People sometimes ask where the ideas behind Sin-eater come from.

The answer is not straightforward because the work emerged slowly — over decades — through lived experience rather than formal theory.

But if I had to identify two enduring influences, they would be:

  • long-distance travel
  • healing practices

Both became ways of exploring regulation, perception, memory, embodiment, and transformation.

Long-Distance Travel

Over the years, I’ve travelled extensively by yacht, horse, foot, bus, and train.

These journeys have taken me across the world — often alone, often over long stretches of time and distance.

Looking back, I can see I was drawn not only to movement itself, but also to the altered states it creates.

This passage from the Sin-eater Companion Guide perhaps explains this more clearly than I can:

“Many trauma survivors live with nervous systems that remain stuck in states of hypervigilance, shutdown, anxiety, dissociation, or chronic tension long after danger has passed. This is particularly true for people who experienced developmental or pre-verbal trauma, where overwhelming experiences occurred before language and conscious memory fully developed.

Because trauma is stored physiologically as well as psychologically, healing often requires more than insight or conversation alone. The body itself needs experiences of safety, regulation, rhythm, and connection.

One of the most overlooked yet powerful ways this can happen is through rhythmic movement.

Rocking, dancing, walking, drumming, horse riding, swimming, repetitive motion, and even train travel can have profound regulating effects on the nervous system. Many trauma survivors instinctively seek these experiences without fully understanding why.

The body often knows what it needs long before the mind can explain it.”

When I first began travelling, I would not have described it in these terms.

I simply knew that movement changed me.

Long sea passages, endless train journeys, walking for days, and riding across unfamiliar landscapes all seemed to quiet something internally while simultaneously opening other dimensions of perception.

Travel also altered my relationship to time.

It created distance from ordinary routines and allowed older memories, intuitions, and questions to emerge.

Some journeys felt less like escape and more like a form of listening.

Therapists and Healing Practices

Another profound influence has been my long involvement with therapists, healers, and practitioners from many different disciplines.

Over the years, I’ve worked with:

  • acupuncture
  • craniosacral therapy
  • Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR)
  • EMDR
  • energy healing
  • herbalism
  • homeopathy
  • hypnotherapy
  • massage
  • occupational therapy
  • psychology
  • psychotherapy
  • reflexology
  • reiki
  • shamanic practice
  • social work
  • yoga

…alongside more unconventional approaches including psychic surgery and psychedelic work.

What fascinated me was not simply whether these approaches “worked” in a conventional sense, but the very nature of healing itself.

Why do certain experiences transform people while others leave them unchanged?

Why do some emotional patterns repeat across lifetimes, families, and generations despite insight and effort?

Again, parts of Sin-eater speak directly to these questions:

“Using dowsing, I traced the line of my family across three generations — parents, grandparents, great-grandparents — and asked a simple but piercing question: ‘Does this ancestor require healing first?’

One name came forward with unmistakable clarity: Samuel Macmillan (1863–1927), my maternal great-grandfather.

It was not the first time he had surfaced. Five years earlier, I had dowsed over more than a thousand ancestors, asking whether their lives had been exceptionally good, unexceptional, or exceptionally difficult. Only a handful stood out as having lived lives that distorted the family field. Samuel was one of them.

In retrospect, this was no surprise.

Samuel’s life was marked by rupture. In his middle age, he suffered an industrial accident that ended his livelihood. From that point forward, he and his family survived on Parish relief.

It is likely he had managed one of the Binney stone quarries near Ecclesmachan, a small village in West Lothian, Scotland — a place steeped in older histories, where a 12th-century saint once founded a chapel and where the dead still gather in quiet rows beneath the wind.”

And later:

“Back home, this ‘hidden’ information sharpened my research. I began to see echoes across generations: descendants — his granddaughter, great-grandson, great-granddaughter — each losing their livelihood in middle age, each meeting the same invisible wall. The repetition was too precise to ignore.

My own life threaded into this pattern. For 35 years, I worked in vocational rehabilitation, helping people return to employment after an accident, injury, or illness.

I, too, had carried a life-altering illness.

I, too, had known the disorientation of being unable to fully listen to my body, the feeling of being held in place, and the recurrence of financial and relational cycles that resisted resolution.

I asked: ‘Is my life’s work connected to Samuel’s experience?’

The answer came back: Yes.

It raised unsettling possibilities. Was this simple inheritance — or something more interactive? A kind of entanglement where unresolved experience seeks expression through the living? Was I, in some way, participating in an unfinished story?”

An Ongoing Enquiry

These questions continue to shape my work.

I remain interested in the places where psychology, memory, ancestry, embodiment, symbolism, and spiritual experience overlap — particularly the ways unresolved histories continue to move through individuals, families, landscapes, and cultures.

Perhaps Sin-eater emerged from that intersection:

  • travel as regulation and initiation
  • healing as enquiry
  • ancestry as unfinished conversation
  • storytelling as a way of listening to what refuses to disappear