I popped into my kids school this week to talk to the Early Years and Key Stage 1 children about Spiritual Practice and Meditation. We had a blast, they were really engaged and interested, and asked some cracking questions. One of the things we enjoyed was to ‘Row, Row, Row the Boat’, and then talk about the themes from this simple but powerful rhyme. I thought today I’d blog about it, because it is packed with potential meanings, and it’s a lovely example of how we can take

I recently came across a cracking set of questions about letting go. If you’ve a sense of it being time to reflect on what energises you and what does not, why not grab a pen and notepad, and find a quiet spot where you feel safe and relaxed, and have a muse? What's heavy, what’s weighing me down? What am I tolerating, putting up with or settling for? What am I fantasising about leaving or radically changing? What would I love never to do again? What am I tired of feeling?

A dear friend asked me recently how I recharge myself. It says something about where my mind was in that moment that I really had to think about the question. In the midst of raising my family, caring for my clients, running a business and running a home I wondered if I was in fact doing enough to care for myself. I began to list the things that I find recharging. Gardening, but wait, that is also part of running the house and my business, given my therapy room faces the g

It is a very common occurrence for people to have a discomfort with silence. I wanted to reflect a little today on the benefits of finding your peace with quiet. I recall many years ago my first silent retreat. I fell into it really, an introductory retreat at a Buddhist Retreat Centre, for which I had somehow missed the essential information that there would be no talking. I was sat in the room, feeling daunted by the number of people, wearily summoning the strength to do

It's sometimes the case that we lose perspective. When times are difficult, or emotions are intense, it is easy to imagine that whatever it is that is happening will last forever. Thankfully, and sadly, in equal measude, nothing lasts forever, not the diffuclt stuff nor the joyful. Today's short blog offers two tips I have found to be consistently helpful for clients working to build emotional balance and resilience. The first is to get a diary with just a few lines of spac

I've had a good old move around at home recently, changing the purpose of several rooms, and moving lots of furniture and it's contents. I've been interested in my emotional response to the process, so today's blog is about space and stuff and the way we interact with them. Like many people, I love my home to be settled. Clean and tidy for me is comforting, knowing where stuff belongs and having it be in that place. I knew therefore it would be a big deal to have a re-jig,

One of the most useful metaphors I have for the brain is to consider it as a road network. There are some thinking patterns that are like well-used motorways, wide, fast and without interruption to slow you down. You zoom along them often. There are other ways of thinking that are like hilly, muddy tracks that twist and turn through foliage, great for a walking adventure, but difficult to navigate, and hard work to win through. In between there are A roads, B roads, and c

Do you say yes when you feel maybe, or even no? Or does it take a resounding inner YESSSSS for you to decide something is right for you? This is an important question for authentic living. So often, people have been conditioned to please others, to fit in, to do what is expected, and do so at the expense of their own integrity and well-being. This is an affliction that can affect anyone, regardless of gender expression. It is often painful, with a split between the person

I had a profoundly moving experience recently, of sitting in the company of women, in a space of deep trust and warmth. I was participating in a Soul Circle, skilfully facilitated by Liane Maitland and Emma Cowan. As each woman spoke her truth from the heart, we listened as best we could with our whole beings. We were taking part in the practice of Council, similar to that of many indigenous traditions, where each person is heard and witnessed uninterrupted, and is respond

“When I am at home with myself, everything I do ends as a love poem” Yeats What we experience depends on our state, on our way of being, in any particular moment. I loved this quote from Yeats which so eloquently expresses how life can be when lived from a place of comfort and contentment inside. It reminds me that when there is a depth of connection between our own being and our surroundings and the people we are present with, then love is the natural expression that flows

As a psychotherapist and trauma therapist, a big theme in my work is somatic wisdom. The body remembers, we are all mammals, and to quote Stephen Gilligan “there is a whole pattern of intelligence and wisdom within the body to which you may or may not be attuned.” My role involves helping people to align and centre within their bodies, so that their way of being physically can become expansive, and generate new possibilities and patterns. As Robert Dilts says, when we lose

Anger is an unpopular emotion, and frankly it gets quite a bad press. The caricature of an angry person is red faced, steam coming out of the ears, an unattractive figure that people feel comfortable judging and looking down on. Anger is actually a very normal and important emotion. Anger is what we feel when we are wronged and when our boundaries are ignored or trampled over. It's the natural emotion we feel when we see injustice. Anger energises. It mobilises us to defe

We’re not always in touch with all of the capability, wisdom and resourcefulness we have inside. While we are all multi-faceted, it's easy to get disconnected from our own sense of perspective, humour and groundedness. When this happens, you might not feel at your best, you might get stuck in repeating patterns that you know don’t do you any good, you might even feel like you go round and round in circles. When simple grounding isn’t quite doing it, another way of getting ba

Here we are, another festive season over, and the winter ahead of us. The Christmas lights are coming down. For many people the coming couple of months are the toughest of the year, there is little light or warmth, and the spring can feel far away. Add to that the ongoing pandemic and its consequences and whatever your perspective on it, it’s a complex and challenging picture. Often the advice is to look forwards, to skirt around uncomfortable feelings, and to imagine bett

I’ve had the pleasure of making some new connections personally and professionally in recent weeks, which has felt good after the extended period of altered social interactions we have been living through. I was intrigued to notice what it was I said in response to questions from people, and to notice how I explained who and how I was. This reminded me that we are each continually updating our own narration of our story to this point in our lives. As things happen in the her

“Adaptability does not prioritize drastic change over fierce rigidity. Adaptability is the conversation within us between stability and change, between continuity and innovation. It is the marriage of our fundamental needs for security and adventure. Adaptability is our ability to bend and come back to center over and over again, increasing our flexibility each time, whether we’re in our daily stretch or the fight of our lives. And the more we practice becoming adaptable, the

I was reading some Esther Perel this week, and happened upon a quote about self-love that really spoke to me. She describes it as “about letting others love us even when we feel unloveable” and as “about awareness and acceptance of our incompleteness.” I sense it’s natural at times to feel unloveable, and incomplete. We each have foibles, wrinkles and bumps we might prefer not to notice or acknowledge, and yet, when we turn away from them they somehow gain a power and impac

The work of psychotherapy is vast and deep. Themes running through the many ways it can help are enabling clients to learn how to tolerate differences, discomforts, uncertainty, intimacy, power and privileges. All of these matter, they are the stuff of human relating and they affect us all. We have seen some of these themes at the fore in recent times, with the social change that comes with the pandemic, its economic impacts, and the wider context of the climate emergency.

I discovered recently that the root of the word alone is all-one. Clarissa Pinkola Estes expresses this beautifully, saying “To be all one meant to be wholly one, to be in one-ness, either essentially or temporarily. That is precisely the goal of solitude, to be all one.” I sense most of us know this experience, to be wholly in the one place, to feel complete, to come home to who and what we truly are. We may find it looking at a beautiful landscape or a tiny flower, or fin

In my twenties, I recall going on a Dale Carnegie training course, and being told ‘seek first to understand, and then to be understood.’ As an incessant talker at the time, I found it a weird concept, but it was one that resonated with me and I took to heart. Funny perhaps that decades later I find myself working as a psychotherapist, deeply invested in hearing and seeing the other, and leaving my own personal story at the door! “Every person in our life is a unique, unfold