About – Amicus Mortis

Welcome to my website, Amicus Mortis.

This website is a reflection of my research and personal and professional interest in death and the afterlife, all of which have their origin in the lived experiences of my own life. This relationship with the afterlife, which began in my childhood, was precipitated by diverse experiences of what I term non-ordinary or other-worldly phenomena. These experiences taught me that death was simply a doorway which led to another kind of existence, to another ‘place’. These experiences, which have continued into my adult life, inform how I live in the world as an embodied being and how I understand ‘life’.

As an adult I was bereaved and also became a relatively young widow, and during this time I experienced those close to me who died ‘returning’ on numerous occasions without provocation from myself. These unexpected and random other-worldly encounters, and the attitudinal response from others when I spoke about them led to my conducting research and completing a PhD in bereavement, grief and the afterlife (University of Sydney, 2013). Death had never been this personal before, and I wanted to demystify it as I did the after-death encounters I was experiencing.

In addition to this now public aspect of my private life, I was also a student of an esoteric Christian school located in Sydney, Australia, for fourteen years. During this time I was taught the principles and practices of the Fourth Way (George I. Gurdjieff, 1866-1949) and particularly those of Beyond the Fourth Way (Dr Philip W. Groves, 1920-1999). This was an immensely formative period which continues to have a deeply profound and directional impact on my spiritual growth and understanding of my place within the universe and of the spiritual foundation of reality.

From one perspective, if I was going to define myself in a way which embodies my world-view and associated belief-system, I would say that I’m a social scientist. From another, I would define myself as a spiritual being in a physical body whose birth was a meaningful event in the continual unfolding of creation and in the maintenance of the universe. My prevailing philosophy is that the subjective experiences and understandings of the meaning of death, the dead and spirituality, evidence a changing and shifting theoretical and intellectual discourse. This discourse is helping to revision how we conceptualise what we are as human beings, what the purpose for our existence is, and why the dead, by their cross-cultural presence in our lives, offer all of us an invitation to consider life from a transpersonal perspective.

I have extensive involvement in community development, support and advocacy in both a professional and para-professional capacity, have been an invited speaker at national and international conferences, and am a published author. Since 2006 that involvement has encompassed the for-profit and the not-for-profit sector in the areas of bereavement and grief, hospital pastoral care, and academic lecturing and tutoring. My PhD, Ways of Being: The alchemy of bereavement and communique explores the impact of unsought after-death contact experiences between the bereaved and those close to them who died. I utilise a social constructionist approach to research, qualitative transpersonal research methods and narrative analysis for meaning and theory construction.

I hope you enjoy rambling through the following pages, and please reach out to me if you feel the need.