Stories make the world go round.
Thought experiments, tools, stories and ideas to inspire you
and feed your curiosity.
Is it silly, to grieve for a cup of coffee?
Really, grieving the end of my morning coffee is perfect - it’s perfect because everything ends, specially cups of coffee, and it’s a strange idea that some grief is more valid than other grief, that there’s things that are acceptable to grieve for and things that are not.
It's a strange idea that grief is for special occasions and is not our constant companion, that it's not a very human thing to feel, that it should be avoided if possible.
We have forgotten how to feel it. We have grown afraid.
Love and grief are two sides of a many-sided coin.
Imagine if, when someone is grieving, we collectively knew what to do. Imagine if we had the kind of culture who gathered round grief, made space for it, gave time to it. Imagine if we had the kind of culture that wasn’t afraid of it. Imagine if grief was acknowledged and shared. Imagine if we knew how to move with grief, to move it through our bodies and our hearts, and to let it change us, soften us, open us into love again.
What if ‘progress’ and ‘personal growth’ weren’t what we thought they were?
Trees (and the rest of nature) have no concept of progress. They grow because the conditions are right.
What if we did the same? Instead of trying to force progress, instead of frantically reading more self help books and beating ourselves up for not healing fast enough, what if we recognised that perhaps right now the conditions aren’t right for us to be where we’d like to be?
And instead of forcing ourselves, we started creating the right conditions for us to heal, grow and thrive?
Permission to be silly.
Know what’s missing lately?
Silliness. Absurdity. The whimsical and strange.
Not as a way to bypass the weight of the world, not as a way to stick your head in the sand or your fingers in your ears singing ‘la la la I’m not listening’ (although - good strategies, sometimes necessary).
But as a way to help us stay human, and to resource us for the hard times.
Use the nice journal you’re saving for ‘someday’.
If you're someone who is saving a nice journal (or two, or three) for ‘someday’ when you have a nice enough thing to use it for, this is your gentle encouragement to get out the nice journal, and use it. Not someday, (someday is not a real day) but today.
Use the nice journal.
"What if..." we used these two words for good instead of evil?
What if (see what I did there) we stopped playing the what-if-anxiety game, and instead learned to transform it into what-if-curiosity?
What if (see? I’m doing it again…) we stopped using ‘what if’ to keep ourselves small and safe, and instead used ‘what if’ to encourage ourselves and each other out of our comfort zones, to expand our horizons, to explore what might be possible?
What to do when your feeling feel bigger than you.
When your feelings feel bigger than you, what do you do? There’s not enough room in you for all of your anger, there’s too many tears for you to ever cry them all, the heaviness pins you to the floor, life is overwhelming and confusing, the bigness of what you’re experiencing is too much and it’d be so nice to have somewhere else to put it.
That’s one of the things that art therapy can help with - it gives you somewhere else to put some of those things.
Deciding to do it is the hardest part of doing anything.
What if the hardest part of doing anything was making the decision to do it? And what if every decision you made was the right decision?
Who wants to feel grief? It asks something of us…
Grief isn’t just sadness.
It contains a whole world of emotions, in so many different flavours. Sadness is one - and rage, anger, frustration, ‘it’s not fair!’ and railing against what we can’t change. Numbness and shut down, depression and dissociation. Sometimes guilt. Helplessness, hopelessness. Sometimes grief is a howling whirlwind, sometimes it’s a soft and tender melancholy. Grief is raw, and real, and very human.
And many of us (most of us?) are afraid of it.
On boats, bailing and smooth sailing…
Imagine we're in a boat, and it's taking on water here and there - maybe we pass through a big storm, maybe it rains, maybe we hit something and end up with a hole, maybe it's wear and tear over time. If we don't bail it out and keep the water low, we're going to end up with wet feet.
Grief is kind of like that. If we don’t take the time to tend to it regularly, we might end up drowning in it…
Creating solid ground for grief.
Often our grief feels bottomless, like it’s too big for our bodies to contain. And so we make the choice, consciously or unconsciously, to stay a bit numb, to keep busy, to look the other way.
Wise choices.
Grief is a land we’re not made to travel alone.
What if we remembered how to create a solid ground for grief, and travelled it together?
How to find a way through change.
When we’re in the middle of change and nothing is clear, how do we find the way forward? We can’t go back, but we also don’t know which way to go now.
There are three loose phases to times of change, and the messy middle is where the magic is, if we can learn to stay there in a way that allows us to find our gold.
The stories our bodies tell.
Have you ever tried to read the story of your own life? Our life stories are written in our bodies - the tension we carry, our smile lines, our gestures and the ways that we move.
It’s a different kind of language than the one we’re used to hearing. It speaks in sensations - in tightness and ease, in tingles of energy, in freezy feeling states, in warmth. As we become more and more fluent, deeper and deeper subtleties arise. It’s endlessly fascinating! At least, it is to me - I love what happens when we learn to attune to ourselves so deeply.
Judging yourself for being judgemental?
If you want to stop being judgemental, a nice first step is to stop judging the part of you that judges stuff.
Being judgemental in itself isn’t bad. It’s part of being discerning and knowing what we want, knowing what we’ll tolerate, knowing our boundaries.
The secret to becoming more accepting of yourself and of the rest of the world is to let your internal judge do its judgey thing, and taking what it says with as many grains of salt as you need.
Art Therapy: do you need to be creative or talented?
One of the first things many people say when they find out I’m an Art Therapist is:
“Oh, I couldn’t do that, I’m not creative. I can’t even draw a stick figure.”
If this is you, I have good news for you!
You don’t have to be talented, know how to draw or see yourself as creative to benefit from art therapy. Here’s why.
Leave no stone unturned.
Leave no stone unturned.
Sounds like a serious undertaking, turning every stone.
Every stone, turned with anticipation of finding whatever it is that you’re looking for. Treasure? Frogs?
How many stones will it take?
The simplest tool I know for building self trust & enoughness.
This simple tool is a way of attuning to yourself more deeply in a way that feels really good. Taking the time to check in shows you you’re listening to yourself. Taking the time to find the right words shows you that you care. And as you learn the subtle nuances of how you feel, moment to moment, you’re validating your own experience (which is a powerful way, over time, of dismantling unworthiness and not-enoughness).
Give it a try!
Why we are the way we are.
When we’re small, we base our understanding of who we are and how we should behave by noticing the world around us. If we don’t learn to question this understanding as adults, we can end up feeling out of place in one or more areas of our lives, of not feeling authentically ourselves, in a way that’s hard to define.
Navigating life seasons and cycles.
There are seasons for rest and seasons for activity, times when new things are coming to life and times when old things are falling away.
I talk with Carol Anne on her podcast about how to navigate cycles and the power of aligning yourself to the way of the season you’re in. Lots of permission to be where you are, and to sink deeper into your own bones and your own magic.
We are made of stories.
Once upon a time…” are magic words to me - I find myself leaning in, eyes wide, ready to suspend my disbelief and enter a place where the normal rules don’t apply.
In stories, there’s so much possibility. Anything might happen at any moment. Talking rabbits. Magic carpets. Star crossed lovers finding and losing and finding each other again. Ordinary people overcoming extraordinary odds and discovering they’re not so ordinary after all.
Book a free 30 minute consultation.
Don’t listen to what they say about curiosity killing the cat - curiosity is the first step on any fruitful journey. Book a Zoom call and let’s have a conversational adventure.