A goodly turnout (nearly 50) turned out on trust, on a wet November Sunday afternoon, to hear a talk by a man that most of them had probably never heard of – but they were not disappointed. Christopher Strong’s decades of dowsing experience, and his vast portfolio of interesting, often bizarre, case studies have made him a much-sought-after after-dinner speaker. His renown is out of all proportion to humble helper he has become. However, when you have been through as much, and have come to appreciate as much as Mr Strong, a certain amount of reflected reverence becomes almost unavoidable.

While Christopher is best known in dowsing circles for his Lost Objects and Finding the Cause workshops, this talk was a taster for his forthcoming book:

Christopher Strong:

Autobiography of a Sceptical Dowser

Practising Intuition in Every Aspect of Living

It is a work that starts by illustrating his early influences, and the occasionally unusual and often highly amusing cameos from his upbringing. However, the bulk of text dwells on a selection of the remarkable case studies that he has undertaken over the years – mainly in conjunction with his late wife, Veronika.

From his ever-burgeoning portfolio of practical experience, Christopher has developed not only a unique dowsing style, but also a whole personal philosophy of the dowser’s world.

This talk majored on some of the significant aspects of that philosophy, derived from half a lifetime of direct application.

He explained the intrinsically linked themes that the first dowse on any occasion is always the correct one; that you can’t get more accurate answers by asking the same question time and again, and that you only get any credible answers at all if you actually need to know the result. This provides one potential explanation as to why dowsing is not repeatable under laboratory conditions, and also why it cannot be deconstructed using the standard scientific model.

Christopher himself, as a professional agronomist, has a scientific background that requires him to be embedded in the world of facts. However, his own personal experience is a series of facts, which has led him away from the Newtonian bedrock and pointed him towards emerging physics and philosophy.

Christopher’s approach is deeply rooted in ethics. He always uses the ‘Can I? May I? Should I?’ convention – and is very honest about the times that he has forgotten to do so, which – as often as not – have resulted in self-deprecating disasters. He never volunteers his services, but if someone asks him to help them, he does so – and he doesn’t often discriminate between clients, once the ‘Should I?’ question has been resolved.

In terms of situations where people have lost objects or suffered misfortune, his experience has led him to feel that very often there is a message to be discovered, which will rebalance the situation. If the questioner defines and takes on board the message, the missing objects will often be found in the most obvious of places, and the mishaps and misadventures will often be made good.

Perhaps the other great breakthrough for which the Strongs have been rightly credited is in the use and development of Checklists. While people have used lists of sorts for a long time, Christopher and Veronika drew up their own from scratch – and they remain some of the most useful and comprehensive of their kind. However, Christopher puts their own work into the public domain not to enable others to engage with their dowsing tasks in a mechanical fashion, but to provide them with a structure on which to formulate their own. Christopher is adamant that we should all create our own checklists, honed to meet our personal approach, individual heritage and direction of travel.

He explains that in his experience assistance is always available – from whatever source you choose to call it. You just have to be of sound intent (as filtered by the ‘Should I?’ question) and to ask. Helpful little energies exist all the way through reality, right down to the smallest living entity, the most specific place or the humblest machine. While many of us struggle to take this on board at face value, Christopher further explains that everything we sense ‘out there’ is just our metaphor for the elements of the information field that underpin our existence. If people like to term their helpers angels, genies or nature spirits, then that’s their concept of reality – if they prefer the more academic approach of information fields and multiple dimensions, then so be it. We are all only human (for the time being anyway!), so we can only use the terminology and iconography that we understand and can cope with.

You are never presented with a dowsing situation that you can’t handle, you just have to give it some thought – and/or to ask for help. Christopher’s own journey has taken him across the globe, and into the deepest chasms of the dowser’s craft. He is someone who, even from a young age, has always relished the difficult and the dangerous, as opposed to the commonplace and comfortable.

Yet he remains calm, easygoing, jovial – and above all, modest. When he gets it wrong, he laughs at his own limitations, and he learns from them – and his sorties into the unknown have taken him to the very edge of his own imagination.

It has been a great pleasure to have worked with Christopher on his book, which will hopefully be out shortly via Penwith Press. My most difficult task has been to consider how much of an astonishingly varied and exciting life to leave in, and how much we were obliged to leave out. It has been an embarrassment of riches.

Many thanks to Christopher Strong for taking the time and effort to travel down from Worcestershire to talk to us. From the large number of unsolicited pieces of positive feedback, this was evidently a very well-received presentation.

Nigel Twinn, Tamar Dowsers, November 2015