A couple of months back my life was sent into a tailspin and I knew that in order to level out and keep moving forwards I had to deliberately focus on things that were going to help rather than hinder me. This is really no different than everyday life, but when something dramatically different happens it’s a lot easier to notice the dynamics at play because they are more exaggerated.

When I saw renowned author, coach and speaker Tony Robbins being interviewed last week, he described this really well.  “Whether we feel pain or love depends on three things: our state, our story and our strategy”:

• State is about my focus
• Story is about the meanings I attach to things
• Strategy is about the action I take

He makes the point that these are all decisions, things that we can control, but we each tend towards patterns which can be helpful or unhelpful. When asked which of the three would give the best returns, while acknowledging all three are interconnected and changing any one will change the other two, his choice would be changing our state of being, our focus.

“People have habitual patterns of focus. For example, do you look at what you have or what’s missing? Do you look at what you can, or can’t, control? Do you focus mainly on the past, the present or the future? Clearly when you focus on what you have, what you can control and the present those are more empowering choices than the alternatives.”

That is his key point, that we each have choices. I may have subconscious patterns, but as Tony says:
“Inside of you, there are parts of you that are incredibly gracious and generous, but there is also a part that is selfish. We all have loving parts and not so loving parts, playful parts and boring parts, courageous parts and fearful parts”.

Then he said poignantly:

“The real question is not Who are you?

The real question is Which part of you is in charge right now?”

In fact, Tony firmly believes he doesn’t change people; he just gets them to put another part of themselves in charge.

So as I was facing the end of my relationship, I knew I had to be careful about which parts of myself I put in charge. Especially since an issue I’d been contemplating for a long time, re-establishing my career, suddenly became more urgent.

What I’m here to do has been a nagging question in my life for as long as I can remember. In school and going to university, choosing which subjects to study, starting my career and looking for jobs, I just couldn’t see anything that felt like the right fit.

I distinctly remember when I immigrated to New Zealand in 2006, it was the year I saw the movie The Secret which helped me awaken to the power I had within me to change my life, but I still had no clue what I was meant to be doing with my life. All I knew was that I wanted to start a family and time was ticking.

So I made the best decision I could at that point and took a job which – while it didn’t light me up in the way I wanted – gave me some security while I set up home with my now ex-partner, and we started a family.

Having finally got the family I so desired, I found that juggling that and my work life was too much, and left the field of corporate change and transformation six years ago to take a more hands-on role with my kids. Bringing up my kids (with a strong desire for them to be an authentic expression of their best self), has proven to be a personal development bootcamp for me.

As Lisa Marchiano puts it “You’re going to project your stuff on your kids. There is no way that you are going to get through any amount of time with your children and not meet those parts of yourself you cut off and sent backstage”. So as I’ve undertaken the journey to me, this question of “what comes next?” has been ever present.

There is no doubt I’ve become extremely passionate about helping others undertake their own journey. Uncovering why I subconsciously chose certain patterns of state, story and strategy – and learning to make different choices – has been revolutionary for me.

As people have contacted me over the years to ask for my advice, I realised that helping others uncover their own blocks and make positive shifts in their lives would be really fulfilling. The question on my mind has been, how? Then last year someone said to me they could see hypnosis being a good healing modality for me to learn.

I wasn’t entirely convinced about the idea of practicing hypnosis. My connotation with it goes back to some sessions I had in my early twenties. I remember the lady having a falsely soothing voice, and I can recall falling asleep during the sessions; I didn’t consider them effective.

Then, when my attention was so abruptly returned to  this notion of “what next” in my career a couple of months ago, I knew it was a pivotal point that could see me sucked back down that same old corporate road if I didn’t choose a more self loving focus.  

There are a lot of feelings to process at the ending of a relationship, I couldn’t just shove them down and soldier on regardless. So I set to work in the same way I have over the last few years as I’ve processed grief from my childhood, grief from my mother passing and uncovering the patterns of beliefs and behaviours that no longer serve my highest interests.

I knew when it came to money, I had to go wider and focus more generally on abundance and its associated energies of love, compassion, joy, connection, adventure, play, laughter, invention and imagination as I wrote about in How Is Your Ability to Connect With Abundance Right Now?

Then, this week as I looked at a Diploma in Clinical Hypnosis with renewed interest, things finally clicked into place.

On my own journey to me, as I’ve so often written about, I’ve used various techniques to uncover and heal the emotional traumas that had remained stuck within me, long after the mental, physical, emotional events that had caused the trauma had ceased to be an issue.

It suddenly occurred to me that the common factor in the various techniques I use is this act of what I call going within which involves quieting the thinking mind and going into a state of deep relaxation where it feels safe to explore past issues, in other words, what I use is self hypnosis. It was a light bulb moment!

I’d gotten stuck with a story in my head about what hypnosis was, and – while acknowledging it as a powerful modality - was not completely aligned with the idea of using it to help others until I realised it is actually my own go-to medium all along. It’s no wonder someone suggested it to me as modality to use to help others.

As Tony said, change my state, story or strategy and the results start to change, everything has lined up.

I can see now why for so much of my life I just couldn’t see what I was meant to be doing; I was lined up with problem rather than the solution. And because I can see that is so normal in our world, and that there is a growing desire for change, this presents a huge opportunity to help others who are seeking that change in themselves.

It seems fortuitous that with the launch of We Rise Up (which I suspect will become another movie of its moment), the focus has moved in the last fifteen years from using personal empowerment for personal success to a redefining of what success looks like - creating new models and structures in society that work for all people, creatures and the planet.

Where in your life are you lined up with the problem rather than the solution? What parts of you are in the driving seat? Let’s find the most loving, courageous and compassionate parts of you and put them in charge of defining and driving success in your life and watch your deepest yearnings finally be fulfilled.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Normal Is Dysfunctional That Is the Growth Opportunity, Reclaim the Sweet Spot of Being in Your Element, What If The Thing You Dread Is Actually Your Dreams Trying to Unfold? Clear the Fog of Trauma to See the Magnificence of Your Being, and What’s Your Relationship with Money? … And a simple technique to improve it. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I had a vision of myself in the shape of a turkey running into the sunset making one last ditch attempt to take flight while hysterically shrieking “I want a do-over, I want to live life to the full”, all the while knowing my epitaph was more likely going to be “Triggered and Distracted, Try Again Next Time”.

Triggered and distracted, these were the words that came to me after I was considering how sidetracked a conversation with my partner had gotten, and I realised that would be a good description of much of our time together, and much of our individual and collective lives.

The start of a new year has been and gone, that time of self reflection and hope already a distant memory. Time has marched on, eaten up in the business of day to day living. Sure, I have a few nice memories here and there, but it feels like it could be so much more – and I know why, I keep getting triggered and distracted by a whole bunch of (not living life to the full) stuff.

Listening to more of Sarah Blondin’s soothing tones this week, I was captivated by her meditation on Our Warring Self versus Our Infinite Self.

She describes the warring self as “the part of you that hides under the surface and surprises you when she shows her teeth. The part of you that you deny, push away, pretend does not live in you. She is your darkness, the one who dwells in the shallow waters of your being, riding up on the back of your self righteous ego. She is in every one of us.”

I felt guilty because my warring self showed her teeth last weekend when I was in a store buying a new top. The label on it had the wrong code, and the young sales girl was doing her best to find a code so she could put it through the system. A supervisor was drafted in to help, but to no avail, and I was getting anxious.

I had headed to the checkout after receiving a phonecall that the rest of my family were ready to be picked up in the forest where they had been riding. I had said I would be there in ten minutes, and was acutely aware that it was now taking longer.

There are so many subtle layers mixed in to just this one tiny example, but I can summarise by saying my people pleasing tendencies together with childhood lessons about “being on time” had kicked into overdrive. Eventually, after standing smiling and waiting patiently, my inner turmoil was enough to alert my warrior that I’d had enough and needed to take immediate action to alleviate the discomfort.

On the inside I felt incredibly anxious, and it turned to anger. On the outside, I have a mental snapshot of the sales girl’s surprised face in my head as the patient customer in front of her suddenly turned into a tense, complaining one. “I will just have to leave it” I said in a clipped tone, “I have family waiting to be collected. But I am very disappointed that I have stood here for ten minutes and can’t buy the top I wanted despite having the ability to pay.”

Now while all of that is legitimate, and it probably wouldn’t rate as one of the worst experiences the sales girl has had in her job, the internal intensity of it for me was very much one of the warring self.
In contrast, the infinite self is “tender, able to withstand storms” Sarah Blondin says. This is who “catches the furious pain of others, the difficult experiences you face, the things that make you want to fight, and she cradles them, swaddles them in unconditional love over and over. She is the bottomless source of light and love, she is your essence. Pure and wise, she lives in your deepest depths.”

Most importantly, Sarah adds “She is the one you can choose to embody, to call forth as you navigate your life... she serves where the other severs; she heals where the other wounds...you have the power to choose which to call into form. They are two polar energies, forces living within you, a choice for you to make in every triggering moment in your life. There is no question which makes us feel more alive. More vivid”.

This reminded me of another quote I heard recently “Nothing that needs to hide in the dark has an authentic power of its own”. Yet here I am actively seeking to free myself from the shackles of the shadows of my childhood; the turkey trying to become a bird of flight.  How powerful those shackles become because the voice in my head is the voice of a parent or my resistance to the parent, old outdated well-worn recordings that no longer serve.

As Sarah Blondin put it “such intensity and emotion is very powerful, palpable, weak in root but alluring in force”.

And all the while time is ticking. And the only way to end up with that “Lived Life to the Full” epitaph is to take one conscious breath after another, to become more present and grounded in the moment I am in. Or as worded more poetically by Sarah “feeling your softness, returning to your nature, is the only thing that will feed your life in the ways it is asking.”

I think of all those moments in my life where I’ve been triggered and distracted and I compare them to those where I’ve been present and my sense of humour is happy to play, I know which feels better.  

I also know that doesn’t mean I have to be a doormat in any shape or form, it’s all in the way in which I stand in my truth and, more importantly, which truth I’m subscribing to. Am I reacting from the (often) much exaggerated place of the wounded child within, or am I acting from the point of a healthy, present adult?

Ultimately, I want to feel delighted and amazed when I reach the end of my life and think “well, I really did learn how to live it to the full!” What about you?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change Unhealthy Reactions, How to Stand in Your Truth and Be Heard Without a Fight, How to Stop Being Triggered by What Other People Think and Honour Your Story but Free Yourself of Its Shackles. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

A very dear friend of mine was here for her annual visit recently. As usual, we were engrossed in our conversation about life at the deepest of levels. She had been musing on what she was here to do in this life, with retirement in sight and with many mokopuna (a Māori word meaning grandchildren) growing up around her, her purpose seemed to elude her.

We had talked about many things. One of the questions she asked was why a person would want to strip away all their layers of life’s stuff, of course I could only answer for myself as it’s the journey I’ve been on.

“It feels lighter, less encumbered.” I told her, “I get less wound up by the same old stuff, less triggered and able to respond more calmly; I can think more clearly and, well, I feel better.”

We also spoke about this idea that perhaps we are all just aspects of the one thing getting to know itself. This led her to question why, that being the case, starvation was something that needed to be repeated over and over in different lives.

It is an interesting question. I’m not sure any of us came intending to suffer in any way, yet there is clearly a lot of suffering that occurs from the ritual beating ourselves up in our own minds (which is likely an echo of a past parent’s words) through to starvation and so many more horrific ordeals.

Perhaps it is more that I came with an intention to gain something new from this life, a new way of being rather than of doing.

My friend told me it was a huge relief to think of life as becoming who she was meant to be, rather than what she was meant to do; it felt far more achievable that this illusory purpose that had seemed to evade her all these years.

Perhaps there is something specific I am here to do, but I suspect that until I become the person I intended to be in this life, the fullest expression of myself, it will not be clear. I also think it’s entirely possible that I may never know what I’m here to do, because it seems that I could have an effect on another’s life without ever knowing it, the way many others have had on mine:

The kindness of my paternal grandmother, her gentle nature and care for me...The belief my first swim coach had in my ability to improve and swim well, and the time he spent helping me do it...That same belief my second coach had in my ability to succeed at a higher level and play an important role in the team...The question posed on how many dimensions there might be, a physicist revealing to me the ten already discovered by scientists in the early 1990’s...

I could go on, these are seemingly small yet seminal moments, times in my life that have retrospectively created a sort of virtual cheerleading squad in my head when I would otherwise have had doubts about who I am and who I am capable of being.

Regardless of the circumstances we are born into, or find ourselves in, whether mundane or horrific, I suspect it is who we are being that carries the most weight.

A starving grandmother can still make a difference in who she is being both to herself and to others, as can the well-fed one. Sometimes those circumstances are extraordinary, sometimes ordinary. Perhaps though, it is in the extremes of life that things that are most important to us come into sharper focus.

I can only attest to my own circumstances; I find myself in the murky soup of western civilisation. I say this not to point to the current global pandemic, I’m pointing to all the modern conveniences and constructs of life that serve to distract me from things that are important.

Like someone talking to me about conspiracy theories the other day. The moment I hear someone referring to something that is conjecture as if it is fact, my solar plexus goes off like a tsunami warning system.

It is not that I disbelieved what was being espoused particularly; it is simply that I was listening to my own truth. My gut was telling me to steer clear and for good reason. Whether some well known historic figure is still alive, or whether a government has a malign intention, or a secret organisation is behind events or atrocities, there is little to be achieved by my dwelling upon it.

The temples on each side of my head start to throb and my mind starts to feels totally congested with information that cannot serve me in that moment except to distract. It brings to mind a statement I heard long ago “if you cannot convince, confuse”. I have a suspicion that is exactly what most of this information is designed to do – both in the mainstream and in social media.

I have done, and continue to do, my personal work; unwinding the unhelpful thought patterns and beliefs that I unwittingly adopted in my childhood. I do this so I can think more clearly, without getting waylaid or triggered by old fears.

In a life where I wasn’t unwinding my trauma, I was distracted going around the same old loops, having the same old arguments, the same old guilt trips, and the same old unhelpful stuff. I spent too much time worrying about what other people may be thinking or worrying about other things that are outside of my control.

This brings me to a conversation with another friend, when I said “I reckon most people have been getting born, then spending their life distracted. This feels like the start of an era of moving beyond the distraction, gaining clarity on who we each really are, our authentic self and who we came to be”.
Who were you born to be this life?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Risk Your Friendships More in Order to Be Fully Loved, What Are the Right Questions to Ask Right Now?, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, How to Break Free of Addictive Relationship Patterns and You Don’t Need to Be Perfect to Make a Breakthrough. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I’ve had a sense of bubbling euphoria this week as I’ve been moving through day to day life. It comes from some work I completed over the weekend that really helped me to crystallise where I am on my journey, with a definite sense that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The journey to me has been a deliberate and painstaking pursuit, taken in small steps over a number of years. But I get the sense that the metaphoric dark night of the soul is drawing to an end, it is the dawning of a new day.

Along the way there has been a diverse range of literature and teachers whose work has provided much needed guidance, most of whom (if not all) have been mentioned in my weekly musings. I am nothing if not resourceful, and on each part of this rushing river downstream it has seemed that the right thing has appeared just at the right time to help me navigate whatever tumultuous waters I was in.

Claire Zammit’s work on self actualisation, the latest piece I’ve been diving into, ranks among my favourites for its ability to capture and and categorize (into eight distinct areas) what aspects of life one might have deeper yearnings for, not feel fulfilled and want to evolve in. Her work in recognising why this is the case and how to break through the barriers is well thought out; and a blessing for those of us who are really serious about realising our full potential in any area of life.

Being asked to talk about self awareness last week gave me the opportunity to review the stages of the journey. First there was a desire to develop and succeed in a more unconscious state, then there was an awakening to the bigger context of life. This illuminated the burdened state in which I was attempting to move through each day, so there then came the more deliberate reclamation of my authentic self.

Don’t get me wrong, do I think this is the end of my journey? Heck no, more of a breakthrough, moving onto the next chapter. It will be interesting though, each week as I sit down to write these and reflect on what I’ve learned, to see if and how the flavour changes.

So back to the breakthrough, it came from going through a 73-page document that Claire Zammit co-authored with Katherine Woodward Thomas; it goes through the twenty one self-limiting thought patterns that create our more burdened identities, outlining the common thoughts, beliefs, gifts and so on, that comes with each.

To be clear, I’m not saying you can just read this document and – whoosh – you’ll have the same epiphany. It’s possible, but bear in mind there are many roads to the same end, and each journey is unique. This happened to be the one that, for me, was the perfect tool given the culmination of everything I had experienced, read and learned to that point.

In fact, I’d been subconsciously searching for this list. Ever since I’d heard Teal Swan talk about Fragmentation, referring to the parts of us that fragment off in relation to our essential self. An example she gives, from memory, is about being brought up in a family where it wasn’t okay to express your anger, and how that might affect who you show up as in the world over the years; perhaps even to the extent that you become a person who doesn’t recognise you ever feel anger because it has become so denied, suppressed and disowned.

Anyway, in her various talks on the subject, Teal mentions that with each fragment we each split into many parts (she has seen as many as over eighty), with a minimum of twenty two. It struck me as a very specific number. So when Claire Zammit mentioned the twenty one thought patterns she had identified, I immediately connected the dots (21 parts plus the essential self being twenty two).

I have no idea if their lists are the same, but the point for me was this represented more of a totality of what could be at play within me. For the last few years I’ve been healing patterns that reveal themselves through whatever is triggering me in the moment, and it has served me well, but I was wanting a litmus test of how far through that dark night I was.

So I went through the 73-page document highlighting every single statement that resonated and looked at where the clusters were. What became very clear was that my two main themes were in relation to my own feelings, needs and desires and my uniqueness, calling and contribution. Specifically how to name them, assert them in a way that garners support and maintain a healthy balance between giving and receiving.

Having done a lot of work this year on healing my boundaries, and recognising my people pleasing and co-dependant tendencies, it made a great deal of sense to me that being able to fulfil my potential in the area of clearly and confidently expressing my thoughts, feelings, needs, desires, ideas and visions to others, has been a key step towards fulfilling my potential in terms of being able to recognise and contribute my gifts in ways that are meaningful and have a positive impact.

Knowing that I had already begun working on these things, I realised this was my sense check that the change in light was indeed the dawn of a new day and not an oncoming truck about to hit me square in the eyes. I also checked in with another lady I know, and who knows me well, whose chosen field is in helping people work through these barriers who affirmed I am well through the continuum.

What has made the most difference, in my little bubbling, euphoric state, is recognising how l feel when someone else around me is triggered. I was at lunch with some friends, one of whom gets really triggered on certain issues, and I accidentally stumbled into one of those particular topics. Even though she knew we were each well aware of the issues on both sides of the fence and hold the same vision, it was as though all the oxygen had been sucked out the room as a tirade ensued.

It was an amazing experience of having a mirror held up. I am no stranger to these tirades; I too have been a tirade queen on many issues that are important to me (just ask the kid’s school). What I have been able to see clearly now for a while though is that my anger is only spinning my wheels in the mud on any topic. Other people can’t hear me because my anger instinctively makes it unsafe for them, triggering those around me into flight, fight, freeze or fold.

Also, what lay at the heart of my anger was something else entirely, in my case it was the childhood pain of my opinion not mattering, among other things, and I came out fighting, determined no one would put me in the corner again. It was that I had to work through so that I could begin to communicate more clearly and calmly.

Claire’s core message in unlocking our potential is:

• You absolutely cannot fulfil your potential if you have inner blocks or barriers (like my anger, for other examples look at How to Live in Conscious Self Awareness in the World)
• But you don’t need to be perfect... to create a breakthrough you only need to break the biggest pattern standing in the way of the main area you’re yearning for (for example, purpose and calling, but there is a free questionnaire in here that will help you identify yours) and this will start a chain reaction.

My bubbling euphoria isn’t because I feel entirely clear of my past, it’s because I’ve now got awareness of and am working on the biggest pattern that has been standing in my way. As I recognise and work to integrate those parts of me I’d denied, I can feel a seismic shift in my own energy as it starts to orientate itself towards the very thing I’ve been yearning for, my contribution and calling.

Do you feel a deep yearning for something more in your life, an elusive potential within? Perhaps you’d like to more clearly express your authentic self? Or contribute your gifts to others in ways that are meaningful and have a positive impact? Or feel safe, valued and supported in your romantic relationships to become the best version of yourself? Or feel you have all the resources you need to thrive? Or feel connected to your creative expression? Or to your deeper knowing? Or feel energized, well, healthy, at peace and at home in your body? Or to make a difference in the lives of others?

I want all of these things, and what I’ve discovered is – while I need to recognise there’s work to do, and do it – I don’t need to be perfect to make a breakthrough, and neither do you, you just need to begin.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy I Am Worth It – Are You?, Why Projecting is the Best Tool for Self Awareness, Honour Your Story but Free Yourself of Its Shackles and How to Heal the Past so You Can Live Your Best Present. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I got an email today from someone in lockdown who is struggling to see any of the positive aspects in her life. It is serendipitous as I’d just been ruminating on the messages life has sent me over the years that I’d completely missed.

In hindsight I can see that some things I disregard or push away are the things I need to embrace. In fact, all the things in my life that feel uncomfortable, stressful or painful are all telling me something important.

The general thought pattern in my head goes like this “The thing I feel most inspired towards/want the most is X (fill in the blank), this particular issue has nothing to do with that and it doesn’t inspire me so I’m not going to focus on it.” In fact, it is fair to say I usually feel it would be easier to focus on all the other, less important, things if only I could have the one thing I desired the most first.

That blank (the thing I feel more inspired towards/want the most in my life) has been different things for me at different times. It’s not something that usually changes on a daily basis, but rather something that becomes an overarching or dominant theme for an extended period of time. And the longer I don’t have it, the more strongly I want it and the more I think about it, yearn for it and feel its absence.

As I was reminded by Claire Zammit in her Unlock Your Feminine Power talk recently, I do have aspirations in all areas of my life, and it is often helpful to focus on something of less importance in order to create some positive momentum.

There is no greater example of this in my life than when I wanted to start a family. After years of trying and four unsuccessful pregnancies, as I describe in Food for Your Best Life, it was only when I felt I’d done all I could and decided instead to focus on my overall health and wellbeing the way forward presented itself.

However, this is obviously not a lesson easily learned for me as I still have a tendency to focus on my main desire to the exclusion of all else. Yet when I turn to the other areas in my life that need attention, and are usually easier to get traction on, I get so much positive momentum. Usually, in hindsight, I see they were all intrinsically linked like a magic code to unlocking my deeper desire.

I’ll give you some examples. Despite my experiences that led to finally having the family I had dreamed of, I had gotten off track with my diet after the kids arrived. For a number of years I knew my body fitness and health needed some attention but it was not my dominant theme. My dominant theme was about uncovering my life’s purpose.

I allowed myself the excuses of a busy work life and a busy home life, and had argued in my mind that I could get through until about age sixty without making drastic changes, by then I’d have the time and energy to focus on it as the kids would be grown.

Then a couple of years ago life decided it had enough of my crappy excuses and sent some stronger messages as I contended with my first kidney stone, which I wrote about in What Are Our Thought Patterns Really Doing for Us?

I knew the changes that I wanted to make, I wanted to take up swimming again and eat a diet that resembled something consistently closer to nature rather than anything processed. Having given my mind permission to ignore this until I was sixty, my body rebelled.

My body had decided instead that my mid-forties were more suitable and delivered me some straight forward calls to action through my osteopath as I wrote about in Get Moving to Get Moving: Where Physical Exercise Fits into the Soul Journey and Listening to the Signs – My Road to Health.

In the midst of this I realised my life’s purpose - as discussed in How My Kids Helped Me Find My Purpose (and it is not them) – and my deepest desire then evolved into a desire to understand how to live my life’s purpose, how to be of service in the here and now.

Meanwhile the relationship I have with my partner is another example of an area of my life that was (and is) important to me, and it wanted its time in the sun despite my attention being focused on how to live my life’s purpose. As this year got underway, having come out of the long summer school holidays here in the southern hemisphere and an extended visit from a family member drawing to a close, I was ready for a big out breath; finally some time to myself.

However, only four days later my partner had an accident. Instead of out working, he found himself at home, incapacitated, for a few months. To give this context, he is a person who likes to be productive and enjoys being out and about serving his customers, meanwhile I enjoy the solitude that (and the kids being at school) brings.

This happened before our country was particularly concerned about the spread of COVID19 and a month before lockdown. I won’t deny that I had my moment of anguished “why me?” and “are you kidding me?” cries to the universe. My partner and I had not spent that much time alone together since before the kids were born and, while it required some major mental shifts on both our parts, it was a true gift.

Now, in light of the lock down, it has actually turned out to be such a blessing. That time together enabled us to be on a more solid footing together before the kids got added to the 24/7 environment.  As I described in Is This the Opportunity of a Lifetime? It is allowing us to work on our whole family dynamic and relationships.

Would I have chosen any of these things? The answer would be an emphatic no. However, I cannot deny that these are all areas of my life that are flourishing as a result of giving them some positive attention. That being the key, I think, they are all now receiving my positive attention rather than the negative light I saw them in beforehand.

Another area of my life coming to light, that I have been pushing away for some time, is about creative expression. I decided the other day that – while we are all in isolation together – I have to find a project I can work on in snatches that gives me an outlet for expressing that deeper part of me. The obvious answer, since I love to explore and focus my thoughts through writing is to write a book (or at least start one); something many people have suggested.

This idea is one I have never really felt inspired towards, but when I consider how uninspired I was about improving my health and relationships, and how well that has turned out, I’m thinking it’s an idea at least worthy of consideration since it keeps coming up.

It also tackles another area that I’ve been ignoring, and that is taking time for myself when the rest of the family are around. If ever there was a prime opportunity for cultivating that it is now.

There is a quote by Rumi “what you seek, is seeking you”, so what is seeking you right now? What challenges are you facing, and therefore what opportunities are staring you right in the face? If ever there was a time to really confront the obvious, it is now.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy in Life Really Does Support Your Deepest Desires (And How to Access Its Support) or What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was listening to Claire Zammit coach someone this week in her workshop designed to help people break free from hidden power blocks. The particular block the lady had was around a deeply held desire to cultivate an intimate, growth-oriented relationship with a loving partner. Despite many attempts, she had yet to find the right person and has developed a story in her head about the universe perhaps having a different design for her life.

I recognised that story.

My deepest yearning is not the same; instead I feel a deep knowing that I am called to use my talents and gifts in service of others, but the answers about the next best step seem to evade me. Like the lady being coached, I have oftentimes accepted that – as my gran would say – what is for me won’t go by me, and I should just trust that life has a different plan right now.

But the yearning calls to me frequently, many times in each day; it refuses to remain subdued and feels like a dead weight inside. I constantly wonder what it is I am meant to be doing with my life, feeling a mix of emotions from the shame around a lack of contribution right now, to a lonely ache to be something more and blocked on moving forward.

Yet deep down I know life supports me in all I desire. I truly believe that, if something was not for me, I would not desire it. The desire is the seeds of creation I was born with, the beacon that calls me to the life I had intended when I volunteered to come forth.

I only have to look back on my life, and all the things that have happened, to see how life supports me. As Lance Allred, a former NBA player, said to Tami Simon in an interview about his new book The New Alpha Male:

“I’ve had to start over so many times in my life, and each time I look back and see how life has had my back, even when I didn’t feel like it did. And I can see how all of these experiences have set me up to be in a beautiful place that I could not have imagined in my own logical, analytical, left-brained head.”

Then a thought occurred to me last week as I caught part of a conversation between Jessica Ortner and a guest she was interviewing, it was about the upsides of sabotaging my success. As I chewed on that, I realised that, with not knowing my life path, there could be no more demands made on my time. I acknowledge I have a fear of overwhelm.

I’m someone who likes space around everything so I can fully experience and immerse myself in what is happening and have enough fluidity around it to dial it up or down or take it in a new direction. I don’t want the little spaces I’ve carved out taken up with other commitments.

When I dived into this using the parts work I described in Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You? I rediscovered the part of me who was joyful about some of the different aspects of working with people I experienced during my corporate career.

This more optimistic part of me was able to appreciate where the fear I had about overwhelm was coming from; life is busy. However, it was also a part of me that recognized there are many aspects of that busy life that are not bringing joy and – should I choose to redirect my energy to something more fulfilling – I can outsource those other aspects without feeling I’ve compromised anything.

It was the first time in a long while I had even reconnected with the part of me that believes that, not only can I have my deepest yearning, but it is my calling. This was very like the lady Claire was coaching, she had disconnected from her deepest desires and thus created a barrier between herself and the ways in which life was supporting her.

When Claire asked her to describe how it would feel to have the loving, connected relationship she was seeking, the lady gave a description that just sounded like a bullet point list we could all relate to in terms of words.

In that moment though I could hear so clearly what others have referred to in me, she was speaking from her head rather than her heart. I could not hear the yearning, the feeling, in her words. In contrast, when I was listening to Lance Allred talk I could hear the raw emotion when he talked about “so many deaths of so many dreams” and what it means to persevere.

Learning to tap into that heart space and be vulnerable is really the turning of a tide in my life. I’ve noticed it more in every aspect; the most authentic core of who I am is beginning to take its place in the sun.

What I found interesting, having been drawn to Claire Zammit’s work on Feminine Power and Lance Allred’s work on the New Alpha Male, is that both are singing from the same song sheet; both are deeply heart centred.

How heart centred are you? If you need help making that shift there are so many resources out there, including the ones I’ve mentioned here and the many others mentioned in my other articles. But the key thing is to become aware of our subconscious patterns and blocks and – to steal’s Lance’s phrase -  “catch them quicker” and recentre ourselves in alignment with our deepest desires.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy in Get out of Your Head and into Your Heart. 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.

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.

A friend of mine has found her life put on hold lately to take care of one of her kids at home for an extended period. She is beginning to wonder whether her current preoccupation with the situation is making it worse.

As Carl Jung said “What you resist not only persists, but it will grow in size”.

In her reflections, she recognised that several other child-related issues (that had been taking up a lot of her energy until this point) seem to have resolved themselves since her focus shifted. She realized perhaps her life didn’t need to be quite so on hold as it has been with all the ruminating and worrying she has been doing about things outside her control.

This has certainly been my experience. When I switch focus (preferably to something more positive), my resistance drops and issues resolve. The best example I have was my journey to having children, as I refer to in What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances. My kids are pregnancies five and six and only happened when I finally switched my focus to my overall health and wellbeing.

Just yesterday my youngest child jolted me awake to the tune of (cue tired, whiny voice) “I don’t want to go to school today”. Her protests continued for almost an hour, valid protests that pull at my heartstrings.

She is struggling in these early years at school; the focus and attention required literally drain her of all energy. In her words “there is too much telling and not enough freedom, too much working and not enough playing, and I am sad and angry and tired all the time and I don’t want to feel that way”.

It’s an authentic voice that wants to be heard and I wholeheartedly applaud that. I think many of us recognise those words even in adulthood. The question is what to do about it?

My kids don’t have an issue with their school per say, they like their teachers and friends and the environment. What they have an issue with is what they regard as the overly onerous attendance requirements and curriculum, which basically just follow the norms.

My daughter’s solution is that I should home school, just like another parent opted to do with one of her classmate’s recently. We have been round this block many a time. It’s hard to watch my kids struggle and not want to dive in and solve things for them. Yet I know that will usually only hinder their growth. 

That hasn’t stopped me feeling stuck around this issue many times, but when I have tried to step in its only exacerbated the problem. As I explained to my daughter, I am a writer not a primary school teacher; I would not be very good at that. But what I can do is use my writing to let people know what it’s like for kids, to create awareness and insight and advocate for change.

I share their views and advocate for shorter hours in those early years, and more child-led learning (for those interested, see the articles under Education).

I suggested to her that maybe one of the reasons she was having a tough time is to build up a big desire within her to do something about it for other kids as she grows up. But in the meantime, since it’s a legal requirement, she will need to shift her attention to the things she does like if she wants to feel any better about it. Her resistance to school is making her feel worse, so we are working on things she can control, that she does like, to help her process all these big emotions she has going on inside.

That said, it’s not always the case that there are no immediate solutions in sight. Often when I am feeling stuck, there are solutions I call red-herrings because they might address the immediate issues but they don’t solve the root cause.

I feel our culture values taking action beyond all else. But when I get stuck, it might be my circumstances that need to change or it might just be my perspective, but it is always my feelings.

There are many times in my life I have changed my circumstances and, after the excitement of new beginnings starts to fade, still felt the same swathe of negative emotions return that I had been seeking to resolve. When I’ve left relationships behind, or places, or jobs, and still come around the same loop – different time, different place, different person, I finally got the message that the answer was about changing something within me.

While I don’t always have all the answers in my head, I do have the answers in my heart and I’m getting better at listening to it. Whatever circumstances I am in, there may not be something I can immediately do to change those, but there is always something for me to learn.

This is where articles like We May Not Relate to Everyone but We Might Need to Hear What They Have to Say and What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)? have come from. I recognise life is a mirror, and the players around me are reflecting opportunities for personal growth back to me  – usually about some aspect of my self worth.

Someone asked me the other day whether I’d reconsidered coaching or launching some sort of business in relation to these life lessons. I won’t deny the question of what I’ll be doing in the future is certainly of eternal curiosity but, rather than focus on things which I have no immediate answers to nor energy for, I have decided this year to focus on something I could steer and feel good about, my own health and wellbeing.

Having finally managed to create, grow and deliver new humans into the world and nurture them through these early years, my body would very much appreciate a bit of attention. In the last year I’ve returned to a loved activity, swimming, and listened to my body’s desire to eat more natural foods and cut out the more processed ones.

That is just for starters though. I’ve been paying more attention to the aches and grumbles that had somehow managed to become background noise for decades. When I’ve asked around for recommendations about health practitioners, I’ve let my heart take the lead in choosing them.

​Along the way I’m even learning about new modalities of healthcare, the different cell memories in my body and the interconnectedness with different events, slowly beginning to defrag myself towards the best health I’ve had in years.

Switching focus from the agonizing question of life purpose to doing everything I can to be in the best health now and moving forwards has changed my perspective significantly. It’s created a shift from resistance to open curiosity, and I am able to be present in the here and now for my kids, friends and family.

Life is out there to be lived now, not to be put on hold for some future moment. If you are living in the now, you are on purpose. So if you are currently feeling stuck, where is there an opportunity for you to switch focus and do something more positive for yourself?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances, We May Not Relate to Everyone but We Might Need to Hear What They Have to Say and What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)?. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

A number of times this week I’ve picked up on messages about embracing and valuing our uniqueness. When I was listening to a meditation that I hadn’t heard in a few years, there were some words in there that leap out as a great reminder:

“You are a person of value. There is no one else ever like you. Focus on that unique set of qualities that makes you an individual.

You are valuable in so many ways, for example, in how you do things, how you help others, and say things that make people smile. People remember, and when people feel good about you and what you bring, they seek out your uniqueness.

When you are enjoying yourself it makes it so much easier for others to enjoy being with you. Doors open so easily when people like you, the more attractive you feel on the inside the more you attract on the outside.”

It’s too easy, I find, to beat myself up instead of appreciating who I am; especially when I’m fully embracing growth and healing. Like this morning when I was at the local pool, as I was swimming along I could hear myself making all sorts of inane and ridiculous judgments about others’ motives for being there (who I don’t even know) and then started judging myself for being judgy.

So then this idea of judgment and needing to be more compassionate with myself and others started playing on a loop in my head, it was absurd really. Luckily I recognised that, the voice in my head wasn’t even mine (it was my mother’s from long ago) so I decided to go back to enjoying my swim.

Watching the sun dance on the bottom of the pool like healthy neurons firing along the length of a spine, and the light playing through the burst of air bubbles as I turned at the end of each length, was a lot more fun. It brought me back to the present moment and a huge feeling of gratitude.

Earlier in the week I had also been listening to another of Oprah’s SuperSoul Sessions with an exuberant young pastor, John Gray. He was talking about the bridge, an expression that caught my attention as it’s one I use myself. He talked about the bridge as a place to meet and recognise each other as people of equal value regardless of our race, gender, beliefs or anything else, and to embrace and celebrate our unique qualities.

I use the same term to describe those of us who are awakening to the reactions and reverberations that our thoughts and feelings have, and who are consciously and deliberately evolving - thus bridging - to a new, more conscious, world. What we are both talking about though is the same thing described differently; I loved his vision of it.

Valuing my uniqueness, though, means knowing what that is exactly. This gave me pause for thought.

There are lots of articles and books out there to help with this process (try Googling value your uniqueness as a starting point). One that helps me most is the reminder that our uniqueness is almost always a combination of small things that weave together uniquely rather than just one unique quality.

I like this because my young daughter was spontaneously telling me tonight that she can describe her dad easily. Given that I was musing this topic of uniqueness, after she had described my partner, I asked her how she would describe me; her reply “that is a bit trickier”.

She started to give it a go though and I was pleasantly surprised by some of the things she mentioned, like being kind and sometimes funny (huge sigh of relief on the parenting front). As I mentioned above, like a lot of people I can be pretty hard on myself, so it makes good sense to get feedback from others about the qualities they appreciate about you the most.

With the ball rolling I decided to put it out there and ask a couple of close confidantes their views, while also telling them the top two or three things I value about my friendship with them. I was blown away by the positive response I got, also noticing how many of the things we value and admire about each other are the same.

This reminded me of another technique to uncover our value, to list the things you admire and value in others, because you most likely have those qualities also (remember Annette’s Noontil’s advice that we only see in others what we have in ourselves?) It was interesting for me to notice some of the negative self talk in my head playing the feedback down, my “I’m not good enough” voice.

There are also a whole load of other techniques out there like listing the things you are passionate about, your achievements, reflecting on your best traits and qualities. The important thing is to be able to define your uniqueness, own and value it.

As always, simple but not necessarily easy.

One of the tasks I used to hate when I worked for other people was pulling together a resume. However, it was also extremely valuable because it crystallized all my previous efforts, successes and strengths. I think this is the same, writing down my personal uniqueness and validating it with examples, with the same painstaking care I used to take with a resume, is valuable.

It’s valuable because believing that I am valuable or unique is not always easy, so seeing the evidence helps to take it on board. It also breathes life into something that, until now, was more of a vague concept in my mind.

Seeing what makes me me and you you is quite fun. Doing this exercise with my friends, it’s easy to see our points of similarity, which also makes the differences all the more obvious, and helps me to more deeply appreciate their uniqueness and my own.

As Naomi Arnold says “I believe with every fibre of my being that you are incredibly special. Your mind, body and spirit one-of-a-kind. I know that when you are in tune with the intricacies of this uniqueness that you can best be of service to yourself, your loved ones and the world”. Agreed.

So I challenge you to go ahead and define your uniqueness so you can begin the job of owning it and starting to value it. Remember, when you can enjoy your-self and value your-self, it makes it a whole lot easier for others to do the same. Then you can watch in amazement as you start to attract more opportunities to be celebrated and rewarded for being exactly who you are, just as life intended.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Build a Healthy Self Concept. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

Aside of the glaringly obvious and well documented health benefits of sleep, this week I’ve been delving deeper into the dreamscape as a way to get me out of my own way; let me explain.

I am here, like each of you, for the joy of the journey and the growth that occurs as a result. As you might know, I’ve spent the last four years specifically focusing on foraging out the fragments of authentic me; the one that lies beneath the decades of experiences that entrenched beliefs I had no choice but to adopt in childhood.

The journey to me will no doubt unfold over my whole lifetime, which is the best part. Without anything to work on, where would the challenge be? But I do like to think of myself as a balloon ready to bob about in the air, contemplating life as one big smorgasbord, so I am on a mission to lighten the load as much as I can.

Having become more consciously aware of the thoughts and feelings within me, regularly meditating and contemplating, and focusing on wheedling out any recurring thought patterns that really aren’t serving me, I’ve come a long way. And yet there are still areas of my life that I know could get a lot lighter, for example, I still have chronic muscle tension in my right shoulder.

There are lots of ways to alleviate muscle tension, but I want to unlock it. And there are so many tools out there that can help, looking at the metaphysical causes of pain and tension or using Applied Kinesiology can provide some big clues, I can also get a deeper understanding from meditative or hypnotic states or using techniques such as Family Constellations, among many others I am sure.

But when I heard Charlie Morley talking about Lucid Dreaming recently, I was reminded about the untapped potential that lies within the time I’m already sleeping each night. In that unconscious state, that we spend around a third of our lives in, our mind is processing through all the interactions of the day. It is completely unhindered by any constraints we place upon our reality in waking life, so there is huge potential to get to the heart of any issues or ongoing themes.

I started keeping a dream diary. If you are a person who rarely remembers their dreams, it’s more about deliberately focusing on their recall. Dreams happen at the end of each sleep cycle throughout the night (typically we have four or five cycles per night, about 90-120 minutes long) at the end of which we are closest to a waking state.  

A friend of mine was asking how I record the dreams, since they happen when I’m asleep. I literally put some paper and a pen next to my bed each night and, having set an intention to capture some details, in a semi-conscious state at the end of the dream I remember to reach out and scribble (with my eyes closed) a brief summary before submerging back into the next cycle.

It then takes me about ten minutes each day to translate these spider-scribbles and record them. Some dreams I remember others I have zero recall of. 

There are a few different components to our dreams that are worth capturing: the plot/actions, feelings, symbols and word play. This helps in the translation. I usually use my intuition when it comes to interpreting them, the key is not to get anxious about it, some I might not be able to make any sense of, others are useful.

Some examples might be: if I was feeling panicked in a dream, I’d look at what was making me anxious in waking life; if there was a distinctive item, character or colour standing out (like the blue velvet shoes I saw in my dream last night), does it have any symbolic significance to me? What about double meanings, if I was being pursued, is there anything in life I’m currently pursuing? Or the overall theme of the dream might represent something I’m working through, like a loss or a failure.

Our dreams are like a virtual reality that depicts what is really going on with our inner life, they don’t lie to us the way we can lie to ourselves when we are awake. If I am unhappy about something, I can deny it and gloss over it when I’m going about my day, but the feelings will haunt me in my dreams.

My best tools for dream interpretation seem to be Google search plus intuition. For example, I keep having recurring dreams that feature lifts/elevators in them. If I Google “Meaning of lifts in dreams” it gives me a variety of options and I just scroll through a few until I find one that fits.

What I found most interesting when I started doing this was the reality check of my overall thought patterns. While awake, it’s easy to address the things that really trigger me and delve into those more, but when I’m asleep the more chronic – less observed – patterns emerge in the dreamscape.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the keywords I’d captured over a five-night period: striving, out of time, worried, being ignored, out of control, failure, unappreciated, outraged, pleasing others, survival, isolated, stressful, up against time, frustrated, harrowing, drowning, and can’t get a grip.

Wow. If I’d have done this exercise five years ago, this would have come as no surprise. Yet the same thought patterns are obviously still playing, albeit at less intensity. They are the white noise of the day, the thoughts in between the ones I’m more conscious of.

After a bit of contemplating and diving into what some of my favourite teachers (Teal Swan, Abraham Hicks and Eckhart Tolle) have to say about dreams, what stuck was something Teal said about being a person who ruminates on the negative aspects of my day.

This is true, I’m a perfectionist in many respects so I’m pretty hard on myself and always striving to do better and be better (particularly when it comes to parenting).

Her advice was to compensate by starting to focus consciously on the positive aspects of the day and how those felt. Now that I’ve started doing this, and writing them down each night, I can see the dreamscape changing from something that felt stressful to something that feels a lot better. As Charlie Morley points out, the more positive our dreamscape the more likely we are to wake up feeling refreshed and revitalized.

This brings me back to the lucid dreams, ones in which we are aware we are dreaming and may even change the dream outcomes; these are the ones we often remember when we wake up without even trying to.

It hadn’t occurred to me the huge opportunity to talk to myself in these dreams. If the dreamscape is our unconscious mind unraveling everything in our psychology and emotions, that means I can get stuck in and ask my unconscious self for answers to questions like “why is my shoulder chronically in pain?” and I’m more likely to get an accurate answer than in a waking state with all my bias and limitations.

The possibilities are endless.  Charlie gives an example of a guy who, while dreaming, became aware he was in a dream. So he asked one of the characters “who are you?” and she replied “your brain”.
He asked his brain about his health and the character said “you’re in perfect health but do us all a favour and stop smoking”. So he asked her to help by making him think of something else every time he felt like a cigarette and she said “Sure, that’s easy”. Since that day he has not smoked another cigarette.

In his book Lucid Dreaming Made Easy, which I’ve just started, Charlie goes on to teach how to have a lucid dream and how to interact with it. I was quite thrilled when his advice to do a reality check worked.

One of the techniques to check you are actually dreaming is to look at your hands then flip them over and back again. The dreaming brain doesn’t have the processing speed to reproduce an identical projection of your hand twice in a row, so you can get some funny variations.

So there I was, in my dream, speeding into a harbor on a boat and I looked down at my hands, then flipped them over and back and the fingers were all misshapen and blurry; I recall feeling pretty pleased in the dream that it worked but was having so much fun I forgot to ask my unconscious mind about my shoulder. Another sleep, another chance will arise.

With a third of our lives spent in slumber, there is so much opportunity to tap in and leverage the wisdom that takes its form in the strange and bizarre landscapes of our dreams, it just take focus. Take out a pad and pen and pop it on your nightstand now, give it a go and see what comes up. Let the dream realm point you in the direction of your best life.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy The Most Honest Feedback You Will Ever Get - Dream Messages. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

A friend reintroduced me to this word sovereignty recently, something I hadn’t really associated with much aside of the Royal Family as I was growing up. However she was using it in the context of our self-rule, our freedom to make our own choices.
I really like this because for too long I gave away my choices to others, making the necessary choices I had to make as a young child dependent on the adults around me for support and survival, instead of honoring the choices that felt right for me. This, as it does for most of us, become the way I operated in the world. Rules became something I automatically adhered to; deference to authority was a mark of respect.

Even those around me that I saw rebel in many ways, still carried far more deference to the power outside themselves than the power within than they recognised. Those early years of punishment and reward for desirable and undesirable behaviour leave their marks subconsciously on our sense of self acceptance.

As I commented to someone yesterday, we all swim in a soup of early trauma, whether consciously or unconsciously. There are very few people in this world who operate in clear line of sight and complete connection to their authentic selves. 

However, that decision to clear the clutter from the path, to regain sight of who we truly are, is completely within our control and it’s been my driving mission now for a good few years. When I birthed my children, I thought about what kind of parent I wanted to be and knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I passionately want them to be free to be who they are.

Note that passion does not translate to being free to run amok and do as they like. I’m talking about freedom of expression, and freedom to become consciously aware of the authentic self, rather than one swathed in the shroud of everyone else’s beliefs and desires.

That passion was something I recognised when I was listening to a podcast of Tami Simon interviewing Dr Tererai Trent last week. Dr Trent has an amazing story, having been born into an oppressive colonial society in rural Zimbabwe only a few years before I was born. The oppression that she endured in her circumstances separated us by more than just distance, but the passion she felt united us.

Tererai came from generations of women silenced because of their gender. Held back from even the most basic education, which was her greatest desire, she was instead married off young in exchange for a cow. Yet her remarkable story about how she chased (and claimed) her dream is among the most moving I have heard in a while.

In the process of pursuing her dreams there were desperate times, times when she wasn’t even able to feed her children, times when she wanted to give up and go home. When asked why she didn’t she said simply “I didn’t want to pass on the baton (of women silenced because of their gender) to my daughters.” It brought tears to my eyes.

Her journey and her baton are quite different to mine, but the burning desire for oppression to end is the same.My journey is also one of liberation, reclaiming the sovereignty of my true self and preserving that of my children, at least within their own home.  The baton is painful to hold onto because, having embarked on the journey to authenticity, I can attest that all the while the same neurons still fire as they learned to in childhood, so the same thought patterns play out.

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. We therefore feel a pull to react as our parent’s reacted “obey me or else”. But I will keep a hold of that baton until it turns to dust as each fragmented part of me becomes integrated.

It’s a challenge being confronted by children who have all these big feelings and are learning to express them in a world that is still controlled by the adults around them. Like last weekend my daughter was asked to sit up at the kitchen bench to eat her cornflakes. But it was the straw that broke the camel’s back after a tiring week at school, her reaction was nothing short of instant and unadulterated rage.

She screamed, roared and yelled so sincerely any passerby would be forgiven for thinking this was a life and death play for the sovereignty of her soul, which she obviously felt it was, rather than a request to sit at the kitchen bench while eating. Any attempt at saying anything was like adding fuel to the raging inferno, her rational mind gone as she looked around for things to destroy, including the source of her throttle, me.

As I stood there in that impossible moment between past and future, every fibre within me wanting to react strongly to this little girl’s fury, matching fire with fire, I did not. Instead I let out the energy of my frustration with a guttural scream and withdrew.In that instant, Dr Gabor Maté’s words were never so true. “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 frustration I inwardly wished I had never embarked on this journey with my kids, I wished the kids just did as they were darn well told. The thoughts that accompanied it were the same thoughts I heard my own mother express, a jabbering chunter about ungrateful kids who were acting maliciously.

Then Dr Tererai Trent came to my mind “I did not want to pass on the baton to my daughters” and gave me the strength and clarity I needed in that moment to not react to fire with fire, instead I held still and observed as that fire, bereft of fuel, burned out.My purpose in life could not be clearer. Just as Dr Trent is now building schools in Zimbabwe that allow all the local children to attend, giving girls access to education, I am on a mission to reclaim the sovereignty of my soul, and my children’s and help others do the same.

Regardless of the constraints we find upon us, allow them to fuel your passion towards your own authenticity,
the reclaiming of your true self. For it is that person who came to live in this world, and that person we need to create a more authentic world to live in.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Looking Back to See the Clues to Your Destiny and  Build a Healthy Self Concept. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“One of your life lessons is to move from your head to your heart” I was told recently. It’s interesting, for someone as empathic as I am, who feels so much, to hear truth in a statement like that. In essence, while highly sensitive to others’ feelings, I tend to intellectualize my own.

Conversely, when I was reading about Attention Deficit Disorder recently, I became aware for the first time that someone who is insensitive to the feelings of others can be highly sensitive in their own experiences. I think I’d sort of pegged people as either sensitive or insensitive, including myself, in a much more universal way. So this new lens opens up a fresh perspective.

That said, I’m not oblivious to the pattern I’ve played out in my own life many times, experiencing strong emotions in private while presenting a mask to the world, then talking about it with others only in retrospect once I’ve reached a place of calm or resilience.

While that isn’t necessarily unhealthy, especially in the context of the infinite intelligence and love I’ve discovered within these last few years, what is unhealthy is the role I assume in taking on blame for these emotions. I am guilty of looking at what is wrong with me or what I did that was wrong, instead of treating myself with the same compassion I’d show others.

Back in the days when I was much less conscious of my thoughts and feelings, if I experienced trauma like a relationship breakup, or a run-in with a colleague at work, I would just chew myself up with thoughts about it all. I’d experience feelings about the lack of fairness, I’d get angry and defensive and I’d negatively obsess about the whole thing for days, weeks months or even years.

As I’ve become more consciously aware of my thoughts and feelings, and of the way our world works in terms of attracting our own experiences and why we attract them, I’ve become kinder to myself in the sense of trusting it’s all part of a broader picture and that everything always works out. Yet I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m compassionate towards myself.

Compassion would require working more in my feelings, my heart, and I’m acutely aware that is not where I’m generally focused. I like to work my way out of any negative feelings as soon as I can, distract myself from them, rather than actually take the time to feel them; especially those that have really triggered old hurts.

But I am finding myself drawn towards the healing that occurs by integrating all parts of the self, including those parts I view negatively, and it is time for me to take a more compassionate approach. I understand that everything I feel is serving me in some way and I want to dive deeper into that. 
To be truthful, I tend to gloss over positive experiences too, playing it cool instead of milking the feelings for all they are worth.

That is why it’s important to me to have more experiences where I’m not in my head.  Have you ever noticed that you are driving or walking somewhere and you suddenly realise you have not been paying attention? That is an example of being distracted, lost in thoughts, being in our head.

What I’m talking about here though is about being present to my internal environment; specifically being with my feelings rather than my thoughts and noticing the relationships between the two.

Instead of getting into the narrative that goes along with certain feelings, and getting bogged down in the right and wrong of the here and now thoughts, I am more interested in gaining a new perspective on the feelings themselves. It might sound cliché, but everything that triggers us has its roots in our childhood somewhere. I can’t change the past, but rather than replaying an old tape, I can record a new one.

For example, probably like most of you, there are many times in my childhood I felt powerless. My life depended on adults in my home, at school and in the various other activities I was involved in, so I often had to do as I was told with or without question or debate. As I became an adult and got a job, the same thing applied.

Now that I am free of those things, I still have to contend with my own children’s school and that brings up a lot of those old feelings. Life continues to present situations that make me feel powerless, as I wrote about in Build a Healthy Self Concept, so I am diving into those feelings and starting to understand them and their origins from a more mature and empowered perspective.

I’m finding myself practicing more and more the process I wrote about in Change Unhealthy Reactions. Being with my feelings is a tricky thing to do without wanting to fix how I’m feeling. Yet I know if I can just sit with them, in next to no time at all, their intensity seems to lessen. I find it really is the case that the more I try to push something away the more it persists.

It’s not that I even want to observe the feelings, which also feels like a distraction, I want to feel them. I want to remember – rather than bury – where I first felt the feelings and gain a fresh perspective on the pattern that has played out since. I want to learn and to grow into a more whole human; that being what it’s all about of course.

Whether your journey is to get more into your heart and out your head like me, or vice versa, it’s all part of our expansion and growth. And as we are expanding and growing, so is our collective experience enriching and expanding in ways we couldn’t anticipate. That is what I want to experience while centred in my heart, what about you?

For those who are heart centred, you may want to read Why the Big Questions Are Important. If you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

Last year I was gifted an affirmation bracelet and was asked to select what it said. There were lots of great choices, but the one that struck a chord with me was “I Am Cherished”. I’d like to say right upfront, it was not because I felt that way; it was because I innately felt like this was something I wanted to learn how to feel.

Since I’m a person who doesn’t wear jewellery, I’ll admit it’s been packed away with all my sentimental things and so that affirmation has sat ignored. However, this week I’ve been doing some really interesting work on my life purpose and it’s surfaced again.

The work I was doing was based on the premise that in order for us to fully experience whatever our core intention was for coming into this life we must first experience its opposite. This resonates with me, ever since I was a child I have realised that I can’t really appreciate the good in life without having had bad experiences.

Further, since what we experience in this world is largely through our closest relationships, I was asked to look back on all the significant relationships I’d had in my life and tune into how they felt each time they had turned sour. I didn’t really need a facilitator to point out the commonality, I have long since recognised that the faces, names and circumstances might change, but life keeps presenting the same lessons until we learn them.

What I realised as I sat with each of these scenes in my head, was how abandoned I felt. It wasn’t that people had left me, though that did happen on occasion, it was more that it felt I became too difficult to deal with and they simply didn’t know what to say or how to be with me. I was an old head on young shoulders and, nowhere more so than in those intimate relationships, I would reveal my innermost thoughts about life.

I’ve always felt that no one really understood me. Things that seem so obvious to me – like the premises I’ve outlined above about our core intention and the role of relationships – just can’t be understood by people who are totally identified with the thoughts in their head and the reality around them, they don’t see the innate link between cause and effect.

As is normal in our society, conforming often feels safer than expressing who we truly are. Since I felt my ideas didn’t really conform to the norm, I had grown up expecting that the safest place to express who I truly was would be within my intimate relationships. Consequently, as these relationships broke down, the core feeling that kept repeating was of my needs and my thoughts being rejected and me being abandoned.

Beyond those relationships it was easy to reflect on how common and pervasive these feelings still are in many areas of my life. For example, if I’ve shared an innermost thought with a good friend and they don’t respond, that familiar feeling crops up, or if I express my ideas and expectations to an organisation and get a template response or no response, it all feels like I’m just too hard to deal with, they don’t have the words for things that just seem so obvious to me.

So over the years I had abandoned myself, retreated within, so much so I had no idea who I even was, it just felt that the inside and outside were not a match. I was careful about who I spoke to what about, all the while finding the shallow and irrational (to me) conversations dissatisfying and soul destroying.

Until four years ago that was pretty much my life’s story. Though, since you are now reading my innermost thoughts you can see I did make dramatic changes. I stopped denying myself at that point and decided to just go ahead and publish what I wanted to say into the wider world and see what happened.

Guess what? The walls didn’t fall in, nothing terrible happened, in fact, I’ve had some great feedback and helped quite a few people over that time. There are still those in my life that think I’m nuts, but those that matter haven’t stopped loving me as a result. That, however, doesn’t mean I feel cherished.

Nor can I ever feel that way unless I start to cherish myself. That is the bit that needs work.

It took a while to land on the words to feel cherished as my core intention for this life. For someone who has felt like my needs and thoughts have been rejected, abandoned and stonewalled all my life, getting into a place where I can believe these can be cherished almost seems out of reach.

However, I can quite clearly appreciate the logic. In order to fully experience feeling cherished, and in order to help others feel cherished, I had to firstly have an opposite and fully immersed experience of not feeling that way. So I decided I need to go deeper and do some healing work.

Up until this point in my life, I haven’t really taken many steps in the direction of healing past simply becoming aware of how many of my thoughts and beliefs have affected my life experiences. However, I have noticed that the echoes of their related feelings are still stuck in my body. I can’t change the things I have experienced, but I can change my perspective of them, and thus how I feel about them.

The principle behind this healing is to go back to the time when I first experienced the feelings that have become so familiar, feeling abandoned, and to look at the whole scene through fresh eyes. Honestly this wasn’t an easy exercise. I was thinking I’d land back in the hospital waiting room, alone at age three, while my dad was taken to see my mum and new baby brother; young children were not allowed inside the ward in those days.

Instead, in my self induced meditative state, where I’d set an intention to go back to the first experience of feeling that way, I found myself in the womb experiencing what I assume the fetal version of me experienced many years ago.

My heart kept dropping into my stomach as I was absorbing waves of panic. This was not labour, I got the sense it was likely mum panicking about my survival after a previous loss she’d had. The feeling was suffocating and it made me withdraw inside, and go completely still and quiet.

I just kept getting wave after wave and, by the time I felt it lessening, I was practically in the fetal position on the chair I’d chosen to sit in during my meditation. I got the sense that fetal me felt that if I could just absorb these waves of panic, it would help create calm around me. I had shut off and retreated inwards, feeling alone and just focused on survival.

Of course, as an adult now observing this, there was a compulsion to want to sooth fetal me. I was wondering what would have helped in that situation. I felt myself fending off outside help, instead drawing in light with each heartbeat, filling up from the inside – it pumped me up like a balloon; so much so that adult me was now sitting up in the chair again. The calm and peace was a relief. I was still aware of the waves of panic, but I was no longer absorbing them.

Instead it felt like I was anchored inside, calling on my inner resources to fill me up and deflect (rather than absorb) what was coming at me. As I I felt that sense of calm and peace within I realized that would have radiated out towards mum and eased her panic. It changed the feeling of the whole scene. By absorbing the panic previously, going quiet and still, it would have further perpetuated her panic. However, when what is being reflected back is calm and peace, it would have calmed things down a whole lot quicker.

In my primitive and relatively helpless form all those years ago, I had inadvertently cut myself off from the source of my own power by absorbing someone else’s energy rather than reflecting it back to them. This is something I’ve learned how to do recently, as I wrote about in Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling.

By sensing this scene, in what is not even a conscious memory, and by changing the feeling at the root, it changes the way I feel about the things that have happened in my life that led to me feeling abandoned; they each take on a new light. This means that I am less likely to attract situations in which I feel abandoned, because I now no longer abandon myself.

In fact, as I experienced breathing in light, I felt that I was breathing in the very essence of who I am. In that moment, I remembered just how cherished we all are, and how cherished this experience called life is. I didn’t mentally note any of it, I just felt it.

To cherish is defined as protecting and caring for someone or something lovingly. As I wrote in Embrace Your Sensitivity Rather than Have to Protect Yourself from the World, protection isn’t a word that conjures the right images for me. Instead I see it as operating from a strong centre core, the inner knowing and honouring of my true self rather than defense or armor.

But fundamentally, what I take from my experience is the complete contrast between absorbing someone’s negative energy and then amplifying it back to them, a highly toxic feeling, versus the negative energy instead being deflected in the process of cherishing myself; this allows the possibility for love to reverberate instead.

To feel cherished, you first have to cherish yourself. Your thoughts, your feelings, your creative expression are all important, vital to your life experience and to the broader evolution of life here on Earth. Is it time for you to care for yourself as lovingly as you care for others?

If you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

Novelist Mary H K Choi writes in Emergency Contact “Penny believed with her whole heart that there were moments - crucial instances - that defined who someone was going to be. There were clues or signs, and you didn't want to miss them.” 

In my search for purpose, I notice there are many signs that give me insights when I choose to see them.

I was at a parent education talk last week about the changes kids go through in their ninth or tenth year. It’s a significant time in child development terms, a big step into the world of critical enquiry and independence, leaving the realm of imagination behind and being more concerned with their sense of I.

In the course of the talk, Heinrich Schliemann (a pioneer in the field of archaeology in the 1800’s) was mentioned in relation to his discovery of Troy. This had been an obsession of his since the age of nine. In the book Encountering the Self: Transformation and Destiny in the Ninth Year, Hermann Koepke talks of Schliemann as an example (among many others) of how a fateful encounter at that crucial age defines a destiny.

This got me intrigued as – when asked what we remembered about our own childhoods at that age - I drew a blank. I have many memories that span the range of those early school years, but I’d struggle to place them in any age order and nothing immediately sprang to mind as significant.

Yet a few days later, as I was driving somewhere, suddenly a memory popped into my head. It was me emphatically stating to my mum that my aunt was not allowed to tell me what to do (I’m guessing she obviously had), stipulating only my parents were allowed to do that. While I clearly recognised my dependence on them for survival at that age, I also knew I was not giving them a lifetime pass.

Mum used to paint a picture of my toddler years defined by the statement “I will do it my own self”. Independence, more accurately freedom, was of innate importance. So I suspect it is no coincidence that almost forty years on I’m writing about liberating the true self from the shroud of values and beliefs I’d come to see as my own after having to don them for so many years.

Neither is it coincidence that I was attracted to a fiercely self oriented and stubborn partner, I had a lot of learning to do on the topic of pleasing others and self worth. I suspect that it is also no coincidence that both our children hold tightly to the independence and freedom that is their heritage and birthright.
It makes life interesting as a parent as I cannot allow them complete freedom within our society or our family unit. To function out in the world they have to be able to respect other people’s boundaries; to take a no. So one of my greatest challenges is walking that line between having a few carefully selected boundaries, the absolutes, while also allowing them to feel into their freedom as often as possible.

What makes it such a challenge is society’s little advocate in my head, the critical voice I heard through the years of rigid control that characterized the typical childhood of my time and place. The wrangle between that voice (have you ever caught yourself sounding just like your parents?) and the awareness of my true inner voice, the one that was always there but spent years being snuffled (have you ever listened to that one? Do you know how to?), results in quite divergent behaviour at times.

I’ve realised my inner critic predominantly offers two voices, one is judgment, the other takes my empathic awareness and turns it against me. It makes judgments of people and situations all the time, the same judgments I heard over and over as I was growing up: the rights and wrongs of the world, the way things should be.  This voice makes me feel angry. Of course my inner voice makes no such judgments and knows there is no right or wrong, only what is right for me right and right for you in any given moment of time.

The other voice is always making me aware of how others feel often before I’ve even figured out how I feel; it makes me think it’s the right thing to do to put other people first. In short, my inner critic makes me feel guilty about putting my own needs first and prefers that I just appear helpful to others rather than rock the boat. 

A friend was asking me whether the reason I rewrite and rewrite emails before pressing send (in response to a person with a particular authority, or a company or other organisation) is because I want to avoid upsetting people. Yes, sort of.

Reshaping my words though is more about my underlying desire to be heard. I know if I run with the critical voice in my head, the one that is angry or feels guilty, then the words create harm, so I look to reshape them into something that will inspire and uplift towards the solution I seek.

Writing is where I tend to get it right; it's a focused form of thought. Opening my mouth to talk, however, is a bit of a gamble. Like being mama in the house at the end of the day when everyone is tired, well, that's the part that needs filtered.

I know the origins of that voice were about keeping me out of trouble, helping me fit in; in short it was – in its intention - about protecting me and keeping me from harm. But the voice needs an upgrade, because the reality is I was born with my own inner voice and it has lots to say, lots that needs to be heard.

Now that I have found my inner voice, I recognise the clues to my destiny much more easily. To hear it, I have made room to listen. I’ve practiced a daily meditation over a number of years now, and I take regular time out in nature to contemplate and hear what I have to say.

What about you? Can you hear your inner voice? What clues does it provide when looking back? What are the clues to your destiny?

​If enjoyed this you might enjoy What You Give Your Attention to Is Your Greatest Contribution, Have Fun Not Knowing What You Want to Offer the World and Finding Your Purpose – the Magic of Those Who Believe in You. If would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

That is why we are here, I believe, in this life. Not to do stuff that holds no meaning, and to do more, and still more. It’s about exploring and contributing our ideas, that is what adds to this world… read more

Published in Having Time

I was talking to someone last week about the funerals they have attended, and how they often feel it’s quite sad listening to a eulogy that simply says something along the lines of “he loved his family, worked hard and liked to go bowling with his friends.” I guess they were contemplating their own mortality and contribution.

We are more than the sum of our actions of course, who we are lives on in others. But I understand what they were meaning. What do we contribute to Earth, to humankind, while we are here? That will depend on where our attention has been focused.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton once said “I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.” This reminds me of Eckhart Tolle talking about the term Mind-ful-ness, and how it implies of the opposite of its intent.

But I do agree that if I let my mind take the driving seat in my life, my greatest contribution would likely be a huge amount of misplaced worry about many things past, present and future and I would associate effort with achievement.

Instead I’ve become aware of what is going on in my mind, I’ve become the observer as Mr Tolle says. Over time, and with increasing awareness, I’ve made room for another part of me in the driving seat, a part of me that seems to understand who I really am a lot better than my mind.

I could call that part the soul, spirit, inner voice, inner knowing or intuition. But it’s a part of me that knows - no matter what has happened, is happening or will happen in future – everything is always working out for me.

Even in the worst of times, it is always pointing me in the direction of my best life. For example, when relationships have ended, or people have been ill or died, or jobs have been made redundant. Out of everything that has ever happened in my life, I can point to how those things that have made me stronger, happier, and more authentic about what I want in life and who I am.

That inner voice takes any bad or good feelings that accompany the thoughts in my mind, and it uses them as fuel to attempt to move forwards. Pain and joy, they are two sides of the same coin.

So rather than wait for hindsight to learn what good has come out of the things that feel bad, I take comfort in knowing something will. Instead of being completely engulfed by the emotions, rallying against the feeling that life is in some way unfair, there is a part of me that is simply interested in what is arising out of each situation.

I’ve become curious. I’ve sought out the observations of those who have been observers before me, who have seen the patterns in human suffering – both physical and emotional – and taken note of what they mean. I’ve tested their observations against that inner part of me who often seems to rally in agreement.

“That resonates” I say when I feel like I’ve hit upon a truth.

It’s one thing to become aware of our thoughts, it is another to use them and shape them to propel us in the direction of our best life. That step is about tapping into the ideas we have, the things that occur to us that can be done differently, better, in a more fun way.

An idea is the start of a creation, an expansion of who we are and what we have discovered or achieved. It is evolution, it is growth, and it is legacy and contribution.

We often shrink away from our ideas, they remain a fleeting thought hanging out in the ether somewhere awaiting someone to take a hold of them with enough drive and conviction so as to bring them to life.

I’m not just talking about ideas like inventing something, it might just be creative ideas on planting or cooking, or which clothes go with what. We all have ideas, but do you have conviction in your ideas? Enough to give them your attention often, and to share them with the world (or at least one other person)?

Or do you listen to the voice in your head that tells you that you are not good enough, that your idea won’t be good enough or of interest to anyone?

I think that is a voice that comes from childhood. I’ve watched (and experienced) the way we come into society. Babies and young children are generally treated as empty vessels that require filling. Yet if you spend any time with a youngster you will know that is not true.

But when the people we love and depend on keep giving us messages about them knowing better, it takes a toll in the form of our self esteem. The voices of doubt in our head are just echoes of this, and because they are there we prove to ourselves again and again that the voice is right.

Observe that voice, is it relevant? Or are there things you’ve actually been successful at in your life? Perhaps you are worth something after all? Perhaps there is no maybe about it, perhaps if you were born then you have a contribution to make?

It might be a small contribution, like the difference you make in the life of a child.

My grandad was a straight up kind of a guy; kind, helpful and honest. He helped a lot of people, especially young lads getting into soccer as he was a scout and loved the game. My dad also embodied those characteristics and has helped a lot of people to manage other people with integrity and kindness in the workplace. Today my nephew sites him as the person he admires the most in his life,so no doubt he will emulate those traits and help more people through his life.

Really none of this is a small contribution.

As I observed my own thoughts and doubts about putting my writing out into the world, I realised it didn’t matter whether some people agreed or disagreed, it’s all just an opinion; what matters is if it helps one person to make a difference for the better in their life.

So I pay attention to my life, to what happens in it, what I think and feel about it, I observe and I share with others. I learn and grow and I share this with others too.

Whether you deliberately focus your attention or not, whatever you are paying attention to will be your greatest contribution. So you may as well make it something positive, and something you enjoy. Each of us has something to contribute, something that comes naturally, that we enjoy being or doing. Imagine our world full of people deliberately focusing their attention on those things, how cool would that be?

If you feel stuck in the weeds and would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was thinking about a website I’d seen that I really liked; it was essentially someone offering coaching. The vibe was great; the whole way the service had been pitched used a very authentic, easy style. My first thought was “I’d like to adopt that vibe when I finally figure out what I have to offer the world.”

When I think back to the times in my life I had to pull together a resume, I had to dig deep. I didn’t recognise my true talents. It took a long time to figure out who I really am, not because that was particularly hard, I just hadn’t been focused on it. I’d been so absorbed in doing my best at everything I had no idea where my natural gifts lay.

It’s been a joy to since explore and uncover who I am, and look at myself in different ways.

So as I contemplated this question about what I have to offer the world, I realised it’s not what we have to offer that is important, it’s what we want to offer that is the question. When I think back to those resumes I’ve written in my life, I remember how tempting it was to include each and every marketable success; yet there were some of those I had no wish to repeat.

Like the time I led a very hands-on project for months, developing a customer response and tracking system, requiring many bespoke technological changes to the off-the-shelf product (which the company then included as new features in their offering to others). While the project was successful, it was grueling, and I had no wish to repeat it.

After so many years of trying to do my best at everything, now I appreciate - while I have some great things to offer - there are also many other things others can do more easily and they enjoy them. Leading a technological project would certainly not feature on my list.

So I then wondered, “What would I like to offer?” I know I feel compelled to help people, I’m drawn to the challenge of finding some words that might inspire someone to move forwards when they are feeling stuck. But what I want to offer in relation to that, changes often; sometimes it’s just sharing my perspective through a conversation or an article, sometimes it’s more involved.

I realised I’m just not ready to land on any answers yet, I don’t want to be pinned down; I’m enjoying exploring, browsing and playing, I want to keep it fluid. And I know that is okay, I’m having fun. I might be ready to land in a day, a month or a year – it might not be for several more years (or ever) – it doesn’t matter.

I used to get frustrated, wondering “where is this all taking me?” In fact, I’d feel that I needed to know exactly where I was going. The big realization about what I would like to offer the world is that I’m genuinely feeling comfortable not knowing right now; the answer can change on a daily basis. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I’m more than just comfortable, I’m actually excited about all future possibilities.

When I was young my gran often used the phrase “what’s for you won’t go by you”, while I always believed that in the big scheme of things this was true, I didn’t trust in it day to day. Finally though I’ve got the message, just go with the flow and enjoy it all.

I know life has this amazing habit of unfolding in ways I just couldn’t have planned or even imagined. When I look back at the times in my life where I’ve felt stuck: in relationships, jobs, places, or situations; it all seems like such a short ride in hindsight.

Instead of worrying about where life might lead me, I decided to live life more in the moment. Really, with the summer school holidays there was no choice. I’ve been throwing myself into whatever I am doing and enjoying things. The more I do that, the happier I’ve been and the more I seem inclined to trust things will work out as they always do.

I’m not saying I won’t face challenges, but since those are the very things that have always led me to better places in my life I just need to remember that when they arise, challenges are a gift.

What matters is I’m enjoying the ride and because I know what I enjoy and what I’m good at, and I get to practice it in many different guises as I go. Even if I do land on something in particular I want to offer the world, it will no doubt evolve again in search of more personal growth, and that will be okay too.

Life feels permanent but it’s an illusion. Everything from our relationships and our jobs, to our minds and bodies, it’s all temporary. Life moves on and it takes us with it, giving us opportunities to change, to drown, to thrive, to transition from one to the next. The key is being awake enough to our own life to see the opportunities when they arise.

So forget about what you want to offer the world, just have fun doing whatever you are interested in and enjoy each and every day as it comes.
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If you enjoyed this you might also enjoy Finding Your Purpose – the Magic of Those Who Believe in You. If you feel stuck in the weeds and would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

If someone said to you that over-effort was indoctrinated in you and, over time, it’s confiscated your sense of joy, how does that make you feel?

For many of us, having being brought up in societies that value productivity and extrovert behaviours, it’s a statement of truth. Certainly it is for me, although I hadn’t thought about it in terms of my sense of joy; it makes sense, but seems sad.

The point is amplified when I think in terms of lining up with my life purpose and all the things I really want in my future. I am aware over-effort creates a stressed, striving version of me, whereas going with the flow creates a more relaxed version. I also know from experience I am more likely to notice the little serendipities that connect the dots to my best life when I am in a relaxed, easier frame of mind.

Therefore, I know ease is my aim. Yet it kind of freaks me out, I’m not confident in my ability to just relax these days.

I can remember days long past on the beach during summer holidays with nothing to do but swim, go for walks and lounge in the sun. So I know it’s possible for me to switch off.

Yet, with two young kids in the picture, the aforementioned indoctrination into over-effort and my attentive nature, I know achieving a state of ease will take focus and commitment. I can feel the adrenaline coursing through my system and I can visualize the over-efforting me tapping my proverbial fingers wanting to use it.

A friend of mine had her second accident within the space of a week, running around town trying to get things done while her kids were being looked after elsewhere. I can relate, I always have a reserve list of things I’d like to get done if the kids are otherwise occupied. Often though, less is more.

Yesterday was a classic example of over-effort. With the kids at home and wrapped up in their own world happily occupied, instead of just being I was busy doing. There were groceries to put away, two loads of washing to do and invoices for my partner’s business; just the usual day to day stuff. But I also wanted to get the pool up for the rest of the summer months.

When it came time to cook dinner, I could hardly stand in the kitchen as my back kept going into spasms and my head was throbbing; I’d totally overdone things. Then, after supper, we took the kids for a drive to a nearby neighbourhod where a whole street has gone out of their way to decorate the gardens and houses for the festive season.

While it was exciting for the kids, it was busy and noisy, and the flashing lights did nothing to help that headache I’d developed. Instead of ease I seemed to have opted for every opposite choice I could have possibly made.

Today I resolved to do better and, although I had the linen cupboard in my sights for a clean up, I opted to do something for myself instead. At first I did my daily meditation, and fell asleep. Then, as I scanned through some of the enlightening and uplifting videos I like to watch, after a while that all felt like too much effort as well; so I just closed my eyes and fell asleep again.

The kids are on holiday for the whole summer. When they are at school I usually think of that as my moments of solitude which I use for contemplation, personal growth and writing. When they are at home, because they need my attention, I think of that as the time I catch up on projects around the house or garden while they play. This summer I think I’ll just cast aside my M.O. and play too.

I created a bubble around this first week with no plans so the kids can defrag, but now I know I desperately need to do that too. The rest of the holidays are more social, with several sets of visitors coming and two short trips in the pipeline, all quite fun in light of the freedom from the binds of our usual routine.

So really it’s the perfect time to embrace that inner child of mine and learn what ease feels like again; more importantly, to rediscover a sense of joy. I’ve realised that in running around being busy, I could actually miss the main event – my best life, the one I came to live.

Can you imagine your world with more ease and joy in it? What about the people around you?

So let’s do less and be more, let’s ease in 2019 together.

​If you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Life is like a mirror, it keeps reflecting back to me what I need to see about myself in order to grow and keep on purpose.

Now what I have just said in that one sentence took me decades to learn. For years, if I was upset with someone then it was about something they were doing to me. Now I know it’s reflecting back something I’m doing to myself.

My whole life I have sought my purpose, only to realise the whole time I’ve been totally on purpose. Life is unfolding the way it should; I’ve learned the lessons I needed to learn to grow to this point. There was even a time when I wondered whether having kids was my purpose because I wanted them so instinctively and so much.

Prior to having kids, my partner and I liked to squeeze every last minute out of each day. There were always things to be done around the house, or the garden, there were places to visit and people to catch up with. On holiday we wanted to make the most of each destination. When working we are both fully focused, quite high energy people.

Being productive has been drummed into us both in our lives. It’s been about making the most of life out there but that has come at the cost of our inner lives.

I, at least, knew I had an inner life. I was a letter-writer and journal writer when I was younger, and I used to (and still do) have best friends that I’d share my deepest thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams with. But as I grew up and took on the responsibilities of a home, career and family, that time for inner digestion, observation and insight became less and less.

Bringing kids into the world helped take me back to my own starting point, the place before I began being marinated in the juices of our society; indoctrinated into a normal life (by western society’s standards), the busy life. 

In her first couple of years my eldest daughter would wake up through the night wanting fed, wanting the mummy time she missed during the day while I was working. By the time she was three she was far more vocal and demonstrative about that, each evening turning into a nightmare of meltdowns and anxiety.

I had a job that carried a high level of responsibility, it was normal to be responding to emails at ten o’clock at night and ordering groceries online in between emails while travelling to work. I used to wake up at two or three in the morning as my brain would thaw and I’d remember something I was supposed to do or I’d think of a solution to an issue and get up and make lists of more things to do to keep the wheels turning.

Meanwhile I could be in a meeting at work and suddenly realise my daughter’s dummy was stuck down the front of my bra, or mentally be adding something to the mummy list of things I needed to buy or do for my daughter. Life was all out there. My engagement with the outer world was so high it left zero time for inner reflection.

Watching my daughter’s distraught behaviour each night, I heard the call loudly and clearly. It wasn’t about managing her behaviour, her behaviour was mirroring exactly how I felt on the inside.

So stepping out of the corporate arena and into the role of ,first, kindergarten and now school mum has also been enlightening. Having moved to a new area, knowing we were on this journey through kindergarten and school together with many other families, we determined to make an effort to get to know people.

After-school playdates and activities, while loved by my kids, were also their undoing. It was all too much. I had to pull the car over one day on the way out of the school because my daughter was having a horrific meltdown in the back and had unbuckled herself and was climbing out the vehicle while it was moving, absolutely beside herself. After that, we withdrew from anything extracurricular.

It’s been hard to look in that mirror. The mirror of a person who loves engaging with the world in so many ways, but simply needs a greater balance between that and time to absorb it all; digest, regurgitate, learn and grow.

I sometimes feel sad for my children because I have no desire or capacity to home school, so the only alternative is to put them into the education system. By their nature, systems restrict freedom, they do not allow for individuals going with their own flow.

And because school hours take my kids to the outer edge of their capacity to have their attention out there, I become the mean mummy who says no to much desired play dates and other things they’d like to explore.

So I’ve had to make that stand for their inner life, because the evidence that it is needed is obvious.

Now and again we test the waters and I agree to let one of them attend a play date, event or activity, or agree to look after another child during their usual downtime. Each time I see the meltdowns, the disrupted sleeping patterns for days on end, the sniping and lack of patience, and it reminds me that less is more.

We are on the right track by continuing to disengage in what others might think of as normal levels of activities, balance is required.

The temptation to do more is always there, yet it’s in just being more that the answer lies.

This is what my children have taught me. When I make the time to tune into my inner self, to let inspiration arise, to recognise and take advantage of the serendipities, things go more smoothly, and we expand and grow in a gentler way.

The more that we seek in the doing, comes so much more easily in the being.

As my eldest child is growing, I am seeing her anxieties lessen and her confidence grow; I see more of the beaming, thoughtful child who happily skips along. This too is a mirror.

I was in the classroom helping with some handcraft a while back and one of my daughter’s school friends asked whether she could have a play date on a school day. My daughter just shrugged and said, “Mm, nah, too tired, we do play dates in the holidays”.

Now I accept we are all quite different. Some of us need more inner reflection time versus social engagement, for others it’s tipped the other way. But I do know western society, among others, is currently wired to keep our attention outward.

I now know my purpose, thanks to my kids, it is about bringing conscious awareness into my life, and therefore (by default) onto Earth. The reason I know this is because, due to the necessary periods of downtime my kids needed, I am now consciously aware of my inner world; my thoughts, feelings, intuition and connection to all other things.

But, as I’ve said, that didn’t happen overnight, it’s been a journey that got sharply honed in its focus from the moment I had kids and got pushed to breaking point. I wished I had been able to see what is now so clear without having to be pushed so far, but when we are being slowly cooked we don’t always realise it.

So ask yourself, what is my life mirroring to me? Take some time this holiday season to reflect and hear your inner voice; that is what will help lead you to your best life.

​If you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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I am not alone, I am the gift my ancestors gave to the world and, as such, I pick up the baton. If there are challenges to be overcome, I will overcome them. If there are old hurts to be healed, I will heal them. If there are lessons yet to be learned, I will learn them. If there are talents and gifts I have inherited, I will use them; I am the very extension of all who came before…

While I don’t know each of my ancestors’ individual stories, I feel them through my own experiences. There are some things that hurt more than others, some things that are more joyful than others, each perhaps on a similar path travelled by another part of me in a time gone by.

When the first physical trace of me appeared back towards the end of 1945, as an egg in the fetal version of my mum (who was developing in her own mother’s womb at the time), this physical piece of who I am was carrying a lot of emotional data about my maternal lineage.

Just as I said in Womanhood – A Story of Our Time, the emotions we feel are carried in each of the cells within our body, positive emotions fuel our wellbeing and negative emotions create dis-ease and disruption to our biological makeup if not dealt with in a healthy way.

So when that seed of who I am physically was joined with the rest of the genetic DNA required for me to take my human form - the successful one-in-a-(250) million sperm - almost twenty seven years later, it is easy to see that who I am is a veritable buffet of everything from my entire ancestral make up to my own life experiences.

Despite not knowing the specific stories of the vast majority of the people in my lineage, it is easy for me to imagine these and how they might affect my life now as I enjoy reading historical time-slip novels. These have two or more interconnected stories across varying timelines where the main character gets taken on a voyage of discovery that dives into challenges they are facing in the present day.

This brings to life the stories of the past and how they intertwine with the present. While fictional, there is no doubt they were almost certainly, at some point, bits of someone’s story. These stories are the kinds of stories we all descend from and they echo down the generations and affect us in ways we often sense but don’t fully understand.

I do know, though, that all my grandparents had experience of the Second World War; with one set of grandparents also alive during the First World War. Having heard some of the real stories, been to museums and specific battle sites, and having read many fictional stories that bring to life the details of that time, I can see how the things that affected their lives then ran through the veins of my parents in their respective upbringings and then got passed on to me.

It was a time when feelings were heavily suppressed and having basic rations was something to be grateful for. There was a sense of lack, not abundance, yet gratitude for the little that was had. There was so much trauma at that time, and yet there was also beauty, many of our ideas are shaped even today by the experiences our ancestors had throughout that time not so long ago in our history.

I have a very definite sense that - despite life being very different for my grandparents then - they were all real people with wants, desires, hurts and tragedies.

Last year, before my mum died, she filled me in on parts of her own mother’s story. There was a lot of pain that continued on in mum, showing up as resentment towards others in her lineage for being the perpetrator or being too passive. Her own childhood experiences in that environment also inevitably shaped her values and beliefs about the world and, thus, her life experiences and the way I was raised.

Talking to another elderly member of my family about her childhood recently, I uncovered old hurts there too; events that happened over seventy years ago still fresh in her mind. I asked whether she had ever reconciled her issues, but they had never spoken about them, a common feature.

The things that happen to us early in our lives we sort of chalk up as history in our heads, feeling foolish to even mention or care about them. Yet they can weigh upon our hearts for eternity, shaping the very fabric of who we are and how we allow ourselves to interact with the world.

When we were asked to sink into our maternal and paternal lineage during a meditative part of a Family Constellations session I attended this week, facilitated by a good friend, the joy on my gran’s face as she birthed my father popped into my imagination. Perhaps she intuited her own father’s creativity (a father she hadn’t ever known) in the eyes of her youngest son, perhaps not, but her joy was evident in her creation.

I also imagined the same at the birth of my gran on the maternal side. The stoic great grandmother of the stories I had heard was somewhat softened by the birth of her baby girl that was named Joy. It was quite beautiful.

That we are each the gift that our ancestors gave the world was one of the many take outs I had from that session. When I mentioned what I was writing about to my friend she added “You embody all that was and all that is, you are your ancestors’ prayer for all that could be.”

That is quite something isn’t it? Here we are, the leading edge of all that has been, with opportunities to be aware of ourselves and love ourselves as never before. And if that is all each of us do, imagine what life would be like? What an amazing gift to the world.

If you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog