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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We humans have forgotten how powerful we truly are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History of Healthcare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antibiotics and Vaccines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we are self responsible we can heal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

​What about you?

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

Lately I’ve been focused on healing my body of the traumas it has endured over my life and it’s really brought home to me what it means to embody my spirituality. I think of it like peeling an onion layer by layer, slowly uncovering all the things that – over the years – I’ve either suppressed or repressed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
Set Myself up for Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look for the Lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As always, simple but not necessarily easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was watching a SuperSoul Session with Oprah and Gary Zukov and a statement he made jumped out at me “Authentic power is the ability to distinguish within you the difference between love and fear, and choose love no matter what it happening inside of you or outside of you.”
 
But when I respond to an interaction with a friend or colleague, or my child having a meltdown, or a member of staff at a checkout counter, or a situation that has arisen, how do I know when I’m acting out of love and not fear?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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