Kathy Ratcliffe, 53, is organising The Mind, Body and Spirit Event, a free and open gathering which will meet at Swindon’s Goddard Arms on Tuesday evenings at 7.30pm from August 16. Its purpose will be to discuss issues such as belief, consciousness and possible meeting points between science and spirituality. Kathy, who lives on the outskirts of Swindon, is an author and life coach and has two children.

“IT’S an idea I’ve had brewing in the back of my mind for a while,” said Kathy Ratcliffe of The Mind, Body and Spirit Event.

“I wanted to have a mind, body and spirit group and establish it so that people had somewhere to converse and meet like mind people who are interested in the same kind of thing.

“I wanted to leave it on a very open basis so all sorts of people from all kinds of belief systems and backgrounds and religions could come together and exchange philosophies and views.

“We’re all on a path to seek our own versions of truth and the things that work best for us in establishing a life path that we want.”

Kathy says everyone will be welcome at the Tuesday evening meetings, so long as they have an open and inquiring mind.

The subjects raised will be up to the people there, but might cover anything from the survival of consciousness beyond physical death to the nature of matter, anti-matter and what we call coincidence.

Kathy is also fascinated by documented scientific phenomena such as light existing simultaneously as waves and particles, and sub-atomic particles reacting to one another even when far apart. She is the author of a book, Quantumology – Bridging Quantum and Human Worlds “I see the coming together of people in the community as almost a pivot point for this new consciousness evolution that’s happening now. There are an awful lot more people who are interested in the metaphysics of life than there have been, probably, for our living memory.

“Metaphysics simply goes beyond physics. A lot of my groundwork personally was in the quantum physics field. In established-speak, if you like, metaphysics is the cornerstone of conscious knowledge – that goes beyond what we can perceive naturally with our five senses.

“In our own personal evolution as we develop, we find more and more areas in which metaphysics comes to play a part. Some people see auras or see ghosts or spirits, other people hear and channel voices, other people sense things.

“There are lots of ways in which our senses can be expanded to include and embrace the metaphysical area, and that’s what I’m aiming to establish – a free-flow gathering of people who can come and go and explore whatever they want to explore in this kind of field.”

Kathy is the youngest of three siblings. Her mother is veteran local charity campaigner Mary Ratcliffe, and her late father was involved in the early years of Hambro Life, which eventually became Zurich.

After Hreod Burna School and Swindon College, she worked as a teller at auction houses and then for the Swindon Messenger newspaper, where she became features editor.

Later career changes saw her move to the Midlands and begin producing publicity material for various organisations. Kathy then became a trainer of employees, with companies bringing her in to improve staff happiness and productivity.

She founded her own firm, Xia, and moved into life coaching. Kathy is delighted to be back in the town where she grew up.

“Swindon is my home. It feels like home. They say home is where the heart is. I’ve never been more excited about a life venture than I am about this because it really does feel like coming home to my roots, to where I belong.

“It’s got a character all its own this town. It doesn’t matter how far back you go in history, that history will follow you somehow. That’s one of the lovely things about this town – that it’s got an impregnable character that sits inside your soul.

“I think those who love this town – and I know it’s a bit like Marmite because a lot of people make jokes about Swindon – really feel that connection to the village element of its society, the camaraderie that’s in there.”

She began wondering about spiritual matters very early in life.

“I suppose even from childhood I knew in the back of my mind that there was something else – something beyond what we can see. My childhood was a reasonably steady foundation for an open-minded belief system that would incorporate some form of spirituality.”

In the 1990s Kathy felt drawn to study scientific phenomena, especially the behaviour of sub-atomic particles.

“It accelerated my belief in a conscious universe and the way in which life incorporates and fits itself into natural scheme which we are only beginning to scrape the surface of understanding.”

The Mind, Body and Spirit Event, she says, aims to improve that understanding.

“We’re being encouraged increasingly to close our minds, and to accept things like fear and terror and hatred of each other and hostility – and defence mechanisms.

“That’s why I think this is so needed and important for people.

“All we can concentrate on and develop is our own personal existence, and the more connections and contacts we have that are based in trust and love and positive energy, the better off we are all going to be at the end of the day.

“The search for a creator is what drives people down certain tracks of a religious kind, and the search for natural knowledge and information is what drives scientists down the track they run on.

“Somewhere in the dim and distant future, hopefully there’s a bridge which will allow everybody to have a bit of a eureka moment – and find that there’s a correlation between science and religion that explains things in terms that everybody can embrace and enjoy, and live more functional, fruitful, happier lives. That’s the dream.”

Further information about The Mind, Body and Spirit Event can be found at www.xiaspeak.com.