My path into this work was not a conventional one.
I spent fifteen years in corporate leadership. By any measure, it was going well. And for a long time, that felt like enough.
At some point it stopped feeling like enough. Not suddenly. More like a tide going out. A gradual recognition that I was very good at something that was not actually feeding me. I tried what most people try: reading, therapy, better habits, clearer goals. All of it useful. None of it, in the end, sufficient. I understood the problem perfectly. The problem did not move.
Acupuncture was the first real door. I came to it for back pain, practical, specific, and frankly sceptical. What happened over the following months was harder to categorise. Something in me that had been fixed began to move. I became curious in a way I had not been for years. I enrolled at the College of Integrated Chinese Medicine in Reading, trained in Five Element acupuncture over four years, and qualified in 2016.
Training changed what I thought knowledge was. It introduced me to ways of understanding the whole person, body, mind, emotion, spirit, that Western frameworks tend to treat as separate or to ignore altogether. I began to take seriously forms of wisdom that I might once have dismissed. I trained in Reiki. I sat with teachers and in meditation for sustained periods. I read widely and practised consistently, not because I was supposed to, but because something in me was genuinely hungry for it.
The two-year diploma in Traditional Shamanic Practice came later, through a training that worked with the Celtic Medicine Wheel and practices of ancestral healing. It was the most demanding and most clarifying thing I had done. It did not ask me to believe anything. It asked me to look honestly at what was actually there. That turned out to be its own kind of rigour.
What I do now is not easily categorised, and I am comfortable with that. I work from a dedicated healing space at my home, with people who are ready to engage seriously with their own lives. I bring everything I have learned and continue to learn, without hierarchy and without dogma. I am not the source of your answers. My work is to help you find them yourself.
- Five Element Acupuncture — College of Integrated Chinese Medicine, Reading (qualified 2016)
- Reiki Master
- Two-year diploma in Traditional Shamanic Practice, working with the Celtic Medicine Wheel and ancestral healing
- Member of the British Acupuncture Council (BAcC) — placeholder: confirm membership body
- Continuing professional development in somatic awareness and energy medicine
Unhurried. Honest. Grounded.
James brings genuine care to the work, but he will ask difficult questions. People feel safe, heard, and held, not because the difficult things are avoided, but because there is enough steadiness in the room to face them. The pace is slow enough that things can actually land, rather than be processed at the surface and moved on from.
He works from a dedicated healing space at his home, which is set apart from the rest of the house and prepared with care. Sessions are conducted without interruption. There is no agenda beyond what is most useful for you on the day.
If you would like to know more.
James is happy to answer any questions before you commit to anything. An initial conversation is without obligation.
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