Steve Taylor

New edition of Fierce Grace podcast with Steve and Serge - Interview with Philip Carr-Gomm

2026-06-23T16:13:32-04:00

Dear

'Fierce Grace' - Episode Three:

Interview with Philip Carr-Gomm

Here's the third episode of my podcast with my friend Serge Beddington-Behrens. In this episode, we speak with author and teacher Philip Carr-Gomm about his life and work, drudiry, spirituality, the rise of psychological disordered leaders and the state of the world. We also ask Philip about his most influential spiritual book, teacher and piece of music, and the most powerful place he has visited.

You can watch on you tube below or here

Or you can listen on spotify here

Or on apple itunes here

I hope you find the discussion stimulating. If you listen closely at the beginning, you can also hear me playing one of my piano pieces as the introduction music!

lots of love, Steve

Calverley Building, Faculty of Health & Social Sciences
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds West Yorkshire LS1 3HE
UNITED KINGDOM

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Steve Taylor's June Newsletter - Kindness and Oneness

2026-06-14T16:04:46-04:00

Steve Taylor's June Newsletter

Dear

I hope you are well. Last week I had a heart-warming experience. I was walking to my local supermarket and saw two boys ahead, about 8 years old, one of them holding a stick and the other throwing water from a paper cup. I thought they looked a bit mischievous and wondered if they were going to splash me with the water. Then one of them shouted to me, 'Excuse me - can you help us save this bee? Do you know how to give it sugared water?' The bee was on the stick. shrivelled up and looking dead. The other boy was holding a spoon, so I said, 'Maybe if you put a little of the water on the spoon, then get the bee on to the spoon.' The boy put some water on and gently pushed the spoon towards the bee. To my surprise, the bee came to life, stretched its antennae on to the spoon, and started drinking. Then it opened up its wings, as if ready to fly, although it stayed on the stick. The boys were so excitedly happy, jumping up and down. 'We've saved a bee!' 'We've saved a bee's life!' They put the bee down in the grass and as I walked on, they were still shouting. 'Mum - I've saved the bee!'

It was a wonderful lesson in making false assumptions – me thinking that the boys were mischievous when they were actually performing a beautiful act of kindness. It was also a glimpse of the natural altruism that exists in children, which is often socialised out of them by the competitive and selfish ethos of our societies. I firmly believe that human beings are naturally altruistic, because at our deepest level, we are all interconnected. We have the capacity to feel each other’s suffering and joy, because ultimately we share the same being. We are all channels of the same fundamental consciousness. When we sense other people’s suffering, or sense that they are in danger, we feel a natural impulse to help them. That’s why there are so many examples of spontaneous heroism in crisis situations, such as terrorist attacks.

I wrote an article about this for Psychology Today magazine a couple of years ago. https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/articles/202309/inside-the-mind-of-a-hero

Of course, sadly in many people that natural altruism is obstructed, and becomes lost in selfishness and even cruelty. But it is always there as a potential, beneath the egoic mind.

My Book on the Beatles -

Across the Universe

If you’re an author, one of the best experiences is when you first see a physical copy of your new book. There’s a feeling of fulfilment – it’s the realisation of years of effort and preparation. Something which originally existed as an idea and an intention has now incarnated into its final form. A few days ago I saw the first copy of my new book Across the Universe – I had a meeting with the book’s publicist, and she brought along a pre-publication copy. I was quite thrilled – even more so, because the book is so well produced and has such a striking cover.

The book is officially out in September, in hardback. You can pre-order it here for the UK and here for the US.

It will be interesting to see what kind of reaction it has. The Beatles are undergoing a new wave of popularity at the moment, so I’m sure there will be some interest. My focus is on the Beatles’ creativity and spirituality. I suggest that the only way to truly understand their prolific transcendent creativity and their cultural impact is on a spiritual or transpersonal level.

Steve and Serge's 'Fierce Grace' Podcast

As you may have read in my previous message, my friend Serge and I have just recorded our second dialogue, in which we discuss the major question of why there are so many corrupt and narcissistic spiritual teachers and gurus. Of course, there are some benevolent ones too. Serge discusses his years with Ram Dass, while I discuss the 20 years or so that I regularly visited Russel Williams.

You can watch it here (you can also subscribe to the youtube channel)

Or you can listen on spotify here

Or on apple itunes here

French Translation of Time Expansion Experiences

Another rewarding aspect of being an author is receiving translations of your books. It’s nice to think that your books are reaching people in different countries around the world. Here is the French translation of my recent book Time Expansion Experiences, retitled Expériences extraordinaires du temps. For any French or French-speaking readers of this newsletter, you can see the book here.

Poems

Since I began this newsletter on the theme of kindness and oneness, let me share two short poems on that theme. The first is from my book The Clear Llight, the second from my new book Back to Stillness.

We Are Each Other

We’re not ghostly entities

marooned inside our mental space

with personal pain and suffering

that can never be shared or understood.

We’re not machines full of selfish genes

scheming to outdo each other

who only ever show kindness

if there’s some benefit to ourselves.

We are each other.

We feel compassion because we’re connected.

We sense each other’s suffering

because we share each other’s being.

We risk our own lives to help others

because there is only one life.

We help and heal and love each other

because we are each other.

One Life

When you look into a stranger’s eyes

and see yourself staring back

and they return your gaze, surprised

to see themselves staring back

When you gaze at the sky on a clear spring day

and its endless space shimmers inside you

When you swim between wild ocean waves

and the sea absorbs you into its oneness

Then you’re no longer a solid separate entity

but a soft and flowing unity

no longer living your own life

but living as part of one life.

all best wishes and blessings, Steve

Calverley Building, Faculty of Health & Social Sciences
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds West Yorkshire LS1 3HE
UNITED KINGDOM

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New edition of Fierce Grace podcast with Steve and Serge - Why do so many spiritual teachers become corrupt?

2026-06-09T14:25:31-04:00

Dear

'Fierce Grace' - Episode Two:

Why do so many spiritual teachers become corrupt?

Here's the second episode of my podcast with my friend Serge Beddington-Behrens. We discuss the meaning of spiritual awakening, why some people become disconnected, and why disconnected people gravitate to the role of spiritual teacher. (We specifically address the topic of corrupt teachers around 20 mins into the video.) We also discuss some examples of genuine and benevolent teachers who have helped many people, including Serge's teacher Ram Dass, and my teacher Russel Williams.

You can watch on you tube below or here

Or you can listen on spotify here

Or on apple itunes here

I hope you find the discussion stimulating.

lots of love, Steve

Calverley Building, Faculty of Health & Social Sciences
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds West Yorkshire LS1 3HE
UNITED KINGDOM

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Final call to join Saturday's online workshop on poetry and spirituality

2026-06-04T14:35:42-04:00

Upcoming Workshop on Poetry and Spiritual Awakening

Dear

I hope you are well. I'm a little delayed sending out my June newsletter, so for now I wanted to remind you about my online workshop this Saturday, June 6^th. The workshop is on poetry and spirituality, based on my book Back to Stillness. We’ll be cultivating spiritual states through meditations and visualisations. Then we will (optionally) create our own poetry, based on the Japanese ‘haiku’ tradition of describing moments of intense experience. I will read some of my own poems too.

This will be a great opportunity to reconnect with your poetic muse, or to intensify your creative inspiration - and not least, to experience spiritual awakening! The workshop will be recorded on zoom if you can't make the actual time.

Further details here

All best wishes and blessings, Steve

Calverley Building, Faculty of Health & Social Sciences
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds West Yorkshire LS1 3HE
UNITED KINGDOM

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Fierce Grace - New Podcast with Steve and Serge

2026-05-23T14:50:46-04:00

Dear

I hope you are well. Normally send out my newsletter close to the beginning of each month, but I thought I would send an irregular mid-month newsletter now, as I have a few items to share.

'Fierce Grace' - New Podcast

Firstly, I am pleased to say that my friend Serge and I have started a podcast. It's called 'Fierce Grace' and we'll be releasing episodes every two weeks. In future weeks, we'll be interviewing people, but this first episode is just the two of us, speaking about the crisis of disconnection in the world, and about our different backgrounds and approaches. Sign up to my youtube channel, to get access to the episodes. (It features one of my piano pieces at the beginning.)

You can also listen on spotify and apple.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5obsPKDNNXczrp7UasKXbo?si=e7b46f67af3f45ea

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/fierce-grace-with-steve-taylor-and-serge/id1896730165

Upcoming Workshop - Back to Stillness

On June 6^th,I am leading an online workshop on poetry and spirituality, based on my book Back to Stillness. We’ll be cultivating spiritual states through meditations and visualisations. Then we will (optionally) create our own poetry, based on the Japanese ‘haiku’ tradition of describing moments of intense experience. See here

Academic Degrees

If any of you are thinking of studying spiritual themes in a formal academic way. let me remind you that I teach on two different master's degrees in the field. One is an in-person degree at Leeds Beckett University; the other is an online degree at the Alef Trust. See the links below, or contact me if you are interested.

In person degree at Leeds Beckett:

https://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/courses/interdisciplinary-psychology-ma/

Online degree at the Alef Trust:

https://www.aleftrust.org/academic-learning/masters-degree/

lots of love, Steve

Calverley Building, Faculty of Health & Social Sciences
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds West Yorkshire LS1 3HE
UNITED KINGDOM

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Steve Taylor's May Newsletter - Natural Therapy

2026-05-10T13:28:30-04:00

Steve Taylor's May Newsletter

Dear

I hope you are well. Recently I've been pondering over the connection between spirituality and creativity, partly as a result of the course I'm teaching on poetry and spiritual awakening. It’s striking that so many poets have been spiritually awakened people, or at least have described powerful spiritual experiences, such as Rumi, Hafiz, William Wordsmith and Walt Whitman. It's also significant that so many spiritual texts are written in a poetic form, like the Upanishads and the Dao De Jing.

I also speak about this in my upcoming book on The Beatles. In 1967 The Beatles went on a meditation retreat in India with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They were only there for a few weeks but came back with about 40 songs. John Lennon alone wrote 15 songs in seven weeks. Most of the songs were included on the album they recorded later that year, the so-called White Album. It's a graphic illustration of the power of meditation to induce creativity. The Beatles' trip to India also introduced meditation to millions of people, as it received massive publicity, and they spoke so much about the benefits of the practice. When I was 19, I signed up for a weekend course on TM (transcendental meditation) just because I knew about it from the Beatles.

In recent years, there has been a lot of research on creativity and psychedelics. In some cases, psychedelics can definitely help creativity, by breaking down concepts and mental habits and revealing new landscapes of possibility. This is also true of the Beatles. After taking LSD, they made massive creative leaps. Just 18 months after singing mostly simple love songs in 1964, they were recording songs like ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ with spiritual/philosophical lyrics, sitar drones, avant-garde tape loops and so on. However, I also read an interesting piece of research recently that found that although artists thought they were being more creative on psychedelics. observers or listeners rated their creativity lower. So there may not be a totally clear relationship between creativity and psychedelics. But there is definitely a strong relationship between creativity and meditation, or between creativity and spirituality in general.

In my view this is because creativity and spirituality are two facets of the same deep state of being. To become spiritual is to be creative, and to be creative is to be spiritual. When we attain a state of mental spaciousness in which ego boundaries fade away we also gain access to our creative potentials. Meditation connects us to inspiration.

I recently wrote a blog for Psychology Today on this topic, which you can read here.

Upcoming Workshop - Back to Stillness

Continuing on this theme, on June 6^th,I am leading an online workshop on poetry and spirituality, based on my book Back to Stillness. We’ll be cultivating spiritual states through meditations and visualisations. Then we will (optionally) create our own poetry, based on the Japanese ‘haiku’ tradition of describing moments of intense experience. See here

Russel Williams

Last month it was the 8th anniversary of the death of Russel Williams, the great spiritual teacher who I regularly visited for about 20 years, and who I helped write his book Not I, not other than I. Below is a photo of me the chair where Russel used to sit and share his teachings, at the premises of the Buddhist Society of Manchester. I felt slightly reluctant to sit on the chair, as it feels like a sacred space, but it was a wonderful way of connecting with his energy and presence. I still miss Russel's powerful spiritual presence - it was an amazing experience just to sit in the room with him. Sometimes it didn't really matter what he was talking about; I could just bathe in his powerful spiritual radiance. But I still feel permanently and continually enriched by his wisdom.

Survey on Time Expansion Experiences

Following on from my recent book Time Expansion Experiences, I recently received some funding to conduct further research in this area. I’m doing a survey to find out how common time expansion experiences are and when they occur. It would be wonderful if you could help my research by filling in the questionnaire. It should take just a few minutes. The link to the survey is here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdvFIjXN0xcT0P4ReGVzbNhXhBt5VSdpKGEIn60pCFnQTQMOQ/viewform

Poem

Recently I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in the countryside, and have become intensely aware of the therapeutic effects of nature. I wrote the following poem to describe the effects. For me, ecotherapy is so effective!

Natural Therapy

The best therapy is simple.

You don’t have to pay or even make an appointment.

The therapist is always available, for unlimited sessions.

She doesn’t need to know your condition or symptoms.

You don’t have to talk about your childhood or your relationships.

There are no strategies to follow, no techniques to learn.

You don’t even have to pay attention to the therapist.

You can daydream in her presence

chat to your companions, barely even glance at her.

But still her therapy heals you.

You just need to climb her hills or mountains

walk through her fields and woods

swim in her lakes and tarns

for long enough to absorb her radiance.

Her healing is so subtle

that we don’t feel her touch as she massages us.

We don’t hear her voice as she soothes us.

But all the time, her healing energy

flows gently through our being.

She awakens us to the present

so that the past and future stop disturbing us.

Her radiance spreads through our inner space

so that shadows of fear and worry fade

and love and hope and gratitude rise

and meaning reveals itself around us

like the beauty of a landscape at dawn.

And at the end of the day

we are purified, refreshed

reconnected to our source

reattuned to natural harmony.

All best wishes and blessings, Steve

Calverley Building, Faculty of Health & Social Sciences
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds West Yorkshire LS1 3HE
UNITED KINGDOM

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Steve Taylor's May Newsletter - Natural Therapy

2026-05-10T13:16:35-04:00

Steve Taylor's May Newsletter

Dear

I recently wrote a blog for Psychology Today on this topic, which you can read here.

Upcoming Workshop - Back to Stillness

Russel Williams

Survey on Time Expansion Experiences

Poem

Natural Therapy

The best therapy is simple.

You don’t have to pay or even make an appointment.

The therapist is always available, for unlimited sessions.

She doesn’t need to know your condition or symptoms.

You don’t have to talk about your childhood or your relationships.

There are no strategies to follow, no techniques to learn.

You don’t even have to pay attention to the therapist.

You can daydream in her presence

chat to your companions, barely even glance at her.

But still her therapy heals you.

You just need to climb her hills or mountains

walk through her fields and woods

swim in her lakes and tarns

for long enough to absorb her radiance.

Her healing is so subtle

that we don’t feel her touch as she massages us.

We don’t hear her voice as she soothes us.

But all the time, her healing energy

flows gently through our being.

She awakens us to the present

so that the past and future stop disturbing us.

Her radiance spreads through our inner space

so that shadows of fear and worry fade

and love and hope and gratitude rise

and meaning reveals itself around us

like the beauty of a landscape at dawn.

And at the end of the day

we are purified, refreshed

reconnected to our source

reattuned to natural harmony.

All best wishes and blessings, Steve

Calverley Building, Faculty of Health & Social Sciences
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds West Yorkshire LS1 3HE
UNITED KINGDOM

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Final call for Steve's new online course

2026-05-02T12:24:58-04:00

Final Call to Join The Poetry of Awakening

Dear

I hope you're having a wonderful weekend. This is just a reminder (apologies if you've seen earlier mails!) that my online course 'The Poetry of Awakening' is starting this Tuesday, 5th May.

It's a seven week course that explores the intersection of spiritual awakening, creativity, and poetry. All sessions are recorded if you can't make the actual time, and there is a communal forum where participants (and me) can communicate and post poetry between sessions.

The Poetry of Awakening:

Connect With Your Muse Using Haiku & Meditation to Cultivate Spiritual Presence & Creative Flow

Through meditation, reflection, and simple poetic forms like haiku, I will show you how poetry can become a way of working with spiritual awakening in real life.

For more details, here's a video of me introducing the course:

https://vimeo.com/reviews/c89f8f3c-81be-4d5e-bb19-4a612d307cc0/videos/1177812804

Further details and registration here:

https://shiftnetwork.isrefer.com/go/spawST/a23561/

lots of love, Steve

Calverley Building, Faculty of Health & Social Sciences
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds West Yorkshire LS1 3HE
UNITED KINGDOM

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Steve's new online course 'The Poetry of Awakening' - change of date

2026-04-25T07:13:40-04:00

The Poetry of Awakening -

New Online Course (Change of date)

Dear

I hope you're having a wonderful week. Apologies to anyone who may have tried to enrol on my new online course. There was an issue with the link (you may have been told that the course has been cancelled, but this isn't the case.) The course is running, but has been put back a week, to compensate for the broken link. The course now begins on Tuesday 5th May.

It's a seven week course that explores the intersection of spiritual awakening, creativity, and poetry. Here's a brief summary of the course:

The Poetry of Awakening:

Connect With Your Muse Using Haiku & Meditation to Cultivate Spiritual Presence & Creative Flow

Through meditation, reflection, and simple poetic forms like haiku, I will show you how poetry can become a way of working with spiritual awakening in real life. During this experiential program, you’ll:

Connect with your poetic muse and release creative blocks that may have kept expression dormant
Understand why poetry has long been a natural language of spiritual awakening
Practice guided meditations that cultivate presence, gratitude, acceptance, and inner stillness
Deepen your sense of connection with other people, nature, and the wider web of existence
Gain a simple meditation-to-poetry practice you can return to time and again for ongoing spiritual growth
How to express the sacredness of your body in poetic form

Further details and registration here:

https://shiftnetwork.isrefer.com/go/spawST/a23561/

lots of love, Steve

Calverley Building, Faculty of Health & Social Sciences
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds West Yorkshire LS1 3HE
UNITED KINGDOM

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Steve's new online course 'The Poetry of Awakening' starts next week

2026-04-23T12:29:17-04:00

The Poetry of Awakening -

New Online Course Starting Next week

Dear

I hope you're having a wonderful week. I wanted to inform you that my new online course 'The Poetry of Awakening' starts next week, on Tuesday 28th April.

It's a seven week course that explores the intersection of spiritual awakening, creativity, and poetry. Here's a brief summary of the course:

The Poetry of Awakening:

Connect With Your Muse Using Haiku & Meditation to Cultivate Spiritual Presence & Creative Flow

Connect with your poetic muse and release creative blocks that may have kept expression dormant
Understand why poetry has long been a natural language of spiritual awakening
Practice guided meditations that cultivate presence, gratitude, acceptance, and inner stillness
Deepen your sense of connection with other people, nature, and the wider web of existence
Gain a simple meditation-to-poetry practice you can return to time and again for ongoing spiritual growth
How to express the sacredness of your body in poetic form

Further details and registration here:

https://shiftnetwork.isrefer.com/go/spawST/a23561/

lots of love, Steve

Calverley Building, Faculty of Health & Social Sciences
Leeds Beckett University
Leeds West Yorkshire LS1 3HE
UNITED KINGDOM

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