John Hamwee

I was born in 1945, just after the war, and grew up in a safe and happy environment. I went to Balliol College Oxford where, because my father was a lawyer and I was meant to follow in his footsteps, I read law. I qualified as a solicitor and practised for a few years, but I never enjoyed it and escaped by way of teaching law at Oxford Brookes University and then by becoming a lecturer in Systems at the Open University - which was a wonderful place to work in those early days.

We taught Systems as a way of thinking which was both practical and holistic; an aid to making good decisions when faced with complex and intractable problems. We thought it was a pretty new discipline, but one day I discovered that the Chinese had beaten us to it by about two and a half thousand years. For traditional Chinese medicine never sees a human being as an assembly of parts, nor does it separate the person from his or her illness, yet it yields very specific treatments for a multitude of human ailments. Good decisions, in fact, when confronted with the most complex of all systems. I became fascinated. I read up the theory; then I qualified as an acupuncturist; then I left the University to work at it full time and have been doing so for over twenty five years, and counting.

Soon after I qualified I met Fritz Smith, the originator of Zero Balancing, and was hugely impressed by him and by his work. He really knows what energy is, he really knows how to work with it, and because of his Western Medical background (he is an MD as well as an osteopath and acupuncturist) he can communicate what he is doing in clear, precise concepts. I learned enormous amounts from him, qualified as a Zero balancer and then as a Zero Balancing teacher, and finally, to make sure I understood it, wrote a book about it. I found it so illuminating to write about energy without making it seem strange or esoteric, that I then wrote four more books about it.

I have been passionate about the Lake District since I was about eight years old, and after having had holidays in one particular valley for over forty years, I finally realised a dream by coming to live in it. I get great pleasure form taking hosts of grandchildren to places my three daughters loved when they were small.