The Silken Thread

About the Book

A giant ball of gleaming straight pins threatened to kill the terrified eleven year old boy. Running in terror, he faced a barrier of thick, black cables. Somehow he knew safety lay in finding a silken thread lying concealed amid the cables. From this nightmare, the author's search for The Silken Thread became a life-long quest.

Many years later, the author realized the ball of pins was the terror of his mother and beliefs formed the barrier of cables keeping him separate and unhappy. The Silken Thread explores healing childhood's wounds and cultivating spiritual growth. The crucial issue addressed is how we give meaning to events and people, especially ourselves. As children we learn patterns of meaning-making. Some patterns, although once helpful, become self-defeating in adulthood.

Recognizing how we are enthralled and trapped by our meaning-making is essential to shifting self-defeating habits into self-enhancing ones. This is described as the Cycle of Healing. In embracing the cycle, we draw upon a range of capacities with which we were born.

These capacities are strands of The Silken Thread. They were never lost. Rather, they became subverted through our habits of meaning-making. The Cycle of Healing focuses on restoring aspects of our original self.

Even in healing, we continue to depend upon meanings. Spiritual growth takes us beyond the need for meaning to learning to be present to the immediacy of our experience. In being present, we recover The Silken Thread, a deep, abiding sense of connectedness within us.

About the Author

David lived as a child in England during the second world war. The combination of the war, a tyrannical mother and difficult boarding school experiences gave him a legacy of mistrust and self-doubt. The image of The Silken Thread arose in a nightmare at age eleven.

He served in the British Army and then the Canadian Army after emigrating to Canada in 1958. Searching for The Silken Thread was already a theme in his life when he worked for four years with the Innuit in the arctic. In 1970, he attended the University of Calgary. Despite self-doubt, he gained bachelor and masters degrees in Social Work. He then worked for two years as a volunteer in Malaysia with Canadian University Service Overseas and then taught at the University of Calgary until early retirement in 1990.

Only in 1981 as David began work on a doctorate in psychology did he shift his search for The Silken Thread from the external world to the internal. He became fascinated with the processes of meaning-making and the operation of belief and language in directing our lives. Through a combination of research, meditation and the study of eastern religions, David entered a period of healing and spiritual growth, which continues today.

David has two children, Petra and Adrian. He currently lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia, with his wife Susan. David continues to study the processes of meaning-making and uses this approach in counseling individuals and couples