Founder
Living Spirit is run as a social enterprise. It was founded by Rev Sam Wernham and has grown from small seed groups started over 20 years ago.
Over the years Sam has been joined by some wonderful colleagues as Living Spirit continues to grow and change. Please see our journals and links for more details about collaborators.
Sam has been committed to spiritual work over the last 30 years and since her early twenties has run retreat houses, led workshops, facilitated groups, given guided meditations, hosted many gatherings and made many cups of tea…
She was brought up in a liberal, christian family and spent her childhood in their Kentish apple orchards and riding horses on the Eridge Estate. She learnt much from her mother’s skill as a professional craftswoman and adult educator. From her father she inherited a love of ideas and literature, which she studied at Sussex University. Organic gardening, time in nature and wilderness and a concern environmental issues have remained central throughout her life.
From her late teens she has deeply explored other faiths, especially Buddhism, Druidry and Jewish & Christian Kabbalah. In her Dharma days she travelled in Ladakh and Zanskar and studied at the Tibetan Library in Dharamsala, she practised Zen at Tassajara Zen Mountain Centre in California and Vipassana and Mindfulness at Sharpham and Gaia House, spending over a year in retreat and as a manager. She has been a long term member of Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, having completed their Bardic Grade. She studied Kabbalah with both Christian and Jewish teachers and in the Western Mystery Tradition and from 2000 – 2017 she was a tutor with The Kabbalah Society. Having set up Living Spirit she studied interfaith ministry and spiritual counselling and in 2003 was ordained at the One Spirit Interfaith Foundation and remains committed to promoting peace and interfaith understanding.
After ordination she went on to complete four years professional development with the Scottish Episcopal Church, including studying theology at Aberdeen University. She worked for five years as a pioneer minister to collaboratively create Future Church in her local community in the Highlands of Scotland where she created an eco retreat centre with her former husband, Adrian Slocombe. Alongside her inter-spiritual ministry, Sam remains committed also to established Church, her ministry was formally affirmed by an Anglican Pioneer Assessment Panel in 2018 and she is currently a Church of England ordinand.
As part of her ministry Sam works as a spiritual counsellor and supervisor and with her colleague, Marie Beresford (see below), offers CPD trainings in depth psychotherapy. She has an MA in Mindfulness based Psychotherapeutic Practice with the Karuna Institute and Middlesex University and is accredited with ACPP and UKCP. She is currently engaged in doctoral research into transformative education within a small research community linked to the MA in Myth Cosmology and the Sacred at Canterbury Christ Church University.
Sam is the founder of the spiritual, social enterprise Living Spirit which focusses on western spiritual wisdom through courses and events run by Open Spirit and Wild Church. She loves the creative arts, especially myth and storytelling and is a pioneer of the ancient art of trance telling. She is also developing her exploration of sacred art and especially icon painting with the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts. Alongside her spiritual and creative work she has raised a family, including home schooling and created several eco homes and organic gardens. She now lives in Dartington with her friend Ian and two beautiful cats.
Marie is from New Zealand, spent 10 years in South East Asia and India and has lived in the UK for the past 35 years.
Raised as a Catholic, Marie embraced Tibetan Buddhism in her early 20’s in India where she studied for 7 years in Dharamsala with HH the Dalai Lama and his Senior and Junior tutors, as well as other highly respected teachers from that tradition.
In 1992 Marie qualified as a Psychosynthesis counsellor and at that time completed the 2 year study course in the Western Mystery Tradition to gain entry into Dion Fortune’s Society of Inner Light.
Marie went onto to become a senior trainer in Psychosynthesis, a system of psychology founded by Roberto Assagioli, a contemporary of Freud and Jung. Marie found that the psychologies of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and Psychosynthesis were very compatible and uses both as a theoretical background to her on-going therapeutic work.
Marie has also found the Tree of Life a bridge between the theistic beliefs of her early Christian upbringing and the non-theistic beliefs of Buddhism. It remains a vital aspect of her on-going spiritual enquiry.