themselves and I accept that. It is not a passive acceptance however, but a very active engaging acceptance that allows the client to feel ’seen’ in what they are currently experiencing.

I also trained in counseling skills with Relate and took several other supplementary courses such as William Blooms Endorphin Effect to augment my core practice. I also read widely on other therapies and when someone comes to me with a condition that I know can be aided by another therapy or practice (conventional or complimentary) then I suggest it to them.

I do not empirically know if healing works. I would like to know, but it would be very hard to test because the nature of a successful healer (as I subjectively see it) does not just depend on being trained – I have met plenty of spiritual healers who I did not feel peaceful with. It is a quality that is developed through a deep inner practice, developing a peaceful nature in our selves. So it would be very hard to empirically identify ‘good’ spiritual healers to start with. Some healers may also be more successful with some clients than others – due to personality clashes. There have been some studies, but I have not encountered any that tested healing as I define it, or something else in the study made me question its methodology or authenticity, such as a lack of statistical significance due to a low participant size.

Whilst still working at Green Dot Guides as the website developer, a friend from my days as a freelance website developer contacted me. He was setting up a holistic holiday centre called The Spirit Of Life in Greece and he invited me to join him and work as the centres residential healer and course facilitator. I flew over to Greece in the spring of 2003.

It was a very interesting year. It was the centres first year and there were some long stretches between courses where I was entirely alone. There was one five week period early on when I had no phone and towards the end of it the water supply broke for a week; it was a real trial, but it was an experience I welcomed. I spent most of the time meditating, exercising and weeding the couch grass out of the fledgling garden. I became very familiar with the inane chatter that goes on in my mind. When Kerry, came back in preparation for the next course, every word he spoke seemed to be surrounded with eons of space. It lasted for half an hour before my brain started speeding up again. The courses started to pick up steamas the year rolled on and I thoroughly enjoyed helping with them. Kerry is a very giving host, always doing his all to give his guests an enjoyable relaxing experience. I learned a lot that year, from how to navigate Athens whilst driving a mini bus (with a compass), to why olives are not eaten fresh (I have never tasted anything so astringently bitter). More importantly I learned how to work with groups both as a facilitator and a leader and I had the space to learn a lot about myself and how healing integrated into my life.

After being in Greece I traveled to the USAfor 3 months, wondering what step to take next in my life. I decided to go on a pilgrimage across Nevada and into Arizona. I ended up at the Grand Canyon, with snow on the ground, looking out at the sunset and thinking: ‘This is still me, standing here looking at this, I could be looking at a wall in England and it would still be me.’

I decided to come home. I wanted to work in a way that did not involve traveling so much – I was all too aware of the environmental damage. I ended up moving to Hebden Bridge.

My given name is Sky Wickenden. I was named on a ferry on the Irish sea on a misty day. I am not Sky, it is just a name. I am the fingers that type as these words appear on the screen. I am the joy in my heart that is feeling today and the memory of sadness that was felt yesterday. I am the vision of my wife sitting on the sofa and the guilty feeling at seeing the pedometer I received for Christmas on my desk and not having run lately. I am the light from the screen and the window. I am the trees seen outside and the glass of water on the desk, the thoughts of wondering who I am. I am none of these things.

I reside in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, England. I am happy in Hebden Bridge, with friends and social activities, lots of wonderful local shops where I do nearly all my shopping and all of it within walking distance. The wooded valley and the moors above. A waterfall ten minutes walk away. I love it here, have never felt more settled anywhere.

I like to study how people think and feel. To experience and share it. I enjoy finding ways of relating to different perspectives on life.

A large reason for me setting up this blog is to explore how I can interact with the global society we live within, help enable the world to be sustainable and how I can earn a living doing this.