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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We humans have forgotten how powerful we truly are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History of Healthcare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antibiotics and Vaccines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we are self responsible we can heal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being passive is often regarded as weak in our society. I remember teachers barking phrases like “have some gumption”, “think for yourself” or “have some backbone” to various students, which is ironic given the modus operandi of most school systems is for students to do as they are told. Most systems and authorities tend not to like being challenged, yet we respect those that do.

Early in my high school years I recall listening to a talk by someone differentiating between being passive, assertive and aggressive, and being assertive was the obvious choice of the three. I see the benefit of assertively walking down the street, keeping my head up, shoulders back, hips square and looking people directly in the eye (with a good natured smile and nod of acknowledgement).

It conveys “I have my wits about me”. And when I have my wits about me, it means I’m calm and alert; it’s the ability to think quickly, especially in times of stress. Yet, interestingly, while I grew up being someone who proved good in a crisis, I suffered from chronic anxiety the rest of the time.

Like most people, I grew up with an abundance of mixed messages, but the predominant beat of the drum was to submit. Psychology tells us that when faced with something we don’t like, it’s perceived as a threat and thus we flee, fight, freeze or fold.

In the face of being told no: “no you do not know what is good for you”, “no the way you are feeling is not acceptable/ridiculous/unwarranted”, “no you cannot express yourself that way” and so on, I – like most young children – had  harsh choices to make to survive in the family home and community.

I think I fragmented, freezing the soul-led part of me, and moved forward with a persona that was the most acceptable compromise in my world.  Much of the time I strove for perfection in order to avoid criticism or conflict, and became highly anxious in doing so.

At home I wasn’t given criticism in a constructive way, so I am relearning how to hear it as a grown woman without becoming so defensive. That said, I was far from being a quiet mouse as a child, there were many times I just couldn’t suppress that undeniably big warm heart beating in the somewhat frozen soul-led part of me.

When I felt the heart of my soul beat, I acted in response. I found the best way to get what I wanted and needed was to present a rational argument, fighting against whatever decision had been dished out. When that didn’t work, I was like a dog with a bone until I had worn out my oppressor.

In a highly controlled and disciplined environment, being passive was not useful.

Being ready to fight for myself and being persistent paid off. It paid off in the years of growing up, and it has paid off as a grown up in making the decision to find a way back to that authentic part of me. But there came a point that it no longer served me. The authentic part of me does not know how to fight, and does not want to fight, it simply wants to stand in its truth and shine.

Becoming a parent has just amplified everything that was going on inside me. When I find myself chuntering or yelling the same criticisms I heard, I cringe and I stop. That old part of me has so many years of momentum, but it’s slowly slowing down in the light of awareness and active healing; I know one day it will become so still and quiet I’ll hardly hear it at all.

The word passive has popped out at me a number of times lately. When I was asked to repeat an affirmation “you are confident, grounded, passive and comfortable”, I just couldn’t connect with passive; it did not feel affirmative.

Yet, a few days later, when I heard Matt Khan say “Passivity is how we evolve in the journey from the small I am to the big I AM. When we all evolve, we will break down the systems of society” I was in complete agreement.

When I put it in the context of living a more soul-led life, passivity really takes on new meaning. After years of setting goals and fighting for my place in the world, it takes practice to make a shift to a place of surrender and allowing. And it’s not about surrendering to the whims and desires of the world around me; it’s about allowing the world within me to see the light of day.

​Passivity is not about suppressing things that trigger me, it’s about observing what is triggering me and what it is trying to teach me. It’s about acting on inspiration from within, rather than feeling the need to take action because of a voice in my head that is fearful and deems me a failure otherwise.

​It’s about dismantling the defensive armour, the ideas and beliefs I thought were mine, to rediscover that who I am is far more connected to everything and everyone than I could ever have anticipated in my learned state. Passivity is about allowing who I truly am at my core shine out into the world.

Being passive in this sense is honestly powerful and liberating. It’s a relief to ditch the effort involved in presenting a front to the world, and all that senseless worrying about what people might think of me. To become more passive and stand in my truth in all my relationships, and in all situations, has become my goal in life.

​What about you?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling and Do You Need to Cherish Yourself? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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Lately I’ve been focused on healing my body of the traumas it has endured over my life and it’s really brought home to me what it means to embody my spirituality. I think of it like peeling an onion layer by layer, slowly uncovering all the things that – over the years – I’ve either suppressed or repressed.

I discovered that suppression refers to denial of impulses on a conscious level (for example, if I was deliberately holding back from expressing my true feelings during a conversation), whereas repression involves denying impulses at a subconscious level (for example, if I was born into a family where expressing my anger was not allowed, I may have long since numbed myself to even feeling anger arise in me).

Of course, what has been suppressed or repressed will find a way to be expressed. There are many ways this can happen and life is always presenting me with clues. A quick read of any good book on metaphysical causes of disease, or a chat with any healer that works with the energy in our bodies, will usually point to the thought patterns and emotions that need to come to light in order to be healed.

Continued denial, conscious or unconscious, just seems to manifest in more and more debilitating accidents, events and diseases. This, I believe, is why there are so many people who develop terminal illnesses after many years of locking away their true feelings, and most of the time they are completely oblivious to the links.

When dying of bowel cancer, my mum was much happier just chalking it up to fate rather than reexamining the relationship with her abusive alcoholic father who died very early in her life. Not that it would have reversed what was happening in her body necessarily, but it may have created some healing and slowed things down.

But since I started living life more consciously, the feelings, thought patterns and behaviours that stem from traumatic events are usually quite obvious now I know what I’m looking for. As I mentioned in a previous blog, some of my favourite go-to reference books for this are Lise Boubeau’s Your Body’s Telling You: Love Yourself and Annette Noontil’s The Body is the Barometer of the Soul,

Traumatic events are not just about abuse though, or the horrors of war, there is also a whole raft of developmental and more commonplace traumas that we each experience. These amount to anything that cause us to go against our true nature, for example:

• Early life parent-child attachment issues
• The culture within the family home, community or country that places more value on certain behaviours than others (for example, extroverted behaviour is valued more in Western society which is not so great for sensitive types like me)
• Normal childhood diseases or immunizations
• Accidents, illnesses, surgeries, medications etc
• Other emotionally significant events like parents getting divorced, or me getting divorced, made redundant or the death of someone significant in my life

In essence, anything of significance creates an emotional signature in the cells of my body whether I lock them out of my conscious thinking or not. The body, in a bid to create healing and equilibrium, will continue to attempt to get my attention for as long as I am in it.

When I set my sights on leading a soul-led life, I knew there was a bit of work to do to unpeel the layers of my own metaphorical onion. But, I’ll be honest, I really wasn’t fully thinking through that each layer is also multi layered (in terms of mind, body, spirit) and discovering what is locked away in the cells of my body didn’t cross my mind.

Yet I have lived through each trauma moment by moment, time and again I have had experiences that jolt my nervous system and do unseen damage within organs. I’m discovering that a broad recognition of, say, a troubled relationship with a parent, and sweeping forgiveness doesn’t really cut it.

So committing to unpeeling the layers of trauma is a bit more involved than I imagined, not unlike parenting. It requires dedication, patience and its own time and space to unfold.

I’m particularly enjoying a sequential honouring of my timeline (starting at the present day and working backwards) using a mix of homeopathy and emotional work. This has been surprising and downright painful at times as I said in Learn to See What Is in Plain Sight, but, in reality it’s quite benign compared to the years of trauma now being expressed.

Left squashed down, my body will try to express what is locked in there in a way that gets louder and louder, so by starting to work through the most recent traumas it simultaneously works through the older, related ones.

For example, I have just had root canal work, a dead nerve being the cause of an excruciating facial neuralgia and a subsequent painful abscess; this is a further expression of dental work that took place a year ago. More importantly, it’s an expression of the pain I felt in being taunted as a child as I described in Play Big in Life, Stand Up and Be Seen and the related anger and sadness that I had never really addressed.

Physically clearing out the dead debris is the same as dealing with the underlying thought patterns and emotions, they are just the physical, intellectual and emotional expressions of the same thing and it allows the issue to dissipate.

One of the techniques I like to use to address my emotions is a visualization where I sit with younger me and hear what she has to say about the issues, and then I invite in (in my imagination) someone wise to give their views, and then I let present day me express how I am now feeling and how it has changed my thinking. This allows me to let go of the old feelings that – having now been heard and understood - are no longer serving a purpose in my life.

For years a mentor of mine has talked about change beginning first at a soul level, then – once I have got up my nerve (to do something) - it filters though to the nervous system , then the electrics come online as little sparks go around my body and fire up my sensory system. Once my body is fully online, my heart begins to feel the change, and finally – lastly – my intellect understands it.

Now that my authentic self has managed to get all systems online, in a good few areas, I can really appreciate intellectually the multi faceted way I was sabotaging my own authenticity for much of my life. I also have a greater respect for my body, which is clearly wiser than my mind, and listen to it far more.

I was told a story today of a little boy who had such a troubled start to his life. When he was first able to talk he would get all agitated and kept repeating “I said no” (to coming into this life). His mother, with loving patience and persistence, has taken the time to spend with him in nature and focus him on the beauty of being here, and now he is far more at peace.

I’m sharing this little story as a parting thought on this topic, because recently when asked what the purpose of life is, this (still) little boy said “to experience true love coming back to you”.

That, in essence, is the purpose of embodying our authentic, spiritual self; to experience true love coming back to you. Now isn’t that a worthy goal?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Whose Energy Is This Anyway? Stop Taking on Board How Others Are Feeling and Do You Need to Cherish Yourself? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Recently I’ve realised just how much my body has been living in a state of chronic stress for much of my life. In the last few years, having broken away from the corporate world, my lifestyle has been much less stressful. Given that I still reside in the same body and mind, this change has given me more clarity on how and why stress still occurs.

For me, a large part of that is my inner critic. I was listening to Matt Khan talk this week about the words I am. He distinguishes between two versions of who this I is, one lives in our heads (the one criticizing, judging and seeing itself as separate from everything else) and the other is the broader part of ourselves that knows only love (and feels connected to everything else).

There are many words used to differentiate between these versions of ourselves. I think of it in terms of there being a version of me that has become encumbered and unwittingly enslaved by my life’s experiences, versus a more authentic version of me that knows only how to love me and others and retains just the wisest parts of all my lives’ experiences.

Becoming aware of these differing perspectives has created such an enormous shift in my own life. I resonated with Matt Khan as he talked about our goal as being, in that broader awareness, to embody and bring that perspective of love into our day to day experiences; rather than continue to beat up, reject and disown parts of our self.

Matt also talked about the need to train our nervous system to deal with sustained periods of higher vibrational energy. Our nervous system can’t hold that energy for long as it is too powerful and feels unsafe.

My nervous system has been screaming for attention lately with neuralgia and a dying nerve in my tooth. So each time I hear the words nervous system, it gets my attention. Just this morning I received an email that started by talking about how beneficial meditation is for calming our nervous systems.

However, the other important word that keeps cropping up is the concept of safety. Only a couple of days ago I listened to a talk by the wonderful Wendy Palmer, about how to shift from our small, reactive self to our expanded, universal self. She refers to that small, reactive part of us as “the personality that references on creating security, using the strategies of control, approval and safety”.

With all this in mind, the other night when I awoke in the early hours and couldn’t get back to sleep; my mind started ruminating on a conversation I’d had the day before. I had been waiting some time for that conversation to find its place to occur, to speak my truth on some important issues, and it had been satisfactory on the whole.

While there are things I wish I’d said, or said in a different way, I’m sure I understood many of the issues better from the explanations I heard, while managing to convey my own point of view, really it needed no further thought or action.

Yet I found I was obsessively going over it again and again in my head while simultaneously being aware of the now alert state of my body and feeling of tightness in my stomach. I’ve been here many times in my life and it wasn’t a space I wanted to be in, I wanted to relax and go to sleep.

I immediately recognised that, on some level, I was feeling unsafe. The fact that I could connect to my deeper understanding of the reason for that was helpful, at least allowing my mind to rationalise that the perceived danger was a conflict of opinion.  

As I said in Play Big in Life, Stand Up and Be Seen, I’ve spent much of my life feeling anxious because of the contradiction between what my parents/society would have me do/believe (the picture that is painted of what is good/right/intelligent), versus what I know to be true for me.

As a young child, like any other, dependent on adults for survival, I took any conflict of opinion very seriously. Unwilling to let go of my desires if I viewed them as important, I was always sure to fully prepare my case and rationale in order to hope for any kind of outcome more aligned with what I wanted.

So it was I had found myself ruminating on this conversation in the middle of the night, like the young child replaying again the pattern of justification and desire for approval. Recognizing how my body has been trained to respond in these situations, I thanked it for trying to keep me safe but now I know it is also keeping me small.

As I was lying there another visual came into my head from something different I’d heard just last week, talking about the solar plexus and the heart. The solar plexus was being referred to as the energy centre for the ego, the small self, and the heart as the energy centre for love, our expanded self.

Recognising the knot in my stomach is right in the solar plexus area, I lay there visualizing the energy moving and flowing up to my heart, while telling myself “Thank you for keeping me safe, I can rise up and shine now. I am safe, I am seen, I am loved” over and over. After a while, the words morphed somewhat and “I am strong” also got added.

This went on for quite some time and, of course, I instantly stopped ruminating about the conversation, it was done. As I dozed in and out of sleep, some part of me took over the chant and I felt the knot dissipate and something within me shift for the better.

In fact, I’d say I felt the love I had for the part of me that had stood up and told me truth, while simultaneously recognizing the difference of opinion and knowing I could do what I wanted anyway, I didn’t need this person’s approval.  As Wendy Palmer would say, “they get to feel how they feel, even if they don’t like you or agree with you, that is okay.”

I thought about what Matt Khan had said about our nervous systems needing retrained to handle higher energies, and there is was right there, the training in practice.

I also reflected on how sad it seems that retraining is even necessary. Our physical lifecycle begins in that love, the powerful and pure energy that babies carry is undeniable in my experience. Then through this process of socialization we become more and more weighed down; entraining our energy downward. So much so that when it experiences the power of love it feels dangerous to our nervous system, wow.

There are stressors that occur outside of that socialization process of course. Just breathing in the air in the urban environment I live in will no doubt be taxing my various bodily systems that have to deal with pollutants and high levels of radiation, and driving a vehicle requires my body to be in a higher state of alert than it would naturally.

But the stressor that has me on high alert too much of the time is that inner critic, those thought patterns that are outdated and still serving the child in me rather than the grown adult.

What are the patterns you’d dearly like to change? What would help reassure your body and mind that it is safe to do so? You will find there are many resources and techniques out there to help, find what works best for you and Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy You Know What’s Best for You, So Stop Giving Your Power Away. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Usually the expression playing big is about taking risks. However, the specific risk I’m talking about here is being true to your authentic self.

Everything in life works in cycles I’ve noticed. Certainly when I’m learning something new it takes a while for my old habits to disappear, they sort of swirl around like an echo slowly fading as I recognise and observe rather than react. Then finally, one day, I stop even noticing.

Therefore it is fitting in my most recent growth, learning as a student of anger while becoming its master, observing its echoes in a familiar recurring cycle. Each month for as long as I can remember, in tandem with my hormones building up and releasing, I go through a phase where everything irritates me more.  

I was curious about how this would go after doing a lot of work lately to understand and release a lot of anger. As always, I remain grateful my friends and I have cultivated a metaphorical ring, into which we can throw anything we are currently tussling with, in order to gain a fresh perspective.

So as I was busy throwing a lot of stuff in the ring that I was getting really irritated by, I recognised the correlation immediately. Wisely one friend observed how the stuff I was getting sidetracked by, while admittedly annoying, was keeping me playing it small. So what was the real issue? Why has this become a pattern?

I stayed with the feeling of anger and observed that, sitting right underneath it, was a feeling of immense sadness. What reverberated were words from my childhood: “Don’t get too big for your boots” and (sarcastically) “Shona knows it all” and “Shona knows best”.

I recognise that sadness has kept me small, not in the sense that it’s ever stopped me doing what I wanted nor standing for what I believe in, but  the stance from which I’ve played the game. Coming to mind is the image of my youngest daughter yelling “Hi-yah” as she runs around karate-chopping at everything.

The opinions of those around me kept me feeling small and kept me acting from a point of defence as I grew.

Inside, while I never doubted what I knew, I just got sad others didn’t seem to see things the way I did, I felt like a bit of an outsider and was afraid someone might see me as too big for my boots, and neither was I usually allowed to honour what I knew was best for me without a big fight.

So I asked myself, in light of the memory of the childhood taunting, what do I have to say about the “Hi-yah” tactic now? Here is what I heard:

It served you once, but it is keeping you small, play big. Stand tall, step up to the light and take your place. There is nothing to fear.

As soon as I heard that, it unlocked the tension within me, the fading echo was suddenly gone, I could no longer hear it.

Playing it big doesn’t mean I just break rules willy-nilly, it means I take fear for what it is, as the acronym – False Evidence Appearing Real. True fear is designed to trigger me into flight or fight mode, if my survival is being threatened from, say, a tiger attacking me.

The reality of the fear I have mostly felt for the majority of my life, is more an indication of my authentic self screaming for its survival, knowing I’m being tricked into believing something that is not true for me.

To say it more plainly, I’ve spent much of my life feeling anxious because of the contradiction between what my parents/society would have me do/believe (the picture that is painted of what is good/right/intelligent), versus what I know to be true for me.

Playing big means figuring that out and honouring what my inner voice actually has to say.

What are my truths? Might I actually know what is going on in my body without a doctor telling me? Might I not believe in some kind of judgmental hierarchical truth without being struck down or going to some hell? Might there be another way for me to learn than rote learning?

I could go on, and these are all very big questions, just like What Is the Deal with Conspiracies? But it also applies to more mundane issues too. Might a person be able to thrive in this world without a traditional education and career? Might my kids be able to watch TV without it creating some irreversible neurological damage? We each have our own beliefs and they are worth unpicking.

So what is keeping you playing small this life? What are you afraid of? Pay attention to those things, they will be your undoing – and can be in a good way if you can unravel your authentic self. You didn’t come to play small, you came to play big. Even if you are shy, at least when you occasionally stand up, let it be the authentic you that is seen.

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

I was putting my youngest child to bed this week and she asked me with sincerity whether aliens were real. Her dad had been watching a 2017 documentary called Unacknowledged, an exposé on the veil of secrecy surrounding UFO’s and, although she hadn’t seen it, the thought of meeting an alien scared her.

This gave me pause for thought. From my perspective, as I look out into the night sky and see the thousands of stars that represent the millions I know are out there, it just seems logical to me to conclude that there is likely intelligent life on other planets.

It would also seem logical to me that these life forms are likely more evolved than ours if they have managed to traverse to our time and space, and most likely peaceful. I could write a whole article on how I’ve arrived at those conclusions, but the point is that you should come to your own.

I’ve listened and read enough on the subject (and related subjects that involve lots of scare mongering) to have thought the issue through for myself and arrive at thoughts that resonate for me.

What was of more concern to me was that my little one has obviously been suffused with this fear at such a young age. I’d say it’s mainly through watching children’s TV shows that depict the power struggles between various goodies and baddies, often portrayed as differing species.

That she wouldn’t welcome the chance to meet and converse with another intelligent species kind of caught me off guard. But it was also a stark reminder of the messages that get played through mainstream media if you are submersed in it.

When a friend recommended watching Unacknowledged, I commented that the biggest conspiracy is the creation of the idea that believing in conspiracies is a pathological condition. I remember being convinced myself as a teenager and young adult that anything that smelled remotely of a conspiracy was unworthy of my time and attention in case it made me look less credible or intelligent.

However in the years since, as I have withdrawn my attention from mainstream media and began to dive deeper on many different topics that interest me, there came a point when I realised what had been hiding in plain sight all along.

There is a saying that Truman used many years ago to describe the unscrupulous tactics of his opponents “if you can’t convince them, confuse them.”  The moment I heard it, it resonated it deeply.

The tools used are wide and varied, but they run off of and perpetuate one thing – fear.

I have read and watched the (often successful) attempts at debunking, discrediting and ridiculing well respected academics and scientists who get too close to the truth and can’t be bought off in many fields.

Inventions that would allow giant leaps in technology and resolve our environmental impacts are purportedly not ever allowed to see the light of day at the Patent Office because of the detrimental impact it would have to the economic dynamics where much is in the hands of the few, who want to keep it there.

High ranking politicians and leaders are potentially puppets and pawns at best, often kept in the dark.

It is conceivable that mainstream media is infiltrated and corrupted at the highest levels to ensure that confusion and fear reign among the masses on many profitable topics. And with as much valid information on the internet as there is contrived, people generally are maintained in a state of confusion, tending to believe what credible sources tell them.

Credible being defined as media sources and professions we have been brought up to trust through the debunking and ridiculing of others that may have valid viewpoints and skills to offer.

It is my belief that there are many good leaders, politicians, academics, scientists and journalists out there, but I have no doubt that for most of my life what I’ve been fed through mainstream media, education and culture is utter garbage.

Put another way, it is pure spin that is designed to keep me feeling small, scared and enslaved to the economic machine that feeds a small group of greedy people who think power is amassed by taking it from others.

This is the stuff of science fiction, or so I would have been led to believe, which is why there are more programs and movies that are designed to perpetuate the confusion and fear than there are those which open our minds and hearts to other possibilities.

What if most things ridiculed have some basis in truth? What if we already have the technology to solve world hunger, poverty and environmental impacts? What if we have the technology to deliver free energy at our fingertips? What if it’s being suppressed so that the rich are getting richer and – they think – more powerful?

What if your body has the power to heal itself? What if pharmaceuticals and conventional medicine are making us sicker? This is a topic particularly close to my heart and one I’ll be diving into in more detail in a 3-part series in the next few months.

What if you already have the whole of human knowledge contained within you at birth? As my eldest daughter says, it makes no sense to her she has to be rote taught number and letter systems, when humans have been calculating and communicating for a long time and she has the power to do and fathom everything else for herself when exposed to the right conditions.

This tussle to control others had been going for millennia among humans, played out for a long time through churches, but in our most recent period of history is far more heavily influenced by big money players.

My lesson in all of this is that there is only one credible source, and it lies within. I can observe, I can listen, I can be curious and investigate. I can be sure that anything portrayed as fearful requires a much closer look. But through all of it, it’s my inner guidance that reveals what I believe as my truth.

When I watch something like Unacknowledged, which I felt was well laid out and presented, it reminds me of all the garbage that gets fed to unsuspecting humans. I get a familiar feeling inside, like a tight band around my gut, and it reminds me of feelings I’ve had like that in the past. There have been many times in my life when I’ve felt I’m supposed to look intelligent and agree yet knowing something was amiss.

But decide for yourself, wherever you land on these issues will be your truth and your truth will either keep you chained up in fear, or it will set you free.

Some of those talking in Unacknowledged conclude this dynamic will require a revolution. But I believe pushing against something we don’t want gives it more power, I say instead Be an Evolutionary (Rather Than a Revolutionary).

Learn to read your inner signs, trust your natural (not learned) instincts, and learn to think things through for yourself. What have you bought into that might not be as it seems? Once you can tap into your own power of discernment, no one else can impose their power upon you, because you will know the only true power lies within.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul and Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

Over the last few weeks I’ve been contending with facial neuralgia. Often described as one of the most painful human conditions, I can attest that it is up there on the scale with childbirth and kidney stones, as it comes in waves of debilitating and excruciating pain.

This is the story of how it led me to an inner truth I’d not seen clearly at all until now: that I was still seeking respect for my decisions from other people.

So, starting with the pain, once I was confident my life wasn’t in any immediate danger, I moved pretty quickly into detective mode on what was causing it. Physically it seems likely it’s caused by a post virus that got activated when my immune system was low, a bit like shingles without the rash.

I’m skipping past a whole bunch of stuff here about the process of healing and healthcare that I will dive into in some later blogs, for now I’ll just share what was relevant to this particular nougat of authenticity revealing itself.

Whenever something physical arises I know it’s my inner being communicating that it’s been trying to get my attention and I’ve missed all the clues, so I was interested in what was going on beneath the surface.

My chiropractor said the feeling of being stuck is often associated with a post-virus. I also had a good look through my go-to books on what the body is telling me when illness arises and pinned this down to the emotion of anger.

No surprises there you might think, since it’s an area that I’ve been feeling called to look at lately (you may have read Let Anger Be Your Teacher While Learning to Become Its Master). That is what surprised me though; I’d done a lot of work on it and thought I’d released anything stuck.

My body, obviously fed up with me having missed subtle and not so subtle communication, was being quite painful in its insistence. So off I went to the local pool to contemplate just what I might be feeling stuck on. As I was swimming up and down the thing that kept coming back to mind was how stuck I was on the issue of the lack of respect I feel from my kids’ school.

Having switched tack on my communications with the school earlier in the year, there was this old thought pattern (sitting like a devil on my shoulder) just relishing the possibility of being able to unleash itself in an intelligently worded tirade. Yet I knew that doesn’t work for me, but without having expressed my anger to the people at the school who had so offended me, I was at a loss about what to do.

I feel such gratitude to have some good and insightful friends and a safe place to throw all this stuff in the arena to tussle with it. A lot of conversation flowed, but here are the pieces that hit the nail on the head, as we flushed it out:

Friend: “Do not waste your grace and self respect on opening your wounds to people who are unsafe to open them up to. The school clearly doesn’t care, so don’t ask them to give something they never will. Dare I ask, in ten words or less, what is the hot button here with the school?”

Me: “It's about honoring our innate intelligence”

Friend: “I feel for you, I see the stickiness and the loop. I also see that it’s so strong that it can’t just be about the school, this has to be something more that is here to propel you into a higher perspective. It’s literally playing small on purpose so you don’t have to face something much bigger..?

It’s at this point a whole history of writing long, articulate letters to those who have offended my innate intelligence flashed before my eyes. In fact, earlier this week I came across the very first of those, a letter I wrote over twenty five years ago to a doctor. The story of how it came about can be paraphrased simply as a response to being passed around multiple practitioners, given repeated unsatisfactory diagnoses and a series of unhelpful treatments, along with a huge dose of condescension.

My friend said “While I totally get where you were coming from, I’m really interested that you felt so under attack by the world (or a psychiatrist) at such a young age, that you felt the need to pen a 5-page letter to correct his incorrect assumptions. That’s pretty intense and a lot of active indignation.”

Then the grand slam of observations “Is this about self validation, internal acceptance and a deep knowing of your worth and value, without seeking approval from anyone or anywhere else?”

At that point a light went on, something I heard often when growing up “for someone so intelligent, I’m amazed at how much rubbish you believe.” Bingo!

I’d hear this and associate it with a lack of respect, and I’d work harder to connect the conventional wisdom into how I’d arrived at my decision.

Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge, whereas innate intelligence is, by definition, inborn. Aside of the obvious intellect that is at play in every aspect of the natural world, I’ve always felt that I did not arrive here like an empty vessel waiting to be filled up; nor did you.

Right from the first moments, babies show both an inherent awareness and an ability to apply and acquire knowledge. Yet the world into which I grew commonly considered that I had nothing of value to offer unless I got it from a conventionally recognized expert or had become one myself.

In short, I knew my own mind, I did and do know what is best for me (as I believe we all do), and balked every time I heard “Shona knows best” delivered in sarcastic tones and with rolling eyes.

As an adult this has led to a world of frustration and a pattern of writing long, intelligently worded letters or emails in defence of something or other – usually the right to have my own opinion about my own life.

Most aspects of our society – the health, education, finance and legal systems and professions - have rattled my chain at one time or another. It may just be the very reason I have gone wide and deep in my learning, in order to defend my own decisions. I now recognise that my knowledge and my ability to articulate it can be quite intimidating to people, especially when directed at them as a personal complaint.

Rather than intending to intimidate, really I’ve just been seeking validation and respect for the choices I’ve made. Yet none of that will happen unless it happens within me first. Certainly, with every letter, every line of every email I’ve constructed, it’s brought me back to knowing what I already knew, I do know what is best for me.

You may not be surprised to know that this revelation has brought about a relief of the painful symptoms on many levels. And I continue to be fascinated be just how much of who I am and what drives my everyday actions and outcomes is so often unseen and misunderstood, yet standing in plain sight.

So what is standing in your plain sight just waiting for you to notice it? Learn to value your unique traits and insights and know that you did not come to help this world stagnate and crumble, you came to evolve.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Build a Healthy Self Concept. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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Anger, I’ve found, is a double edged sword. On one side it has the ability to damage and destroy relationships, on the other it has the ability to open wounds and allow deep healing and understanding to take place.

Behind this sits the other important double aspect of anger. There is the part that demands action as the feeling of it flows through the body, triggering it into flight of fight mode; it is this aspect that can destroy lives and, to avoid this, I must master my response to its call.

Then there is the other aspect that is pointing to deeper learning. “The emotion arises in direct response to a perception that a personal (often subconscious) boundary is being challenged” says Teal Swan, “whether it’s physical, mental or emotional”. Anger is essentially the fear of pain, which is why it triggers our flight or fight response.

Uncovering and challenging both my fears and boundaries has much to teach in the quest for self awareness, growth and authenticity. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Gary Zukov relates “Authentic power is the ability to distinguish within you the difference between love and fear, and choose love no matter what it happening inside of you or outside of you.”

I find this can be pretty challenging when it comes to anger, because that adrenaline coursing through my veins wants me to act in defense of my fears. To enable me to act with authentic power, I think there are three steps:

• Set myself up for success
• Use the urge to act in my favour
• Look for the lessons

 
Set Myself up for Success

Anger is an emotion that has cropped up in all aspects of my life, particularly in relationships and the workplace, but nothing has made things clearer to me than becoming a parent because nothing has confronted me as much.

I’m with Alfie Kohn when he says “Even before I had children, I knew that being a parent was going to be challenging as well as rewarding. But I didn’t really know. I didn’t know how exhausted it was possible to become, or how clueless it was possible to feel, or how, each time I reached the end of my rope, I would somehow have to find more rope”.

I was sharing with some friends one of those moments where I ran out of rope and started yelling at my daughter for her refusal to get in the car this week. We started talking about the things that trigger us into yelling at our kids. One said straight away: sibling fighting, having to repeat herself endlessly to get simple tasks done, and people (not just the kids) not tidying up after themselves. That seemed like a pretty familiar list to me.

But as I thought about it, I was also aware that I generally only lose it if I’m not putting my whole attention on what is happening in front of me. So to Eckhart Tolle’s point, presence helps calm the emotional seas, stopping these situations of overwhelm building to start with.

Then I realised it’s not always possible to be fully present when I’m looking after the kids. Food needs prepared, clothes need washed and there are a whole host of other tasks that need to be attended to aside of the “mum, can you just…” demands.

A practice that I have used before, that helps tremendously though, is to give my unadulterated presence to each of my kids for ten to fifteen minutes each day, in the same way I do for myself when I do my daily meditation. I figure if I make this a regular thing it should have the same cumulative effect as meditation and help me to become more mindful in the difficult moments.

But while I can set myself up for success more often, there will be moments of anger in my life because my personal boundaries are still likely to get triggered or overstepped; both by little people who have limited awareness that others also have needs and wants and by adults who, frankly, have a somewhat traumatic relationship with their own.

Use the Urge to Act in My Favour
 
So how best to deal with that anger in the moment so as not to damage my relationships? Strategies I’ve tried - like counting to ten, screaming to let go of the energy, pounding a pillow - were ineffective. I’d always revert to yelling – and often it would get misdirected to those in the home if I’d had to suppress it elsewhere.
 
Recently, watching the docu-series Transcendence I was reminded about the mechanics of our flight or fight system, and how amazing it is when we are actually in mortal danger. But by constantly triggering it when the threat is not imminent or mortal, it stands in the way of my ability to look objectively at what is happening and live my best life.
 
Dr Libby Weaver’s advice is, as soon as we become aware of being in flight or fight mode, start to focus on our breathing. Slow it down, take belly breaths in and extend our exhalation. This is an effective way to calm our system and invoke the parasympathetic nervous system, from where we can operate more effectively. Here are some other methods that also work to soothe the nervous system.

Look for the Lessons

Once I’ve done that, I can take a real look at the anger and what it has to teach.

The first thing to notice is my own relationship with anger itself. I acknowledge that, despite my own disgust at the way I’ve expressed it on many an occasion, it did once serve a purpose. As a little girl taunted by classmates all the way home one day, when ignoring them hadn’t worked, exploding in verbal response and shoving a girl out of my personal space brokered no further issues.

Hearing my mother yelling in our house was a daily occurrence when I was growing up, and talking back a punishable offence. Finally, at fifteen, the dam broke and I retaliated after being slapped on my face and called a name. It served me to slap her right back and correct her, it stopped any further physical punishment (normal in those days) but there were many years of yelling and arguments that followed.

Having never really learned a more healthy way to express my anger, I have often felt disgusted at myself for not being able to express it better. And yet I also feel resistance within me to letting go of the part of me that expresses my anger in this way because the only experience I have of that is to accept powerlessness and let others walk all over me, something the child within vowed would never be an option again.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “it’s always darkest just before dawn”, my dawning has arrived with the new awareness that I am not that child any more, and if I don’t want to perpetuate the same cycle with my own kids (which I don’t), it’s time to adopt a new strategy.

And aside of my awareness about the relationship with anger itself, this has also given me a fresh perspective on any issues that trigger my anger. There is always a lesson within that helps to understand and get to know the more authentic me.

So what is your relationship with anger? How do you express it and could you use it to fuel you towards a more authentic life?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may also enjoy Base Your Actions on Love Not Fear and What Can Your Anger Teach You About Your Gifts? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

There is a common perception that women tend to share their feelings more than men, but I’m not sure I agree. If anything, I’d say we tend to share what we think is socially acceptable, rather than even acknowledge our true feelings.

Acknowledging how I actually feel puts me in a position of vulnerability, and that often seems unwise in our society. Given that I grew up learning what I wanted was really not relevant to my survival, it has taken me a long time to realise the purpose of that survival was to get me to a place where I was then in a position to thrive.

I’m probably two to three decades beyond where that could have first occurred, but early survival meant taking on a lot of concepts that weren’t mine, like – for example - despising people who behave in a lazy, selfish, non-committal, unresponsive or inconsiderate way, and it really obscured my view.

It’s taken quite a few relationships and roles to begin to see patterns that make me look in the mirror and really question my own beliefs about things. I’ve had to start to own my true desires and figure out how to do that without feeling like a bad person.

If I take my little list of despised behaviours, while these were not things I was particularly berated as being, certainly I heard judgments about those around home; condemning them in others. This left me in no doubt I did not want to become those things.  

Taking lazy as an example, I’d look at lazy people in disdain. Yet what was my definition of lazy? Really it was someone who was less busy or productive than me. So in a work environment, if your diary wasn’t as full as mine I’d think I was working harder than you. Of course I may have been right, but the other person may just have been working smarter.

When I really look at the word lazy, and take out the judgments, what I felt was “why do you have more down time than me? I want to relax and recharge too”. But I didn’t really feel I could do that because I’m a chronic overachiever, always trying to stay one step ahead of those expectations about who I should be in order to avoid trouble.

There’s the root of my true feelings on most of those things. I didn’t want to be the bad girl, so I became the perfectionist, the over achiever. Those are some hard habits to break as they were also highly prized and regarded with praise and positive attention.

When I suffered a fourth failed pregnancy and a colleague suggested going to see a therapist I was offended. What I felt he was saying was “you are over emotional and it’s affecting your work, you need fixed.” When I went to see the therapist (I really felt I had no choice as work paid for it and it was in work time) he said “do you think you could be a perfectionist?” and I felt insulted.

Being a perfectionist carries the same sort of stigma as being lazy, they are both adjectives used to describe behaviours that are usually associated with weaknesses in our society. I feel one indicates I’m spending too much time and attention on something, the other indicates I’m not spending enough time and attention on it.

Weak is not something I want to feel, I like to feel strong – as we all do. Strength and vitality are, I believe, our true nature and that is the issue. Not having had any real opportunity to explore my true nature as a young infant and child, I was instead cast into a mould of what was deemed good and strong in order to survive in our family and society.

Said another way, instead of being fortified from the inside out, I stepped inside a suit of armour. While that presented a strong front, it lacked inner strength and resilience, it lacked vitality.

To figure out who I was beneath that armour, I had to use my feelings to guide me. Having strong feelings about things didn’t tell me what I liked and disliked, as I first assumed, it taught me about what I’d never really owned in myself.

The things that I despised in others were really a list of things I had within me, but the same is true of things I admired about others. Both are hard to accept in their own way. Owning both creates anxiety around feeling worthy because of all the feelings I’d attached to them.

I remember back in my early thirties, I used to watch all the Trinny and Susannah What Not to Wear programmes. I used to really admire those people who knew how to dress with style.  I didn’t have a bad body image particularly, but I really had no experience in dressing well. Growing up we had only enough money for essentials, so I was often dressed in what was sensible and available at the time.

Moving into my teenage years it was all about fashion. How I laugh now to look at photos of the dangly fry pan earrings (with tiny fried eggs in them), the short cropped hair slicked up to one side, the bat-winged jersey and baggy trousers; finished off with a pink neon studded belt. Fabulous.

But when I learned about dressing to suit my body shape and colouring, well, it tapped into a part of me that I’d never really explored. I had great fun creating a new wardrobe and new image. At first I felt really vulnerable dressing differently, instead of the stock standard pleat skirt and blouse I’d usually wear to work, I started to wear things like a wrap dress and knee high boots.

I was worried people would think or say things like “who does she think she is? Mutton dressed as lamb”. But I took a deep breath and did it anyway and quickly became confident in my new look.

Owning the things I despised in others took longer – another decade – and was just as uncomfortable. But if I take my little list (lazy, selfish, non-committal, unresponsive and inconsiderate) and turn those into attributes I admire it becomes self evident that those are concepts I want and need to adopt:

• taking time to restore your energy
• putting your own needs first
• taking a position without feeling the need to explain it
•  saying yes to things that fuel you, no to things that don’t

Again, at first I was worried that I’d be attacked or thought less of as a result of adopting some of these concepts, they were uncomfortable. But they felt positive, I could sense that my vitality and wellbeing – my inner strength - depended on me practicing these new behaviours.

Like anything new, it just requires focus and persistence. I’m not saying I’m there yet, but I’m consciously aware of what I’m feeling about most things on most days, and that helps guide me towards things I might need to look at or focus on in order to keep fortifying myself from the inside out.

So what are your feelings towards others and situations telling you? What do you admire or despise in others? Imagine a world full of people becoming conscious of their true nature in this way, a world full of more authentic people would mean we could take put all that armour in the melting pot and use it as fuel towards a better life.

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

Let’s start with something more normal, here is an example of a scenario that demonstrates the opposite of unencumbered and work on how to release it…

It’s Sunday morning here, a beautiful sunny (but cold) Winter’s day in the Southern Hemisphere.

Having been at home for ten days straight with sick kids, who are now recovering from a nasty flu virus (and as any parent knows the only thing worse than sick kids are kids on the mend but not back to full strength), I headed out to the pool for a swim this morning before my partner left for work.

As the sun was coming up, it was four degrees and the (outdoor) pool looked very atmospheric with steam coming off the top. I chuckled as I noticed two ladies doing aqua jogging were both wearing big matching woolly hats as they chatted and waded.

Swimming up and down I found my bliss, and returned home feeling refreshed and ready for the day.

My six-year-old was laid on the couch and immediately started asking if she could watch TV. In our house, device time is limited to late afternoon/early evening on a weekend. But with having been sick the kids have watched a lot of TV this last week. “Later” I said and tried to distract her by focusing on what she might want for breakfast.

This was an ineffective strategy, my daughter – who her teacher had just described as “a ray of radiant sunshine” in her end of term report – looked like an incoming storm that quickly whipped up into a tornado.

Soon that tornado was hurling abuse and objects in my direction. And as Dr Gabor Maté reminds us “it is not our children’s behaviour but our inability to tolerate their negative responses that creates the greatest difficulties.” Indeed.

My response wasn’t pretty, what was already in play was somewhere in the region of a category two (extremely dangerous) hurricane, my inner child was more than a match for that storm, she was whipping up that scale and turning this thing into a category three or four.

Here’s the thing, being on the journey to me – the reclamation of my soul –means recognizing all the junk in my trunk so to speak.

This junk identified itself very clearly as I heard myself scream “I had to put up with being yelled at and hit my whole childhood, I will not put up with the same aggression as a parent, it’s not going to happen.”

Simultaneously I’m recognizing that in reaction to my trauma, I’m now traumatising my daughter, so immediately remorse set in. The thing I could find instant gratitude for however is that I recognise it, I’m not unconsciously repeating a pattern, I’m aware of it – I am aware of something that is weighing me down.

As I often say, there was nothing particularly remarkable about my childhood, as a child of the seventies in western Scotland, it was a normal thing to be yelled at, to be smacked if I did something bad and to be punished in the same way in the school system. It was normal so I don’t think of it as abuse and I don’t blame my parents for the way they acted as they were doing what they thought was best.

What I do remember from my childhood was suppressing my anger, I used to often stomp up to my room (after being told what to do or told off) and I’d be saying under my breath all the things I really wanted to say to my parents. Then I’d look around for things to throw but, after quickly determining that anything broken would cause me even more pain, I’d often just punch the concrete wall.

And even though I don’t remember feeling traumatized (though I probably did when this pattern began as infant me started to fiddle with the buttons on the washing machine and get my knuckles rapped), there is absolutely no doubt trauma occurred.

Do you know how I know? The force of my reaction to my daughter is how I know, I could literally feel the force of the sound and shock waves moving through me and hurtling towards her. The trauma I can feel from that reaction is still reverberating in my body, so how do I get rid of it?

It’s got nothing to do with the other person, my daughter has already forgiven me and moved on, she knows violence towards me triggers me and she knows why, she also knows that I want and encourage her to express (rather than suppress) her feelings, but it’s not okay to express them violently.

Getting rid of an activated emotion that has years of momentum probably requires a multipronged approach. As I said in Change Unhealthy Reactions there is a moment, it is fleeting but it’s pivotal, it’s my choice point. If I can catch myself in the act, I can change my response. Equally there has to be compassion for myself.

I understand why my patience was worn thin; it’s been a stressful week. I’m not proud of my reaction, but it’s not going to serve me to beat myself up either – that is like further beating the inner child who wanted to be heard in that moment.

There are lots of approaches to inner child work, and its’ become so clichéd over the years. It made me laugh when social scientist Brené Brown was talking about her own journey in being vulnerable and brave, and telling her counselor that she was there to do the work but “can we skip all that childhood stuff”.

There is no skipping it; it’s been hardwired in there. In the docu-series Transcendence Josh Axe talks about how most people aren’t aware certain emotions cause disease in specific organs. For example, emotions of fear affect the reproductive organs, the kidneys and adrenals. Think about a child getting really scared and they wet themselves. Why? Fear directly affects the bladder and the kidneys.

As I could feel those emotions ripping through my system this morning, I am left in no doubt there decades of junk still in the trunk to clear out. Inner child work is essential in order to give my inner child her time to speak her truth, to be heard, understood and held. Then it’s time to speak my now truth, as an adult that does not need to tolerate violence of any kind towards me, nor to project it back to others in defence. I deserve kindness and so do you.

What is also interesting is the amount of blockages in my system that relates to old stuff that is not even mine any more. My chiropractor/applied kinesiologist/nutritionalist/emotional therapist (she is even more holistic than all of that), in pursuit of the cause of my shoulder pain, uncovered that my lymph system wasn’t functioning well due to a blockage in my ileocecal value in the digestive system.

The emotions that were creating this blockage were feelings of powerlessness: lacking strength, resigned to fate, no longer caring, expecting to fail, feeling alone, misunderstood and distant. These are not emotions currently activated within me, in fact I’d say based on the location (where my mum had a tumour) they are not even my emotions as I have never resigned myself to fate in anything other than a positive way, but I recognise the feelings from the year mum slipped away from us.

All I can tell you is that, after releasing these emotions with some Bach remedies and physical work on that area around my colon, my shoulder now feels freer than it has in a long time.

It’s also like the example I mentioned in Value Your Uniqueness of becoming aware of all the judgmental thoughts in my head and recognizing them as belonging to my mum when I was a child.

One of my enduring memories was the mortification I used to feel taking public transport with mum who used to loudly disapprove of various people’s behaviour without actually addressing them directly. What I used to do was think of all the reasons why they may, in fact, be behaving like that. That is my true voice, the one who sees a broader picture and understands that what I perceive may not be the truth. In fairness, it wasn’t even my mum’s voice as she matured; it was a moment in time that has gotten stuck in a loop in my head.

​Releasing these thoughts and emotions and finding kinder thoughts is really the route to becoming unencumbered. It’s an active process that requires awareness and persistence.

Imagine the feeling of being free of all fear, anger, anxiety, grief and worries? That is the sovereignty of your soul. Imagine a world of people who are in the pursuit of that? I believe that is where we are headed, and it starts with the likes of you and I setting a goal to be unencumbered and live our best life.

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