This project nominally started in early 2025. At least, that's when pen met paper, for the first time.
It struck me, while on holiday in Cornwall overlooking the beautiful South Coast, that the transpersonal space in all its beauty lacked a unifying taxonomy — that because people approach consciousness, numinous experience, transpersonal development, and altered states of consciousness from spiritual, scientific, social, historical, and psychological starting points, academic debate can sometimes confuse practical guidance for practitioners, therapists and coaches.
My contribution was going to be, I hoped, to offer a framework that was practical and unifying, in service of supporting those encountering transpersonal challenges and/or spiritual/developmental crises. A diagnostic framework; a practice structure that spanned modalities; ethical principles to support the client's best interests. A taxonomy that found common ground amongst all transpersonal experiences and explorations, using that ground to allow respectful support from therapists, coaches and healers. Unlike Transpersonal Coaching, the aim was not to approach coaching from a transpersonal lens — this is ground well covered by the Alef Trust, Hetty Einzig, amongst others — but to create structures and ethical frameworks that are useful to people working in, and adjacent to, these experiences.
I felt that an architecture of the common ground — and yes, there are the echoes of Huxley's perennialism in this early thinking — could be a useful tool for cross-disciplinary teams working in this space. I am hardly the first person to attempt this work — Grof, Wilber, Washburn, Lukoff and Turner, and contemporary academics have provided architecture we can follow, but frequently within a single vertical of philosophical thinking.
More recently, I have become aware of Lindahl and Britton's exceptional piece of work — Varieties of Contemplative Experience (Lindahl, Fisher, Cooper, Rosen, & Britton, 2017, PLOS ONE) — some similarities are noted. Consider this essential reading as it is a remarkable piece of work. The fact that there are seven territories in my model and seven domains in theirs is a coincidence, for what it's worth, albeit a rather charming one; theirs describe dimensions of experience, mine describes terrain, and reconciling the two is on the long list.
A flurry of creative activity in 2025 produced several pieces of work — a Core Manual and Coaching Manual, both of which are published on this site — a therapeutic manual and toolset are yet to be released.
As my thinking evolved over the Summer of 2025, so inconsistencies crept into the work. As I extended my own research and studies, so I became aware of some issues I needed to reconcile. Notably, I did not feel like the participatory turn was well represented. Today, it is acknowledged; however, more needs to be done to fully integrate it into the framework.
There is much more I could call out. I have not attempted to duplicate the already excellent resources available on the wisdom traditions. In large part, I have taken these from the best academic sources available, summarised them, and called out said source. Any omissions, do feel invited to point them out so we can accurately reflect prior work. For those familiar with the traditions the mapping will be a point of conversation, but an amount of understanding or effort is required on the part of the reader at this stage. The Core and Coaching Manuals use 7 and 6 territories, which reflects changes in thinking over time — 7 is canonical to this model. Some sections in the source .pdfs need the hand of a kind editor. I have amended some sections of the site on this basis, but overall, this is very much version 1.0.
I am undoubtedly making work for myself (and collaborators) downstream — there will be a body of work bringing the site, the Core Manual and the Coaching Manual into alignment.
This said, as we enter Autumn of 2026, I did not want to sit on this work indefinitely. In all of its imperfections, I would like the community of transpersonal academics, coaches, healers and therapists to have access to input and debate as it sees fit.
Comments are welcome through the Review page. The work is published under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) so it can be cited and discussed but not altered without attribution. This is a resource for trained practitioners; it is not a self-help guide, and nothing here replaces medical or psychiatric care.
I offer this work humbly, acknowledging the traditions it draws from, the thinkers it leans on, and the community it speaks to.