About our extraordinary journey.

This site has been designed as a result of a desire that I have had to reach more people in the hope of creating a feeling of greater support amongst people looking for help in their lives. As a result, most of this page at present refers to me and my own journey to where I am today. Winnie, my wife, has been a vital part in my life and much of this site is influenced by her knowledge and experience. Her story though is one that only she can tell and so far the time has not been right to do that.

MY CHILDHOOD

My life began on June 29th 1960, the youngest of three sons to John & Margaret Durdant-Hollamby. I was born in Sevenoaks in Kent where my mother and father were starting a guesthouse. In addition my father was a buyer at Hamleys toy store in London.

I had a wonderful and relaxed childhood - having the privilege of attending Sevenoaks School in my teenage years. The school had very high standards, both academically and with sports - much to my relief being an avid tennis player.

During that time my mother and father had concentrated full time on building up their guest house into a hotel - with all the unsocial hours and financial pressures that went with it. In 1975 my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and following a successful (though touch and go at the time) operation, they decided to sell their business. This was a decision instigated by my father who, despite the financial impracticalities of selling (they had only just finished building an expensive extension which left them with little capital in the building) was not prepared to take any further risks with my mothers health.

WORK MARRIAGE AND CHILDREN

And so they sold up. We went from rented house to rented house, eating away at the little capital that was left all the time. When it came to leaving school, I had no doubt at all that I wanted to get out there and start earning, whilst my other friends were nearly all going on to university.

I started by opening a car cleaning business in Sevenoaks with my brother Noel. It was o.k. - but really after a year of cleaning cars I realised that wasn't for me long term. I then managed to wangle my way into the music business (always a passion of mine) and soon found myself engineering, producing and writing records.

Ten years of incredible highs and lows flew past, during which time I met and married the woman who has helped me change my life - my wife, Winnie. We met at a gig I was playing at in Croydon - our eyes met when we were both on the floor looking for our singer's contact lenses. Such is life.

We got married in 1988 and had our first child, via emergency caesarian, in 1990. Nine months later my father died after a long battle with emphysema. Life was starting to change for me, as I began to realise that there was in fact more to life than just trying to have a hit record. And so it was, in 1991 and after much soul-searching that I decided to throw in my career.

I took up gardening. Don't ask me why. I had been brought up by a man who would have concreted every flowerbed he'd ever had if my mother had allowed him to, and I had never had the slightest interest in gardening. I had no money, a mortgage to pay and a wife and child to support. What's more it was the middle of autumn with winter fast approaching. I must have been mad.

Still, within three weeks of starting, I had managed to get enough regular clients to stop advertising and keep me going through that first winter. Over the next couple of years all my work came from word of mouth and I soon started using my creativity to design and make gardens for people. Suddenly I was a landscape gardener. I had no qualifications, but plenty of first hand experience and ideas.

Yet the bigger the jobs became and the more I developed the company, the less money and the more stress we seemed to have at home. The mortgage became harder to pay, not easier. What I didn't realise at the time was that I was being given plenty of clues by the Universe that this was still not what I was meant to be doing with my life, its just that I wasn't seeing them clearly.

In October 1992, a few hours before she was expecting to have our second child by elective caesarean, Winnie began to haemorrhage and had to be rushed to hospital by ambulance. I had to wait for her parents to come down in the middle of the night to baby sit for Anna, before I could follow in the car. I shall never forget that car journey in the early hours of the morning, not knowing whether I had missed everything, whether she was alright - everything went through my mind.

When I arrived at the hospital, Winnie was in the labour ward, still haemorrhaging, with a nurse beside her saying that there was nothing to worry about. I nearly blew a fuse. Even I knew she was haemorrhaging. I rushed to the desk, insisted that they got hold of our consultant, who then raced over.

Sophie was born by emergency caesar within two hours. She was brought out of the operating room, I was not even allowed in this time, and after I was allowed a quick hold, she was taken straight to an incubator in intensive care. The consultant didn't emerge for a little while, but when he did I knew things had been difficult. He was visibly shaken and drained and went on to report that he had just carried out the hardest caesarean section of his life. It had clearly been touch and go for both Winnie and Sophie - Winnie having a rare complication known as placenta accreta.

It was five hours before I was even allowed to see Winnie - she was left in the emergency room until they were certain that she had stabilised, and when I did see her there was a mixture of great relief and great shock at all the wires and drips that I have since seen so many times in cases of serious illness or following major operations.

Although the two of them were reunited later that day briefly, it was a matter of days before they could really start to bond properly. Their recovery after that was quite quick - although it was necessary for me to stay at home for about 10 weeks to help care for both Winnie and our two children. I had no compunction in making this decision- it meant great financial strain, but like my father before me, my family's health had to come first.

It was beginning to strike me as odd that society makes it so difficult for us to provide that love and support when it is most needed - purely because we must continue to earn the money to pay the bills. Whilst banks and the rest are understanding in such situations, no-one offered to waive their interest charges or reduce their fees in response to what was a family in crisis. I was beginning to feel that the world was not a good place to be sick in; I was also beginning to feel the strain of having to provide constant support emotionally and physically at the same time as having to juggle the figures, writing constantly to our creditors to keep them happy. Anyone who has been through financial crisis will understand the strain involved in the wording of every letter, the calculation of every cash flow forecast and the agonising wait for a reply.

As Winnie and Sophie began to improve, so I started to pick up my landscaping again. Over the following three years, with Winnie's brother John now involved, I worked hard to establish the company and managed to gain a good reputation for designs and landscaping. The part that I was really good at though was the client liaison - I had always loved people and loved trying to help someone find out what it was they really wanted.

HOW I BECAME INVOLVED IN HEALING

But still the same story rang true. More jobs, more stress and no more financial reward for the extra heartache. I couldn't understand what was going on. It was as if something was stopping me from making a real success of it.

At about the same time I began to notice that I was suffering from recurring sore throats. Very gradually my throat began to deteriorate and I soon found that I was getting quite hoarse during work. At first I wouldn't really notice this until the evening, but soon it began to happen earlier and earlier in the day. Eventually I was getting hoarse by as early as 10.30 in the morning.

Winnie had, some years earlier, been introduced to a brilliant homeopath who I had also started seeing. She had been treating my throat for a few months and, whilst I am certain that she was improving my general health, the pain in the throat and the hoarseness were not improving.

During the summer of that year, after Winnie had read Quantum Healing by Deepak Chopra, we also decided to learn to meditate. Meditation did something for me almost immediately. Not immediately on a physical level, but it did seem to help me find a place inside that was total calm and total acceptance. As my throat began to get worse physically, even coming up in a lump, there was something inside me that was saying don't worry. I knew somehow that doctors had nothing for me, and yet also knew that somewhere there was going to be an answer.

And yet everything we read gave us bleak prognoses. As is typical whenever one reads up about symptoms of disease, I managed to find that all roads seemed to lead to the dreaded cancer. The symptoms got worse of course the more I thought about it. I was really grateful for the meditation in those early days.

Then, one day, Winnie and I found ourselves at the library together - something that had never happened to us in all our time together. By that time my throat had been particularly bad for some weeks and I was beginning to become a little anxious as to where my 'cure' was going to come from.

We came away from that library visit with eleven books - all of them on complementary medicine, alternative health, meditation and the like. There were books on flower essences, homeopathy, crystals and healing. Where to start?

Then something else happened that I now also know was no coincidence. I walked into our bedroom the next evening to find Winnie swinging a small crystal pendulum. She was trying to dowse - something that I knew about from my landscaping when I had been shown how to find water pipes and electrical pipes using two thin pieces of wire. But dowsing with a crystal - what was this?

She explained that one of the books from the library was about dowsing and she said that it is possible to find out almost anything (via yes or no) by swinging a pendulum. She had already managed to get anti-clockwise and clockwise answers and she was just about to stop because she was getting concerned as to where the answers were coming from.

Being a trusting and fairly brave sort of chap I immediately had a go. I got huge swings instantly and I didn't think I was causing them by anything I was doing. We asked a few questions, seemed to get the right answers and then put it away for the evening, intrigued by what we had found.

The next day I tried again and again I received strong swings. Winnie really put me to the test by asking me questions that I could not have known the answers to (things that had happened in her life prior to meeting me) - and again the answers were 100% correct. It was then that we wondered whether this dowsing could help me find respite for my throat.

The answer seemed to be a resounding yes. I remember the pendulum doing a circle that was so strong my hand would have needed to be moving quite clearly to produce the same effect. I was fascinated.

Over the course of the next three hours I dowsed over the books that we had borrowed from the library. The dowsing indicated that I must focus on the flower essences encyclopaedia and that within it were two remedies for me. Two remedies out of over 1200 - understandably it took a long time.

When I finally arrived at the right remedies, I then had to sort out how to take them. Unfortunately this was also a time consuming business, as I ended up having to swallow four drops under my tongue and rub two drops into my forehead.

The first remedy I took over the course of a weekend - by which time my throat was very bad. In fact it had become so bad that I had actually booked in to see a local healer (something I had never done before) on the following Tuesday. I didn't think too much about the remedies - it all seemed a bit ridiculous to my intellect, but I took thefirst one and waited.

The second remedy, which was to be taken on the Monday, was Rescue Remedy - a remedy commonly used, even by some doctors, for shock. On that Monday it couldn't have been more appropriate. When I woke up, for the first time in about three months, the pain had completely gone and the lump had also gone right down. I was indeed in a state of shock.

Trying to describe to anyone else what it feels like to be free of pain, to be free of the constant reminder that there is something wrong, is almost impossible. Pain itself is completely subjective. Only I knew for sure that I had had it.

As I went back to the landscaping, a nagging thought was going round my head. "Was I meant to be doing something else with this experience or was I really meant just to go back to work as if nothing had really happened?".

I had little doubt. I had always been an opportunist in my business life and now here was an opportunity surely waiting to be seized. Winnie and I had long talks about it and decided to gain more experience before jumping into anything that we might regret.

At the same time as this had been going on Winnie had been devouring books on a vast range of fascinating subjects from Deepak Chopra to "The Celestine Prophecy"; from "Mutant Message Down Under" to the teachings of Abraham that are channelled by Gerry and Esther Hicks. As she read, so she would pass me books that she felt I would find of interest.

A pattern was beginning to emerge, a sort of perennial wisdom which seemed to run through all these books and the many others that we consumed during this period. Whilst a vast amount of information was being absorbed by our hungry intellects, the same things seemed to be standing out to both of us. It was as if we were both looking at the same picture and both seeing exactly the same details at the same time.

What was becoming clear was something that seemed incredibly familiar to me. That the world was not this terrible place that sections of society seemed to want us believe it to be, but a place full of joy and excitement and magic; a place where you could have what you wanted when you wanted it just by being clear about what it is that you do want; a place where there is an abundance of everything for everybody.

But most importantly that the true happiness that I had made my primary goal since the birth of Sophie lay not in what I could accumulate; not in how successful my business could become; not in what other people felt about me or in how other people treated me. All these books were confirming what I realised I had known all my life but that I had just not seen clearly enough up to this point; that the path to true happiness, to bliss, to joy, to contentedness, lay not outside the self but within. I had probably been meditating just long enough to know that what was happening to me was the start of that journey to find myself. I realised at that point that the more I was in touch with and following my true feelings, the easier and happier my life would become.

And so, after much soul searching, we decided to take a major plunge. I handed my landscaping business over to my brother-in-law and Winnie and I launched into the wisdom of uncertainty.

We had very little money to live on and two children to support in a part of England (the South East) which is quite expensive. And yet it felt wonderful, it felt right. Of course we had our concerns, we were after all just beginning with all this, but we both seemed to know that the more we could trust in the natural process that I had already experienced with my throat, the more we could end up getting what we wanted.

Within a few weeks I was treating some of our family (those who could cope with the whole idea) - and getting pretty good results. The first really interesting breakthrough came when we were asked to dowse for someone we had never even met.

Max was a young mother with three children who was suffering from a lump on her breast which her doctor had said had been going on too long to be purely hormonal. (see Max's case study in Chapter 4 of our book.)

Max's success inspired us greatly. Within a few months we found ourselves with many people seeking our help for various ailments/problems. We did no advertising, this was all through word of mouth. We have never charged for this service accepting only donations where offered. We would never want to stop anyone from coming to us because of lack of money.

The more people I treated, the more I was becoming aware of other factors that seemed to be involved in healing. The dowsing would indicate certain remedies, and yet not everyone would show improvements, in fact about 6 people showed little or no improvement at all. If the dowsing was so great, then how come some people didn't respond? I wanted answers.

And then, over the course of the summer, the answers started to come. I found myself sitting down at my computer and writing page after page of information relating to the whys and wherefores of health. The experiences of the last few months all seemed to be pouring out with a simple explanation of why we get sick, why we get better, how we can reduce suffering and how we can get what we want.

I was intrigued, so was Winnie. Before long we realised we had the makings of a book that seemed to summarise all those things that we had read, learnt and experienced.

Winnie took the job of editing and before long we had a rough manuscript that we were able to give to one of our patients The patient then asked for another copy and within 6 weeks we had run off 9 copies on our little computer. It was at this point that we decided that we had something that should be printed. And so we decided to go ahead and print up 500 copies of "The Truth about Illness, Unhappiness and Stress?"

I soon found myself settling into a completely different routine with patients than the first three months. It was as if the initial period had been given to me to enable me to gain experience, confidence and to see the ways in which we were all guilty of misreading illness. I gained so many insights during that initial period that I found myself feeling more and more confident to deal with the increasingly serious cases that seemed to be coming to me.

I was also finding that I had to give these serious cases time. Any amount of time. I couldn't make one hour appointments, or even arrange to meet at a particular time every week or fortnight. Illness doesn't work like that and I couldn't expect my patients to work like that if I wanted to help them achieve their wishes. I had to be prepared to be flexible and to spend time with each. And so, with no planning or written down regulations, I just got it into my head that I would never want to have more than 6 serious cases running at any one time. This I felt would give me the time needed to work with each.

During this period I also found myself working more and more with my hands - doing healing a few inches away from the body. This had come about as a result of being shown a simple form of healing by a local healer where one just visualises negative energy being removed with the left hand and positive energy being put in with the right hand. The healer, as I understood it, just acts as a pure channel conducting energy to the healee whose Higher Self takes and uses that energy at the appropriate time. It seemed very simple, very straightforward. And yet at the time, I have to admit I doubted my ability to act as such a channel.

My view was changed when I was asked to go and do some healing on a little baby who had a very bad form of reflux and who was about to have a major operation to stop her from being sick at all. The mother was very sceptical about anything non-medical, but her best friend had convinced her to give me a go. I had already dowsed and the baby had had one homeopathic remedy by the time I turned up to do a session of healing.

About a week had gone past between this remedy and my healing session. The mother reported a slight improvement since taking the remedy, the vomiting had been reduced by a small percentage. I had never carried out healing on a baby before. She was 14months old (she had been hospital for much of that time) and she decided to crawl and crawl round her flat the whole time I was there. Her mother offered to hold her on the couch but I felt it was vital for the little girl to trust me and to remain free. So for about30 minutes I followed her round the flat also, holding out my hands where possible, feeling heat and letting negative energy flow out of her.

And then something wonderful happened. I was just sitting in the middle of the lounge floor chatting to her mum when the little girl crawled over and sat on my lap. For a few minutes I was able to do concentrated healing on her, and I left feeling like I had done what I could. The operation was planned for three weeks hence and I hoped to be allowed back to carry out more healing before then.

The next day the phone rang. It was the best friend to say that the girl's mother had been on the phone, almost in tears, because for the first time since she had been born her daughter had not been sick for a whole day. I put the phone down and felt as if I had just won the lottery. Coincidence? - No, if there was one thing I had learnt by now, there are no coincidences. (I never was asked back to do more healing on her but at least her operation was cancelled).

This experience built up my confidence yet further. I started doing healing on a regular basis and was rewarded with excellent results. Nothing spectacular maybe, certainly nothing that I would want referred to as miraculous, but just enough to make me realise that I was dealing with a very potent energy . I also felt very strongly that it was because of my experience with my throat, the fear and pain that I had gone through, that I was able to act as a relatively clear and strong channel.

WORKING WITH CANCER AND FEAR

As my confidence improved, so the cases I was being given became more complex. I found myself thrown into the deep end with a small group of cancer patients who were to play a vital part in my continuing education. Even plunged into the depths of family crisis and personal tragedy (theirs not mine), I felt a great sense of strength and calm. I knew for sure that each one of them had magic inside them to be unlocked and that I was there to help them find the key. I had no attachment to them getting better - I just wanted to help them achieve a peace of mind, a satisfaction with their lot. For someone who has just been told that they have terminal cancer, just peace of mind can be a lot to ask for.

It became clear that what these people needed was not necessarily remedies, but more importantly they needed to talk. And they needed someone to listen. My meditations soon became a time where I would receive insights as to what a particular patient may need to talk about or hear - and so I would just follow that guidance, the guidance that was coming from my Higher Self. The more I listened, the more I learnt and the more I was able to help these people help themselves. A new truth, one based on the ideas in our book that is itself based on ancient wisdom, was beginning to emerge. A truth that linked the recognition of fears with the lightening of a physical load - sometimes of disease itself. A truth that each individual's desires are of prime importance in leading a healthy and happy life. A truth that no combination of orthodox or complementary medicine could make one bit of difference to a condition if the sufferer's inner guidance was being ignored.

I know this because I have seen it. I have experienced it. I have a saying - "Information leads to knowledge but only experience can lead to knowing". Dwell on this. It is important. For we can only know, we can only be sure, of what we ourselves experience. We can be told things, we can read things, but this can only ever lead to knowledge not knowing. And yet to know ourselves fully and completely is the only way to reach peace and joy.

And so my time with patients was changing. Anything up to two hours talking and half an hour of healing. It is a routine I still use today and one which serves me well. I have learnt not to underestimate the power of conversation, it is quite possibly the greatest healing ability that we all have after love. The ability to listen is a very great force.

MYSELF AS A MIRROR

I have found in these sessions that I tend to act as a mirror. I am not trying to thrust any philosophy upon any one- remember I have no training and also therefore no boundaries within which I have to work. I believe that everyone must find their own way. Neither am I doing the healing - only the individual can do this. I am purely acting as a mirror to reflect back to them what they know they need to hear. As a result I am eternally grateful to my patients for it is through them that I receive probably my greatest insights - techniques and information which enable me to develop and which enable me to help others. This is why I prefer now to refer to everyone I help as my teachers, not my patients. I have only referred to them as patients up to now for the sake of clarity.

MONEY

As these changes went on and as both Winnie and I gained more experience, so the money that we needed to survive just seemed to come in. In fact our lifestyle improved quite dramatically over this whole period. Our two children were able to come to a wonderful independent school following the workings of Rudolf Steiner. We were able to move to a much bigger house five minutes walk from their school; and we had and have a lifestyle which leaves us plenty of time together as a family which is so important to us with the children being so young.

In fact, as soon as we stopped trying to earn our way, as soon as we stopped trying to manipulate the world to fit our needs, as soon as we stopped fearing that we would never be able to afford this, that or the other - we started to attract the things we needed. Money has come in when we have needed it. Time, that other invaluable asset that we never seemed to have any of, started to manifest. And as we saw the results of our change in attitude, so we have practiced it even more. We are now in no doubt that we do all create our own reality - we have been busy uncreating a reality that we no longer want and trying to create a new and happier version. And you know what, so far it has worked.

I even found myself writing and recording a CD of instrumental music for meditation and relaxation. And this time, instead of doing it to raise some money, I did it purely for the love of doing it. And I love it. And so far so do the friends and patients who have heard it. And yet three years ago I would not have allowed myself the opportunity of doing it because I would have said to myself it will never make any money. The joy I would have missed out on.

TODAY