​Image by Bhikku Amitha from Pixabay 

“Keep your feet on the fresh carpet of the earth, but raise your mind to the windows of the universe.” These were the words written from father to adopted daughter as his parting words in a novel I’m reading, and they really resonate with my soul.

This immediately reminded me of the analogy my homeopath uses when describing my constitution as “a tethered balloon that needs to regularly bob around in the heavens”. Nothing feels truer at the moment with the kids on school holidays; my soul wants me to take regular helicopter rides.

Yet being with people constantly, especially children I’m responsible for, often keeps my attention tethered in a way that makes me feel cut off from that broader perspective.

This heavy feeling was how I used to feel when I was in an office all day, with my attention tethered to people or a screen. But before I had children I could come home and take a big out-breath. With children there are too few out breaths, the tether to my attention seems all pervasive.

Just last week one of my kids was at her grandparents’ house and I dropped the other at a friends’ house for a play. This allowed me the brief time I needed to go and shake off the heavy feeling while swimming up and down the lane at a local pool for a half hour, my mind was free to wander.  

Literally, doing backstroke for some of the time, my mind could follow my eyes to the windows of the physical universe and its vastness, and then the fifteen minutes I had to meditate at home alone before collecting my daughter allowed me the time I needed to bring my awareness to the windows of the universe within.

I felt lighter, more connected and fuelled with energy.

It reminds me of a quote by Khalil Gibran “But let there be spaces in your togetherness. And let the winds of the heavens dance between you”.

I’m learning as I move through my journey to ask for what I need, and these micro breaks from being the person who is responsible for everyone in the moment is as necessary as breathing. But how I garner the support for that is also an interesting journey.

As a recovering people pleaser I have a pattern of keeping going, like a trouper, and resenting the heck of it while secretly harboring a hope that someone will notice how dreadful I feel and offer to help. If that doesn’t happen I eventually address my needs by getting angry (with my partner mainly); not really the healthiest way to assert my needs.

There is also a lot of guilt that comes with this particular scenario for me. It feels as if there is an assumption that, because I am a mother and I wanted children, I will enjoy motherhood. Well, I quickly discovered that is not the case, after all the trials and tribulations of just getting to the point of having a family, here it is and I do not enjoy all aspects of motherhood.

Like most parents I wouldn’t change it, because there are so many wonderful aspects to being a parent too. But, gosh, it is relentless and – I find – often tedious. Unlike the days where we (as humans) lived in communities and could spread the load somewhat across the extended family, the exclusion in which we live prohibits this on a day to day basis.

This makes it vital for me to organize micro breaks and honour my own needs. It is so intense that, if I don’t, I start to turn in on myself and get ill. That is why I think parenthood is an excellent personal development boot camp if I am paying attention to the areas I need to develop.

Of course, what happened in generations past, is we (the former kids) had to comply in order to fit in with the adult’s around us, hence I now have really bad ingrained habits, like being a people pleaser, that need addressed if I am to live my best life.

It seems to me all us adults are, to varying extents, a bunch of inwardly-injured kids walking around in adult bodies, which is what also makes the whole process of evolving past this even more fascinating (and difficult terrain). As I decide to step into awareness of my own bad habits and strive for healthier responses, I’m aware of the varying patterns in others too.

It often makes me think how, if we can evolve past this perpetual cycle of repression, by becoming more attuned to ourselves and others, won’t this world be an amazing place to live?

Evolving past it is the key, I have to keep my eye on the prize. If I continually sit here observing these same patterns I’m just keeping my energy attuned to what is, rather than could be. Instead I have to entrain my energy to that of the solution I’m seeking.

Which brings me back to the beautiful quote that resonated within me to keep my feet on the fresh carpet of the earth, but raise my mind to the windows of the universe. The real key is to give myself enough space to raise my mind to that place, and I now know what that takes for me to do that regularly.

​What does it take for you to raise your mind to the windows of the universe, and are you willing to gift that to yourself, to our world, on a regular basis?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Be at Ease With the World Around You and  I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I took my daughter and her friend to see a movie this week whose theme was Our Differences Make Us Stronger. I truly believe that our differences do make us stronger when they are embraced. This applies equally to my own differences as it does to that of others.

As I have listened to podcasts with people talking about diversifying our social circles in order to expand our hearts and minds it rings true. The point is well made that, if I interact with people only like me, I have a limited view of the world.

I also have come to understand that I only attract those on the same vibrational wavelength as me. And it has really opened my eyes these last few years, as I have shared my angst and insights on the journey to me, those of you who resonate with the vibe of my own life lessons come in an astonishingly wide range of forms and circumstances.

It seems to me that many of our similarities and differences are those that can only be seen and felt by the heart.

Interacting with people I don’t know is easier though, particularly if we have been drawn together through mutual trials and tribulations. Knowing more about someone seems to create more barriers, as per the old saying familiarity breeds contempt; more experience of someone (including myself) can make me so aware of my own or their faults I become scornful.

I remember hearing a story recalled from Jerry Hicks about his wife Esther, watching her having the most marvelous fun with another passenger at the airport trying to retrieve their luggage. He was chuckling to himself thinking “if only they each knew who the other was, the fun would soon turn sour.”  As I recall the man was a preacher of some sort and, when his adverts played, it would impel Esther to stand up and shout at the television set in indignation.

But until I can embrace my own differences and preferences, be relaxed enough to communicate them in a clear and calm way, I find it is hard to feel safe listening to other points of view; I often have this unspoken sense that my listening will indicate a tacit acceptance of their views as my own and am preparing for the attack on mine if I express them.

For the longest time I have had a quote from Stephen Covey displayed on my bookcase Most people do not listen with the intent to understand. Most people listen with the intent to reply. For me this is because I struggled growing up with my own differences and didn’t feel accepted.

Despite good intent to listen, I still seem to do far too much talking. With awareness, I have known it is because I don’t want anyone to attempt to steer me away from my truth, I often jump in and state my views to erect a barrier of protection; a throwback to my childhood when I was always told what I should be thinking, feeling or doing.

As I read Mona Miller’s words this week about conflict and confusion, in her book Invisible Warfare, that entanglement began to make more sense. She says “Most of our educational systems are set up to train us to provide answers, not to question. Many times these answers are created to please someone else, so we lose the capability to check-in with ourselves to see what we actually think or feel about the information we are getting.”

I’m finding it is particularly tricky at this point in my journey where I’m learning to heal my personal boundaries. With decades of defensive wiring, just getting a clear view of any particular scenario is oftentimes a challenge. However is it one steering me towards a win-win.

Certainly I have been challenged by a couple of conversations with people close to me this week. With all the awareness I could muster I traversed both conversations with trepidation and determination to honour my own boundaries while respecting theirs, for both these people are dear to me in their separate ways. 

What came up for me was the question of how I can listen, understand and respond to someone when their truth doesn’t resonate with my own and I feel, because of the way they are expressing it, I need to go into defence, attack or hiding.

This is where Mona’s writing on conflict and confusion helped clarify “whether someone is lying (it may be to you or to themselves) or telling the truth doesn’t matter. Lies can help you see the truth as you move towards understanding.” She explains “We are trained to either be know-it-alls or stupid; people who speak in statements or not at all. Yet a wise person knows there is always more to learn and this creates confusion and conflict.”

When I feel a twist in my gut as someone interacts with me, that is a signal from my body to let me know the views or desires they are expressing are not aligned with my own. This triggers the flight or fight centre (as per the childhood wiring) and my rational brain shuts down. Unless I can catch myself in a brief moment of awareness, the best I can manage is “boundaries… must defend”.

Yet whether someone is trying to persuade me to their view or not is no longer, in my adult life, an actual problem or danger to me in any way. As a good friend reminded me this week:

I am a sovereign being and an intelligent woman, no one’s words can influence me anywhere my soul doesn’t already want to go.

It feels to me that I’ve known the basics of good listening skills for a long time, certainly since the early years of personal development work over two decades ago. True listening is about asking open ended questions with only an attempt to understand another perspective rather than control the outcome. Yet in fear of another person trying to control me, I have often been unable to truly listen and shut down, making my position clear to create a defensive barrier.

While I want to feel understood and accepted, the cost of fitting someone else’s mould is too high, and the desire for authenticity from within is too strong.

What I’ve really taken to heart this week is that neither what I think, nor what another thinks of me, matters as much as the weight I give it. It might if I was in a job interview or something similar, but even then, why would I want to attract anything other than a vibrational match to my authentic self?

But in the normal course of day to day interactions with friends, family and those who are more acquaintances or part of my life in some other working relationship, there is no real reason to avoid understanding our differences.

Looking into this shadow I have seen that I had a propensity to seek sameness, for a subconscious fear that any differences would put me in danger. As a child this danger of not fitting in would have been too risky, the approval of my family and teachers as I grew was central to my survival as it is to us all. And, frankly, old habits die hard.

Seeking common ground is healthy, it helps me relate to others, but that is different from being the same. I imagine I could seek the whole world over and never find anyone the same, I could no doubt go back through the generations of the entire world’s population and never find anyone exactly the same. And I can project forward into the future and believe no one else has had or will have my unique combination of heritage, wiring and experiences.

Embracing differences, therefore, is necessary to thrive in this world. It starts with embracing my own differences without the need to defend them or even state them (unless I’m actually being asked about them and feel comfortable doing so). Getting relaxed with who I am in this way helps me open up to who others are and, of course, that is what will make us stronger.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Be at Ease With the World Around You and  I Am a Recovering Approval Seeker and Control Freak. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Making the world a better place starts with making my personal world better.

I was listening to an interview with Dr Tiffany Jana this week, whose passion is teaching about embracing diversity, and she said “The idea that anyone has to edit themselves to conform to some kind of system or social construct is harmful. It is harmful to the collective because if you can’t be everything you were sent here to be then the entire human narrative is missing an essential piece.”

While Dr Jana was being asked about healing racism, she was recognising that any part of us that we have to shape in order to conform creates a disservice to the human race.   

And she reiterates advice I’d heard previously from Sean Korne about facing our own shadows before diving in to others’ shadows,. The best way we can help anyone is from a point of loving acceptance of who we are embodied authentically.

Herein lies the challenge, as far as I can see, most people don’t even recognise how their own hurts beget more hurt (no matter how long ago, how forgotten - or more accurately, buried - or how unintentional); I certainly didn’t.

If someone had asked me thirty years ago how tuned in I was to my own feelings, how did I value my own needs and desires, I’d have responded that I am very tuned in. Yet after decades my life did not seem to be joyful, even with traditional successes under my belt, I did not seem to feel healthy or fulfilled. So how tuned in was I really?

I was reading more this week about attunement, a developmental phase in humans that I first came across when reading Dr Gabor Mate’s work on the effects and causes of early childhood development on our lives. He says:

“Attunement is necessary for the normal development of the brain pathways and neurochemical apparatus of attention and emotional regulation. It is a finely calibrated process requiring that the parent remain him/herself in a relatively non-stressed, non-anxious, non-depressed state of mind.”

If you are a parent you will likely know that this can be a huge ask. I am the first to admit that – if I was never aware of my shadows before – they certainly became rather obvious with young children to challenge me. Of all my relationships, the one with my children is the most intense, followed by the relationship with my partner.

And guess what lies at the heart of our relationships?  Attunement.

“Attunement is the process by which we form relationships” Dr Dan Siegel says. “When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift to come to resonate with the world of another.”

As Teal Swan points out, “We learn attunement by virtue of other people being attuned to us. Ask yourself the following questions...Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me? Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not? Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way? How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

I would imagine as most people read this, they would recognise the lack of attunement in their own childhood, for being seen and not heard and do as I say not as I do have been predominant tenets of parenting for a long long time. Thus, as Teal also points out, dysfunctional relationships are the norm, not the exception.

She says “when our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience:

1. We learned that our survival depended on disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience. Or
2. We learned that our survival depended on being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm.”

I certainly feel the truth of this in my own life, in hindsight I can see I became hyper vigilant to others’ feelings and co-dependent in my relationships. It’s no surprise that each of these coping styles tend to attract its opposite and – while one is good at taking care of everyone else’s needs, neither is actually good at recognising and taking care of their own.

Again this resonates with what I see and experience in life, most people are not good at taking care of their own needs. Even, says Teal, the narcissists who are “so busy resisting everyone else’s that, instead of experiencing strong authentic emotions, they are experiencing emotions related to suppression, avoidance, denial or defensiveness.”

So the bottom line is that, unless I learn how to attune (to myself being that I am hyper vigilant to others, but to my own and to others if I had gone into a narcissistic bubble) my relationships will be riddled with conflict and painful for everyone.

This isn’t something I find easy, and particularly when it is an ingrained pattern within existing relationships which, as mentioned above, are already imbued with painful associations on many levels.  True change is intrinsic though, is has to be self driven and nothing changes by following the same old patterns.

That is why I have been doing so much work on recognising and healing my own needs and boundaries, but it still requires practice and more practice.

Wanting to feel good about myself, and wanting to present that goodness to the world is the old defence mechanism, and it’s a strong one. Like everyone else I can fall into the trap of blaming others and my circumstances when, really, I’m no longer the trapped child, I’m a grown adult who can make her own decisions.

And, being hyper attuned to others more so than myself, I also have to watch out for the guilt trap. Those who have got themselves ensconced in a narcissistic bubble know how to play the blame game just as well as I do, but being sensitive to others means I can feel guilty just because someone else is feeling bad.

When Dr Tiffany Jana talks about people editing themselves to conform, the lack of attunement and the dynamics that arise from it are, I believe, one of the most pervasive and insidious among us edited humans. The worst thing about it is the lack of conscious awareness about this root cause issue.

Because, as Teal Swan remarks, “You cannot be attuned to someone and drop a bomb on them or shoot them. You cannot be attuned to someone and say the wrong thing to them. You cannot be attuned to someone and stay in denial about his or her reality”.

This is our work, becoming attuned to our own authentic needs, and those of others. This will not only improve your own life significantly, but together we can make this world a better place.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, What to Do if You Feel Trapped By Your Circumstances and Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“I spent too long wanting what was taken from me and not what I was given.” King Caspian, The Dawn Treader

As I watched this movie with my daughters, after we had read C.S.Lewis’s infamous Narnia Chronicles, I knew these were not words spoken in the original book, and yet they were so perfectly on point.

This week I’ve been staring straight into the eyes of resentment, which Teal Swan describes as “a soup of different emotions all associated with being treated unfairly; it is one of the strongest hooks that anchors a person to the past”.

As I listened to my own internal dialogue about the way I had just spoken to someone, I realised that what I was hearing was a defence. If I had been putting my point across to a judge or jury, I’m pretty sure they would have sympathy for me, perhaps even granted me a pardon.

However, I thought to myself, I am not in front of an objective judge or jury; I am having a subjective experience. Both I and the other person were communicating from a perspective that was so wrapped in our own entire life stories that – try as we each might – it would be hard for either to understand without a long, drawn out autopsy.

It was a familiar realisation that I’m no longer playing the survival game I played as a child, when I was forced to explain my actions and learned to use words to rationalise out everything in my experience. This is a silent begging for recognition of the right to my own views, wrapped up in the angry indignation and resentment at being treated as I was a child.

This game no longer serves me, it gives my power away (the power of my own discernment, my own decision making) to the person I’m speaking to. In fact, I realise, this is not a game I can ever win, even if it was an old survival strategy that was relevant, is surviving winning at life?

And the fact is, I’m holding onto old resentments, wanting the respect that was taken from me rather than respecting who I have become in spite of it all.  

Resentment is a complex and deep rooted emotion, and I knew that while I certainly harboured resentments in my life, I also needed to explore the ancestral ties to some of those feelings too. For, perhaps like you, I had inherited certain philosophies and beliefs about life and people that already carried the stench of resentment right from the outset.

So I was excited to be in a Family Constellation session facilitated by a good friend of mine this week. I’m always blown away by how quickly I can switch my focus to the wider quantum field of energy in these sessions; it’s a powerful way to connect with those (usually hurt) parts of me that need to be seen as well broader sense of who I am unencumbered by my experiences in this physical body.

This session did not disappoint. The question I brought to the field was one seeking clarity on why I turn my emotions in on myself.  With a chronic shoulder pain, which signals holding back emotions, a recent kidney stone and a also a fibroid growing in my womb (both growths signalling the suppression of anger and resentment to the extent the body creates a physical demonstration of the feelings), it felt important for me to get a broader perspective than just the thoughts in my head, I also needed to consider the emotional stories I’d inherited.

So with proxies chosen for Control and Emotion, we were underway. It was a fascinating exchange: Emotion was happily waving about like a tree in the wind and wanted to hug Control (when Control was frozen and very closed to an interaction). As Control softened, Emotion wanted to create distance, it was an interesting dance.

As I entered the field, not knowing what I was a proxy for, I wanted to keep both at a safe distance and could feel myself like a sentry on guard. This was particularly true when Control hid behind Emotion; I was extremely uncomfortable and paid Emotion zero attention because I was on high alert for Control. Once I had Control back in my sights I then felt more curiosity about Emotion. And when Emotion moved away, I felt a grief for not having gotten closer.

At this point I discovered that I was a proxy for my reproductive system. I could sense though that this wasn’t just about my reproductive system, in fact, there was way more trauma coming through from previous generations. As Control and Emotion worked together more it allowed the Reproductive System to disengage, to retire.

Not only has it done the amazing job of producing two children, it has been much wiser than me and processed my suppressed feelings on my behalf for as long as I can remember.  All be it, this has manifested in many things that – on the face of it – I would not have asked for. But my body has been trying to get my attention in the only way it knew how to.

This highlights my womb has always been in a state of alert and actually does better when the stressors are known, if all seems calm I actually go into a state of hyper vigilance on the look out for control, to the point of completely ignoring my emotions.

Then came this feeling of utter shock, as it hit me that I (Reproductive System) was no longer required and I felt lost, not knowing what I was to do. The others in the field described me as if I were suffering from PTSD at this point. That is precisely how I felt, as if I were staring across a fallen battlefield; I was numb.

Wrapping me in a warm cloak, I was aware that my facilitator friend was asking me to sit down, and lean against Control and Emotion for support. I have no idea how long I stayed there, it felt like a long time.

But then I had the most sublime experience. It was as if, on the floor before me, a pool of light opened up, it was in the shape of a heart. It was a nurturing, healing light, full of love and warmth and compassion. Within that light came the answer I was looking for, that my womb – now free of its reproductive duties and being honoured and unshackled from its role as guardian of my resentment, overwhelm and other emotions – was now the portal to this light, taking its rightful place as the seat of creative power within my being.

Without all that distraction and burden, it is freed up energy available to support my creative expression and growth. As I continued to watch this pool of light I saw within it a DNA strand unwind and reconfigure, this represented not only a different possible future for me, but for my children, and theirs.

Next I saw a Phoenix rising and, as I continued to watch, the Phoenix became a She Wolf. As I watched the She Wolf standing proudly in this light, the facilitator friend (who knew nothing of the vision I was having) came along and serendipitously put a proxy directly on the pool of light. This was a proxy for me; my reproductive self watched on in delight.

The feeling of that experience is one I have shared with a few people already, and it is still with me. If you have ever experienced moments of grace like this you will know what I mean. But if you have not I can only wish the same for you, for they are sublime beyond anything you can simply see with your eyes, smell with your nose, taste with your tongue, touch with your hands or hear with your ears. This pure essence can only be felt in your heart.

It certainly has provided a wonderful experience to help me switch over from focusing on what was taken away from me and, instead, focus on what I have been given instead, a whole new lease of life. What is it you feel has or is being taken from you? And what possibilities, gifts or opportunities have arisen as a result?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Kneel at the Doorway of Your Heart to Usher the Dawn of a New Era, Do You Need to Heal Your Boundaries?, Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You? and Get in Touch With What You Want for Your Future – Recognise Your Brain Is Dwelling in the Past. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

It seems to me that more and more people are becoming less identified with their thoughts and the self, and more aware of their connection to something much greater. At first I wondered whether it was because that is what had been happening to me over a number of years, a bit like when I’d want something as a child and then I’d suddenly start seeing that thing all over the place.

However, listening to Scott Shute , the Head of LinkedIn’s Mindfulness and Compassion Programe, he was citing the growth of mindfulness practices in recent years. He was saying there was only 5% of Americans who practiced some kind of mindfulness just a few short years ago, compared to a growing 15% today, and many more who are familiar with the term and have tried mindfulness practices.

Dr Jean Houston talks about how we are at the end of one era but not quite in the new era, rather we are standing on the precipice and she invites us to leap across the chasm. In Jean’s terms we are moving out of the era of the “local human” and into the era of the “quantum human”.

I certainly feel called to help usher in this new era. A world in which people are more aware of the thoughts and feelings that define their boundaries and, simultaneously, connection to all else, is the one I came for, the one I champion.

Jean says “speak like angels and use words like wands”. In my view, C.S.Lewis was a master at this. When he writes in The Magician’s Nephew, the prequel to The Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe about the birth of a new world, Narnia, it gives me goosebumps.

The children discover a place, a wood between worlds, where everything is peaceful and calm. This place is a portal to many worlds and they find themselves in a new world unborn. When they arrive there is nothing, just blackness, no stars, no sound, no sense of anything. They are naturally drawn to sing to keep themselves cheerful and sane and, after a while, they hear another sound...

“In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing...it seemed to come from all directions at once...its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise ever heard.”

“Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars...single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world.”

“If you had seen and heard it, you would be quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the first voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.”

“The voice on the earth was now louder and more triumphant; but the voices in the sky, after singing loudly with it for a time, began to get fainter... far away, and down near the horizon the sky began to turn grey. A light wind, very fresh, began to stir. The sky, in that one place, grew slowly and steadily paler. You could see the shapes of hills standing up dark against it.  All the time the voice went on singing.”

“The eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had produced, the sun arose.”

This revealed the singer, the mighty Aslan, the creator of this land. He went on singing in a more gentle, rippling lilt, creating grass, plants and trees, and then the song changed once more, it became far wilder and – from this – the first creatures appeared. 

As I think about Jean’s proposition to leap across the chasm and cling to the ledge of a new era, I think of those children sitting in the darkness breathing life where once there was nothing and witnessing a whole new world appear.

I think of the cumbersome impossibility of trying to disentangle and reengineer the outdated societal systems we live with, and instead I imagine those behind me, my face to the new era, listening intently to the voices that are singing it into creation. That is where my attention must lie, and where my own voice must ring out.

In this world  between worlds, I think the heart is the quiet stillness – C.S. Lewis’s wood between the worlds – and in it we find the portal to our quantum self, and thus this new era.

Sarah Blondin describes this portal as having an umbilical chord to the divine (or greater intelligence or whatever word you feel most comfortable using for something bigger than ourselves). To cultivate this she says:

“It is practice and it is discipline. The heart knows its worth and needs to smell the sincerity on your breath and glimpse earnestness in your eyes, it needs to know you are kneeling at the doorway of your heart”.

I recognise in my own journey the many divine experiences I had by sheer grace in the year before my mum died. Since then I have been busy working to unshackle myself from my story so far, to unpeel the layers of experiences that have generated self limiting beliefs, unhealthy relationship patterns and chronic health conditions.

But, as Jean Houston says, this is the local human. There is a broader part of me – the higher self, the quantum human – that knows no such shackles. While recognising and honouring the challenges as the local human, it feels time to turn my attention more to the part of me I’ve always been aware of, but not lately been so focused upon.

As Jean describes beautifully, this is the part of me that says “I lure you with love into the universe and I pour myself into you”.

At this dawning of a new era, I feel it’s important to look into the shadows of that local human to free myself of unnecessary burden, but equally as important to practice sensing into that broader part of me that notices the serendipities of life lining up in so many subtle ways.

That broader part of me knows, expects even, to co-create this new era of human evolution with many others and the universe itself.  As Sarah Blondin asks, so I would ask you, how much time are you spending kneeling at the doorway of your heart? How much time in your day do you nurture that quiet stillness within you? Let us usher in this new era together.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How Can I Create a Better World?, Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary), Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, and What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

One of my top goals or priorities in life right now, as has been the case for a while, is to come into the fullness of who I am. To allow that to happen, I have been focused on my physical and emotional health, a peeling back of all the layers of stuff that I have taken on throughout my life.

It is not until I started this process that I have gained an appreciation for just how much stuff a person can accumulate.

I began by looking at the things that triggered me, I observed the thoughts in my head and started to see the underlying beliefs that percolated beneath, a lot of them not even actually congruent with what - in the present day - I have more consciously come to believe.

Instead, when I was triggered about something, I was most often flung back to a point in my childhood. This became most obvious when I’d be reacting to something the kids had done and I’d find myself sounding just like one of my own parents on autopilot.

This last few weeks I’ve been feeling physically out of sorts, the reason why became apparent when my left kidney started aching painfully and kept me from sleep, then I could feel a stone moving down through the ureter across my abdomen the next day, and finally its release and relief the following day.

Metaphysically kidney stones represent repressed or suppressed anger and resentment, crystallising physically as a stone. Reflecting upon this deeply, and acknowledging the voices in my head of late, I could see that (as the lockdown had progressed) I’d slipped back into some old thought patterns, pointing to some healing that needs attended to.

Clearly, as Dr Jean Housten would say, I had not been doing my internal housekeeping. This was quite true, and I can see in hindsight where these thought patterns started gaining momentum and turning me sour so to speak.

Anger is a great indicator that my personal boundaries have been violated.  By boundaries I mean the things I like and dislike, what is right for me, what is wrong for me, how I let myself be treated by others. In effect, my personal boundaries are what uniquely define and separate me from everything else.

“Signs of unhealthy boundaries”, says Teal Swan, “are saying no when you mean yes (or vice versa), feeling guilty when you say no, acting against your integrity and values to please others, or not speaking up when you have something to say, and so on.”

Through the personal work I had done to date, I recognised myself as having weak personal boundaries growing up, and a pattern of eventually exploding in anger as a way to affirm myself long after they had been overstepped. While I had done quite a bit of work in this area, I wanted to do a thorough spring clean, to “blow smoke on where I begin and others end” as one of my good friends said.

For this I’d highly recommend Yvette Rose’s book Healing Your Boundaries, it was an easy and insightful read and helped me put words to things that I had long since felt and been unable to express in a way that felt comfortable and empowering.

After the kidney stone had passed I awoke the next morning to read what dreams I had recorded the night before (I often jot these down half asleep through the night) and found an intriguing statement I had written:

Our greatest weaknesses can be exploited and used against us in an orchestra of our own demise.

I had no recall of writing this, but I knew instinctively it was referencing the kidney stone that had passed, and the broader picture of what it meant. Who does the exploiting? I do. Without addressing my now unhealthy childhood (emotional or physical) survival strategies, and asserting firm boundaries calmly, I am creating my own demise.

I’m aware that many of my boundary issues arise from the relationship I had with my mother growing up. It was not an untypical parent-child relationship, she was a strongly opinionated lady who had strict views on our behaviour and morals and it did not serve me in my younger years to argue if I felt any differently.

It would have been my mother’s birthday this week if she were still here, I’ve seen firsthand what illness can do to a person’s body. While she had no interest in the metaphysical herself, I can see quite clearly how life experiences weigh upon a person and create terrible suffering.

I have no such desire to suffer. I feel it is important that I get this sacred vessel of mine, the body in which I reside for my time here in this life, into as healthy a state as possible, for there is much to do.

Earth is awakening to a new level of consciousness, and I am committed to building that bridge to a new era in enlightened human life. It seems to me that we are all so much more than we see, and it is time to see with new eyes, to hear with our hearts and to move towards our best life.

Do you have unhealthy boundaries that you need to heal?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You?, Change Unhealthy Reactions and Get in Touch With What You Want for Your Future – Recognise Your Brain Is Dwelling in the Past. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

The thought occurred to me, who am I without my story?

The reason it occurred to me was because I was working with someone who can intuitively feel trauma and stuck energy within a body, and work to clear it. We were talking about a time in my life, long ago, when I had my heart shattered and my self esteem suffered badly; with many unhealthy self depreciating thought patterns arising. This had then led to many more unwanted things like an unhealthy relationship, panic disorder and a car accident.

The healer said he could remove that trauma and all its associated effects from my body and asked whether I would like him to. There is a big part of me who would love to just shrug off any chains that shackle me in an instant; to be immediately free of the effects of any of those harder experiences. 

The fact is though, I really wasn’t yet ready to let go of that part of my story. I got a vision in my head of a hand delving deep into a murky pond and wrenching a weed from the bottom; it stirred up everything else in its wake.

What I seek, more than just ridding myself of all trauma, is a conscious unwinding of all of it. I have a desire to peel back the layers gently, in reverence, one at a time, and create someone more whole in the process as I described in Take Your Broken Pieces and Make a Beautiful Life.

I think of who we show up as in the world like the layers of an onion, with layer upon layer of experiences that occur in our lives because of the meaning we have associated with our earliest events. As Dr Gabor Mate says in Shattered Minds “Of all the environments the one that most profoundly shapes the human personality is the invisible one: the emotional atmosphere in which the child lives during the early critical years of brain development.”

Margaret Mahler, child psychologist and researcher, further explains “To the infant, the world reveals itself in the image of its parents: in eye contact, intensity of glance, body language, tone of voice and, above all, in the day to day joy or emotional fatigue exhibited in the presence of the child.”

I’m aware therefore that I began receiving signals and making unconscious meaning of this world (and myself within it) from all these non-verbal signals long before I could even talk. It is no surprise then, as I heard a therapist say in the Transcendence 2 series, that the most commonly held beliefs we have are:

• I’m not good enough
• I’m not important
• Mistakes and failures are bad
• If I make a mistake or fail, I’ll be rejected

And so, as I came to see life through my unique lenses (a veritable cocktail of things like genes, disposition, and experiences), my experiences served to further perpetuate and instil whatever beliefs I had first formed. While it is reassuring to know that this is exactly as every human does, I find it’s also startling to realise that is quite separate from my parents’ (good) intentions and it was all well in motion before I started to more consciously become aware of myself.

As I peel back the layers, I reconcile the emotions and unhelpful beliefs and come to a deeper understanding of who I am and how to move forward without being shackled to that part of the story. And that is the real key I think, it’s not that my story changes, it’s how it lives within me that changes.

A friend suggested writing each emotional or physical trauma in my life, and the meaning I had made of each, on separate pieces of paper, then creating a beautiful box and placing all the pieces inside. Finally, with love, gift the box to the elements and let nature take its course. I like this idea symbolically, but however it happens, the tethers must be cut in order for me to come into the fullness of who I am.

It is also not just a story of triumph over trauma and challenge; it is a life that has (and has had) many beautiful people and wonderful experiences that have filled me with hope and light over the years. They too are part of the fabric of who I am, as I have talked about in articles like Who Showed You Unconditional Love?

As I cut the attachments to the things that keep me weighed down, I must also learn to use the positive experiences as wind beneath my wings. All of this is part of the experience of enlightenment in every sense of the word.

Each of us will feel called to unshackle ourselves in different ways, but unshackle we must if we are to truly fly.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Take Back Your Power - Only One Thing Need Change for You to Feel Good, Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You?, Change Unhealthy Reactions and Get in Touch With What You Want for Your Future – Recognise Your Brain Is Dwelling in the Past. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

It feels good to feel good. This sounds like an obvious statement, but I had actually forgotten how good it feels.

An old friend of mine sent me a link to a song this week, it reminded him of some time we had spent together with our swim team way back in 1985. We then got to reminiscing about old times, as is our tendency when we have touched base now and again over the years.

I enjoyed the conversation, being reminded of simpler, less encumbered times always feels good. I suspect this happens a lot in the era of social media. What I notice though, is this often ends up in an emotional entanglement, especially between men and women; it certainly used to for me, because I would attribute my feeling good entirely to that person.

What has changed for me is my perspective. As I got older there seemed to be more that made life complicated and weighed me down. If things got particularly bad, I would attribute those feelings to a person or circumstance and often move on.

Then I got to a point after a lot of life changes when I looked in the mirror and realised the only way I was going to feel good about myself and my life is if I changed what was going on in the inside. Really, every article I have ever written is a reflection of this journey of personal growth and change.

Catching up with my friend gave me a bit of a litmus test on how far I’ve come. Going back to those days of childhood innocence, of what fun, love and heartache at twelve and thirteen feels like, is light in contrast to my life today.

More importantly, it gives me something tangible, a real feeling point within me, of what I’m aiming for as I actively seek to become less encumbered in my self-limiting thoughts and beliefs by reaching for new ones.

As we caught up on our lives today, we both share in common having started a family rather late, we laughed at ourselves having taken on such a foolish task in our forties. Of course I love my children, but there is no denying that parenting is a strenuous task, one that pushes me beyond the brink of my comfort zone most days.

Life at home, with two adults trying our best to provide a good life for our highly spirited children, is challenging. I’ve come to appreciate that my partner and my kids are reflecting back to me all those self limiting beliefs and narratives I have going on in a very intense way; it’s like a boot camp for personal development.

I’m also aware, that in the past, in the time before I looked too deeply into the mirror, my gaze would have fallen on my circumstances and the people in it, and I would have felt my dissatisfaction towards them instead of the real culprit.

In fact, thinking about my time in the swim team again took me right back to that juncture in my life when I started to look outside myself in a really tangible way for other people to make me feel good.

Having grown up in a family with two parents who were solidly together, and often against me, I thought I was half of a whole, and somewhere out there was my other half. Certainly the messages surrounding me in society supported that, especially all those happily ever after Disney-type tales.

It took me a long time to realise that I am actually whole within. As I said, there were a lot of self doubts, fears and other self limiting beliefs that certainly made me feel less than whole, but as I have started to address those I have a real sense of just how whole, and what a powerful creator of my own reality, I am.

It is quite a lovely thing to have people in my life who are an emblem of a life less encumbered and remind me of the feeling I’m working towards.

Another example from that early juncture in my life is my grandparents, who died when I was fourteen. While a part of me would have dearly loved to have known them better as an adult, I know instead I am left with a sincere impression of something very precious; I still feel my grandad’s interest in my swimming and see his beaming face, and I still cherish within me my gran’s gentle eyes, and her care and kindness.

I like to think of my friend, grandparents and others, as my soul family; people and circumstances that represent a part of my essential self, the one I wish to reclaim.

Even in my adult life, my partner and I reminisce the days we used to go out on our boat before the children came along. Although it was laborious getting the boat ready and then unloading and cleaning when we got home, there was an amazingly middle part that made it worthwhile; lazing on the deck, watching the sun dance on the water.

There are many examples in my life of times that felt good when I start looking for them, times shared with special people in my life in the past and present. They are not there to beckon me back towards them and to repeat those circumstances, but to remind me of how good it feels to feel good.

​What or who in your life reminds you of how good it feels to feel good?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First, Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You? and Get in Touch With What You Want for Your Future – Recognise Your Brain Is Dwelling in the Past. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“The wound is the place the light enters you.” Rumi

I saw this flash up in one of the Transcendence 2 episodes about emotional healing, which I had been watching fresh from the heat of an argument.  I’m not going to pretend that I let the light in and had an epiphany at this point, the feelings of the trauma recreated in the argument were still flowing through me and I was basically distracting my mind by watching.

It’s important to point out the word re-created here. I’ve moved past the phase in my life where I’m completely identified with any self limiting thought patterns for any length of time, I’ve stopped labouring on points of principle and right and wrong. But on a bad day, and in the heat of an argument, yes siree, I report for rewind and repeat duty.

Thankfully it doesn’t take long for conscious awareness to kick in, and I realise the details of the argument are not important. What is important to me is to recognise the pattern, and uncover what about the whole interaction poked at an old wound and caused the flare up into automatic pilot.  I try to use each opportunity as a chance to at least let the light in retrospectively.

In that moment, however, I was just too exhausted to do anything more than recognise that this was exactly what had happened. The self righteous voices in my head disappeared and I vowed to look at it afresh when I had the energy, clearly there was some work to be done.

I do wonder sometimes if I will ever be free enough of the encumbering patterns to live life as my kintsugi-ed essential self. Kintsugi is a traditional Japanese art that uses a precious metal (liquid gold or silver dusted with powdered gold) to bring together the pieces of a broken pottery item and at the same time enhance the breaks.

As I’ve said many times, those unhealthy thought patterns really came about from my early childhood, in the process of my making meaning about how to be loved and to survive. I know I came into this life with an expectation of growth and expansion, so I look at the process of taking on those thoughts (which started out as helpful forty years ago), recognising they are no longer helpful, then healing and integrating them, in a similar way to kintsugi.

In a bid to quantify this in some way, earlier today I drew out what I called the pain body. The inspiration came to me after watching an energy healer do work on moving stuck energy in a couple of peoples’ biofield. As she worked through their fields, identifying and clearing traumas, it was very clear that both people viewed trauma differently.

Unlike the healer, I know both these people well. One, who I know to be highly sensitive, empathic and more likely to assign meaning to events, had a significantly larger amount of stuck energy in their field. The other, who tends to be more present in their body, had relatively little stuck energy.

There were also no real surprises in their fields, as both had previously talked about the issues that came up. The surprise was that those issues were stuck in there because of the depth of emotion that had been felt and meaning assigned to them by the individual.

I created a picture in my head of my own biofield projecting out around me with the significant events in my life reflected in it. Within my body I saw the beliefs, the repeated thought patterns, which I had developed as a result of making meaning of these events and their potential to cause disease. While many of my beliefs will have had their origins in the time before conscious thought or memory, the stuck patterns will have reflected themselves in later life events anyway and are likely quite visible.

So I first listed out all the significant events I could think of year by year. This ran to three pages. I thought about the two people whose biofield I’d witnessed being cleared and imagined if I were like the second person, and did not feel so much around me, I’d likely have less than a page.

The usefulness in this thought was really only in appreciating how different we all are. We all carry unwanted baggage around with us, but I have high sensory sensitivity, am an empath and meaning maker by nature so my baggage cart was so full I could not even see myself behind it when I started becoming aware of all this on the journey to me.

“The worst predator is our thoughts” says Dawson Church. If you feel any sort of discomfort that is a sure sign you have emotional baggage. Then one of the other presenters in Transcendence 2 asked “Is there someone you haven’t forgiven?” and I know the answer to that in most cases is me. I am very good at forgiving others, but seem to have unreasonably high standards for myself.

This week, after a nostalgic conversation with an old friend, it took me back to a time in my childhood when I was less encumbered, it was nice to feel into that and get a good look at the girl pushing the baggage cart. It’s a useful technique to imagine a conversation between present day me and child me, because I find it a lot easier to forgive myself in hindsight.

My friend was encouraging my writing and it got me to thinking about some of the other people in my life that have really cheered me on and believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself. As I result I decided to get in touch with my first swim coach and share with him what his belief in me had meant through the years, only to discover that he had sadly died back in July of 2018.

I lost touch with him in my twenties, and had kicked myself for not getting in touch with him in 2016 when I wrote Magic Happens When You Believe in People. Bill Tinney was the kind of man everyone only had good things to say about, and he took time out his busy schedule to break things down for me so I could perfect my technique.

After I had exchanged a couple of emails with his son, I walked out onto our deck to take a look at the night sky and, would you believe it, I saw a shooting star. I like to think that was Bill acknowledging he had heard and understood, and was still cheering me on.

I figure if I am going to look at what is encumbering me, I should also look at the good stuff: the things that went well in my life, the helpful beliefs I held, the happy moments and the people who believed in me, those are the parts that are worth dwelling on. In fact, these are the very things I need to expand on to get in a better feeling place more of the time

I’ll finish up with a quote from BrightVibes “Stop being ashamed of how many times you have fallen, and start being proud of how many times you have got up.” No matter how broken, the willingness to take ownership of and examine our broken pieces allows the light to enter and the wound to be healed and integrated into a stronger, less encumbered and more expanded you.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First, Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You?, Change Unhealthy Reactions and Get in Touch With What You Want for Your Future – Recognise Your Brain Is Dwelling in the Past. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I heard from someone this week who was sorely disappointed with the Mother’s Day she experienced. While her husband and kids had recognised Mother’s Day and given her gifts, it was a far cry from her expectations. She did not really feel seen, understood and – most desired of all – cherished in her role as a mother.

This was similar to some parts work I had been watching recently where a young woman was struggling to reconcile the relationship she had with her grandparents, who had brought her up. Each time she visited them she had expectations about her emotions being seen and validated, instead, she continually felt crushed and unseen in this regard and would take about a week to recover from the sting.

Emotional intimacy was what she yearned for from her family yet, as much as she yearned, she had never glimpsed it in that relationship. The teacher pointed to how the young woman was continually torturing herself. She reminded us that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

They explored both the part of her that desperately wanted to be seen and understood by her family, as well as the part within her that did not want to let go of the relationship despite the pain it was causing her. This led to the revelation about other needs she did get met – and value – from that connection with them.

The teacher asked her to consider, that while the potential was there for her family to meet her need to be seen and understood emotionally, there was a strong likelihood they never would have the kind of relationship she wanted and to consider that those needs could be met elsewhere.

Pointing out the power in reminding (that part of) herself (that wanted emotional intimacy), in advance of any visit to her grandparents, of all the wonderful needs that would be met; the teacher went on to make another suggestion.

This was for the young woman to take a more curious approach in her relationship with her grandparents, sort of make it her mission for the visit to get to understand them, their life experiences and what makes them tick.

I did see how – in seeking to understand them better – it would give her something more empowering to focus on, and perhaps even more insight into the emotional world of her grandparents and thus some of the intimacy she had been seeking.

All of this reminded me of some words I first heard almost fourteen years ago, to let go of the cumbersome impossibility of trying to control people and circumstances, when the only thing we can really control is our reaction to what is happening around us.

In both of the examples above I recognise expectations I once had of other people too and won’t pretend that they have completely disappeared. In so many aspects of my upbringing, from the expectations and boundaries that were set around my behaviour and choices, to the role models I had, the books I read, the programmes and movies I watched, a picture was created in my head of what a good partner/mother/father/colleague and so on looks like.

Now I recognise this was all conditioning and, while there are certainly generally agreed archetypes, for mothers for example, expectations do vary from person to person, within cultures, times and societies. As the lady who got herself into a self professed funk over Mother’s Day said, it is literally published, advertised and displayed everywhere.

I feel this kind of sets us up for a fall. As a mother I know I’m still wading my way through trying to figure out my authentic desires versus those that were indoctrinated deliberately or inadvertently. I also know the expectations I put on myself are different to every one of my friends who are mothers; some differences are minor, others major.

In every role I‘ve held and hold in life I used to feel righteous in some ways, a failure in others; now I just feel that each one of us is doing our best. I’ve also noticed I hold a lot of contradictions within myself.

One of the big contradictions going on in my life at the moment is “I want this to end; I don’t want this to end”. A lack of personal space has had me yearning for an end to the lockdown, yet I’ve enjoyed our family bubble and there is a part of me grieving that it is coming to an end.

There have been times I’ve felt understood and appreciated, times I’ve felt taken for granted and used, and times I’ve felt invisible and powerless. There have been times it has been intense. Other times it has been easy. In all of it there is only one thing that has really changed, and that is the script in my head. When I catch myself thinking about what I or anyone else should do, I know I’m just buying into some conditioning.

Sometimes that means I have to go into the shadows and get a really good look at whatever part of me is lurking there, other times it means I just need to change my focus in that moment, it just depends on what has triggered me and how strongly I’m feeling it.

There have also been times in my life when I know that I cannot continue in a role and be true to myself, and I have walked away. But mostly, when weighing up the pros and cons, it’s not the role I need to change, it’s the narrative. Otherwise I live in continual self torture, which is a miserable life and I don’t want to feel miserable, do you?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First, Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You?, Change Unhealthy Reactions and Get in Touch With What You Want for Your Future – Recognise Your Brain Is Dwelling in the Past. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

About this time five years ago I watched one of the most fascinating exchanges I’ve seen. It was between Dr Wayne Dyer and Esther Hicks at a Hay House conference as he interviewed the collective consciousness Esther accesses and calls Abraham. He had been a fan of Abraham teachings for many years and was relishing the opportunity to gain some insights from this more abstract level of consciousness within our infinite intelligence.

It is clear in the interview that, as well as acknowledging it in words, Dr Dyer held the Abraham teachings in great reverence. The interview goes on for almost two and a half hours, but my absolute favourite part is towards the end when Dr Dyer, normally the teacher on stage, becomes the student and is shifting uncomfortably as he recognises the wisdom in what he is being taught.

It is a moment of such humanness that it touched me to the core, and the lesson stayed with me. Hay House has just replayed it as part of their You Can Heal Your Life Summit, as they have most years, and I made a point of relistening to it just to hear that lesson again. I’d sum the lesson up as:

Don’t get so stuck in the problem that you continue to feed its energy and exacerbate it, focus instead on the solution and how it will feel to you when there is no longer a problem.

I can only agree wholeheartedly with a review of the conversation when someone named Hank writes “I laughed out loud when Dr Dyer expressed how GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and their corporate manufacturers piss him off. Abraham’s answer is worth the price of the video. Anyone who is an activist can really benefit from taking this wisdom to heart.”

While this is true, I look to that lesson every time anything feels unjust in my life, be it to do with an issue my kids have had at school, a legal stance on natural health remedies or something that is of great public debate. When I feel I am right on some sort of moral grounds and start to feel myself getting hot under the collar, I think of the wise words I heard.

Part of what Abraham was trying to teach Dr Dyer is there are many sides to an argument, and to push against someone is to create resistance, further entrenching them in their position. I know when someone challenges my point of view in an emotive way I can instinctually feel that I get drawn to defend my position. Yet there are usually good points on all sides of an argument and, certainly, one solution does not fit all.

As if to really drive this lesson home again, I got a few extreme reactions to a documentary I shared on social media that was raising some questions about the approach to the current COVID-19 situation. The documentary was subsequently deleted, which I found disappointing especially when there are plenty of videos that attempt to debunk it still live.

Some of the reactions were skewed by one of the points in the documentary, which was questioning the validity and wisdom of mandatory vaccinations. Despite being only one of many points, this immediately invoked extreme reactions on both sides of that debate. So, instead of entertaining that, I posted this:

“I've deleted my posts lest they divert your attention from what I believe is the most important point here.

What I'm most interested in is the freedom of people to express an opinion, and I'm disappointed that big platforms continue to remove things like this. I don't believe in absolute truth versus lies, what popular opinion and science presents as truth continually changes, just as what I personally feel as my own truth continues to grow and evolve.

It’s interesting but very human for people to call a whole documentary crazy sauce because one person featured in it has been debunked as crazy by a faction of society. Our human tendency is to debunk everything someone says if they disagree with our core beliefs or motives in some way. I don't believe nor disbelieve what was said as a whole, but the documentary made some interesting points that resonated with me.

Let us all be free to express our own views and explore others because the only gate keeper of our own truth lies within each of us. Trust that.”

Interestingly, with the topics removed from the discussion, and as if to underline the lesson I had reheard, this new post got far more positive interest than the previous ones. I don’t have a transcript of that interview, but here in summary is what stuck with me from that iconic conversation about GMOs:

Noticing the problem is a good thing, just don’t get stuck there. Dr Dyer spent most of the conversation trying to get Abraham to acknowledge what he saw as the problem with genetically modified foods and was talking about a commitment he had made to actively educate people about the problem.

One person who is actively focused on the solution is more powerful than millions who are not. If you do get stuck in the problem, as is the human tendency to get in the middle of things, eventually (assuming there is enough desire for change) a solution will come about. However, this means enduring a lot of unnecessary suffering.

Dr Dyer was talking about how the fruit being sold on Maui no longer had seeds in it, and Abraham asked him “all the fruit?” “Well” said Dr Dyer, “80% of it.” The answer? “Focus on the 20%, on how delicious it tastes and how good it feels to know the natural fruit can be replanted in the back yard from its seeds for generations to come.”

There is a moment of obvious frustration where Dr Dyer says “But won’t you at least acknowledge the issue?” With that, Abraham challenges him “Can you acknowledge that, on the other side of the fence from where you sit on this, there might have been some benefits to the human race in GMOs?”

Abraham was certainly not advocating for GMOs, the wisdom was instead pointing to an acknowledgement of the many sides to the argument. Even if one of those sides is the economic benefit, as it invariably is, it is a hard task to pit heath against money on moral grounds, the viewpoints on an individual level are far more complex.

In short, Abraham’s advice was to stop beating the drum of the problem and, instead, get out and promote the benefits of naturally grown, delicious foods. That is the approach with least resistance and the approach that invokes the energy of the universe in our favour.

I write these articles in humble acknowledgement that these are my own lessons. While I did not get particularly triggered by the reactions to the documentary I posted, or it being removed, I can admit that I did get very triggered by something of no significance at all on the world stage; an email from one of my children’s teachers about building will.

I think we are all activists on different levels, with different topics really activating our flight and fight responses, be it a niggle in our day to day existence or a debate of global importance. Any issues that activate us, whether big or small, are the ones that most benefit from taking a broader view, focusing on the solution, and creating a vision of the world in which we want to live.  

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy What You Give Your Attention to Is Your Greatest Contribution, Change Unhealthy Reactions and Is This the Opportunity of a Lifetime? If you would like to see or read the exchange mentioned in this article it was released as a book and DVD called “A Conversation Between Master Teachers – Co-Creating at Its Best”. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I was reading an analogy of 2020 today as a year that was full of promise that seemed to get off to a false start.

Anne McNaughton’s said “Imagine Usain Bolt, the fastest sprinter in the world, lined up and hyper focused. The starter’s gun goes off and they bolt out of the starting blocks but then an alarm goes off – it is a false start and the runners, one by one, realising this at different lengths down the track stop, turn around and no doubt say a few choice words. A lot of mental preparation had to go into getting off to the best possible start and that has all been destroyed. There would not be many happy chappies in that line up”.

This is true, and I can’t count the times my partner has said “2020 isn’t at all how I imagined”, I suspect few could have imagined it this way. However, it has its silver lining; it has given many of us – and the planet – much needed breathing space.

Tomos Robert’s four minute video The Great Realisation, published this week, sums this up more beautifully than anything else I have read or seen to date. It is read as if written in the future, a father narrating a story to his children that explains why they say hindsight is 2020, well worth a watch.  

To pick up on the theme, this has certainly been an opportunity for me to get clarity on many things I would not have otherwise been able to see. With an end to lockdown in sight here in Aotearoa (New Zealand), my thoughts are turning to concrete actions that were not centre stage before we went into lockdown. It is a real chance for a do-over.

One of the things that has become crystal clear, having been forced into home schooling, is why my kids are normally so resistant going to school. Other than the big first day of school, which brought with it a sense of coming-of-age excitement – neither of my kids have ever relished going to school.

I can now see they haven’t grasped some of the basics and – as the curriculum advances – they are feeling more out of depth. It is hard for me to relate to this as I had no problem learning in school but my partner, who has ADHD and we suspect is dyslexic, spent most of his school years completely unengaged in class.

I do remember watching those in my own class at school who struggled and, even at that young age, could see the classroom environment wasn’t serving them. The last thing I want is my kids to spend the majority of their days in flight or fight mode from being forced to learn in a way that doesn’t suit their brain. So, as we start turning our heads towards life beyond lockdown, I am actively seeking screening and exploring alternatives for them.

Just as I have reflected on the children’s schooling, my partner has also had time to reflect on his work-life balance. For the first time since starting his business a few years ago, due to the lockdown, he returned a zero revenue balance last month. Things have truly gone back to the starting blocks in many ways, and allowed for a reset around expectations and workload.

While I highly recommend listening to Tomos Robert’s The Great Realisation video, there is another short video I want to share that might make you smile and lighten your heart. It was made by a family in Akoroa, here in New Zealand, and really captures the spirit of the family lockdown opportunity in a fun way with the Family Lockdown Boogie.
 
So while 2020 might not have got off to the start we were expecting, it may just have given us exactly what was needed: a chance for a do-over. What have you learned from this lockdown? Do you need more time for reflection? Or is it time to make your way back to the starting block and win at 2020 and beyond?
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Is This the Opportunity of a Lifetime?, Are You Overlooking the Obvious Opportunities in Your Life? and  Be at Ease With the World Around You. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I had been doing some shadow work this week, which is to say I had been diving into the subconscious mind to surface some unhealthy thought patterns and feelings I had recently become aware of, when the universe gave me a sharp reminder to get out of the weeds and look at the big picture.

On this journey to me, I thoroughly enjoy the ah ha moments when something suddenly makes sense; it is like another piece of the puzzle falling into place and I become that little bit lighter and brighter. This was no different except I got stuck in the bad feeling of memories and details rather than focusing on healing; as if I wanted to punish myself more.

You see, for quite a while now I have been tracking my dreams, and I often get this feeling of being on the outside. When I explored this (see Heal Your Past Hurts To Help You Fulfill Your Potential) it took me back to a time in my early teenage years where I betrayed someone’s trust - twice - and unsurprisingly lost their friendship.

For a number of years, although I saw my once-friend on a regular basis, he ignored me and it created a deep sense of loss. He was someone who had got me and liked me and that was something I needed, I imagine it is something we all need.

Simultaneously I lost both grandparents on my dad’s side within a short period, and I used to go back to see their house often, sitting unseen in the neighbourhood outside knowing I could never go in again and I would never see them again.

This ache of not being able to connect with my friend, nor ever see my grandparents again, was palpable. This feeling then embedded itself over the years as friendships and relationships ended and, whether I had been the one to end the relationship or not, I would blame myself in some shape or form.

Being liked for who I am is important to me, as I am sure it is for most people. This wasn’t something I felt as a child, how could I when – like many kids – I was constantly being corrected and told what to do and who to be. I used to seek validation through my friendships and relationships, and it is true to say that still happens today to an extent.

My memories took me back through each friendship I had left behind or lost and I felt ashamed that I had hurt people, or not been worthy enough to hold onto certain friendships, perhaps I was just too intense for some people? As I contemplated all this I felt that there was a lack of integrity with myself that I needed to heal.

This, as you may imagine, was not a good feeling place. So, when we were playing a version of hide and seek today with our kids, as I was hiding under the table, my mind flashed back to this deep dive I had done on the feelings of being on the outside, and I reminded myself I had further work to do on it.

Then, suddenly, I was sprung from my hiding spot and – as I leap to my feet – my foot got caught in my trouser leg and it bent my big toe under me, making a crunching sound (a bit like when the chiropractor does a neck adjustment) as my weight landed on it.

I’m not sure if I have fractured anything, but I sure have given it a good wallop and my foot is rather swollen and bruised. Knowing accidents are often a subconscious way of punishing myself for guilty thoughts, I was intrigued by what my little reference books on the metaphysics of trauma would reveal.

Annette Noontil’s book said that the big toe is all about “the inner authority to love yourself and the will to stop judging yourself or others”. Obviously I had little trouble seeing a connection between that and the whole narrative I had been contemplating about past friendships and relationships.

Lise Bourbeau’s book said “The big toe gives direction to the others. An injury represents regret or guilt about the direction taken and will impact your future. You need to get back in touch with what you want for your future. Whatever your goals, regret or guilt will only serve to magnify your fears. Remember, there are no mistakes; there are only experiences that will be useful in your future.”

I contemplated this thought of keeping integrity with myself and recognised that there really is no way that anyone can get through life not hurting anyone nor being hurt. So, yes, shadow work is great - when it is brought into the light rather than me going off to dwell in the shadows.

There is a great article How and Why you Compromise Your Integrity  by Leon F Seltzer that explains this particularly well from a psychotherapy perspective. He asks “have you ever considered that the word integrity intimately relates to the kindred integration? Because if the different parts of yourself – each harbouring a voice and agenda of its own – aren’t well integrated, it may be impossible (across a large variety of situations) to keep your integrity intact...
​
Your integrity, your wholeness, can come only from your integrated self.”

I also recognised the entanglement – the feelings from childhood of not being accepted for who I was, the loss of a friendship and the grief of loss of my grandparents - that had given rise to particularly potent sense of not belonging.

In fact, I can see how it feeds another part of me that lives in the shadows, highly anxious about speaking my truth for fear of? That is the question, as I unpick this, I see the jumble of entangled experiences that have led to and enforced this feeling of anxiety that arises. Luckily I have a louder part of me that compels me to speak my truth anyway; but then one part punishes the other with deep
rooted anxiety.

This is especially so on email, text and social media. Sherry Turkle says “When someone’s in front of you, you get to see the shadow of your words across someone else’s face.” Julie Beck explains “while social media allows for a back and forth dialogue, it is without any of the additional context of body language, facial expression and intonation. It’s harder, for example, to tell that someone found your word choice off-putting, and thus to correct it in real time, or try to explain yourself better.”

With all of this floating around my mind, it really is no wonder that the universe delivered a short shrift to get back in touch with what I want for my future, I was allowing my mind to dwell on all this and got stuck in the weeds. In fact, it is a great reminder to me to Get out of Your Head and into Your Heart. This kind of work is better healed and expedited in my heart space.

The reason I even do this kind of work is to bring me to that place of kindred integration that Leon Seltzer describes. The more integrated I am, the more at peace and in synch with myself I am rather than carrying the chaotic energy that had evolved from beliefs attached to old experiences. Integration creates greater clarity, and allows me to see more of the opportunities life is presenting to help me move forwards in a direction consistent with that kindred integration.

So what about you, rather than allowing your life to run on old neuro wiring that dwells in your past, is it time for you to get in touch with what you want for your future?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Meet Future You, Do You Really Know the Different Parts of You? and Rewriting Your Future – Rewiring for Appreciation. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

The only way to be at ease with the world around me, is to be at ease with the world within me; which feels like a big job at times. It never ceases to amaze me how I might face the same circumstances as hundreds – thousands, or even millions – of other people and yet the range of responses to those circumstances is as varied as the people involved or even just observing.

Right now there is an excellent example of this globally with around a billion kids on the planet, who usually attend school, finding themselves at home with parents like me who are suddenly expected to home school on top of everything else. Or are we?

As I contemplated this whole arena of my kids learning at home during lock down, knowing I have actively considered and rejected the idea of home schooling for my family many times, my mind wandered to what my legal obligations actually are at this time.

After a few Google searches, I could find no answers. It reminded me of when my curiosity led me to investigate what our legal obligations are around attendance, how it is recorded and what actually constitutes a red flag. I like transparency and, instead, what I seemed to find is smoke and mirrors.

If I feel there is an expectation set around me delivering something, I get triggered. As a recovering perfectionist and people pleaser, this homeschooling stuff It is right on target to test me. This is the crux of what I mean about becoming at ease with my inner world, the felt expectation is a narrative I created about the outer world.

And while it is likely there are people in political power and the educational arena that have their own agenda and are indeed driving those expectations, I also recognise the opportunity that home schooling gives me at this time.

The fact is, my kids need some sort of attention, many times in each day; for my youngest it is a great deal of the day. I have choices: I can determinedly plough on with what I’m trying to achieve for myself, I can sweep aside all of that and just focus on my children, or I can manage some of both those things. The key for me is the word manage.

I need a plan; I had one in fact before we ever went into lockdown. I knew it was a prime opportunity to teach my kids how to get involved more in looking after themselves and the home they live in, there is also quite a number of card games and board games that largely get ignored in our house that I could see would be useful additions to managing the family dynamic.

Device time is a non starter for us, we already conducted that human experiment and came out the other side as I talked about in What Addiction Has to Teach Us on the Pathway to Joy. We certainly did not want to be cooped up with two frazzled kids, but I could see this was an opportunity for us to connect more as a family and cultivate respectful communication and compassion for one another.

What about school work? In its doses. There are things my kids are drawn to, and things they hate, this feels like the time to focus on what they are drawn to.

A good friend shared with me the words her child’s school had sent about accessing online learning materials throughout the lockdown; they were salve to my soul:

“The work on the Distance Learning site are suggestions only. It is up to individuals families to decide how much of the work their children complete. They are not intended to place undue stress on your family at this time.”

It was as if a weight lifted from my shoulders and my heart had space to breathe. I needed to hear that.

While it wasn’t directly from my own kids’ school, with the flight or fight response within me now set at ease, common sense and rational thought did manage to kick in. If that had come from a school in our country, it is the answer I had been seeking.

The communication went on like an enchanting, deeply resonant song drawing me in:

“Don't worry about your child regressing in school. Every single child is in this boat and they all will be okay. When we are back in the classroom, we will focus on their learning and meet their educational needs. Teachers are experts at this!

Don't pick fights with your children because they don't want to do any activities. Don't scream at your children for not following the timetable. Don't insist on 2 hours of learning time if they are resisting it. See if you can make learning fun through their play.

Over the coming weeks, you may see an increase in behaviour issues with your children. Whether it's anxiety, or anger, or protests that they can't do normal things - it will happen. You will potentially see more meltdowns, tantrums, and oppositional behaviour. This is normal and expected under these circumstances.

What children need right now is to feel comforted and loved. To feel like it is all going to be okay.”

In short, this kind of heart-felt communication set the perfectionist and people pleaser in me at ease. I felt understood, I felt my children were understood; I felt validated. I recognised that this is exactly the kind of communication I need to write to myself more often.

While this is a deep process of conscious learning for me, I also recognise there are many parents who don’t have these same triggers. They may be adopting the home school curriculum and that works well for them and their family, or they may wholeheartedly take an entirely different direction without even a thought or a care for what anyone thinks or expects.

My triggers are not necessarily your triggers, but you can be sure if you are feeling ill at ease in the world right now you are being triggered by something. Become aware of the narratives in your head, this is your opportunity to do something about them, it does not serve you to be in a chronic flight or fight state.

Yes, there is a new virus out there. Someone you know or someone you care about may even have died, and this – like all death – is hard for those left trying to figure out who they are in the world without that loved one. However, most people will not catch nor die from the virus; I know the more robust my immune system, the more likely I am to remain healthy. Nothing compromises a human immune system quicker than fear (check out Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress for more information on that).

The chances are that you, like me, are faced with the challenges, and therefore opportunities, these movement restrictions have created. This is life calling you to become unencumbered of ideas and beliefs that may have served you once, but no longer do. Dive into the narratives, and really challenge yourself on whether those narratives help or hinder you.

Becoming at ease with our inner world is the key to being at ease in the world around us.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Is This the Opportunity of a Lifetime?, Are You Overlooking the Obvious Opportunities in Your Life? and 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 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.

In New Zealand we have gone boots and all into lockdown this week after initially taking a getting-slowly-sucked-down-the-plughole-of-coronavirus-control-measures approach since the first case was reported here at the end of February.

I guess, having watched our fellow humans across the globe tackle it in different ways, the government here decided we were better to jump to the most stringent control measures. So one day, when our kids were at school, there was an unexpected nationwide address at 2pm announcing all this. By 3pm our kids were being picked up along with all their schoolwork, and non essential businesses closing for a minimum of four weeks.

While I know there are people who are worried about having enough income to get through, I feel gratitude for the decisive action the government here have taken, and what appears to be relatively good communication, support and quick decisions; it is quite refreshing. We have one friend who, within a day, received a decent hardship payment, but I am sure it is not all plain sailing for everyone.  
As I pondered the irony of finding myself overnight taking on the role of homeschool mum (a role I have always rejected in absolute self awareness despite my views on Evolving Education) I related strongly to a funny post someone shared “Day One of Home School: Two Students Suspended for Fighting, Teacher Fired.”

After a few days of infighting I decided that this was a golden opportunity for us as a family to get on a calmer footing and learn to communicate with each other more respectfully. In Be Accountable to Your Intentions and Find Blissful Peace I wrote about a tick sheet I created for myself, towards the end of last year, that was titled “I will speak respectfully to my children”. They get to decide each day if I get a tick or a cross.

Dr Laura Markham says “How can you expect a child to learn to control his own emotions if you don’t control yours? … If you were yelled at, it takes tremendous work not to yell…it’s not rocket science, it takes about three months.”

I followed her advice and, having seen it in action for a good few months, the kids were happy to get on board with a tick sheet of their own. For every five ticks, my youngest child gets a glass crystal, once she has collected five crystals she gets to choose what we, as a family, do for an hour. She has in mind our first activity: nail painting, including her dad.

I am also thinking about other opportunities for the kids to dictate their own learning and pace for a while, as well as looking after my partner who is currently undergoing a lengthy recovery from a rather bad riding accident.  Of course this is all while ensuring I take care of my own needs.

With the pace of life more natural than at any time since my childhood, this all feels like a golden opportunity to recalibrate. While we are not allowed to drive to the beach to take a walk, we are allowed to walk around our local neigbourhood, which has plenty of greenery.

I am also feeling blessed we have a garden that needs just a little bit of tending each day. It is enough to keep me connected to Mother Nature and not too much that I am overwhelmed, especially coming into autumn here. Our neighbours are friendly and helpful, and chats through the hedge and across the street are a welcome connection to other people outside of the electronic highway to everyone else.

My partner and I had already started an online course with Kelly McGonigal 40 Days to Positive Change, which is another blessing as it is not time heavy and supports all the changes we have had to make, as well as ones we want to make.

I’m even feeling blessed about the surge in theories and conspiracies, all of which are always interesting, I especially like this one as it made me think about what a virus (any virus) actually is. I don’t fully resonate with the conclusions, and - as always – I advocate just taking what resonates for you.

However, I’m not wading too deeply into any of that as these largely point to things outside my control at this juncture and there is a fine line between keeping myself informed and creating needless fear. It is much better that I focus the vast majority of my time on the things directly before me and on maintaining presence.

Meditation is always a non-negotiable for me, only fifteen minutes a day, but it keeps me consciously aware of my thought patterns and feelings and helps me course-correct pretty quickly. Last night when one of my kids refused to settle down to sleep, and kept bouncing out of bed well over an hour after her usual bed time, I found myself screaming “I just want to have some time to myself!” In light of that, today, Sunday, I’m taking some time out.

So is this the opportunity of a lifetime? An opportunity for us all to slow the pace, to reflect and think and make positive change? How can you turn the negatives into positives, what opportunities lie before you right now?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy in Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, What Is the Deal with Conspiracies? Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress or 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.

What a crazy world I’ve lived in this week
LIfe full of that word virus yet it’s peace I seek

I don’t feel fear, not yet at least
More dismay at people preparing for famine than feast

Taking sensible steps is a chore in my head
Aspects of daily life getting harder is a thing one can dread

So each day I take the time
To seek that inner peace of mine

To gain some perspective on the conversations I hear
To choose rational thought and reclaim my inner peace over fear

It is not always easy I will admit
When I have an inbox full of things talking about it

I turn to my partner, my friends, my kids
Too much virus stuff, it gives me the skids

Yet the nuggets of gold are not hard to find
Mother Earth has taken a big out breath in areas human activity has declined

Life could actually slow down in a way
To help us contemplate the next positive play

The years after this virus hit
Will we make positive changes because of it?

​Will governments learn from this hullabaloo?
Who knows, but will you?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy in Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear, What Is the Deal with Conspiracies? Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress or 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.

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.

I can see that loving me for who I am, today, not what I can be tomorrow, and loving my life for what it is today, is a worthy goal in every respect. But if I can’t do it today, if I can’t love myself, will I beat myself up? Or will I allow in enough love, enough understanding, to be gentle with myself and simply try again tomorrow, knowing I am doing the best I can?

I don’t find it easy to be kind to myself. Growing up I learned I often had to be something else, someone else, than who I was being in that moment, to be loveable. This was inadvertent, through a combination of messages about acceptable behaviours and my parents’ reactions to my thoughts, desires and requests; it was certainly not intentional on their part.

Then, in early adulthood, I fell totally and utterly in love. Finally, I felt I had someone who could love me for me, someone who brought out something more light-hearted in me. But less than two years later, he left me.

As I was swallowed by a gaping chasm of pain, loneliness and grief, I blamed myself for being too needy and too serious.  Maybe I was those things, but I can see now I was still loveable; the only person who didn’t understand that was me.

I beat myself up about that for decades, decades, and kept playing out some version of needing to be more in my life in order to be happy. And did it make me happy? No, according to an amazing lady I met recently who has the capacity to reflect back to me exactly who I am being in that moment, formidable is what I have become.

This is not gentle; it is not kind; it is not loving; it is harsh.

With my partner incapacitated at the moment, having broken his leg, this is probably the most time we have had together since our children were born. It has led to some interesting and introspective conversations about the things our children are reflecting back to us, things that we might want to change about ourselves and our habits.  

I’ve always known how different my partner and I are, but what these conversations have crystallised for me is just how self satisfied my partner is versus my opposite sense of self dissatisfaction.  He has a self satisfied light that beams from him; it was one of the first things that attracted me to him.

In truth, I believe that light is within us all, it is just that it’s often obscured.

In our parenting, while my partner and I each recognise aspects of ourselves that are less than desirable, our reactions to that are quite different. I am hard on myself, feeling less than, and driven to change. He is far gentler with himself and, while wanting and committing to change, still remains essentially self satisfied.

It is not that I haven’t felt the satisfaction of the expansive and joyful feeling of connecting with the source of who I am, it is more that many of my thoughts and beliefs disconnect me. The sense of self worth I have was not built from the inside out; it was built on trying to please others outside myself.

This is something I have sought to fix on the journey to me, and I have spent the last few years getting to know many of the parts of me that I have denied, rejected or disowned. But my reaction to these recent conversations with my partner has given me another lens through which to look. I can consider that the path to enlightenment is also, paradoxically, another path upon which I can opt to beat myself up.

Spiritual growth is something I thrive on, and there is no doubt it is a good thing. However, if I see the growth as necessary for me to be somehow more worthy than I am today, then I know that is not serving me. It is, in fact, contradicting the very growth I seek.

Being gentle with myself, while learning to love all the parts of me, is something I am yearning and learning, slowly. It takes vulnerability and willingness to set strong boundaries around my own needs and desires.

Meanwhile, I know that every day of my life I’ve done the best I could, with what I knew, felt and believed at the time. I can’t change the past, but I can change how I view it, and I can certainly change how I view things in the present.

What about you, how hard are you on yourself? Do you fear that going easier on yourself will lead to more disappointment or not meeting other people’s expectations? Do you feel worthy of love? I like to look at it this way, would you benefit from more love? And if you are not able to give it to yourself, do you think others will be able to love you enough to make up for that?

I pray that we each find ways to let the love in, because I don’t have to use much imagination to picture this world full of people who are withholding themselves from love. But a world full of self loving people?  Now, that would be quite something.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Why Resenting Your Parents is Healthy, You Are the Gift Your Ancestors Gave to the World, The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling and You Are Not as Important to Your Parents as You (or They) Think. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog. Heal Your Past Hurts To Help You Fulfill Your Potential.

I want to acknowledge the many awful moments that my children have experienced the worst of who I am. Moments where I’ve dropped into flight or fight mode and spewed forth the worst of who my parents were to me in those same moments.

You know the moments, the ones where you suddenly realise how much you sound like your mother or father?

I also acknowledge the many awful moments in my life where my partners have experienced the worst of who I am. These were the moments I also dropped into flight or fight mode, or the sympathetic nervous system response, reacting to something that reminded me of the way I was treated as a child, only this time I wasn’t powerless to hold back my fury at such treatment.

You know the moments, the ones where you feel criticized, undervalued, blamed, or the many myriad of emotions that our parents used elicit in us as we were growing up?

I am not perfect, and I am not always right, if there is such a thing. But I do observe most of us walking around as our child selves dressed in adult skin. The real test is under stress, which is when we revert to old patterns.

I know that it would have helped me a lot growing up to have heard “it is not you; it is my stuff that I am dealing with”. Instead I heard “it is you, it is your bad behaviour that is making me act like this towards you.”

As a child, I had no context of the family history, I had no concept of what either of my parents had suffered themselves growing up, but I saw it written in their behaviours, and I thought I was to blame.
This is not about the atrocities that happen, though it applies to those things too, it is about the far more pervasive emotional abuse that occurs unknowingly in most households.

If I interact with others outside the home and have friends and colleagues who think I’m a nice person, it is lovely. But if I then walk through the door of my home each day and become someone less than lovely, it is a huge warning sign that I’m being inauthentic. 

The exhausting pretense of going out into the world and acting in ways I was taught and learned were appropriate means I then come home and am too tired, perhaps too hurt even, to keep that all up.
How I interact with my children, the example I show them in terms of my own emotional equilibrium and how I maintain it, is everything.

I can yell at them from the kitchen like a director shooting a movie and expecting absolute compliance, or I can walk over to where they are and look them in the eyes while talking to them. I mean, if I had a guest in my house, I wouldn’t just yell at them would I?

I can carry on yelling at them to hurry up while I myself am barely making it to the car on time, distracted by a message on my phone. Or I can ignore my phone and be more present with my kids and help get them to the car on time with much less fuss. Heck, we could even make a game out of it.

All of this seems so ridiculous and yet it is normal. Generation after generation unintentionally and unwittingly repeating wounds and hurts; until someone says “no more”.

For me personally, I have to be that person. I can’t accept behaviour from myself that perpetuates constant pain and mediocrity. If I am to fulfill my potential, if my kids have any hope of fulfilling theirs, we must unburden ourselves of these patterns.

​From all I have been able to ascertain, although many people tend to spend many hours in therapists offices around the world delving into their childhood, it takes more than just recognising where these behaviours and patterns come from. I have known many people able to recite quite aptly exactly why they are the way they are, and yet feel powerless to change.

Despite the best of intentions, without actual healing taking place, each time I get triggered, my sympathetic nervous system is turned on and, boom, I am back in child mode. That takes a huge amount of willpower and persistence to overcome.

True healing only ever seems to take place if the memories of the relevant events are refocused while in an open and relaxed state. As I mentioned at the outset, it would have helped me a lot growing up to have heard “it is not you; it is my stuff that I am dealing with”. Instead I heard “it is you, it is your bad behaviour that is making me act like this towards you.” That creates a shame state which is totally destructive.

Instead, if I can go back into some of those early memories in a relaxed state, preferably guided by someone who is experienced in this type of work, I can acknowledge that child-me deserved better. I can then refocus the memories away from an attachment to me being somehow bad, by recognising the real culprit; my parents’ own childhood traumas.

In Your Childhood Is Not Your Fault but It Will Be Your Limitation I talk about The Completion Process by Teal Swan, one of the most powerful techniques for healing I’ve used (and continue to use). Here is a link to an enlightening video of her doing this process with a client, it is certainly excellent at demonstrating just how early in our life these traumas occur and the patterns begin, and how to heal them.

There is also this other article that gives a great overview of trauma recognition and releasing techniques. Marisa Peers is another good self help source. Family Constellations is a possible way to go; there are many ways to conquer our shortcomings and suffering, it is just a question of finding something and someone who works for you.

As I said to someone else this week, you are never too old to heal. If there is breath still in us, I believe it is in fact our duty. I truly hope that you will make the quest to give yourself the love you deserve a priority in your life. It really will be a huge gift to you, but also an amazing legacy for your family. I will be cheering you on and celebrating as you step into your best life, giving us all hope and inspiration.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy You Are the Gift Your Ancestors Gave to the World, The People Who Hurt Us Are Vehicles for Our Growth, Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling and Want Better Health? Be Shrewd About Stress. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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