The Living Path: Between Worlds

At 76, Andy Martin offers something increasingly precious: wisdom earned through a lifetime of direct experience.

Childhood in Malawi taught him interconnectedness as lived reality rather than philosophy. The Yao people, among whom he grew up, wove ancestors into daily life; a few steps from the classroom, an entirely different understanding of the sacred was being lived. Decades of exploration followed: contemplative traditions in Southeast Asia, mystical practices in Europe, shamanic journeys in Siberia and Oxfordshire, always as practitioner, never merely as an observer.

Years as a clinical hypnotherapist deepened his understanding of how transformation unfolds: not in straight lines but spirals, not through escape but through engagement, not suddenly but through patient, repeated returns to essential themes.

Thirteen years ago, in the Algerian Sahara, seventeen words crystallised during meditation. They required thirteen more years and seventy-five years of life to mature into complete poems. In 2025, after a retreat in Oxfordshire woods, The Ascending Path: From Gratitude to Wisdom emerged fully formed. A second collection, The Living Path: Between Worlds, followed almost immediately, exploring the territory between cosmic consciousness and ordinary reality.

Now caring for his mother in Devon, Andy lives the wisdom his poems explore: presence in ordinary moments, service without fanfare, the recognition that profound spirituality often wears everyday clothes. A third book, The Earth Remembers, is forthcoming.