More about Rose

Here are some of the life threads that have woven together to become my work at Tribe in Transition today: 

1. I’m a passionate lifelong learner and educator. Began teaching at age 22 in a secondary school and by 32 had found my way into supporting tutors offering informal adult, community and health education, throughout Scotland;
2. I discovered I have a gift for initiating leading edge training programmes and seized the opportunity. My first programmes were in listening skills, informal women’s education and group leadership;
3. I became involved in the Women’s Movement in the early 70’s and later studied women’s psychology and ran many women’s groups. This was the beginning of a lifelong quest for liberation;
4. My first spiritual awakening happened at 28 with a spontaneous outpouring of poetry. In my 30’s this deepened into my first explorations of soul, and that in turn led on to focused spiritual practice and to my Soul Journey at age 42,  Soul, healing and creativity have always been interwoven for me and the most vital aspects of my life.
5. My interest  in mental and emotional well being began aged 22.  At 34 I entered training as a Gestalt therapist (focusing on presence and unfolding the creative process) and this gave me the foundational skills for all my work to come. Of course I discovered that the one who needed to be healed was me! I worked for 25 years as a Gestalt therapist, 1-1, in groups, and as a trainer.
6. At age 35 I started my own business, Team Work, offering personal and professional development training and consultancy. By the time I left 7 years later it was a successful six woman business;
7. Around the age of 40 I hit my mid-life crisis and outgrew the life and identity I had created to that point. A deep desire to turn inwards led me to step out of my business and therapy practice and everything familiar. I took off on my Soul Journey to the NW Highlands of Scotland and then to NZ.
8. I became an author. I published my first book, Migration to the Heartland, in 2004. Since then I have written 3 more full length books, Living Your Passion in 2008, True Wealth in 2012, Whole Mind Whole World in 2019,  and many shorter e-books. I will be making all of these available soon.
9. In my first few years in NZ I trained counsellors and psychotherapists, ran workshops and had a therapy and coaching practice.
10. My exploration of transformational learning began in 2000 and has been a lived inquiry ever since. I have created a body of transformational work starting with inner work skills, through to creative mastery and living our passion and then into the making of a co-creative culture.
11. For many of these latter years I have focused on creating, and experimenting with small groups locally and virtually. Sometime late 2018 I decided, since I am now an elder, that it’s time for me to connect with more people and deliver my gifts. Luckily this coincides with a much bigger population waking up to the need for just these skills. Since making this decision I have written my fourth book, Whole Mind Whole World, created 3 online learning programmes, Build Your Soul Sanctuary, The Power of Wise Choices and Pausing at the Portal; and launched The Tribe in Transition Community on Facebook. 

If you resonate with me and you need the skills I have, I look forward to connecting with you and to serving you.

With Love, Rose Diamond 

Here’s the longer version:

A Global Perspective

Born in England, I lived for 19 years in Scotland, 3 years in Virginia USA, and 17 years in the South Island of New Zealand. I am currently back in my homeland in Wales, UK.  Living on different sides of the world, combined with evolving spiritual and political perspectives means that I now live from a global and cosmic vision.

My Mission Began in Childhood

From the viewpoint of soul choices, my unhappy family provided the perfect conditions to learn about the healing process and seeded in me a powerful longing for social justice and creative freedom. Slowly, slowly, I have learned how to free myself from the restrictions on my fullest expression and, as I have liberated myself, I have also followed a strong desire to facilitate the empowerment of others.

A Lifelong Learner and Visionary Educator

As I entered adulthood,  I began to separate psychologically from my family and from mainstream society, and to learn who I am as a unique individual.  I started out as a secondary school teacher in London and soon migrated to special needs and adult education in Scotland. From my early 30’s my life became a playground for action and experimentation. I pushed through shyness and introversion to become an innovative whole person educator.  In the early 80’s, I worked throughout Scotland, supporting community leaders, prison staff and health professionals. I had a natural ability to spot emerging learning needs in the practitioner field and discovered an ease with initiating, writing and publishing learning materials and delivering training programmes. I was fired by a vision for a more co-operative world, and a passion for lifelong whole person learning.

Whole Person Learning and Healing

At the same time, I was also discovering the inner world. In the early ‘80’s I began training as a Gestalt (whole person) therapist. This powerful transformational discipline took place within a group process and turned me inside out. I was introduced to the skills that would be the foundation of all my future work: becoming present, aware and embodied; harnessing the power of the emotions; making the psychological shadow conscious; and being guided by intuition and the imagination.   

My Soul Path found me and I’ve lived in response to an Inner Calling ever since.

Alongside this active, experimental orientation, I also experienced spontaneous inner awakenings. At first these came in the form of writing poetry, and in my poems I discovered an authentic voice far wiser than my personality. Before long, this deepened into an exploration of soul and for a while I chose to live on the margins of social “normality”, finding sanctuary in wild and beautiful landscapes.  This quest was thrilling and, at times, confusing and lonely, since there was no common language at that time to talk about such experiences.

The Women’s Movement

The women’s liberation movement was emerging into the world as I was entering womanhood and it has been a powerful, informative, and always evolving part of my life ever since. I was deeply inspired by feminist writers who revealed interconnected aspects of psychology, soul and politics and helped me to understand at a much deeper level how we have all been shaped and mis-shaped by the politics of power. My explorations in feminist psychology also helped me greatly in my understanding of Soul and how Soul, Spirit and authentic truth have been suppressed throughout history for political ends.

My Free Spirit led me to Become an Entrepreneur

I was so fascinated and compelled by the gift of poetry  and my deep dives into the archaeology of Soul that I left my full-time job in adult education to make more space to pursue my Soul mission.  I soon realised I couldn’t live on poetry alone and created my own business, Teamwork, through which I developed my work as a personal and professional development trainer. Over the next ten years this grew into a successful six woman business and was still going strong when I left for my next leap into the unknown in 1992.

Dedicated Spiritual and Creative Practice

In my early 40’s, in the midst of an intense period of disillusionment, I was introduced to my first meditation practice, which had an immediate and profoundly healing effect. In response to an irresistible pull inwards I determined to become a writer and left my business, my therapy practice, my home, professional community and friends  to set off for expansive landscapes and big skies, first in the North-West Highlands of Scotland and then, a few years later, to the South Island of New Zealand.

This was when I really became an edge-dweller. Whereas my previous life chapter had been about action, experimentation, relationship, accumulation, building and being “out there”, this new chapter was about learning to sit, wait, surrender, let go and empty. This was a big challenge and the spiritual practices that came to support me took me to places therapy hadn’t begun to touch. Meditation and spiritual practice were the tools for a thorough process of clearing and cleansing that echoed down the soul line. Whilst still half asleep to what I had chosen, yet irresistibly drawn forward and committed, I dedicated myself to this task of following my soul as I gathered tools for transformation and conscious evolution.

Transformational Learning

After a decade dedicated to spiritual practice and writing, in 2000 I became intensely creative and began to invent my own unique approaches to transformational learning.  I wrote books, made websites, ran workshops and programmes, and conducted numerous experiments in this new, holistic discipline.  The work has been evolving and guiding me ever since. I co-founded A Whole New World in 2007 with my soul friend Woods Elliott, and this became Tribe in Transition in 2013.  

” The choices I’ve made to uncompromisingly live my passion have led me to let go of social conditioning, old stories and limiting beliefs and to travel light. I was a seeker for many years. Eventually, I learned that everything I had been looking for is already inside me and emerges through creative work and in relationship with others. My experiences have taught me to see beyond society’s judgements about success and failure, what is normal and what is pathological, what it means to be rich or poor. It’s been a process of shedding skins, trial and error, death and rebirth, radical uncertainty and deepening trust”

Sitting with Death and Choosing Life

2016 was a year of deep transformation for me. My closest friend and co-creative partner, Woods, died in December 2015 and my only brother, David, six months later. These losses catapulted me into one of the most challenging transformational processes of my life in which I felt taken apart, stripped of all my powers and then put back together in a new way.  During this time, I wrote two e-books about my experience of grief and coming to terms with death: Portrait of a Gentle Man and Sitting with Death and Choosing Life.  The integration I achieved through this writing has led me to a renewed passion for my transformational work and a desire to give back and share the gifts I discovered. I now know going to the bottom of grief holds the key, not only for individual transformation, but for a positive life-enhancing shift in our culture.  I have been learning how to grieve all my life and this healing is the work I was born to do.

The unique blend of skills I offer you:

Whole Person Experiential Learning, in which your authentic expression is always at the centre, enables shifts in perspective, transformational leaps of consciousness and new, satisfying experimental actions. I would love to help you to connect more fully with your own wisdom, soul inspired motivation and authentic truth.

Inner knowledge and Experience of the Soul Journey and the Process of Transformation

I read widely and keep up with current trends in my professional field but my learning about the subtle, wonderful and, frequently, lonely landscape of the soul has been a remembrance and recovery of inner knowing. This is what I will encourage in you. It’s a continuing journey of deepening trust in our own intuition, inner guidance and gifts, as well as a deepening into the essential interconnectedness and intelligence of life.

Becoming Empowered Creators

As we allow the limiting identities, stories and beliefs that have held us, to be deconstructed and melt away, we emerge into a greater spaciousness and presence. We step into a fresh and unknown space in which the new is emerging through us, impelling us to become the most skillful and empowered creators we can be, so that we may bring this new consciousness down to Earth, into embodiment and form.

Our hope for a whole new world arising from the ashes of the old, lies in the flowering of this soulful “new consciousness” which connects us back into the living wholeness of life and to what is essentially meaningful, nourishing and supportive of our survival and evolution.

Faith in the power of the collective.

We are all interconnected and each of us has a unique part to play.  When we come together in intentional learning circles, we step out of isolation and into a more expanded energy field which holds us in a shared human experience. As we practice putting language to our experiences, by practicing conversation from a state of presence and naming the process with increasing subtlety and accuracy, we gently unfold our growing edge, and we all advance together with greater ease and grace.