Mike Jenkins trained as an actor and has worked in theatres in London and around the country. He later worked as a performing arts teacher and customer services trainer and now creates and manages websites to help people connect with their audience. He has written two stage plays, a growing collection of poetry and has always been drawn to expressing his own perception and perspectives and exploring those of others, through the creative arts. Mike loves to talk, sing, walk, read, write, cook, eat, sleep and to help others to feel and know the deep joy, grace and peace at the centre of all life.

After many years of mental and emotional distress in his 20s and a diagnosis of cancer at the age of 29, he began exploring spiritual teachings with a voracious zeal. In 2010, after encountering the works of Tony Parsons, Jeff Foster, and many other contemporary teachers, Mike began to experience more profound changes in his perception of himself and others and began writing about this on a blog.

That blog was called: Nothing Saying This, so titled in recognition of the experience of the state of consciousness sometimes referred to as ‘no self’ or ‘a transcendent state’, ‘the absolute’ and in some traditions referred to as ‘witness consciousness’.

He has given talks in Leicester, Yorkshire, Lancaster, London, and Brighton, recorded dozens of videos on YouTube, was interviewed by Rick Archer on the popular spiritual awakening video series Buddha at the Gas Pump, and has written many articles and some short eBooks.

For several years, Mike helped to manage and run silent retreats, weekend workshops, and online courses (along with Jane Metcalfe) for former Trappist monk and American spiritual teacher Francis ‘Fran’ Bennett, traveling around the UK and accompanying Fran to Barcelona, where she first spoke presenting as a trans woman. This period was a profoundly special and privileged time, spent in the company of a friend, spiritual mentor, teacher, and brave soul whose integrity was to prove too much for some in the world of living spiritual teachings and who ultimately met the harsh realities of human limitations. Fran died in January 2022, in America, after complications brought on by worsening type 1 diabetes.

It was the arrival of Fran in Mike’s life that began the process of what she would have termed ‘immanence’, or as she said many times ‘you gotta come down from the mountain and take your new perspective into the chaos of the marketplace or the village’, referencing the story of Jesus atop a mountain with his disciples (where being on top of the mountain represented transcendence). In talks with the American spiritual teacher Adyashanti, Fran spoke of the embrace of Jesus and The Buddha, illuminating the movement of ‘transcendence’ up and out of egocentric consciousness and perception and the ‘immanence’ of the Christ journey, down into a human body of flesh and blood.

Not I, Not I 
Poem by Mike Jenkins

Not I, Not I
the space in the sky

the silence in sounds
the eye in aye
in love whatever
may live or die

I did not go
you left me.

Look!
Here I am
forever free.

From an article written in 2016
Failure, Surrender and Living in Grace – a continuous call to come home. 

In many ways, I continually experienced extreme states of egocentric consciousness almost all of the time, swinging wildly from ecstatic joy and pleasure to deep and dark despair, stopping off at confusion and delusion along the way. Not only did these patterns create a great deal of chaos in my life affecting work, money, home life and relationships, but the accumulated impact of the stress and anxiety that resulted from these experiences also led to developing unhealthy coping habits such as drinking and smoking and finally to serious physical disease in the form of cancer, at the age of 29.

Four years after successful treatment for cancer and just 1 year before I was given the all-clear, I stumbled upon some teachings of modern, Western teachers of non-duality (or Advaita Vedānta) and almost instantly experienced a sudden shift within. It felt like a huge chunk of heavy, embodied pain and resistance had fallen away, like a great mass of land breaking off, disappearing and dissolving into the vastness of an ocean. In time, I came to understand that my ultimate identity was this vast capacity and the repeated returning of my awareness to the unchanging and infinite within me (or rather, me within it), slowly began to feel more and more like my true and natural home, more and more like my true Self. Since then, I have been learning to trust that wisdom within. I have come to know it as a wisdom that appears to have a capacity to supply never-ending kindness, compassion and unconditional love in the face of whatever difficulties and pain life may present to it. We could call that capacity, God. Trusting in that vast, timeless, unchanging and undying love through the living of my life in the world seems to come more naturally every day. And yet. 

Life can and does present all of us, at some point, with some form of very painful suffering. My own suffering, I hope, has not been and will not be in vain. In fact, I am thankful for every ounce of suffering, for it has shown me that it IS possible to live in a peace that passes understanding; that there is a happiness available to us that is beyond our traditional ideas of happy vs. sad and that there is a contentment that is contented even in the lived experience of discontent.

Updated 17th August 2026 
Trusting the Inner Order in the Midst of Outer Chaos 
As I write this update in August 2026, there has been much to test the stability of the ground of wisdom and love that I have been learning to surrender to over the past 26 years. Suffering, if we choose to call it that, IS inevitable in our world. Old lessons appear packaged in new forms, versions of ourselves show up in different people and it seems that our capacity to hold, heal and transmute pain into something valuable with more ‘creative responses’ increases with each sling and arrow shot in our direction.

Life: it’ll be the death of me, I commented to a group of friends last week. To their and my amusment I might add! 

In the last 18 months, I have come through two further biopsies, begun to live with the death, grief and loss of my father, fallen into a darkness and loss of identity the like of which I never anticipated and walked a little further along the road of recovery from addiction and the mess it can create. 

Our wings are forged in the heat of a fierce kind of love, that promises to burn away all that no longer serves us or those around us. That doesn’t look pretty from the outside, but in the chamber of our awakened hearts, we can feel deep sorrow AND a sense of peace and joy, courage and happiness that has no opposite. We are in the realm of divine paradox; freedom IN the bounds of our unique, personal Self. 

With much love 
Mike