[The picture on the home page was taken during a presentation on attitudinal healing to the Dorset Association of Complementary Practitioners]
PERSONAL GROWTH AND HEALTH
My interest in psychology and self development began with the serendipitous discovery of a book in the Northampton library. I remember the occasion well, although I no longer remember the title of the book or its author, and I must have been 10 or 11 years old, because I returned to London before my twelfth birthday. It was in the Dale Carnegie or Norman Vincent Peale tradition, but less superficial than they because it contained references to some of the "greats" in the area of psychoanalysis and philosophy. Certainly it was the first time I had seen Alfred Adler or Sigmund Freud mentioned, and I can date my interest in those subjects from that "Peak in Darien" experience. It was an interest that never left me.
Involvement in psychotherapy and complementary practice
I have been a member of the Institute for Transactional Analysis, the International Co-Counselling Community, the Association for Neuro-Linguistic Programming, the Association of Humanistic Psychology, the Centre for Attitudinal Healing, the Group Relations Training Association, the Independent Practitioners Network, and the Dorset Association of Complementary Practitioners.
For several years, during my membership of the last three organisations, I produced and edited journals or newsletters for each of them. Early in 1999 I undertook the editorship of New Learning, a quarterly journal published by the NLP-Education Network which built up a gratifying international reputation for the quality of its material.
A difficulty I experienced in these editorial activities was to reconcile my professional standards when wearing my editorial hat (in this case involving discipline, regularity and commitment to excellence), with a somewhat muddled approach that seems to affect many people involved in healing and complementary practice when they try to move out of that area. With a frequency that suggests (physician heal thyself!) I might benefit from a large dose of my own therapeutic techniques, my involvement with others ultimately suffers from a lack of patience with their apparent apathy.
The solution, I came to believe, lay in a publication that owes no allegiance to a specific organisation. Following discussions with colleagues and friends we came up with the idea of publishing a journal dedicated to developments in educational methods and techniques, and specifically those that may be neglected in similar publications. Being independent of external influences we could be as controversial as we wished.
We then wondered why we needed to restrict ourselves to education. And from this discussion topic evolved the idea of Nurturing Potential - a magazine published both online and as a paper issue, devoted to empowering its readers to develop the potential for greatness that lies within us all. And in case you consider that "potential for greatness" is too grandiose a suggestion, let me quote from the magazine's Mission Statement: ". . . greatness is not measured by objective achievement alone, but needs to take its starting point into account . . . it doesn't matter how far you have come or where you wish to go, you can always get there from here."
And the success of this venture is evidenced by the links to the magazine on our home page or on the magazine's own dedicated website.
Nostrums, remedies and elixirs
Most people, if asked, would be able to describe a product that they "swear by", if only because it is something they were introduced to by their parents. Furthermore, I have yet to find anyone who enjoys Indian cuisine who does not "swear by" a particular and superlative Indian restaurant or dish. Well, I "swear by" Kefir, and I never tire of telling others about it and introducing them to its remarkable benefits.
Click on: