Dr Mick Collins

Dr Mick Collins has had a diverse career since leaving school at 15 years, including working as a builder’s labourer, infantryman and heavy goods truck driver. In 1977 he spent six years travelling and working around the world, which became a valuable cross-cultural education for him. In 1983 Mick went to live in a UK based Tibetan Buddhist Monastic College for three years, where he had a deep awakening experience, which catalysed a spiritual crisis. It took over two years to work through the epicentre of this intense and overwhelming transformational encounter. However, the spiritual crisis also activated a process of individuation that resulted in him finding his vocation as a health professional. Mick spent 12 years working as an NHS Occupational Therapist in acute mental health settings and in a psychological therapies team. During this time he spent nine years training in process-oriented psychology, where he incorporated humanistic, systemic and transpersonal methods into his therapeutic practice.

Mick’s academic interests developed further when he worked for ten years as a Lecturer (and Director of Admissions) in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Science, University of East Anglia, Norwich. His doctoral studies explored the relationship between individual recoveries from spiritual crisis – through new ways of doing, knowing and being – and how these transformative processes could inform a shift in collective consciousness to tackle the global crisis. Mick retired from academia in 2015; however, he continues to focus his research and writing on the links between spiritually transformative experiences and humanity’s collective adaptive potential in relation to processes of evolutionary unfolding. He is interested in how our transformative efforts could lead to the co-creation of a sustainable and improved future.

Mick’s first book The Unselfish Spirit: Human Evolution in a Time of Global Crisis won the 2014 Scientific and Medical Network book prize. He was ‘author in profile’ at the 2014 Hostry Arts Festival, and was interviewed about his book at the 2015 International Hay Festival for Literature. In 2016 he was interviewed about his work on Conscious TV. Mick’s new book The Visionary Spirit: Awakening to the Imaginal Realm in the Transformocene Age was published in March 2018. He currently works as a writer, public speaker and transformational coach, where he assists individuals, groups and organisations to explore the role of the transpersonal in relation to awareness and action. Mick and his wife live in Norwich. He is a father and grandfather.

Mick donates all the author’s royalties received from his publisher (for both books) to a charity that feeds starving children in African schools. The programme not only keeps the children in education, it also helps to break the cycle of poverty.