Category Archives: Co-Creators

Who am I? I am a 61-year-old work in progress living on a Welsh hillside. From 1974 to 2001 I worked as a Reuters correspondent, reporting from more than 20 countries . The foreign land where I spent the most time was Brazil. For the past seven years my chief professional focus has been the Gaia Coach Institute, a learning community for personal and global renewal. We have run five “Gaian leadership” courses, bringing together trained scientists and coaches in one teaching faculty, to help give people both a sense of world context (challenges and solutions) and greater clarity over personal goals. In recent months my sense of focus has shifted and I am now engaged in setting up a forest farm using a community share offer to raise investment to buy land. I have two beautiful daughters who are set to start university studies later this year.

In 2005, following 14 years working in the Health Service in Wales I became a co-creator of a profit for purpose social enterprise taking up the role as Creative Communities Consultant and Event Manager. My background is in hospitality management and through exposure to a whole range of new experiences including NLP, The Art of Hosting and World Café I began to understand my aspiration to lead by engaging, hosting and interacting with individuals, groups and teams. I have discovered a constant craving for the courage to take up new opportunities as they emerge to host a level of consciousness where people can be together in an authentic way. “If the group is an art form of the future, then the convening of groups is an artistry we must cultivate to fully harvest the promise of the future” – Jacob Needleman, Centered on the Edge.

Born and now back in Amsterdam, Peter de Haan is a real city-dweller. For someone who teaches shamanistic principles, that may sound a little strange … isn’t shamanism about trees, herbs and animals? Yes, of course, but apart from his fascination with everything that grows in nature, he is first and foremost a people person. All his life he has been intrigued by how people ‘work’. He does not expect to figure that out this lifetime, but the exploration brings him in touch with people, and keeps him sharp. He divides his attention to this exploration in three ways. He is a community development worker in an old area of Amsterdam, where he works in the middle of the tension between people living at the bottom of Maslov’s pyramid and civil servants who’s work is guided by the emotion of political agendas. Also, he is a shamanistic teacher who has been working with groups in The Netherlands for bout 20 years. In his workshops he teaches that the searching soul can find ways to give words to what it feels or knows. The third arena for his exploration is formed by the deep relations with special souls in his private life.  In short: a life that is characterised by people and their movement. Conclusion thus far: without us realising it, invisible aspects around us are far more important for our well being than we think. We think we can influence everyhting, the truth is that we are always just ‘off’. Maybe the mission for the coming period is to ask what moves outside of us, and why we do not see it?