Palden Jenkins

Palden Jenkin in conversation with David Eastaugh  https://penwithbeyond.blog/about/ https://www.palden.co.uk/podcasts.html About Palden I was born in Hartfield in the Ashdown Forest in Sussex in 1950, in a nursing home which not long before had been the American Generals’ HQ in Britain in WW2. A fine start. I grew up in 1950s Cardiff, Wales, and in 1960s Liverpool, and here my spiritual path began at age 16, tripping out on acid and beginning to see things in an entirely dfferent way. Went to university at the London School of Economics in 1969 during its time of revolution. I never looked back. This was the big change-point in my life, which set the course for all the rest of it. In today’s terminology I was radicalised, thereafter dedicating my life to world change, and personal change with it, though very much tied up with it. Later I lived in the mountains of Snowdonia, Wales, then I had to leave the country in 1974, regarded by the authorities and media as a traitor and even a murderer, to live in Sweden until 1980. I’m really grateful for the safety and healing Sweden gave me. I married a Swedish lady, Berit, and we had two kids and many adventures, partly in Stockholm and partly in the forest in northern Uppland. There, as an English teacher of political refugees, inadvertently I started my later humanitarian work, in which I came to specialise in trauma recovery, social reconstruction and freelance intelligence work in conflict zones. During that time, after seven years’ study, I became an astrologer. Since then I have counselled a few thousand people, writing three astrology books and founding the astrology camps in the 1980s. But I didn’t easily fit into Sweden and, when I found out I was exonerated of my former alleged crimes, I returned to Britain. This involved a painful end to my marriage and the loss of two children. I landed in Glastonbury and I cried my eyes out with grief for two years in men’s groups and therapy groups. This was a big change too, opening me up for something. Then came my instructions and I came alive again. In 1983-84 I started the UK camps movement – first with indoor gatherings in Glastonbury, then with summer camps, at first near Glastonbury, and later round the country. The Glastonbury Camps, spontaneously started and lasting three years, were followed from 1987 by the OakDragon Camps, from both of which many other camps organisations sprouted, in several countries.   By 1990 I was burned out, and there were quite a few people in the OakDragon who wanted to take things a different way. So, sad about that, I left and started again. I  went into book editing with an enlightened publisher called Gateway Books. In 1992 when I was asked to write The Only Planet of Choice – a book of communications from some cosmic beings called the Council of Nine. It was a privilege to write. I was also involved with editing a series of books by and about the Austrian genius Viktor Schauberger, and five books of alternative ideas about Jesus, and lots of other books too, through the 1990s.