Every year I try and do something for charity whether it’s a gentle 5k jog or a 2 and ½ mile jump out of a plane. I was pondering what this year’s adventure might be. Should I climb a mountain? Walk through the rain forest only using my knees or maybe a balloon flight across the North Pole. And then I saw it and I knew it would be perfect for a multitude of reasons.
In doing this, I will face an emotional challenge that will have me writing for months! This, coupled with raising awareness of something I feel so passionately about, and the boxes are well and truly ticked.
Some of you know my story, some know bits of my story and some of you probably think my story is very very different to what it actually is because the reality would never have occurred to you. I have only been really open about these experiences for the last couple of years when I realised that it challenged stigmas and helped break down the walls of silence that people carry through feeling shame. Stigmas rage in our society about alcoholism, child abuse, homelessness, depression and there really is no need for people to carry this alone.
So here is a little timeline of a decade from a time in my life that has shaped me in far more ways than are for exploration in this blog post. When I was 13 I went into the care of the local authority for 3 years. I lived in foster homes and children’s homes, an experience which impacted upon me on every level. The very core of my being was affected emotionally, spiritually, financially, mentally, socially and educationally. In every possible way.
As it was the 1980’s and the Children Act 1989, created to protect Looked After Children, had not yet come into play, I then endured two years of homelessness. During this period, I lived in night shelters, the streets, trains, hostels and squats until finally housed in 1988 in London thanks to services available to children and young people who find themselves in this vulnerable abandoned situation. I slowly built my life by crawling into an AA meeting at the age of 20, getting clean and sober and then receiving funding from an amazing charity that enabled me to take A levels and then go on to do a Degree, recovering an education I had lost years before to survival!
The multitude of charities out there that saved my life are saving lives every day, quietly and continuously, while I sip my cappuccino and gaze out of my window with food in my cupboards and the heating on.
The purpose to telling you this is that out of all the things I have lived through, homelessness was the most disturbing of the lot. To be homeless is to be cold, hungry, invisible, ignored, segregated, abandoned, a nothing. To survive that, teaches you about yourself and about society at a depth that is unexplainable to those who have not been through it.
My chosen charity event for 2012 is going to be far harder than jumping out of a plane. I want to do the Sleep Out forThe Big Issue. This is a demon that I feel ready to confront….
Will you do it with me? Groups of four can apply for only £100 with each group needing to raise a minimum of £1500. We could have a 40 of us….ten groups of four!
The Big Issue is amazing as it provides a truly entrepreneurial response to one of society’s hidden truths.
Please write to me at lisa.cherry@hotmail.co.uk if you would like to join me on 18th May in London and if it’s not for you, or you just like clicking buttons, then please press the ‘like’ button on this page and make a difference through raising awareness.
Your Comfort Zone is the place where you feel safe and secure. It’s the place where nothing and no-one really challenge you. In this place you are never ‘on the line’, exposing your vulnerabilities and your insecurities. You are not going to have to deal with the perception of failure in this place called Comfort Zone and you won’t have to worry yourself about change, unknowns and facing fear.
The flipside to all this of course, is that you won’t get it wrong or ‘fail’ so there are no learning opportunities. You are unlikely to meet interesting and new people that question and challenge and make you think about the world in a different way. You will be unable to gain the experience and knowledge of your own capabilities and strength because you will not have pushed yourself to try something different. Fear lives in Comfort Zone.
Luckily, leaving Comfort Zone, can be achieved by taking small steps.
Try something new as many days a week as you can, whether it’s a new food, taking a different route to somewhere you go all the time (it doesn’t have to be major to start with).
Understand the inevitability of change. Everything changes. All the time. That’s just the way it is. When you embrace this, the world becomes the adventure that it should be appreciated as.
Say yes to doing something different/new.
Do something spontaneously just because you can.
Understand that there is no such thing as failing, only learning (or free training!).
Release the need to believe that you absolutely must know the outcome to everything you do. Not knowing how something is going to pan out, is exciting!
Now you are on your way to be in Experience Life To The Full Zone. Where you can be the very best you can be, feel a sense of fulfilment and experience the love and joy and learning and pleasure that the world has to offer you…. See you there!
Do you ever find that sometimes the same thing keeps showing up in your life in different forms and situations like it’s in a slightly different colour to everything else so that it will stand out and you take notice? Well, I’ve been seeing lots of amazing projects and meeting with lots of courageous, community and system changing people lately that have brought a number of things to me to ponder upon.
I’ve been reflecting upon what we seek out of our experience of being alive. Personal fulfilment, a feeling of connection, a perception of belonging, happiness and a sense of self-worth all seem vital components to living a happy life (securing a definition of ‘happy’ would take another article so please just see it to mean what it means for you).
I have learnt that there are many simple things that you can do so as to have these in your life, but here are a few to get you started.
Pay it forward. I am continuously amazed at how the more I give, the more I receive. I seem to live on fresh air at times, yet me and my children have enough to meet our needs and a little more. I’m not sure how it works other than seeing it as an energy that flows around people who engage in this way of operating.
Get involved in a project in your Community. Find something locally and become a part of a bigger picture to make a difference. In Oxfordshire, there is a new project just launching called The OTCN Oxhop Challenge. There are always things happening in your community and if you can’t find something, create it!
When you stop to talk to someone, a friend, a colleague, an acquaintance, comment on how well they look, or how the colour they are wearing suits them, or pass on something good to them that you heard someone else say. It’s not hard to say something nice to someone but it can make the biggest difference to the receiver of the compliment and they’ll be left with a lovely feeling. The quote “People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel” springs to mind.
Being who you are is actually all you’re meant to be….self-love is the cornerstone to everything! Remember that….
What do you do? What brings you the happiness you seek? How do you feel a sense of belonging and purpose? What can you share about what you have learnt on your journey that might help someone else reading this post?
I have always been fascinated with the idea of meditation and have often wondered how some people appear to have the ability to sit calmly and quietly, focusing on breathing and not much else. But it was one of those things I felt was inaccessible to me. I have a very busy head, filled with excitement and ideas and creations and I can sometimes appear quite unfocused, which I’m actually not especially but my focus is untidy and a little unstructured sometimes and left unchecked, can make me feel very tired.
In May last year, I went away for a week to enable me to have some space to write, away from the distractions of daily life with a company calledSerenity Retreat where I met a lovely woman called Annewho was running a Course there on Mindful Meditation. This was the first time I heard about it and I was stunned that I could even participate in short 10 minute group meditations without completely distracting myself.
I have gently and slowly built upon this introduction over the last few months. Mindfulness is about paying attention to purpose, having awareness, being conscious. I had never been able to deal with my continuing thoughts through meditation, but Mindfulness just acknowledges them in a non-judgemental way. They are not good or bad. But by awareness of them and redirecting awareness away from negative thoughts and using an anchor to bring thought back to, their effect on our lives diminishes and we can then create a space where calmness and contentment can be and can grow.
I often joke that I need to be a Massage Therapist as it’s the only time that I stop, mentally stop and become very purposeful and ‘in the moment’ about what I’m doing. I have become very aware that I Massage in a mindful way. I am completely focused on the person I am working with and what I am actually doing, the purpose, and this is even more true when I use Reiki. I also have some CD’s with short 10 minutes mediations on that I use for myself and also with my clients during a massage (as an introduction) and I have found, even in this very early stage of bringing mediation into my life, very helpful and centring.
Here are some suggestions if you’re looking to create some space in your mind away from negative harmful thoughts.
Find out about mindfulness and see if it resonates with you at all. Hugh Poulton runs courses in Oxfordshire which, although I haven’t been on one, I’m reliably informed are amazing and life transforming!
Try out some CD’s. Sometimes it’s just about finding a voice that you can relax to. I have a mix of accents and of male and female…you have to feel comfortable.
Become purposeful and aware in your every day activities. For example, don’t just eat, eat consciously. Don’t just walk, walk and know that you are aware of walking and what your body is actually doing to make this happen.
Become aware of your breathing without trying to change it. It’s not about doing it deeply or through the nose or mouth. It’s just about becoming aware…as it is.
I would love to hear about your experiences as mine are very new and from a beginners perspective and please do share about any courses, practitioners or CDs that you have tried and can recommend….Many thanks and please share the love, mindfully!
It’s time for a Christmas post. I feel I have to do one and I absolutely know that my regular readers will not be expecting anything other than an alternative post from me compared to most blogging/articles on Christmas right now. Most posts in the Health section seem to focus on at best, managing family relationships, delegating some of the chores, managing the need to be perfect, dealing with guilt….I can’t connect with any of it. So this post is for those of you who sit on the planet I sit on.
The whole world, it seems to me every year, would have us believe that this is a time of year where families sit in one room together happily eating Turkey, playing charades (likes that’s a normal thing to do!) and smiling knowingly at one another. We’re led to thinking that all people are purchasing bits of plastic that no-one even wants, needs or can justify its very existence. That we all have fabulous trees plucked from the ground draped around the house and that we all eat and drink to excess and need an Alka-Seltzer to recover. And yes, some people do indeed live like that during this festive season.
But thinking outside of this, what is Christmas all about for the child in care or the care leaver? It’s a fat slap in the face as to how their life looks nothing like the lives that the media is showing. That knowledge that every person in their lives is paid to be there. It’s a day when the doors of whatever support services are being used are actually closed.
And what is it for the child who lives in fear of their parents? It’s the holidays, which means that both parents are at home, fighting, drinking, frightening.
What is Christmas for the homeless person? It is absolutely nothing other than yet another day of freezing cold Winter weather and possibly some extra food being dished out by the overspill of irrelevant Supermarket food needing displacement prior to close of day on Christmas Eve. I remember one year dishing out food on the strand – freshly squeezed orange juice and strawberries from warmer climates seemed almost offensive but I desperately wanted to be involved in the solution, any solution, even though it seemed a weird way of being able to go about it.
What is Christmas for the parent who has lost a child? I cannot even begin to imagine and I daren’t.
The list could go on… and on and on and well into the rest of the world but I’ll spare us that.
What is Christmas for me? It has been many things over the years, each year bringing something else for me to ponder and each year being slightly less challenging. I spent many Christmases alone as a young person recovering from the effects of being in care and also as a homeless teenager, wandering the streets aimlessly clutching luncheon vouchers dished out from the night shelter. I have had many difficult Christmases but my children have helped me to some degree have some tradition and sentiment about it that I would never have allowed myself to have were they not in my life.
I love putting up the tree with every year of their childhood represented by an ornament made in their primary years. I love filling their stockings and ringing the bells on them on Christmas morning to say Santa has arrived – although last year they told me off as they were still asleep and it was “to early” (teenagers need sleep, even on Christmas Day it seems!).
I like the smell of cinnamon and oranges and I love the sparkly lights on the tree. Last night I sang with the local Singing Group which was lovely and had a Christmassy feel about it that I liked, especially with all the families there and children joining in.
What really cheers me up is when people step outside of their bubble and remember that Christmas is an incredibly difficult time of year for lots of people. But essentially, the world will not be a better place until we spend every day of the year trying to make a difference, thinking about others, understanding our own privileges and not making assumptions about how people live. I use this time to reflect, be grateful and try and make a difference, not only for Christmas time but for every day, all the time. That to me is what Christmas is about….that is how I makes sense if it for me. Wishing you all a Happy Christmas x
Inspired by a repeated pattern of behaviour that I have observed of myself all of my adult life, I feel compelled to write about ‘sabotage’. Those of you who have done some work on yourself will be familiar with this terminology in relation to self-destructive behaviour, but for those of you who may be yet to explore it, allow me to offer my understanding of this.
Sabotage is born out of fear and operates so as to prevent having to deal with questions such as ‘I’m not enough’, ‘I won’t be loved’, I don’t deserve it’ or ‘what’s the point – I’ll be rejected/abandoned/fired sooner or later’.
In recovery terms, recovery from drug addiction or alcoholism, it might be that a person sabotages their recovery by continuing to go to places where they are at risk of using and then blaming the places, people or things that ‘made’ them use, rather than facing their role in that outcome.
Sabotage is not about taking responsibility. It seeks to blame other people for an outcome. For example, pushing someone away continually until they have no choice other than to actually go away and then they can be blamed as the person who was the abandoner…. In a kind of ‘see, I told you they would leave/reject me/abandon me’.
As a person who is aware of sabotaging, in particular, potential intimate relationships, I am knowledgeable and aware of this behaviour, a behaviour that I was made aware of a very long time ago. But what happens when it becomes more subtle? When knowledge does not equal power? Or worse, when you can actually see yourself in the behaviour but feel powerless to stop it?
We:
Forgive ourselves…first and foremost
With that comes compassion
We then take responsibility
With that comes repairing any damage
And when all is said and done, sit safely and quietly in the knowledge that we have just learned a little more about ourselves that will then make the lesson next time shorter until it has been learnt and does not come again!
Self-awareness is an amazing, frustrating, liberating state of mind, body and spirit. The lessons may take longer than we would like and they may get harder and more difficult to manage than we would like. But essentially what choice do we have if we are to become the best that we can be? The personal goal in life has to be that we can become the very best that we can possibly be, so learn, grow and love yourself in the process, as you are and as you can be.
I have recently found myself in the position whereby I felt the need to evaluate and crystallise what it means for me to say that I am Recovering Alcoholic. It can be a pretty emotive statement for some and I sometimes find a defensiveness about it as people almost run to look at their own behaviour and go about the business of either defending it or shirking away from talking about it for fear of ‘catching’ this god awful dis-ease. Usually there is a lack of understanding about what it means and there is definitely confusion around what is in fact a heavy drinker as opposed to an alcoholic.
If you read my blog regularly, you’ll know that I walked into my first AA meeting at the grand old age of 20 after an incredibly distressing seven year period. It was at 10pm in the basement of a hall on a road just off the Kings Road in Chelsea and I still stank of the booze from the night before. It was 1990 and there was a very lively pub on the corner that had to be negotiated before the meeting was reached. I felt grey, I felt alone, I felt misunderstood and I felt like I didn’t deserve the gift of life. A 10pm AA meeting is a pretty hard core meeting, even for a one in Chelsea. It was not for the fainthearted but, one day at a time, I haven’t had a drink since that first meeting and I will be grateful beyond measure for that, for every minute of every day.
I lived in meetings for about 2 years, sometimes three a day, substituting drinking with tobacco and coffee until I learnt that it didn’t actually matter what your substance of choice is, at some point you’re going to have to feel the pain. You’re going to have to confront what is left. You’re going to have to stare long and hard at yourself and get real, and there is nothing real about being in an AA meeting three times a day, in coffee shops with other meeting goers, drinking coffee until 1am in the morning, smoking endlessly!
When I talk about ‘recovery’, it is this process of being real, every 24 hour period, that I mean. It’s the daily process of reflection, self-comprehension and a self-honesty that most people would avoid at any cost. It is taking responsibility for my actions and being true to myself. It is a daily acknowledgment of what I have in my wonderful life – self-pity and gratitude cannot live side by side. It is impossible.
There is a saying in AA that goes, if you keeping going to the Barbers shop, you’re going to get a haircut. If I hang around dis-ease, heavy drinking, endless smoking and a disconnect from all that is beautiful, I am at risk of having a haircut. I don’t metaphorically go to the barbers very much at all, as these are not the circles I hang around in, but a difficult situation has presented itself to me and I have swiftly removed myself.
For me, my recovery is everything, because it is my life, literally. I am not here to judge other people and the choices that they make. I only know, with all my heart, however uncomfortable that might make you feel, that I cannot put myself at risk because I am worth sobriety. I am worth being well. I am worthy and that is why self-love and my spiritual connection, will always, always be, the cornerstone to absolutely everything.
This has to be one of my very favourite poems….it is such a gift.
The Invitation Oriah Mountain Dreamer Canadian Teacher and Author It doesn't interest me what you do for a living I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing. It doesn't interest me how old you are I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love for your dreams for the adventure of being alive. It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon... I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain mine or your own without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy mine or your own if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful be realistic to remember the limitations of being human. It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy. I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure yours and mine and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes." It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children. It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back. It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
– written by Max Ehrmann in the 1920s – Not “Found in Old St. Paul’s Church”! — see below
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
