Hello

Like most stories, mine begins with a call to adventure.

Well, more than one — but we’ll get there later.

Before that, I’ll introduce myself a little bit.

I am a teacher, practitioner and researcher.

I work with parkour, strength training and first principles.

I am interested in the relationships between complex systems.

That covers things like risk, intuition and non-linear progress in training.

I am a husband and soon, I’ll be a father.

I come from London, and now I’m living in Croatia with my wife.

I have been practising parkour for 15 years, and teaching for around 10.

Parkour was my first call to adventure, in 2007.

It struck a deep chord in some dormant corner of myself.

There was a boldness, a sense of liberation I had never seen before.

An intelligence, a playfulness, a connectedness.

Perhaps above all, I felt the presence of something truly mysterious.

Parkour became my life, and I did little else for the next eight years.

My skills became sharp, but my career options were narrow.

I wanted a change. I found a mentor and studied animal behaviour change.

Dog training introduced me to a deeper layer of training.

I learnt about complexity; heterarchies of control existing beyond perception.

How the past influences the future; how control is at times illusory.

I caught a glimpse of how little I knew, how little I could influence.

Another call. Another mystery.

Poorly equipped with a behaviorist education, I sought deeper knowledge.

Knowledge deep enough to work with both humans and dogs.

I read books on emotion; Damasio, Porges, Barrett.

I started to feel confident.

And then I fell. The worst injury of my career. A shattered wrist.

A poor decision resulting from a mistaken world view.

I wanted to control my emotions without a thought toward integrating them.

On reflection, I realised the growth of my intellect had withered my intuition.

I learnt that the intellect is a fine cartographer, but a lousy compass;

It tells you what is there, but not what to do with it.

I learnt that the growth I was seeking was not something I could find in books.

A third call. A bigger surprise, a deeper mystery.

Full recovery took years. I became anxious and depressive.

My movement became fearful, apprehensive.

But life moved on. And new opportunities began to show.

My studies continued, and I came across archetypal psychology.

The study of evolutionary psychological constants.

This excited me endlessly, and I created a class based on these concepts.

The London Exploration sessions.

A new location each week, heading to an unknown destination.

These sessions were spontaneous, authentic and surprisingly popular.

Then COVID hit. …

When life began again, I started the group in a new form.

The Exploration group.

Dedicated to researching the application of scientific principles in movement.

You can read more about the Explo group here.

Aware of the limits of knowledge, the group provides a unique education.

By orienting toward unfamiliar concepts, the group has gone deep and broad.

Outside of leading the group, I have been coaching parkour and strength work.

These days, my work is online and offline; creating a local community of movers in Pula, Croatia with my wife. Pula movement group.

I am continuing and evolving my work online.

Life is good.