The Ancient Inn
Dean Melbourne & Andrew Phillips invite you to...
The Ancient Inn
A nurturing space for professional and personal rejuvenation
Available to clients in the UK and internationally
The Ancient Inn is a place for those who kindle the flame of imagination, soul and a curiosity for the inner life. A place of shelter in a culture addicted to surface, speed, and growth.
It is a space where conversations of depth and richness place you at the centre. Bringing together our extensive experience and interests in art, mentoring, and psychotherapy, we open the doors to both the curious and the committed.
A warm welcome
As your hosts, Dean Melbourne and I invite you into an online space for conversations around creative work, purpose, and the inner life.
You will experience something a little different from most creative mentoring and coaching, which often has achievement as its immediate focus, and therefore provides systems, strategy or tactics.
The Ancient Inn holds the belief that inner understanding, alignment and holistic “success” can only be attained in a more exploratory process.
As our client, you will benefit from the combination of our extensive experience, providing a distinctive blend of perspectives.
We understand the importance of achieving worldly success, but we emphasise the significance of your life's personal context and creative vision, rather than an ‘at all costs’ approach.
Join us
The heart of The Ancient Inn is an online meeting in which the three of us participate. You may wish to emphasise your own creative work, your imaginative life, your sources of inspiration and meaning. You may be experiencing difficulties in these areas, a sense that something is missing, or perhaps you find yourself full of enthusiasm but an absence of receptive others with whom to share it.
Alternatively, your reason for knocking at the door does not need to be easily defined at the beginning. If you have a sense that there could be something here for you, we hope the Inn will provide a place of exploration and possibility, to see what unfolds and makes itself known when we meet.
If you would like to find out more about joining Dean and myself at The Ancient Inn (including practical details and fees), please contact us using the form at the foot of this page.
Our vision for creative conversations at the hearth
We became friends through a mutual appreciation for each other’s artwork, and a shared sense of inspiration from various sources.
Our ideas for this work partly came into being whilst in the hospitable surrounds of an ancient Inn at Ludlow, Shropshire. It seemed to us that there was a relation between our core idea of offering mentoring sessions together, the possibility that someone else might pull up a seat and join us in conversation, and some sense of an atmosphere that stretches back into time we haven’t personally known. We are using this image as illustrative of how we envisage our offering. We are not talking here about a tavern of drunken nonsense and discord, but something with an altogether different archetypal nature.
We are consciously choosing to frame our work in this metaphorical way because we believe it touches upon something deeply important, which to our eyes is diminishing at this time in our culture. Perhaps it could be described as ‘romanticism’. We are not afraid of this term or the dismissive response it is sometimes met with, precisely because we know it to have a fundamental value within a soulful and enriching individual life, and the wider society.
To us The Ancient Inn is a place where people who may be strangers to one another might engage in conversations of purpose and depth, perhaps around the hearth. There could be an amicable parting of ways at its conclusion, with all parties enriched by the discourse and atmosphere of integrity and openness, or maybe lasting bonds of kinship are formed. It suggests that all are welcome, there is room for both sincerity and lightheartedness, and one is free to dream whilst knowing that there will no doubt be someone present who can offer a helpfully grounding and embodied presence for balance.