The InnerSpace

In 2009, something shifted in my perception. I woke up and the world looked different, not metaphorically, but as if a layer had been peeled back and I was seeing reality at a depth I had not known existed. Nobody could tell me what had happened. No institution had a framework for the possibility that my perception had deepened rather than malfunctioned.

So I carried on with ordinary life. I completed my physics degree at Oxford, went into finance, and eventually started my own consultancy advising some of the UK’s largest companies on strategy and finance.

I spent fifteen years working within the structures of the material world, and in doing so I proved to myself that spiritual experience does not require us to withdraw from life, and is certainly not an excuse for doing so. The material world does not disappear because something has shifted inside us. If anything, the work is to stay grounded, to focus on making our best contribution within the systems and structures that exist today, and to become more fully who we are whilst doing so. As we grow into our creativity, the opportunity to innovate and build something new increases.

In 2020, after years of intense focus on work, I burned out so severely that I lost my ability to walk. I stuck to a rigorous pattern of rebuilding, shuffling a little further each day until I could walk one mile, then two, then three, and slowly back into running and weight training. Willpower got me moving again but progress was slow, with frequent setbacks where I would have to rebuild ground I thought I had already gained. I was functional but depleted, forcing myself through each day rather than being drawn forward by any genuine enthusiasm. Something fundamental was still stuck, and no amount of discipline could reach it.

Then I found the Dalian Method, a transformational process created by Mada Eliza Dalian that works directly with the body to expose and release the unconscious patterns that run beneath the surface, transforming them through awareness into conscious understanding.

Within my first self-led Dalian Method session, something shifted that months of wilful effort had not been able to touch. My energy came back because the unconscious patterns that were suppressing it dissolved.

My gratitude to Mada is deep. I was lucky enough that she accepted me as her student and I’ve had the benefit of being able to learn from her wisdom for over five years. She has helped me to rebuild trust in my own experiences and intuition, which is the greatest gift anyone can ever give to another human.

Building InnerSpace is partly an expression of that gratitude. It’s the least I can do to elevate her work so that it becomes more widely known. I am also creating this because the institution I needed in 2009 simply did not exist. I spent well over a decade in the gap between what I was experiencing and what any system could hold. I do not want others to spend as long as I did there.

For those of us in the cultural West, The InnerSpace Collective is coming into existence at a time in which the fabric of our collective reality is breaking down. I understand how confusing and disorienting that can be, because I have lived through the personal version of it.

When the structures we rely upon for a sense of secure identity stop holding, the instinct is to look outside for answers. What I have learned is that the most reliable ground is the one we find inside. Nobody can ever disrupt those foundations because they are anchored in the truth. The truth is the solid foundation that we need to build something better.