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: the preparation and long-term integration support offered to participants engaged with ceremonial plant-medicine practices. That support required introspective skills, intuitive reception, regressional meditation, and subjective interpretation among them. As these were trained, the ceremonial connection deepened, and the inner experiences arising in mentoring began to mirror those the ceremony itself was expected to bring. For participants who were ready to connect, the unconscious proved ripe for communication. Across the journeys of hundreds of participants, the recurring patterns and self-reflections gathered into an understanding of the soul's journey of initiation, and the Inner Council took form. The Inner Council has been offering 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 living framework of the Inner Council is now developed in part by a community of practitioners who span clinical and academic environments, extending the inner voices of their participants and developing best practices which safeguard the effectiveness of the work.
The metaphysical and psychological assumptions of the Inner Council's Inner Child work are broadly Jungian, carried through the hermetic lineage. The Inner Council holds that Jung was interpreting a natural background process of the psyche, one comprehensible through the literature of his legacy and yet asking, in each individual, for a pioneering attitude: the development of tools by which a person navigates their own unique field of content and interpretation. Most of that content is recognised directly by the participant through experience. The work leans into the subjective field and cultivates a tangible feedback system with intuition, stabilised by a healthy trust in oneself and a strong commitment to follow through. The developmental maps of Ken Wilber's integral theory have been weighed alongside the work of Jean Piaget and Jean Gebser's four mutations of consciousness.
The work proceeds from non-judgemental acceptance. Deep therapy asks for sacred space, a holding within which both parties can open, receive, and feel at once vulnerable and safe. Past actions are held as material for healing. The Inner Council holds with Gabor Maté that behavioural challenges such as addiction are open to understanding and resolution, conditions to be met and worked with.
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 Inner Child–Informed Parenting 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.