About

Hi.
I’m Martin
and
i’m holistic heron

I am based
in the
NE of England
near Middlesborough

I teach both in-person (if you live near me) and online sessions

Please read about the skills, experience, qualifications, interests and passions that feed into and inform my work…

Teaching Experience

Spanning fifteen or so years, my first career was as a TEFL (Teach English as a Foreign Language) teacher. This afforded me a lot of opportunities to hone my communication skills, especially the ability to explain things in a clear way. In my time I gained extensive experience of teaching all age groups, from 4 year olds upwards.

Other educational experience includes voluntary work in primary and senior schools in the UK, and a learning support assistant role at a college for older teenagers with physical and learning disabilities.

Meditation

Starting a regular meditation practice over 20 years ago was the beginning of the journey on which I stumbled across holism. I have gained many benefits over the years from meditating, and seen positive changes in myself.

Environmentalism & organic Gardening

Like many who begin a spiritual practice, I reconnected with nature. For me this  manifested itself especially as a love of being in woods, developing a deep interest in green issues, and organic gardening.

Although my dad has been a keen organic gardener for many years, I never took an interest as a child. Yet when I returned to the UK after I had begun meditating, I asked him if I could grow some veg in his garden, and cultivated a small patch over the spring and summer. Since then, most years I have had a patch of one size or another.

A few years after returning to the UK, I felt I had a relatively good grasp of environmental issues to step up a level and get involved at the community level. (see later section)

Holism

My reading choices experienced a big shift after I started meditating, towards the spiritual, environmental and psychological. While reading books in these fields, I started to notice the words ‘holism’ and ‘holistic’ cropping up. I bought one book on holism and that led to another. I realised that holism offered solutions to problems afflicting our times. The theme has informed my reading choices, and I have been researching around the subject for over 10 years.

Permaculture

Another word that I kept coming across was ‘permaculture’ (What is permaculture?) I read a book on the subject and attempted an allotment based on permaculture, but it was only when I attended a two week PDC (Permaculture Design Certificate) course in 2014 that my passion really took off.

Since doing the PDC course, I have embarked on the next-level Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design. This involves a lot of independent learning and the progress has been quite slow at times when trying to fit it around work and so on. But they say life is all about the journey and not the destination. I have learnt a lot of underpinning knowledge. And, moreover, I have developed a ‘systems’ way of viewing the world which has come to feel like second nature. I believe this is a crucial skill for coming up with effective and lasting solutions to problems.

Leading Community Projects

I have led a few environmental community initiatives. A friend and I established a Transition Town group in our corner of Nottingham. We organised a community-wide project, in which we asked people to agree to undertake some environmental challenges over a six week period. They put up a poster in their front windows if they were taking part in the challenge and I am glad to say that many households participated.

When I was living in a different area, I set up a community group with a wider focus than just environmental issues. We carried out issue-based campaigns that chimed with local town residents, such as concerns over creeping privatisation of the local NHS Trust.

Relevant qualifications

Permaculture

 

Meditation

 

Environmental