“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?
​
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

“We’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.” Robert Burns

As a Scot, each New Year is traditionally met with a rousing rendition of this famous song. There is a pause before we leap into the future, and this pause is the now in which we can honour the present and past.

While it’s often a time we remember those no longer with us, it’s also a time to reflect on those challenges we have weathered, risen to and risen up from. It’s a time to look upon others with kindness, ourselves too.

I have to say this year seems to be at its end in the blink of an eye, yet it has taken me through my first full year without mum in the world. It has also brought both my children to new places in their development and they have changed and grown in so many ways.

As a family we have literally been out in the world more, having travelled together a few times. My partner’s business has matured and grown, with more of his creative efforts in the homes around the Bay.

I followed my inspiration earlier in the year to approach Tiny Buddha, a place online I love, and now my own work is published on this and other platforms. That means there are more of my insights out there in the world, having reached and helped more people.

In terms of my wellbeing, I’m experimenting more with fresh and raw foods, especially after getting my hands in the soil and taking on the garden this year. I’m also regularly back in the pool after a 30 year absence, and
I’m getting better at making conscious choices that honour my authentic self.

Even although there has been nothing monumental, unlike last year with mum’s illness and death, it’s been quite a year.

And while I look back on some of the year’s challenges and successes, I also am aware of the many people around me going through some tough times of their own at the moment.

Like a mother with her newborn baby, challenged by not being able to move for hours at a time while breastfeeding and not being able to be there for her older child in the way she would like to. This is aside of the physically demanding aspects of feeding and having to carry a baby everywhere, all underpinned with inadequate sleep.

There is a man who has finally found someone to love and who loves him, but she has been ill. Doctors think her liver may not last another two years. While she has outlived the opinions of the medical world before, it’s a lot to process and he has retreated within himself.

I know a lady who has had the courage to leave a marriage, that wasn’t honouring her needs, and is struggling to navigate the ongoing relationship necessary for their children.

There is another man whose ex partner has died; a lovely lady, taken too early from the world by cancer. His sadness and grief are deepened by regrets about the relationship they had, wishing he had been more attentive when they had been together. 

As someone who is always looking for words to uplift or inspire when people are looking for a perspective on a situation in their lives, I also know there are times when there is nothing I can say that won’t sound trite.

In these situations the people I know are just trying to live through their moments of grief, anger, frustration and guilt among the many other emotions. I know each of them will find their way through the tough times and be somehow more for it, hopefully with some kindness from others and towards themselves.

That is the word I particularly like from Auld Lang Syne, kindness. We all deserve kindness. No matter how well we feel we have done, or how poorly. No matter whether it’s towards others or ourselves – in fact, it has to start with ourselves in order for us to give it fully to others.

For example, I know I am often tougher on myself than anyone else could ever be, and spend far too much of my life worrying about the past or future rather than just being kind to myself in the present. 

Cogito, ergo sum is a Latin philosophical proposition by René Descartes usually translated into English as "I think, therefore I am". A friend sent me a photo yesterday of a clever twist by Gemma Correll that resonated “I over think, therefore I am anxious”.

Interestingly I then started to over-think the statement, rather unkindly berating myself for over-thinking and wondering what I needed to do to rid myself of this habit. Then I realised that is a negative spiral, I had to remind myself I was already on the trail of this one. In fact, as I said above, I’m getting better and better at bringing conscious awareness to my thoughts and making different choices.

Whatever the year 2018 has been to you, take this moment to reflect on it. Sip and savour each part for just a little while and be kind to yourself while you’re doing it; give credit where it’s due. While next year will soon be upon us, look how far you’ve come and where you are right at present. Take a cup of kindness for auld lang syne and for the here and now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The art of putting yourself first sometimes means saying “No”, and sometimes it means facing fears and saying “Yes”. To discover more, read on...

​Published in Soul Analyse

A better sense of self-awareness brings its own reward. Swiftly shifting your attention to what you have accomplished in the past year awakens your can-do attitude and gets you back in touch with your innate ability to make things happen in the year to come. But you need to prioritize self-care first. Read more here.

Published in HavingTime.com

A friend was asking me the other day about whether I thought her partner’s negativity was holding her back. These are thoughts I’ve succumbed to myself, many a time, thinking someone else was holding me back from my best life.

Feeling held back is – in itself – a negative experience. There are many guises of negativity, it can come in the form of doubts, rejection, disappointment, worry, irritation, impatience, anger, fear, hatred, abandonment, shame, anxiety, despair or depression – and many things in between.

I often catch myself thinking that being the hands-on parent in our family is holding me back. I’m the one who takes responsibility for the day to day care of my kids, the relationship with their school and any other activities we get involved in.

I was talking to another parent the other day who does some amazing craftwork. We were talking about that feeling of putting your own self on hold as we bring young children into the world. There is an inner nudge we can feel from our creative flow wanting to express itself, meanwhile we are caught up washing dishes or some other drudge.

Yet when I really challenge myself on that line of thinking, its tosh. Sure, I’m not a person who thrives on doing housework, but I am the best person to look after my kids. I’m insightful about what they need and thoughtful about what we do, even if that means bucking the system at times.

It’s not a one way street either, far from it. It was my daughter’s birthday the other day and I was reflecting on how my life had changed since I gave birth to her. The changes are monumental and all for the better. This parenting gig may be one intense ride but I’ve travelled light years towards my own authenticity; for that I am hugely grateful.

In my friend’s case, she has been focused on catching her own negative thinking and trying to be grateful for all she has in her life, trusting that the ‘more’ she wants will unfold when its ready to. Meanwhile her partner is focused on (what he sees as) the realities of life; the market; their bank balance, how much is earned, that sort of thing.

It is not uncommon to be out of sync with at least some (if not most) of the people in our life as we grow and change, especially when conscious awareness of old habits is arising. When I started on my own journey to me, my partner was similarly focused on life’s practicalities. I’ve found it’s better not to fuel the negativity by pointing it out.

In fact, being grateful for what you have and trusting the future will unfold as its meant to can frustrate the heck out of someone else who is looking at the bank balance; I know as that has been me at times and it can feel like denial. Perhaps it’s better just to be grateful and trusting without trying to force the same approach on someone else who isn’t ready for it.

One thing I have found works well, though, is to dream together. My partner and I can often be at different places on journey, but when we dream together we find common ground. What sort of house would we ideally like to live in, where would we ideally like to live, what education or lifestyle would be ideal for our kids, where we would like to take our kids on holiday, what would we each ideally like to do with our lives, and so on.

But I do understand where my friend was coming from. I’ve often felt others (such as parents, partners, children, friends, bosses, colleagues; the list is endless) are holding me back.

I find it particularly interesting when I observe negative emotions coming from someone under the pretext of having my best interests at heart, especially when they genuinely think they do have my best interests at heart.

Again I’ve been guilty of this myself many times, but it’s really more about how I feel about what they are wanting or doing, which is simply an opinion. We each are our own best judge about what’s best for us.

Someone else was telling me this week about a person who is being abusive towards them. They had determined to ignore further attempts to draw them in (thus not fuelling the negative), focusing instead on the life they want to create for themselves.

This made me reflect on the many wasted hours I have spent fuelling arguments and conflict in my own life in a bid to convince another person to see my point of view. It would have been far better – and less painful – to not get drawn in; ignore the bait and focus, instead, on the things I do want.  

I’ve come to realise that life is a mirror, so if someone else’s opinions or actions are upsetting me I know the situation is reflecting something back that I need to learn in order to move on; often that lesson is about my own self worth.

Regardless of the circumstances I have found myself in, the answer is always the same, focusing blame on another person just isn’t helpful. That is not to say that I condone any form of abuse (be it emotional or physical). But I know that, whatever I’m experiencing, by putting me first everything else will fall into place.

This is easier said than done, especially with my empathic tendencies. How I make other people feel is something I really notice and care about. I’ve also become aware it’s something I can lose clarity on when I’m under stress; I can be hard on myself and hear or see things that others never even thought or felt.  

It can be quite tricky to see what’s going on in your specific situation unless you can stand back and take an objective look at it. Regularly taking time to become aware of your thoughts and feelings (conscious awareness) helps with this. Talking to someone who isn’t embroiled in your day to day life, and who understand and supports your objectives can also help immensely.

But the best tool I’ve found to date, is to become inquisitive about everything. Be interested in what life is pointing to, undoubtedly there are always clues to your best life right in front of your eyes. Question not who is holding you back, but in what way are you holding yourself back? That is the key to your best life.

If you liked this article you might like How Would Life Be Different if You Believed in Yourself?, Put Money in its Place, What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)?, Why Resenting Your Parents is Healthy, Why Does She Stay? … and What Makes You So Different?, or Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First

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

Just like any goal, living your best life – or riding a wave - requires focus and perseverance. At first you might find yourself back in the murky waters now and again, but keep practicing and soon you too will be riding the waves of your best life... Read more

​Published in Having Time

“If a child lives with criticism he learns to condemn, if a child lives with hostility he learns to fight….if a child lives with encouragement he learns confidence, if a child lives with praise he learns to appreciate…” from the poem Children Learn What They Live  by Dorothy Law Nolte

Browsing through a local gift shop in my late teens, I purchased a little pocket card with this poem on it. At some point I attached it to magnet and it’s been a permanent fixture on my fridge ever since.

This week I shared the little card with a friend when we were talking about three things that feed love – attention, appreciation and affection. I had been observing how confronting I often find initiating the latter two, particularly when I’m dealing with adults. In the spirit of Dorothy Law Nolte’s poem, it’s easy to see these as shadows of my childhood.

Shadows are the things we don’t feel good about, the things we shy away from. But by shining a light into the shadows, we often find there is nothing there to be afraid of anymore, it frees us up to uncover and embrace our authentic selves.  

For example, having been brought up in a culture known for its stoicism, it’s no surprise to me that I struggle with initiating appreciation and affection. As I’ve gotten older I’ve become good at picking up on others’ cues, if I meet people who are appreciative or affectionate, it is easier to return this. Otherwise I tend not to even think about it.

After reading the Dorothy Law Nolte poem, my friend flicked me a pointed quote by Ken Keyes Jr in return:

“You are not responsible for the programming you picked up in childhood. However, as an adult, you are one hundred percent responsible for fixing it.”

She asked for my thoughts and I’m wholeheartedly with Mr Keyes on this point. What I wanted to explore was where I am on my journey with appreciation and affection and what – if anything – I wanted to fix. 

While I’ve gone a long way to breaking bad habits, I’ve probably not yet embraced some of these healthier ones. Just because I’ve stopped being as critical in my life doesn’t mean I’ve embraced the art of appreciation and just because I recognise I’m not physically expressive doesn’t mean I’m suddenly hugging everyone I meet.

I was reading an article recently on why someone hated shows of affection and had no desire to overcome it. They were quite adamant there was no childhood trauma; one parent in particular had been quite demonstrative in the hug department. I could understand their perspective and, of course, it’s their choice whether they want to work on becoming more affectionate.

I personally feel if an issue has made itself aware to us, then there’s something about it we need to learn – even if that is simply self love and acceptance so we can drop the defence.

I shared with the writer that I also had a huggie parent, the problem wasn’t the lack of hugs I’d been offered. In retrospect I think it was the sense of hypocrisy I felt between affection and judgments and expectations about my behaviour (and, thus, lack of acceptance of the real me) that repelled me. This is, of course, what most of us call a normal childhood and why we tend to have shadows as a result.

While I’m generally quite adept at reciprocating affection these days, I do acknowledge there are times where I just need to withdraw within and recharge. Generally speaking that is about honouring my authentic self and needs. Knowing that, overall I’m now pretty comfortable with the levels of affection I share with others,

Appreciation though is a different matter. I remember – back in my management training days – hearing someone say “catch them doing it right.” While that resonated, it has also made me aware that I have high expectations of myself and – by extension – others.

Yet how can I expect someone to enjoy doing something for me if I take it for granted and don’t appreciate it?
And how can I expect someone else to appreciate me for a task I don’t even appreciate doing?

For example, I pursued my quest to start a family with relentless determination but often feel trapped in the day to day grind of looking after them and the household. The voice in my head sounds like I’m doing things under sufferance. Not surprisingly it sounds just like my mother’s, when I’d listen to her rant to herself, as I was growing up.

Looking at this through fresh lenses, I understand who my kids are and what they need in order to just be better than anyone else. That is what drives me as a parent, holding a space for them to be who they are. I’m not perfect, far from it, but I’m attentive and thoughtful in my role and that is what I need to appreciate in myself and my choices when I start to feel like I’ve trapped myself in some homemaking hell.

Rather than undertake these tasks with an attitude of resentment, a childhood shadow, I can consider them afresh and appreciate the deep commitment I have to honouring my needs and my children’s needs. After all, I’m unlikely to attract any appreciation if I’m mumbling and grumbling about something. If I can appreciate myself, it creates emotional space for me to appreciate the efforts of others also and vice versa. 

No matter how far I have come on the journey to me, there always seems to be something new to look at, shadows that still lurk. These days I look at them with interest and inquiry rather than fear or dread.

Dorothy Law Nolte says “If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness”. And so as we each practice shining a light on the shadows of our childhood to take an honest look, we gain insight and confidence and take another step towards our own truth into a bright new world.

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

I am not alone, I am the gift my ancestors gave to the world and, as such, I pick up the baton. If there are challenges to be overcome, I will overcome them. If there are old hurts to be healed, I will heal them. If there are lessons yet to be learned, I will learn them. If there are talents and gifts I have inherited, I will use them; I am the very extension of all who came before…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Be fluid” the osteopath said to me. Of course she was referring predominantly to my physiology, but I couldn’t help see the parallels across all levels of my being, and how that shows up in everyday life.

Unbeknown to me until recently, osteopaths are very concerned with how fluids flow throughout our bodies; through channels, across membranes and within open spaces. Should the flow of fluids stagnate our wellbeing diminishes.

As I was lying on the table during the consult, she asked me to take a minute and focus my thoughts elsewhere so I could get out of the way of my body. Often, as a patient lies on the osteopathic table and is trying to guess what the osteopath is doing (or is about to do), these very thoughts are inhibiting the flow of fluids that the osteopath is trying to assess.

I took the welcome respite from having to focus my attention on what another was saying and started to notice the noises in the room. It was a warm day and the windows were slightly open. I could hear the traffic going past on the road outside. Then I could hear the birds twittering away, seemingly oblivious to the encroachment of man’s modern world.

It made me think about the same sounds I’ve been hearing in my back garden while meditating recently. It’s late spring here in the southern hemisphere and nature has come alive all around. The birds and their melody will soon be surpassed by the pulsating symphony of cicadas as the weather gets warmer, but for now it’s the bird’s chips and chirrups that reach my ears all day long – should I wish to tune in.

Another thing the osteopath said that captured my interest was how attentive I was with my daughter (who she had also treated recently). Having just spent another 4-day weekend with the kids due to a teacher development day and a strike, and having had visitors over that time, I was feeling rather depleted and in need of alone time.

I mulled over this word attentive, rolling it around in my mind, in a similar way to sucking on a delicious candy. Contemplation is one of my favourite pastimes; I love going down the rabbit hole with just one or two words that pique my interest.

So I thought about this word attentive. It indicates presence, which I have been deliberately focused on these last few years. In fact, I should probably take a moment to just absorb the fact that I am less prone these days to fretting over the past or future, the thoughts in my head often relate to the present moment, which is a good thing.

That said, I am not exempt from cogitating the burgeoning to-do list in my head in any given moment; especially when I am at home with the kids. The process of running a household, supporting a business and looking after two young children is often a juggling act of crazy proportions. However, I know I am not alone  in that, we each generally have responsibilities that require our attention many times in each day.

So as I circled back to this issue of being fluid, I wondered, how can I go with my own flow when I’m feeling pulled this way and that so often? I thought about what being fluid really means, and – given these apparently encroaching responsibilities I have chosen – how do I define flow?

There is a verse in the Teo Te Ching, ascribed to Lao Tzu, which resonates “Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it. The soft overcomes the hard, the gentle overcomes the rigid.”

It brings to mind a picture of flowing around obstacles rather than pushing against them.

For example, yesterday I had an opportunity to go with the flow or push against it. I went to pick up the kids from school. Generally I park at one end, walk to the other to pick up my youngest first, then collect my other daughter on the way back down to the car. As a rule, I usually like to get home as soon as possible; it’s the time of day the kids need to unwind, and I need to make dinner and such forth.

So when I had walked from one end to the other and back again, my eldest daughter asked if we could walk back up to the other end of school to collect “something I left there earlier”.

I groaned inwardly, my flow was taking me to the car, now I could see an obstacle. It quickly became apparent that her desire to go get this valuable item (that she described as “a yellowish-green thing that sparkles”) was higher than my desire to rush home. To make her go home without collecting this item would have created a virtual dam in the flow, especially since her sister also seemed quite intent on the idea.

So off we went, picking our way up through the school grounds again until we came to the forest where she retrieved her treasure (a dislodged bamboo shoot). It was actually quite a pleasant walk once I’d surrendered to the diverted flow. The weather was beautiful, the kids enjoyed reconnecting and sharing the various things they’d discovered that day, and I enjoyed watching them and being with them.

We got home a half hour later than usual, but there was nothing else pressing, and we managed our after-school routine quite well.

This is not me saying we should do whatever our kids want for an easy life. As an adult, we have a greater perspective than they do. They see only their path on the river, their singular desires and focus, whereas we are able to take in a wider view and assess where these paths may converge.

It also means there is no need to do whatever my partner, parents, peers, or anyone else, wants me to do if it goes against my own flow of wellbeing. I now look for the win-win answers in each seeming obstacle, seeking the path that allows me to remain fluid. Sometimes that may mean I need to body swerve a path that seems easier to take in the short run, in order to stay on the better path for me in the long run.

For example, this last weekend was the school’s annual fair. Rather than be herded into the path that involved the onerous task of organizing the fair, along with most of the other parents in my eldest daughter’s class, I quite deliberately opted to take another path. I knew the first would be my undoing, so I put my own welfare above the pull to fit in and seem helpful.

We contributed to the school’s fair in other ways; my partner made more than 70 bars of his famous fudge and he and his mum both helped to run the coffee and cake stall for a good chunk of the morning while I looked after the kids among the thronging masses who had descended upon the school grounds.

This pales into comparison to what some of the other parent’s contributed, but to do more would have been inauthentic for me. My energy fills up from inward reflection and contemplation, or meaningful one on one time with people, rather than broader social contact. On balance, I’d rather teach my kids by my own example to be who they are than to sacrifice in order to fit with the herd.

As I was listening to the birdsong the other evening after dinner, I was struck again by how completely oblivious the birds seem to our human din. My youngest daughter, who is rather vocal, was upset with her sister. The cacophony that ensued made not the slightest difference to the bird song; they just kept right on tweeting and chirping to one another.

It reminded me of a story I’d recently heard about the fighting in the fields of France back in the Great War. With death and destruction all around, in the midst of mayhem, a soldier became transfixed by a butterfly that fluttered above where he was lying in the field; struck by the beauty and carefree oddity amid his own personal hell.

Nature pays little heed to us; it goes with the flow quite nicely, tuned to its own wellbeing. In contrast, I still spend far too much time tuned into other people, or the thoughts in my head that are regurgitating the past or anticipating the future.

Casting the shroud of who I should be versus who I am is a process. I can’t suddenly be okay with different ways of being in the world without recalling the old beliefs and judgments I had about them. But the more I learn how to go with my own flow, the less resistance I feel in my path.

In addition to taking 15 minutes in each day to do nothing other than observe my thoughts and let them go (meditation), I now stop as often as I remember to just tune into the natural sounds around me. This allows me to tune into the flow of life that is always there, the wellbeing, and reminds me to be fluid.

If you enjoyed reading this you may enjoy Win-Win-Win Giving, Do What Fuels You – And Dump the Rest or Meditation – the Cornerstone to Your Success.

​If you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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While there are not many of us that would dispute the benefits of being fit and healthy, how many of us incorporate regular exercise into our lives? And perhaps the more pertinent question is why?

When I left the corporate arena nearly four years ago, I had been working in a highly stressful, sedentary environment for over two decades. The contradiction in that is well understood from a health perspective.  Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline coursing through us are great if a high level of physical exertion is involved, but if theses have nowhere to go, the effects are quite damaging.

But with a baby and toddler at home, there was barely time to make sure we were all fed never mind thinking about regular exercise, I made do with the mad dash from the ferry terminal to the office each day.

To be honest though, physical exercise has not been high on my agenda for a long time. In fact, it’s been about thirty years since I really took it seriously. There have been moments in there where I played at it for a while, but nothing stuck for the long haul.

When I first left the office environment my priority was to figure out who I am, from the inside out. I stopped having massages for tense, aching muscles, I stopped going to the osteopath for treatments and I avoided any kind of painkillers or other medication. I wanted to get a sense of the real picture.

And over the last few years as I started to write and get clarity about what is authentic versus what I’d adopted through misguided beliefs, I have also started to get clearer about the role our physical body plays. It’s usually the last aspect of our being to reflect our inner state and intention.

Although I consider myself to be generally quite healthy, there are some aches and pains and annoying minor (yet chronic) conditions that have crept in over the years. I guess I could say my body has become stagnant and, like any body of stagnant water, that creates an unhealthy environment for my wellbeing.

Recently I had to take my daughter to the osteopath, and I felt an intuitive nudge to book in for an assessment myself. I figured that, after all the inner work I’ve done, and all the insights I’ve gained, it’s now time to do some work on a physical level.

This has been neatly spurred on by labouring in the garden lately. While it’s been gratifying, by the end of each day my physical body is hobbling around with a back that keeps getting thrown into spasms. It’s definitely time to get moving.

Growing up I tried out several sports: I did gymnastics for a while, swimming, board diving and even cross country running. Then I got more serious about swimming and, before I knew it, I was training for over an hour in the pool every morning before school and then every evening before bed, in addition to the weight and gym training that supplemented it.

After five years of dedication to that way of life, I felt I’d swum all the miles and I’d done all the training I ever wanted to do and have hardly been near a pool or gym since.

There were other sports I tried briefly: mountain biking, climbing, orienteering and hiking, but nothing really stuck. Life got in the way and I spent years of working in desk-bound jobs. So it wasn’t until my mid thirties - after a number of failed pregnancies – I decided to take my fitness seriously again.

I employed a personal trainer and my core muscles screamed in indignation at the drastic reintroduction to being worked out again; it was not an enjoyable experience. I really hate doing repetitions unless they relate more to something meditative rather than excruciating.

If I compare repetitions in a pool to repetitions in a gym, I definitely prefer the feeling of my lungs being expanded and strengthened, as I take a breath in between strokes, than the feeling that my head wants to explode from the way my body responds to squats or pushups.

Yet I still didn’t feel compelled back to the water, though I may have if there had been a decent pool locally. Instead I found yoga. Of course there are many forms of yoga, ranging from the more strenuous, repetitious types that remind me of squats at the gym, to the forms that hold poses for extended periods; I prefer the latter.

The yoga I do is great for stretching out the connective tissues and maintaining flexibility in the joints. So while I had found something that, like meditation, serves my wellbeing and has now been integrated into my life over an extended period, it still doesn’t get my body moving.

When I was at the Osteopath’s for the assessment and she said “what do you do to raise your physical vibration?” I responded meekly that I take a few walks on the beach and a do a physically low key yoga session each week.

Her reply was well aimed:  ” I think your body would really appreciate an opportunity to move, to let each cell breathe and increase its vitality.” That made a lot of sense of course.

We talked then about the options, and I divulged that I had been thinking about taking up swimming again for a while, I just hadn’t yet felt compelled to act. “I think even after just one session in the pool we will see a difference” she said. So right there was my nudge to action.

No longer am I getting in a pool to train for anything competitive, it’s about giving this physical body a chance to move and to replenish itself; to flush out the old and bring in the new. It seems fitting at a time where I feel poised for action on my journey, to get moving: I just have to get moving.

Like anything in life, the signposts appear when we are ready to see them. If you’ve been drawn to read this, it may mean that you also needed a bit of a nudge towards physical exercise beyond it is good for you.

Frankly, our soul’s journey in this realm is experienced through our physical body, so if we want to live in it long enough to feel satisfied that we’ve made a difference, we really need to pay as much attention to that level of our wellbeing as any other.

If what you read here resonates, you might enjoy reading:
When Did We Become So Oblivious to What Our Bodies Are Really Telling Us?
What is Your Body Telling You?
Is More Leisure the Antidote?
If you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

It's easy to get distracted by everyone else's opinions and ideas about how you should live your life, but you're the only one who knows what's best for you. Click here for the full article on Tiny Buddha.

Life pulls you in different directions. The spoken and unspoken rules of our society can quickly create many layers around our self-concept, and it can be easy to lose our sense of who we really are. ​Click here to read the full article on Having Time.

My story as a woman begins so long ago I have no conscious memory of it; it is the story that all women descend from, and echoes down the generations. The story starts in my grandmother’s womb, as my mother was conceived and the egg that would one day become me was formed within her…

“Let’s dive into this together and see if we can figure it out” I said to two of my girl friends.

For over three years now I’ve been regularly experiencing all sorts of cyclical symptoms, in fact it’s fair to say, it’s not been a good experience right from the first menstrual cycle I had over three decades ago. But I want to try and create a shift in my thinking and feelings about it and have a good experience with this aspect of my womanhood before these cycles cease altogether.

And I did indeed manage to achieve a new perspective, in our few hours that we took time out of our busy lives to explore this often taboo topic. The nature in which it is dealt with in our society, often in secretive discussions (from which men are largely excluded), has been insidious in its effects. Effects I want to stop at me rather than pass on to my daughters, or at least take the momentum out of them.

Over the years, after hearing many people’s stories and learning much from anthropological accounts of the female journey through womanhood, I have come to the conclusion it is an aspect of us that is intended to be held in reverence and to be embraced, rather than held in resistance and distaste. It is not an aspect of us that it intended to induce pain, or shame.

One of my friends led the discussion, moving me backwards and forwards and remaining focused on taking the powerful insights and reflecting them back to elicit further insights, it was quite a journey and she was very skilled at it. It’s a story I believe many will relate to and can have powerful healing effects for future generations.

The emotions we feel are carried in each of the cells within our body, positive emotions fuel our wellbeing and negative emotions create dis-ease and disruption to our biological makeup if not dealt with in a healthy way. Our tendency to suppress our emotions is learned early in childhood and, therefore, we are a veritable hotch-potch of everything from our ancestral make up to our own life experiences.

My great grandmother had, by all accounts, been a force to be reckoned with. She was a woman of the Victorian era, a teacher with a strong sense of morality. My mum once told me that she and my aunt used to go to her grandmother’s house every day after school (my gran – by then – was a single mother and worked) and they thought everyone’s grandmother taught extra lessons. But of her biology and feelings I know nothing.

My maternal grandmother was, by contrast, an unassuming woman. She was born at the start of the twentieth century and had just one older brother, of whom she was very fond. While I was well acquainted with my gran, she lived to enjoy her centennial celebration and many great grandchildren, she spoke very little of her own life and her feelings towards it.

Yet there are some defining moments of her life that I have come to know, mainly through my mum. I know that despite my gran’s apparent passive nature in contrast to her mother’s assertive one, it is likely there was a strong determination that lay beneath. Struck by illness and a long convalescence in her school years, she managed to persuade her parents towards the school she really wanted to attend all along.

My gran married young, the inference was that this was an act of rebellion, and had three sons to a man who would eventually walk out one day to get a loaf of bread and never return. One of my uncles saw him once in the years afterwards, at a football match, when he got given a coin. Needless to say, a divorce was had.

Her second marriage was one of deceit as well, her husband pretending to be many years younger than he was. They were married just before the end of the Second World War and had two girls together; he died when my mum was only seven.

This was, apparently, a blessing as my mum was not as passive as her mother. Mum can recall sitting on the floor drawing a picture and hearing a loud crack behind her as my gran went from one side of her peripheral vision to the other in an instant.

My grandfather was an aggressive alcoholic, and lung cancer was squeezing the very life from his body; gran had just entered her fifties when he died. It was the context though in which my mum had been conceived and in which the first physical traces of me – the egg from which I was later formed – were created.

However, this was not my gran’s last insult. A few years later when her parents died and – despite being a widow with two young children to look after (by then her boys, my uncles (who were much older), had begun to make their own way in the world), it was gran’s older brother (who was married with no children) who inherited the estate.

This was life for women back then, there were social customs and laws that limited their choices. Much has changed but, as my friend pointed out, it is only in recent years that domestic violence has become socially unacceptable, she recalls the campaigns of the 1980’s to raise the profile of this issue.

Life for women has changed enormously in my own lifetime, but not as much as it changed for my gran in her lifetime. To have been born into a highly restrictive era for women and yet have lived the last fifty years of her life quietly, and so entirely on her own terms, watching future generations being born into an ever-evolving society must have been quite something.

And yet still we bleed metaphorically and physically in ways that are quite foreign to that of our design. I recall my mum being whisked into hospital for blood transfusions and finally a hysterectomy as she literally bled out in her late forties. This seems to be a common crescendo to the reproductive years for many women, accompanied by years of mood swings, hot flashes and many other debilitating symptoms.

For my own part, I recall the introduction to my reproductive years vividly. Being a competitive swimmer, and training twice daily in the pool, it was not an option to ‘sit out’ for a week each month. I found that in order to use suitable sanitary products required a surgical removal of my hymen. Being admitted to hospital for an operation ‘down there’ at age twelve was embarrassing to say the least.

Then there were the cyclical physical symptoms, the dull aching feeling in my lower back that signaled the beginnings of some pretty acute and incapacitating cramping if there were no Askit powders to hand. I remember mum introducing me to Askit (a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that tasted fowl as it had to be mixed in water and drank), her drug of choice for the same symptoms.

In later years I used Mefenamic Acid for the same reason, as it had the good grace to be encapsulated and was easier to swallow. But the pain was severe even in my thirties, before I had given birth. I can remember one night, around midnight, crawling around the floor in our lounge just trying to ease the pain. Then of course I was up and out for work the next morning.

I used to think I am someone who is sensitive to pain, but a midwife set me straight on that when I delivered my second child. In deliberating whether to give me a local anesthetic before ‘sewing me up’ she told her assistant “no, go ahead, this one has a high threshold for pain.” Mind you, by then I’d had a lot of practice.

Menstruation was also the beginning of migraines. Walking to school one morning, I rounded the corner past some neighbours houses and noticed I had little lights dancing across my field of vision. By the time I’d gotten to school and started the first lesson of the day (it was home economics and we were making an apple pie), I hadn’t got past peeling the apples before I felt unable to keep my eyes open. The pain in my head was one-sided and quite excruciating and I felt totally nauseous.

Someone at the school had to call my mum to come and pick me up. The pain had gotten so bad by the time she arrived that I was literally lying curled up on the floor of the school hallway and only vaguely remember dozens of kids running past as the school bell rang signaling playtime. I was lost in my own haze and have no idea how I walked home.

Then there is the issue of blood flow for women. I remember when I started working at my first ‘real’ job after university; I’d worked there on a secondment during my postgraduate diploma and was quite familiar with the staff in the Human Resources department. The organisation had just employed a new Training Manager and she was quite a character.

What I remember is her arrival one morning after her hour’s bus ride to work. She rushed straight to the loo and then afterwards, in the office with the door closed, she went on to explain to the little gaggle of us women who worked there that she had really heavy clotting and had to go home again.

I was quite taken aback that a woman could experience (as a matter of course) such hemorrhaging that there was no sanitary product that could allow her to go about her normal day. And, unlike the menopausal women I mentioned earlier, the Training Manager was not an older lady; she was actually quite young and only recently married.

A friend told me of her experience when she started her own reproductive years. Her cycles were irregular and painful and – as a young teen – someone advised her sit on the ground against a tree in the moonlight, next time she was menstruating, and let herself bleed into the earth. With nothing to lose she did just that for a couple of nights.

While she doesn’t know why that worked, within three months her cycles evened out and she has never had any issues since (she is now in her forties). Perhaps it has something to do with recalibrating with nature’s natural rhythms and flow.

If menstruation has had its issues, then pregnancy and birth took everything to a whole new level. My children are pregnancies five and six, each one before was a ‘blighted embryo’ – a condition I was told that was usually a one-off occurrence.

After having had surgery to remove the first empty sac, the second time around I decided that – rather than undergo another general anesthesia and surgery – I would take an alternate (debatably more natural) route to evacuating the empty sac. That time I was sat in a ward with several others all undergoing the same process, given a drug called Misoprostal and a metal tub to collect the ‘evacuations’ in and told it would just feel a bit like period cramps.

Pretty horrific is my succinct description of that process. Having already described the pain of a normal cycle, you might imagine that pain as nothing compared to the pain kick-started by Misoprostal. There was no sedate lying in bed, I ended up locking myself in the ward toilet and – on all fours – stayed there in my own vortex of pain, contraction after contraction, until the sac was passed.

Suffice to say, by blighted embryo’s three and four, I opted again for unconscious surgical removal of the empty sac. But these failed pregnancies were not, of course, just about process of physical recovery. While I was philosophical, each pregnancy had carried its own hopes and dreams; most had a name and a bond created within.

After finally managing to successfully conceive in my late thirties (a whole other story on its own), throughout the early stages of pregnancy I had weekly scans. If every emotion we feel is felt in our very cells, you can imagine the stress on that young embryo as I contended with the constant stress of maintaining the pregnancy. It is no surprise my first child displays quite an anxious personality at times.

My first experience of labour took physical pain and exhaustion to yet another new level. After a day of early labour pains and then over twenty two hours of labouring, with not much progress, I finally looked at the midwife and told her I wanted an epidural.

She called for an ambulance to take me from the maternity centre to the hospital, as that is where epidurals were done. Unfortunately it was a Saturday evening and the ambulances were busy so, in the end, it took three hours before I was transferred to the ambulance for the fifteen minute journey.

Having made the decision to seek pain relief, as time ticked on I got more and more frantic. By the time I was loaded into the ambulance, I screamed murder every time we had to cross over a speed bump in the road. I remember finally arriving in a theatre to await the anesthetist, and I could hear the midwife talking to him on the phone obviously debating the need for urgent attention as he was being called to another operation.

I cannot remember the words I yelled, but they obviously sealed the deal as the anesthetist promptly arrived and the epidural was at last dispensed. My daughter was born twelve hours later by ventouse. It was a long night.

My second pregnancy was a bit more relaxed and, for the birth, the midwife had agreed to admit me to the hospital straight away given the horrific ordeal of the first birth. I had decided to try and deliver naturally, but did not want to rely upon an ambulance if I wanted pain relief.

As it turned out the second labour progressed much more quickly than the first and, by the time the midwife arrived, she felt the hospital was too far to travel. She did something for me then that helped me enormously, she grabbed my hips and showed me how to move with the pain rather than resist it.

Almost four hours later, feeling like I had finally mastered the art of labour, I heard the midwife comment to her assistant that they would need to get me to the hospital as the baby was going to rip me open (she had her hand above her head superman-style). This was all it took for my body to respond. With a final involuntary convulsive push she was out, and I needed sewn back together.

That was when the comment was made about my tolerance to pain. As I showered afterward, blood draining everywhere, I remember hearing someone delivering a baby in the next room. It was quite a shock to hear how harrowing it sounded from the outside. No doubt I’d made similar sounds, but from the inside I had withdrawn into a quite space.

I just remember thinking “I never have to do this again.”

And I contrast this with friends and other women who have had amazing experiences that – in comparison – were pain free. They have described their menstrual cycles and labours as ‘mild discomfort’. We are all different.

Sharing these experiences with my friends created a new perspective. There has clearly been trauma, mine from the moment I was an egg in my mother’s womb, and through my own life experiences since birth, and it has been played through this journey of womanhood.

As I talked about this journey, and about my other journey, the journey to a more authentic me, my friend pulled out some words I had used as I had shared: 

• the pain of loss (including my twin brothers who were born prematurely in the pregnancy before me and subsequently died), and the physical pain endured (not just by me, but the generations before);
• the shame felt in having my hymen removed, in unsuccessful pregnancies, and – ancestrally – in domestic violence and in abandonment;
• the reclamation of me, Shona Keachie; the process of evolving in my beliefs about me and the world;
• the feeling of safety to be able to talk about these things today;
• Trust in the way life works, in the bigger picture;
• The process of mastering pain;
• The process of shedding old wounds, old pains, in the journey to me;
• The desire to embrace my womb as a seat of feminine power.

As I look back now, I am in awe of each of the women in my lineage for all that they endured. I now live in an age and a society where being a woman need no longer be about sufferance and for that I am truly grateful.

Just prior to catching up with my girl friends I had watched the final episode of one of my favourite TV dramas, Nashville. At the end, Callie Khouri (the creator) had said “that’s a wrap”. That is how I felt about the chain of pain that has been created through my womanhood, it ends here. Each player has played our part, the show is over.

One of the most miraculous gifts we have been given is the power to create another life. The mechanics of all for women have been suppressed for so long, it was time to take a look in the darkness and see what lurked there.

And as always happens, when we shine a light in the dark, everything brightens. I feel the possibility for an entirely different future for my daughters, and for the daughters out there that are still playing their part in this chain of pain in societies and families where pain and suppression still occur.

After all the years hearing about feminism, embracing womanhood means something entirely different to me today. Rather than something in opposition to the masculine, or trying to compete with it.  embracing womanhood is about embracing reverence and joy, the very art of creation.

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