Let me introduce you to the sentry, my protector. He is super strong and superhuman and thinks his job is to clear the path ahead for me. He says “Shona does not want to be dissuaded from her path, nor have her authority over herself questioned.” if he gets a mere sniff of an attack, he will defend and persist on my behalf.

The sentry is not a person or personality separate from me in the mental health sense; it is simply me becoming conscious of, and naming, one of the many ways of being in the world that I have adopted as part of the normal process of growing up.

That was useful when I was a child surrounded by others who did not always support my way of thinking, but as an adult who no longer wants or needs others’ approval, the sentry is a bit too heavy handed and I’ve dealt with a lot of path-clearing carnage over the years.

In fact, I only met the sentry this week, yet I’d been aware of the existence of this part of me in a more vague way for many years. I had been becoming increasingly frustrated and confused by, what appeared to be, an inner confidence in my own authority, and an ingrained habit of going into defence mode when questioned.

Focusing on that part of me as an individual part of my consciousness was invaluable. I realised if the sentry wasn’t busy clearing my path, creating carnage that was then creating more anxiety and work for me, that energy could be put into something new. The only thing standing in my way was an inner protection that had long since outlasted its use.

Parts work is a form of psychological work, often called shadow work, which looks directly at the things about us that have become subconscious. There are lots of ways to do this, but this week I’ve been using Teal Swan’s self guided process. It’s a bit like method acting parts of you as if they were another person.

In Reflections of the Soul – What Today Reveals About Tomorrow I talk about how I use whatever is actively triggering me in my life to dive into my subconscious and recognise old patterns and traumas. This latest process is one of the best I’ve used so far, as it is allowing me to look at myself through a much clearer lens even at some ordinary everyday things.

For example, other than the sentry, meet my head. When I stepped into my head as an individual part of my consciousness, I met a ground down, wizened old man. He was too lacking in energy to keep up the lifetime habit of keeping me safe by staying ten steps ahead; another outdated protection mechanism that could redivert and refresh its energy by working more symbiotically with my heart.

In contrast, my heart was like a vibrant youth, still running across garage rooftops to find a great hiding spot in the game. It felt expansive, present and in connection with everything around it. Polarities are common in parts work, where one part of us is sacrificed for another. Here you can probably see my head took over from my heart somewhere back in my childhood.

I’ve even taken a look at literal parts of myself, asking my right shoulder what it had to reveal as it seems to be in a constant state of tension and restriction. It told me that it needs my lower left hand side to be given attention, an area of my back that is often weak, so that it can work in symphony with the other parts of my body to maintain balance.

When I looked at that lower left side it wanted me to embrace the more feminine, gentle, kind and compassionate parts of myself so that it could be strong. There are so many facets to look at and, when I see myself though these lenses, it is a lot easier to see where old habits are no longer serving me and where there are opportunities for growth and more ease in my life.

Freshly equipped with the knowledge of my sentry, I went into a meeting yesterday that is part of a process with the kids’ school to inform them of any planned absences. The person who takes responsibility for this process generally uses it as an opportunity to voice disapproval at any unauthorized absence (anything except sickness and death of an immediate family member) regardless of reason.

In the past this has created turmoil within; see Evolving Education – Where Booking a Family Holiday during Term Time Took Me. But equipped now with my knowledge of the sentry, when I felt the anxiety building within me I was able to consciously recognise where that was coming from and used some tapping to calm my nervous system. I was in and out of the meeting in less than five minutes feeling balanced and happy in my choices.

Given these examples, you might have started to think of some others who could do with parts work. But do you really know the different parts of yourself? If we each take responsibility for the parts of us that are no longer serving us, we can leave yesterday’s version of us in the past where it belongs and be free to fulfill our potential in the now.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Get out of Your Head and into Your Heart, The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, Learn to See What Is in Plain Sight and Leverage Your Feelings to Find Your Authentic Self. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

As a parent, two issues that I have really struggled with, and been out of synch with my partner on, are TV and processed foods. From early on I noticed my kids seemed to exhibit addictive behaviour around these two things.

What does addictive behaviour look like? There is never enough TV or so called treats, there are long drawn and often violent reactions to the withdrawal of these things, a constant longing for them to the exclusion of other, healthier, alternatives (like a trip to the park, or a good meal), and frankly there is a lack of motivation and connection to life. 

But I don’t think the issue is the TV or processed foods; I believe the issue is why they are drawn to them. The same could be said of any addiction. As a society, it seems that certain things (take drugs as an example) are vilified and criminalized even, while other potentially (more) harmful and addictive things (like cigarettes, alcohol, TV, social media etc) are legal and commonplace.

This week I was talking to someone who is in the process of firmly drawing some boundaries around the behaviours she will accept from an alcoholic partner. She understands where the desire to numb likely comes from; it is a result of a family history and trauma most of us would agree was horrific.

However, Dr Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-born Canadian physician (and Jewish survivor of the Holocaust) says of childhood trauma “yes this includes terrible events such as sexual exploitation, violence etc, but it also refers to any set of events that, over time, impose more pain on the child than his or her sensitive organism can process and discharge.

Trauma can occur when parents are too stressed, too distracted, too depressed, too beset by economic worry, too isolated etc to respond to a sensitive child’s need to be seen, emotionally held, heard, validated, made to feel secure. Thus, this is the kind of pain that also occurs in normal, happy, childhoods.”

I can easily see why my kids would have felt the need to soothe themselves using TV or treats, in a world where I – as a normal parent in this day and age – went to work and they spent most of their days in another person’s home with someone who (albeit lovely and loving) was not their mother. And when I was around them I was certainly stressed and distracted a lot of the time.

In Beyond Drugs: The Universal Experience of Addiction, Dr Gabor Maté says “addiction is neither a choice nor an inherited disease, but a psychological and physiological response to painful life experiences.”

Most addicted people use no drugs at all… Addiction is manifested in any behaviour a person craves,  finds temporary relief or pleasure in but suffers negative consequences as a result of and yet has difficulty giving up…It can encompass any human behaviour from work to shopping, sex to eating, extreme sports to TV to compulsive internet use, the list is endless.”

When Maté asks his patients what their addictive focus gives them, universally the answers are about coping with stress, escaping emotional pain, giving peace of mind, a sense of control or connection with others.

As I said in Our Sensitive Souls, “For those of us that are sensitive in our temperament, Maté’s work may lend some interesting insights to assist in healing the scars that run deep in our psyche. In an increasingly frenetic world, where overstimulation abounds, we have a job to do in helping ourselves and our children understand and nurture our strengths”.

To do this job well, I also have to understand the coping mechanisms, soothers or addictions, which have nestled into the cracks. Becoming aware of what I do, what my partner does and what the kids do in order to tune out/zone out/escape reality is a vitally important step in being able to meet life head on and find emotional balance.

Talking with someone else this week, who has a grandchild diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder), I can see how it has served me to give in to my children’s desire for more screen time because, honestly, dealing with the constant emotional tantrums and outbursts is exhausting and screen time provides a welcome reprieve.

However, it does not help my kids to be present, nor happy, in the world around them. It doesn’t help them to find ways to regulate their emotions, build resilience, connect with other people and build relationships and patience, As Simon Sinek says in this clip about the Millennial Generation, where will they find real joy?

The same is true of any addiction. If I can’t find my way through pain without tuning out or numbing myself against it, what chance do I have of finding real joy in my life? And what does that mean for the people around me?

These words came to me “I love all your broken pieces, but I can't live with you treating me like I'm the one who broke you. When you learn to recognise and love those jagged edges the way I do, then we can live in love.” Addiction causes pain to those around us, the ones we supposedly love.

Any addiction points to pain, which points to childhood coping mechanisms that require healing. Recognising and dealing with the consequences of our childhood trauma seems to me to be the most important thing we can collectively do to open the pathway to more joy.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, Learn to See What Is in Plain Sight and Leverage Your Feelings to Find Your Authentic Self. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

“Humans are the most violent and the most compassionate creatures on Earth, the most destructive and the most creative” the commentator said. I was watching a short video about what animals think and feel and it concluded that all animals do think and feel to an extent; it’s just that humans are more extreme.

If I dwell on the atrocities that have and still do occur among humans, it pierces my heart and makes me feel small and helpless. But if I spend time focusing on compassion and creativity; I feel that the whole world within me opens up to a brighter and better future, because it helps me be more present in the world instead of enslaved to my past.

Shauna Shapiro talked about this very issue in a podcast I was listening to this week, about having an attitude of kindness and curiosity to allow the parts of the brain, that increase our motivation to learn and create more of an open perspective, to function freely.

In contrast, she pointed out that when we get stressed we shuttle resources from learning and being open and receptive to survival pathways (the fight, flight, freeze, faint responses) and we are unable to learn. Here are the words that resonated for me:

“Really, when it comes down to this basic understanding of how we learn, I think this is why our educational systems, parenting systems and many others have failed, we learn when we feel safe and interested, and that is the kind of internal environment I want to help people create for themselves.”

This, I believe, is the very way to make a positive difference in the world today. And it is no more obvious than in our closest relationships. Shauna Shapiro mentions parenting and, as a parent of two young children, that certainly rings true. As I’ve often quoted, in the words of Dr Gabor Maté:

“It is often not our children’s behaviour, but our inability to tolerate their negative responses that creates difficulties. The only thing the parent needs to gain control over is our own anxiety and lack of self control.”

In Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul I conclude “The anxiety we feel as parents in response to our children’s negative reactions, is the same anxiety we felt as a result our own parent’s reactions.”

But the same is true in our other relationships. James Redfield’s model of the control strategies that we each develop in order to stop others draining our energy is summarised in Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation.

For example, I noticed how defensive I got this week when my partner tried to talk to me about how he was feeling. Rather than feeling safe and open to really hearing him, I automatically sprang into a mode that felt nothing short of pull up the drawbridge, secure the perimeter and ready the cannons.

I then noticed how this pattern, rather like a blame game of tennis going back and forth, was reinforcing the patterns from our respective childhoods. To use James Redfield’s Interrogator archetype, he says if a child is constantly questioned, criticized, nagged and faults found, it makes the child self conscious and erodes their confidence.

As I grew, I learned how not to let my energy be drained in this way and, instead, refuted each criticism admirably, tussling to maintain an even field or win the upper hand. However, on the inside, the criticism ate me up, which is why I became such an approval seeker (see I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak).

My partner has his own demons, but none of these are really the fault of our parents, these patterns have been repeating subconsciously for generations. I think it is highly unlikely there is a person alive today who is not dealing with some version of this. In fact, I would bet that beneath the mask of history’s most vile monsters and egotistical maniacs is a small boy or girl who is hurt.

What makes this time in history different, I believe, is that many people are becoming aware of the roots of our shame and insecurities. This is a time in which I am free to explore taking different roads of action in my closest relationships.

Learning to feel safe and curious is a process. Certainly my kids don’t shy away from blaming me for everything in their life they are unhappy about, and I often feel my partner is not far behind them. At what point did I become an emotional dumping ground I wonder? This too is an unhealthy pattern pointing to a need for healing within me.

While I’ve discovered The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, I also find that most people are still quick to blame others if they are unhappy; few seem to take responsibility for their own growth. It does seem a tad unfair that I’m taking responsibility for my own thoughts and feelings, rather than blaming others, and at the same time having others blame me for their woes.

However, playing boo hoo is not going to serve me nor help me move forwards. As I wrote about in Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling I am learning to notice when I’m taking on others’ negative energy, and ways in which to deflect their own feelings back to them. My old patterns won’t die overnight, but they are getting more recognizable.

Knowing these for what they are gives me a greater sense of safety, and being interested in what others are thinking and how they are feeling, creates a sense of compassion for them as I gain more clarity on their deeper issues and realise we’re all tussling with the same things.

That does not mean I have to accept blame from others. As Buddha said, if you give me a gift and I don’t accept it, it is still yours. Therefore, if you are angry, resentful or frustrated at me, it really is up to me to decide whether or not to get insulted and angry in return.

In fact the gift I recognise is that on some level I am still blaming myself as I did when I was a child, creating this constant need to be perfect and not elicit any criticism. I am quick to defend externally and quick to accept internally.

So I have to look at each thing directed at me and be curious about whether this is something I need to take accountability for, or is this something that is about me learning to love myself more, to have self compassion.

If we can each begin to recognise our patterns of thought and behaviour and regard them with curiosity and self compassion, we will slowly start to change the patterns of behaviour we reflect into the world. Won’t it be fabulous to hear far more compelling tales of compassion from our species than violence, and see many more examples of creativity than destruction? Now that is a world we can thrive in.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, We Can Live in Harmony. How Can I Create a Better World?and Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I had been watching a video on the topic of people pleasing last week, and having healthy boundaries, and was thinking I was less of a people pleaser (in the sense of saying yes to them when I really want to say no) and more of an approval seeker.

Although I will make the decision to say yes to me, I often explain my rationale, I want people to approve my right to make my own decision, whether they agree with the actual decision or not is unimportant. I’m like a dog with a bone. In fact I recall someone describing my use of words as both a gift and curse. She likened me using explanations like using a drug, and feeding others on that drug. 

I have a clear understanding of where this comes from. As a child I, like most people, was taught that what I wanted was less important than what others wanted for or from me. There were punishments for disobeying or misbehaving, and so – being strong willed and persistent - the coping mechanism I developed was to try to persuade (generally my parents, then later teachers, coaches, employers and partners) through logical argument.

This need for approval could also be called a need for validation. After pondering this I serendipitously got sent a short video called Validation. It’s quite cool, a great little pick me up and reminder that we each have amazing and unique qualities that we would do well to focus on. It does, however, perpetuate this idea of other people validating us before we can be happy.

As I said in The Magic of Those Who Believe in You, those people who have and do lift me up in life are truly magical; I need the cheerleaders for sure. But what about those others, the ones I love and who love me, who may want the best for me, but are limited by their own horizons?

Marlena Tillhon-Haslam says “The way you treat yourself and how you let others treat you shows how much or how little you really value yourself. So notice the standards you set. Notice what you tolerate. This will tell you whether or not you value yourself.”

I notice. As someone who firmly believes that there is no one right way for everyone, that we all have our own opinions and priorities, I long to have my own beliefs and priorities respected. But I have tolerated too much.

From those closest to me, I have tolerated my beliefs about healthcare being derided; I have tolerated my prioritised spending on self care appointments being resented and vilified; I have tolerated my parenting being heavily criticized; I have tolerated demeaning (so called) jokes. I could go on. These are the things that send me into approval seeking mode.

The initial phases of recognition and recovery are clunky. I blurt things out, I talk too much, I feel tears coming and I feel totally vulnerable. But I reclaim the ground my soul is calling me to stand upon.

I have not been perfect either. Dorothy Law Nolte said a child who is constantly criticised learns to condemn, and it’s a habit I notice I step into when I’m feeling resentful, underappreciated and/or overwhelmed; I want to step away from doing it.  I have also done a lot of work on learning from my anger as I wrote about Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master.

But one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced is in trying to save others from themselves. Even though I know I can’t, and should not, I’m adept at seeing ten steps ahead and emotionally attuned to others.
As a result I often try to smooth the way as much as possible, which can backfire, leaving those I’m trying to help feel resentful and me feeling underappreciated for my effort when I should have left well alone in the first place.

While I’ve generally backed away from doing this with other people, certainly around my kids I’m still in that mode. Their tired, emotional meltdowns feel emotionally unsafe because they reverberate with the meltdowns I experienced from adults around me growing up.

Just this morning my youngest daughter, who hasn’t been sleeping well (she is a bit anxious about returning to school), told me she didn’t want to go anywhere today because she is too tired. Ten minutes later she had a big meltdown because I said she couldn’t go on a long bike ride with her dad in a forest that is quite some distance from here.

I knew my partner could really do with a big ride on his own to relax which she is not capable of doing at her age. Based on my experience, I imagined by the time they arrived at the forest after the long drive she wouldn’t even want to actually ride, which would frustrate the heck out of her dad.

Anyway, he had said yes to her, so I wondered why I was even standing in the way of this valuable experience for both of them.  Sure, tomorrow when I’m trying to get her back to school after the long summer break, her tired state will undoubtedly add to the intensity, but tomorrow is another day. She is better being in the forest riding with her dad than here fighting with her sister.

Rather than anticipating others’ needs and trying to smooth the way, I know it is better for me to step the heck out of the way and allow them to learn from their own experience.

But I also honour and recognise the child in me who, as one friend says, needed to ensure they weren’t swallowed up by a world that pressed in on them too much. There is a deep need to belong and be seen and yet a deep fear of belonging and being seen also.

I started to write these articles almost five years age in an attempt to gain clarity and confidence about who I am, and it has given me that. But there was also a part of me using them initially as a way to seek approval for the things I believe in.

Over time it has made it easier to speak my truth, because I now have more clarity and confidence in what that actually is rather than just feeling muddled. Nowadays writing these has become a disciplined way for me to reflect on what life is teaching me in the moment.

As Eckhart Tolle says, “For presence to become deeply rooted, it must be tested in the fire of relationships.” As I continue I create stronger boundaries and slowly start to see changes in how those around me treat me, and how I treat them, I know how perfectly on point these lessons are.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What Happens When You Accept Yourself And Stop Seeking Approval? And My Needs versus Yours. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay 

I had a dream the other night that the swim coach I had back in my teens had come back to visit all those he had worked with who had shown promise and been dedicated to achieving success in their sport.  Dreams being what they are, I did not know anyone else at the table, but suffice to say we were all middle aged and out of kilter with life’s big dreams.

Owen Flanigan was a charismatic and committed coach; I can still picture him tracking me alongside the pool, whistling loudly enough through his teeth to catch my attention over the sounds of my breathing and the water rushing in my ears, and moving his hands in a motion that meant “kick your legs harder!” Although Mr F (as we affectionately called him) died 24 years ago, he is still with me when I take a swim - especially when I’m doing freestyle and allowing my legs to just languish.

In my dream I pictured the group of us he had come to visit dressed in work garb that seemed to signify a degree of career success, one man adorned a pin striped suit. Yet the men had paunches and everyone was more than a little worn down by life. Mr F was taking us back to a time when we were full of youthful exuberance and dreams for our future, less encumbered by voices of self doubt and loathing.

Back in those days the voices were not in my head, of course, they tended to emanate from the mouths of adults (and mean kids) in the world around me. For example, I hit a wall in terms of progress in the pool and listened to others debate why that might be. As I would swim I could feel my body lose energy as I took on the thoughts that I might have plateaued because of growth and teenage hormones; something that felt outside my control.

When I started to become more consciously aware of the voices and judgements in my head a good few years back, it quickly became obvious they were the voices I’d heard in my home, school playground, the pool and other influential places.

I suspect even those people out there who are not consciously aware of the voices and thought patterns in their own head, which seem to form the majority of people at this point, cannot fail to understand this principle when they become parents. Like the many other stories I’ve heard along a similar vein, I have often opened my mouth (especially in frustration) and heard my mother or father’s voice come out.

So this group I saw in my dreams seemed to be encumbered with what those voices had drawn to them in terms of life experience. Chip Conley, in a podcast on the topic of lifelong learning. talks about his observation of the path of life in a similar sense to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in that when we are young it’s all about having our basic survival needs met, then it becomes about accumulating and success and then it becomes about editing and meaning.

Editing means getting rid of the old thought patterns, which Christie Marie Sheldon gives some excellent tips on flushing out in this video. She talks about observing the “I can’t have/do/say/be X” statements in our heads in particular and asking instead “what would it take to make X happen?”

Chip Conley runs a Modern Elder Academy to address this education gap in our midlife, which I thought sounded intriguing, and seeks to address the same awareness gap among other things. He commented that participants tend to notice for the first time how many identities or mindsets they are wearing in their lives.

Coming back to my dream, it was a perfectly timed reminder that – however encumbered I’ve become with unhelpful thought patterns in the intervening years since I trained with Mr F, and however successful or unsuccessful I’ve been at becoming aware of them and integrating the fractured parts of me in my life – I can always start from right here.

I’m grateful to have had people like Mr F in my life; people who believed in me when I was younger gave me strength as an adult when I struggled to believe in myself. If I hadn’t experienced that, I still fervently believe in the words of Belinda Alexander “We are still here, so there is something we have to do”.

The sheer magnificence of our design and that of nature tells me that no single life is an accident; we
each have something we are here to do. In order to do it, there is perhaps the need to become untethered from our worries and doubts and that starts from where you are, now go and be great. And when great feels like too much, just be grate-ful instead.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Be Magnificent: How to Create Something Out of Nothing and Be Thankful, I’d also highly recommend listening to the links in the article. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

What is grabbing my attention this week is the inner struggle between myself and my connectedness to all else. Put in a different way, it’s about my own needs versus my relationship needs.

On the face of it, these two things often feel in opposition. After all, that is what the journey to me has been all about. My starting point, like most, was enmeshed in the expectations placed upon me in my early childhood years. These were the years in which I learned that what I felt, believed or wanted often wasn’t as important as what other people wanted of or for me.

That early entanglement is undeniably still with me, though to a much lesser extent than when I started the journey to figure out who the real me is. Instead of being completely identified with the encumbered version, I now observe with interest what things trigger me and use the information to unwrap yet another layer of something false.

This week I read some words that took me back to that early inner tussle with life as I emerged into adulthood. Then, as now, my biggest lessons were always to be found in those closet relationships I had.

You may know I’ve been drinking in several novels by Belinda Alexandra lately, and what a joy it has been to find such kindred spirits in the fictional characters. The latest one was no exception, it was like the very echoes of my own struggles within old relationships:

“If you are lonely with me now, neither marriage nor children will help. You are asking me to fix something only you can solve.”

“Perhaps I didn’t believe anyone would be faithful to me unless they were tied to me in some way.”

“Although our beautiful life together came to an unanticipated end, you have left me with an invaluable gift; the gift to be myself...Without this heartbreak between us I may never have discovered that desire.”

“I need more time, I’m just starting to grow into the real me, and I like her. I want to fill her empty spaces myself. I want to be free of shackles and insecurities.”

“I had yearned to belong to someone then because I hadn’t known how to belong to myself.”

As I wrote about a couple of years ago in Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First  I have come a long way since those early, needy relationships. Nowadays I look upon any issues as a chance for me to get to know myself even better and a chance to look at where I’m still buying into early conditioning.

But putting myself first doesn’t mean I win and you lose, it means I’m looking for the win win. For example, right now I’m in the midst of an extended period of social time. With kids at home over the long summer holidays, and family visiting, instead of my usual regular spaces of solitude I’m rarely on my own.

Today, after driving some distance to bring my youngest child home from a stay with her grandparents, I would have liked to have taken a nap. I could have, but it was my dad’s birthday, and spending some time with him also felt important. So I opted for the win win in that, and we went to the beach for a walk. I allowed nature to sooth my weary nervous system while we chatted and wandered along the ocean, the waves working their usual magic.

It’s always an interesting and testing time of year for me. I am finding that, as each year passes, I am coming to know myself better and be more comfortable in dropping the vestiges of that angry, defensive, insecure person I once was in favour of embracing a new way of being.

I think perhaps there was a point, early in the journey to recover a sense of my authenticity, that I had a strong desire and need to withdraw from my relationships and be utterly covetous of my own company in order to gain some perspective and clarity. However, now I’m able to function much more comfortably within my relationships without losing sight of who I am.

There are still times when I drop into the me versus you mode, but I quickly become the observer and start to notice instead what there is for me to learn when I’m getting triggered. In Belinda Alexander’s terms, I’ve come a long was in learning how to belong to myself and – in doing so – am now valuing my connection to everything else in an entirely different way.

Instead of that needy, insecure person, I am now seeing that your needs and mine must be a perfect match or life would not bring us together in this moment. That does not mean that our needs are necessarily harmonious, they may in fact be mutually unharmonious in order to push each of us to resolve our inner struggles.

Versus can mean against, or in opposition, and that is how I used to view my relationships when there were conflicting needs. But now I have come to see that a different definition of the word versus, meaning in contrast to, is much more helpful in order to gain a valuable perspective on my connection to everything and everyone else.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How Can I Create a Better World?, Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary), Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, and Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog. 

A friend of mine shared a post this week from an Iran-born American human rights activist who had been asked to comment on the assassination of General Qasem Solemani. Given that I don’t watch a lot of media, the news about the assassination had reached me earlier in the week when some family members were discussing it.

It was fabulous to see the comments on the post from others who had been open to exploring an alternative view, outside of what gets reported through mainstream media (or, for that matter, just continuing with the any bias they may have grown up with).

As I said in Each to Their Own – Finding Your True North:

No one else has my DNA, my heritage, ancestry or experiences, nor the lenses through which I see the world; we are each unique. And so our truths are similarly so, speaking to us in different ways.

Thus, in my experience, there is never any one truth, only opinion and perspective, and I was thrilled to see other people willing to explore and form their own. This is something I would encourage everyone to do, and to do it from a point of discovering their own authentic self.

I thought about the lady who had made the video stating her opinion, and the oppressive culture she had described in Iran; it made me think of the stories I had been reading recently about Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy and Hilter’s Germany. It also made me ponder on worthy causes on the Earth today.

This also led me to reflect on the things we are all drawn to, or rebel against. While no one said life was meant to be fair, it seems to me the desire for freedom to make our own personal choices, and equal opportunities to pursue what is important to us, is universal. The thing I keep coming back to time and again is the sovereignty of our being.

I thought about my own part in all of this and realised I still have biases. For example, when I hear Trump described as an egotistical, chauvinistic buffoon, I admit there is some resonance. The same could be said of many political leaders, or the systems I have come to distrust, or even the many people in my life whose opinions and actions have created a sense of dissonance.

It’s not that I feel wrong in having a bias; it’s more that it seems foolish to disregard something or someone entirely because of it. It seems more sensible to look for commonalities that exist, since nothing and no one is actually separate from who I am; it is all just showing me aspects of myself.

I am no expert on the Middle East, so it was easier in many ways to be open to a fresh perspective. However, other topics that are closer to my heart - like parenting, education or healthcare for example –undoubtedly prove more contentious. It was a good reminder for me to remain open, knowing that my own opinions constantly evolve and shift.

I know why I’m generally closed on topics close to my heart. As a child (like most people brought up by even the most well meaning parents) my opinions were undoubtedly shaped and influenced by those around me. Space, time and deliberate inquiry have brought me to an understanding of my authentic self and the many ways my view of the world differs to those opinions.

I’ve gone through the years of trying to persuade others to the views I have formed, and came to the realization – as I said earlier – that everyone has their own truth and some are more open than others to exploring alternative views.

It’s a hot button, I think, for many of us whose early experiences quashed our inner views; it certainly made me less movable and more determined to retain my own. Yet it is a big world out there that can accommodate all the collective individual perspectives, it already does.

The question is what you or I want that collective, prevailing global culture, to look like? Should it remain as one which is intolerant and scared of differences, or do I start to take responsibility for the collective by taking responsibility for re-parenting myself?

As I said in We Can Live in Harmony  “in the world today you can see whatever you want to see; from what would appear to be the prevalent, more insular and selfish behaviours of many – which I like to think of as a crazy death dance of a desperate egoic state that knows its number’s up – to the more conscious behaviours of those who are aware of their connectedness to everything.”

Harmony out there begins with inner harmony in here, and the only person who can create that for me, is me. Each time I see a disharmony, I look within to see where that is reflected within me, and seek to learn from its lesson.

There is no need to feel powerless in the face of the state of the world today, there is much to be done from right where each of us stand, in our own shoes. We can end the cycles of feuds and wars when we each take responsibility for our own inner harmony; this will reflect out into the world in a way not before seen in our history.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How Can I Create a Better World?, Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary), Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, and Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This is a question I ask myself often, especially since drawing the conclusion that we each have our own unique answers within. Yet there seem some glaringly obvious areas in which we humans appear to have been conditioned by governments and unwitting families to the detriment of our own personal power and, therefore, universal abundance and harmony.

This point in history is still marked by a lot of fear, hate and judgment. When I left the UK fourteen years ago I was starting to see and hear a rise in racist and nationalist sentiment, then I saw a post from someone in the UK last week who’d taken multiple photos of an area on the same day that has sadly been tagged in such a way that tells me those feelings are very much alive.

I will confess I haven’t taken a huge interest in Trump’s time in power, given that I watch very little media, but I can tell from the things many others have quoted or said in passing that there does not appear to be a lot of evolved thought or action talking place.

I recently heard someone say “Hate and judgment turn human beings into idiots, but they never seem able to learn that and behave differently.” I couldn’t agree more, along with pride, greed and jealousy.

As I say in Evolve Our World:

“This is now a world where mostly everything is at our fingertips. In theory it's a world where connection, transparency and finding your passion should be easier than it has ever been. Yet in a collective we seem to act on autopilot for much of the time we are together, with old cultures, hierarchies, organisational constructs and societal systems still in play.

I advocate for people following their passion and I advocate for more evolved and enlightened businesses, governments, education, health care; all the traditional constructs in our society that shape who we become. I'm a proponent of self leadership and transparent communication.” 

But how I advocate, that’s the real conundrum for me. At first, when I began to discover just how conditioned we are, I was furious. I read and listened to a lot of alternative media and research on many of today’s constructs and drew my own conclusions, and still do; it drives me insane when I come across people who have vociferous opinions based on nothing but popular media or their parents’ opinion alone.

I have also come to recognise that the key to evolving our world is through a large enough collective of each of us questioning who we really are from the inside out and evolving ourselves first. I have written nearly three hundred articles and it is for good reason most of them are categorised under Personal Power, because that is where my real learning has been.

I was heavily criticised, controlled and judged as a youngster, there has been and still is a lot of anger and defence in me, something I’m always working on. I work so hard on it because I really want others to become aware of their true potential and the alternative ways of living that would naturally arise if more people had the wherewithal, courage and determination to step into their authentic selves.

I know if I am being angry and defensive all that is happening is a drawing of battle lines on both sides. Instead I have to learn a new way. A story I was reading recently about the civil rights movement points to this. One of the main characters is a black man who looked white men in the eye rather than averting his gaze as was customary. When asked about this he said:

“I look him straight in the eye, not to intimidate, but to say I believe you are a good man and I’m a good man too, we should respect each other. I believe each white man I encounter goes away thinking a little differently about coloured men because of the way I act. Mama says you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.”

Time and again I resonate with stories that demonstrate this old adage well. And I also understand the truth of another well known proverb “a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still”.  As Teal Swan says “showing someone their resistance is a greater gift than persuasion.”

If I were teaching someone else I’d say “don’t expect to get this down pat the first time you are at a family gathering (or even the second, third or one hundredth) and Uncle Bob starts spouting off his usual racist remarks again; or your mother looks at you in horror because you’ve decided not to vaccinate your children or everyone rolls their eyes and gets frustrated because you’ve adopted a vegan diet.”

You can be sure I don’t cut myself the same slack and beat myself up for getting defensive when I feel my parenting or life choices are being attacked. However, I do obviously recognise on some level that this is a process. Vinegar doesn’t turn into honey – ever. I have to evaporate the vinegar and go collect the pollen (to create the honey) one flower at a time.

As I quoted in an earlier article, all honourable causes eventually succeed even if at first they fail. This applies as much to my desire to show people their own resistance and paint inspiring visions of alternative paths, as it does to the evolutionary causes I support.

So how can I create a better world?

• Recognise and heal my own hurts and create new, more authentic, ways to live my life that are unique to me.
• Learn and practice (in less triggering situations) how to ask questions of others in order to reveal their resistance to something; and – most importantly – always remaining open to the idea that I could be wrong.
• The (not) small matter of learning how to paint inspiring visions, which is an entire mindset shift from defence.

All of this takes its own time, and requires patience, but I will get there. I have to because, as another character in the civil rights story said, “People are depending on us. If we give up now, the world my child will inherit will be no better and no fairer than this one.”

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary), Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, and Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master, or some of my favourite subjects for change Evolving Education, What Is the Deal with Conspiracies? and Wake Up to the Truth About Healthcare and Healing. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

As the year 2020 nears I can’t help but feel reflective, but with the kids on their long summer holiday and visitors coming and going, there is considerably less opportunity for me to simply sit and observe what is arising in the space within me.

And yet, the truth of what wants to be seen and heard within me is reflected all around me. I need not worry that I will miss out on some important message, life communicates with me in so many guises.

These are little moments of insight, gratitude and support that bubble up while I’m, for example, swimming a length of the pool and watching the sun dance along the lane’s line on the bottom, the way that I imagine neurons fire along my spine. This communicates health and vibrancy and helps me feel deep gratitude for my life.

There are many moments like this, both awake and asleep, giving rise to new ideas to unpick or things to wonder at and be grateful for. Just as the behaviour of others I’m with, or situations that crop up or conversations that take place are also reflections of what is going on for me. Life never stops communicating if I am willing to listen.

Despite having less solitude, I do love this time of year in New Zealand. Once the rush is over for wrapping up work and buying last minute gifts, the majority of the country seems to take a collective out breath. Traffic eases and things just feel more calm and relaxed for a week or so, with most Kiwis heading to the beach (not far from anyone’s door in his country).

For me there is a deep joy in the space I feel in the collective out breath, all the tension that usually surrounds me becomes noticeable in its temporary easing. It has the effect of drawing me out and supporting me in the social swirl.

In contrast, the first three days of the school holidays the kids and I didn’t even leave the house, on the fourth day we ventured out briefly to do some errands, and it wasn’t until the fifth day we actually went to the park and had some fun.

As I was sitting in the park looking up at the sky through the trees, while the kids made their way around an obstacle course, it felt like the world was saying “welcome back, come sit awhile and enjoy”.

Today I even had some time to finish another novel I’ve been reading by Belinda Alexandra. It is set in Mussolini’s Italy in the run up to and during World War 2, and I had stumbled over many harrowing chapters wondering why I felt so compelled to read it. Finally I found the words I knew my heart had been drawing me towards:

"While most Italians - and probably most Germans - had not wanted war, they had chosen a path of greed and pride and the result had been war.

For where else did violence begin but within each individual human heart?

It started with violence of thought and action, jealousy of others and loathing of oneself. It had its beginnings in the daily choices one made, including the indifference towards the suffering of animals in what one selected to eat or wear, and towards the poor and oppressed. 

From there it escalated into a collective consciousness of competitiveness, selfishness, pettiness, spite and greed. Violence of even the most seemingly innocuous kind begat more violence. That was the origin of war."

In her after-note, Belinda Alexandra says her core message is that peace on a worldwide scale is determined by each of us creating peace in our own hearts and minds first, and doing our best to live in harmony with the people and other living creatures around us. She says “When we can each do that, I believe together we will then become a force powerful enough to create positive change on a scale never before conceived."

As I read her words I knew I’d found a kindred spirit and I knew my heart was simply affirming the path I am on. As I said in Evolve Our World “ As many people now search for deeper meaning in their own lives, the discord cannot continue. One person at a time,  as we reveal our inner desires, talents and strengths, we will evolve the world in which we live to pave the way for greater meaning, satisfaction and prosperity for all.”

So all of this is to say, if you haven’t got a lot of time to yourself over the busy social season and feel like you should be setting some goals or doing something different with your life, fear not. Whatever is within you will find a way to be seen, just be open to it and keep curious and your next best step will be revealed. 

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Step in the Direction of Your Destiny, Learn to See What Is in Plain Sight and Awaken to the Gift Your Dreams Offer in Waking Life. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

The days of 2019, like every other, seem to have passed in a sea of ever-rocking motion that appears the same on the surface and yet has carved the landscape of my life a little differently over time.

Since embarking on the journey to me a number of years back, I no longer set grand yearly goals to strive for; my life has become more of an intuitive and undulating unfolding. It is two years since my mother passed away, making that a natural and constant landmark for comparison in my life, but as to the last year on its own, that requires me to reflect a little longer.

Certainly I can see quite a difference in my children, and it was to their teaching I was drawn more this year. They did not sit me down in a classroom and teach me lessons; they screamed, yelled, cried and generally presented challenge after weary challenge.

The same could be said of my body, having carried me on this journey for almost half a century. Health issues took on a new quality, willing me to learn and respect the astounding collection of intelligent cells that I name Shona.

These two themes have dominated in 2019, both calling me to look into my shadows, to bring healing and allow my soul to shine through a little more. As a result my role as a parent has become a little more enjoyable and my body a little leaner and healthier.

It is actually hard to remember a time when I did not know the work of Dr Gabor Mate, Dr Laura Markham or Heidi Short. It’s staggering to think that I did not even know their names this time last year; though I surely knew the wisdom that spoke to me when I came across it.

That makes me wonder what this next year holds, which people will come into my life that I do not currently know? What will I be drawn to through inspiration or challenged with for growth?

My wanderlust continues, with more trips booked. But I think it is more my soul that longs for me to take flight and explore the more that awaits as the layers peel away slowly but surely between the inadvertently encumbered me and the eternally free me within.

Inadvertent though it may have been on my part, each knot that needs untying leaves a crease that tells a tale of triumph in its undoing. These creases are the map of me coming to know myself, and the growth that I was seeking.

Had I of known, I likely wouldn’t have signed up for neuralgia, root canal or more kidney pain. I wouldn’t have invited issues with my children’s schooling, nor the constant turmoil of day to day sibling arguments and meltdowns that punctuated my life.  

Yet all of these things and more carried messages from my soul, beckoning me to take heed and understand what needed to be seen. It’s been a consciously healing year, a growing year as always and one that was in little increments rather than large leaps.

Sometimes I yearn to just rip through all the layers that want to be seen, to unveil the rawest, most authentic version of who I am. Then I reflect on my understanding that is to invite a major crisis. What has been done, slowly and over time, is better to be treated gently and reverently in order for me to continue to function in the world; my children need me after all.

But all the while my face turns to the light, there is a horizon that beckons and I cannot ignore its call. To glimpse at what lies there I must face today, one day at a time, and allow the light to flood into the dark, hidden places that are ready to be set free.

The gnawing sense of more is always there. My dreamscape continues to point to transformation, transition and change. All the while I am somewhat blind to the destiny that stands before me; it’s only something I feel.

Now and again though, as I relax into the wholeness of who I am, visions come.  In one I watched a lady of the shadows dance and she took me among monks chanting within the bowels of a cathedral. As my consciousness moved around the cathedral, I was drawn higher and higher away from the dense dualistic energy I could feel on the ground.

On top of the cathedral were perched some pigeons, and from there we could see more birds sitting atop other religious buildings like Mosques and Temples. I was struck by a thought that is was only here, far about the people, where truth was to be consistently found, sitting atop the buildings where they meet Mother Nature and the vast intelligence and love that created all natural things.

The lady continued to dance as the buildings in the scene began to silently explode and shatter in slow motion into millions of pieces as the building fragments drifted upwards and vaporized. I was witnessing a symbolic end of patriarchal rule.

I was in no doubt I was being prepared for the next stage of life, about stepping into my own power as I encourage everyone to do.

That involves no heroic leap, merely a willingness to stay on the uncertain seas. Tomorrow will no doubt seem quite like today and not unlike yesterday. Yet after more of these tomorrow’s 2020 will be at an end and I will realise the landscape has shifted again, and wonder at how that happened.

Life happens in small unassuming, sometimes excruciating, sometimes exciting steps. These steps may not feel like much but they are everything. Keep afloat and look to the horizon by all means, but there is no need to cast about, for right before you - in the here and now - is where the future begins.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Embody Your Spirituality – a Healing Journey, Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul, The Path to Unconditional Love and The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

What if the world is not as you see it?

What if you woke up one day and saw the world in a completely different way?

What if something, that seemed so inconsequential shifted your entire paradigm about life?

What if – like knowing when you are in love – you suddenly awaken to a much greater knowing that you are simply one focal point of a much greater love and intelligence?

What if you felt your connection with everything else? And realise nothing is as it ever seemed?

​What if, in this realization, everything you’ve ever experienced to this point suddenly makes sense?

This was my experience, and it seems to me from the hundreds (probably thousands now) of stories I’ve heard from others, it is a pretty common experience when awakening to the bigger context of life.

What if I had never awoken to that realization?

​What if I was still that person who was completely identified with my thoughts and blaming everyone else for my misery?

What if I still felt that powerless?

What if I had never had an experience of knowing my source?

This is what I think when I try to relate to those around me who haven’t yet had an experience of glimpsing the fullness of who they truly are. As I said a couple of years ago in Why the Big Questions Are Important, the question of ‘something more’ can be proven, but you need to experience it to understand.

Once I had, there was no going backwards, only more questions. I also still could not answer the question about purpose. What is the point of my life?

But here are the things I wonder about now, and they point to my purpose:

What if I could completely break down the resistance that exists between me and source energy?

What if I could completely break down the resistance that exists between me and my best future?
What if those are both the same thing?

What if I could be completely at peace with other people’s feelings without ever feeling I need to appease them in any way?

What if I could get others to understand their own resistance rather than defending my position?

What if I could find a way to help others experience the fullness of who they are?

What if, instead of being on the outside looking in, I’m on the inside looking out?

What if I felt good most of the time?

What if I could completely ignore my device without feeling a pull to check it and to focus right in the present moment (with whoever I am with or whatever I am doing) more of the time?

What if I could master my own thoughts?

What if I could completely stop getting lost in thoughts of regret or worry about the past or thoughts of fear about the future?

What if I could figure out what I am meant to do next?

What if I am supposed to be doing something I’m not?

What if it is just not meant to be clear right now?

What if there are other things that need to line up before I get clarity?

What if everything I am doing is absolutely, perfectly, divinely on point?

What if I were able to completely trust that?

What if I lived in a world where everyone trusted that?

A world where everyone understood the fullness of who they are?

My job would be done.

What are your questions? What do they point to? This is the point of your life.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Value Your Uniqueness, Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul, Looking Back to See the Clues to Your Destiny and other articles in Life Purpose. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

“When one can’t see the future, all one can do is the next right thing” Grand Pabbie Frozen 2

As Frozen 2 hit screens across the world these last few weeks, I took the girls along wondering if Disney could pull off anything to match the first movie. I must say I was impressed, but this is not an article about the movie, rather what it inspired within me.

With the original movie I came away with an anthem for letting go of the person I’d become, bound by layers of fear about myself and the world. It was a movie that inspired and strengthened my resolve that not only should my children be who they (authentically) are, rather than what I or society would like them to become, but I needed to vigorously pursue the same for myself.

Having stepped up to the mark, I could relate to the opening scenes in Frozen 2, with Elsa left wondering “okay, now what? I’ve embraced who I am, accepted my differences as gifts, exposed it to the world and…and what’s next?”

Elsa hears a distant siren call, she can’t quite grasp what it means, she just knows deep down she’s not where she’s meant to be…

When I was telling a friend this, she summed it up as “hearing the sound of your own song”. Then she asked “are you willing to go into the unknown to find its source?”

Heck yes! But I’m not willing to flounder around grasping at things haphazardly; it’s about following my heart.

That is why Pabbie’s advice makes so much sense; it was like the universe saying to me “yes, yes, you know you have a destiny to fulfill, but right now while that isn’t at all clear, just do the next right thing”.

As I wrote about last week, the journey with my children has been like an intensive crash training course in becoming who I am. I know in my heart that being right here with them is right where I’m meant to be right now. It may not be all of who I am, but it’s a step (perhaps even the foundational one) in the right direction.

In fact, it was nine years ago (this week) I finally became a mother, a goal I pursued with determination in spite of the obstacles and heartache. I recall my mentor telling me at the time it was a rebirth of myself as well, and every step of the way that has proven true. When my kids trigger me, I know it’s something in myself I need to look at, a little piece of the pain or fear that has stopped an authentic part of me from being seen or embraced.

As my friend reminded me, I am thoroughly thorough. I have no doubt that this time in my life has been reawakening me, sharpening me up, unencumbering me for whatever comes next.

I wanted to share this little snippet as we head into the last few weeks of 2019 because sometimes it’s
too easy to feel you haven’t gone far. But if you are following your heart and doing the next right thing, you may not yet be able to see (only feel) your destiny, but know you are moving firmly in its direction.

Here are a few more golden quotes from the movie “You are not responsible for their choices”, “Water is memory”, “Fear can’t be trusted”. “You feel what you feel and your feelings are real” and “Show yourself, Step into your power.”

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Value Your Uniqueness, Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul, Looking Back to See the Clues to Your Destiny and other articles in Life Purpose. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Earlier this year, when listening to a talk by Carol Look, I did a simple exercise to define what success would look like for me. Being a mum of two school age children, top of my list was the ability to centre myself and find calm amid the storms. More than anything, I wanted my words and behaviours to uplift and inspire rather than cut and criticize.

I have found that one of the hardest things to shake, though, is old patterns of behaviour. It’s been relatively easy to understand intellectually why I might react to someone (or a situation) in a certain way given my entry, upbringing and indoctrination into society; even achieving conscious awareness of my reactions in the moment has been possible with regular meditation and practice.

However, the desire to change only took me so far; willpower and patience oftentimes ran out and old patterns kicked in. Conscious awareness of the often incongruence between my reactions and behaviours and the desire I hold within me for something different only increased my pain.

What has really taken me across the final stretch to lasting change is accountability. In my case, I’m doing this work for my kids and myself, but it benefits every other relationship I have and will have.
In her book Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids Dr Laura Markham says “How can you expect a child to learn to control his own emotions if you don’t control yours? … If you were yelled at, it takes tremendous work not to yell…it’s not rocket science, it takes about three months.”

I followed her recommendation and created a tick sheet for myself that was titled “I will speak respectfully to my children”. They get to decide each day if I get a tick or a cross, and I’m glad to say the result so far is overwhelmingly ticks. That said, I am human and expect there will no doubt be occasions where I’m not a model of emotional regulation.

By declaring my intention and following through with the daily check in, it’s given the kids both the comfort of knowing that their mum at least means well and the permission to pick me up on any reactions that don’t match with the intention I set.

What I’ve noticed, is that the years of practicing meditation and becoming consciously aware of my thoughts and feelings in the moment have paid dividends. I am able to catch myself when I’m becoming exasperated and losing patience.

I remember that my body is starting to kick into flight or flight mode only because of its association with the fears of my childhood. Being late, for example, is not akin to a tiger rushing at me, even though it rendered punishments in my early years and thus created this pattern of anxiety. This is the science and biology of entraining emotional regulation and new reactions; I have to create new pathways of response.

I find my best course of action is to stay connected to the kids rather than spin off into the reactions that long since became automated. I get involved if we are late, calmly helping them to get ready, reminding myself the world will not collapse and I will suffer no serious consequence if we do, in fact, end up being late on that particular occasion.

Accountability has helped me to clarify my intentions in my relationship with the children, and it has helped me to achieve success in that as the new norm. In going through this process day in and day out with my kids, it’s inevitably helped me in all my other relationships too, because I’m now practicing a pause before reacting.

And the silver lining? Because it was top of my list in terms of what success would look like in my life, it’s brought me both a sense of meaningful achievement and a sweet, blissful peace.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation . To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

I was reading a novel last week by Belinda Alexandra, about the Spanish Revolution, and there were some words in there that really spoke to me:

“No one life is wasted. No matter the sacrifices, no matter the appearance of defeat, it will add to the progress of the human race. In all of history there is one thing that repeats itself again and again: all honourable causes eventually succeed even if at first they fail.

Out of darkness and suffering can come hope, joy and progress. The spirits of good people, even if they die in defeat, return through future generations to continue moving the human race forwards to higher and better things.”

In a world where I often feel like I’m talking a different language to those around me, these words gave me both hope and perspective. Thankfully I’m not suffering the dire circumstances of the people of that era, but I often feel isolated in my thoughts, feelings and ideas none the less.

There was another line in there that also spoke to me:

“Self righteousness is the greatest squanderer of time… time that you will never get back.”

These words reminded me of the futility of resting my gaze too long on what is and resenting, fighting or otherwise resisting it. Instead it is more fruitful to allow my gaze to open to alternate future possibilities and weave those into existence.

I experience deep pain and sadness when those around me can’t see the ordinary every day things that keep our true selves from fulfilling our potential. More frustrating is that so many either don’t see it or prefer to remain silent.

​This is because I am here on a mission, I feel the sovereignty of our being is the most important issue on this planet right now; I make no apology for saying this time and time again – in as many ways as I can express it.

Having kids of school age, I am constantly confronted by example after example of Western education and health systems’ dire need to evolve. But that doesn’t come close to the underlying and drastic need to change the fact that it’s big money - and not what is best overall for our people and planet (and all life that exists on it) - that drives our culture and choices today.

​Then there is the pain of watching people I know and love choosing suffering in ignorance of their real potential. I am surrounded by many who are completely identified with how they think and feel, playing out patterns that emanate from their childhood without any conscious observation of the lack of connection to a more authentic part of themselves and everything around them.

I have one editor who likes me to write only about my personal vantage point, using I/me, but we is my personal experience; I’m intrinsically connected to the whole, which is why the first person grammatically is I and we. Your pain is my pain.

Yet I know my perspective is mine alone, I understand this, it is the lens through which I experience the world. I also know my lens is most oftentimes obscured by my own early experiences in life. So I live in a committed routine of becoming aware of those and seeking to create a new, more authentic experience.

People who are educated in becoming consciously aware of their thoughts, feelings and actions, and the cause and effect between those things, will – I believe – make honourable choices about how to treat others; including our living, breathing planet and all of the life it contains.

However, I am aware that by pointing to the everyday things that are not in alignment with that, and complaining about them is only a starting point. It doesn’t create change, and may not even incite the need for it in others. How can I feel heard or respected when many around me don’t even hear or respect their own authentic selves?

The only way I know to reach that authentic part of each being is through inspiration, not exasperation. Therefore dwelling on whether I feel heard, respected, lonely or in pain is not in the least bit helpful.

Like the words that were scattered through the novel I read, or sometimes it’s just something I hear in a movie, or from the lips of someone in passing, I feel the universe is conspiring to light my fire. It lights my fire by helping me to see possibilities.

That too is my mission, to see the possibilities and to express those. I get glimpses of this, but each time I resist what is in front of me in self righteous indignation, the future alternative possibilities slip further from reach.

This is the process I am in right now, it is a quieter time of emptying out, letting go the impulses to act and react in defence, to allow the greater field of possibilities to come into view.

So if at times you do not feel heard or respected, perhaps it will help to think of Belinda Alexandra’s words “all honourable causes eventually succeed even if at first they fail”. The drum beat will become louder as more and more of us join in conscious awareness of the new world we came here to live in.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Evolve Our World. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

One of the things I found myself contemplating this week was the question “what are you most embarrassed about/ashamed of in your life?” I started to recall a night almost thirty years ago, when a younger, heartbroken me cried uncontrollably in front of my ex’s mates after we had all been out for the evening.

One of his friends said something like “It’s not the end of the world Shona” and I reacted by wailing a distraught response along the lines of “You have no idea what it feels like to have your heart broken!” I was completely mortified by my lack of emotional control in that situation.

There are probably things that are much more embarrassing I could dredge up from my past which – on the face of it – would rate more highly on the scale of shame than this, but I was deeply wounded by that break up, and exposing just how wounded was something I always regretted from the moment it left my lips. It left me feeling vulnerable and weak.

I think it’s also true that many people are uncomfortable witnessing a display of raw emotion like that. I was listening to a rare disclosure from Tami Simon (Founder and CEO of Sounds True) about her personal life. Tami admitted that she finds it extremely difficult to deal with her partner when she expresses her emotions; she wants to jump in and fix things as quickly as possible to get away from the intense, uncomfortable feelings.

In Psychology Today Leon Seltzer says “There are many reasons that we may endeavour to hide or disguise the emotional pain that comes in the wake of negative beliefs about ourselves, evoked by a particular person or situation. But what they have in common is that they are all fear based.”

On the journey to uncover my authentic self these last few years, I’ve discovered that tuning into my emotions is important – critical even - for these reasons:

1. They tend to be reliable indicators of my wellbeing and can lead to sickness, injury and harm if I don’t pay attention; if I do, they can lead me to my best life
2. Healthy relationships of any kind come from expressing my authentic feelings in a healthy way
3. Most of my negative beliefs about myself stem from my pretty normal childhood, raised by well meaning parents

Knowing this, when I was contemplating this moment of shame I had experienced after that break up way back when, I wondered when it was that I had first learned expressing my true feelings was not a safe thing to do.

I decided to go back in time meditatively to see what I could uncover, and sooth the memory by bringing in my more aware adult perspective (which tends to then take the sting out of any subsequent related memories).

After immersing myself for a while in the memories and feelings of that horrible night, I then asked when the first time I’d experienced those feelings was. This wasn’t a process of trying to go back through my memories, it’s more about looking into my mind’s eye as if it’s a video screen that is about to reveal to me something that my memories can’t consciously access.

What I saw and felt took me back to a time in my first year of life when I had contracted bronchial pneumonia. Here are some of the metaphysical meanings attached to that: stirred up emotions, wanting to get rid of the thought that you are not in charge, you want to cut contact with those irritating you but you dare not branch out on your own, and, feeling suffocated by a situation.

I can well imagine that, as a helpless young baby I may have indeed felt this way. Being a parent myself, I am also acutely aware how hard it is to know the right things to do for our children, especially in the face of contradicting advice from family, friends and healthcare workers.

One of the things I remember when my own kids were born was the vehemence with which the healthcare system promoted both natural birthing and breastfeeding, and methods such as attachment parenting. This would have been in stark contrast to the healthcare system into which I was born almost four decades earlier, which advocated pretty much the opposite.

I started off in a cot in my parents’ room, only to move into my own room after a few nights since my snuffling noises kept interrupting their sleep. I was breastfed initially but soon moved onto bottle feeding. Healthcare nurses of the time were obsessed about the volumes being drunk, with advice to keep feeding despite baby’s rejection and spilling (a pretty way of saying the milk comes back up from your stomach and out of your mouth). It is no wonder I was such a huge baby.

When I used to cry, I remember my mum telling me that she often used to switch on the vacuum when she had exhausted all the obvious avenues to soothe (Too cold/warm? Needing a diaper change? Needing a sleep? Needing burped? Teething? etc). She said the vacuum seemed to “do the trick”, no doubt I was terrified knowing what I know now about the effects of noises like that on burgeoning auditory systems.

When my own babies would cry and I could find no reason, I’d assume - after reading Aware Baby by Aletha Solter - they just needed to unload some emotions. A bit like Tami Simon’s reaction to her partner’s distress, I noticed most people around me were uncomfortable with my baby crying, even in her mum’s arms in her own home; everyone was always trying to fix this rather than seeing it as a natural way for the baby to de-stress.

What I sensed more in my meditative state than anything was how I used sleep as an escape mechanism. If I just shut my eyes and fell asleep I could forget the turmoil of this new world. Of course, looking back on it all through my adult eyes, I can see we were all just trying to do our best. At the same time, I can see how easy it was for me to pick up the belief that it was better to keep any emotional distress to myself.

Understanding how these ideas have come about is helpful, just as it is to acknowledge that all emotions are valid; we feel what we feel whether we understand why or not.

Tami Simon’s disclosure about her discomfort around intense emotions’ was while interviewing Dr Christian Conte, who is an expert in meeting people where they are, even when someone is in a state of intense emotional distress. In the podcast, Dr Conte talks about how to make yourself a safe space to receive another person, the keys to deep listening and how the primary purpose of validation is connection.

Dr Conte is clearly well practiced in dealing with people when they are highly emotional and has much to teach. This seems to me the real key – practice. Becoming comfortable with my own emotions, being vulnerable and becoming a safe space for other, these are all things that require practice.
In my former years in the corporate world I learned a lot about communications through leadership training and experience. All of that, though, was from a perspective of being wrapped up in layers of beliefs that truly did not originate from my authentic self, they originated from my upbringing in keeping me safe.

Since then, having discovered a lot more about my true feelings, and coming to a clear understanding that there is no right and wrong, only what is right or wrong for any given person in any given moment, I know that this is a better perspective from which to learn.

I completely agree with Dr Conte when he says “one of the biggest obstacles to meeting someone in emotional distress is thinking they shouldn’t be feeling whatever it is they are feeling”. He calls this living in a cartoon world, a world we make up from the beliefs and expectations we have about how we think people should or shouldn’t feel.

He says that once we stop trying to mold people to fit our cartoon world, we can enter the real world and meet people where they actually are (not where we think they should be). I think this is a great place to start with ourselves.

Accepting myself for the way I acted that night, seen in the light of compassion for the baby whose tears were drowned out by a vacuum cleaner, is a step in the right direction. Rather than going over and over that night, or other interactions with my kids (or others) that I think should have gone differently – especially if I’ve gotten emotional – it’s better to talk in retrospect about what was happening for me rather than not discuss it at all.

When I talk about emotions I’m also aware that words like blame, entitlement and deserve are ones to watch for. Caroline Myss says “if you could extricate those three words from your head you would have no idea how much better you would feel.”

Everything I feel is about me and my journey; my growth towards authenticity and service from that standpoint. Blaming others or feeling that I am entitled to or deserve something other than which I’m getting will only hold me back from that growth.

In time, and with practice and focus, talking about my emotions in real time will get easier and easier. I have already experienced a huge shift over the last few years in terms of what is happening on the inside. With a regular meditation practice, I’ve become more of an observer of these moments instead of being completely identified with them.

I do believe that expressing my true feelings in any situation is a great indicator of where I’ve gotten to in the journey for authenticity, especially when I’m not blaming anyone (myself included) or feeling entitled. And those situations where I’m avoiding that have great depths for me to plunge into and examine and learn more about who I am.

It’s not about just about what I express, but the way in which I express it; I’m driven to master the art of authentic, compassionate communication.

Imagine a world where each of us was aware enough of our own psyche to more objectively examine and understand what was triggering us, and be comfortable in expressing our true feelings without blame or shame? This, I believe, would be a more harmonious world in which we could work together to create a better future; now that is a world I’d like to live in.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Get out of Your Head and into Your Heart, Change Unhealthy Reactions, Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation …Until You Take Responsibility to Heal. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was talking to someone about the retrieval process, the process involved in retrieving one’s authentic self, and they said “I like myself just as I am”.  Yet the vibe I got was very much one of defence, rather than a loving acceptance of themselves.

I totally get that disparity. Probably like you, I’m my own biggest critic. By very virtue of the fact I’m on a journey to retrieve my authentic self, it really means I was not happy in the skin of who I had become.

​In contrast, I yearn to be accepted just as I am; after all, I don’t want to feel like I have to change in order to satisfy someone else. The issue being, this is exactly what - again, probably like you - I had to do from the time I was born just in order to survive in (what is deemed) a normal upbringing.

It is no wonder why there is sensitivity to the slightest whiff of a suggestion of a need to change within that context. But I will admit, it is hard to look at others around me who say they like themselves just the way they are, and yet they are so obviously not happy.

The signs of unhappiness that I see in myself and others are things like chronic issues and illness, and habits like blaming others for their misfortune (for a witty and ever-insightful delve into this unhelpful behaviour, listen to this powerful excerpt from Brené Brown). Each of these holds such amazing opportunities for self empowerment and growth, so it is frustrating to stand by and watch as someone gives their power away.

Listening to Michael Beckwith talk last week, he reminded me of something very important though. He had been asked a question about a scenario where a loved one was ill and they were very resistant to any help that was being offered. His advice was “to simply love them, until they ask for your help, you are trespassing on their paradigm”.

In his response there were two things that really stood out for me. The first was the truth I felt in the premise that until someone asks for your help, they are not open to your suggestions. But the biggest impact was more around the first part “to simply love them”.

If I turn that statement around, the lesson I was hearing for myself was that I will find it easier to love someone where they are at, and withhold uninvited suggestions, once I am able to love myself.
That isn’t about me becoming this unattainable perfect self, it’s about learning to love who I am right now, and to listen to my inner champion rather than my inner critic.

But who is my inner champion? If my inner critic is really a morphed version of those who shaped my life when I was younger, like a record stuck on an earlier timeline, my inner champion can be the same. It can be the voices of those people who have cheered me on (read Who Showed You Unconditional Love?), Magic Happens When You Believe in People and Finding Your Purpose – the Magic of Those Who Believe in You).

But I think there is also another very important person in this, and that is the child that I once was; the one who got postponed and couldn’t fully bring herself into the world.

As Sarah Blondin says “It’s the tender heart inside; the you that was shooshed when you were young. The you that you shoved inside when you were told to act more appropriately or to be less truthful, to hide your feelings, or to more loveable by acting the way someone else wants you to. The you who is free from being someone others want you to be.”

To reconnect with that part of me, I was drawn to a visualization Robert Moss was doing the other day on Reclaiming Your Magical Child. He asked that I imagine a wall somewhere, and to then imagine that a door appears on the wall. Through the door was a world of my own creation; a magical garden filled with plants and animals and things that were beautiful and magical and fun.

Interestingly the wall I instantly imagined was in the neighbourhood I used to play as a young child, out on the street with my friends playing games like Hide and Seek, and Kick the Can. The visualization helped me to reconnect with those magical feelings of childhood when anything seemed possible; certainly anything seemed possible for adults.

Well, here I am, the adult; the only chains and limitations now are the ones in my mind.   

If I need a sharp reminder, I look at my daughter going through her first year at school. She is tired and angry much of the time, reeling against the legal requirement that she needs to attend and participate in an education system that is too rigid and unnatural for her to feel that she is going with her own flow. She is realising she can’t bring all of herself into the world at this point, that she has to postpone her full expression.

That is what makes me weep when someone tells me they like themselves just as they are in defence rather than loving acceptance. I’m weeping for their inner child, who postponed being the fullness of themselves, now trapped and forgotten inside and trying their best to communicate through aches and pains and anger and sadness and blame.

I hope my daughter doesn’t take another forty years (as I have) to realise what has happened and release the pause button to free the part of her that she has to push down right now. I hope she doesn’t settle for that part of her being imprisoned inside and tell people “she is happy as she is”.

I struggle to watch the process, knowing that I do have an option to home school. Simultaneously though I know my truth, I’m far enough down the road towards my authentic self to know it would be far from authentic for me to take on that role.

Instead I can only love and accept her for where she is at, knowing she is doing the best she can with what she has, as am I. Hopefully she will be led to liberate the wild and creative and free aspects of her nature she is holding in check every day from 9am to 3pm in every opportunity.

The best I can do is to lead by example, and to be honest about my own messy, stumbling journey to liberate my soul from the chains I had put it in, in order to please those around me. And to accept and love myself knowing I did the best I could with what I had.

Have you been able to accept and love yourself as you are?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Embody Your Spirituality – a Healing Journey, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation …Until You Take Responsibility to Heal. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“Every person needs to take one day away. Jobs, family, employers and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.” Maya Angelou

This week feels like I’ve been at the raw and ragged edge of life, where the rubber meets the road when it comes to walking this earth in my authentic shoes. On the face of it, nothing spectacular happened, and yet it feels like my whole world has imperceptibly changed.

I made a conscious shift at my core from anxiety to love, resetting my system so to speak. It was big work done in small segments of time.

It was just an ordinary week for this time of year. Spring has sprung in the Southern Hemisphere, the calendar, school, sports and work years are coming to a close, and with the festive season on the horizon social activities ramp up. I’m not one for a whole lot of social activity at this point in my life, and it’s also the time of year I birthed my two children, so everything always feels a bit pressured.

Then I got invited me to a weekend retreat and, as bizarre as it might sound, it tipped me over the edge. As much as a retreat from the world sounded very desirable, in fact almost as necessary as breathing at this point, it became another thing on my mental to do list. And since it required a four hour drive each way it sparked feelings of instant overwhelm.

So right in the middle of entertaining an out-of-town visitor at our house for the weekend, I was awoken one night at midnight with shooting pains coming from my right kidney. This made it impossible to sleep and the whole night was spent drifting in and out of a semi-conscious state as my kidney griped and wailed within me.

In a conversation the previous day, my mentor had said to me it didn’t sound as though I could really wait a few weeks to retreat from the world, and suggested doing it on the days the kids went back to school after the holiday weekend.

In the blink of an eye several thoughts had simultaneously flashed through my mind. The first was the mental list of what lay ahead in the short school week; which included a parent-teacher evening, a school Ceilidh (like a pagan version of Halloween) and – of course – Halloween itself, all among the usual rounds of domestic and business activities that just keep the wheel turning.

The second thought was of how, in a week like that (with no one else to pick up any of the responsibilities), I’d have to be really sick to feel I could retreat in any substantive way; my mind flashed back to the time I had a kidney stone and had to lay in bed for two days. Oops. Even although the very next thought that passed through my mind was one of discarding that notion, not wishing to relive that experience, my body had obviously decided it needed to take charge and that was the best option.

As I lay there through the night contemplating the message my body was giving me, it wasn’t any stroke of genius to join the dots. “Okay,” I relented, “it is time to withdraw from the world.”

Having a visitor, I did get out of bed a few times that day to make lunch and dinner, but it was pretty low key and I had a couple of naps. I will confess though, I’m not a complete martyr, I was in no pain by that point, just tired; rest assured had the kidney pain continued I would have stayed in bed.

The next day, as soon as I dropped the kids off at school, I came home, closed the curtains and put on my dressing gown and just sat and did nothing; literally. I didn’t crawl into bed and sleep, I’d done that the day before. What I wanted to get a sense of, consciously, was how my body was feeling.

There I sat for the next few hours just feeling the thrum and consternation of my nervous system.

There were times my body wanted to move in a subtly exaggerated way, occasionally it wanted to shake, I just let it do what it wanted and kept feeling into the points of pain and tension, to simply observe.

Thoughts came into my head (for example, I started to mentally plan a new guest room layout) and constantly kept trying to trick me back into action. Much like meditation, when I became aware I was thinking, I just let the thoughts go and went back to observing my body.

There was no other agenda that day; I just sat until it was time to pick up the kids again and domesticity returned. I did however serendipitously later listen to a soothing and uplifting talk at the Hay House Heal Summit by Michael Beckwith, on the topic of healing and resetting our authentic core.

The next day began the same way. After dropping off the kids I sat again and felt back into where my body was at. After an hour or so, I felt settled enough to begin the work that I knew was necessary to create a shift in my life away from anxiety and towards self love.

I felt intuitively that I needed a bit of structure, so with Michael Beckwith’s words still fresh in my memory and the broad structure of Teal Swan’s Completion Process in mind, I started to really focus in on the feelings of anxiety in the present and then asked myself when I first experienced these feelings?

This began the deep dive that took me back to the point of conception. I had this vision of a sperm meeting the egg and it looked like a micro universe in creation. While it was wondrous and magnificent to watch as an observer, it was also a cataclysmic event with so much pain and trauma inherited within those cells.

When my consciousness later stepped into the emerging fetus, the sensations of density were hard to bear and describe. Michael Beckwith’s analogy of the sun shrouded by dense clouds felt very real, I found myself in a darkly clouded cocoon just trying to survive, having lost all sense of the light, warmth and where I’d come from.

As I became aware of the other presences around me (mother, father etc) I started to cry and kept uttering “I was only trying to make them feel good”. This was the point of illumination, where it was obvious that my anxiety arises – as it does for so many – out of a propensity and desire to please others.

This is also the point that my adult consciousness was able to step in. This sapling version of me in the womb needed help to see the sun beyond the clouds, to know and feel there was support there for her and to be reminded that all she need be (or give to herself or anyone else) is love.

This is what I’m guessing Michael Beckwith refers to as a reset. How I understand this experience I took myself through, is that when I got back to the original point of trauma, and provided within that memory the help needed to integrate what was happening into my experience (rather than just react to it in a limiting way), I became more whole, stronger from my centre core.

Certainly I feel lighter, healthier and more positive. But I also recognise old habits die hard, and I recognise this as one piece of me, one fragment; there are many others, some retrieved and integrated, some still lurking in the shadows. What this has given me is awareness, now I need to practice putting this awareness into a new way of being in the world. Feelings of anxiety won’t disappear over night, but they will lessen, they already have.

Over time, after practice, the clouds will shift and the sun will appear more often. In the meantime, I know it is always there, always shining; I just need to let myself feel its warmth. Even a small step like this is huge in my life.

As the amazing Sarah Blondin says in her I Would Like to Give You Permission meditation “You are becoming aware of the division of selves, all the parts you’re not allowing to be true, how you are one thing but choosing another for fear of being received”

Then later she goes on to say “I’d like to give you permission to let go, to not hold it all together, to remind you that the you inside knows exactly what you must let go of in order to rise above the things that are holding you hostage. Rise above the things that are disturbing the peace of your core, follow the deep and unwavering wisdom that is yours within and enter into your intrinsic freedom.”

Now does that sound like it’s worth taking a small break from your life to explore?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Embody Your Spirituality – a Healing Journey, Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation …Until You Take Responsibility to Heal. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

I was talking with a good friend a while back now about the time in my life when my grandmother died, and promptly burst into tears. While I’m known to cry watching a sad movie or hearing a sad story, my own life is usually something I can talk about quite freely, especially in retrospect, so I was quite taken aback at the wave of emotion I felt thirty five years on.

My friend asked what my grandmother had represented in my life, a great question. “Kindness” I replied.

​This memory came back to me today when I was talking with the wonderful lady who used to look after my kids when they were only babies and I had to go back to work. If it couldn’t be my arms they were in, I wanted them in familiar, loving arms each day; and we were very fortunate to find just the right person.

Living with her own daughter and grandchildren, my kids soon embraced her and her family as an extension of their own; and she became known affectionately as Nana. Although both her family and ours moved out of town before the kids reached school age, we have kept in touch and she comes to visit once a year.

Sharing with someone about her upcoming visit, they were remarking how lovely it is to keep in touch like that, and quite rare. She explained that the part of herself she gives to her own grandchildren, she also gave to the children who were in her care, and so they have remained in her heart.

​As she was explaining this, I felt that connection with my own grandmother. I wasn’t just hearing her words, I was feeling the way my Gran made me feel and I understood very well the gift my children have with her in their lives.

Instantaneously I was transported back to the feeling of arriving at Gran’s house on a Saturday to the warmth and smell of pancakes being made on the griddle, the thrill of making my own pancake man, and the challenge of creating something more than a smooshed up blob with raisin eyes.

Having someone in my life who embraced me with love and showed me nothing but kindness was a gift beyond measure. No one can take away the way it felt to be with Gran. My kids are very fortunate because, on both sides of their family, they also have doting grandparents, so they are getting a triple dose of something that is beautifully potent.

In this journey to me, my drive for authenticity, I talk often about the layers of self limiting beliefs I’ve adopted over the years, and those I observe in others. Most of these beliefs boil down to some version of “I am not worthy”.

However these special people in our life, whether grandparents or others who have chosen to give us a piece of their heart, they beat the drum of something else entirely. It’s a beat that speaks to my self worth in a language that knows no words, but my body recognises it.

Watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy last night, one of the characters was talking about finally meeting her real mother after being abandoned as a baby. In that one meeting, there was a moment where she reached over to touch her mother’s hand in empathy, and her mother drew away from her.

She couldn’t understand why she kept replaying that moment, trite in the scheme of things, over and over in her head. The therapist looked at her and said “you were five days old when your mother abandoned you, when she drew her hand away from you as an adult, it wasn’t trite. In that moment your body remembered the pain you felt in being separated from her all those years ago.”

I think, for most of us, there are so many moments of pain in our lives, and they add up to many self limiting beliefs, but there are also the moments of love, and these are the moments to cherish and to replay to find our way back to self love and self worth.

Even if we weren’t still in touch with my kid’s adopted Nana, the love she gave them would still be part of them. But for them to become consciously aware of that as they grow, and build on the relationship, is certainly a wonderful gift. Thinking about that, and the love I felt from my own Gran, made me think about whose lives I have and could gift that to.

There is one very obvious answer that is easy to miss, and that is the gift of unconditional love towards me. Instead of a voice in my head that is an echo of all the critical voices, I wonder how many more people I can gift love to if I can learn to love myself in that way?

What about you, who showed you unconditional love? How did it feel? And do you – or could you – gift it to yourself in honour of those who gifted it to you?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation …Until You Take Responsibility to Heal. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

Stepping into authenticity isn’t, I find, always as easy as I’d like it to be. For a start, my authentic self was not evident at all to me at the outset of my conscious journey towards it; there was just a deep knowing that the way I was playing into the world was not authentic.

Even now I don’t hold a clear vision of what my authenticity looks like in its entirety. It is more like it’s being revealed to me little by little, like bandages slowly being peeled away. This week has been no exception. As we returned from a family vacation, my youngest daughter struggled to reground herself and has had a few nasty tantrums. This was exacerbated by a return to school, not something she was relishing.

Now nasty tantrums were not something that I would have dared to express as a child. Like many of you, demonstrating my anger was simply not an option; instead I swallowed it and occasionally punched the concrete wall in my bedroom in frustration. As I became a teenager I would express my frustrations verbally and had arguments (yelling matches) with my parents.

I say to my daughter when she is frazzled and gets in this state “it is okay to express your anger, but not to throw things and hit people.” Yet, I actually have no template for what that looks like. I revert to yelling, threats and defending myself when I’m really pushed, which I’ll admit can happen when I have several projectiles thrown at me by a screaming banshee. This, of course, is not the authentic role model I’d like to be.

When I searched for answers on dealing with tantrums in school age kids I was dismayed by the standard responses, which are basically about control and suppression. Then I found a great question and answer example by Dr Laura Markham, author of the Peaceful Parenting series, which really resonated. It simply felt like the right approach for me.  

Not that changing my approach to anything after nearly half a century is an easy task, but at least now I have a template for what authenticity looks like. I can attempt to role model for my daughter what a healthy expression of anger looks like rather than meeting her with my suppressed adult self or my unleashed child self (neither of which are pretty).

Interestingly, as this was all coming to a head, my whole abdominal area went into non-specific painful spasms for about two days. It was quite unnerving, as if my body was practically insisting that I address an emotional imbalance within myself, which it was of course. Once I equated the pain with all the anger I’d gotten into a habit of swallowing, and had pursued a solution, the pain disappeared.

The other issue that my body communicated about was through locking up my neck muscles. Upon returning from our vacation, I hit the ground running with all the unpacking, grocery shopping, end of month accounts, bills and tax returns to catch up on. After the first few days my neck and shoulders felt tight, then (since I didn’t let up on activity I felt I had to do) I woke up to find I couldn’t turn my head to the right without a great deal of difficulty.

As Lise Bourbeau points out, whether the pain is more predominant when I nod my head yes or no, determines whether I should be saying yes or no (to whatever is active in that moment) and it’s my stubbornness and inflexibility that is the obstacle to making the appropriate decision.

It became obvious to me I should be saying no to more of the inauthentic activity and yes to the authentic parts of me that want enough space to express themselves.

Of course it can be hard to say no. I’d watched Rob Herring’s amazing Need to Grow environmental documentary and been inspired by the vertical planting and other techniques in there for growing more of our own food.

I believe fervently in nature’s supreme intelligence and so a return to more natural solutions that harness and mimic nature itself have my vote. However, my authentic self was quick to point out the magnitude of me replanting and taking on more work in the garden.

There was a very definite part of me that felt an obligation to get on and do it, and do it all myself if needs be. There was another (more authentic) part that was encouraging me to take things slower, reminding me of the enormity of parenting and the other responsibilities I have in life without needing to spend many hours in the garden.

“Just continue to buy local organic produce” that authentic voice said, “anything else is too much right now”. True.

Saying yes to unexpressed you means paying attention to what your mind, heart and body are actually saying. It won’t necessarily unveil your authentic self overnight, but little by little (with practice and persistence) the unexpressed you will start to express itself. So what is your authentic self saying today?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy some of my other articles like: Embody Your Spirituality – a Healing Journey, Learn to See What Is in Plain Sight, Leverage Your Feelings to Find Your Authentic Self, Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

A few weeks ago I was listening to an extremely moving TEDx talk by Mataio Brown whose own childhood had been less than idyllic. He said “Your childhood trauma is not your fault, but your healing is your responsibility” and my heart sang loudly in response; I feel this speaks to the very core of what is needed to evolve individually and collectively right now.

I deliberated for quite a while about including the word trauma after childhood in the title but decided to leave it out. In my experience, people tend to associate the word trauma with things like physical and sexual abuse, warfare and life threatening illnesses to name a few. While these are unarguably traumatic and horrendous, most of us experience emotional and psychological trauma on some level that comes as part of a normal childhood. 

This is often caused completely subconsciously by well meaning parents, who themselves have grown in a form reflecting their own childhood. However, I feel this is an era where are becoming aware of these cycles and have a responsibility to break them.

Trauma can arise from any event or situation that overwhelms a person’s ability to cope. This can range from issues with the way a parents interacts, to childhood illnesses, injuries and accidents, developmental trauma, exposure to violence and chronic stress to name a few.

A trauma is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience, so it makes sense to me that –  especially as helpless babies and young infants beginning to interact with the world – it would be traumatizing to feel rejected in any way. For example, Dr Gabor Mate talks about certain disruptions in the attachment process leading to developmental trauma.

To put that in plain English, I am talking about the job I might have to go to, which places my attention elsewhere, not on my infant seeking far more connection than I am able to give him or her. Or the constant distraction of a device and countless other things in this day and age when there is far more screaming for my attention than I am capable of giving.

Then there are the inherited patterns of behaviour in our parents that we react to, and unwittingly develop patterns in response to. These are essential for our survival in childhood but become unhealthy patterns later in life, and will certainly pass on unless we take action.

The best description I’ve seen of these is in James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, he describes control strategies that we each develop in order to stop others draining our energy. These sit on a scale of aggressive to passive and he describes four archetypes; it’s often easiest if you start by taking a look at which strategies your parents employed:

• Intimidator’s threaten verbally or physically and come on too strong, making others frightened. They are so wrapped up in their own anger they don’t care what is happening inside the other person.
• Interrogator’s constantly question, criticize, nag and find fault, making others self conscious and eroding their confidence.
• Aloof’s shut down when confrontation happens. They often withdraw physically or verbally, forcing others to struggle and dig to find out their true feelings.
• Poor Me’s tend to guilt trip, projecting themselves as the helpless victim in need or care and attention. This makes others feel guilty even if they know there is no real reason to feel this way.

Each of these are linked with the corresponding strategies that created them, and that they create. For example, Intimidators create Poor Me’s appealing for mercy, or, the child will endure until they are old enough and big enough to fight back, creating another Intimidator, and so the cycle continues.

To break the cycle I have to become aware of the strategies I employ, and those being used by others around me. As James Redfield’s characters say, a person cannot play these strategies unless we play the matching drama. While the answer lies in becoming a more detached observer of our own interactions, rather than getting pulled into the drama, and calling out what is actually happening, this is something that requires learning and practicing new skills that I will talk about later.

While I found these archetypes of how humans interact exceptionally useful, Jen Peters points out the many ways in which unhealed childhood trauma manifests:

• Fixing others
• People pleasing
• Co-dependency
• External validation
• Living on high alert
• Fear of abandonment
• De-prioritising one’s own needs
• Need to prove one’s self
• Tolerating abusive behaviour
• Attracting narcissistic partners
• Difficulty setting boundaries

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it gives an indication of the common types of ways in which childhood trauma can limit us in adulthood if we let it.

Yet when I take responsibility for my shortcomings and seek to heal them, I break a cycle that has been repeating uninterrupted for thousands of years. I become less encumbered, more connected, happier and more able to fulfill my potential. I become the very best version of me, and the best partner, best mum, best friend, best sister, the best of me reflects into all my relationships.

Circling back to the inspirational Mataio Brown telling his story in the TEDx talk, whose first memory of Christmas was as a three year old witnessing his father beat his mother half to death with the Christmas tree, he now says this of his father "That man who was my childhood monster, I now see his pain and loving him releases me to be the father for my children that I wanted".

This is an excellent example of what Tony Robbins means when he says “Heal the boy and the man will appear”. Mataio could have become another generation of monster, or he could have played the Poor Me drama his whole life, instead he now campaigns with the slogan "She is not your rehab” and advocates for awareness and a healthier approach to childhood trauma.

I agree wholeheartedly, and I also think you could easily widen the scope in the broader sense of trauma and say “your partner/your children are not your rehabilitation centre". As I’ve said before, whether psychologically, emotionally or physically The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth.

There are many things in this world that need to change: poverty, having access to education for all and the way we treat the planet to name a few of the big ones. But I am swimming upstream until I take responsibility for my own healing.

I realised life is not about having, life is about being, being who I truly am; not the misshapen version I’d become. Like most people, I would go to work to just exist, albeit it in a nicer lifestyle than that which I’d grown up in. It is easy to get distracted by the glittery baubles of day to day living, but they soon lose their sparkle yet require the money wheel to keep spinning anyway.

Becoming the observer of my own life, consciously aware of what is really tripping me up, is one of the most fundamental skills I have learned; and that is a whole lot easier when I take regular time out to meditate. The other skill that helps me take ownership of my part in all of it, is building my energy through appreciation of the beauty and awe of intelligent design that abounds on this planet; in people, animals and our environment.

The alternative, the default setting we have developed, is to steal energy from others, winning points in rounds of interactions.  It is some time since Newton told us that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Well, here it is, this is what our actions and reactions among each other have come to look like after generations of just living on the wheel, acting and reacting subconsciously.

There are many ways to heal childhood trauma, but the common thread between most that are successful is to recognise and learn from the emotions we have locked inside us. My own approach has been to deal with one issue at a time, starting with whatever is my biggest block or trigger in the moment, including what’s happening on a physical level with my body.

I sometimes self heal using techniques and practices I’ve learned like The Completion Process, other times I use healthcare practitioners to help. I have some trusted confidantes that willingly dive into issues with me when they are raw and we keep each other honest, looking for the lessons rather than to blame, and I have a mentor that keeps me focused on the big picture.

This is not easy, it is not quick work, but it is everything.

Be the you that you are destined to become, you are not just destined to take from this Earth and provide for your family, get off that wheel. Until you feel connected to yourself you are cut off from your connection to everything else. You are here to be somebody, so wake up and be that person, this world needs you.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy some of my other articles like: Embody Your Spirituality – a Healing Journey, Learn to See What Is in Plain Sight, Leverage Your Feelings to Find Your Authentic Self, Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary). To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

What I’ve found over my years of investigation as someone who is self motivated to maintain my own health, is that there are a rich choice of alternatives to conventional medicines out there. In my experience, everything has its place, and with an open and curious mind, and a holistic approach to health, the goal of feeling well, having energy and vitality is entirely achievable.

In Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress, I mentioned there have been many times in my life that I couldn’t find satisfactory answers from medical doctors. This is not to say there is no place for conventional medicine, on the contrary, but it is only one avenue among a great many.

​An example, close to my heart, was when I was trying to conceive and kept having miscarriages. I got told that Blighted Embryo’s (a cause of miscarriage) only generally happened once and were rare twice. Yet this happened to me on four occasions. Ultimately the response from doctors was a shrugging of the shoulders and not having any answers.

In the end, I found success in conceiving and delivering healthy babies when a couple of factors converged. The first was finally finding myself in a place where it was possible to forget about conceiving, since we had exhausted all natural and medical avenues and were on the wait list for IVF treatment. The second was a referral from someone, who had also had trouble conceiving, to an alternative health practitioner.

The practitioner had earned the nickname of baby doctor from his clients, and I sighed at the thought of going to see this guy who was a herbalist and used iridology to assist in diagnosis. As I suspected, I came away with recommendations for radically changing my diet (not high on my list of habits to change) and herbs. With nothing to lose I did as I was advised and – to my great delight - was pregnant with my first child the next month. The same happened with my second child.

Looking back on my notes of that first appointment, I can see he also picked up (just by looking at my eyes), the injury I sustained to my lower back when I was young, and a sluggish left kidney (which later produced a kidney stone) though I’ll admit I paid no attention to that issue at the time.


It is often the case that people explore alternatives to standard medical care when they are unable to find answers, and find their way back to more ancient wisdom and systems of healing. In the process people begin to gain a deeper understanding of their bodies and what is necessary for healing to occur. This is called the wounded healer phenomenon, a term first coined by Carl Jung.

In Wake Up to the Truth About Healthcare and Healing, I noted that people often accept that when they go to see their doctor (or go into hospital) with chronic conditions they are likely not going to come out cured, they are going to come out with more medicine. This may temporarily ease the condition rather than cure it, but is likely to be creating deeper issues.

For example, my partner has chronic back pain, many trips to the doctor later they are still just as unaware of the cause or how to fix it and have told him his only option is pain management. His job is physical, so this means committing to decades of potent painkillers such as Tramadol.  These painkillers cause huge degradation to the internal environment of our bodies, ultimately creating breeding grounds for far more serious conditions.

Aspirin on its own, as a more benign example, has the effect of weakening the mucous membranes on the stomach wall and prone to resulting in an ulcer if taken over a long period. Yet if a very similar painkiller is taken on its own in a natural form, like the herb Meadowsweet, the constituents in that counteract that particular side effect. 

When my children then came along, I found myself at the doctor’s surgery more than I liked. In that first four years my kids had already been prescribed antibiotics at least once a year for relatively minor chest and skin infections, so I decided to focus on the more natural healing methods I’d come across over the years.

As I said in Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress, my journey around health and healthcare has been a long and windy road over a number of decades. I’ve tried many different types of healthcare by many different healthcare practitioners, and read and researched a whole lot more.

There was an article in the Telegraph last year in the UK, about their Royal Family’s commitment to holistic health, which then went on to do a bit of a spot poll online that probably demonstrates the split in attitudes I come across in others quite well:

• 51.65% said “Yes – I’m a believer in maintaining harmony with our minds, bodies and natural world”
• 7.09% said “I’m very skeptical of choosing unproven medicines over evidence-based real ones” (for this read Wake Up to the Truth About Healthcare and Healing)
• 41.25% said “Not at all – there’s no evidence that homeopathy (which is apparently the British Monarch’s preferred healing modality) is effective as a treatment option”

 
I do find, however, many of the greatest skeptics and cynics, while vocal and crude in their opinions, have simply not been put in a position where they’ve yet needed to go beyond the bounds of the medical and surgical treatments on offer via their publicly funded or subsidized doctor.

Recently I was told by a cynic that homeopathy could, in fact, be dangerous. I suspect they meant in the sense that they believe it’s no more than a placebo and thus an absence of ‘proper’ healthcare. For my part, I think the only thing that's dangerous is when people stop thinking for themselves and put their health in someone else's hands. 

Personally I find homeopathy extremely effective, especially now that I have found a Heilkunst practitioner, which refers to the more comprehensive system of healthcare homeopathy’s founder, Dr Hahnemann, developed. I’m finding it has a very real and impactful way of unraveling the various traumas and indignities my body has weathered over the years.

In an article in the Huff Post in December 2017, Dana Ullman observed that skeptics and cynics spread a lot of misinformation. He found it remarkable that many skeptics of homeopathy actually say that there is “no research” that has shown homeopathic medicines work. Such statements are false, and yet, these assertions are common in the media and even in some peer-review articles.

Misstatements and misinformation on homeopathy are predictable because this system of medicine provides a viable and significant threat to economic interests in medicine, let alone to the very philosophy and worldview of biomedicine.

In fact Dr. Luc Montagnier, the French virologist who won the Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering the AIDS virus, set out to disprove homeopathic medicine and then surprised the scientific community with his strong support for it after his findings.

In an interview published in Science magazine of December 24, 2010, he said “I can’t say that homeopathy is right in everything. What I can say now is that the high dilutions (used in homeopathy) are right. High dilutions of something are not nothing (i.e. not placebos). They are water structures which mimic the original molecules.” The answers are not found in Biochemistry therefore, they are found in Physics.

Putting aside homeopathy, it is wise to consider the broader history of human healthcare (Wake Up to the Truth About Healthcare and Healing), take the anthropologists view, which was largely based on herbal remedies. Herbs and fungi used to form around a quarter each of our diets, along with plants and animals. This gave us the required nutrients in a form that kept us healthy. As we focused more on just the plants and animals we've eroded our natural healthcare plan.

After all my own research and experience I came to the conclusion that the focus exclusively on pharmaceuticals in the world of conventional medicine and mainstream media is money driven. No one is looking for cures; they're creating symptoms and things to soothe symptoms.

This was no clearer to me than when my mum was diagnosed in 2017 with late stage bowel cancer. Like many of the baby boomer generation, steeped in the beliefs of the era that biochemical medicine and doctors alone are to be trusted, she was not to be dissuaded from her path.

Now, everyone dies, I accept this, so not everyone is going to be saved. However, I was completely stunned that in the valuable months while she underwent tests and awaited results, there was not a single recommendation or reference to her diet. Setting aside any skepticism about any other healing modality, the concept that what we eat has the ability to harm or heal is almost universally accepted.

​When I watched an episode of the docu-series Remedy about cancer, there was general agreement among the various practitioners that an integrated approach is probably best. One thing that stuck with me from that programme was the comments about those people who choose the solely natural route and then die, like Steve Jobs. As one practitioner commented, people die from the conventional treatment all the time (and in great numbers), and yet everyone seems to accept that.

Chemotherapy started from the use of mustard gas in WW1, they started using it and getting successes in the 1940’s, so after WW2 the electrical and nuclear industries got into the medical game. I just can’t get my head around a concept that basically nukes our bodies, it is so drastic and – while it does prolong some lives – it often has devastating effects.

In the Transcendence docu-series, Chris Wark’s story of beating cancer through breaking negative thoughts and emotions, and using the power of nutrition is remarkable.

He talks about how the fear alone (created from being told you have cancer) creates an internal environment in your body conducive to perpetuating the cancer. Out of fear he booked chemo, but never showed up. Instead he got busy creating better lifestyle habits, predominantly raising his thinking and nutrition. Every time fear would creep in, he’d have to catch it really quickly so those emotions didn’t rule him; instead he used gratitude to focus more positively.

A later Remedy episode talked about The Gonzalez Protocol: a proven, evidence-based, all-natural method that is achieving extraordinary results on both early and late stage cancer cases. The late Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez was the pioneer who brought this forgotten method back into practice.

He was ridiculed, called a quack, and lived under constant threat of having his medical license taken away, or worse, but he believed in this protocol so strongly (he had healed hundreds of cancer patients with it) that he never stopped until his death a few years ago. Luckily, his work has been carried forward by his colleague Dr. Linda Isaacs who continues to save lives to this day.

There was a patient of his called Ann that reminded me of my mum’s situation. She had gone to Dr. Gonzalez with late stage pancreatic cancer after being given 3 months to live by modern oncologists. Unlike mum, twenty years on she was sharing her story.

What I liked about Ann’s story was her recount of going to see an Oncologist and refusing to book in for treatment after hearing what he had to say. He had told her that he was recommending chemotherapy in order to give her maybe another 15 months; this is pretty much what my mum had been told too.

When she refused the treatment he said very aggressively “woman, this is your best shot, without it you will die!” She stood up and replied “doctor, we are all going to die!” When she walked out, the nurses (who had all overheard) stood up and clapped her.

When I was in hospital for a minor procedure a couple of years ago, I was talking to the various and many nurses I encountered about my thoughts on the inadequacies of the public medical system, feeling quite sorry for those who feel called to provide care and healing within it. Without exception, they all expressed similar views, opening up to me with their stories.

It was quite interesting to hear about how many of these medical professionals turn to alternative methods of healing in their home. Far from discounting alternative medicines and modalities, it’s that they are not funded, trained or allowed to recommend anything other than the conventional methods and pharmaceuticals available within their workplaces. 

What is really exciting are the advances the scientific community have made just in the last ten years when it comes to explaining some of these other modalities, with the fields of Epigenetics and Quantum Physics really leading the way. Anyone who hasn’t explored the latest research is out of date.

One of the really cool talks I heard lately was a Sound’s True podcast with Mark Wolynn on becoming aware of inherited family trauma. As part of his studies Mark had worked with German Psychotherapist Bert Hellinger, who is known for his pioneering work with Family Constellations.

Family Constellations is one of those modalities that really sounds like woo-woo. According to Hellinger, one way we can express our family lineage is by unconsciously carrying the pain of previous generations so that it might have a chance to heal through us. The thing I liked about Mark Wolynn’s podcast is his scientific explanation as to why that makes sense.

As mentioned above in relation to Dr. Luc Montagnier (the Nobel Prize winner in 2008), who surprised the scientific community with his strong support for homeopathic medicine, these latest discoveries are not always welcomed and many (even in the scientific field) still resist the findings, vigorously expressing oppositional views.

You will find that there is disagreement among experts on both sides of the argument, because all anyone really has is an opinion based on what they currently know. What most people (even the experts) know is often misinformed, outdated and, certainly, always changing.

There is so much information and so many choices out there; I’ve only touched on a few. Every day I get new emails going deeper into other areas. Just this morning I got an email from The Shift Network about a free online summit on Sound Healing and one from sacredscience.com promoting a free 12-day event called Regain Your Brian, with world renowned doctors and neuroscientists exploring enlightened ways to reverse mental decline and think about Alzheimer’s, dementia and all forms of cognitive decline differently.

​At the end of the day, my only plea in all of this is to think for yourself when it comes to your health. I believe there is no one right answer for any of us; only what you feel is right for you in this moment. Embrace life, knowing that our time here in this body is limited, and take back your power – the sovereignty over your own body, mind and spirit - in order to live it as well and as fully as possible.
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy some of my other health related articles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

​
When asked what surprised him about humanity the most, The Dalai Lama replied: 

“Man. Because he sacrifices his health to make money. Then he sacrifices his money to recuperate his health… He lives as though he is never going to die and dies having never really lived.”

The key to better health lies in recognizing and addressing whatever is creating stress within us, which can be quite a task in today’s day and age. There are many types of stress: everything from the physical (like accidents and illness), to chemical (like caffeine and alcohol) and environmental (like pesticides and herbicides) to emotional (family tragedy, second mortgages and single parenting).

All stress knocks the body out of balance and a combination of all those things creates chronic conditions.

Looking at the lifestyle many of us are running with today, Dr Libby Weaver says, “it’s not the physical threats like a tiger coming at us that is creating stress, what leads us to creating adrenaline and cortisol today are things like caffeine and our perception of pressure and urgency”.

Like many, my day used to begin with an email inbox full of stress and pressure and urgency. When I wake up and see my day as difficult, or that everything is urgent – whereas, maybe in reality two things are urgent – I put my body in sympathetic nervous system dominance (essentially the flight or fight response).

This elevates blood pressure, directing blood away from the digestive system to the peripheral limbs ready for ‘flight’. And while the body has two types of fuel it can use, glucose or fat, in that state it can only use glucose. Apparently many of us have lost the ability to use our body fat effectively as a fuel because we are always running on glucose due to stress hormone production.

Nick Polizzi (of the Remedy series I dived into in Wake Up to the Truth About Healthcare and Healing) asked why it is that our society is so unhealthy – physically, mentally and spiritually? Why are more people addicted to painkillers and antidepressants than ever before? He asserts the truth is startlingly simple:

We humans have forgotten how powerful we truly are.

I can attest to this. I recall going to our local doctor’s surgery as a child, a place that had multiple family physicians available to see patients with their day to day ailments. The doctor was someone we held in a position of trust and respect, this is who we would go to for answers when we had more than a common cold.

As a kid I had many of the typical childhood illnesses, like chicken pox and mumps, but generally I was considered to be in quite good health. In my teenage years I’d been physically very fit as a competitive swimmer, so the doctor’s surgery wasn’t a place I frequented often.

​This changed in my early twenties. Fresh out of university, floundering to find my path in life, I was working three jobs and entertaining a rather unhealthy relationship after having had my heart broken the year before.

One day, as I was taking a bus into town to meet my boyfriend, all of a sudden I felt as though my heart was going to burst through my chest. This was accompanied by a vice like sensation around my head, I thought I was going to pass out and tried to focus on my breathing. Desperate for fresh air, I got off the bus and began to walk the four or five miles to my destination in the city.

Despite this episode occurring over a quarter century ago, what is marked in my memory is having to lie in a cold dark cupboard (in my boyfriend’s office) for two hours, feeling totally ill, while his boss had him work overtime on an urgent issue before he was allowed to leave. Once home I promptly crawled into bed and stayed there for a number of days vacillating between horrible chest pains and throwing up, which I now reflect upon as a reaction to the distress I’d experienced.

Back in the early 1990’s, panic attacks were synonymous with silly overreactions to something someone said or did, certainly they were not seen as an actual condition causing very real physical symptoms that a doctor would diagnose.

Trips to the doctors surgery resulted in several courses of antibiotics, the chest pains being taken for some sort of chest infection, which then resulted in several bouts of candidiasis treated by anti fungal medication that only served to exacerbate the condition – probiotics were not something seen as anything other than woo woo at this time and not widely available.

There was no internet to use for research in those days, and I found myself at the rather small section of self help books in the library. As a result, I tried an anti-candida diet, which was pretty grueling back then as the range of non-standard healthy foods available was fairly limited.

One of the books I read was by Dee McCaffrey, an organic chemist who had found her way back to health by cutting refined flours and sugars from her diet. Aside of the now well known data on refined sugars and flour, one of the things that always stuck with me reading her story was that she had been one of the scientists in the USA who had come up with the iconic food pyramid.

But the food pyramid the scientists had come up with had been practically inverted by the government in its final publication. Having always pooh poohed the idea of conspiracy theories as the domain of those with overactive imaginations, this was probably one of my first wake up calls that business – money – often runs this modern world, not the best interests of its people.

Ultimately I found my answer to overcoming panic attacks after a psychiatrist finally diagnosed them and then I happened upon a fantastic book by Christine Ingham called Panic Attacks in a grocery store pharmacy. Once I understood the anatomy of what was happening and how to switch out of flight or fight mode by invoking the parasympathetic nervous system, I was on the road to recovery.

In the docu-series Transcendence, Dr’s Bruce Lipton, Libby Weaver and Joe Dispenza remind us of some of the fundamentals for keeping our bodies in a good state of health. They tell us that 90% of illness today is based on lifestyle and stress, not genetics.

“Optimal health is based on the perception of the mind. If I open my eyes and see someone I love, the brain releases chemicals related to love like dopamine/pleasure, oxytocin/bonding, and vasopressin/making you more attractive, growth hormone. So when a mind perceives love, the chemistry from your brain enhances vitality.

The same person, if they open their eyes and see something that scares them, will release stress hormones and inflammatory agents that affect the immune system (cortisone, norepinephrine, and cytokines). When we are in fear, the stress hormones shut down the immune system.” Dr Bruce Lipton

Dr Libby Weaver finds one of the most common things people get stressed about is the fear of letting people down, of how other people see us. This is certainly a pattern that I adopted in childhood. As I talked about in Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling I keenly felt my mum’s angst and stress in ordinary day to day life as she was parenting.

Like most kids, I learned to recognise the signs around this and wanted to smooth things out, bearing in mind kids depend on the adults around them for survival. This would obviously be more marked in abusive households but, since we are all human and experience a gambit of emotions, I suspect it happens to a certain extent in all households.

Dr Joe Dispenza also talks about indoctrinated fear as a major cause of stress, “be afraid of criminals, be afraid of terrorists, be afraid of drugs” …. and so on. Since stress shuts down our blood vessels in the conscious part of our brain, effecting less intelligent decisions, essentially this renders us powerless. And as long-standing British Member of Parliament (1950-2001) Tony Benn once said “Governments do not want a healthy, intelligent population because they are difficult to control.”

“When you turn on the stress response and can’t turn it off, now you are headed for disease” says Dr Joe Dispenza. No organism can live in emergency mode for extended periods of time. Chronic conditions require lifestyle changes. I can totally appreciate this if I take my panic attacks as an example. I had to change the way I thought and the way I felt, and that required me to become conscious of how unconscious I was.

Dr Libby Weaver explains the effects of chronic stress from a physiological standpoint:

Phase 1 – High adrenaline creates a lot of inflammation which is the beginning of most degenerative disease.

​Phase 2 – To keep you alive the body has to damp down that inflammation; cortisol elevates (its job is to slow your metabolism to get you through a famine). So clothes get tight, you diet (confirming the perceived famine), which slows your metabolism further and melatonin levels go down (you’re not going to want to sleep because your body thinks it has to be on guard).

In this mode, it’s not a time to create, imagine, learn, open your heart, or go within, it’s a time to run, fight, hide; so people naturally cling to their fear, worry, wherever is perpetuating the stress. Our attention is ‘out there’ where the perceived threat is, we obsess about time.

I quickly learned to get myself out of flight of fight mode as soon as I became aware of it (and still do today in any stressful condition). I would start to focus on my breathing, slow it down, take belly breaths and extend my exhalation; this invokes the Parasympathetic Nervous system – this is our rest, digest, repair and reproduce system. From here our body works more effectively, it’s also able to use body fat as a fuel, simply because it’s getting the message via the body “it’s safe”.

Another thing we can do is to take micro breaks throughout the day. At the traffic lights, instead of checking social media, become breath aware. While waiting for the kettle to boil, the lift to arrive etc, check in with our bodies. Regular meditation, though, is the best way to increase awareness (read Meditation – the Cornerstone to Your Success).

As well as making lifestyle changes, eating better, exercising, getting out in fresh air, and spending more time with loved ones to name a few, there are also methods like tapping (also known as EFT Emotional Freedom Technique) to reduce stress.. 

Dr Josh Axe talks about how certain emotions cause disease in specific organs. Emotions of fear affect the reproductive organs, the kidneys and adrenals. Think about a child getting really scared and they wet themselves. Why? Fear directly affects the bladder and the kidneys.

He goes on to say emotions of frustration and anger are toxic to the liver. Grief, sadness and depression affect your colon and lungs and also your immune system. Anxiety and nervousness affects the heart, small intestines and nervous system. Worry affects the spleen, pancreas and stomach.

Taking care of the emotional aspect of health is vitally important, as discussed in Embody Your Spirituality – a Healing Journey. This premise has been known in Chinese medicine for thousands of years. As I mentioned in that previous blog, I personally like Lise Boubeau’s Your Body’s Telling You: Love Yourself and Annette Noontil’s The Body is the Barometer of the Soul to help me fathom what is going on in my body from a thought pattern and emotional standpoint.

I believe it’s time for us to start reclaiming personal dominion over our own bodies. Our body is far wiser than our mind, and it is always trying to communicate with us at a level of absolute authentic need (unlike our mind).  All in all, there is a lot you can do starting today to take ownership of your health and ensure you have a healthy relationship with life’s stress.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy some of my other health related articles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“Healing is really about self empowerment, whether we use doctors, herbalists or other practitioners, they should be used to guide us only, to empower us to make the right decisions. But when we hand over our power to them we become at the mercy of everything around us and we are not steering our own boat” Rosemary Gladstar

This is one of the opening comments in the first episode of Nick Polizzi’s docu-series Remedy. It presented quite a compelling and concise history of healing that also explained why so many of us are feeling polarized around (what we refer to as) the conventional healthcare system in the western world.

It is a topic close to my heart. For decades I’ve been researching many aspects of health and healthcare in order to manage my own health and, more recently, that of my children. Remembering the details of all that research, however, is definitely not on my list of strengths. Once I’ve formed an opinion, I usually forget all the details that led me there, with the exception of a few golden nuggets and my final conclusions.

As a result, and given I only started publishing articles in the last few years, those I’ve written on different aspects of health and healthcare to date usually pertain to issues that hold my attention in the moment.

However, that Remedy episode inspired me to write a short series of articles that tell the broader story. Since it summed up the history of healthcare so beautifully, I thought I’d start there. This will provide context, especially in cases where people haven’t had much need to look beyond conventional healthcare. Then I’ll dive more into the insights I’ve gained from my own health issues, and some of the healing modalities I use, over the next couple of weeks.

I’ve focused on the salient parts of that first episode and interjected with my own thoughts and insights from other sources (as indicated in italics). Of course, truth is subjective and entirely personal, but this perspective may just give you a fresh lens through which to look at your health, or the words to share with others to help explain your own experiences and feelings.

History of Healthcare

Historically humans were hunters and gatherers and, as omnivores, essentially herbalists by nature; for most of human history food and herbs were conjoined. Then, roughly ten thousand years ago, we started planting intentionally and – as a result – bred a lot of nutritional and medicinal value out of our food.

In our modern world we’ve been filling this deficiency with chemical medicine. While a large percentage of pharmaceutical drugs were (and a proportion still is) derived from plant extractions or synthesis, it is ironic that we call herbal medicine an alternative when it’s arguably the natural form.

Anthropologists, herbalists and scientists commonly agree that this natural form of medicine was discovered, honed and safeguarded in large part by women. It would have been rare to find a woman who didn’t know the plants around them for both medicine and for food because people were always gathering. With a few exceptions like Hildegard of Bingen, this knowledge was passed down orally from generation to generation within families.

That takes us to the point in the patriarchal age of our history where the church began to fear that knowledge women had to alter physiology with plants. So much so, they began to burn and drown women who carried that knowledge in witch trials and inquisitions. Certainly in Western culture we thereby broke the oral chain and our history is written by the then victors.

Within these texts you will find hints of women’s involvement however. For example, there was a famous medical treatise written in the 17th century by a physician named William Withering introducing (not discovering) Foxglove and its medical uses. To his credit he at least acknowledged that he learned from a woman herbalist although she (as was normal then) remained unnamed. Whereas some of the 19th century books would lead one to believe their male authors invented herbal medicine.

From a scientific perspective, these herbs and spices - and the recipes passed down from grandmother to daughter since time immemorial - are literally epigenetic inheritance systems that keep our genome patterns healthy and optimized in relation to our environment. These are as essential to our health as the hardcoded protein genes in our genome.

However, oblivious to this, in the last two hundred years we started getting away from plant medicine altogether in the developed world. This had its roots a little further back with the likes of Paracelsus, when we started moving towards mineral based medicines and then chemical medicines which have taken over in the Western world.

In the US this created a division between people called the Irregulars and the Heroics. The Heroics liked to experiment, doing things like giving people mercury for everything, and a lot of people died because of it. The Irregulars were those who were the natural healers.

In 1847 the AMA (American Medical Association) came into being and the put in place certain regulations that split these two groups. A large part of the split was caused by the need to become licensed through a specified procedure, but women, African Americans and Native Americans (effectively many of the traditional healers) were excluded and could not be licensed.

Also, those who chose to be part of the AMA and be licensed could not discuss a case with someone who wasn’t, even if their therapy was not working.

Then in 1904 the AMA put together a council (promoted by Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefeller family) to evaluate what was going on in the educational system of medicine. Abraham Flexner – author of the resulting Flexner report in 1910 – went around visiting the various medical schools to see what they were doing.

Remember the movie Titanic? This gives me the framework for imagining the pursuits of these men. It was felt to be an age of great discovery, it was that thirst to be first, biggest and greatest that marked the era.

The outcome was that the way medical education would be taught, and ultimately funded, was very codified. So, for example, at that time there were several prominent medical schools of homeopathy –an integral but not so profitable part of what was then deemed conventional medicine – and, after the Flexner Report, funding was essentially gone for those homeopathic medical schools.

If someone wanted to become a physician, the only choice was to learn (what we now call) conventional medicine; focused on pharmaceuticals and invasive techniques.  The travesty was that, after that time, instead of trying to find a way to integrate some of these other modalities they were just left out and even vilified.

​So here we have Scottish-American industrialist and business magnate Andrew Carnegie, and the industrial, political and banking family, the Rockefellers, involved in the way things were progressing in the medical field.

What evolved from this was the understanding that if drugs (through the pharmaceutical industry) were put together with the AMA’s control of the practice of medicine and other factors, it would create a conglomeration that could politically and financially control healthcare.

As I understand it, while the details and the stories are different in other parts of the Western world, they follow a similar theme. Europe fared better in some ways, but today with decades of misinformation and government budgets under pressure, many of the modalities that are considered to be outside of the mainstream are being cut (in ignorance and arrogance in my view).

For example, if you look at the history of the Royal London Hospital for integrated Medicine, you will see that was part of the public health system until very recently. Queen Elizabeth II remains its patron and the royal family (a rare example of a Westernised family that remains rooted in traditions that have been passed from generation to generation) are highly vilified as both users and advocates of alternative forms of medicine.

Yet if people could see past the media hype and look at the facts, they would see that what we now call conventional medicine has coincided with a dramatic increase in most of our civilization’s diseases...

The fact is we don’t have medical cures for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, on and on, yet we’ve been convinced healing is a thing we can do overnight with a pill.

One of the commentators in Remedy remarked “it’s as if we are part of the biggest human experiment in history, one that poses the question: if we take all these toxins, chemicals and growth hormones are we going to live longer?” It’s basically a bait and switch…

Antibiotics and Vaccines

We’ve been convinced that because we have had the use of antibiotics to cure something overnight (although we are now losing this ability as the human biome is adapting faster than we can produce new antibiotics) that we can cure anything. This is far from true.

The convergence of the development of antibiotics and the vast improvements in sanitation and hygiene implemented in the developed world, gave the impression that we have conquered all kinds of diseases.

The same could be said of vaccines. Most of the diseases were well and truly on the decline before vaccines were introduced. For a balanced view about this topic – and facts and data –I like this report by JB Handley.

In contrast when I looked up the WHO (World Health Organisation)’s website for facts on vaccines what I read was startling to me as it basically just denies what it calls ‘the misconceptions’, without directly providing any data to support its claims.

My own feeling is summed up well in a video I was watching by another layperson talking on the subject:

“Injecting a system with some kind of attenuated virus is not a substitute for giving your system a fighting start with a good diet and healthy lifestyle. Our bodies are polluted (think processed foods, caffeine, environmental factors and so on), it’s those choices we make that make our bodies susceptible to illness.

Remember we are talking about intentionally infecting a human system that is in perfect health. There is nothing more profitable than making well people get sick.

Regardless which side of this argument you are on, you do not want to lose the ability to make this choice for yourself and your children. Do your homework; there are scientists, doctors and researchers speaking out and, while often blocked by mainstream media, information is widely available if you look for it. Trust your intuition.”

The truth is, as we have raised our wealth, our lifestyles have led us to a path of chronic disease and illness. These miracle drugs aren’t fixing us anymore. People understand when they go to see their doctor or go into hospital with these chronic illnesses they are not likely going to come out cured, they are going to come out with more medicine.

This is leading many back to the question of prevention, and alternative remedies. People want to feel well.

We have got here because we have put a lot of faith in people other than ourselves, people we have put in an ivory tower. We don’t allow ourselves to be the masters of our own knowledge or investigation. When you get on a healing path, you take your power back.

When we are self responsible we can heal.

Herbal medicine, the oldest and most natural form of medicine became illegal to practice in the US, and still is today apparently. In that country, while the pharmaceutical companies indirectly own and control medical care, it’s felt by some that the insurance side is more insidious. Regardless, it is money that is controlling availability and promoting skepticism and fear, not the realities of the far less costly and more freely available alternatives to the pharmaceuticals.

In the current climate it is positioned that unless a drug is a FDA (or equivalent in other countries) approved drug, it is not effective and may be harmful. A thousand or more years of human trials with a plant such as chamomile is not counted as evidence, could this be considered symptomatic of our arrogance?

No one denies that botanical medicines can have side effects, there was one study done which reported 37 deaths a year due to herbal medicine between 1992 and 1998. But in that same time pharmaceutical medicines caused hundreds of thousands of documented deaths. 

The laws are becoming so repressive in the US that, let’s say, someone wanted to make ground-up Echinacea, you could not print on the bottle that it supports the immune system unless there have been two studies that are published in mainstream literature (bearing in mind most of those publications are paid for – in terms of advertising dollars – by the pharmaceutical companies) and it costs a lot to get the studies done.

You have to have two studies showing not just that Echinacea worked but that the exact form that you’re going to market it in worked i.e. the same exact amount, the same extraction process and the same isolated component etc, which is far more than is needed to know that these plants work.

​There is no money in herbs, they can be grown in our garden, so no one puts research into them. People in medical school are taught “here is how we treat this problem, with this chemical”, there is little – if any - holistic training, not even on nutrition, and medical conferences are generally sponsored by pharmaceutical companies.

For clarity, I’m not against what we now call conventional medicine, as Alberto Villoldo says, it’s diagnostic and surgical techniques are extremely valuable.

Having said all that, I’ll bring this article to a close by coming back to the point Rosemary Gladstar made at the outset. “Healing is really about self empowerment, whether we use doctors, herbalists or other practitioners, they should be used to guide us only, to empower us to make the right decisions.”

My personal belief is that there is no one right way for anything, no one truth, there is only what is right for you right here and now. There is help out there far beyond what you may hear or be offered in your doctor’s office. Is it time to investigate a little more and to start steering your own boat?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy some of my other health related articles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

In The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, I wrote that it is no coincidence that we form relationships with people who trigger us. Whether it is an intimate relationship or a more distant one, we are drawn to people who, in some way, match our own issues and they both challenge us and help us heal and grow.

A great question that arose out of that was “How do I know when to break away from a bad relationship or situation and when to stay”? While in my experience there is no one right answer to that, I think there are some basic questions to ask and principles to apply that are of benefit.

I do acknowledge that there are conditions that can make life extremely difficult or impossible for some people to make changes to anything other than their mindset at particular points in time, for that read What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances), but here I’m assuming a choice.

There was an exercise I heard Sonia Choquette taking someone through a few years ago I thought was extremely pointed and useful for making decisions like these. In her example the person was deliberating over whether to stay where she was or move to Marin, which was a major upheaval for her family.

Sonia said "Tell me your thoughts on it" and allowed her to answer before saying "and?" three or four times. This gave the rational mind the opportunity to fully air its pros and cons. Then Sonia asked the lady to close her eyes, take a deep breath, feel into her intuition and then open her eyes. She asked "What is the true question here?" and the lady answered "Can I spend the rest of my life living apart from my sister?"

Interestingly the sister hadn’t even been mentioned until this point. So Sonia asked her "How do you feel about that?" Her response was "I have to move to Marin". Sonia checked in "Is that true?" to which the lady said "It feels true". Upon which Sonia felt the lady had got her true answer because it was something felt rather than part of the back and forth mind objections that needed to be given their say first. 

​In my life I’ve made conscious decisions to leave relationships, jobs, careers, teams, homes and many other things I likely just can’t call to mind right now. Equally I go through the same process if I decide to stay. I’m not a half hearted person, when I commit to something I take it seriously.

Change has been necessary for my survival. I don’t mean that in a physical sense, though that would be a legitimate reason, for me it’s been about self love, growth and authenticity. Given what I know about the human experience, I suspect it’s the same for all of us.

If I’m feeling lack, and I know I’m not living life from a standpoint of self love, there is only so long I can deal with that before my body starts breaking down (see What is Your Body Telling You?) in even minor ways such as a cold or a headache through to more serious wake up calls.

The way I look at people and situations that trigger me now is always from a perspective of “what is this person or situation teaching me?” but to help me figure that out I need distance, objectivity.

When I’m not able to personally achieve that, I go to the people I have in my life whose opinion I respect and value and ask them to help me figure it out. I have a couple of friends who also look at situations in their life from a point of inquiry. When I can’t see the forest for the trees, so to speak, I explain my predicament and another starts questioning in a similar way to Sonia Choquette. We learn from each other through this process time and again.

But there are many other methods of inquiry I use: journal writing, writing with my non-dominant hand (to access the subconscious brain), emotional release techniques like tapping and applied kinesiology. I also have a trusted mentor I can call upon to give me a broad spiritual perspective and that helps to lift my thinking on any topic, plus my trusted set of reference books on the metaphysical causes of illness and accidents.

What I am always looking for is something to lift me out of my thoughts and the fear they hold for me (the “what if’s”) and something that helps me to figure out what is right for my highest good. All of which is underpinned by my daily mediation practice that helps me to understand the difference between being in my head and simply observing what is in my head while being in my heart.

For example, when my partner and I got together thirteen years ago we had both been married before and, when we talked about our future, my partner really had no interest in saying wedding vows again. At first I felt quite insecure about this; I wanted a forever promise no matter how irrational that was since we had both broken that same vow previously.

I’ll never forget the moment I broke away from that thinking; I was on a long car journey and, suddenly, this question of marriage popped into my head and I looked at it with curiosity.

Why was it even an issue for me? Why on earth would I do that to myself again? How could I promise someone forever? I didn’t want to, I wanted and want to be free to be me, and I don’t want him to ever be anything other than who he is either. I’d had enough of trying to change people, or compromising who I was and what I wanted in life.

It occurred to me that being married was just a concept I’d been brought up with (in the family home and indoctrinated by society), believing it part and parcel of committed relationships. It was tied to a whole heap of multi-layered emotions about security, self worth, sex and children among many things.

Needless to say I let go of that belief there and then, it was liberating.

I find situations and people that trigger me are often just signaling outdated beliefs I’d taken on either about myself or the world in my upbringing, and I am continuing to adopt even though they are no longer serving me. This trigger then delayering process is a constant source of learning and growth for me.

If you have ever approached life in this way you are one of the few. It seems to me most people go around thinking life is being done to them. Yet it is has been liberating to take my thoughts and emotions into my own hands. That said, this has been a huge journey for me, I did not learn any of it overnight. But I have every confidence that anyone can learn how with focus and determination to claim their best life.

One thing I do firmly believe though is that no one need tolerate being abused by another physically or emotionally, for this you might want to read Why Does She Stay? … and What Makes You So Different?

But whether that is (or has been) true for you, most likely you are tying yourself up in knots and what is going on inside your head will be far more insidious than whatever happened or is happening on the outside; it seems to me that most of us have the tendency to beat ourselves up mentally and emotionally almost constantly.

​As to whether to stay or go, like I say, there is no one right answer, there is only ever what is right for you in that moment. And regardless of which you choose, a silver lining of personal growth towards a more authentic you is always possible with many awesome ways to make a breakthrough towards it.

Feel free to comment on or share these thoughts with others if they inspire. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also subscribe to my blog.

It’s no coincidence that we form relationships with people who trigger us. We are drawn to people who are, in some way, a match to our own issues, and they both challenge us and help us heal and grow...
Read the full article here on Tiny Buddha