More on Elizabeth and her story

“Since I was a little girl I have been interested in understanding how things work, and explaining things.  I have taught extensively from childhood although the day when I attended the Facilitator Development Programme in Deloitte was a turning point in the way I worked.  Previously I had only understood the mechanisms of explaining and telling, and this programme introduced me to the skills of provoking, unlocking and gathering through questioning skills and facilitative practice for adults.

In my late twenties I became restless at work with a desire to spend time considering deeper questions of meaning, in particular what it means to be human, to be fully ourselves and to understand our relationship to the world.  Through the perseverance of a university tutor, I found myself one day reading the reworked feminist fairytales of French author Pierrette Fleutiaux.  I knew on reading the first one that I had found where I needed to land. I moved  my job, home and community and started, funded for one pivotal year by a Graduate Teaching Assistantship from Exeter University.

Before long, I had been asked to work as an external facilitator on programmes in the UK and overseas, and to design programmes.  I chose, somewhat reluctantly, to relinquish university teaching because the frail earning power made it almost impossible to concentrate on work.  My consulting practice developed over time.  Imperceptibly, I grew as a consultant, and eventually grew a brand, evolute, named after the central dynamic of my PhD thesis conclusions about the nature of humanity, integrating both linear and cyclical change, into a growing evolute curve which embodies seasonality, choice and progress, still central elements of my vision of human lived experience.    

As well as more standard facilitation for clients, within evolute, I pioneered new forms of learning and development, including the at-the-time ground breaking lent adventure and advent-ure which used daily emails and a private online community space to enable a global community to explore new ways of being.  Adventurers reported substantial shifts in courage, creativity, self-regard, and hope from the experiences they initiated in being brave, expanding their personal frontiers and sharing with and supporting other in a group.  Up to forty adventurers from up to fifteen countries participated at any one time.

The surfing chaos and complexity leadership adventure also grew out of this season.  This three-day programme originally took place in a residential home in Polzeath, Cornwall, hosting up to eight people for a transformation adventure based on the discoveries of my academic research into the dynamics of human growing and transformation in the face of life circumstances which initially exceed inner resources.  The loops of Jungian change – first in the psyche, then in a reconnection to the body, and finally a reconfiguration in the relationship to the external world – informed the design of the sessions and the incorporation of a physical element – the actual surfing – linked to the bioenergetics of Alexander Lowen.  As a container for such substantial change the environment of the programme was curated for maximum feelings of comfort, respite, peace and inspiration, and the role of homemaker – a cook and community host devoted to making the environment loving and nurturing – played a pivotal role in enabling people to reach places of great vulnerability and depth in the service of their own transformation.

In 2009 the PhD was completed but not published.  In 2013 academic publisher Peter Lang initiated a series of contemporary European women’s writing and accepted a revised thesis-based proposal.  What followed was another four years of completing the research into human transformation refracted through the protagonists of Fleutiaux’s novels, resulting in a final chapter on leadership, revising and extending the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Carl Jung as it related to (women) leaders in the contemporary world.

While working between commercial and academic worlds, evolute served clients across the Western hemisphere from the UK to Sweden to Russia to Madagascar.  These work stories are featured now as part of story roots referred to here as the Toromiros offering.

Strange Adventures: Women’s Individuation in the Works of Pierrette Fleutiaux was published in 2016, and in that year something surprising also happened:  A series of mysterious prompts and sensations led me to a visit to Sophora toromiro in Gothenburg Botanical Gardens. This new shift led to a complete transformation of everything connected to my existing life, including the end of the evolute era, and a pause before something new was able to be born. I found myself deeply renewing the ground of my life so far, to be able to have something to offer that came from a deeper, more mysterious, more integrated place.

And this arrives into the world in the shape of Toromiros.”