Insights

Stillness is a beautiful thing. We are in such a busy world now, that we often have to actively choose to pause, to still our body and our mind. We know from research that time being "bored" or time for our minds just to ponder gives us new ideas. Trusting that we have inner wisdom in this high tech world can be a leap of faith, but also one that's worth it!

The bit that can be a challenge is that in the silence we open up to whatever our unconscious wants us to hear. If we are avoiding something, there is a risk that it'll come up. If we are engaging in numbing type activities, we might have something we are avoiding. Often numbing from distress also numbs us from delight.

Take a chance and give yourself a minute to be still. Watch the clouds go by, look at the space between the leaves on a tree, run your hands over an interesting texture, sit and stitch, get a massage, go for a walk, join a wondering workshop or retreat (mine are awesome, but I'm biased).

June 27th, 2025

When we can befriend our inner voice and really hear the underlying messages, life becomes a little smoother. Rather than considering that voice as problematic, we can recognise that it's worried for us. This might be from past similar experiences, from an overloaded nervous system, from stress and strain, from isolation. Our fight/flight/freeze mode is designed to help us, worry is designed to help us, a fright is designed to help us. We need to be startled if we have checked and are set to cross the road but then a car comes whizzing around a corner. But we don't need to be startled preparing to cross the road and just seeing the cars passing by. 

June 14th, 2025

Grief, if we give ourselves over to life and love, is inevitable

My mum was a big believer in including us in the process of saying goodbye to our loved ones and for me that has continued to be important and plays out in different ways depending on the loss.

Beyond that moment of loss in death, is the living loss. Living loss, like anything has a spectrum and isn't just about loss through death. In my family, at one end of this, it has meant navigating degenerative neurological conditions, and my post natal depression, among other things. Looking back on the losses holds grief, sometimes anger and disappointment, envy where others "seemed" to have it easier than me, and many more emotions.

It often feels easier to want to block these challenging emotions, however in doing that we may numb ourselves to the positive emotions, events, or memories. We may miss or block the happier memories and narratives, be not quite engaged in life, or create a skewed and sometimes spiralling thought pattern.

On a very different end of the scale, another loss not often talked about is the loss we can feel when our kids grow up and head into the world. I am feeling that with my son of late. I am so proud of him and when I open up to the positives, heck even with the various difficulties we faced, I managed to help get him ready for the world!

So rather than try to fight the feelings I had tonight after he visited, of missing him and the gap he leaves in our house, I'm feeling them, processing them with this writing, with a few tears, a huge amount of privilege that I got to be a mum and especially his mum, and with joy that he's doing okay, that he's happy.

I don't so much miss how many cups and glasses he seemed to use across a day but I do miss his hugs hugely!

This picture of us was taken approx. 23 years ago, it was yesterday and a lifetime ago.

June 8th, 2025

We often want things to just go away, but feeling better, detaching from being in the emotions of our trauma, isn't about them going away. It's about shifting perspective, it's about calming our physical body, it's about changing how we respond to triggers. There are so many different ways to support this. There is no one way and often a  number of different methods are needed. And again, there is no recipe for the order or amounts of them either. It's often a bit like untangling a few balls of wool, we start in one place and move to another, then maybe back again. Or like the onion analogy, we think we've peeled that layer off but we come back round to a similar issue and be to address it in a new light.

It's can sound a lot to hear this whether you are freshly wounded, just beginning the healing journey or whether you've done lots of healing, but you don't have to be there yet. And when you are, it will be more ok than it feels now to know that we can't just wipe the hard stuff away.

June 2nd, 2025