I’m Robin. I teach a quiet, grounded way of being with plants, called Domei, that helps you slow down, pay attention, and rediscover kinship with the living world.
In my twenties, I trained to be a priest in the Independent Catholic tradition. This tradition is part of the larger stream of Western esoteric Christianity.
The people who were attracted to the church sought depth without dogma, and that suited my unruly spirit.
I studied the Western contemplatives, folk like Hildegard of Bingen, the Rhineland mystics, the Desert Fathers, and others.
These people had journeyed into their interior and into the world and returned with maps, pretty antiquated maps to be honest, but still maps if you could read the archaic language and metaphors.
My bishop was a kabbalist called Alan Bain. He had deep insights as well as serious blind spots, like so many of us. It was by being around him that I discovered Gurdjieff and the Fourth Way, which taught attention in everyday life.
There is no need to disappear to the top of the mountain or become a monk, nor contort your body into weird postures.
Gurdjieff’s core idea was simple: most of us go through our days on autopilot.
I left my training before ordination due to an experience I had during a deep contemplative moment.
Something happened that words are very difficult to describe. In fact, they don’t even come close to the actual experience.
Now, it wasn’t a vision or anything revelatory, and it lasted all of about thirty seconds yet felt like an eternity.
The floor to my worldview gave way. Everything I believed about how things worked, including my role in life, was simply a story I had been telling myself.
I said it wasn’t that profound, but it was deeply transformative for me, and it took twenty-five years to integrate and come to some kind of understanding of what it meant.
One thing I knew, I had to leave the church because you can’t rebuild inside a structure that has just collapsed, and so, I walked away from that community.
What I kept was the practise: the sitting, the returning, the discipline of focusing on what is truly present.
My work with plants began around that time too, although it wasn’t for many years later, that I actually started teaching.
The contemplative skills didn’t disappear; they found a new direction.
During my forties I entered my personal dark night of the soul. I developed a chronic drug and alcohol addiction that lasted eight years. I want to be clear about this: everything I had learned about attention and presence didn’t prevent the addiction from happening.
Practice doesn’t shield you from what life throws at you, but it did keep me grounded enough to stay afloat as I hit rock bottom. And rock bottom I hit at great speed, losing everything I held dear, I ended up homeless, friendless and bankrupt.
The practice was the only thing I had left, and in some ways, the practice is the reason I’m alive and you are reading these words.
By some curious twist of fate, I found my way to a Buddhist recovery community in Thailand. Sitting in the forest temple I focused on my breath and body, being asked for nothing except direct experience.
In the end, it was the plants that changed everything for me. Not in a metaphysical way. No plant has ever spoken to me. Nothing has been downloaded into my awareness from spirit. I am not spiritual or enlightened. That kind of language isn’t mine, and you won’t find it in my work.
What happened was very tangible. Spending long periods of attentive time with plants transformed me.
This journey slowed my mind down. The endless naming and commentary quietened, and in that gap something else emerged: a quality of contact I spent years trying to name.
For a long time, I called it primal sensing. It described the mechanics, but it felt too clinical. Too distant. It sounded like something from a research paper, and it didn’t fit my work or my experiences.
Then one year I found myself doing field work in the interior of India, away from tourists and cut off from digital life.
I was spending time with ordinary, humble plant people. They weren’t performing their relationship with the land; they were simply immersed in it, unhurried and at home in their bodies and surroundings. It was during this time that a word came to me: Domei.
It’s a neologism that I made up, combining two Gaelic roots: Domhain, meaning deep, and Éist, meaning to listen. Deep listening. But I meant with the whole body, not just your ears.
By then I had been teaching plant practices for 15 years and foraging for 20. With thousands of hours in fields, woodlands, and wild places across four continents under my belt, what I saw in people around plants wasn’t transformation.
That word feels far too grand, tidy, and neat. It was instead a quietening, a return to themselves.
It happened when people stopped performing attention and actually started paying it. There’s a difference. You can only learn it through practice not description.
Sure, I can talk around the subject, but it is the practices that are most important, and they are the only way you will develop any understanding, relationship or kinship with the living world.
We can read all the books we want on swimming, but it is not until we actually get into the water and attempt to swim that we understand what the practice really entails.
I’ve already mentioned Alan Bain, my bishop, and yet there are two other people who need to be acknowledged.
One is Frank Cook, an American ethnobotanist and educator who died in 2009, aged 46. He had a deep understanding of the plant world, and he died far too young.
When I began this work, Frank heard about it and told me to teach. I said I wasn’t ready; he said, ‘Tough, you need to be going out and teaching people.’ So you are reading this because of him.
The second person was Stephan Harding, an ecologist and Goethian scientist and co-founder of Schumacher College in Dartington, Devon. One year, I was teaching at a very small festival, and he attended my workshop.
We hadn’t met before, and afterwards, he made a beeline for me and simply said, ‘We’re drinking from the same well.’ It wasn’t until that point that I realised we were doing similar but different work.
So there you have it: where I’ve come from, where I’ve been, and how this whole Domei practice has shown up in the world.
I hope you get something from it.