Gethin Kemp (Jñānakumāra)

Gethin Kemp is a Highly Specialist Physiotherapist working in the field of chronic pain and fatigue. He has worked in both residential and community pain management programme settings. As a practicing Buddhist for 35 years and was ordained in 1997 and given the name Jñānakumāra. He has been responsible for incorporating mindfulness and meditation into two NHS Pain Management Programmes. He has taught mindfulness and meditation approaches to people with chronic pain, chronic fatigue, cancer and addiction problems. He works on a daily basis with clients dealing with trauma, CPTSD, severe anxiety, panic attacks, depression, sleep disorders, hypermobility and complex regional pain. He has developed a range of Facilitated Muscle Relaxation approaches that have been useful for the above client groups, helping reduce muscle spasm and pain for this complex group of individuals.

Gethin wrote the Pain Management Programme Handbook that was the basis of the Programme in use for numerous NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups across England - as well as providing training to teams to introduce them to the ACT and mindfulness aspects of this pain programme.  He has developed a Sleep Programme that regularly runs in the Shropshire and Telford area and has provided training around this to a wide number of clinicians further afield.

Jñānakumāra enjoys developing new and more accessible approaches to traditional meditation practices to get results rather than sitting with a yearning hope that someday meditation will work. Of particular interest is the use of Inquiry approaches to help bring shifts in seeing through narrative self/the runaway problem solver that seems to be the basis of the perception of suffering. Very taken with the Predictive Processing models currently being researched, he is keen to develop the Inference Challenge (IC) approach at the heart of the Odoki Method. This uses Predictive Processing and successful frameworks of awakening (eg. Ten Fetters) to formulate an easy-to-follow path incorporating reflective, affect-focusing, body-space and hypnagogia approaches amongst others to help people towards a state of Deep Wellbeing.