Who's behind
The Gentle Path
Jennifer's search began with the body. Ben's began with emotion.
Jennifer de Chickera
I thought I knew wellness.
Then life blew the theory apart.
My first experience of cancer taught me something I wouldn't have had language for at the time.
During treatment, I experienced two frightening periods where I lost my usual sense of lucidity.
My medical team investigated what was happening, including whether the cancer had spread to my brain. I never received an explanation that fully made sense of the experience.
But it left me with a question I couldn't shake.
Every new field gave me another piece of the human being.
gave me extraordinary specialisation.
gave me behaviour and lifestyle.
gave me systems and interconnected biology.
gave me the body as lived experience.
gave me state and capacity.
gave me patterns, emotion and identity.
changed what happened inside me.
raised questions of meaning, faith and what it is to be alive at all.
Each added something.
None, on its own, felt like the whole human.
Ben Murray-Watson
I grew up being praised for the right answer.
Logic was safe.
Cleverness was rewarded.
Emotion was something that happened in other rooms, to other people, and usually meant something had gone wrong.
I learned young that feelings were a problem to be solved or a mess to be avoided.
Two different searches.
One question.
Jennifer's search began with the body.
Ben's began with emotion.
Both eventually led to the same question:
What changes when we stop treating parts of ourselves as problems to overcome, and start learning how to live with more of ourselves available?
The Gentle Path grew somewhere inside that question.
The philosophy behind it.
Stay on the path.
Life has a way of pulling us away from what matters.
We send occasional reminders to come back, alongside new concepts we're exploring, emerging research, ancient wisdom, practical ideas and things we're learning about health, healing and being human.
You'll also get first access, subscriber discounts and early bird offers for Gentle Path experiences.