Archive | Relationships RSS feed for this section

10 Top Tips For Surviving ‘The Breakup!’

Being in your 40's, Emotional Health, Love, Recovery, Relationships

After spending an evening this week with yet another friend who is recovering from the awful experience of being in a ‘happy’ marriage that ends within half hour, always commencing with “It’s not you, it’s me” (The Mid Life Crisis) or “I think this is really it, she’s the ‘one’ for me”  (The Affair and The Mid-Life Crisis) or “I never meant to hurt you but I need some space” (The Affair), I decided that a survival plan, laced with a little humour, was probably called for! For the male readers, this blog is entirely from a woman’s perspective, but please feel free to add your own recovery pointers onto the comments section….

  1. Get yourself a good Multi Vitamin. Oh yes….my all-time favourite from my very sturdy and practical friend, in or out of emotional pain! She is right of course, as your immune system will be low and your food intake will be bizarre so this will keep you vaguely balanced on a nutritional front.
  2. Read a self-help book, a good self-help book and preferably a funny one. My absolute favourite while sobbing all over the house during my own ‘the breakup’ was perfectly titled “It’s Called a Breakup Not A Breakdown.”  In other words, you’ll get over it!
  3. Learn everything you can about who you are. Know who you are and what you like and don’t like, because you will be a different person from the person you were before you were together and different from the person that you became in the marriage/relationship. This is a great part of the journey, so try and enjoy it.
  4. You will either eat yourself stupid or you won’t be able to eat at all. In any circumstance, you’ll need ice cream, good quality expensive ice cream, that contains chocolate, cookie dough, nuts, etc. Essential for vague nutrition and comfort.
  5. Get your toe nails painted. One of my ‘favourite’ memories of the darkest days was sitting in the conservatory, eating chocolate and sobbing, while a friend painted my nails for me. Recovery, girlie stylie!
  6. I’ve heard it said that the best ways for a woman to get over a man is to get underneath another one. It isn’t. Really. It isn’t. Go back to number 4 and get the ice cream out of the freezer again!
  7. Understand the Story of Creation from Eve’s Perspective. This will help a lot.
  8. Don’t be on his Facebook page for a moment longer. You don’t want to know. Trust me on this one. You really don’t want to know.
  9. Go and buy lots of good quality wooden hangers and reorganise your clothing through the whole double wardrobe to replicate Jigsaw. You will now have space in between your clothes as they hang like ‘pieces’ from the rail as opposed to squashed together as if his clothes and yours were having their own private row as they fought for space in a wardrobe that just wasn’t big enough!
  10. On a more serious note, the pain will stop and if you allow yourself the much needed recovery time, you will learn to love your life as a single woman safe in the knowledge that one day, you will be annoyed again by the toilet seat being left up! So this time is your time. Now is the time to enjoy….

What is Wellness?

Emotional Health, Love, Personal Development, Physical Health, Recovery, Relationships, Spiritual Health

In a recent blog, I explored Holistic Health and what I mean when I use that term; the way I understand it and the way I believe it is understood. A natural progression on from that seemed to me to be an exploration of what wellness is and how we understand it.

What I do know is that we all have the power within us to have a feeling of wellness. A feeling of happiness, of enthusiasm for life and a sense of energy is something that we can all work towards and experience. How?

  • Understand yourself holistically as a whole person with many areas of your life that need to be balanced.  You are not ‘stress’ or ‘lethargy’ or ‘a bad back’, you are a person operating in society in a relationships at work and at home. You have your spiritual, physical, emotional and mental aspects of yourself to keep in check. See where the imbalance may be and that will give you a lot of information to help you work through whatever is presenting as the problem.
  • Self-esteem and self-love is everything or as Louise Hay taught me, the cornerstone to everything. Without it, there is nothing because there is no connection with yourself. If this aspect of yourself is poor, work on it and work on it hard. The use of daily affirmations, positive loving relationships, eating wholesome food and allowing yourself some time to reflect in solitude so as to improve your relationship with yourself and connect spiritually, are all a good start.
  • Take personal responsibility. When you are wrong, say sorry, learn and move on. Don’t say yes when you mean no.  Don’t relive scenarios over and over again punishing yourself for the past and concerning yourself with the future. Keep your side of the street clean so that you can look at yourself in the mirror every day. Forgive yourself….often. Perfectionism is just another form of self-loathing.
  • Live consciously! Value the food you eat, the trees you pass, the people you smile at. Photography is a great way of living in the moment and seeing something from a different angle. It’s a conscious activity. Care for your environment. Care for the people around you. Turn off the TV and sing or dance or bake a cake. Come alive and stop getting lost in the misery of soap operas…..created I believe to quieten the masses.
  • Enjoy yourself. Enjoy your sense of connectedness to yourself, the Universe and all people. Have fun. We are here for such a short time. Make your goal that of making a difference to the world, to the people around you.

Your wellness is your responsibility. No-one is going to bring it to you, fix what’s broken, give you a magic pill to ‘make it all better’. The power to do that is within you and no-one else. You can choose this right now. You can choose to take a continuing series of short steps one day at a time and give yourself the life you deserve, being the very best that you can be.

The Invitation

Emotional Health, Love, Mental Health, Personal Development, Recovery, Relationships, Spiritual Health

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.

In the living years….

Being in your 40's, Emotional Health, Love, Personal Development, Relationships

How many times do you get asked to do things for charity? Whether it’s letters from the charities themselves pleading that there aren’t enough runners or friends who are jumping out of planes or swimming the channel with spaghetti on their head, it’s endless. There are always so many requests on my Facebook wall, my inbox gets a fair share and canvassing in the street has become a mission! (I have also been partial to the odd Skydive myself and the associated requests!)

So how do you choose? We all only have a limited amount of money to spend on charity and I always try and support as much as I can, but there is a limit. But this week has been one of those weeks where something becomes clear, ding dong moments of clarity that come flying from everywhere until you say “ok ok….I hear you”.

I had already decided to support Micheal, a business friend, as his passion came flying off the page. But it wasn’t until I went to The Just Giving Page and read his story, that the true emotion behind his passion became clear. He had lost his father to cancer and had never said goodbye or I love you or you are my hero. Youth plays tricks with us about the cycle of life and we all pay the price for that at different times of our lives and it seems to me that this is Michaels opportunity to say the things he never said with a passion and a voice so strong that the wisdom will be embedded not only for him, but for readers of the story who gain their own clarity in their own life lessons. Human beings love stories and we love nothing more than a story that resonates with our own fabric of life or a story that we can learn from.

My Gran was a seamstress, to fund life a single parent after her husband died after only 9 years of marriage. This was much to her disgust in many ways, as she had to kneel on the floor and sew hems of the ‘English peasant women’ (she was French and you’d never know that she lived here for nigh on 50 years). As I tried to make a skirt the other day, I wished I’d watched her. She could have taught me everything, but I cared not for such dull activities as sewing when getting on with my own life. I cried one Christmas after she died, into the washing up, for what seemed like an eternity as the radio provided the background music to my usual Christmas melancholy with the song In The Living Years.

A male business colleague who writes poetry (rather secretly I understand) wrote a line that captured this sense of life’s cruel trickery so beautifully. It reads  “And nature’s paradigm laughs at wisdom”.

I take from that line the understanding that this cruelty is how we gain wisdom which is precisely why wisdom can only come with age. These lessons are often un-noticed through life until we have the ability to really learn what we need to learn from them. This is the journey that we all take reagardless of who we are. All of us share this path and all of us will have to watch our children start the journey from the very beginning….as we desperately try and teach them what we know from our wisdom to somehow protect them from the pain (pain which they themselves need to grow and develop their own wisdom);  that which they cannot learn until they reach that point where they understand the cycle of life and it’s lessons.

 

 

A Rule Book for Living…

Emotional Health, Love, Mental Health, News, Personal Development, Recovery, Relationships, Spiritual Health

Wish I’d had this years ago but here it is…

Desiderata

– 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.


Single Parenting….abroad!

Emotional Health, Love, Recovery, Relationships, Single parenting

I was recently privileged enough to be asked to co-ordinate a 42 strong group of single parent families for the holiday company Single With Kids. With only the tiniest trepidation, a smidgen of worry and a vague concern about group politics, I agreed. 

I don’t often write about being a single parent, yet it’s a subject I know a fair amount about. My family now nestles in it’s fourth generation of female led single parents, acquired through death, abandonment and sheer absence. I have brought up my children as a two parent family, a single parent family, a step family and as a single parent again. I have been a step child and a step parent. I have been the child of a single parent in the 1970’s with all of it’s condemnation, lack of emotional articulation and hidden and not so hidden social structures that isolated and excluded those who sat outside what was then perceived of as the norm. In my previous career, I have also worked extensively with families in distress, abandoned families and families so broken they are unlikely to ever mend.

The experiences of single parents are so often categorised as though we are one homogeneous group in society operating within the same frameworks and experiences, a ‘group’ identified usually for the purpose of blame, vilification and as scapegoats for societies ills and dysfunctions, popping up in Daily Mail headlines as and when required.

Spending some time in an entire group of men and women, who sit inside the single parent spectrum has been inspiring. Watching everyone getting up and getting on with it, smiling, enjoying, loving their children no matter how exhasuted they feel brings a sense of pride at the sheer strength possessed in order to do this incredibly mammoth task. Listening to all the different stories of hurt, joy, recovery and determination is an honour.

The people here have families with one, two and three children, mostly with sole repsonsibility for their children, some with 50/50. The ages of the children range from 2 years to nearly 15 years and all of us are hard working, dedicated and committed to the bringing up of the next generation.

In the lift on the way to write to this, I said to one of the parents I was on my way to go and do a little blogging about single parents. He asked me if I’d made any general observations and I replied yes I have, I think we’re all amazing!

A tribute to Amy…

Alcoholism, Mental Health, News, Personal Development, Recovery, Relationships

I am in the business of personal development, self-development, self-awareness, recovery, whatever you want to call it, this is how I choose to live and it is also how I choose to make a living. We had an amazing day running a Get back Your Mojo return workshop where we have the privilege of seeing the distance that people have travelled since they attended the first workshop. It is humbling, empowering, learning and fills me with positivity and hope.

I got into this business of personal growth through my alcoholism, a double edged vehicle that takes us to wherever it takes us and it carted me right into an AA meeting over 20 years ago.  I not only haven’t had a drink or drug since, but I was lucky enough to be so completely destroyed by it all that I had to break my entire self down into little pieces and start all over again.

Today I arrived home to the news of Amy Winehouse, a woman who I distinctly remember saying to my son that if she carried on her path of addiction and continued to say no no no to rehab, she would be dead within a few years – that was a few months ago, and at the age of 27, she was today found dead on the floor of her flat, alone.

I cry for her as I have cried for everyone that I have lost through alcohol and drug addiction. When you go to AA, death from drinking and drugging unfortunately becomes something that inevitably happens, whether it’s suicide because life is to just unbearable for some or liver failure, it’s all the same thing. The unbearable pain of life numbed through addiction, oblivion and behaviour that justifies the madness.

As a Social Worker, I lost three young people I worked closely with to drug overdoses in one form or another across a  five year span. I cry for them too. As a friend, I lost someone I got sober with at the beginning of my recovery because he was so drunk, he thought he could dive from a cliff, except there was barely any water for him to jump in to. I cry for him.

It’s always so much more tragic I think watching someone publicly destroy themselves, watching someone want to die and show the world their pain through the eyes of a glass bottle. I loved Amy singing, I especially loved her singing on Jools Holland singing with Paul Weller, I heard It through The Grapevine.

Our modern day Billie Holiday maybe? I’m not sure that we can compare, but she was nevertheless in pain, unable to do ‘this thing called life’ like Billie who was heavily addicted to heroin but somehow made it to 44 years old. But as with a lot of public destructions that lie in front of us, baring all for us to see, we are left with something. Amy left us with some beautiful music. Thank you for dropping by this life and leaving us something special Amy and may you rest peacefully and safely….

Moving on…

Benefits Of Massage, Massage in Witney, Personal Development, Relationships

I am constantly reflecting upon changes and growth in my personal and professional life and development and I always love how the Universe (life force, God, The Divine, whatever you choose as your spiritual connection) seems to ensure change and movement when we are not necessarily ready for it, haven’t appeared to ask for it and aren’t necessarily feeling that it’s required.

Right now, it seems that so many people I speak to are in a state of movement and growth, moving house, losing relationships, gaining relationships,  confronting ‘stuff’ that was presumed long dealt with and it’s fascinating how we all deal with this process in different ways.

I always find for me that if people are not meant to be in my life, the Universe removes them quickly without me having to do very much at all. It’s the same when I meet new people that the Universe feels should be in my life, they just appear when I least expect it and I am so grateful for that intervention.

Currently, I’m enjoying the process of watching my work growing and developing and can’t wait to move my practise to an ‘office’ (soon to be gorgeous room of serenity and tranquillity). Through doing lots of joint pieces of work with Kirsten from Aspiring Change offering Life Enhancing Workshops, expanding my personal and professional development and seeking to build a virtual team of practitioners to ensure complete bespoke treatments consistently underpinned with healing, continues to be a fantastic journey. Through having my Massage room in Witney, I shall be able to have other practitioners offering their services such as Life Coaching sessions,  Homeopathy, a Stress Clinic and…..who knows what else.

And that’s the wonderful thing about being open to what is available to us and also believing that we can create something bigger than we dare. It has taken me a while to feel able to take on my own room but now I’m chomping at the bit to get going and can’t wait to open on 1st September.

So what I would offer you to consider as my reflections would be, give yourself space to dream, then visualise them and be open them, believing that you deserve them, for they are usually just the very beginning of something much bigger than you could imagine.

 

Being Still…

Being in your 40's, Emotional Health, Love, Personal Development, Recovery, Relationships, Spiritual Health

Holidays mean so many different things for people giving much needed opportunities for either doing nothing, doing everything, sightseeing, scuba diving, spending time with the family, catching up with friends, reading books, resting. Whatever it may be, it’s a time we all look forward to. I booked a holiday for me to have some time alone. I am writing and I wanted some space to write without any distractions and that is exactly what I got and it was bliss. So while it was hard to leave the children behind, I knew that I couldn’t write at home, the way that I could write were I absolutely away from everything; my kids, my dog, my Blackberry, my daily life.

I arrived to a basic little room right on the beach in a virtually tourist free town called Nikiana in Lefkada, a Greek Island just off the Mainland.  Travelling alone but with a Solo Travellers company, I knew that there would be other people around but I could dip in and out of socialising. Being constantly surrounded by people and distractions, I actually found the first couple days of  incredibly difficult and coupled with writing about things that were difficult emotionally, I cried a lot. But with the silence, came healing beyond anything I have dealt with in a long time. The combination of writing, of articulating long forgotten feelings and the sound of silence which came in the form of the sea and the birds singing, brought more recovery than I could have imagined.

Running a course on meditation was a lovely woman called Anne Simpson who led Meditations and discussions on topics such as detachment, responsibility and desire. I hadn’t booked onto the course but joined in on a couple of sessions and they were brilliant. The discussions would bring up a variety of emotions which would then be meditated on. Fortunately, the meditations were only around five minutes as stilling my busy mind while sitting still, takes a mammoth amount of effort! A contradiction if ever I heard one!!

Anne shared something with us that I absolutely loved. She said that Earth is a feelings planet. It is an education. Some people sail through with few difficulties, few problems. “Like people who seem to have an instruction booklet for living?” I said as this is how I felt so profoundly when I was growing up. Everyone else had the leaflet on How To Live and I hadn’t received one. These people she said, are in the Nursery part of their education. For people who have suffered a lot, they have probably been here several times before and are now doing a PHD. I considered briefly where I may be on this spectrum …

What I absolutely love about this view of the world,  is that we live in such a warped society, whereby people are constantly being quantified by what car they have, the size of their house, the amount of consumer items they possess etc etc. This viewpoint turns all that judgement  towards other people upside down. So when you next look at the homeless guy on his last drunk, he’s probably off to a higher spiritual plain having finshed his PHD in life. I like the idea that souls more troubled than me are just more highly advanced than I am in their education. And you can have as many ‘things’ as you like dear shoppers, but you can’t actually take them anywhere with you. It is people who matter, the people we love and who love us and the ones we can’t cope with because they’re further along the education system.

I still have so much more writing to do but my holiday this year was about giving myself time to focus, to breathe, to write and to heal and for the opportunity, I am truly grateful.

The Voice Behind The Stories

Emotional Health, Love, Personal Development, Relationships, Spiritual Health

One step at a time, one conversation at a time, one relationship at a time, we have a voice. A voice so powerful that we can create change and that we can be heard.

What a crazy, intellectually stimulating, powerfully resonating day I had yesterday. Like most of my days, the day was about women, but it wasn’t about directly ‘helping’ women or facilitating workshops or running events or using Holistic Therapies for healing. It was about standing still, taking a deep breath and being part of the bigger picture.

I was lucky enough to be asked for my opinions on women, relationships and intellectual compatibility by BBC Radio 4, so the day commenced with an interview conducted by a very lovely woman, the producer, a woman divorced for three years with two children, who shared her journey and her thoughts with me. I love the fact that even though we had never met before, we shared stories like old friends who hadn’t seen each other for years. We compared experiences from University right through to post divorce dating and something shifted for both of us.

When women come together, there is a need to share one of our stories and part of what I feel passionate about, is ensuring that women have the space to do that and are not judged, but supported, that it is normalised and not something that is considered as unnecessary or ‘gossip’ or unproductive. This may go some way to explaining the absence of women in The Boardroom as is currently being discussed in Government as we speak.

The day ended in the Examinations Building in Oxford where every student who belongs to Oxford University will sit and take an exam at some point or another, so the walls rang with learning, silence, tradition and more stories. I went to listen to a talk called Conversations with Extraordinary Women and the room was filled with extraordinariness. Hosted by the Global Retreat Centre, the underlying theme was about using your voice, telling our stories, working in collaboration, building our communities…..shaping the future from a feminine perspective. Lynne Franks, a hugely successful business women with a background in PR, sat at the top table in awe of the founder, a ‘Revolutionary’, of The Global Retreat Centre, a connection which Lynne clearly found ‘grounding’ in the heady sometimes, self-obsessed world of business. So much of what Lynne talked about resonated with me and the philosophy behind Networking Women that I felt compelled to go up to her afterwards excitedly trying to explain that we do this….we collaborate, we support each other, we have built communities, we tell our stories. Graciously, she took my card as I said you must remember me…think of Cherry, Cherry the fruit and please come and visit us. (I’m sure she thought ‘bonkers, bonkers the fruit!’)

The theme for the evening was about change and making a difference and being open about the fact that the ‘old’ order hasn’t really worked and that it is time for change. Change is such a big word, but it needn’t be. We can create change one person at a time…ourselves. We can work together in our communities supporting each other to work in our own rhythms, to be supported in ways that we need as women through relationships and by having a space to tell our stories.

We are all revolutionaries, sometimes in small ways, sometimes by making a big difference like the founder of The Global Retreat Centre. We all have voice and, it was said last night, that when we find it, we will create the most change through patience, tolerance and contentment.  I shall definitely have to give patience a lot of work (not a strong point) and in keeping with that, I absolutely cannot wait until our Conference when we will have around 100 women in one room all telling stories, all supporting each other and having a voice creating change….one step at a time, one conversation at a time, one relationship at a time.