pretty much everybody in my peer group as a kid drifted into crime, largely drugs and robbery and stuff like that. And I could feel like the desperation and the probability And so the music thing became a tether. In this episode, I speak with David Field, a somatic experiencing practitioner who was my own therapist and mentor as I got into this work myself, and is just an incredibly important relationship to me personally. But I also have a sense of his impact on other people and that he is something of a authenticity anchor for a lot of people. And is really marching to the beat of his own drum and has his own creative spark, which he's kept alive over many years. And in this episode, we really trace the arc of his life. Starting in the black country where there was no work and he had a job on a factory floor on a building site and he followed a dream to London and became, basically a busking street musician and was picked up remarkably by a music executive who brought him into Warner Brothers and started an illustrious career working with musicians as an A& R man in London and New York and worked for Sony, EMI, BMG, with artists like The Pixies, Bjork, Radiohead, Crowded House, Annie Lennox, Eagle Eye Cherry, Carly Simon, Natalie Imbruglia, and Kasabian. And he would not volunteer such a list easily, and I, uh, don't bring it up on the podcast, uh, because He's an incredibly humble person and he's really interested in impact over status and creativity over competitiveness. But he has had a remarkable career three decades in the music industry that I think informs a lot of his work as a therapist. I think something that's really unique about David is how much creativity he brings into the process. And when you hear him speak, you're going to hear the melodies and the rhythms, and there's a real musical quality about the way he thinks and the way he is in the world. And I think that's really enabling for other creative people to be in the same space with him is to feel a certain vibe and transmission that comes through and is very freeing and very enabling of creativity in yourself. So I hope that you enjoy meeting David, someone who is very important to me, and that you can get something from this.
I'm Stephen Bradshaw, and this is Snowball Psychology.
Steven:David Field. Hello, mate. We're at the start of this project, which is about snowball psychology. And I wanted to have you on very early because of your influence in starting my own Snowball. And just to give a little context, a Snowball is, a life project that starts with something sincere and a felt sense of meaning and builds out into the world without losing that sense of connection and meaning. So I've gone through different phases in my life and we happened to both meet up at a place of transition and you took me on as a guinea pig about eight and a half years ago, as you were going through the somatic experiencing training. And I got to experience your beginner's mind, your fresh encounter with some of that material. I don't know how early I was in your work. I'm guessing in the first handful of people. Is that the case? Yeah. It was a very rich experience and I was an artist at that time and pretty lost in many ways. And your gentle guidance and feedback and encouragement to get a little more out into the world. I think I was very isolated in my art process. And then seeing your example of, working with people and developing me became a model for my own career in this field. I followed the training after you and you told me, okay, now we'll flip it. I'll be the recipient. And that was pretty early for me. I did not know what I was doing at that time, but you were very generous. And so I feel like you've really helped to shepherd my own snowball of my life project. Bless you. Yeah, I really mean that. I don't think I would be a therapist if it wasn't for you. Thinking about this idea of the snowball when I've taken in many of your creative works and we'll get into your background. And I want to talk through a lot of it because it's so rich. You have a lot of lived experience before being a therapist or a practitioner. So when I went through your book that you wrote visible from space, is that available by the way? No, It's not. I'm not really sure what to do with it. It was really for my own edification and clarity but I will extract from it. I am going to use it quite soon, I think. Great. Yeah. So a very rich and storied tale of your life that I appreciated reading, and I appreciate your integrity and purity of process in terms of how you share things and that you do work on things for yourself. And I think that is a lot of the ethos of this project, the integrity and staying in good connection with your muse, with your vulnerable parts, not exploiting yourself. So anyways, reading through the book, I identified three main phases to your life. And the first one was dropping out of school and. Heading into London and busking as a street musician which is remarkable to me to start out that way. And you really followed the muse there, then becoming a music executives and A& R man and working at major labels and, being suited up and in the business world. And then in this last phase, meeting, you as a practitioner, in the mental health space. And so these three phases have each been their own, we could think of them as snowballs, their own journey or arc. And I was curious, as a starting point for you to reflect on each of these three, and think about what was the intention, and how did that manifest, and what were the issues? And then maybe finishing on what's different about this snowball and if it's sustainable in a different kind of way or something is happening now, it wasn't in those two prior phases. They are distinctly different. The core of the snowball in each one is distinctly different. The first one, I mean, I was born into the working class of Midlands of England. But near Birmingham City, an area called the Black Country, so named because everything was covered in soot from coal mines and foundries. It's believed to the Tolkien based Mordor. on the black country, just to put it into context. I take some sort of strange pride in saying that I grew up in Mordor. I don't know why. And so it was an intense and somewhat bleak and harsh landscape made more so by the industrial collapse that Britain went through starting in the late seventies as I was leaving school. Through into the eighties, during the Thatcher era, where the motor industry, the steel industry, the coal industry, the whole manufacturing base of the country was gone. And with it, the the working class franchise, if you like, the working class was disenfranchised and the working class went from being the salt of the earth, the backbone of the country to being scroungers within a very short period of time. Because pretty much everybody from the working class base had nowhere to go and lived on benefits. And the education system in the working class was really very much shaped towards you staying in the working class. Like the options for me really were like woodwork and engineering. There were other things available, but you were pushed towards manufacturing base every parent on the street pretty much worked on it. Every father and some of the mothers too worked at one of the big car plants or some sort of ancillary factory. There was no real opportunity in my home to do homework. So I fell behind in school. I was bright, but I just didn't have the opportunity to keep up. And I think, and some sort of core anxiety set in them because I felt really clearly I was getting left behind. and relied on humor and wit and a fair amount of mischief to carry me through. And I got as far as the final high school exams but didn't take very many of them. I just didn't show up because I just knew, you had to take them by law. But I showed up for just a couple of them and was a no show for the rest and just drifted out of school somewhat unceremoniously. into a short period of unemployment, and then when, like so many other people into the factories, one of the few remaining. Yeah. So that's the phase that I guess I was not counting. But yeah, and from age 11, you worked in a petrol station as well. That's right. Yeah. So I got into adulting pretty early. I worked in a petrol station, a gas station pumping gas on my own. There was no there were no adults there. I used to work on a milk float, which was in England, these electric vans that would drive around and deliver milk to people's doorsteps. And so I used to do that on a weekend as well, and then a paper round, like most of the kids and was buying my own clothes at the age of 11 or 12, just so I could buy the things that the other kids were wearing. But I think I missed out on a, quite an important part of childhood. Because I was working on a lot of the weekends. I don't know if that was really snowboarding, or more just surviving, I don't think there was any real momentum, it just was fits and starts, and it didn't seem to have any fixed point of ambition, it was more just trying to keep up. And so I left school, worked in a factory. It was desperate. It was windowless, extraordinarily noisy. You could barely hold a thought in your head because of the sound of the presses and other machinery just pounding. There were people in there that had been there their whole lives, 20, 30, 40 years. There's some of the women that were in their 70s that had been there since they were 14 and working on the same machines. their whole lives, and not much daylight. And I would, especially during the winter months, it would be dark when I walked to the factory and dark when I left. And I would just very quietly weep to myself as I was walking to work and when I left. Just the desperation, the nothingness of it, sitting at a machine all day. doing piecework, which is where, you're just doing it's numerical and you're supposed to do 1, 000 or 2, 000 repetitions of the same movement to make your numbers, which are counted sort of analog, but it was a digital reader. And And that's what you did. And it was mind numbing. And I'd always been interested in music and wanted to be a musician. And I think it was fairly disassociative as a kid. I always felt like I was on the outside looking in. It was quite a lot of emotional and physical violence in my home. And I think, now knowing what I know, I'm, I was pretty disassociative, and I had real problems sleeping, so there was fatigue as well sleep deprivation and I, when I used to watch the music show in England, Top of the Pops, it was like a religious experience for kids to watch Top of the Pops and it was where the bands of the day would play the song that was in the chart, I would see these artists performing, Bowie was probably one of the principal artists of the day, Brian Ferry and Roxy Music, and other bands, but I would see these artists and I thought, oh, that's, I'm supposed to be there, because they had this other, otherworldly ascendant quality and that seemed to resonate with the disassociative. Obviously, I didn't know all of this at the time. And so I just assumed, Oh, that's what I'm supposed to be. Cause clearly they didn't go to school. They're clearly like the rules of school. did not apply to these people. You could tell by the way they dressed, and so I thought obviously I'm supposed to be in that strata. I want you to tell your story about the belt that you fashioned since you're closing even. That was that was I was trying to emulate Tom Jones, who's still around as an entertainer, Welsh singer, been around since the sixties. And had a bunch of hits about, as recently as about 15 years ago. He's a legend. And I was, blimey, I was not even 10 yet. And there was a girl who lived a street away from ours. And she was 16. Really beautiful. And I knew she was into Tom Jones. And I just wanted to get her attention, basically. I was, I think, 9 years. And so I had this idea Tom Jones used to wear like flares and ruffled shirts and very it was a sex symbol, like a blatant sex symbol and and used to wear these belts with these huge buckles. So I fashioned the belt out of a custard tin lid. The brand was Bird's Custard and it was just powdered custard in a tin and the lid was gold and round and about this big. And I managed to stick some string to the back and I tied this custard tin lid around my shorts. And just waited, because she'd always, she'd have to walk past our house to go down to the town. And she walked by and I just stood there nonchalantly and was convinced she was gonna see the Tom Jones ness in me. Yeah. So you had this, you had already a lot of this impetuosity or rascality and you went for it and your creativity was showing big time. The first, I remember asking my elementary school teacher to come to her house on a date. I was seven years old and I was like, and I asked her if I could have a word with her in private. And I took her outside the classroom and I said, would you like to come to our house for tea? And she was so touched by it. She did. neglected to tell my mom, but she knocked on the door and showed up and had tea which was felt pretty like a big deal at the time. Anyway, yes. Yeah, early feels like your personality that I've come in touch with was already coming through the ability to do things others don't. Yeah, I feel this from you. You've led the way. into the space of mental health that enabled people like me and others to follow behind. I think it was born of definitely a fairly healthy sense of adventure, but also I knew, like I knew really early on, once school started getting more serious. That I wasn't going to be able to keep up. And and that I needed to, obviously this wasn't conscious, but there was some mechanism where I knew I needed to compensate for that somehow. And so it was really, I think, wit. Relying on my wits and absorbing information and trying things and being daring and having to be daring to create any kind of movement. And, not to say that it was in the absence of nervousness. There was plenty of nervousness. There was a great deal of nervousness moving to London. I'd been in, just to go back to your introduction, when I was in the factories and pursuing my idea of I, I need to be on the music TV shows. There were a lot of other kids in my hometown that were in a similar position to me. And we just put a band together, as a lot of kids in the working class, including the Beatles, of course put a band together in order to find a way out. Not everybody's. mentor made to work in a factory or in construction. I've worked in construction as well, and not everybody's cut out for that. And it was really the only other option, that or sports, which is why so many of the great fighters have come from really desperate backgrounds, because you're literally trying to fight your way out. I was in various bands and the industrial collapse deepened and the rising criminal behavior was correlative. And pretty much everybody in my peer group as a kid drifted into crime, largely drugs and robbery and stuff like that. And I could feel like the desperation and the probability And so the music thing became a tether. And it also took me out of circulation because we were rehearsing as a band in my friend's garage. And I was singing at the time in the band. And it kept me out of the way, the other trajectory of the nighttime where everybody else was going the criminal route. And of my peer group, I was amongst a very small minority that didn't have a criminal record. By the time 17, 18, 19. And a lot of my very close friends went to jail, because young offenders, and then there's adult offenders various bands came and went, and then I ended up being able to afford to buy a saxophone. I got injured in a road accident when I was 17 by a careless driver, which took me out and I was in hospital for some time with significant leg injuries. And It took me out for really more than a year, and there was a compensation payout from that. And with that money, I brought a saxophone and learned to play it really quickly because I so badly wanted to. And the saxophone was the instrument du jour at the time. There were a lot of bands with sax players in going into the 80s now. And I learned to play it remarkably quickly. And this perhaps the slower part of the process was getting the musculature in my face to cooperate with what I wanted to do, because it takes a while for that to build, obviously, like any. any muscle group that's not been used for a purpose. And that band started to do well. Like we had started to attract some attention and we got serious management and we were playing in a really good club in Birmingham regularly. And then record company started to see us play and then a lot of drugs came into the band. And it just started to get very paranoid, and very cliquey, and very infighty. And then we got some got some support slots with Culture Club, by George's band, and they were huge band at the time. So we were the opening act, and we were playing in front of thousands of screaming kids. Who were amped to see Culture Club that they would have screamed at anything. And so we were going on stage to this adulation that it's arguable whether or not we deserved it but anyway, we got it. And it was just too much too soon. And the band imploded. And some of the members of the band, were family men and for all of the success that we were having, there was no money coming in. And so they started to make money the best they could largely by illegal means and ended up getting sent to jail. It just wasn't at that juncture. I w it was just exhausting and fraught. And my situation at home was untenable. And I, the same week that my band members had been scrutinized by the law I was refused. Signing on to the doll. There's a piece of paper that you have to sign to apply for the doll for a welfare check, called a UB40, which is where the band get the name, it's named from, and yeah, so their first album, the first UB40 album is called signing off. Cause when they got the record deal, they were able to sign off the doll. So I had no way of making any money. My band just fragmented. And I felt the tension. I felt the tension of the gravitational pull towards criminality through desperation. And I, the, so the snowboard moving to London definitely was a romantic idea. I'd never been, and it was this, I, I just knew it was where musicians were, I was a pretty good saxophone player, and I had this naive idea that I'd be there about a week. before somebody heard about this saxophone player playing on the street and might get invited into a band and then probably invited to stay on somebody's couch and, and etc. And how much money did you have in your pocket? Oh, equivalent to about 30 bucks. And a friend of mine was managing a German rock band, and he had a flat in North London, Finchley Road. It's a tube stop heading north. And he said crash on the couch. And so I did that for a little while and then that fragmented and the bang got dropped and it was really chaotic. They were signed to EMI and and then I was just busking. And I was able to sign on to the Dole in London using that address. And so I was signing on the Dole, trying to help that him and that German rock band and playing my saxophone on the street. And it was an incredible time. I didn't have enough money to really buy. I lost a lot of weight, didn't really couldn't really afford to buy food. And you were sometimes sleeping in by breaking into cars. Was that? Yeah. Did that come a little later when you were there? It was within that time frame Tell that, yeah, tell that story, I feel it's a good one. Cards weren't as sophisticated then and I had a small Swiss army knife that had this little, I still have it, I saw it the other day, and it had a little nail file blade with a blunt end that you could use as a flathead screwdriver, and you could stick it in the door of a mini. And it would just open or a Ford Transit, which is a cargo van and it would just open, and there weren't alarms back then. It wasn't sophisticated enough to start the ignition, but it would get you in the vehicle and it was pretty decent shelter compared to no shelter. And one time I gained access to the cargo bay of a Ford Transit like a delivery van. And you go into this deep rest, but not sleep state or no sleep deep rest, where you're it's like sleeping with one eye open. You're just aware and I was in the back of this van and I heard the door, the driver's door. There was a partition between the cargo bay and the cab. And I heard the door open and slam and the engine starts. And we were in North, Northwest London, West Hampstead near Abbey Road, near the famous Beatles studio. And this van just drove and drove and I was okay, I'm in it now, and watch the, watch London go by through the back windows without moving, just watching. We ended up in diagonally the exact opposite corner of London and East Ham. Which is a working class part of London, where, very close to where West Ham Football Club comes from. And thankfully, he just got out, went to wherever he was going, and I got out and walked all the way back into London, over the Tower Bridge, past the Tower of London. It was the first time I'd seen that side of London. And was walking through the City of London, the Financial District. And where all the civil servants are during morning rush hour. And at that time, civil servants would wear a uniform. It was a bowler hat, a black blazer, a shirt and tie, and really broad pinstripe trousers. And there was just this sea of thousands of men, different age groups, all wearing this exact same uniform who either worked in the bank or in civil service. And I was walking the opposite direction. to them. It was very, and I was like zigzagging and just look and looking at all these people. And it was, I, I didn't, I wasn't widely read enough at the time to think of it as some sort of Orwellian scene, but now I do. But that's a remarkable image. Yeah, that uniformity is gone now. And you also describe the glow of light within pubs and feeling outside of all of that. I've had my own experiences in both London and New York, without much money as a traveler, feeling outside of the contained spaces where good things were happening. There's a there's a real difference being on each side of those walls. Being in the cold is quite something. Yeah, it's probably a throwback to like some genetic memory of not having access to the campfire. But there's something, there aren't that many pubs left and I don't drink anymore anyway but back then it was exactly what the name suggests, a public house. And people would congregate. And it was a leveler, a pub. There were levelers in the UK where you would go into a pub. And some of them were really very old. There are pubs still in London that Charles Dickens drank in, and you would go to a pub and there'd be like barristers, and lawyers, and judges, and criminals, and milkmen and foundry workers, and they'd all be just like in this mingle of this sort of strange, momentary equality and I'm tempted to say brotherhood, but there were really rough places as well quite often. There was a sense of belonging if you were in, if you were in, but you were on the outside at that point. Yeah, flat broke, yeah. And then of course, the reality of my situation, I wouldn't say it was a homesickness, but it was definitely a sense of displacement. And my accent, my, my black country accent marked me instantly as somebody from the working class. And so there was condescension and stigma. Really big stigma, and which even by the time I started to move into the music industry, executive was still there, it was still there, where people would be like, Oh, somebody from somebody doesn't really belong here. It was definitely a stigma attached. So in terms of the metaphor of the snowballs, what would you say the snowflake of intention or the driving force was of that phase? I would say definitely a flight response. There was definitely a flight response and a need to escape. And a sense of nothingness, of blankness, if I stayed in my hometown. I qualified for manual labor and there wasn't any. And so there really wasn't any other option but to to create some literal physical movement. So there was that. And then definitely romance. And this absolute faith in my own ability as a musician. I had this romantic idea of I'm going to be discovered. It might take a minute, but it's going to be one of those rags to riches stories, where the musician was in the gutter, so to speak, and then found his way to, success and those romantic rags to riches stories. Is there any way that could have played out? It did play out. It did play out. As a musician, as I know, we'll get to the transition in a sec. But was that dream set up to succeed? Or do you think I, I think if I'd known a bit more, I think if I'd known enough about like where the rehearsal studios were in London, where I could just rock up with my saxophone and listen to bands that were rehearsing and knock on doors and say, do you need a saxophone player? Can I jam with you? If I'd have had that awareness and sense of, Oh, I need to network. I think it could have played out differently. I just didn't have a clue. You have to remember I was 22 years old from a fairly Or industrial, but somewhat provincial city. From the outside it feels like a higher authenticity, but maybe naive stuff. Oh, yeah. Naivete, yeah. Yeah, for sure. And had the naivete not been there, I don't think I would have ever gone. I would have just, slugged it out in the Midlands and figured out a way of doing some job somewhere, naivete in that regard served me because it was, following a dream that, that wasn't, I call it the hope goggles. I had the hope goggles on and you're willing to overlook the most desperate of circumstances, like sleeping in the back of vans when you've got the hope goggles on. The reality is there to be seen. I just didn't allow myself to see it. Yeah, a reality distortion field. Yeah. It seems to have served you. And maybe it's a good transition into what happened there in London. But it seems to have worked out as you put yourself into these situations. I think so. All of these things are mixed blessings, i, I felt deeply in love with London during that time, deeply. The names were, some of the names were familiar to me because of the Monopoly board and of course the night time news. I had no, no real understanding of what it meant to be somewhere that, A, was a world capital, B, that had that kind of evidential vibrational history. Thank you And in importance, like the permeated, it felt like every brick and every street and I could feel it, I could feel the energy and potential, even though, it was a hard time in England, in the United Kingdom, it was a tough time, but there was potential there. And I felt it and that was unique. That was unique for me to feel to be somewhere I could feel that energetic potential. Yes, putting yourself in that geographic place is probably a big part of your story. It increased the amount of Your perspective, your ability to imagine more. Yeah, and I think to feel more, just to feel that potential, to feel the possibility. It was so exciting and I was not going to let it go. There was no way I was going back. No way. And and so it was a genuine, passionate enthusiasm to find a way of staying there. Which I think was another big factor in that particular snowball. It was like love. And I didn't want to lose that love. I didn't want to lose being in a place that brought me alive in that way. Even though my position was somewhat precarious. I'd felt, I felt alive in a way that I hadn't known before. And I was not gonna go back to something that was, two dimensional by comparison. Not to deride my hometown or Birmingham as a city, just that was my experience, and I think there were a lot of things that played into that, including my willingness to risk myself. And somehow that's, somehow that was met energetically in London. I think it's something similar in New York as well. So should we get to the discovery that happened? Yeah I was playing on the street busking, which is a street musician, and I was playing a piece of music from the, I think the 1930s called the Harlem Nocturne. It's a famous sleazy kind of jazz piece and much favoured by strippers. And somebody stopped, a gentleman, a besuited gentleman stopped and we talked about music for a while, put some money in my case and left. And some weeks later, long story short, tracked me down. We met again. We met at a cafe and he explained to me that he'd been in England looking meeting with, music executives with a view to opening a Warner Brothers office, an American Warner Brothers office in London. It was one of the Warner Brothers labels called Elektra Records and that he'd met several people and basically nobody had made as big an impression on him as I did and so would I be interested. And the first question I asked was does that mean I would need to work in an office? Because in the working class if you leave the factory floor Or you leave the actual construction site and go and work in the office, you've crossed a line. And somehow that was ingrained in me and it was like, yeah. And I was hesitant. And I was also hesitant because I think intuitively I knew I had this strong sense that my musician path would probably come to an end. And he said, look, come to New York, meet everybody. We're just getting the label started again. Come to an A& R meeting, et cetera, and see, and I'd never been abroad. I had to scramble to get a passport. And at the time I had a silver photographer's case, a steel one. Those heavy steel cases to keep cameras in. I had a cheap walkman, pseudo walkman, a bunch of cassettes, and very little else. I didn't have a bank account. I didn't have a passport. I didn't have an address. How many pairs of clothes? One. I was still wearing the same jacket that I wore in the factory and it was still soaked in machine oil. It was like an off green Harrington cut jacket and it looked really tortured and interesting. It reeked of factories. And it was just saturated in machine oil and something that we used to call suds, and suds is, it's a, both a lubricant and a cooling agent when you're doing high speed drilling through metal, or die cutting. And it would just splash everywhere. And so this jacket was just saturated with dried in suds that would dried a kind of a grimy color, and that's, and I was still wearing that same jacket. And and so I scrambled and about two, three weeks later, I was in Manhattan. What do you think that besuited gentleman saw in you? We talked about it after some time later. And it was that I had committed. There's a quote by a jazz musician, Don Cherry, Eagle Eye Cherry and Nanny Cherry's father, late father. And there's a quote from him and he said I realized early on I would either live or die by the trumpet. And I think it was that, that he sensed that I had, it was, this was it for me. It was all in. Yeah, it was all in. It was either going to be musical, or death. And And he sensed that, and he sensed that I understood really early on, having grown up in a fairly bleak environment, the transformative power of music. And I would see it was like a metamorphosis, or like some alchemy was taking place where people would be grumpy and in pain and weary and short tempered and unavailable. And then a song would come on the radio and it would be like, people would all of a sudden, the switch had been flipped and they'd be singing along to that song, the Kinks or the Stones or the Beatles or Shirley Bassey or whatever it might have been Dusty Springfield. It was just this power, this transformative power where a world suddenly became eye deaf and rich with color. Where prior to that moment, it felt. Like a negative space. And then there'd be this, you know, Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water, and there'd just be this. And everybody was like, compelled to sing along with the tragic, poetic chorus, the heroic, I'll be there for you type rallying. You must have been very energetically interesting to him. Very, there must have been a lot of passion at that age. For sure. Yeah, There was an animation, I'm sure, but for sure I wouldn't have been trying, I wouldn't have been efforting, I would have just been speaking about something that meant a lot to me, so I wouldn't have seen, oh, here's an opportunity, or any, it would have just been, this person seems interested in something that is essentially me, that I am alive. I wonder if he was jaded by business types, and there was something fresh and someone not of that world. It was probably one of the sexiest jobs in the world at the time, there was the CD boom, the MTV boom, and everybody wanted to be an A& R man. And so there were a lot of chances. and a lot of poses and a lot of very pretentious and overly ambitious people drawn to it, draw that they didn't really understand creativity or the creative process. They just wanted to be near it. And I was later to find out that was the dominant actually. Yeah. I've heard the term shadow creatives. And, I think that's where some of the exploitative aspect comes in. So you were you're in this jacket that your one jacket, how did you even get started? The first, you need a little bit of money just to show up on the first day in a certain way. Yeah, no, I didn't. I didn't. They put me on a salary that was less than the young lady that was on the reception to the building, considerably less. I think she was on I don't think, I know, she was on 12, 000 a year and I was on seven. And that wasn't in a much, so I managed to get a studio apartment way on the outskirts of London. The other side of Kilburn, Cricklewood which was very much a working class part of London, but still at the time. And I had this little bedsit. Tiny apartment, not much bigger, quite honestly, probably the same size of a, as a transit van. And it didn't have a bathtub in it, it had a tiny shower stall and it was, like a 1970s or 1980s New York hotel room, but not a fancy one, and it was a mile and a half from the nearest tube station, which had you told anybody that in the music industry would have been a course for derision and mockery. The postcode was a course for derision and mockery. My accent was a course for derision and mockery. And in amongst that, I was suddenly immersed into American corporate culture, which I was not prepared for in any shape or form. And yet I could get into gigs free and I could say legitimately that I was an A& R person for Elektra Records, the Warner Brothers Corporation. And and the other bizarre quirk was there was some weird tax thing whereby, They couldn't buy a company car for me. And so instead they gave me a car with a driver. And so anytime I went to a gig, I had a car with a driver waiting somewhere nearby to take me to the next gig. Cause you could go to four, five, six gigs a night in London, but there were that many venues and that many bands playing and Obviously, that was quite something, but I'm sure the driver was making three times more a year than I was. But we became friends, actually. I remember him to this day. His name was Morris. And he was my regular driver and we had some adventures. But so that was a thing, and as a single man, being able to chat to people, chat to young ladies, and what do you do and what do you do? And, of course. I could say I worked at a record label or I'm going to know the gig. Do you want to come on? And this is my driver, Morris, it made a huge impression. Probably not the right one on reflection but, to go from being on the outside of a pub, looking in to being on very much on the inside and at the center of a music venue was a Big transition, huge transition. Yeah. And I recall you talking about this phase of the excitement of going and seeing acts and finding special performers and then, bring them in and just a period of that glowed with aliveness and life. Yeah. And seven days a week, probably from nine in the So hard work was your competitive advantage, it seems. You threw yourself at it. Yeah, and it was easy to do it because I loved it and it was vibrant. It was just alive, and I didn't want to miss a minute. And then and then I was able to experience London somewhat. I was living on my expense account. I couldn't afford to pay rent and buy food. I had a small expense account which was supposed to be used for getting trains and buying tickets wherever I needed to if guest lists weren't available, just basic buying music magazines and I lived on cheap takeaway food for a couple of years. And beer, cause going solo into a club, there's a little bit of social awkwardness in that. And given I had, I was somewhat self conscious about my dress, my accent, et cetera. First thing you do is go to the bar. And I calculated, I was drinking something like 22 gallons of beer a month. It was ridiculous. Like five or six pints a night. I forget what that converted into, but I remember doing the math and it was multiple gallons per month. And I started to get quite ill, and lack of sleep as well. And my flat was very damp and full of mold. And so I just stopped drinking in my late twenties. I was like this, I need to take myself in this more seriously. And I just stopped drinking and got into running and distance running. There's a way of being able to. Stabilize and prepare my body for the rigors that I was putting myself through. It was stressful as well. It was the first time in my life I'd ever had anything I was afraid to lose. And I think that was another factor in that initial snowball. Is the movement is somewhat relatively easy when you have nothing to lose. Anything at that point is a plus. If you're nowhere with nothing, any movement. is going to be met with enthusiasm, not trepidation. And then, so this was the first time, and I'd, and I remember I'd found a way into this through extraordinary good fortune just pure luck. Okay. My life at that point, it shaped my language to be able to speak about music in a way that made an impression. But nevertheless, the encounter was pure luck and I became really superstitious. and courteous to a point of pathology, because I just didn't want to upset the gods of good fortune. And I was very vigilant not to as best I could. Yeah. So this early part of the, your music industry line of work and A& R for those that don't know, is Artist in Repertoire. Is that right? Yeah. So you're responsible for finding the artist. And then back in the day, pre the Beatles, pre Dylan, you would also be responsible for finding their repertoire, the songs that they were going to sing. So there'd be professional songwriters and professional entertainers, not necessarily would you find one in the other. Okay, so those were two categories of people, artists and repertoire. The writers and the artists, yeah. Interesting. A lot of the, like Elvis, didn't write hardly any of his own songs. I think he wrote one, one or two songs in his entire career. It was only in the 60s that singer songwriters and self supporting artists emerged as the norm. So the job changed somewhat and it really became about finding bands and artists and giving them a record deal and then navigating the process of being a small band in Sheffield or Leicester or Birmingham or London, that was playing in a pub with no money, to suddenly getting a record deal, which is, a massive transition, to then working in a recording studio with a producer, a record producer, That they've admired the records of working in a studio that was extremely expensive. Remember, this was analog, so it was tape, not digital, really expensive, and all of a sudden the red light would go on, the recording light would go on, and the realization that what I am about, the sounds I'm about to be make will not only be captured forever. But this'll be it'll go out on a record and a CD and a cassette, and it will not be able to be changed. It's a moment of absolute definition, a defining moment. And it's amazing to see the self consciousness, that kicks in that moment. Because everything is in there. Yes, that's Hello, Graham, such new recording studios back then, there's so much excitement about recording. And so you, so at this early phase of this project, Part of your, say your music career, music executive career. It was still on your authentic core. Still, it hadn't yet been, later we'll probably get into some shadow elements or difficulties in that space, but at the start of it, it was just, you were in the, the gods had favored you, you were where you were meant to be. There was nothing you'd rather be doing and you just. Yeah. Yeah. So that, so in a way that yours, that was a good start, if that was a good thing to be building on, right at that time, although, as you said, there were maybe some structural elements like relying on alcohol or, the probably you needed to grow up in certain ways still. Yeah. Very much oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then the challenges of. It had to be a hit, it's it's one thing to go and find a band and then you navigate through that recording process and the transition and the extraordinary shift in consciousness that's required. Then there's the transition into where art meets commerce and navigating that and success being fraught. Because then there's that, and success never looks like people imagine it's going to, and the work, the incredible amount of work that's required, especially if your record started to happen internationally. It's just unbelievable amounts of work for press, for radio, for gigs, interviews, needing to write the next album whilst you're on a tour bus responding to fans. It's being away from loved ones, et cetera, et cetera. It was extraordinary amounts of work and a lot of bands didn't survive it. A lot of bands broke up halfway through the American tour, first American tour. So you were there for a bridge between the artists and the labels and someone shepherding the process and helping these artists level up. During the ascendant period, assuming it was ascendant, obviously not all bands went on to be successful, there was definitely a need to have you interpret and to act as a liaison and a, and as an emissary. between the artist and the label in, in cooperation with the band's management. But when the success came, there was this strange egoic transition in the artist. I saw this consistently. It went from, thank God you're here to help us, to, isn't it amazing that you got to witness our destiny. It was always going to happen. We were always going to be stars. Wasn't it great for you to be in proximity to that? It must really help your career. And that, and so some version of that shift, that egoic shift, and it's a necessary one. It's a necessary egoic shift to, to believe in that destiny and the, the supremacy of their creative vision. I think it's a necessary enlarging. To be able to cope with the extraordinary demands of success. There's a term adaptive grandiosity. I've never heard it but it's perfect. Yeah, so you think that your ego does need to be able to occupy more territory, be able to hold the front up and to have certain expectations. I don't know if that's true now with social media and the access that people have to artists across the arts where there is more room for humility and candor, but back then, to get the front page of the music magazines, etc. The needed to be that sense of that person's a star, and it's different now. It's completely different now because of the amount of exposure. We know more about choose any artist in the top 10 and we know more about them than we do probably about Aretha Franklin and Bob Dylan and Otis Redding and, because you can't, your act wears out. Now there's forced authenticity. You have to be a little closer to who you are. I think it's more that there's a expectation, there's a pressure to overexpose. There's, you've got to keep, what did, like artists putting photographs on Instagram of what they ate for breakfast or whatever, it's it's it's deconstructed. The mystical and the mythological, it's the mystery, in that regard, I think the magic's gone out of it, where you would have these, as I was saying to you about when I was a kid watching the music shows, there were these otherworldly characters. I don't think that's true anymore. I think what makes them ascenders now, what makes them otherworldly now is the accumulated wealth or the creating an impression of accumulated wealth. So there's a separateness. through material gain, through wearing the brands and having access to the, and that of course is actually a point of artistic expression as well. I've got this, I wear this, I have that, I do this, swagger. Is that too cynical though? Isn't creativity always being reborn? far away from the capital emerged the new sources of creative expression. And then maybe they'll get tainted later, but that there's a refreshing quality. I'm thinking of Jung's story of the spring that gives eternal life. And each time it gets found, humans build up structures around it and fences, and they start to charge admission. And over time, the spring dries out and no one realizes it. So people are still paying to visit a spring, which has no more juice to it. And then water finds a way out somewhere else. Yes, a new spring appears somewhere else and then the whole process repeats. It's a tricky one. It's a really tricky one because And this is probably a much longer conversation than we have time for, but and I don't mean to sound cynical but the depth and the quality of art reflects culture, right? And yes, there are pioneers. Yes, there are people that push it. But I, I don't think there was the tendency toward art for art's sake or celebrity for celebrity's sake then. Of course there were, and there were pop artists and they were thought of as somewhat disposable. But I think there's a cynicism in the process now. There's a story about Man Down, the Rihanna song, which is actually a really catchy tune. It's a good tune. It's an interesting song. It was a big hit, but I think it has something like 20 writers and it went around the world and cost over a million dollars to, to because it's become this. Almost like an algorithm, what people want to hear, and so it's, and so there's that piece to it, whereas when I look back at previous decades, You think about the diversity that existed in music, even within a single genre you know, there's a considerable difference between the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin, they're both rock bands. To go way back but I don't know, but look, the other thing is, I'm in my 60s now, what's happening now isn't meant to appeal to me, and I acknowledge and accept that. When I was a kid growing up with The Clash, and Elvis Costello, and X Ray Spex, and then what came after punk with the electronica. The grown ups of the day were like, What is this? This isn't music, and it's not supposed to be for me. I'm not supposed to relate to it. And I acknowledge and applaud that. I think each generation should have its own sense of itself. And its own access to its own language and its own sense of belonging to its own culture. So that its own unique identity can form and grow and hopefully contribute something. I think there's, a great sadness in the fact that there's not much disbursement of profit to the middle and the lower echelons. And so the artistic development isn't being stimulated. The streaming services don't distribute wealth in the way. I hear a lot of people complain that mainstream movies aren't very interesting, particularly the superhero variety and creative risks aren't being taken in the same way. Maybe the conditions for creativity are less important. supportive, the whole idea of a shadowification of attention and people not taking as deep a dive in the creative process. Maybe there's a structural shift that has happened that doesn't produce the same kind of old growth that used to. For sure. You look at the big movie houses and they used to make films and it would be a Paramount Pictures film. Look at the beginning of any film now and you'll see 10 production companies listed. It takes that many partners now. And there used to be a thriving, Alternative industry of arthouse films that just, that, that money's just not there now. Technology's there for people to be able to make films more cheaply. There's just very little outlet for them and they get lost in the noise of the streaming services and occasionally a film comes through. Nomadland springs to mind, which is quite linear in its story. It's a profound observation. Really powerful it's a mold busting in that sense that it doesn't tick any of the usual boxes that been other films since, but they're still out there and the response to them, the response to anything that has integrity or depth you can see there's still a hunger for it, but I'm also, acutely aware that some people just need to escape, like I, I was never into pop music in the, as a kid, as a music lover, or as a professional. I always worked with artists that had some sort of left of center quirk and uniqueness. But I was also aware that a lot of people just needed, like a Spice Girls or something as pure escapism from the rigors and quite often the The sort of bleakness of just getting by, I don't mean to sound condescending, I'm just pointing out that there are some things I can't fully appreciate. the value of. That doesn't mean to say they don't have value and they have value for different reasons for people with different value systems to mine. It's a fascinating discussion. I think you can, I can see it both ways. Circling back to so you were talking about the, pressures of making a hit. And so it sounds like the job just became more and more intense for you in terms of the actual experience of taking artists into the limelight. The industry started to compress, it was like ever decreasing circles. MTV started to decline. College radio, where most bands would get a foot in the door, started to decline. When I first started A& R, the pressure was, if your band wasn't a success by the third album, they were going to get dropped. And it felt like real pressure. Now it's one single. Maybe two. When Napster appears, it was the beginning of the end, but it wasn't just Napster. It was also that a lot of the creatives had been driven out of the senior positions because they just started to get too mad, with success and started making really foolish decisions. And so they were replaced by. Radio promo people and lawyers in the senior position who had a much more cynical, packaged sausage factory kind of view of art and artists and just whack it out there and see and test records at major stations. And if the major station was like when they were not likely to play this, the record would never come out. So you would be through that whole creative process with the band, and the band has been told on signing, especially if it was competitive, and other labels wanted to sign them. We're going to put everything behind you. We think you're the best band. You're going to be the new U2 or whatever it is. And then if the record didn't test well at some of the key stations, the radio guys would take them into key programmers. What do you think of this? And they'd be like, don't really see it for us. The record wouldn't come out. And you would be the one. That I had that public facing relationship with the band and would be the one that they would be like, what's happening. And in that regard, you were the record label because you were the only person they had access to. That was a brutal position to be in. And MTV was in decline. CD sales were in decline. People were buying less records because you could get them for free through illegal downloading services. Less interesting records were being released. There was a general sense of panic. So even more terrible decisions were being made. Labels were throwing money at bands that they thought was going to be, Oh, that's our one hit for the year. So they would make like multi million dollar videos. And they weren't. And that created more panic and job losses and mergers and mergers. And it just became a smaller and smaller entity. And then, over time, the streaming services started to appear and radio stations disappeared. And so it became quite hard. If you had a successful record at college radio, the college radio format, if you had a college hit and number one or a top 10 record at college, you could sell two, 3000 tickets in the market based on a big college hit. So for a band to come and have an experience in America, like the Sugar Cubes, Bjork's first band, on a 3000, 2000 or 3000 ticket tour, They wouldn't need tour support. It's phenomenally expensive to tour America, but on those kinds of ticket sales and merch sales, it would be self sufficient. That's a big deal. And then you could do it again. All of the, like Simple Minds, Sisters of Mercy, The Cure U2, all of those bands that came through to be big, came through in that sort of way, college radio first build, first album, foot in the door, second album, ideally build, although. A lot of them slumped. Then there was the third album and it had to cross over, meaning crossover out of the college format into a more mainstream radio format. But by then the bands had learned, they'd learned the craft they'd learned, and you had those amazing third albums like U2's third album. Yes. If you get one shot, then you're not going to take the same kind of risks. You're going to mimic more. You're going to play it safer. Precisely. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to make a record based on what's happening now, rather than authenticity. Yes. And your story there about yeah, the tolerance for failure going down. is reminding me of something I heard about Esalen, that people, staff who worked at Esalen used to occasionally go off the deep end, have, basically they were in a very safe environment. And so often their childhood trauma would come up and they would have psychotic breaks or be basically incoherent for some period of time. And it was a fairly common thing for one or two staff members to be, like not completely with it. And that, yeah, and that was tolerated. until the person found their way back and they were healed. And then they, then they became functioning staff members again. And they, there was a major life moment for them. It was very helpful. And I heard that when Esslin was taken over by, the tech manager was brought in and a lot more focus on kind of operations and revenue and all of that, they shortened that if someone, if someone started to act strange, they were pretty much asked to leave the property almost immediately. So there's that shortening and reduction in capacity. that I feel is almost everywhere you look. And I suppose there's a consideration of liability. Is it a liability to have that person? And there's a parallel with that in music as well, or that person made a bad decision, they're a liability. And so yeah. And it just became like the industry then I feel became populated by people who knew how to survive rather than people that knew how to make creative contribution. That's a fairly damning and broad brush stroke statement but sharks Yeah. Sharks and bottom feeders. yeah. Oops. Yeah. But but I think so, of course there's, there are exceptions. And there are some people that I admire that are still in the biz from when I was in it, but not many. So let's transition to the last stage and maybe we should start with, the major life event that led to that. And this was happened, I think maybe about six months to a year before I met you. Is that correct? about a year or so. Yeah. I think I met you during your recovery. I was, it was something that you would frequently bring up and you were aware of a lot of symptoms in your perceptual, field. Yeah. And So maybe you could just describe what happened and how that changed things for you. I'd been in ever decreasing circles in the music industry and probably from 2000 onwards, there was a calling in my own, from my own soul to, to find something else. And I had no clue what that might be, but I knew I needed to find something and was not able to respond to that call. And then., There was no jobs available for somebody at my executive level in the USA anymore. I ended up very reluctantly going back to England in 2001, having lived in California for many years and New York before that. Took a job at a major label in England against my, all of the intuitive alarm bells. And I had an appalling four years of life experience personally and professionally. Came out of that in a state of disarray, started my own label with friends. That ended terribly badly. And to untangle myself and to deal with the extraordinary levels of grief, again from personal mishap and professional mishap, relationship. Issues and whatnot. I decided to throw myself headlong into physical fitness. I'd always been interested in distance running and I got into endurance cycling and joined a team at the suggestion of a friend called the Fireflies and their fundraising cycling team for the city of Hope hospital for leukemia research. And so I joined this team. I didn't even have a bike at the time. I was a runner and borrowed a mountain bike. And of course they all had road bikes. I had no kit or anything. And joined the cycling team, and they'd go on these extraordinary training rides. And really got into that, and I thought, okay, I'm going to do this for a year and work out why I keep finding myself in really desperate emotional depletion and turmoil and anguish. And that, that one year out turned into two
David:years out, and I'd gone from being moderately fit to extremely fit. and was fitter than some of the riders on the team that were 10, 15, 20 years my junior. I was approaching 50 at the time and it turned into something quite egoic and I was really identifying with this sort of fittest 50 year old kind of image. We were cycling across the Alps in six days type rides. And as I was approaching my 50th birthday, I was with Chloe, my beloved partner of now 14 years at the time. And I said to her, I need to stop doing this. It's turned into something that doesn't feel altogether healthy anymore. And I was living again in Los Angeles at the time. And the aggression towards cyclists on the roads was palpable. And I'd had a couple of near misses. I was approaching my 50th birthday and I said to Chloe, I think this Friday's ride will be my last training ride in the early mornings. Something doesn't feel right to me. And I went out on the training ride and we'd done a couple of really steep hills up in the Pacific Palisades and up off the PCH, Latigo Canyon and things like that. And we got to the bottom of the hill and I was like, come on, let's do it one more time. And we did. And we were on the descent, which was steep and quite fast on a residential road. And I stayed at the back because I'd had some first aid training and I didn't talk about it, but I carried a first aid kit in my shirt in case anybody took a spill, so I'd always come down last. And the team went through this narrow gap between cars and dumpsters. And this car just pulled out. He got tired of waiting and drove straight towards me. And it was either a head on collision. Try and fit through the narrow gap between the dumpster and the car, or hit the dumpster. And so I dove off the bike, and as I was diving off, the car clipped me, and I spanned through the air, and then hit the ground pretty hard, and slid beneath, partly beneath the dumpster. And I had a head injury and broke my shoulder, broke my clavicle and had a skull injury and a brain injury and I didn't have health insurance at the time because it was pre Obamacare and because I had that road accident when I was 17, I was considered high risk and couldn't get health insurance. It's a two bike accidents. I noticed that in your story. It's in a segment. And so I was taken to UCLA and the first day was 85, 000 in the head trauma unit. And then they dispatched me. I kept saying, I don't have insurance. And they dispatched me and said, you need to go to city hospital. So they discharged me without diagnosis. And I called city hospital and they said, Oh, it's a 72 hour wait. You'll have to come in and be reprocessed and come in as walking wounded. And the nurse at UCLA said to me as I was leaving, I think your clavicle is broken and you may have some other broken bones. You need to go to hospital. And I was like, I'm not going for 72 hours. And I was really confused. I had a very serious concussion and I thought, fuck it. I just won't go. And I sat on the couch, and then the, everybody was like, you need to go to the hospital. And the team rallied around the bike team, the fireflies. And one of the riders said, we need to get you to a surgeon. And they organized for me to get x rayed at St. John's in Santa Monica. And they were like, yeah, your clavicle's in nine pieces. So I had titanium plates put in, that was 25 grand. And it just amounted to, hundreds of thousands of dollars in the end. And then Obamacare did come in, but my co pays and deductibles every year for the following three years were like 25, 30 grand. And it ended up being something like a quarter of a million dollars. And because I couldn't work because I was in a state of post traumatic stress, post concussion syndrome. I'd had a bleed on my parietal. My optic nerve was damaged. I was in a massive amount of pain. I'd gone from an incredible amount of activity to sedentary overnight, which is the shock to the system. I was hallucinating. I was in a I truly believed that I was in some Bardot state, that I was in some replica reality, that I needed to find a way of breaking through back to the reality that I was previously in. And I was afraid to talk to anybody about that. But for more than a year, it was my secret and I couldn't sleep. I couldn't lie down. It was too painful for me to lie down and I'd probably average somewhere between two and three hours sleep a night in broken intervals. So the sleep deprivation was extraordinary and there was sometimes quite almost like low dose psilocybin type visual interference. And this sense of being in this dream like state and anyway, I had the surgery and because the true damage to my brain hadn't been properly diagnosed, I didn't pay too much attention to it. The surgery was long, six hours and it was probably too long for me to be out with the kind of head injury that I had. And then they gave me opioids because I had now a titanium plate where my clavicle used to be. And then they gave me more opioids to take home and they discharged me after the surgery. I took the opioids and my brain was like enough and just, and I slipped into a deep unconsciousness and, a coma, basically. Yeah, for how long? For a day. And then I came, and now in and out and in and out to different levels of what we think of as consciousness. And so this altered state of consciousness was there for months, and profoundly for weeks. I like the image that you have in your book of the deck of cards with all the characters you've played, the music executive and the street musician. The different personas that I've been able to manifest, and I saw them separate out. And I remember in this unconscious state, seeing them and having this realisation that I needed to order them again, and choreograph them. And it just seemed extraordinarily improbable. And somehow I had this realisation that if I wasn't able to align them, it would manifest as some sort of behavioural abnormality. Here you're fighting for sanity. Fighting for coherence. Across all levels of what coherence means, yeah. And functionality, yeah. And so I was really for twelve months or so, truly dysfunctional. And I couldn't I was claustrophobic where I'd never been before. I was blacking out a lot. Transcribed I would feel like I was okay and we would go to a cafe like Cafe Gratitude on Main Street or Real Food Daily or somewhere in Santa Monica. And I'd be looking forward to it and I'd get there and then there'd be a loud noise or something and I'd pass out, just pass out. I remember walking up Broadway to the co op market on Broadway and it was a blazing hot summer's day and I felt relatively okay and I walked in and the air conditioning, the temperature dropped and that temperature dropped just, I went, I think my legs just gave way and I was on the floor like a puddle. So my system couldn't tolerate, my capacity and my tolerance was practically zero. So anything that affected my state of being to that. degree put me into VESA, VEGO, and I would just basically faint or pass out and sometimes I would properly be out. I remember face planting in Café Gratitude because somebody walked by with a tray a bowl of knives and forks and plates and it was jangling and I was just sitting there and then the next thing I know I was, I'd face planted on the table. Because the stimuli was too much for my nervous system. Wow. So then you became the recipient of somatic services. And then that led to understanding the value of that type of work. Is that what, is that? Yeah. Yeah. It was, I'd had a few therapies and It was the only one that I was like, oh, it just made absolute sense. And I felt an immediate expansion. I felt an immediate move out of contraction and self protection and rigidity. And I was pinging between rigidity and chaos. And it was the first thing that gave me this sense of center again. And then over time my therapist said, you should learn this. I think it'd be very good at it. Who was the therapist? Her name is Gina Wright. So she, she inducted you. It's interesting how these things chain. Yeah. And so I signed up for it and was able to get in based on life experience qualification rather than prerequisite qualification. And went through the training and with a view to it. Just to go into this snowball, it was really different. My, my view was it was going to be for my own journey, for my own recovery. And then I'll get back into music and I'd idealized my past. I'd idealized my former self because the state I was in was so desperate physically, mentally, spiritually and financially. that my past suddenly became this golden aura promised land that I needed to return to. I'd somehow conveniently forgotten I'd wanted to get out of the music industry for at least a decade and a half at that point. But because it just seems like such a period of relative painlessness, I idealized it. That, that makes me think of a John o Donahue quote, that your unconscious is already working on the next phase of your life that you're not aware of, So you still thought you were orienting to get back into music, but something else was building it. It very reluctantly, but then during the training and when we were getting into diads and triads, necessarily to practice the modality. I realized that it did have a similarity to the nurturing of and creating a container for people to find depth of expression. which was part of my work with artists as an A& R man. And there was something enormously rewarding, not necessarily on an egoic level, there was something enormously rewarding about. Being able to participate in somebody's healing that was unique, again, yes, there was some similarity, but nothing like, and what people were sharing about their experiences in those practice sessions. And the majority of sign up to any cohort is women. The ratio is about seven to one in America. I think it's about 10 to one in Europe, maybe more of ratio between men and women in the mental health field and most health field. And so everybody I was practicing with were women and the vast majority of their stories were some form of sexual trauma or sexual abuse. And that opened my eyes enormously to, oh wow, and what that felt like as a man. And for a while I felt like a walking apology, which is helpful and necessary, but it's not ultimately what's needed. And so that took a while, and the burden of that and the sense of shame, really. It was, I felt the burden of shame which I had to figure out a way of navigating through. And I felt, I thought about all of the times in my life where, maybe I'd been like, a bit pushy and a bit cocky and not seeing the sensitivity in the moment because of, testosterone and ego and whatever it might be. You reflect on all of that, and it doesn't even occur to you at the time. And there's nothing in your culture that suggests that you should. In fact, quite often, the opposite. And so I really reflected on that and I had felt, as men go, I was, and I was known in my hometown as being particularly sensitive and respectful towards women. And even with that, I could see, my, my areas of ignorance and clumsiness, and ego, and that I think is a day, it is, it's a daily practice. One of the things about getting older moving into my 60s, is it's amazing how much easier it is now to be able to talk to young women, and by young women even women in their 30s. Without there being some assumption that there's an agenda because you're older and it's so liberating. It's so liberating to be able to just, hey, how are you doing? And it can be met with not a protective response. There's something in that is truly joyous and is unexpected in there. I never, I hadn't thought that aging might have that gift in it. I think it's a particular issue for sensitive straight men, or I don't know how you identify, but sensitive men they are excluded in some ways by exactly what you're talking about with women. They're outsiders to female culture, and they're somewhat threatening. And then masculine culture is so antithetical to sensitivity and emotionality, the sense of man has, no real community. I think that defines probably 40 years of my life. Exactly what you just said. Yeah. And now as I'm moving into my 60s there's a liberation because you're no longer seen as being motivated. Just by aging out, which I'm totally fine with, and I'm obviously deeply committed to my beloved anyway. But just that automatic sense of, you surely must have an agenda, that, that guardedness, totally understandable that guardedness should be there, but it's not there anymore. And it's joyous. Yeah. And I feel in your work, you've cultivated A community of sensitive people. I think so, yeah, and, the other thing, Steve, this has been, there's been a reluctance and a hesitancy for me to fully enter into this. It took years. I was really reluctant to identify myself as being somebody that did this work fully. And it took a lot of time, and even during the COVID years, I volunteered entirely through that entire time. It felt like the right response, but it also felt like something that I needed to go through when I gave of myself to fully inhabit my skill set and to feel that I inhabited in a way that felt commensurate with taking money from people. Of course I'd been paid before that, but there was always this strange tension around it for me. I think because I did so much volunteer work with doctors and nurses as an emotional support volunteer through the COVID period I've really felt like it may, it might be the 10, 000 hours thing that people talk about, that you become experts after 10, 000 years of practical experience, 10, 000 hours of 10, 000 years. Roughly 10 years, right? Yeah. And I think perhaps that I needed to feel that to fully inhabit and embody the profession, if you like. And at the same time, I think I have a healthy amount of attendant self doubt. It keeps me humble. I check myself and I don't think I've ever started a session. Without a certain amount of apprehension. Say, if this is the one where I'm just confronted by my limitations, and there's something about that, that brings an intensity that really helps with my focus and my presencing where I don't take anything for granted. So I think that it's a healthy doubt and it's keeping me grounded. Whereas I can't, with all honesty say I ever had that before, certainly not in my music career. I think I veered more towards not necessarily arrogance, but a sense of this is my domain. I am a creature of this realm. Yeah. So there's a healthy respect for the work and humility that you have. is an anchor for you. I imagine your working class background being in the music industry where money corrupted the creative process and different ways that there might be some imprinting of monetary success being detrimental to health and vitality and creativity. Yeah, very much very much the health part, especially, access to decent food. I grew up with food poverty, my mom had this strange thing around drinking and not drinking too much.'cause it mean you'd have to get up a lot at night to use the bathroom and wake the whole house up.'cause it was a really small house. Two up, two down, two rooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs. And so don't drink too, so I'm pretty sure I went through my entire childhood seriously dehydrated. And malnourishment was a thing, there was social welfare organizations that used to give out these little brown bottles of intense orange juice concentrate because kids weren't getting enough vitamin C. They were dispensed. to go to the welfare office to get these little food supplements, quality of food and processed, it was all processed food. So yeah, there was I think at some point There are universal aspects to suffering. They may manifest in different ways in the actual events, they may show up in different forms, but the behavioral consequences and the systemic consequences start to look a little bit like, oh, okay, you can relate it to. your own experience? There aren't many weeks that go by where I don't hear myself say something to a client that I myself need to actually hear, if only as a reminder, because we forget. What would you say is at the core of your current snowball? What it was it about? What are you doing? It's shifted a little bit and it's shifted when I had that near death experience with the head injury. And it's crystallizing as I'm getting older. And I think now it's orientated towards, without trying to define it in any specific way. All of our work essentially is about a spiritual journey. It may be dealing with psychological, physiological, emotional issues. But I think what I see as this container, this responsibility is more orientated towards can we get to the point of transition, death, whether that happens suddenly through misadventure or misfortune. Or in the natural course of events, can we reach that point of transition with a familiarity with our own authenticity, even a glimpse of it? Free of the burdens of the things that we had to become, because of the things that we've suffered, free of adaptation, free of coping mechanism. Do we, can we get to experience ourselves fully, even if only for a moment, in our trueness, what we would have been had we not suffered the things we have, and had we not suffered the things we ourselves have created. That we've normalized, that we call civilization and society. Can we experience that sense of liberation and ourselves fully before the moment of death? So that should we need a reference point for that in transition, we have it. We have a familiarity with it. So that we are not overwhelmed by acquaintance with our own true self. And that we're able to recognize it when we need to. And so I'd say that has become something that has formed some sort of impetus for me but peripherally, I very rarely actually name it, but I'm aware that I'm trying to identify that authentic, pure, innocent, maybe even naive aspect to everybody that I work with. And then it just becomes a question of what is blocking them from being more fully acquainted with that part of who they are, if that makes sense. It does. And I appreciate you putting words to it here. And it does seem like healing and spirituality are different language systems for the same process. As the healing journey continues, it becomes more spiritual in nature. And your what you were speaking about there made me think of Lao Tzu's line, a man who experiences the Tao in the morning can die contentedly in the afternoon. Yeah, exactly. So So yeah, there's something that now, you know, and so I think that's a guiding. That's like a North star. Yeah, I've felt it in our work. I think that's what, it's remarkable that one hour of therapy a week or whatever cadence one's on, it's not a lot. It's remarkable that can actually change a life. And so I think we have to call on these very big forces in order to do that. There has to be some, a reference point for something larger than ourselves, even if it's only the mystery, even if it's only the infinite or the vastness of space. Thanks. Because it gives us the largest possible context to place our own experience in. And that doesn't mean to suggest that we're deliberately making ourselves small or inconsequential. But more that we belong to it, that we are a part of it, that we are literally manifest from it. And that sense of belonging, if you can let it in, does tend to contextualize that all our experiences is. The difficult ones and the beautiful ones exist beneath an infinite sky. It's an absolute truth. I've experienced you as a village elder, or the like a Native American wise man or someone who just is, it was ahead of me in the journey and, could point to some things and it feels like that role fits you well. So I appreciate you for that, for holding that space for me. Thank you. Steve. It's been a privilege.
Speaker:If you enjoyed this conversation and you want to become more involved, look for Snowball Psychology on Patreon. Our music is Find Your Way Beat by Nana Kwabena.