I have worked with groups for some decades and I have a deep confidence in the nurturing, creative, healing and healthily challenging power of a group of reasonably well-intentioned and responsible people to enable remarkable things to emerge for individuals and for the group as a whole.

After more than fifty years working with people, including thirty years as a psychotherapist, twenty years as a body psychotherapist, and about seventeen focusing on trauma, I closed my individual psychotherapy practice in 2012.

I have finally left London behind and settled by the sea in Dorset.

I have now reached a stage in my life when I am more focused on reflection, writing and mentoring the development of adventurous souls.

I love watching people develop personally and professionally.

I have a particular interest in how people - particularly helpers, and people in positions of leadership - can survive and thrive within organisations, how the Helping Professions can so easily take their toll on the human spirit, and what can be done to humanise this process..

I continue to be fascinated by ways of working with trauma, and with the complexities of trauma-conditioned transference and counter-transference. This is in no small part due to my long friendship and collaboration with Babette Rothschild (The Body Remembers, Help for the Helper, 8 Keys to Safe Trauma Recovery etc.). She has kindly said: Michael Gavin has been my closest UK colleague since 1992.… There is no one I have more confidence in as a therapist, teacher, consultant, and supervisor."

After more than twenty-five years of learning from and collaborating with Michael Randolph, our Radix Intensive Body Psychotherapy workshops remain a enduring source of surprise and delight to me. I have long felt a calling to bring the insights of our body focused ways of working to those whose training has been in the talking therapies.

Through yoga, Tai Ji, through dancing and riding my bike, as well as Body Psychotherapy and Somatic Trauma Therapy, I continually return to the fundamental importance of embodied living and body awareness. A relatively new project unfolding over the last couple of years has been the EveryBodyKnows workshop series devised and delivered in collaboration with Brian Stirner, a revelation and an affirmation of the propositi

on that "less is more", and that deep learning can come for simplicity and focussed attention.

I am a certified Radix Body Psychotherapist, involved with London Radix Workshops for 30+ years.

One of only two Certified Somatic Trauma Therapists in the UK, I am an Approved Supervisor on the Somatic Trauma Therapy Certification Program.

I was External Supervisor to the London Underground’s Counselling and Trauma team from 2007 to the end of 2015.

I was in private practice as a therapist in SW London from the 1980s until the end of 2012.

I have been a Regular member of the Institute of Transactional Analysis since 1982, and a frequent presenter at ITA Conferences over the years. My three years of TA training in the eighties, disrupted by a prolonged encounter with ME/CFS, has formed a valued frame of reference for my thinking, and I learned much from intensive training with Bob and Mary Goulding and Richard Erskine.

For twenty years, from 1997 to 2018, I was a regular member of a Professional Development Group, led by the Psychoanalyst, Shirley Spitz, exploring relational psychoanalysis, transference and counter-transference and other analytic and psychodynamic themes.

My own Jungian analysis lasted from 1986 to 1998, and for the past 33 years I have been associated with the Champernowne Trust summer conference focussing on Jungian psychology, creativity and the Arts based approaches to therapy. I am now myself a Trustee with particular responsibility for the Web and Social Media.

I trained additionally in Core Energy Management with William Bloom (The Endorphin Effect, Feeling Safe etc), and with Dina Glouberman in Imagework.

My awareness of Mindfulness practices began in 1966 when I joined an esoteric school based in the teachings of Gurdjieff, Ouspensky and the philosophy of the Advaita Vedanta. The practices and the philosophy have continued to inform my life and my work.