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Eleanor Stoneham about me |
(c) Eleanor Stoneham 2008 |
I obtained my scientific research doctorate before leaving academia for a career in accountancy, within large international firms and then in my own successful business. I qualified as a Chartered Accountant, Tax Practitioner and Investment Adviser, and also took some theological training as I explored the possibility of Anglican ordination. A serious mental breakdown enforced my early retirement from professional life. But this was a turning point, a period of healing and spiritual growth. Together with my business background this gives me a broad insight that I am able to put to good use in this, my first book. The photo is of me at the top of an extremely long and steep hill which I successfully slogged up with Edwina Currie on our London to Paris bikeride for Marie Curie Cancer Care. The 360 degree view at the top was stunning! The bike is Edwina's! |
Where did the idea for the book come from? ...whilst on holiday in Turkey in 2004. I was in the middle of a long process of healing following the devastating mental breakdown and burnout that for a while had turned my life upside down. I was receiving excellent professional help for |
As I thought more about what I was reading it seemed to me that the compassion and vulnerability of the Wounded Healer could have a significance for healing our dangerously fractured world far beyond the realms of the pastoral and medical professions, where it is primarily researched and understood as a means of healing and where most of the literature is to be found. Where else, I mused, can we find the Wounded Healer in our lives? How, I thought, could we hope to heal this world when so many of us have our own unhealed spiritual and mental wounds, and so much of our destructive behavior is because of those wounds; when for so many of us it is not regarded as appropriate in our working lives to show too much compassion, let alone vulnerability. But I had not realized the enormity of the project I had started......... |
So there I was, lying by the swimming pool at that Turkish villa reading Michael Ford's The Wounded Prophet: A Portrait of Henri J.M.Nouwen. |
And do you have a favourite book by him? Oh yes, undoubtedly his short bestselling gem, The Wounded Healer. But several of his books became valuable and reliable sources of comfort and support in my pain. |
mind, body, soul and spirit, and to supplement this healing I had turned to the contemplative books by the Roman Catholic priest Henri Nouwen. |