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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As always, simple but not necessarily easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was watching a SuperSoul Session with Oprah and Gary Zukov and a statement he made jumped out at me “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.”
 
But when I respond to an interaction with a friend or colleague, or my child having a meltdown, or a member of staff at a checkout counter, or a situation that has arisen, how do I know when I’m acting out of love and not fear?

This might sound simple at first, but it is far from easy. For example, Brené Brown says “Shame is the most powerful, master (negative) emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough.” This is an inner belief that gets created in childhood in many of us, something I talk about often.
 
We are born into this world as love itself and then, as our caregivers actually have to deal with our needs and desires, we get shaped and molded out of authenticity and into well behaved members of our community (or so the aim is) that don’t make any fuss. As a result this creates trauma within us and we develop fears.
 
Interestingly shame isn’t an emotion I’d have particularly associated with, yet not feeling good enough is. This made me want to dig a little deeper after hearing Gary Zukov’s impactful insight. I listened to Brené’s first TED talk on The Power of Vulnerability. In her research she found the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they are worthy of it.
 
As I wrote about recently, I’ve been tracking my dreams and feelings like fear, not being good enough and not belonging feature frequently. Since the unconscious doesn’t lie, this helps me to really get a grip on some of those less obvious chronic thought patterns that are clearly still playing out in my head.
 
While I’ve deliberately tackled many of the more acutely felt thought patterns, these are like a baseline that has been familiar to me for as long as I can remember. I now recognise this baseline is not one of love, it’s more like a suitcase full of feelings I’ve carried since I was a child that add up to anxiety, anger, rejection and constraint. You might now begin to see why I often tussle with the question "am I doing this out of love or fear?"
 
Recording my dreams was something I started to do a few years ago, then I remembered the other day the reason I’d stopped is that they were often depressing and (I felt at the time) better not remembered. Pushing them away hasn’t helped, of course, they are a wakeup call to what is actually going on inside me whether I choose to face it or not.
 
Learning to wholeheartedly love myself is an essential part of the journey to authenticity. The question I found myself asking was “how do I go about feeling love rather than fear as a predominant emotion? How do I take this suitcase of anxiety, anger, rejection and constraint and turn it into something loving?

As well as the work I described in Awaken to the Gift Your Dreams Offer in Waking Life - focusing consciously on the positive aspects of each day and how those feel - I decided to get even more targeted. Following the advice of Katie Byron, I looked at the opposite of what I was experiencing. I came up with these statements by completely flipping the emotional baggage in my suitcase around:

​I feel calm/at ease
I feel wanted/cherished/loved
I feel like I belong
I feel I have all the time in the world
 
As well as taking the time to look at what has gone well in my day, and how that felt, I’m also looking for evidence to support these statements in particular. I personally write them in a journal so they stick more. 
 
What I’m flushing out each time are my sticking points. For example, deep down I know that I will always have time for the things that are important to me. Yet the end of a school term looms for me like a giant stressful ticking clock; school holidays mean the absence of my little blocks of solitude, which is what I crave in order to feel into myself.
 
However, past experience tells me that I will get enough moments – often unplanned and ad hoc - to nurture that part of me that wants to explore new threads of thought and insight. So that is the evidence I need to draw upon, in enough detail and enough times that I start to tell myself a different story, beat a different drum.
 
It also helps to organize a few things that help me to see the times in the calendar that make that possible. I have to take charge of the self talk, call out anything that wants to sneak back in with the old baggage.
 
The other thing I notice is how my examples can start to lean towards external validation, for example, how others might make me feel loved or feel like I belong. These might be good indicators that I’m making some progress but, if I rely on them alone without feeling and demonstrating evidence of self love and self acceptance, the old thought patterns will soon kick back in the minute I believe someone rejects me.
 
That said, everything that happens, I think, happens in love. Even the things we would all agree are atrocities bring out aspects of people they never knew were in them. Everything lends itself to our growth, prompts us towards our path and – even the choices we make in fear – create opportunities for future choices to be made in love.
 
I know there it’s unlikely I’ll suddenly start making every choice out of love than fear, it will take time and perseverance. In his book The Pilgrimage Paulo Coelho describes a process called The Cruelty Exercise. This involves digging the nail of your index finger into the cuticle of your thumb of the same hand every time a thought comes in your mind that makes you feel bad about yourself. Being cruel to be kind may be a quicker route if you’d like quicker results.
 
It takes focus for me just to figure out if my thoughts are born of love or fear; sometimes it feels like a bit of both. Just the other day I was examining my reaction to a hissy fit one daughter was having because her sister had just got some new sparkly shoes. She was jealous and everything about getting dressed and out the house that morning became difficult.
 
I stayed calm and supportive and I got the kids out the house and on time, win, but did I follow a path of fear or love?
 
I know where these hissy fits can go if I try to work with my daughter to rationalise them rather than just to allow the feelings, they head straight to explosion city; suddenly smoldering embers become thriving wildfires and there is no stopping the meltdown that ensues – often for both her and me. None of that feels good, we all suffer and, inevitably, we are all late. So it is fair to say there is likely some fear around the tact I took.
 
On the other hand, from a loving standpoint, I want my daughter to know it’s okay to feel jealous, it’s okay to want something someone else has got and it’s actually okay that she doesn’t have it right now, she will survive. This is an important lesson in self regulation.
 
Overall, I feel that my decision was based more in love, but it can take thrashing it out in detail like this for me to start to recognise what is happening and to build that confidence. I’m also aware that I’ll just as likely make some decisions in fear for some time, but I’m okay with that as long as I’m becoming more conscious of what is happening and the overall trajectory is going in the right direction.
 
Better than mashing my thumb into a raw state (I shudder at the thought).
 
When you make decisions out of fear, this gets played back to you in frustrations and failures, but when you make decisions based in love, you absolutely know that even if something that might look like a failure initially is just another step along the way to living your best life.
 
If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Do You Need to Cherish Yourself?. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I am in conflict with someone’s ideas or behaviour, I have to remind myself to choose kindness over suffering. In my heart I know that we are all expressions of the one thing, and yet when I start acting as if I’m separate and unconnected, believing that they are the cause of my distress, all I’m doing is blocking my own energy.

A few years back when the kids started regularly fighting, I taught them in words that they deserve kindness. I try to teach this through my actions too of course, as that is what will actually teach, but don’t always succeed. Often if they have friends round and they all start arguing I ask “who here deserves kindness?” and they all put their hands up and instantly get the point.

I was reminded of this quality again when I was watching an interview with Jeff Olsen who had a near-death experience over twenty years ago. He described how his consciousness was wandering through the corridors of the hospital (where his body was lying in the Intensive Care Unit hooked up to umpteen machines), and he was looking at the doctors and nurses and experiencing everything they were feeling.

This is a phenomenon I have heard described before in these circumstances. He expressed how, with one nurse, he somehow knew everything that had happened to her, her abusive childhood, the events that had occurred since and all that she felt about herself and the world. Above all he felt this deep connection to all the people around him and complete unconditional love.

I like to imagine that was him having the experience our source energy has at all times, that we are each just individual points of focus in the broader scheme of things, all connected in the context of that unending unconditional love. As such, I feel it is my goal in life to be a full expression of who I am in this point of focus, while honouring that connection to everything else.

So choosing kindness is essential for my own wellbeing and the health of my relationships with others. That means I also have to be kind and forgive myself when I haven’t been kind to others. Like when I’ve reached some limit of tolerance with the kids and yelled, or been argumentative with friends who have challenged my thinking, or tetchy with my partner for getting in my way in the kitchen.

It’s deeper than just a commitment to being kind to others, as with everything it starts within. When I find that I haven’t been kind, I look within myself to what that points to. My patience with the kids may be endless if I had endless patience with myself, or I may have reacted to my friends’ viewpoints as an opportunity to expand my thinking or my partner’s intrusion as an opportunity for connection.

As always, it points to our early experiences in life. I could say that if I’d experienced endless patience as a child I’d be patient with myself and others, if I’d experienced more interest and respect in my ideas as a child I’d be more open to hearing others’ views, and if I’d felt more welcomed into the personal space of those I was closest to as a child, I would likely be more welcoming to others.

It is easy to see how these thought patterns and behaviours perpetuate generation after generation; until we become aware of them. This is precisely where kindness is required, those people who were responsible for me had their own experiences as kids that shaped their behaviours, they were likely doing the best they could and living in a state of unconscious awareness of the connection that now seem so obvious to me.

Instead I look at these examples as the fertile fields of the lessons I’ve come to learn, the areas I want to expand in. It doesn’t mean I’m obligated to follow through on any of it, I might decide I like my personal space as it is, but that I do want to be more patient with myself and others, and more open to others’ ideas.

I also know that the neurophysiology inside me won’t change overnight. My experiences over a lifetime will have created strong neural pathways, so my reactions will require conscious awareness and practice to create new wiring. I have to choose kindness in this process as I learn to have patience.

One of the kindest people I knew was my grandmother. She died when I was fourteen, but the visceral memory of her kindness lives on inside me. That kindness showed in her features and was expressed through her heartfelt generosity. It is not hard for me to call upon that memory when I want to be reminded of how kindness feels.

And I know I must be making progress. After writing an advocacy paper recently about an education system, one of the recipients invited me to discuss any concerns with him about the specific experiences we are having at the children’s school. Previously I’d have felt myself rallying in response, ready to go in fully loaded with all my grievances.

In this case, I felt called to an entirely different approach, one I always yearn for but have often felt too rushed to ask for. People want to express and address concerns, but there is a wider context – always. That wider context is who those people are, their unique cocktail of genetic expression and experiences; their story.

So invited to express my concerns, instead I said I’d love to hear their story; what was it that had drawn them to this system of education, what their experience of the journey had been like and why he was still involved in its ongoing story. I said I’d then share our experiences and leave it to him to decide whether that gave any cause for concern.

At the end of the day I am at a point in my life journey where I realise my opinion is only that, and I’m comfortable that I don’t need to persuade others to agree if it doesn’t resonate for them. I can choose kindness and stand in my own truth, whether that means making choices that differ from others or running with the pack.

And because I’ve given myself permission to be who I am, I generally feel more comfortable with who others are in their differences too – including my kids. It’s an absolute wonder to watch them knowing they are born of me and yet so unique.  When they challenge me I recognise that – on some level – I have invited that challenge.

So kindness remains the thing I must choose towards myself and others in this unending journey of growth and evolution, integrating all the pieces of me that separated from the love that I am in the quest to become one with all.

​What about you? Will you choose to continue suffering or will you choose kindness?

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Nurture Yourself, The Path to Unconditional Love and Change Unhealthy Reactions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

In Abby Wombach’s Wolfpack she talks about her memory of a new coach getting out a guitar and singing Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a Changin’ at their first meeting. The players thought this was weird at first, then uncomfortable, then finally they felt moved. The new coach didn’t want them to just win games, she wanted them to win beautifully, to move people. Rather than just saying the words, she expressed this through her actions.

This prompted me to listen to Bob Dylan, it’s been a while since I have heard The Times They Are a Changin’ which then led to me listening to many other of those old folk rock songs of the era that ushered in a period of radical social change.

As I thought about some of those revolutionaries, I realised that I feel more called be an evolutionary.
A revolutionary is someone who creates radical political or social change in a relatively short time, through a process of resistance to the status quo, and it creates a lot of unrest that often doesn’t end well for many. Whereas an evolutionary, I think, is someone who expresses the change they want to see through the way they are living their life, they more quietly stand in their own truth in the way Abby Wombach’s coach did.

It’s perhaps the story of the tortoise and the hare because being an evolutionary is likely to create a gradual change that takes place from within. Don’t get me wrong, I want change now, but the change I want to see needs focus, patience, resilience and love and that starts inside me. 

When I was born, only seven years after Bob Dylan’s song of social and political change, The New Seekers were at number one in the UK music charts with I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing. It was a time of hope and feels completely in tune with my own mission to be who I am and help others be who they are:

I’d like to see the world for once
All standing hand in hand
And hear them echo through the hills
For peace throughout the land

While many things have changed tremendously in the last half century, I believe what hasn’t changed dramatically is the root of our discord. It’s my belief that the discord between humans comes from the discord within humans.

Let me share my reasoning. Right from the early months of our lives it seems that the vast majority of us are taught right and wrong, good and bad, by our family, community and society. This results in feelings of anxiety or shame about our own desires if they are not aligned with those to whom we have been born. In short, we become encultured into a world that tends not to allow us the freedom to be who we are.

And by the time we are independent enough to think these things through for ourselves, we are already so shrouded in others’ beliefs that most of us buy into that neural and emotional wiring (that took place within us in those early stages) as our guide to what is good and bad in life.

We think if we feel anxiety or shame we must be doing something wrong, yet in reality all we are experiencing is the anxiety or shame of not living up to our early caregivers’ beliefs and expectations of us, regardless of whether they are truly aligned with our own.

To sum up, we lose sight of who we are and what we truly feel about anything.

Christian Morgenstern said "Don't let the mouth say what the heart doesn't feel." I realised some years ago that I was no longer sure of who I was and what I actually felt. There was a dull pain that I felt in my own discord, a tugging, nagging, persistent pain. To speak my truth I knew I’d have to undertake a journey of discovery to figure out who I am.

Even though I’m now much clearer about who that authentic me is, I still feel that pain sometimes, a teacher returning to its student. It is like a hopelessness that descends every now and again, an amplification of all that discord that existed and those parts that still persist; I call this my black mood.

When this pain descends, I know it is waiting to be felt, to be acknowledged, to be experienced without being pushed away. I did spend many years pushing it away, pushing it down; being too busy to contemplate any of it. Then I became a parent.

What I deeply desired for my children is the freedom to be who they are. I failed in this spectacularly, and continue to at times, not for a lack of love for them but a lack of love for myself. It is not my intention, but there was a lack of knowing myself and being able to stand in my own truth. So what to do?

I took the journey to me. I got still, I listened to the thoughts and feelings within me and I keep listening, over and over. Through it come insights, clues to my true nature. I started to respond to things differently, more authentically, did I want to participate in this/that/the next thing?

​Slowly I became more aware of my truth, and that it is only my truth. I am realizing we each have our own truth; because we are each such a unique cocktail that what is right for one is not necessarily right for another. Slowly I am becoming a better parent, allowing my kids to be who they are and blossom in their truth.

So you see, allowed to be who we are, standing hand in hand with those across the world that – in our judgments of old we might have despised and hated – is not an overnight thing, it’s a journey that begins with the self. To figure out what stems from beliefs placed in our heads rather than felt in our hearts.

Because in our hearts we would know that the person who seems like a wimp is actually just strong in other ways that we can’t yet appreciate. We would know that the person who seems overbearing is actually just scared. We would know that the colour of a person’s skin, their socio economic status, their circumstances are not right or wrong, good or bad, they are just different experiences. We would hold their hand and see that hand as an extension of our own.

The communities, societies and structures would begin to honour and reflect the individual. This evolution starts with evolutionaries, like you and me, standing in our own truth and becoming who we truly are.

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Become You, What You Give Your Attention to Is Your Greatest Contribution and Stand in Your Own Truth. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

I can remember early on in my corporate career, amid a restructure that happened swiftly with a new guy suddenly at the helm one morning and several new faces around the Director’s table, I read a quote about speaking truth to power. I can’t remember the quote exactly, but it gave me courage to speak out in an attempt to influence the inevitable management restructure that was about to follow, and the allocation of resources.

In my corporate guise, I was a staunch advocate for the customers’ experience. However, generally speaking this was usually outweighed as a topic of discussion around the top table in favour of whatever the latest and greatest upgrades were in that company or organisation’s offer (with little regard to how it mapped to the overall customer journey and experience) and the vast and pervasive arena of financial tracking and cost cutting.

However, I felt compelled to speak my truth and quickly put together a paper for consideration; drawing the links between the service, the customer experience and the balance sheet, and carefully placed it on each director’s desk before anyone else arrived that next morning.

I’ll admit I was nervous. It felt like I was being naughty because I hadn’t asked anyone’s permission to do it, my boss wasn’t aware of it, though I did give him an apologetic smile and a heads’ up on his way through to his office where he found the same paper on his own desk.

The fact is, had I of sought permission, it’s highly likely it would have been denied since everyone was wary of the new head honcho and, even then, I knew the glaringly obvious fact that people don’t generally like to stick their neck out and speak their truth.

Given that the paper was bereft of any blame, it simply focused on the facts and objectives, there was no big backlash for or from my boss. There were some minor gains as a result. However, what I was naïve about at the time, was that I wasn’t speaking my truth to the real power. The new guy at the helm wasn’t really the head honcho, these guys were just players in the game, as vulnerable to losing their job as I was.

Yet here I found myself, many years later, no longer in a corporate structure and just as nervous about speaking my truth. Let me tell you about it and then I will share how life conspired to give me clarity and courage.

Over the last four years our family have started their journey through education. Entrusting our kids to anyone else is a big leap of faith as parents, the teacher-child relationship is among the most influential in our lives, and so we had chosen a system of education that we felt was closer to our own values than the default state system.

What I was completely unprepared for was the relentless ambush the parents and children face on their time and attention both within and beyond the curriculum, which is quite contrary to the founding pedagogy. While these are usually in support of activities and events that children enjoy, the harm comes from the fact that it is often requires time most parents these days do not have and most harmfully of all, it is all stemming from the school community, leaving little for anything outside of that.

Yet, in today’s world, where most of us are no longer living in the communities where we were born and raised, there is a bigger world outside school that we have to connect with and is healthy for us to do so. This is the world in which one’s family lives in other parts of the country or other parts of the world; and it’s important that there is freedom to connect with places, people, and other rich and rewarding activities and events that are not generated by the school community.

There is, of course, most significantly, the world within that we all need time to connect to. With so much of their time prescribed already within the school day, I feel children must be given time and space in which they can feel into themselves again, and to begin to become aware of who they are and what their true preferences are in life.

So with these gallant observations made, you may imagine some of the colourful conversations I have had with the school over these last years. I’ve often talked about my own anguish and self growth that has resulted through these articles, most usefully teaching me the value of saying yes to the things I can freely and joyfully, and no to anything else (making me a rather low contributor).

Then as I was watching the series finale of Grey’s Anatomy, I was struck by something the character Meredith Grey said “Let me clean up my own mess, stand in my own truth. What I did was wrong, but what I was trying to remedy was so much more wrong, and I stand by that”

It started me thinking about standing in one’s own truth. Unlike the character in Grey’s Anatomy I haven’t done anything wrong, yet I was feeling like I had. I was feeling like a victim and et, at the same time, I was feeling like the naughty kid again.

Yes, it is true that there was little – if anything – in the way of information about all the contribution and activity required that would have helped inform our decision before embarking on this educational journey. I have encouraged the school to look at this more, even created information documents for parents that I would have found useful, which were welcomed in words but not used in practice.

Having had a look at articles and forums across the globe where parents voice their insights, I believe this to be something of an inherent issue with this type of education rather than a localized one. It is also true that, for the moment, this is still the best schooling available for our kids within our locality. So, knowing I need to get in a better place on my feelings in this matter, I thought about what I can do positively rather than negatively.

​Rather serendipitously a podcast interviewing Fleet Maull popped up in my inbox. Fleet was talking about his book Radical Responsibility. While serving a 14-year prison sentence for drug trafficking in a maximum security facility, Fleet had come to understand there was no power in blame, and so had begun the process of self empowerment by asking “what can I do?”

It wasn’t hard to see the alignment, nor the theme of disempowerment to empowerment that I was attracting, I’m also reading Gregory David Roberts novel Shantaram at the moment. Roberts, like his lead character, is a former heroin addict and convicted bank robber who escaped from an Australian prison and found himself in India; in every way.

Both Fleet Maul and Gregory David Roberts’ circumstances were far more extreme and disempowering than my own, but it is often in these extremes answers can be found. Both men realised that that they could blame any number of factors for where they had ended up in life but, instead, both decided to get off the blame train and start to see their own part in what had happened and how they could more forwards more positively.

I was also listening to an interview with Mind Coach Vex King, who talked about his own process when he is triggered by something. Rather than respond from a point of anger, he instead focuses on his breathing and goes for a walk to lower his heart rate and distract himself out of the flight or fight response, allowing for more clarity in his thinking. It was also a good reminder that it is not helpful to vent as that further entrenches the victim thinking,

So with all of this in mind I decided it was time to speak my truth and to advocate to power. First I had to identify who that power is. The intended audience is the thought leaders and policy makers that globally shape that system of education today, but with the system having grown organically over decades and each school operating independently across the world, it took a while to assemble a reasonable list.

It also took me a while to devise a suitable advocacy piece with the main thrust being “less is more”.  I feel the saving grace of this system of education is that most state school systems in the Western world have not evolved either, so many parents are looking at alternatives. But I want them to be an alternative that lives up to the central theme, which is to enable students as fully as possible to choose and, in freedom, to realize their individual path through life as adults.

In short, in a world that desperately needs less vying for our attention, I want the schools to do less in order to be more in support of the awakening of human consciousness.

I was clear in my mind, with thanks to reminders from Fleet Maul and Gregory David Roberts, that appropriating blame is entirely unhelpful. I can see most people within the system are doing the best they can in oftentimes trying circumstances so, in order to evolve education, I had to step outside of that mentality.

A friend asked what I was expecting as a result. The answer that came to me was truly inspired by wisdom beyond that in my head. Am I expecting anyone – especially one vested in a particular system of education- to think "wow, we've been doing it wrong all this time!" ... no... but little drops do make an ocean, and it is on these seas we sail that slowly carve our landscapes.

So the real answer is I’m not expecting anything immediate, change out there is likely to be slow. My family will likely continue to experience the onslaught of requests for our attention, and I will continue to stand in my truth, making the best decisions I can in the moment in support of that.

But something else has changed immediately. I feel elated to have spoken my truth, free of the burden of blame on someone else. I no longer feel like a victim and I will do what I can each step of the way to honour that place within me that knows the most important thing I can all do is to stand in my own love and truth.

​As I believe German author and poet Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914) said Es gibt in Wahrheit kein letztes Verständnis ohne Liebe which, translated, means There is, in truth, no last understanding without love. When we step outside of the victim- perpetrator-rescuer scenario and stand instead in a place of self love and empowerment, then we are truly standing in our truth.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Reclaim the Sovereignty of Your Soul. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The anxiety we feel as parents in response to our children’s negative reactions, is the same anxiety we felt as a result our own parent’s reactions. We therefore feel a pull to react as our parent’s reacted “obey me or else”. But I will keep a hold of that baton until it turns to dust as each fragmented part of me becomes integrated.

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

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

As I stood there in that impossible moment between past and future, every fibre within me wanting to react strongly to this little girl’s fury, matching fire with fire, I did not. Instead I let out the energy of my frustration with a guttural scream and withdrew.In that instant, Dr Gabor Maté’s words were never so true. “It is often not our children’s behaviour, but our inability to tolerate their negative responses that creates difficulties. The only thing the parent needs to gain control over is our own anxiety and lack of self control.”

In frustration I inwardly wished I had never embarked on this journey with my kids, I wished the kids just did as they were darn well told. The thoughts that accompanied it were the same thoughts I heard my own mother express, a jabbering chunter about ungrateful kids who were acting maliciously.

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

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

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

I used to think it was indulgent to nurture myself; the fact that I viewed nurturing myself as pampering was the problem. To nurture is to care for, or to tend to one’s needs. To pamper is when we go beyond that, indulging every whim.

The thing is though, our needs are all different and they change throughout our lives. I’ve learned that the perfect way to show the world what I need is to give it to myself. There was a time though that I used to think that was the job of the other people in my life.

The belief I held was along the lines that if they truly valued me they would know what I needed and be only too glad to give it to me unprompted, in appreciation of that which they valued. If no kind words or deeds were forthcoming that meant I did not feel valued; then I would get resentful and defensive.

Another tact I tried was nurturing others in ways I’d like nurtured to see if they’d get the hint, or – after reading Gary Chapman’s Five Love Languages – nurturing other’s in the way I thought they needed nurtured and asking them to read the book to understand me. The same belief still held true though, that it was up to those significant others to nurture me.

It wasn’t until a prior relationship was breaking down and my mentor suggested that I take a corner of the house and make it mine, wholly mine, that I first really heard this idea of nurturing myself. She recommended that I go buy a picture I like – not one that I thought would be acceptable to the other person – and hang it on the wall in my corner, my little nurturing nook where I could read books or write in my journal.

Once I understood that it was up to me to love myself, I ran with the concept and had great fun making that space mine. I booked in regular massages and time with my mentor because I felt I needed to for my wellbeing and personal growth. I took walks on the beach and spent time reading for the same reason.

With Mother’s Day upon us this week, it reminded me I was likely not alone in my prior beliefs. Mothers are renowned for nurturing others to the detriment of themselves, but I think it extends beyond that. In this frenetic society I hear from and see many people putting the needs of others before their own for years and years. Yet how can others truly nurture us if we can’t nurture ourselves?

I have an important and busy job in looking after my children, among other roles I play in life, but I now also know that to do those well I have to look after myself. There is nothing I consider more important to my wellbeing than the integration of my emotional, mental and physical self, so I make a point of making space in my life to nurture this regularly.

This can take many forms. Whether I’m diving deeply into the study of something I find fascinating, creatively expressing myself through these articles, undergoing self discovery work or healing, swimming at the local pool, contemplating nature or life in the great outdoors or meditating in my cosy nook, it’s all part of nurturing myself.

There was a point in my life not so long ago when all my time was focused on work and work, things I did not find in the least nurturing, it wasn’t pretty for anyone, but it’s still taken me a while to get used to carving out time to nurture myself. When I started to do this I used to feel guilty, but I’m truly a better person as a result, much more able to give of myself in ways that are loved rather than resented.

When a friend of mine recently recommended Hawaiian massage, I was intrigued. As I mentioned, I used to regularly have massages when I worked in an office environment to relieve the aches and pains of endless physically inactive hours and the agonizing posture adopted in meetings to pay attention to whomever was taking lead.

However, in those days I saw massage as something to help my poor body get through the days of living my inauthentic life. Since leaving that environment, I’ve been more focused on living life from the inside out.

Hawaiian massage, otherwise known as Lomilomi, goes far beyond massage though; it’s more of a restorative healing. According to Gloria Coppola, it reflects the connection we have with the land (‘aina), the spirit guides or ancestors (‘aumakua) and the breath of life (aloha).

This sounded to me like the perfect kind of massage for where I’m at in my journey, so I decided to gift it to myself.

Nurturing yourself may look completely different your life, it really depends on what is actually important to you and what you enjoy, the important thing is to make some time to do it. Mother or not, male or female, we all need time to put our own needs first in order to live our best life and give our best in life. So how will you nurture yourself today?

If you enjoyed this you might enjoy reading Connect to Your Well-Being and What You Give Your Attention to Is Your Greatest Contribution. Contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information if you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

I was sitting in a waiting room yesterday morning next to a baby girl who I’d guess to be around three months old. She was curious about the world from the security of her mum’s arms. Each time I looked around and smiled at her, she would take great delight in this and reward me with a beautiful smile right back.

​To get my attention, she would make an “ouh” sound with her mouth and I’d look around again and we would exchange smiles and she would get all giddy and cuddle into her mum’s shoulder. Then another middle aged man came into the waiting room and sat opposite, he too was soon engaged in this happy little game.

It’s a scene I am sure will be familiar to you, happy babies tend to have this kind of effect. At the same time I was aware of my own beautiful daughter sitting on the other side of me but, in that sharp contrast, I can see just how encumbered by life she has become in her short years.

She was anxiously awaiting her natural therapy appointment, which deals with ailments seen and unseen – physical and emotional. Although we had been there before, I could see she was worried there might be some judgment involved because she has a lot of big feelings to process at the moment and has already learned from the world about what is deemed good and bad behaviour. So she feels ashamed of her emotional outbursts and is understandably reluctant to talk about them.

In contrast, while babies may feel anxious when they are apart from their mum (or haven’t been fed, or have a wet nappy or desperately want to shut out stimulation so they can sleep) those feelings of judgment and shame are just not part of a new baby’s world.

But there comes a point, I think it happens not long after an infant becomes mobile, when society appears to expect a child to be trained. The prevalent form of training in our society is punishment and reward. Punishment may be in the form of something taken away (including the withdrawal of the parent’s positive attention) and in the form of something dished out (like a chore of some sort, a physical rebuke or a verbal attack).

As a parent I could always feel judging eyes upon me in scenarios just like that, in waiting rooms, where my then infant daughter would be climbing on things she ought not to, and exploring places she shouldn’t. The reason I could feel those judging eyes is because I too had been trained as a child, indoctrinated in the ways of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and I too had become a judge.

Based on all I have experienced, observed and read about, it seems to me that there are very few of us experience unconditional love for anything more than that first few months of our lives, if that. Yet I have arrived at the conclusion that in order to thrive in this world, feeling unconditional love is essential to our wellbeing and so we must learn to give that to ourselves.

The work of Lise Bourbeau, who compiled 20 years of research in the field of metaphysics and it’s physical manifestations in the body into her book Your Body is Telling You “Love Yourself”, repeats this advice over and over. Forgiving the origins of our shame that has no conscious memory attached to it even, and other emotions like fear, anger and insecurity that get triggered within us, are all easy to understand in the context of the waiting room example.

As some of you may know, I’ve also been fascinated with the work of Dr Gabor Maté lately. As a revered physician and author who has Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) himself, Dr Maté explores the myth of ADD as a genetically-based illness in his book Scattered Minds and demonstrates it is a reversible impairment and developmental delay.

Being a physician his book is full of academic references and dives into the world of neuroscience, epigenetics and psychology, but in the final sentence in his book he concludes “If we can actively love, there will be no attention deficit and no disorder”.

In fact, as I read his book, I could see that the very journey I’ve been on personally, the journey to authenticity, is a journey to love. Figuring out who we are beneath the layers and layers of beliefs that began to shroud us in those early years of our lives as we met those first expectations put upon us, is a journey that every single person on this planet would benefit from.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s a journey that each of us would not only benefit from, but that it would also benefit us hugely in terms of evolving our society and its archaic systems and it would lead to a healing of the planet itself.

As grandiose as that all sounds, I for one know this is not an easy journey.

When this beautiful child of mine was born, I was working in a corporate environment where I was experiencing a lot of resistance to the role I was put in. This was being played out predominantly by a colleague who kept trying to discredit and undermine my work. Much of my time there was overshadowed by this dynamic. I was constantly infuriated and distracted in trying to remain professional. 

You can imagine that as a mother with a young toddler and new baby, a household to run and senior work role to carry out, there was very little in my life that got positive attention never mind unconditional love, certainly not me.

It was the turning point, with two children physically acting out the meltdowns I was having inside, I felt no choice other than to turn towards myself. I knew I had no more to give unless I could figure out who I truly was underneath all the layers of expectations that had become mixed up in my psyche over my lifetime as beliefs.

As patient as I was with my children much of the time, there were inevitably moments that I erupted in sheer frustration. And, as beautiful as my children are, I was simply unable to give them the adoring and unadulterated attention they needed to build a healthy self concept.  

A few years on, with much of my journey recorded through these articles, I have found my way back to love and understand much more about my authentic self. There is still some work to do, I imagine that to be a lifetime, but I am at a stage now when I am able to be the parent that I feel my children deserve; one who is able to more consistently give them unconditional love.

There is little joy for me in knowing my children are able to honour others if they don’t know how to honour themselves. Here too, there is work to do in unraveling some of the inadvertent damage caused along the way. But here I am, able and thrilled to be able to turn more wholeheartedly to the task.

Earlier in life I thought unconditional love was something I would find in other people, but I can’t see something in others that I haven’t got in myself. That love had been obscured under layers and layers of expectations and beliefs, and I’ve now gone a good way towards seeing and feeling what lies beneath.

A tip I heard a long time ago is to ask “what would someone who loves themselves do right now?” when I am faced with options, expectations and demands; it has served me well. It firstly means seeing that I have choices and then it means responding to things in new – often uncomfortable – ways.

But as I have become more practiced at putting myself in the line of love, I feel more loving towards others and I’m able to help people in ways that work for both parties rather than only one. Rather than seeing myself as separate, I now see everything as separate expressions of the one. So if I take from one, I take from all, but if I give to one, I give to all.

Far from being selfless, loving ourselves unconditionally is a reclaiming of our authentic perspective. It is this perspective through which we can best serve ourselves and the world around us.

If you enjoyed this you might enjoy Do You Need to Cherish Yourself? Contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information if you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

I did a fantastic exercise this week where I visualized future me. As I’ve been writing about recently, I’m focusing more in my heart than my head right now, so this wasn’t one of those wish list type exercises where I think about who I’d like to be.

Instead it was more of a meditation to relax the mind, followed simply by trying to see what ideal future me looks like. It was refreshing to observe aspects that made absolute sense, though I doubt I’d have come up with them if I’d let my head take the lead.

Future me was relaxed, my skin looked soft and glowing, despite some fine lines that appeared to etch kindness and point to something inside that was very at one with life.  I felt love flowing to and from me, especially in my interactions with others. I could hear children’s laughter and life seemed lighter and more fun.

Trying to capture the feeling of that vision in words simply doesn’t do it justice, it was a moment of pure grace and it will stay with me for a long time. It’s my aim to imbue this feeling and breathe this ideal me into existence.

Had I have gone the other route and tried this exercise from my head, I’d likely have focused on what I was doing and achieving rather than who I was and how I felt. Yet I am acutely aware that anchoring myself in the feelings of that visualization couldn’t fail to attract all the things I would love to see in my future.

It conveyed great relationships, vibrant health and wellbeing, satisfaction with life. No worries or stresses, though that didn’t mean an absence of challenge, I was just able to trust in the moment that everything was unfolding exactly as it needed to.

It’s as I described the three main states of being in Building a Healthy Self Concept, this future ideal self had managed to integrate, through awareness and active healing work, the parts of myself that had fragmented through my early life.

It is fair to say that I am not there yet, I’m more in the second category I described in Building a Healthy Self Concept. While I am aware of my thoughts and feelings much of the time, I am still working through the patterns and their origins as I outlined in Do You Need to Cherish Yourself?

But the third state, which still seems to be the default path for the vast majority of people, is one that occurs in an unconscious mind; unaware of the effects of one’s thoughts and feelings. A friend of mine commented on a photo of a family member they knew. It was a photo of her earlier in life, and they were particularly struck by how attractive she had been compared to the lines of bitterness that now etch her face.

Who we are on the inside shows on the outside whether we like it or not. But awakening to your thoughts and feelings, and the role they have in what happens in your life, means the default is reset constantly.

I once heard a spiritual teacher talking about bygone days of mystics predicting our future. There was a time when a valid psychic reading would have been extremely accurate. However, with each passing moment, our life presents infinite possibilities to change and so the future possibilities can also change.

As more and more of us take charge of what we are thinking and how we are feeling, future forecasts like this are less reliable.

It helps me to think of an ideal future version of myself as one who is unencumbered by circumstances and experiences. Rather than trying to be something different, I am simply trying to lighten the load and heal those experiences in my life that created splits within me (between what I would have authentically liked to have said or done versus what others wanted from me).

I can’t change those experiences that have happened, but I can change my perspective of them.  Rather than have them dictate the values and beliefs I subconsciously hold and thus the way I feel about everything in my life, I can look at those fragments as stepping stones towards greater clarity and understanding and – most juicy of all – growth.

The truth was, my parents did the best they could with what they knew in the moment, as did my teachers. Yet, as a grown adult, I would often feel defensive and angry if things were not going well for me in life. Then I started to reclaim my own life, to become aware of my thoughts and feelings and take ownership of living my life authentically.

There were glorious moments of testing the waters, of living my truth, and the walls not crumbling down. Through each step, my parents may not always have understood or approved of my actions, but I no longer felt the need to be validated by that approval and our relationship became adult to adult.

When my mum died, I felt blessed for all that she had taught me. But things could have turned out differently, like so many parent-child relationships, she could have passed away before I had got my big girl undies on and grown up. As grownups, we have the opportunity to make our own choices, and that includes rediscovering what we think about and feel about things.

Visualising future ideal me gave me the gift of hindsight in the present. By embracing who I felt my less encumbered self to be, things already feel a little lighter and brighter.

Given that you were drawn to this article, and particularly if you are still reading, it would suggest you have already diverged from your default path. So are you ready to meet your future self?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our self concept is about whom we believe ourselves to be. There are three main states I observe around this:
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1. If someone is mostly unaware of their thoughts and emotions at any point in time their self concept will usually align with whatever they were shaped to be by their upbringing. The voice in their head will be full of things they should do, and others should or should not do.
2. If you are becoming aware of your thoughts and emotions, and how they impact on your life, you are likely feeling somewhere between enlightened and confused many times in each day. You will now be more aware of the should and should not’s, but not necessarily sure how to react to those, or how to act differently without anger, guilt, fear or shame.
3. Then there are those who are not only conscious of their thoughts and feelings, but have actively worked to heal many of the fragments of their inner being that arose in those early years when compliance and pleasing others meant survival. These people are able to self determine with more ease.

A healthy self concept, I believe, is in that third state. It is one where who we believe ourselves to be is as a result of the awareness and work involved in integrating all the parts of ourselves that fragmented in those early childhood years.

For example, just yesterday I was talking to a friend about my own mum’s labour when she birthed me. I know very few details about the labour itself, but I do remember her telling me a story about the nurses offering her a cup of tea. Mum didn’t drink tea, and didn’t want any, but they gave it to her anyway, and she drank it anyway. Then she threw up.

As my friend pointed out, the fact that they ignored her initially and brought her a cup of tea anyway, and then she drank it, indicates a dis-ease right there. It was a sign of the times perhaps, back in the 1970’s authority knew better and you did what you were told, and certainly you were polite. Maybe.

On the same topic I was reflecting on how much I must have eaten as a baby in those early months of my life as I was a huge infant going by the unflattering photos. We were recalling the approach to feeding at that time, it certainly wasn’t about being child-led, it was about drinking and eating all I was served. That carried on throughout childhood.

So I would have drank some milk, pushed it away, and then been encouraged to drink more. Sensing mum’s fear and determination, I would have drank some more and spilled (a nice word for throwing up), then, in line with the times, been fed more. Over time I would have spilled less.

I’m not sure if or how times have changed in regard to the expectation that others know better, certainly in birthing my own kids it was clear the health system still imposes its beliefs (albeit they have changed dramatically), but it’s a huge disrespect to a person’s boundaries. For me it’s a surefire arrow that points to a big clue about why I hear many thoughts in my head about what I should be doing in order to please others.

Sure, I’ve flushed that voice out, and I make sure I’m honouring my own needs and boundaries nowadays, but it doesn’t mean I’ve yet moved past feeling defensive about it, or feeling guilt, fear or shame. I still have some deep work to do in healing these traumas.

For that is what they are, the trauma of going against our natural inclinations when we were too little to do anything else, we had to survive. As we get older, those neural pathways are well and truly worn, as are the thoughts and emotions tied to them.

While I care what other people think, I want it to be because they may have perspectives that are useful for my happiness, growth or success in life rather than because my whole self concept is riding on it. There is a huge difference between those things.

There are times I find myself defending something and what I’m really seeking is validation. I don’t need someone to tell me I’m right, in fact I’ve come to believe there are no absolutes in this regard, just to recognise that my perception is right for me in that moment.

While I know that caring what others think is a trigger for me, and a relatively common one among our population, there are many more triggers we might have in relation to our entire self concept. It can be about productivity, looks, money, relationships, personality, the list is endless. It’s really more about the things that were important to those people who brought you up and the society you lived within.

So how can I go about integrating this part of me that wants to please others with the part of me that wants to do exactly as I please? I believe conscious awareness of the pattern itself goes a long way towards achieving this. But really, the only way to really unify these parts of me is with love, patience and practice.

Instead of imagining how disapproving others might be of me I can imagine instead pushing away my milk and that being the end of it, or not being made to eat everything on my plate when I didn’t want to. I can recall the many desires I’ve had and decisions I’ve made that have been questioned and compromised, instead imagining what it feels like to be validated.

I can even imagine a replay of the scene where mum declined the tea and that was unconditionally accepted.

Most importantly, when I sense that a desire I have or a decision I am making will be frowned upon, or perhaps even challenged, I can instead imagine the other person or people saying “it sounds as though you’ve put a lot of thought into this, you should trust your own judgment”. I can imagine people not thinking less of me, in fact thinking more of me for standing squarely in my own ground.

It’s not something that is likely to change overnight, I know to build a healthy self concept around this issue of pleasing others I am going to have to practice regularly silently standing my own ground without defence or justification, letting time and experience prove me right, or not. It doesn’t matter, what matters is embracing the freedom to make my own choices and to feel love regardless.

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

“The choice point is to step back and swallow your anger while getting busy in the doing of proving your point to people who will inevitably only just smile and nod and have rolling eye sessions behind your back for as long as you continue to attempt to engage with them on a level they are utterly closed off to now and forever, amen.

Or…

Become aware that your inner guidance has stepped you up to the platform again because you are a vibrational match for something far far greater than what’s being sought within, which is permission and validation.

You are so much bigger than this.

If it’s not now, life will continue to put things like this in your path until the day comes where you have no other choice but to claim the space you take up in the world and let that be a problem for others if they so chose.

The higher path…

Your higher purpose is not, nor will it ever be, in alignment with what you are receiving at this moment.
Your higher purpose is a calling forward of your own sovereignty, your own truth, your own adult ability to make decisions that you trust. That’s your higher ground. Higher ground is never about not offending someone else.

How how how are you going to be in service to a new paradigm if you cannot even put your toe over the lines let alone challenge and erase them all together?

Too many lines in your sand.

Here is an opportunity, to stand in your space and claim your light, or allow others to reinforce that you aren’t ready for the reigns to your own life.....

In here, are the shining beacons of light that fill you with your truth. You mustn’t and simply cannot any longer continue to give your power away. In doing so, you will not attain the level of enlightenment you seek.

I encourage you to put your energy and attention to the you who will show up when the old paradigm shows up in attempt to clip those beautiful new wings of yours.

It’s not your fault that their own light isn’t a match for yours.

I wait and watch with all the love in my heart.”

Ever wish someone who cared enough to tell you this? While these were the words given to me by a dear friend, for which I’m deeply grateful, I am sharing them here with her permission because it’s time for us all to step up.

You know how I know?

You read this.

​With eternal thanks to Rachelle Mann of Echo Valley Retreats (Family Constellations and Trauma Therapy), the kind of friend I wish for everyone.
 
If you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

I am highly sensitive, my partner is sensitive, and both our kids are sensitive. It shows up for each of us in different ways but, despite its various guises, we are all susceptible to overstimulation in our emotional and physical senses.

In a world that is increasingly vying for our attention, few would disagree overstimulation is an issue, yet the world seems to insist on toughening us up. It’s very isolating and I’ve been quite stunned by some of the reactions people have had in relation to this issue, not seeing it as anything other than a sign of weakness.

For example, just this week a teacher told me she believes my sensitive daughter, already overwhelmed by her school day, should be taking on a team sport next term; requiring two after-school/weekend commitments each week. The purpose? So that “she feels she is just like the other kids, and is as strong as the other kids and, like them, has talents and challenges”.

This is quite interesting to me, as the premise seems to contradict itself. Every person does have unique talents and challenges, this is true, but why does that make one strong and another not? I have no problem seeing her sensitivity as anything other than a huge strength that comes with certain challenges.

One of those challenges is that, for her to remain centered, she needs quite a bit of time to unwind – or defrag as my friend aptly calls it – after a lot of social interaction and sensory stimulation. Of course, school, falls squarely in this category. So after years of trial and error (that got downright ugly at times) we arrived at keeping things simple and making a point of heading home after school and staying there.

At home my daughter, who the school would have out pursuing sports that she is neither interested in and also contradicts its own core pedagogy (which advocates not introducing team sports until they are older), is happy drawing, writing and building. It’s the time in which she gets to express herself freely in the home sanctuary.

I also make a point of taking my kids out of school for two reasons. The first is to learn how to swim, in my view a basic survival skill, especially here in New Zealand where we are at the water’s edge in every direction. We have, of course, tried learning after-school and on weekends, but school has already taken the best of their attention and they arrive with ears closed and uninterested in focusing on anything else.

Any teacher worth their salt knows that, to learn, you have to have a student who is able, eager and willing to focus their attention. My kids love being in the water, but timing is everything if they are going to learn this basic survival skill well.

The second reason is for rare and coveted quality time as a family, which I wrote about in Evolving Education – Where Booking a Family Holiday during Term Time Took Me.

Before I move away from this example completely, it’s worth adding that I had shared my observations with the school about my daughter’s sensitivity when I first came across the work of Elaine Aron, though received no response. I had put that down to lack of time rather than a dismissal though; based on the aforementioned pedagogy I’d imagined we might be well aligned, apparently not so.

This is also a school with a long-established form of rehabilitation programme based on the premise that learning difficulties are often due to disruptions in the development stages in the first seven years of life that can result in poor spatial orientation and body awareness, sensory processing challenges, retained early movement patterns and coordination difficulties.

Why these disruptions to development occur is less often discussed but, as I understand it, it is thought to be a result of trauma. The trauma could be, for example, in the form of an illness that occurred right at a critical time of physical development, or an emotional upset such as the birth of a new sibling or a loss of some kind.

This is where It gets more interesting for me as I connect into the work of Dr Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-born Canadian physician with a background in family practice and a special interest in childhood development and trauma, and in their potential lifelong impacts.

In his book Scattered Minds, Maté demonstrates that ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder also known as ADHD - Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder) is not an inherited illness, but a reversible impairment and developmental delay. While he believes there is significant hereditary contribution to ADD, it is based on a deduction that what is being transmitted genetically is not ADD but sensitivity.

He asserts that environment has the far greater impact on the circuitry of the brain though and it is that which shapes the inherited genetic material. He believes environment – and specifically trauma occurring within the environment in the first months and years of a child’s life – to be the determining factor in whether the impairment of ADD will or will not appear in a child.

For those with ADD, it is well worth reading Gabor Maté’s work in more detail, but the specific type of trauma that he refers to is the emotional state of the primary caregiver when the new infant enters the world and in those earliest months of care. It is easy to see in an overstimulated world how stress unwittingly creates the type of trauma being discussed, especially where there is a genetic predisposition to sensitivity.

Whether ADD (or some other disruptions to development) will arise, will vary from individual to individual. When he makes the statement that people with ADD are hypersensitive he adds This is not their fault or a weakness of theirs, it is how they were born; their inborn temperament.

In putting to bed the idea that it is not ADD itself that is genetically transmitted, Maté points out that genetic explanations for these conditions assume that after millions of years of evolution nature would permit a very large number of disordered genes, handicapping an ever larger proportion of humankind, to pass through the screen of natural selection. He goes on to say:

We face no such difficulty if we see that what is being transmitted genetically is not ADD or its equally ill manned and discombobulating relatives, but sensitivity.

The existence of sensitive people is an advantage to humankind because it’s this group that best expresses humanity’s creative needs and urges. Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted. Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shamans, poets, prophets. There would be a valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity.

While Dr Gabor Maté’s work is more concerned with what that sensitivity predisposes humans to and how to heal it, I felt it is one of the most empowering paragraphs I’ve read on sensitivity.

On the face of it, it links in well with the pedagogy and programmes at my kids’ school, so you can see why I might be somewhat perturbed by responses I’ve had, or not had.

In venting about this, a good friend of mine bravely said to me “I get why you are angry, but can you share your dreams for the future when the fire has died down, I rarely hear them from you?”

Well, in a nutshell, my dream is that we as a society evolve past this point of treating children in a one-size-fits-all way. Instead of seeing newborns as empty vessels that we can shape, we need to wake up to the critical importance of those early months and years and support families to be there in a nurturing way.

In Our Children Are Changing – We Need to Move with the Times I talked about research such as the Dunedin Study bringing this important link between early childhood and the later outcomes to the fore. As Maté points out , it is recognition by society at large that there is no more important task in the world than nurturing the young during the earliest of years that will make a difference. So much social dysfunction would be prevented and so many productive and creative forces allowed to unfold.

As for those of us that are sensitive in our temperament, we have a job to do in healing the scars that run deep in our psyche from our own experiences and we have a job to do in helping our children understanding their strengths.

I’m also making it a priority to seek out people, practitioners and healthcare experts who have experience and knowledge in this area and who can support our family in our wellbeing and create a supportive community around us.

It’s important for me to raise awareness, for a person has no more choice in being sensitive then they do in eye colour or gender. And, in fact, it’s a huge benefit to feel and perceive the world in the way we do. It’s time to move forward and give more voice to this issue in the most apt way we can, sensitively.

If you enjoyed this you may also enjoy Embrace Your Sensitivity Rather than Have to Protect Yourself from the World. If you would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

We like people who are like us; it’s likely a survival instinct that served us once upon a time. Except I now notice when I start to feel some invisible barriers trying to erect themselves between me and another simply because of our differences. It is precisely where those barriers arise that can sometimes indicate an area of growth for me.

For example, I have enjoyed reading some really short articles from a particular author over the last few years, who publishes only the briefest of insights and observations about life. They are the type of insights and observations that also come up within me, so I asked him whether he has his story published anywhere. I am fascinated by the divergent backdrops in people’s stories that still result in the same understanding of why we are here and how to be successful in a meaningful way.

His reply was a bit curt, but he mentioned bits of his story came out now and again in his blogs and he’d written about it in one of his books. So, ever the Google investigator, I managed to discover a little of his background.

Between the curt reply and a single fact I then discovered about who he presents as in the world in the introduction to one of his books, I noticed when I next got notification about a new article of his, a barrier had crept up.

This has brought awareness to the judgments I’ve made. I decided to attribute the best possible motives to his curt reply, likely just a factor of time and timing, also being aware of the irony of enjoying his short-and-to-the-point articles and yet not liking the same in a personal response.

The other factor that rubbed up against my own choices was the mention of religion in the backdrop of his life. While this is something I used to have an almost allergic reaction to, I’ve arrived at a point summed up beautifully in the Chinese proverb There are many paths to the top of the mountain but the view is still the same. So I found it interesting I was still having any kind of a reaction at all.

The great win out of this is that I am now conscious of these kinds of barriers I used to put up subconsciously. I am also conscious these are the kinds of barriers people can put up or let down when they talk to me or read my articles.

Even knowing this fellow and I share the same ideas about life at a deeper level, just in a slightly different packaging, I recognised some of my old patterns reverberating. I won’t feed them, I simply recognise them and will let them fade to a distant echo and continue to enjoy reading his short insights.

That is why I feel each person’s story is of value, and would encourage everyone to share their story with others, precisely because not everyone relates to just one person. Even if I do relate to someone in general terms, I’m not going to relate to everything they say.

For example, another of my favourite authors published an article about the one difference between men and women that men just don’t get. It was that women have regular moments in which they fear for their lives, almost on a daily basis (and it intensifies when they have others they care about in their life, like children), whereas for men it happens in distinct moments they can likely count on one hand.

I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with this premise, it just didn’t resonate for me right there and then, but it did intrigue me. Based on my experience with this author there will come a point in my own life’s experiences where I will revisit this notion and be able to express it in a way that makes sense to me.

At the moment it sits there like an object to be observed and considered, which is fascinating in itself.

Then, of course, there are the people I know but generally don’t relate to at all – and no matter what they say I am in danger of disregarding it. This is something I need to be aware of too because each person may have something to say that inspires some further insight within me.

I find, for example, that when I’m dealing with doctors I have to be mindful of that bias. After years of frustration with the health system, I was forced to seek answers to my wellbeing and vitality elsewhere. Now when I’m dealing with practitioners in the health system I know I’m seeking a diagnostic opinion only, rather than a drug or surgery if other more natural alternatives are available.

That said, I know there are many practitioners in our health systems who, while they can’t necessarily prescribe or professionally recommend alternative treatments, are often users and supporters of these within their own families.

That was a journey that started in early adulthood, with me having blind faith in a health system and its practitioners and, frankly, a tentative mistrust of anything alternative. My early judgments came from the values and beliefs I’d adopted within my family and community. Fast forward a quarter century and those values and beliefs have changed radically, through a willingness to open up to possibilities and – now – many years of personal experience and knowledge.

In sharing our stories and our insights, for each person who is disinterested, there may be another who needed to hear it right then to inspire their expansion and growth.

​If you have read or heard something you disagree with, just sit with that for a while and wonder at why it got your barriers up, is there something in there for you to explore and open up to in your own life? What judgments are you carrying that are not even really your own? Life can open up immensely when we are willing to open up to it.

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

It was 1985; my swim team was on an exchange trip with another team in a neighbouring country. I was spending my first weekend away independently from my family. Thirteen year old me was nervous but looking forward to meeting the other family I’d be staying with: a young girl my age, with an older brother, who both swam for their local team.

When I arrived, I met Rachel and her older brother, who was driving us back to their house. I got into the back of his old light blue Ford Capri, his obvious pride and joy, and Rachel and I began to chat. As the journey began through the winding countryside of Lincolnshire, I had been unprepared for the sheer terror I was about to face.

At thirteen I didn’t want to seem uncool, neither did I want to be bad mannered, but taking the narrow winding lanes at speeds in excess of those dad normally drove at on the motorway was pretty hair raising. I was having a complete internal melt down and literally preparing myself to die…

Over the last couple of weeks I had been enjoying some of the talks at the World Tapping Summit. I often forget about tapping as a tool – especially in the moment when I’m blindsided by something that gets me spiraling on a negative track.

Anyway, after listening to a great talk by Carol Look on self sabotaging behaviours, I had started to recognise how my empathic abilities were sometimes stopping me from getting too close to others to be able to help them.

This was followed by another fantastic talk with Carol Tuttle on this very topic. Discerning whether the energy we are feeling is wholly ours, or whether it originates from other sources (like a TV programme or others around us, or even our ancestors).

She covered something very close to my heart, about what we take on board in our early childhood affecting who we become. She made the astute point that, if things aren’t peaceful, predictable and safe in our early years, our ability to read others’ moods is heightened in order to just survive within our family environment.

While this would obviously be more marked in abusive households, it happens to a certain extent in all households, since we are all human and experience a gambit of emotions after all. Carol teaches how to take this empathic gift we have developed out of preservation and protection and use it instead for something that can benefit us.

This really resonated with me, having keenly felt my mum’s angst and stress in ordinary day to day life as she was parenting. Kids learn to recognise the signs around this and want to smooth things out. Yet I can’t help someone feel good by taking on how bad they are feeling, which is precisely what ends up happening.

With my awareness raised I’ve been more alert to taking on energy that isn’t mine and using some of Carol’s techniques to release it.

For example, last weekend I was headed across some native bush in a car with four others. The road we were on climbed up over the hills and back down the other side on miles of dirt track, with many sharp bends and places where the track narrowed to a single lane.

This isn’t my favourite kind of car ride, and not just because of the motion sickness I experience. When it comes to cornering I stick with the slow-in, fast-out technique taught to amateur drivers’ world over. Approaching with caution appeals to my nature.

Many years ago, I did an Advanced Driving course at Silverstone, home to the British Grand Prix. I have noticed in the years since that it appears to be a trademark of most petrol heads to drive as if they are on the race circuit, maximizing both entry and exit speeds when taking a corner. Of course there is unlikely to be another vehicle coming towards you on a race course.

As we were headed along the road I heard my fellow passenger in the front telling our friend, who was driving, to be cautious. I knew my fellow passenger was not looking forward to taking this route due to an experience she’d had many years ago; so my empathy was on high alert.

That is when I became tenser and started to anticipate all the awful things that could happen. While our driver was far from a petrol head, he certainly cornered faster than I would. And as we progressed along the road I added my voice to that of the other passenger, and then the person next to me picked up on the vibe and added her voice and anxiety, while the other passenger just wanted to know when we would get there as she felt sick.

You can imagine the discord. I could see by the set of my friend’s jaw as he was driving that he was feeling under pressure, and it felt like he was digging his heels in by not slowing down. That triggered me further because of past incidents (like the one described above) where I’ve felt like a hostage in a vehicle, absolutely sure I was going to die at any given moment.

This brought the cacophony to a head, with him yelling at us all to leave him alone to concentrate. I imagine there are many out there in great sympathy with my friend, I mean, I get it. Even in that moment I started to get it; just how affected each person’s energy had become by the others and our own spiraling memories and thoughts.

So I just closed my eyes for the rest of the journey and focused on my breathing, imagining myself sitting inside a bunch of reflective mirrors that allowed me to return others’ energy, and leave me free to experience my own while working on becoming more centred.

Carol Tuttle mentioned how it takes men take seven times longer to process their emotions, just because of where the limbic system is situated in their brain, so it was fair to say there wasn’t a lot of engagement from our driver for the rest of that day; he was pretty wrung out. That said, we had all gotten ourselves in a better space by the ride back, which was a lot calmer.

One of my friends mentioned afterwards how sad she was we had that experience, but I don’t see it like that. There is no one person responsible for setting the tone, we are each responsible for our own energy. Our driver friend was as responsible for his energy as I was for mine; the same applies to the others in the car.

The only thing we can each do is start to recognise when we are feeling triggered by something and do what we need to in order to centre ourselves and feel calm enough to get some perspective that is more helpful. All in all, it was a fabulous learning experience for all of us.

I have had many experiences of unpleasant car rides, just like the one I recount at the outset of this article and – when I think back further – all of these reinforced the initial anxieties I took on in childhood sitting in the back of a vehicle and listening to terse phrases about slowing down, and watching out, the energy palpable in those moments.

I can see how I’ve taken on board someone else’s story and made it my own over the years. That is not to say I’d steer away from advising any driver to approach corners with caution, especially with nervous passengers in the car. Nervous passengers versus driver ego appears to be a common scenario.

This is just one example of many in each day I could probably mention. That very same day my partner was watching a documentary about a huge pop star, now dead, accusing him of some horrific deeds. I knew better than to tune my energy into something like that. I am aware of the suffering that goes on in this world, but I am not helping anyone by taking it into my energy.

As I said to my friend, the best we can do is focus on our own energy rather than trying to fix other people, no one needs to take responsibility for how others are feeling. She has a sunny nature generally, so just be the sun that continues to shine. Sure, there will be the odd cloud, but no need to invite a storm because of how others are feeling.

If you are reading this article it likely means you too are aware of taking on others energy. As Carol said, this is huge in itself. Conscious awareness of something is the first step to change. Figuring out what is mine and what is not is a process. It will take many examples to work through, tapping being one way of helping.

Practicing feeling into my own energy versus others may take some practice, but I reckon it’s worth it to just feel the relief of my own unadulterated energy – so much lighter than carrying everyone else’s.

​There are many other techniques and tools to help out there to release the trauma we feel, for that is what taking on negative energy is. Anything negative that triggers us is likely to be creating a trauma signature in our bodies and, left untreated, will eventuate in sickness. A quick Google search brought up suggestions such as bodywork, hypnotherapy, energy work (like tapping) and Biofeedback.

I’m grateful for my empathic gifts, but know that unless I can learn to observe without letting my energy tune into something heavier, it is stopping me from helping as much as I can in this world – which is the real reason I have this gift.

Empathy is the gateway to compassion. For a long time I had understood compassion to mean I needed to get down with the person so they knew I was in their corner. Instead of lifting them up from down there though, I’ve discovered it’s a whole lot more effective if I can help them to lift themselves up.

The reason for that is it’s an inside job. I can make someone feel better by lifting them up, but then what? Then a dependence is created on external things (like me) to make them feel better. When in reality, they are already equipped with that ability inside themselves.

For a long time I’ve created distance in order to help others, by offering perspective. While I will continue to do that, it’s time I created capacity for deeper healing and growth to occur.
What would it feel like for you to lose the weight of how others are feeling? What would it free up capacity for you to do? A world of lighter beings, even just a few, sounds like progress towards a more authentic and compassionate world.

​If you enjoyed this you might want to read Who is Holding You Back?, Shine the Light on the Shadows of Your Childhood or You Are the Gift Your Ancestors Gave to the World. If would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog

I have noticed there is a moment, you might not notice at first, but keep observing every time something comes up that triggers you. This moment is fleeting, but it’s pivotal, it’s your choice point.

You will desire nothing less than to satisfy the lust of your usual reaction, the pull will be strong.

If you take it to satisfy your hunger, it will feel momentarily delicious, victorious and powerful. But then the moment passes, and – what was a passing storm – has grown into a cyclone that feels like it’s going to consume everything in its path including you.

Instead, if you resist the pull, it will feel a lot like trying to resist laughing when you are tickled. There is a visceral surge for action within you. Rather than continue to be enslaved, watch it, observe what is happening with interest.

If you can ride this urge without reacting, you will discover it is fleeting. On the other side, you will find the storm passes quickly. On the other side there is a calm centre, a place to watch the whole event with interest from a new platform and you will gain insights for your growth.

You may be triggered many times, many more storms may come your way and each time you must make a choice to observe rather than react.

Eventually you will be rewarded with a realization that those storms don’t even come your way anymore and, even if they do, you are no longer triggered and no longer feel the ugly desires to satisfy the unhealthy reactions that you once felt.

What you now feel, is the peace of your own energy, your inner self unencumbered by the unhealthy patterns unwittingly taken on from the others around you in preservation many moons ago.

You are now free to be you.

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

“Just like a GPS, the universe sends you signs to show you the best course. If you follow the flow, you get where you want with ease and happiness. If you miss a turn (you still get there), the road becomes longer and harder.” Charbel Tadros

“Book your next appointment after cutting out sugar and wheat for at least twenty one days ” said the osteopath. Wait, what now?...

I was looking forward to the appointment with my Osteopath. She has a really nice vibe about her, always positive but in a gentle, understated way. When I first started seeing her for some chronic back pain, she prompted me about getting back in the pool “your body would really appreciate the chance to move, to feel its flow” she said. I heard her and I’ve been back in the pool now twice a week for the last three months.

So there I was, anticipating the usual low key yet impactful interaction and she starts asking me about my diet, after listening to my response she said “your body would really appreciate you cutting out wheat and sugar”.

Dread flooded through me. I proceeded to tell her my journey with food, and explained that I understand the optimal diet is one where the food is in its natural state rather than processed.

There have been only a few times in my life that have necessitated a strict diet, for health and fertility reasons. While there has been an overall positive shift along the scale towards more healthful eating over the years, there is still a lot of unhealthy stuff in there.

So I rolled out the excuses. In short, my diet feels compromised because of the situation I find myself in. I’m the cook of the house and cater to a meat and gluten glutton, a couple of anti-vege sugar fiends with differing but limited palettes and all of them seem to have adverse reactions to trying anything particularly healthy. On top of that, preparing meals is something I do because I have to, not because I love to.

I concluded by meekly acknowledging my awareness that my body really isn’t appreciating the food I’m feeding it and I have an intention to change once there is some time to focus on it. Meaning, I do not really want to prepare my food separately from the family, which feels like an even bigger grind.

As I waxed lyrical on all of this, she listened without comment or judgment. Then she said “So you are putting everyone else’s preferences ahead of your own, even ahead of your own health.” Ouch! “Your body really should be able to recover quicker than it is, there is too much inflammation, and it would appreciate you listening to what its telling you about your food preferences.” True.

Then she surprised me by saying “Book your next appointment after cutting out sugar and wheat for at least twenty one days.” Wait, what now? Didn’t she hear my excuses; I don’t want to do this now. I prodded a little to see if she was serious, she was. “Well, okay” I half joked, “I’ll see you around.”

I left feeling pretty down in the mouth. I was being overtaken by the sense that my time for procrastination was over and I wasn’t yet ready to let it go. After having ignored all the signs my poor body has been trying to give me for so many years, it had to inspire an advocate to speak on its behalf to get the message across more clearly. I was being given such a big sign I’d be a fool to ignore it.

Interestingly, that very afternoon, I started getting an earache in my right ear. I turned to my trusty reference book Your Body is Telling You to Love Yourself by Lise Bourbeau. Under ear problems there was a paragraph that struck home “Pain in the ear that does not affect your hearing is a signal that you feel guilty and are punishing yourself over what you want or don’t want to hear.”

Let’s just say I could see the connection. Then, as I got to thinking about it, I realised the osteopath was only saying sugar and wheat; “That is doable” I started to realise, not so limiting as the previous diets I’ve been on. I just need to cut out the crap (like confectionery and flavoured chips) and choose alternative grains, which isn’t that hard really – and it is only for twenty one days so I can get a picture of the difference it will make.

That said, doing something for just twenty one days and then quitting is not really in part of the fabric of who I am, plus that is the length of time it takes to form a new habit. So I begrudgingly stopped eating processed sugar and wheat, knowing I’d just leapt off a cliff and there would be no going back.

Then, the next morning, I read my daily horoscope as I do for fun, and the words leapt out at me:
“You have learnt the hard way that you can’t always be true to yourself and be everything that everyone else wants or needs you to be. If you always put your own needs ahead of others you would not have a happy or fulfilled life, nor would you if you always put the needs of others ahead of your own.

It is all about balance, realising that we live in a world of give and take. Yet above all, your personal truth can’t be compromised, which means some relationships or situations might have to change. Don’t be afraid of change, for doors open when you are being true to yourself.”

Really, I can’t argue with that either. Having decided to take action my earache had gone and I have enough experience of cutting out these foods to know what a dramatic difference it will make to my body. All the stiffness, aches and pains will no doubt be a thing of the past, as will any other figurative or literal excess weight I’ve been carrying; I’d been neglecting myself from a dietary perspective for a long time.

Signs can be subtle, or more blatant. I find the longer I ignore the subtle signs the louder they get. So what signs do you need to listen to in your life? Is it time to find the sweetness in your life more naturally?

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

Would your kids, niece or nephew, or anyone else look at you and think you were happy? Would they aspire to a life like yours? Are you happy?

I recently asked an older teenager whether there was anything she was particularly looking forward to in her future years. Her response was – since she doesn’t want kids – she can’t really see past forty (as in, nothing appealed beyond that age).

It made me think about whether those of us past forty make it look attractive in any way. I don’t mean whether we think we are happy, that was my first (and likely defensive) thought pattern. I started to think about my life, the things I’m grateful for and found that I was almost going through this process of persuasion to an extent, feeling I ought to be happy because my life is pretty great.

What I mean is whether I actually feel happy most of the time and therefore project happiness to those around me? If I could hook up a mood-o-meter that took a pulse check on how I was feeling every few minutes throughout the day, I thought about where I’d sit on the scales:

• Mostly stressed or relaxed?
• Mostly distracted or present?
• Mostly negative or positive?
• Mostly unhappy or happy?

And is happy or unhappy a combination of the first three? Certainly they seem like fairly good indicators. There are lots of other categories I could probably name, but these ones provide enough contrast to help me see that – while I still have room for growth - I’ve made a definite shift towards the descriptions on the right these last few years.

What has created the shift for me is tuning into what I’m thinking and feeling more often.
When I think of my life before conscious awareness of my thoughts and feelings, ouch, it was ugly and I was most definitely not happy. I can totally see why someone like me, just running on default, wasn’t radiating anything anyone else would have aspired to.

Like most people, I was all wadded up with thoughts and beliefs that I had inherited from my childhood. Over the years these thoughts and beliefs that had once served a purpose (usually they were keeping me in the good books of adults around me) were no longer serving me at all. The true gift of my adulthood has been the space and freedom to explore who I am, and what I truly think and feel about things.

Just fifteen minutes a day meditating has given me an increasingly conscious awareness of my thoughts and feelings in many given moments, so it’s created a lot of positive change in my life. That said, while it would be great to be relaxed, present, positive, and radiate peace and contentment all the time, I do still get tripped up.

For example, with chores to be done around the house, especially at breakfast or dinner time, there is no doubt my kids get little attention as I juggle between their chatter or requests and preparing food or clearing up, while also often managing other communication with the adults in my life at the same time.

Making it through the period between school pick up and the kids’ bedtime in a relaxed mood can be challenging to say the least. I often find myself saying to the kids “I can only focus on one thing at a time” or “how many pairs of hands do I have?”

It is often said women can multitask, but I find if I’m trying to split my attention is creates tension. And, although I am an optimistic person, my kids certainly hear the word “no” on an all too frequent basis.

So as I contemplate this outside-in view of whether I am any kind of a role model for happiness, it is a bit of wake up call. Even though my life has changed considerably, my kids still get the best and worst of me. It’s obvious that there are still pinch points in my day that don’t feel so great because I get overwhelmed.

This is never truer than when I am mulling over something that happened and dwelling on what I should have done (or what I wished someone else would have done) or I’m thinking about something like imminent chores and their delicately balanced sequence in order to meet some deadline like getting the kids to school or to bed.

Regurgitating the past and obsessing about the future are hard habits to break I find, despite knowing that things always work out and – most often – in ways I could never have planned. Today is yesterday’s dreams, like the beautiful family that I dreamed of – striven for – for many years. It wasn’t the obsessing and planning and worrying that got me there, instead it was a series of unplanned moments that I would call serendipities or coincidences that finally brought it all about.

I have a lifetime full of examples like that, the unforeseen things that happened in the lead up to landing jobs, or meeting partners, or other opportunities. In spite of these examples I often forget all about them and  obsess, worrying about what I should be doing in order to make things happen; noticing things aren’t where I’d like them to be, rather than just trusting a dream will work out when I take inspired steps as they arise.

The answer, then, seems to lie in continuing to practice conscious awareness of my thoughts so I can:

• remind myself to let go of the need to do just for the sake of activity rather than inspired progress, recalling the examples of the things that have taken care of themselves in the past.
• focus on honouring what I say to my kids “do one thing at a time” and give that thing my full attention.

I know a lot of people feel like they’ve tried and failed at meditation because they keep thinking. But I have discovered that noticing my thoughts is actually the point. I have become increasingly aware of how unlikely I am to be either stressed or negative if I can truly bring myself into the present. 

There are a whole host of apps out there to help if you don’t know where to start. Just a quick Google search on the topic immediately brings up suggestions like Headspace, Calm and Smiling Mind, but there are also an abundance of guided meditations on You Tube.

Personally I just sit with my eyes closed in a quiet space for fifteen minutes each day and listen to the sound of nature, constantly refocusing on the sounds as I notice thoughts creeping in that I then let go of.

​Whatever the method, I figure the way to be more happy, and radiate that happiness, is to live more of my life in the moment.

If you can connect more with the present, it will help you become less detracted, more relaxed and more positive – in short, happier. The happier you are within, the more you’ll radiate it outward, and the more infectious that happiness will become. A world infected with happiness, now that does sound attractive!

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

Over the last few years I’ve focused on taking control of my life, so that I could rediscover and anchor in a more authentic standpoint. But I still find that there is a part of me that wants to please others.

While it can be hard going against the grain in society, my natural disposition had been forced to go against itself much of my life in order to fit in. All that had resulted in was my misery and illness.

So in the end, what is harder, to make a stand for who I am? Or to submit, fitting into someone else’s ideas of who I should be?

Often I espouse many contrary views, particularly in favour of evolving our systems in society (education, healthcare, government and so on). But I don’t go against the grain for the fun of it, if anything it’s uncomfortable. What is more uncomfortable though, suffocating in fact, is constantly putting others’ needs ahead of my own – and those of my children – just so I’m not rocking the boat.

For example, when my eldest daughter was transitioning to school, we were encouraged to take time out and do early pickups, especially if there was an out-of-school activity like swimming lessons to attend. Tired kids were not welcome in class. I felt this was quite an enlightened approach and applauded the focus on our children’s wellbeing, albeit because it made life easier in the classroom.

Two years on, the school has completely changed its tact on attendance, with focus on meeting the Ministry of Education’s more rigid stance around justified and unjustified absences. As my youngest child is now transitioning to school, I have decided to stick with the plan that worked, picking the kids up early for swimming lessons.

I must admit, I look forward to the point in time when I can pick up my kids at the end of a school day and find they occasionally still have energy for more activity. Right now they don’t, they want – and need - to go home and unwind.

It’s just not comfortable being the one to buck the trend. Some people seem to manage it with ease, but not me. I’m a people pleaser by nature, so going against the grain takes practice. Like anything new, it feels awkward and my biggest challenge is letting go of defense. These kinds of scenarios are just ripe for me to turn into a crusade.

But making a drama out of a difference of opinion isn’t the best way forward either. One of my friends reckons I’m not a pain-in-the-ass parent (as I dubbed myself during a recent conversation about this; I have a rather self depreciating form of humour), just someone who has healthy boundaries and is not afraid to let them show. This was kind of her, but I know I can be like a dog with a bone at times.

Getting good with anything new takes time and application. And because I’m not comfortable with it, things can be a bit clunky at first. Like when I went to pick up the kids early this week and my youngest daughter was covered from head to foot in wet sand and we had to get her changed. This meant my eldest child was then late getting picked up and, as a result, had become aware of something fun she was missing at the end of her school lesson. So she burst into tears and fixated on it, crying and crying all the way to the swimming pool, screaming that she didn’t want to go.

You can imagine, these are the points at which I wonder why I bother. But I also know how ugly the scene gets if I acquiesce, so I keep true to the decisions I’ve made and look for ways to make things easier.

There is this thought in my head though, and I hear it from others in different guises, that if everything is going wrong at times like this then I must be doing something wrong. But my mind can play tricks, working against me, like society’s little advocate in my head.

So I often sense check the decisions I’ve made, were they result of an overactive mind playing into society’s expectations, or were they the result of something more intuitive, orientated to my wellbeing?

I know I’m in my mind when I’m feeling bad, and I know I’ll never get clarity from that position. So I set it all to one side like I did the other day, and I got my daughter to focus on eating her sandwich instead and I focused on how good it was going to feel diving into the pool in the lane next to the kids and having a swim while they were learning.

Of course the kids had a great time and really enjoyed their swimming lessons in the end, they have made strides in their confidence and technique this term. It’s a skill that can’t be underrated when we essentially just live on a huge island surrounded by water with many lakes, rivers and streams within it.

And I had a great time too, unwinding after the drama of the early pickup. From that perspective I was able to get clarity, and was able to trust that – for now – we are on track.

Yes, it may be a bit uncomfortable organizing early pickups with the teachers at school, but so long as I don’t start demonizing their intentions so I can feel better – or berating them because I feel a lack of support - it’s all good. Instead I focus on the things I’m grateful for, like the appreciation I feel for the depth of care they show towards my children’s education and development.

I have discovered there is no need to make someone else wrong in order for me to be right, that is just another hang-up of society’s conditioning. It’s the very hang-up that is the root of every conflict that ever existed. Instead I now recognise there is only ever differing opinions, and thank goodness for that. If we all thought and felt the same way life would be very dull and predictable.

So what situation keeps calling to you? What’s your inner voice got to say that wants to be heard? Is it time to go against the grain outwardly to go with the flow inwardly?

​I try to imagine a world full of people going with their own flow, listening to their own inner voice. I think it would be a world filled with more energetic, positively charged, passionate people and that is definitely the kind of world I want to live in.
 
If you feel stuck in the weeds and would like a fresh perspective on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me with an outline of your circumstances or click here for further information, I love to help. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

I know for me to truly connect with others, even my kids, or to connect with my creativity, I first need to connect with myself. When I do that I get a feeling of wellbeing, I’m less distracted and more open to opportunities to enjoy life.

​The summer school holidays have just ended here and gave me many opportunities to observe myself in states of connection and disconnection as you might imagine. There have been good times and bad, but on balance I’d say it’s been mostly good.

There were certainly days though that reminded me of when I used to work in the corporate arena. When it got to ten o’clock at night and I’d finally get a moment to myself and know I had missed something. That said, these days I do know what it is I’m missing, it’s the inner voice I can so easily hear when I’m connected to my own wellbeing.

​While I’ve been managing to meditate and go for regular swims, it’s the days when I made choices that worked for all of us that went best; instead of days where I set aside my own needs and then felt like I was making a sacrifice for others.

Like one day when my kids were low in energy and I had organised a playdate at an indoor trampoline park with one of the girl’s friends. I had ignored my intuition to meet somewhere in nature and to organize something separate for my youngest child. It turned out to be an awful experience with lots of infighting and the younger sibling getting ditched by the older ones, so there was more and more upset as the afternoon progressed.

In addition to dealing with the fall-out of this dynamic, I found myself in this echoey, noisy warehouse of a place on a really hot day with nothing but an occasional breeze from outside to cool down. It was hard to hear the other parent, especially with the constant interruptions to sooth frazzled kids, which was a shame as we often have some interesting exchanges.

As serendipity would have it, an Eckhart Tolle quote came through came through on email that night “Ask yourself is there joy, ease and lightness in what I am doing? If time is perceived as a burden or struggle it’s covering up the present moment.” This was precisely what had resulted in the mix of good and bad experiences. So I resolved to maintain my focus on the present moment and follow my intuition so we could enjoy more of our time together.

Then, the next day had been relatively low key and my kids were still playing happily together in the late afternoon. This is unusual as they are generally too exhausted at that end of the day and start fighting with each other. So, as the day was cooling to a more welcoming heat, I took advantage of the good moods and weather and we went to the beach for a late afternoon swim and some fish and chips for dinner.

When we arrived I immediately felt excited and happy to be there, completely well in my being. I had a great time splashing in the waves with the kids and my eldest daughter rated it as one of her favourite summer holiday experiences. It was wonderful, everything worked out well.

But I discovered things can still go well in more challenging circumstances. The other day we stopped at the grocery store to buy a few things for dinner on the way to a park where we were having a picnic. One of my kids came in with me, the other stayed in the car with their grandparent. As soon as we got back outside, my daughter started having a hissy fit because I had said no to having a treat before lunch. There was no reasoning with her; she had jumped into the proverbial well with no way to go but down.

As hissy fits go with that particular child, my best maneuver was to stick close yet not respond as it tends to further antagonize; the less verbal communication the better. I find that if I’m disconnected from my own feelings of wellbeing, I react badly and compound the ill feelings that are running riot in the moment.

As she started in on her hissy fit I had a choice: to push against her reaction which, experience has taught me, is like supersizing the depth of the well; or I can maintain my position calmly and be ready with a nice hug when she sploshes to the bottom and wants to get out again. I chose the latter.

While it wasn’t a great experience sitting in the driver’s seat of a parked up car, holding a child who had lost the plot for twenty minutes, I just focused on watching the people passing by as a distraction and maintained my sense of calm. This also had a positive knock on effect to the others in the car at the time, and we were all able to go on afterwards and enjoy our picnic.

Then today, although there have been a number of appointments to attend and it’s been a busy day, I’ve just been outside to reconnect with the whole cosmos. It’s a beautiful clear night and I can hear the nighttime movement of the cicadas’ symphony playing the in the trees; their chirping is a fantastic backdrop to the boundless sky filled with so much life and wonder. It’s so peaceful and – with everyone else asleep – I finally get time to just be.

This is the stuff I love, delving deep to contemplate the universe and then coming up for air to see the stars. That is when I know I’m connected to my wellbeing.

Yes, life can be busy, but if we don’t connect into our wellbeing it can pass us by all too quickly and in not a great way. No matter what is going on in your life, take as many moments as you can to observe what is happening – something that becomes infinitely easier if you practice short meditations regularly. It doesn’t mean that every moment will suddenly become great, but the good will more easily outweigh the things that throw you out of whack.

The more we are each connected to our wellbeing, the better decisions we make and the better life becomes. The better life becomes, the better it is for all of us; so let’s take time to focus on connecting as many times in each day as we can.

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

I walked into a cafe yesterday, taking a break mid way through a long drive. My children and two of their grandparents were with me; we had been away together and the kids had been up late the night before.  The car journey was a little taxing, as you might imagine, and the break was a welcome relief from being cooped up with tired, grumpy kids.

The first thing I saw in the cafe was a sign saying “Whatever is happening right now, be thankful” or something to that effect.

Funnily enough it was a great reminder of what I’d been practicing the whole time we had been away. In another mood, one where my feelings were being dictated by everything I was experiencing, I’d likely have hated that sign and wanted to make a rude gesture; at least in my head.

As it was, I’d been practicing just being in the moment. Not every moment, I’m a long way off that, but a handful of moments throughout the day when I remember to pay attention to the here and now rather than being caught up in my head. It is often said “the days are long but the years are short”. I can vouch for feeling this way any time I am doing something I’m not enjoying, particularly if I let myself get caught up in the kids’ drama.

If, in any single moment, I am contemplating more than that very moment in all its glory, I’m increasing my timeline right there, no wonder it’s said the days are long. Like if the kids are fighting or asking to watch TV, there is always a subtext going on in my head “why can’t they just get along?”, “why did I get involved instead of letting them sort it out?”, “are my kids going to spend their entire summer holidays watching TV?” or even “am I failing my kids?”

That subtext is taking me out of what is actually happening. I take the moment, obscure the moment with my thoughts and then get caught up in my worries, serving no purpose whatsoever except to keep me stuck.

And if I am not focused on whatever is actually happening in the here and now, and looking for the things to be thankful for, it’s no wonder the years are short because there are so few moments of true presence in order to truly appreciate and feel like I’m progressing.

Yet if I can be in the moment, this is when everything is happening. This is when I’m at my most happy, when I feel I am progressing.

Let me give you an example, at one point in the last week we took the kids to the swimming pools. After the palaver of getting everyone up, fed and ready, then getting us there, I was looking forward to my swim. While the kids and their grandparents played in the other pools, I took a lane in the big pool and swam up and down for about twenty minutes.

As often happens when I’m swimming, there are many moments I become aware that I’m thinking about something, usually something that is fruitlessly going around and around in my head. When I become aware I’m doing that, I switch focus to the ripples on the floor of the pool sparkling in the sunshine and that makes me smile.

It makes me smile because – in that moment - I remember how lucky I am.  There I was on holiday with some of my family, my kids were happy and well looked after, and I was looking after my body and enjoying the process of going up and down the pool. Everything was going well.

Just a couple of weeks ago, we were having friends over for a barbecue and – because they were running late - I decided to put something in the car ahead of a journey I was making the next day. It was because of that I discovered the battery in my car was completely flat; an inside light had been left on.

Sure, it was a little hectic for a while with our friends’ late arrival coinciding with the arrival of the guy from the AA, but it was a whole lot better than what could have happened. The next day I was due to pick up my dad from the airport, a few hours’ drive away, had I of woken up to discover a dead battery as I was in a rush to leave the next morning it would have been pretty stressful.

So as my friend was profusely apologizing for their rather late arrival, I was just as profusely thankful that they had been late, it had saved me a whole lot of anxiety. Coming into the moment, I was really grateful for the way things had worked out.

The same when I stopped at that cafe. Although the atmosphere in the car had been a little tense, we’d had a great time on the holiday. The weather had been great, there was plenty to do and see, the place was lovely, everyone had gotten along well and the weather was now overcast for heading home, perfect for driving.

To top it off, the cafe was clean and bustling, the service and food were great and there was a kid’s play park right outside. Without getting caught up in the kids’ temporary drama, I was indeed thankful my life is pretty great.

That is just the thing, each time I pay attention to whatever is happening in the moment, life is not only better than the obscure version of whatever issues I had started to play in my mind, there is always a lot to be thankful for.

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

Many years ago now I heard someone recount words of Mother Teresa’s that really stuck with me “I was once asked why I don’t participate in anti-war demonstrations, I said that I will never do that. But as soon as you have a pro-peace rally I’ll be there.”

I was reminded of this as I was reading something similar to my kids this week. They are learning that it is much more powerful to talk about what they do want rather than what they don’t want, yet it is much more common for people to generally focus on the latter.

For example, when we were having people over at New Year’s, I talked to the kids beforehand about a few ground rules as we were expecting to have nine excited children in the house as well as all their parents. My eldest daughter wanted to write the rules down so we could read them to everyone, and the first draft was a no list.

• No playing in the bedrooms
• No leaving the property/garden
• No more than a two or three kids on the trampoline or in the pool at a time

That didn’t sound like much fun to me, so I asked her how we could write a more positive list. We took each one in turn and ended up with:

• Everyone is welcome to play in the lounge and garden areas
• Let’s stay within the property so we know where everyone is
• Let’s take turns to play on the tramp or in the pool with just a few people at a time so everyone can enjoy themselves

I don’t think we came up with the best alternatives possible, but we did manage to turn the action verbs around to create more positive mental pictures of what we did want rather than what we did not want.

That is, of course, the crux of the issue. Words create images in our mind; we can’t help but visualize a green elephant when we read or hear the words “green elephant”.  If I talk about not leaving the property, I can immediately see myself walking away from it.

This imagery makes it harder for us to do the right thing. Our body becomes geared for the action we have created a mental image of, so then we have to work harder to actually do the right things.

It is an eye opening exercise to simply start to noticing this phenomenon in society, it’s pervasive. Becoming aware of my own language is also an interesting experience.

I first really tried to focus on this when the kids just started becoming mobile, so you would think I’d be pretty adept at it now. Yet just this morning when my daughter woke up early I told her “do not get out of bed again please”, instead of just saying “stay in bed please.”

The other aspect of this is – in saying things from a negative standpoint – the receivers constantly feel their sense of freedom being eroded and become more resistant. Whereas when we focus on the more positive language, this is less of an issue.

Like any habit though, awareness is key. I catch myself doing it more and make a conscious effort to change it; especially since I know positive language is far more effective and keeps things flowing.

But it’s not just about positive and negative language in terms of things we should or should not do. My partner is a shocker when it comes to choosing his words. If taken on face value, he is the kind of guy you might peg as chauvinistic, and perhaps a bigot. Yet much of what he says comes more from a compulsion to push people’s buttons.

That said, while he may never have initially had any reason for his prejudices, over the years those words have found their evidence as all words do. If, for example, I think dogs are dirty animals, I will notice those examples around me that support this which is how we develop beliefs. Most of us never stop to question the initial premise as we are often unaware of where it comes from.

As with all of our thinking, it begins in our early childhood. And without any conscious intervention it continues on throughout our life gathering more and more evidence to support it. In my partner’s case I don’t have to look far to see where he inherited his enjoyment of winding people up and his prejudices.

Thankfully though my partner is consciously aware of his prejudices and, on the rare occasions he entertains a more serious conversation on the topic, he displays much more objectivity than his annoying wind-up statements would lead anyone to believe.   

This compulsion to wind people up arose from a frustration in expressing himself, which in recent years was diagnosed as ADHD and possible dyslexia. Often feeling invisible in a social setting because of this struggle to express himself verbally, he took the route of wind up merchant instead.

That said, even though his motivation is to provoke and push people’s buttons, just as in the examples I gave about our New Year’s get together, the words create imagery that is then hard for his brain to get past. So it is really only when the line of thinking is challenged in a non-confrontational way that his thinking opens up.

It is something that is becoming increasing important to him having brought two daughters into the world. He doesn’t want his deliberately provoking and inflammatory comments about females to become their reality.

The kids’ rhyme that says “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” does not ring true for me. Words can and do have great power. It’s better to offer a gift with kind words than a criticism. Another great quote of Mother Teresa’s is “Kind words can be short and easy to speak but their echoes are truly endless.” The opposite is also true.

So let’s choose our words wisely and have them work for us, rather than against us, supporting us in our best lives.

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

In the latter part of the year the theme that kept coming through for me was about relaxing more, getting into a place where I could be open to the serendipities. I wasn’t sure I could even remember how to be like that anymore with two young kids to care for.

But with the pressure of the school day out of the equation for six weeks, life is much more fluid. I’m finding moments where I’m grinning to myself because I’m, well, happy.

The other morning my kids were deeply involved in putting together the new Lego sets their grandad had given them, and I was busy trying to catch up on some work around the house at the same time as responding to all their questions and demands.

I had intended to go for a swim at the local pool to get my body moving and clear my head because I’d spent six hours driving the car the day before. But before I knew it, several hours had gone by. With my dad visiting I was mindful of getting us all out the house at some point to enjoy some of the New Zealand summer.

So I had a decision to make: should I postpone the swim in a bid to get out everyone out the house, or should I postpone getting everyone out of the house to have a swim? With the pool closing early that day, I decided to opt for the latter and put my own needs first.

As it transpired I was back within the hour and the kids and their grandad were still engrossed in Lego; although they had also prepared a picnic in my absence. Meanwhile I had happily swam up and down the pool watching the dappled sunlight reflected on the bottom, grinning to myself as I took each breath; it felt great to take care of my own needs.

I also thought of the many times in the past where I put others’ needs before my own. The many lunchtimes I could have put to personal use at work instead of eating on the go and working through. The numbers of times I have visited people, or had them staying at my house, and not taken the time to even just stretch out my muscles or have a quiet moment to meditate or read a book.

Having kids took taking care of others’ needs to a whole new level. So I grinned to myself again on that day I took a swim as I walked along the beach in the afternoon while the kids made sandcastles with their grandad. These moments have given me the chance to reflect on the wonderful time we are having.

I am enjoying the fluidity and have wondered how much of that I can retain once school goes back. Over the last few years I have had to dial back on a tremendous amount of activity in order to help both my kids’ wellbeing and my own sanity.

School generally takes the kids to the outer edges of their capacity to interact with the world. One child withdraws within, eventually bursting with the force of a volcano, and the other explodes into tirades at the drop of a hat. Both need lots of downtime, so any laissez faire attitude I had about social activity when they initially started school quickly got reigned in.

It also means quite regimented bedtimes in order to arrive at school before the bell rings in the mornings; their natural inclination would be to go to bed later and get up later.  This means we are always pushing against our natural rhythm and desire for more social activity in order to just attend school.

However, as they are getting older I can see their stamina developing and know we will be able to get more fluid over time. I am mindful of allowing their strength and stamina to increase naturally in the way a young shoot does as it grows, I don’t want them to become hardened on the outside at the cost of obscuring what’s on the inside.

By the same token, I don’t want to be so rigid about protecting their space that I’m limiting their growth. Neither do I want to feel like I’m making a sacrifice and becoming a martyr, which is where I have felt myself drawn on many an occasion; all because I’ve previously opted to put others needs before mine too many times.

But this summer I’ve taken the brakes off and let the days unfold as they want to, and it is giving me a good sense of where the kids are up to and a glimpse of the possibilities ahead. That in itself makes me smile, we are slowly edging our way towards more flow.

In the meantime, I am stepping out on the right foot in 2019 and making it a priority to put my own needs first more of the time. What about you? As 2019 gets underway, will you prioritise your wellbeing so you too can be more relaxed and be open to the serendipities that lead to your best life?

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