Andrew MacDonald

1-45 Foster St.,
Perth, Ontario,
K7H 1R9
Canada

Email: andrewcartermacdonald at gmail dot com

Phone, 1.613.200.7647

Twitter: AndrewCMacDon

Like most of us with a strong interest area – and mine is groups and awakening – my interests grew out of my life experience. A childhood with a lot of difficulty belonging and feeling welcomed, and a persistent alienation that just wouldn’t quit when I left it. Finding my own way through the resulting catastrophe was my interest and largely my teacher.

I became a spiritual seeker with a good intellectual grasp of the issues and the literature but little capacity to handle them bodily or emotionally.

As an outsider in many circles, I became an accidental student of belonging, what it means to be an insider and an outsider.

The question that intrigues me is: what does it take for a world where everyone belongs . . . because they manifestly do but often feel they don’t. I’m very interested in the fate of the excluded.

I started meditating at 22 and have a long and complex relationship to this important subject. Early on I spent time with Bubba Free John (aka Adi Da) and later with Bhagwan Rajneesh during his India days. I was more or less, right on top of the consciousness-wave and Mr. Hippy Seeker. Smart but . . actually kinda stupid! Lost!

I spent a lot of time as an outsider and a marginal person looking for a spiritual solution. My workaday life began more and more to look like various aspects of editing and writing.

In ’95 I became a Focusing trainer (a lovely technique or art) for coming out of mental abstraction into body experience and have worked Focusing into my personal practice. Focusing is a skill that accompanies group work beautifully.

I spent thousands of hours in men’s groups hearing men’s stories. It was there that I saw that something happens in a group that is more than the sum of its parts. Since the first taste I’ve had an unwavering sense that groups can be deeply healing for some people and even bring resolutions for some that therapy can’t. That’s been my own experience. I became a champion of groups.

I became a coach, using a system-based approach (Four Gateways Coaching). It’s good work.

A student of the integral approach and generally, new currents in the dynamic evolution of consciousness that’s been galloping ahead, neck and neck with rising global tensions.

I lived alone off-grid for a while which might have helped strip me down for action.

The amazing systems work brought forward in Family Constellations or Systemic Constellations helped me integrate core issues that I couldn’t get at previously despite extraordinary effort.

This work is often about belonging and having one’s rightful place. The group work I do is a kind of systems work. I think that many people with early trauma particularly, don’t respond as well to insight work on themselves alone but swim like fish in a system approach. The “field” / system heals.

In my coaching I offer a system approach to deeper belonging and inhabiting of our place in the world in change. I do this in groups and in one-to-one sessions.

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