About Marcus
Marcus's work begins with questions rather than answers.
What are we actually looking for? What does this familiar sense of being “me” feel like? Where is it located? What's it made of? What is it trying to achieve? And what happens when we explore these questions with non-judgemental curiosity, without assuming we already know the answers?
Marcus is interested in exploring these questions through conversation, self-enquiry and attention to the body. Rather than offering answers or asking anyone to accept a particular view of themselves or reality, he invites people to look closely at their own experience, explore what's arising without immediately judging it or trying to change it, and see what they discover for themselves.
The roots of this exploration began long before Marcus knew anything about spirituality or nonduality.
At eighteen, as a drama student in Bristol, UK, he was learning how to create characters, inhabit them and take them apart again. A convincing person could seemingly be assembled from history, memory, motivation, thought, emotion, voice, posture and physicality.
One night, while working on a monologue, a question arose:
If I can be all of these characters, who am I?
He looked for something solid beneath the roles and couldn't find it.
The question stayed.
Nine years later, at the age of twenty-seven, Marcus underwent a series of profound, spontaneous experiences that unfolded over the following two years.
At times, the familiar sense of being a separate individual disappeared completely. There were experiences of extraordinary intimacy and connection with life, and of profound silence and stillness in which everything seemed to be happening by itself. In the most powerful of these experiences, Marcus watched and felt the identity he had taken himself to be seemingly dismantle itself, layer by layer, through both mind and body, culminating in the complete dissolution of the familiar sense of being a separate self.
Marcus had no knowledge of spirituality or its teachings and no framework through which to understand what was happening. When he tried to describe it to friends and family, they thought he'd lost the plot.
What followed was the beginning of a much longer exploration.
The life and identity Marcus had built began to unravel. He left his career and spent a number of difficult and disorienting years trying to understand what had happened and learning to live with its implications.
Only afterwards did he encounter descriptions of similar experiences in the nondual wisdom traditions. These provided language and context for something he had previously understood largely through what acting had already shown him about the construction and deconstruction of identity.
Over the years that followed, Marcus immersed himself in this exploration. He spent time around the Krishnamurti community at Brockwood Park, working with Inwoods School and assisting the Brockwood development team. He also became involved behind the scenes in the contemporary nondual world, working with publishers and authors, helping to organise events and spending time with teachers and people exploring awakening for themselves.
Those years allowed him to see both the value and the limitations of the spiritual marketplace.
He repeatedly met people who could speak with great clarity about there being “no self”, nonduality, awareness or consciousness, while the ordinary experience of being someone, with its fears, defences, desires, hurts and familiar patterns of behaviour, remained remarkably convincing.
He recognised the same thing in himself.
Marcus had accumulated a great deal of knowledge and had become fluent in the language of nonduality, but increasingly saw that understanding something intellectually was not the same as living it.
The body became central to this exploration.
The sense of being someone was not simply an idea that could be reasoned away. It could be felt as tension, contraction, resistance, localisation, emotion and familiar patterns of response.
This raised a different kind of question.
Rather than continuing to ask Who am I?, Marcus became increasingly interested in asking:
What does “me” actually feel like?
And from there:
Where is it located?
What's it made of?
What's it trying to achieve?
In many ways, this brought Marcus back to the question that had first appeared through acting.
How is the character called “me” actually being created?
What part do thought, memory, sensation, self-image, history, desire, fear and bodily contraction play? What about the need for approval, security, certainty or control? Could even the search for awakening itself be part of it?
Rather than deciding in advance what any of this means, Marcus is interested in looking at it as it happens.
What happens when somebody feels criticised?
What gets hurt?
What are we protecting?
What makes us feel separate?
What are we actually doing to make ourselves happen?
Do we choose our thoughts?
And what happens in those ordinary moments when we're not particularly thinking about ourselves at all?
These aren't questions with answers Marcus expects anyone to adopt. They're invitations to look.
That exploration continues.
For over twenty-five years, Marcus has explored these questions in conversation with people interested in awakening and what it means in ordinary life. Although the nondual traditions have informed his understanding, he belongs to no particular school or lineage and makes no attempt to fit the conventional image of a spiritual teacher.
His spontaneous talks and conversations rarely follow a straight line. There is no prescribed method or programme. One question may lead somewhere entirely unexpected. There may be enquiry, attention to the body, silence, decidedly irreverent turns and plenty of laughter. He has a very dry sense of humour and probably swears more than he should.
The conversation follows what is actually arising.
Marcus isn't interested in asking anyone to reproduce his experiences, nor in replacing one set of beliefs about who they are with another. His own experiences have inevitably informed the questions he asks and where his attention is drawn, but they are not conclusions he expects anyone else to accept.
His invitation is much simpler:
Start with what is actually here.
Explore what's arising without immediately judging it or trying to change it.
Feel it.
Look at it with non-judgemental curiosity.
Question what you assume about it.
And see what you discover for yourself.
Marcus offers talks and group meetings, both online and in person, and occasionally has availability for one-to-one conversations. Alongside his independent work, he joins Lisa in offering meetings and retreats that bring self-enquiry and embodied exploration together.
Marcus and Lisa live in the South Devon countryside with their two sons and two dogs.
Contact Marcus hello@marcusandlisa.com