About me
I’m a PACFA registered Psychotherapist with a diploma in Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy and a 15 year (and counting) love affair with astrology.
I graduated from the University of Western Australia with an Economics degree in 2002, and if you told me then that I’d be practicing holistic therapies at 40, living in Ubud, Bali, I’d have questioned your sanity. Now, instead, I am in a position where people can question mine.
But in the words of Theodore Roethke, ‘What’s madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?’
The circumstance my soul was at odds with in 2002? A life that was fun and interesting enough, but void of something deeper. When I left the shores of Perth that year I would find myself in Greece, wandering with a backpack, and feeling the hand of fate gently intervene in my life. It moved me subtly, yet decisively, away from the well-trodden paths of the surface world and onto the less-distinct path of the soul. The pathless path of the Dao.
Looking back, I would say that in these young years of my life I was making the mental shift from an orientation of causality towards one of synchronicity. In Jung’s language: Causality is ‘what causes what’, synchronicity is ‘what likes to occur with what.’ Through a channel that I can’t fully comprehend, let alone explain, I came upon three mystics who would further change my life. One was a psychic medium in the English countryside, the next a ‘light worker’ living in Istanbul, and finally (and most profoundly), a Pagan Druid practicing shamanism in Hertfordshire. It felt, mythically, like meeting the Crone; the wise old woman/witch. With their help I would learn about the layers of reality that lie beyond (or perhaps besides (or perhaps within)) the consensus reality world. It was a visceral tour of the middle world, the upper world and the underworld.
After many years of experimentation, I moved to Bali in 2008. There I would dive deeper into Astrology and receive mentorship from a teacher of Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST). The years went by and my learning of these two disciplines deepened. Those learnings would be consolidated with my studies at the London Faculty of Astrological Studies, and completing a two-year diploma of BCST at a school called Body Intelligence. In 2016, after five years in Taiwan (teaching kindergarten) and a few more back in Perth, I moved again to Bali to begin my practice in BCST and Astrology, working at Radiantly Alive Yoga Studio in their healing centre.
At the beginning of 2018, I was back to full time study again; this time to become a Holistic Psychotherapist at a school in the Southern Highlands of NSW, Australia called Metavision. Christina Nielson and her staff have created a course there that is able to honour the deeper nature of reality whilst remaining practical in sensory-grounded learned skills.
The process of studying at Metavision was personally deeply transformational. Professionally, it was just what I needed to weave together astrology and bodywork whilst adding an entirely new discipline of working more directly with Psyche.
Today, as a Metavision graduate and a member of PACFA (Psychotherapy and Counselling Foundation of Australia), I’m in private practice in Bali. My work now is deeply influenced by the late renegade psychologist, James Hillman, the weaver of ancient tales, Michael Meade, the Grimm poet, Robert Bly and many more along that lineage which, in my mind, includes the great C.G. Jung.
Their words have helped me see that the questions I ask aren’t so uncommon, the unease I have with the ways of the world is a natural and healthy response, and the path I’m on is led by invisible forces whose absence of form does not make them less than real.
— Chris Skidmore