‘To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.’

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

We decided to get married that October, a few days before offering our first intensive workshop at a place called Springhead in Dorset. We found a beautiful house in Devon called Hazelwood House that we could rent for the weekend. They were just setting up as a venue and we were to be their first wedding. We invited 60 people to come and spend the weekend with us and we asked them all to bring an item of food suitable for a wedding feast. We asked our good friend Julie Devine to make the cake and the rest we left to a mixture of chance and our faith in our friends’ generosity.

Telling my parents that I was getting married was, as I had feared, a terrible experience for them and for me. I decided the best thing to do was to write them a letter explaining that it wasn’t my intention to hurt them in any way. I recently found a photocopy of that letter. Reading it, I felt the pain, strength and determination of that young man. He truly gave up the known road to follow his heart.

I hoped my parents could see their way to welcoming Susannah into the family, but my father told me that if I married her, he wouldn’t speak to me for six months. I knew he would keep his word. He also told me that I would be cut out of his and my grandparents’ wills.

There was nothing I could do. I loved Susannah and that was that.

As difficult as it was for my parents, it was also tough for her. Through no fault of her own, her love for me was seen not as something to celebrate but as something to mourn.

And for me, wherever I turned, I saw people in pain. There was nothing to do but dance, prepare for our wedding and keep on walking on the road we had set out on.

Nevertheless, I awoke each morning with a terrible sense of loss. And even though I kept coming back to Gabrielle’s words that I was simply being asked to give up my need for my family’s approval, it was a tough time for everyone involved. There was loss, and loss hurts. Learning to live with hurt is part of growing up, and life was giving me a crash course in just that. Everywhere I turned, I was being challenged to stay with my heart’s choice, with or without the agreement of those around me.

Time and time again in my life, I’ve noticed that when I’ve had a vision and made a powerful decision to follow it, life sets up a little test for me to see how real and how deep that decision is. This whole process brought Susannah and me closer together. It made us more determined to follow the path we were on. And so we prepared for our wedding and continued to develop our work.

That summer, we went down to Devon to work with Heather Campbell, one of our early Deer Tribe teachers. She was offering an Eagle Dance, a one-day ceremony in which we were invited to dance backwards and forwards to a beautiful large oak tree in the grounds of a lovely old country house. Originally built with stolen South American gold, the house was being used now as a venue for mindfulness meditation and Heather told us it was the perfect place for our ceremony.

Everyone had their own ‘lane’ to dance in, marked out by ribbon on the ground. As we danced towards the tree, we were supposed to bring our prayers to the ‘tree of life’, and then, as we danced backwards towards the edge of the circle, we were supposed to bring back blessings into our lives. The dance was going to continue for eight hours. We were fasting and we weren’t supposed to turn our back on the tree. The music was provided by a tape recorder playing four Deer Tribe Sundance songs over and over again.

At one point, Heather had to leave the circle to go and pick something up she’d forgotten. I don’t remember what it was, but I suspect she was just testing our discipline. We all continued to dance in our lanes for the next half an hour or so. Then at some point, one of us broke out of the form and within a couple of minutes we were all dancing wildly around the tree, following our own impulses à la 5Rhythms.

When Heather came back, she was furious with us. She sat us down and explained that this was an ancient ceremony that she had been given permission to hold. And we were not respecting the form, the tradition and therefore the ancestors.

A part of me felt annoyed. Here I was facing another set of rules and laws restricting my free movement and telling me my impulses weren’t okay! But another part of me knew full well that she was right. We’d agreed to take part in a particular ceremony of our own free will. No one had told us we had to be there. And we’d broken the structure she’d clearly set out for us. I felt like an adolescent resisting the rules of the adult world. But again, a part of me knew that these weren’t arbitrary rules. The structure was designed to bring us to a state of focused attention through disciplined repetition.

We got back into our lanes and danced on for the next six hours. I went through such boredom as I danced back and forth to the tree. I felt stuck in a rut, a routine. I felt imprisoned by the form, but I also felt that something was there for me, just out of reach. It was a strange state to be in. My internal dialogue was jumping between resistance and something new that I could sense but not quite name. I felt I needed the discipline, the form and the structure. At the same time, I hated it and felt restricted by it. Wasn’t this the reason I got into free dance? To break the mould, to be wild and free? On the other hand, I felt that if I just kept going, I would break through some invisible wall.

We were blessed by the weather. It was fine with a strong summer wind to keep us cool, and the great tree provided us with welcome shade. We danced on and on, back and forth, the same four songs going round and round on the ghetto-blaster. I was hungry and thirsty, but after a while I found my stride. The more I danced, the easier it became. I felt lighter. On the outside, nothing had changed. But on the inside, a quiet revolution was taking place.

I was in two places at once. My body was dancing in this everyday consensual-reality world whilst my mind seemed to have opened or become momentarily illuminated. It was as though someone had turned the lights on. I could see the details of my life clearly as if I’d been looking down on it from above. I could see my family and my friends. I could see the road I had walked along and the road ahead. Everything had its place. The pieces of the puzzle suddenly came together as a single picture that made sense to me. It was so simple. I knew I was on the right road.

It wasn’t the kind of knowing I’d ever experienced before – it was impersonal knowledge. Everything else was quiet. The normal buzz of my internal dialogue was gone. My breath was sweet. I could taste the summer sun and smell the light coming through the branches. Everything was in its place. There was a perfection beyond understanding and it was neither kind nor unkind, neither light nor dark. It gave me a feeling of incredible strength, and from that strength, I understood clearly that, like everything that lived, I had to follow the road that made the most sense to me. I understood that structure and fluidity were the yin and yang of the dance and of creation, and that if I wanted to create anything, I needed to honour them both equally.

Back in London, I heard about a famous Jewish Qabalist called Z’ev Ben Shimon Halevi, who had married a Swedish non-Jewish woman. I wondered if I might be able to talk to him. So I found a way to get in touch and I wrote him a letter. Very kindly, he invited me to come and spend the day with him and his wife.

I arrived at his flat at 11 a.m. I was nervous, curious and unsure what to expect. I rang the bell and a man in his fifties answered the door. He looked as though he’d jumped straight out of a tarot pack. He was the archetypal wise man, all beard and mischievous shining eyes. I warmed to him straight away. He invited me in and we sat in his smallish kitchen. His wife came in, offered me tea and joined us.

He asked me about my situation with my family and I told him the story. He listened quietly and nodded. When I’d finished, he said, ‘You know, God doesn’t make mistakes. You’ve been born Jewish, and there’s a reason for it. If you love Susannah, you must follow your heart and marry her. At some point in your life, when you need to know, you will know why being Jewish is a part of who you are. Until that time, follow your way, follow your way.’

Wow! What a gift. This very generous elder was repeating the message I’d received in the Eagle Dance – different medium, same message. I was beginning to get it.

After our tea and talk, he took me into his workroom. It had an eerie, magical quality. There were strange metallic sculptures like angels hanging from the ceiling and the walls were lined with religious books bound in green and red leather.

He led me on a meditation journey up through the spheres of the Tree of Life that are the basis of Qabalistic work. Amazingly, sitting there, I went into the state that I’d experienced in the Eagle Dance. That same impersonal and direct knowledge of how things are arose in me. To be clear, this wasn’t a fluffy ‘everything is perfect as it is’ kind of revelation. It was much more straightforward than that. There was knowledge of suffering and injustice. There was knowledge of pain. There was knowledge of the unfairness of life. And simultaneously, there was the knowledge that everything was in its place, playing its role in some great drama in which all the characters had temporarily forgotten that they were on stage.

In that state, there was meaning to my life and I knew that I had to get down to work. I didn’t feel righteous or religious. I had no ‘I’ve got to save the world’ story going on. I just knew that I had to commit totally to being the person I was and doing what I had to do. And I knew for sure that there were many, many truths and many, many ways to access those truths. And I knew that the ultimate meaning was magnificently shrouded in the mists of deep mystery. And I felt just fine with that.

Strengthened by these encounters, a month before our wedding day Susannah and I took a cheap vacation to Tunisia in order to relax a little and dream the marriage we wanted. Gabrielle had suggested that we write our own vows. She felt it important that we didn’t share them or discuss them until the ceremony itself. There was to be no negotiation or compromise. The truth in each of our hearts and the vows that matched that were all that was needed. Although we were scared (‘What if I promise the universe and she only promises the Earth?’), we were up for the truth and having as real a marriage ceremony as we could.

In Tunisia, we camped and lived frugally until the penultimate day, when we went for a lovely lunch in a posh hotel overlooking the sea. After lunch, we sat on the deck and within minutes our marriage ceremony just seemed to drop out of the sky into the space between us. I got a piece of it, and then Susannah got one, and before long we had a perfect marriage ritual all designed and ready to go. It felt to both of us as though we had received a great gift, fully intact, fully operable and ready to rock and roll.

We were discovering the magic of creation in an everyday sense. The more we told the story that we were connected to spirit, the more we experienced that to be true.

This was the beginning of a more mature relationship to spirit. There was no God on a cloud. It certainly wasn’t all about light and some kind of endless bliss, it was about something very tangible, a sense of feeling physically connected to the ground beneath our feet and, through that, to the life around us. I guess it’s what the mystics call ‘presence’. We were arriving, here, now, in our bodies, on Earth.

We were simply experiencing a sense of guidance that felt bigger than either one of us. The intensity of our practice was starting to open the door to a deeper experience of life.

In the light of this, we knew that if we were going to enter into this marriage and do justice to the ritual we had unearthed, we needed to enter it with a clean conscience. On our last night in Tunisia we had a painful night of confessions, each of us acknowledging times and places where we hadn’t been honest with each other. There was nothing particularly enlightened about that night. Just as a storm can blow up out of a beautiful clear blue sky, the marriage ceremony that we had crafted acted as an immediate and very strong catalyst. Our intentions were clear. We both wanted to enter the space of marriage without hidden skeletons rattling away in the closet. Nevertheless, I think we were both shocked by what needed to be shared, and though we did our best to hear each other, the hurts we bring with us into our relationships from past experiences can blind us to the reality in the present and leave us shadow boxing for hours on end.

We hardly slept that night, but as the dawn lit up the sky, we found we had survived. We were emotionally bruised, cautious and afraid of what the future would bring, but we were learning, step by step, what it meant to walk the talk.

The day before our wedding day, my dear father called me to beg me not to marry Susannah. It was a painful call. I did my best to understand where he was coming from. He was doing what he felt in his own heart to be right, just as I was. But my understanding couldn’t cover over the loss we both felt.

For years, I’d felt that at some point it would come to this with my father. We were very different in so many ways and very similar in ways we wouldn’t have recognized at the time. It was clear we were both stubbornly on the road we’d chosen and neither of us was willing to pull out of the inevitable headlong crash. That was the last conversation I was to have with him for six months, and for years afterwards our phone calls were a predictable and repetitive dialogue: ‘How are you? Where are you? Do you want to speak to your mother?’

It was only when faced with his death from cancer at a relatively young age that we truly connected again on a heart-to-heart level. There were many times when I missed having a father to talk to. I still do. But on another level, I feel that we played out an archetypal drama in which we both performed our roles to perfection. I couldn’t be the son he thought he wanted and he couldn’t be the father I thought I wanted, but love runs deeper than we know, and many times I’ve looked with wonder at what he brought out in me. He pulled the rug out from underneath me many times, and in so doing, he taught me to stand on my own two feet. He stayed true to what he felt to be right and didn’t give in to me, and in so doing, he taught me to be strong. The older I get, the more I feel his presence with me.

He wasn’t there on my wedding day, though. He felt he couldn’t support our marriage and, quite rightly, my mother felt it necessary to stand by him. Gabrielle, however, was due to join us all at Hazelwood to lead the ceremony.

We awoke to a misty grey Devon morning, not at all what we were hoping for. And then we received what could have been a devastating blow. Just after breakfast, Gabrielle called from London to tell us she had food poisoning. We couldn’t believe it. All our plans were suddenly high up in the air blowing in the early autumn winds. She talked about renting a helicopter to get to us, but we all knew that it wasn’t going to happen.

We put the phone down and looked at each other. Maybe we both expected the other to break down, but we had fire in our eyes to match the sun that was just beginning to break through the clouds. We knew without words that this was spirit’s invitation for us to step a little more into our own authority and, witnessed by a circle of friends and family, marry each other. If Gabrielle couldn’t get there, then so be it. It was down to us.

In our ageing photo album of our wedding day, there is a photograph of both of us on that morning. I am barefoot in the misty rain, wearing a floppy hippy sweater and Susannah is in her black sunflower trousers. We both look so very young. And yet there is a determination there and a joy in each other. We had the chutzpah to design and hold our own wedding. And the strength of the ritual came both from that and from the presence of a loving community of family and friends.

A good ritual carries you through the hard times. Well done, it provides a river of strength that will be with you when it’s needed. It was 5 October 1989 and we were beginning a new chapter of life together.

At the end of the day, after a beautiful ceremony that contained elements from the Jewish tradition, the Quaker tradition, a Native American pipe ceremony, singing, blessings from the assembled community and hours of great music and dancing, we were escorted to our wedding suite. Our crazily creative friends lined the stairs, singing to us as we climbed. Unbeknownst to us, they had been in the room and set it up. The bath was full of hot water. There were floating candles in the sink, champagne cooling in a bucket and beautiful fresh grapes and homemade chocolates by the side of the bed. And on the bed, painted in gaudy colours, there was a message.

‘Go ahead,’ it said, ‘break all the rules…’