I originate ideas and perspectives with a rather unique, global and profound slant on things.
Perhaps a 'perceptual healer'. Sometimes regarded as a 'teacher of teachers, healer of healers and supporter of supporters'.

Online book-publishing: check out the Glastonbury Archive!

Major wearing-out of keyboards happens here at mission control
upstairs in our little 380 year-old cottage in Glastonbury!
Our cottage garden round the back is lovely – a blaze of colour in spring and summer.

I've created empowerment-oriented educational projects such as the Glastonbury Gatherings (1984),
the OakDragon Project (1987) and the Hundredth Monkeying inner aid project (1995). I ran innovative conferences and educational events indoors and outdoors for 100-400 people each time, in effect setting off a small movement, the 'camps movement', now perhaps twenty organisations with multiple offshoots, which over twenty years has touched many thousands of people in quite a few countries.

I'm actively committed to realistic personal, social and global change. Nowadays I'm applying it mainly in the Arab world - I'm specifically dedicated to Bethlehem or Beit Lahem in Palestine and nowadays work with Jerusalem Peacemakers and the Hope Flowers School in Bethlehem.

This life

I was born five years after WW2, at Hartfield House near Forest Row, Sussex, England - south of London, in the Ashdown Forest. (It had been the WW2 American Generals' HQ in England, from which the American aspect of D-Day was planned - an ominous start!) I grew up in Cardiff, South Wales in the 1950s and Liverpool in the 1960s.

Went to university at the London School of Economics (1968-71 - yes, a troublemaker). Then I lived in the mountains of Snowdonia in North Wales in the early 1970s, and then Stockholm and the forests of Uppland in Sweden in the later 1970s. For the last 25 years, I have lived and been a community figure in the rather interesting small town of Glastonbury in SW England.

Here's my family

Origins, and a strange collection of names

People often ask me where my name Palden comes from. The name is Tibetan, given to me by HH Gyalwa Karmapa, a high Tibetan lama, back in 1974. My full Tibetan name is Karma Palden Sonam ('radiant merit, Karma-Kagyupa lineage').

My second name Gareth is Welsh, as is the name Jenkins. The name 'Gareth' sounds better in Welsh, since it is subtly intoned Ga(down)-reth(up). The Jenkinses are Welsh descendants of Huguenot weavers who moved to Wales in the 1500s.

My father is Welsh, from Gwyr or Gower, near Swansea, and my mother is a Walthamstow Londoner with clerkish German immigrant origins - they left Germany in Bismarck's time. My parents were both very involved in WW2.

Palden Jenkins 01458-834576 (*44-1458-834576) 16 Chilkwell St, Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 8DB, UK www.palden.co.uk