The Field Near Glastonbury

What eighteen months of doom-scrolling taught me about escape

For eighteen months during lockdown, I was bed bound.

Days ran into each other.

My main occupation was my phone, scrolling for hours, watching the world seem to come apart at the seams.

Somewhere in that scrolling I started noticing something odd.

Conspiracy theories I'd first heard whispered in the 1980s were back, dressed up as brand new revelations.

Same shapes, same fears, just recirculated for a new generation of frightened people.

It unsettled me more than the theories themselves did - how easily fear repeats itself when people are frightened and isolated enough to reach for anything solid.

By the end of it, I was having what many would call a dark night of the soul.

I didn't want stillness by then.

I wanted out

I packed up and went to live in a field near Glastonbury with a community of people growing their own food, living off the land, and giving away what they grew for free.

On paper, it was everything I believed in.

I'd gone looking for a place where the outer world couldn't touch me, and what I found instead was the same human muddle I'd left behind.

These were simply barefoot in a field instead of sitting behind a desk.

I'd nearly blown up my family and my marriage chasing a stillness I thought only existed somewhere else.

I got a mosquito bite on my foot that turned infected. The compost toilet and the well were both a walk across the field, and some days I couldn't manage it.

No phone signal.

No one close enough in my corner of that so-called community field to notice or ask.

I had gone looking for a community of like minded souls and found myself more alone than I'd ever been at home.

That's the part nobody tells you about spiritual awakening.

You can dismantle everything - your routine, your home, your marriage, your whole map of your life — and still find yourself standing in a field, unsettled, because the thing you were running from was never actually out there.

Paramhansa Yogananda talks about carrying your own portable paradise with you - a stillness that has no fixed address, that doesn't depend on where you're standing or who's around you.

Turns out the truth wasn't out there after all.

The field wasn't the problem.

The running was.

I came home.

Not because the dream was wrong, but because I realised the sanctuary I was hunting for a field to hold was something I already had the means to build in my own front room, my own body, my own breath.

That's the whole of what I teach now, really.

You don't have to escape your life to find the stillness underneath it.

You have to stop looking for it somewhere else.

That portable inner paradise is already there, inside, waiting for you whenever you want it

If any of this stirs something in you — the doom-scrolling years, the wanting out, the sense that peace must be somewhere else - I've built something that starts exactly where you are, no field or compost toilet required. A simple, easy-to-follow path you take at your own pace, to find that inner stillness for yourself.