Photo courtesy: Godfrey Devereux.
When my very old friend Godfrey got in touch to say he’d be in London for a night and needed a bed before flying to Italy, I didn’t hesitate. I hadn’t seen him in years, but some friendships just stretch quietly across time. Of course I said yes.
Godfrey Devereux is more than just a friend. He’s a sage of sorts, particularly in the field of somatic intimacy, which he has been developing for over forty years. Though grounded in early development and Oriental medicine, this is blended into his own Dynamic Yoga, Somatic Meditation, Slow Tantra, and what he calls Radical Ecology. ‘Together,’ he writes, ‘they address the full spectrum of human nature: biological, sexual, social and spiritual.’
Never lacking the all-important overview, like all good lighthouse keepers, he has also written:
‘We are living in challenging times. The world as we knew it, both natural and socio-political, is collapsing rapidly. Nobody knows how, when or if this collapse will resolve itself. On every side our political and natural resources are crumbling. Democracy is eroding into authoritarianism. Habitats are collapsing under a combination of human waste and global heating. Our biological resilience is being challenged by the same. Never have we so badly needed the courage and fortitude to face this multidimensional crisis with dignity and grace.’
We go way back—even before all of that. Before the books, the retreats, the global teaching. I first met Godfrey when I was fourteen, still at school in Scotland. He was visiting with a friend, only a few years older than me, but already someone whose opinion I approached like it was an esoteric line from William Blake. He had left school early, as I would soon do, and carried an intellect I wasn’t used to in someone so rebellious, so ungovernable.
While we later drifted apart—‘one went to war and the other to yoga,’ as we say now—those mid-to-late teenage years were a feast of ideas. We wrote poetry, some of it good. We lived for a while in Italy, where Godfrey had an Italian girlfriend and our circle of friends included exiled Iranians, Mexicans, Australians.
Watching my friend scale the heights of meditation and Buddhism even then was fascinating. It was like watching someone climb the 1,800-metre-high north face of the Eiger. But of course he never fell. Furthermore, his presence gave me permission to think differently too. With friends like that, I didn’t need the establishment to reaffirm or deny who I was. Sure, dropping out had its lonely hours. But there was such joy, too—liberating days on Iona, the beguiling chaos of a Windsor Free Festival, much mirth at Stonehenge. A Tardis of a flat in Edinburgh. Somehow, the outside felt more like the inside.
There was also a lot of reading. Godfrey always read a great deal, and without realising it, encouraged me to do likewise. Rimbaud was one of his main ports of call. A Season in Hell he still quotes to this day in French. We both had roots in Northumberland, and I in Scotland as well, and so we shared more than just a taste for outsiderdom. But at the heart of it, our friendship, I believed, was always less about ourselves than about the world and the ideas we wanted—and still want—to explore.
Years later, after no particularly conscious distancing, we came together again, when I began filming Godfrey at his various international retreats—something he still does sleeping alone in a large old canvas tent. I wanted to peer inside his mind via the physical world only. I filmed him in Ibiza, in the southwest of France, in Edinburgh, in a windswept Stirlingshire visiting an old friend, in Northumberland doing likewise, near Barcelona, and on the gem of all gems, Iona. We even returned to Italy, retracing our steps in Perugia and honouring Godfrey’s late girlfriend, who had also become a dear friend of mine. I often say: a good definition of friendship is spending a whole year making a film about someone, only for them to decide they didn’t want a film made about them anymore—and never resent that.
So last week, I picked Godfrey up on foot from the station. He’d come from Oxford, and before that Bristol, where he’d been attending what he called a family constellation—an event where people explore inherited patterns and long-standing family dynamics.
It was so good to see him again. We both wore baseball caps. We laughed a lot. And between that first greeting and the next morning’s goodbye, there was a torrent of talk—review, appraisal, recommitment, even more chortling. Godfrey has one of those cosmic laughs—the kind that ripples through time as much as through the air.
We spoke of everything. Of his coming retreat in a strawbale roundhouse in Pembrokeshire in Wales by the sea (see below). Of the past, the future, and even the time he declined a formal meeting with Leonard Cohen in India because, as he put it, the Canadian poet and singer-songwriter wouldn’t have wanted to be Leonard Cohen at that moment, given that it was a spiritual haven.
What I really want to say is this: friendship matters. Deeply. It doesn’t just reconnect us with the past—it allows us, through memory, to recalibrate our own lives. Still off-grid, in our cases. Though, we also like to think, still plugged in. Neither of us are materialistic. But both, I think, are unjaded. And for that, I’m truly grateful.
Godfrey’s next retreat: https://www.godfreydevereux.com/radical-ecology-retreat.html
