About Phil Barber
Workshop leader, Life Coach and Author
I love working with men who wish to find new freedoms and deepen into their creative unfolding. I am based in Devon.
I live with my partner, a beautiful and wise woman. My two daughters are grown up and I have two teenage grandsons.
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I have been coaching people for twenty-five years and running workshops for over fifteen years. It became increasingly clear I was destined to work with men. For the last ten years I have worked primarily with men supporting the unfolding wisdom and creativity of their hearts. To deepen my offerings, I still seek out new teachers and space holders while being grateful for the ones I’ve had.
My early life had been characterised by loss and instability. My Polish father left before my mother gave birth. My Yorkshire mother had to let go of me at the tender age of two. Without extended family I was raised by many people in many different children’s homes. It wasn’t till I was fifteen I was finally sent to foster parents in Wales. Two years later I was joining my first ship in the Persian Gulf. My dream job as a navigating officer in the Merchant Navy took me across the world for ten years. Then my dream changed to creating my own way in the small business world. In the late nineties my dream changed again to being a healer and a guide for others, while journeying on my own path to wholeness.
People speak of a great turning. Mine was early 1996 coming up to forty-years-old. I was a successful business owner fully expecting to continue my gallop up the sun-kissed road of glorious wealth. I was a hard worker moving fast; fast enough to stay well ahead of the murky turmoil of my early life. Now I realise I was a chronic work-addict – I could not leave it alone. I didn’t realise my golden road had a huge crevice waiting for me. I fell into it. It was not pretty… but it was meant to be.
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Looking for good weather inside myself, all I met was an incredibly lonely and storm damaged man; storms I’d lived out, and storms I’d inherited. Where is your enthusiasm’, a voice kept repeating. With little to nourish my inner life there was no answer, and no desire to carry on with life.
I had left my marriage years earlier, and I scrambled around in my shocked and chaotic state. Keep a brave face on Phil, look good on the outside, was an inherited mantra. With an awful murkiness in my chest, I did my best to function as a man, and father my two young daughters. There was a moment I caught sight of their innocent faces gazing up at me saying (without words), What’s happening Dad? Where are you? Time hung in the air. That moment shook my world, sobered me down, took the blinkers off, AND made me FEEL. Reality was in the room, bringing me back from the brink, humbling me enough to seek out a therapist. I turned up with my ‘smart mind’ in smart clothes and in a smart car. Inside - my bones rattled with fear. My chest was so defended my body had learned to hunch and twist around my heart. It was then the untwisting began.
I sought out mentors, healers and teachers. I found myself hungry and fascinated by what they knew and was guided through many serious personal crises as a result. I learned about healing and being rooted in my true self - why had no one spoken of this before? Along the way I put myself in front of many teachers including John Bradshaw, Deepak Chopra, Patch Adams, Michael Meade, Malidoma Some, Subonfu Some, Marianne Williamson, and Edward De Bono. I received trainings in coaching and Leadership from Coach Training Institute of California. I have attended Awakening work retreats with Jeannie Zandi and the Movement of Being enterprise.
All men have unique talents. All men have the capacity for an enjoyable vibrant life. All men can be generous contributors to their communities, through their work and their play. I long to be with men who show up well, who live for making beauty, care for things that matter, can relax into their own gifts, and speak lovingly from their personal experiences. I long to be with men who can skilfully mourn their losses and those of others without shying away.
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In my coming-of-age years such men were not there. They were mostly angry, violent, confused, irritable, depressed, absent, seriously unstable or worn out by the weight on their shoulders. No one mentioned the heart, except for men having heart attacks. Skill and knowledge were talked of but not in relation to a man’s natural calling. It seemed this way - Some men are born lucky, other men are born on the margins, to be used up, or to be avoided’.
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Many versions of this ‘unworthiness’ can run deep in our unconscious realm, often lodged there from the tender years of childhood.
I distinctly remember my twelve-years-old self leaving the young offender’s institution in Yorkshire after being locked away for six and a half weeks. Violence from the staff was a normal daily thing. Reclaiming my clothes and a few items I had brought in my pockets when I arrived, I climbed into a car and looked back at that grey building, thinking, if I am ever to have a life worth living, I will never learn how from men like them.
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Sometimes I think the rest of my life has been a journey of longing and bringing forward what was withheld during those young years.
"I have attended so many of Phil's men’s groups. Its brotherhood, self-development, and a bathing in what’s good for men’s mental health. Phil has a wealth of well-paced activities to reveal our deeper stories; the ones that matter. He is engaging and relaxed at the same time. A trustworthy, inspiring, fun and creative facilitator and person."
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Darren Ellis
- mental health support