About David Linaker

 

 

I am a writer, spiritual director, funeral and wedding celebrant, and former Church of England priest. For more than thirty years I have worked with people navigating the most demanding terrain of human experience: grief, loss, faith, doubt, transition, and the slow work of becoming more honestly themselves.

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My background is unusual. I trained in Applied Theology at the University of Oxford and was ordained in 1995, serving parishes in Wimborne, Mere, and Salisbury. I spent years in ordained ministry, working at a senior level in the institutional Church. I understood from the inside how much the structures we inhabit can sustain us, and how much they can constrain us. My own life was reorganised, unexpectedly and painfully. What followed was a gradual dismantling of assumptions I had not known I was carrying, and a slow rebuilding of a life that was genuinely mine.

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That experience made me a more honest companion, if not a better theorist.​​

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I now work one-to-one with thoughtful people in midlife: those who are high-functioning in the world but privately living with something unresolved. Many have been through a significant rupture: a bereavement, a breakdown, a loss of faith, a marriage that ended, a version of themselves they can no longer inhabit. Most have found that conventional therapy addresses one dimension of their experience, and traditional religion addresses another, but neither quite holds the whole of it. That is the space I work in.

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I am also an Independent Celebrant, officiating at funerals, weddings, and other significant life transitions across Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire, and the surrounding counties. I conduct around one hundred and fifty ceremonies each year.

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I am the author of Soulful Awakening: Spirituality Without Religion, published in 2024 and Finding Peace in the Second Half of Life: Love, Loss, Grief and the Search for Meaning, published in 2026, both by Homington Press. Further books on estrangement, conflict, and mortality are in progress.

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I supervise graduate Spiritual Directors at the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, where I run two courses each year.

I am based in Salisbury, Wiltshire. You can call me on 07530 007163, or request a conversation through the Spiritual Direction page.

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• Spiritual Direction: one-to-one work for people wanting to create and sustain their spiritual and existential health.

• Books: non-religious spirituality, mortality, conflict, and parental estrangement.

• Celebrancy: funeral, wedding, and life transition ceremonies.