About The Inner Council
The Inner Council was founded in 2018 by Wayne Woodthorpe and Amy Grist. It grew from a body of accompaniment work concerned with the inner life: how people prepare for profound experiences, how they understand what arises within them, and how insight becomes integrated into everyday life. This work required the development of introspective skills, intuitive reception, regressional meditation, symbolic understanding, and careful attention to subjective experience. Across the journeys of hundreds of participants, recurring patterns began to emerge, gradually forming a framework for understanding and accompanying the inner life. The Inner Council has offered a Certified Inner Child Practitioner Pathway since 2020 and has since developed Inner Child–Informed Parenting, the Threefold Hearth co-relational framework, and further programmes for working with archetypal and symbolic knowledge.
The psychological and metaphysical foundations of the Inner Council are broadly Jungian, informed by the Hermetic lineage and by developmental understandings of consciousness found in the work of Jean Piaget, Jean Gebser, and Ken Wilber. At the centre of the practice is a simpler observation: when people are given the conditions to attend carefully to their inner experience, meaning frequently emerges through image, feeling, intuition, memory, relationship, and symbol. The work therefore develops the individual's capacity to encounter this material directly, cultivating inner literacy, discernment, and a grounded trust in their own experience.
The framework is held by values that find a natural expression within the Christian work of Safe Pastures: compassion, non-judgement, truthfulness, reconciliation, service, and respect for the dignity of the individual. Deep inner work asks for a space in which a person can become vulnerable while remaining safely held, where difficult material can be approached without condemnation and where the practitioner accompanies without imposing an interpretation. Within Safe Pastures, these qualities are understood through the life and teachings of Christ, whose encounters repeatedly place compassion before judgement, relationship at the heart of restoration, and the renewal of the whole person at the centre of healing.
In the same tone, suffering, fear, and pain are held as tangible and necessary devices of protection and guardianship, part of the fabric of physical experience. Turned into an essential tool-kit, they enhance the instinctual feedback system that cares for every living being.
Core values of The Inner Council framework
These values held the framework steady. They are named here so the reader can see the conditions the practice formed within, the temperament of the container Safe Pastures took shape inside.
Integrity. Every practice, method, and technique the Inner Council uses has been developed and lived by the practitioners themselves, on their own journeys of healing and transformation. This is what allows a person to trust and follow what is needed for them.
Authenticity. Let the inner compass be the guide. Coming as you are, with an open heart and mind, allows the essence you truly are to find its expression.
Openness. The Inner Council welcomes all who are interested, motivated, and determined to pursue their path of healing, wherever they perceive themselves to be along it.
Transparency. The work honours full disclosure. Every aspect of it is shared with the participant at each stage, revelation, and breakthrough.
Compatibility. The practice works alongside any therapeutic technique or spiritual discipline. It is universal and inclusive, holding both the person seeking supported, rehabilitative therapy and the one drawn to the depth of an inner journey.
Efficiency. The methods are precise and potent, and the collective experience of the practitioners feeds back continuously into them, keeping participants oriented within their integrative process.
These values meet in what the Inner Council calls open source therapy, the principle that healing is a process of learning and that the practitioner works from the outset toward becoming unnecessary. The principles, methods, and practices are shared transparently so that each participant becomes, in time, a practitioner of their own inner life.