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The Turning Point course originated in 1979 in Australia as conceived by Walter and Gita Bellin.

Walter, formerly a lecturer in psychology at the University of California in Berkeley, left his native U.S.A. for the UK in 1975 after extensive experience in the personal and professional development field including involvement with Werner Erhard’s EST organisation and the Mararishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation Foundation.

Walter and Gita, a senior lecturer in Education at Leeds University and a devotee of the Maharishi and teacher in the TM tradition, became key teachers in the British Meditation Society during the late 1970s.

Moving to Australia in 1979, they saw the need to develop a course which incorporated the two strands, the inner journey, including forms of meditation and ancient eastern esoteric wisdom and the outer journey, a balanced input from the psychoanalysis and psychotherapy tradition as well as the self-help practices and psychology flourishing on the west coast of the US in such places as the Esalen Institute.

Developing from its base in Sydney, the Self Transformation Centre grew rapidly throughout Australia and New Zealand on a wave of consciousness exploration burgeoning at the time.

In 1983, the Self Transformation Centre expanded to the UK and in 1985, Graham and Babette Browne were appointed to run the London Centre.

In 1988, the London Centre became independent of its Australian parent company and autonomous in formulating its purpose and direction, seeing its expansion into Amsterdam in 1989.

The company changed its name to Universal Training in 1990, in the same year that Babette returned to Australia. Since then, the courses have operated under the leadership of Graham Browne as Principal.

Throughout the 90s and until this year, the organisation of the courses under Universal Training has seen many phases and partners in its development throughout the South-East and South-West of the U.K. and into Ireland.

As a further transformation of the organisation of the teaching with its ancient roots in the Eastern as well as the more recent Western traditions, the new company, Soul Purpose UK, revitalises and regenerates the effectiveness of the courses for today’s market and contemporary consciousness in a style of its own.