Somewhere along the line, I decided that I didn’t believe in prescriptive advice . Now I’m not even sure what that means? As if I sit with my clients and dish out to do lists of the 10 best ways to improve your life? Personally, I find top tips tedious. Yes as a coach we are supposed to be action focused. That why I’m a doula instead. Yet so much of the time emotions get in the way. I’ve lived much of my life in my emotions and I’m very grateful for it. Most of us are all chasing those action based solutions in the hope that they will make us feel better. Rather than just opting to feel better. Action based solutions can be important. However, so many of us have climbed that mountain, cycled that hill, ticked that box and found ourselves disappointingly underwhelmed on the attainment of the goal, whatever it might be.
It is at this point that I personally realise that my process in writing this blog has changed somewhat. That this blog has become far more about cathartic storytelling that you might realate to rather, than a how-to, can do, information guide.
The thing is I can’t tell you what to do. I can’t tell you the things that I think you might benefit from. Ultimately I’m not you. I’m more inclined to give you homework rather than say hey this will fix everything. I’m more likely to ask how did you do it? Tell me your technique? So that I might garner yet more pearls of wisdom to cast them on as some kind of sustainable wisdom basket to be dispensed at leisure. You see is that advice or is everything open source? If you believe in collective consciousness it certainly is.
Of course, there are core tenants to nurturance like drinking water, getting good quality sleep. Though even for the most intelligent human soul these things can seem near impossible. I know I’ve been one. Even now my body, my soul and my ego have arguments and procrastination about water. They can range from don’t buy it, it’s in plastic, Ewwww it’s going to be cold, I can taste the chlorine to Nah I don’t want to. Queue the draining of all power about 2 days later. At times I even drink coca-cola (from a recyclable container) In the hope that the caffeine and sugar infused concoction will provide my body, brain and soul with the synthetic poison it needs to power on numbed to it’s own sense of its self. This week I’ve actually managed to drink two litres of water consecutively more than one day this week. Which for this year is quite remarkable and yes it is the end of March. Thank you for your restraint. This week too I’ve managed to start exercising again if only for the dopamine hit that I get when I start to beat myself up and then realise I have exercised already. Saving me a lot of time. You see why handing out advice isn’t too snappy? The thing is the wellness map or what I’m now coining emotional environments are malleable. They change with time and with seasons, you are human, you’re not going to feel the same the year your mother dies as you did the year before. Rites of passage are real and as we go through them, we change. Certainty, comfort and routine are often blasted away and replaced with very different realities.
As I move through this process of writing for what is supposed to be an ‘audience’ I’m grateful to ever deepen the connection that I have with myself through writing and I hope that it brings something to you.
So here it is. I have made it to the end of my personal working year. The end of the working year is a strange idea when you are in the wellness business. My personal work is my business, so although I may be powering towards writing the last few words of this post trying to put into perspective a 12 month cycle for a customer facing debrief, the work is far from over. In fact it has only just begun. My head is already spinning around a year in review. The big lessons. How to integrate what I’ve learned into next years planning. How to plan differently. Who to partner with and of course much much more…..
Did you know that Facebook posts can actually be deeply inspirational and thought-provoking? A few weeks ago I saw a post that read “Are you guided by your spirit or by your wound?” Big fucking question right? And it might take you quite a bit of discernment to figure that bad boy out. This has been a question that has plagued me for years, especially when you feel like you’ve been rocking the wounded healer archetype for a while. Getting jiggy with Chiron can be as complex and messy as astrophysics for
Well this is a funny one and it seems to follow on almost directly from my last post…..Conscious Consumption. Some times I feel like I don’t break things down well or enough. My blogging process is simply a matter of what I want to write about today. Then I find that what I have to write about can be broken down into so many other tiny pieces, and each of these deserves it’s own platform. That is what has happened here with Conscious Intake. Maybe you think I’m talking about Conscious Eating or maybe some kind of school screening programme. I’m literally writing about intake what it is that we intake into out bodies. So why not say eating? Well cause that is not exactly what I mean. So now I have to go on to explain it a bit more. What I say might be controversial and so maybe by writing this I might let you off the hook.
#Mood wasn’t this so 2015 or something like that? Where did that go? #Mood. I loved it. All these emotionally literate hipsters trying to visually capture the idea of a late afternoon sugar rush. Yes that’s a thing, especially if your begrudgingly British like me. I recent weeks for reasons yet to be disclosed I’ve been hanging out with an Art Director friend of mine and we’ve been talking a lot about aesthetics. Me being a trained curator and her being, well, an art director that’s hardly unusual. What has been coming to me though recently on my pathway to Zen Goddess that aesthetics are important. You’d think a four year degree in Art History might have taught you that? That’s why no one should go to left-of-center art schools I suppose (winky face).
“Consistently Inconsistent” My father said this to me once as an insult. it’s a terrible shame that it wasn’t actually true. Yet beyond this it has become a kind of mantra for me. Everybody has the right to change there mind, find another way, all in the hope of becoming who we actually are. In recent months I’ve picked up the pace a bit on my wee coaching business and as always adjusting course as I move forward and figuring out what it all really means anyway while attempting to be the truest and best version of myself all at the same time. Which means from time to time my standards slip life gets in the way and I have to consider How best am I serving my clients. If you are looking for a guru I’m not it. I’m as human and broken as the best of us and sometimes I’m envious of Mandela and hid imposed daily routine. Can you imagine enforced spiritual awakening by way of prison regime. That no matter how hard it is. How you might be feeling or even how important you are you have to get out there and get down to the lowly work of breaking rocks. If that isn’t dharma in action I don’t know what is.
I’ve been deep in a mid-winter dirge. It feels like a lot of things have been ruminating and maybe it about time to start letting go. It’s all good and well talking about healing the emotional wounds of our pasts without addressing that some people are so caught up in their emotional landscapes, that it dominates our physical futures. A lot of people might think that mindset and a wellness are not related to each other. That I might pose this as a concept, is a to put it mildly, a bit suspect to many minds. I believe that humans can and are able to heal from anything if we are willing to do the work, to liberate ourselves from the beliefs that we have been born to.
For the last few months my sleep has been disturbed. Having gone through a major life change my wee brain has been on overtime to align. Unpacking what I thought should have happened, what actually happened and what is. Even God can’t change the past (Not that I necessarily believe in an omnipresent super being that has the ability to fix everything).
