I teach contemplative practices that facilitate direct personal experience of the Divine Presence of Spirit.

In the guidance I provide, I emphasize the integrity of our body-being as the instrument through which we’re able to sense and thereby embody this Presence, and our heart as the harmonizing centre of our body-being and consciousness.

My work is dedicated to our personal and collective awakening to Divine Presence in each moment and our transformation toward being able to engage the world from this wellspring of true compassion and graceful responsiveness.

In developing and sharing a contemporary approach to the teachings and practices of the Wisdom tradition, I draw on transmissions and guidance that have occurred and continue to occur in direct experience with Spirit, a lifetime engagement with the teachings and practices of the Wisdom tradition, my learning as a mother and partner, a rich teaching background, and 30 years of practice as an integrative therapist.

“Philippa’s presence evokes in me a deep attentiveness to my own connection with Spirit. I witness in her a clarity of light, an elegant grace and an intelligent wisdom - all grounded in embodied experience. ”

— KATHRYN OVERALL-CASS, SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR & PRACTICE CIRCLE PARTICIPANT

The ethics of teaching & practice that guide me

I care deeply about creating and holding spaces of inclusiveness and hospitality.

My engagement with Wisdom teachings and practices from a number of different traditions, including Christian Mysticism, Sufism, shamanism, and Zen and Vajrayana Buddhism, and my recognition of both the unity and the complementarity of these traditions has fostered in me an intrinsically interspiritual and inclusive orientation toward teaching and practice.

I also care deeply about the need for tenderness toward the personal within the wider context of the transpersonal.

This care arises from a depth of understanding about the threshold between the personal and transpersonal dimensions of life, between the world of material existence and the world of spiritual being, and what it takes for the two to become consciously integrated. I understand the importance of inner work in the integration of our being and the temptation to avoid this often confronting and uncomfortable process through spiritual bypassing.

I care about finding language that helps illuminate the Wisdom teachings in an accessible way.

Practice is a key emphasis in the offerings I make because truth is revealed in the immediacy of direct experience, and because it usually takes time for confidence in the truth of immediacy to develop.   

A bit of my backstory

I’ve directly sensed & felt devoted to the luminous Presence of Spirit since I was a kid…

…and this inspired me to begin studying different spiritual teachings and engaging in spiritual practices from about the age of 13. When I was 17 a vision confirmed in me a definitive sense that my life was dedicated to Spirit, even though it wasn’t at all clear how that would unfold.

  • In my adolescence, I became a student of the way of the wound through trauma and illness. This led me to study indigenous systems of healing and complementary health therapies, and I worked as a massage therapist for a number of years while my children were young. When they were well established in school, I undertook post-graduate training in counselling and creative arts therapy.

    In practice, I developed an integrative approach to working with people, combining somatic work, psychoemotional inquiry, and art-making. The coherence of this approach issued from my experience of and reliance on Spirit ~ a simultaneous inflow-outflow that I came to call ‘presence’.

    Blessed by the opportunity to teach and mentor therapists-in-training within two tertiary training programmes, I learned more about the effectiveness of presence not only in therapeutic encounters but in teaching practice and in relational dynamics more generally.

    Throughout these years, my engagement with spiritual teaching and practice continued, and I wrote about what I was learning and experiencing in Spirit in my journals.

    I’ve been clarisentient from childhood and received visions from a young age, but from the age of thirty the nature of these transmissions intensified. Initially, I didn’t quite know what to make of this, but a more refined attunement to these transmissions and their influence was catalyzed by the life-threatening experience of being in the CTV building when it collapsed in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. I was compelled to pay much closer attention to what was being revealed to me.

    I had to stop work while I underwent a transforming reorientation of my being in which my familiar identity was decentered and my essential identity in Spirit was revealed.

    I eventually returned to work as a therapist, but the integration of this radical reorientation continued over some years and initiated changes to every aspect of my life. During those years, I learned that what was occurring for me was continuous with the disclosures of mystics down through the ages ~ the felt immediacy of the Presence of Spirit opening out into the conscious embodiment of divine love.

    Throughout what transpired over this time, I was given to understand the inevitability and necessity of pouring from what was being poured out in me; that my future work would be shaped by what was occurring.

    These are the headwaters of the work I do now.

Cynthia Bourgeault’s Influence

Only a year after the catalyzing earthquake experience, I picked up Cynthia Bourgeault’s book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene while browsing in a bookstore…

…and I immediately recognized the synchronicity of the discovery. Even at first glance, I registered the resonance between Cynthia’s writing and the spiritual transmissions I’d received. Reading the book in full was the first time I’d ever encountered language that so lucidly described what I experienced in Spirit. I knew I’d found my spiritual teacher.

  • Over the next three years I read Cynthia’s other available work and this reading dovetailed so uncannily, intimately, and elegantly with the spiritual transformation I was undergoing at the time that the potent recognition energy was itself a force in the unfolding. In this way, I experienced Cynthia as a midwife of my transformation even prior to meeting her in person.

    I first met Cynthia attending a five-day Wisdom School she hosted in the spring of 2016, here in Aotearoa New Zealand where I live. Registering the complete continuity between her presence in writing and in person deepened my receptivity to the transmission of her being and teaching, which was luminous and profound. It was the same attending the next Wisdom School she hosted here in the summer of 2018, and during both Schools I received the baraka (blessing) of her recognition of the work I felt called to.

    I continued studying with Cynthia by participating in other Wisdom Schools, engaging with her body of work, and as a student of the Living School hosted by the Centre for Action and Contemplation.

    I feel a deep, abiding gratitude for Cynthia’s vision and presence, her transmission of the mystical visionary wisdom tradition, and her singular influence in my life as a spiritual teacher.

    Her influence is clearly traceable in what I offer with the emphasis on contemplation, the cultivation of presence through three-centred awareness, the conscious work of shifting from the egoic structure of perception to heart perception, and regarding these involvements as active participation in the world’s evolutionary unfolding toward higher consciousness and collectivity.

Formal Training & Qualifications

  • Living School at the Centre for Action & Contemplation

  • Master of Arts in Arts Therapy (Honours)

  • Postgraduate Diploma in Counselling (Distinction)

  • Bachelor of Arts (English)

  • Diploma of Complementary Health (certified in Massage Therapy, Aromatherapy, Reflexology & Shiatsu)