Hello I’m John Sweet.

I’ve had my email john@johnsweet.com for may years now but never got round to starting a personal Website.  I am delighted that you have made it here, but at August 2017, it is still something of a small building site.  This, and my other Websites are in disarray as I decided to move to a new WordPress hosting in Canada.  I live on the side of a mountain in Wales UK a few miles north of the capital, Cardiff.  A very small area is under cultivation notably in a polytunnel containing apricot and peach trees and a few grapes.  Near to this we have about twenty beehives and a cabin where Dinah, my wife and I, usually run various classes on bees or beekeeping topics and trade under the banner of sensiblebeekeeping.co.uk.  With insulation and a green roof the cabin also makes a wonderful place to sit and write.  I do hold writing Journal Workshops here too. However, this past year has been busy for me taking Journal Workshops in as far flung places as South Africa and Milwaukee in the United States.  I have also been taking “reflective practice” in the form of Journal Workshops into two Universities in England and Wales for their postgraduate students to gain resilience in their work through writing and this continues until the end of the year.  I am also involved in Educational Development in the form of devising the inclusion of scholarship in postgraduate tutor training and taking workshops and marking postgraduate teaching certificate portfolios.  I also support a handful of masters dissertation students and mark other cohorts.  We take an interest in matters eco…  We would like to preserve the range of wildlife living around us, live lightly as vegetarians and generate what electricity we can for ourselves.  I must find time to prepare some logs for the biomass boiler, a juggernaught of a heater, that is the nearest thing to having a locomotive in the living room!

And for the future…

I think there is really so much more I could do to help many  who are going through transitions or changes in their lives and who have nor yet come across writing a Journal about their lives.  Working as a face-to-face consultant in these Journaling small groups I know that so many persons were able to draw aspects of their lives together and allow things to move on in ways they did not think possible before.  This all as private individual work whilst gaining the energy of working in a group.  My passion is to take these processes beyond the face-to-face and to make things more scalable, available to a wider audience online.  This, I feel, is my next challenge.  To come up with something that is as effective; that just works.  But further, to deliver the process in such a way that it become sustainable, beyond my individual input.  To fire up the locomotive, as it were, and let it go!   I do hope you return to see how its all getting on despite me!