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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.


What Do You Need?

Massage in Witney, Mental Health, News, Personal Development, Physical Health, Recovery, Spiritual Health

One of the first things I ask my clients is “what do you need today?” Such an important question that a lot of people don’t know how to answer. Such a simple question that in itself, can be very enlightening as to how a person is feeling in their life. They might not know what they need. They may not have ever thought about what they need. Some people are uncomfortable with the thought that they need anything at all. We all have needs and we all need to stop and rebalance ourselves sometimes because there are areas in our lives that have become unbalanced.

If you are coming to see me, you have a need that you have identified. Whether that need is for a better feeling of health and well-being, to improve poor sleeping patterns, or you are over tired needing an hour of self-focus. You may have stiff shoulders, or you are just plain old worn out with everything because life feels to much, we can work it out together.

This working with all areas of a person is known as an Integrative approach that looks at every aspect of ourselves.  By undergoing this exploration we often find that the symptom is not the cause! Within this process, you have an opportunity to think about where you are, a chance to reflect upon what’s going on for you in all areas of your life. By asking you what you might need, I can then create a bespoke treatment that will ultimately give the biggest benefits and results that continue for far longer than the hour we spend together.

We can explore what oils I might use dependent on whether you need to relax, be calmed and soothed or be invigorated. We can look at your emotional needs and establish whether you need to talk, be silent, or be in a deep state of relaxation.

We might do Reflexology to get the body back into a state of balance or a massage with all of it’s healing, soothing, and/or invigorating abilities with endless benefits in it’s own right. We can maybe use some Reiki in the treatment if the deepest relaxation and healing is needed. Or maybe Hot stones which are fantastic for loosening up stiff muscles with the heat itself being very comforting. The treatment incorporates whatever is right for you on the day you come and see me.

So spend some time thinking about what you need today. Whether it’s to make sure you get your appointment with me in the diary, or it’s 10 minutes reading or walking or doing a breathing mediation. Maybe you need to cook your favourite meal or see your best friend for an overdue catch up. Whatever it is, do it! Because if you come and see me for a treatment, I’ll only give you something lovely to do for yourself for Homework anyway!

There is another way…

Being in your 40's, Benefits Of Massage, Emotional Health, Love, Massage in Witney, Mental Health, Personal Development, Physical Health, Recovery, Spiritual Health

When that time in your life comes hurtling towards you, screaming at you that life cannot go on like this, the pain so great that it takes you to your knees forcing you to plead in your aloneness for help because you cannot take anymore, it won’t feel like it but it is indeed a wonderful thing.

This juncture, this fantastic turning point, comes in many different guises. A breakdown, a divorce, a bereavement, constant battling with food drugs and/or alcohol, living with depression, these are all clear messages that something has to change, that your life isn’t working for you, that your choices are causing you harm and you haven’t been listening to the endless messages you’ve been receiving.

However it comes at you, it hits hard but there is another way, a path that is about personal responsibility, self-love, self-investment and consciousness.

I have had to surrender many times but my first and most powerful surrender came at 20 years old through the glass of a whiskey bottle. The beginning of the life I was meant to lead rather than the life self-hatred had shown me was about to begin.

I have learnt that there are a few things that will help us when we start on a path of recovery or when we are going through pain and change.

  1. Be kind to yourself. Forgive yourself. Sleep well and eat fresh food, regularly through the day.
  2. Nurture yourself. By this I mean, walks in the countryside, visits to the seaside, reading a nourishing book, spending time with people you love and who love you.
  3. Start living in a state of self-awareness. Along with what my previous points, this is the time to start taking responsibility for your life, health and wellbeing. Personal growth and self-acceptance have amazing impacts on yourself and those around you.
  4. Make your health your business. If you’ve been suffering from depression and taking endless pills and then more pills to quell the side effects of those pills and you still feel the same, then maybe it’s time to approach life in another way. I am absolutely not advocating stopping doing anything without consultation with your GP, but there are lots of people who manage a host of issues holistically through diet, complementary therapies and preventative strategies rather than reactive ones.
  5. Stress management is so important. Again, think preventatively and ensure that you have time allocated to yourself whether it’s for long lunches with friends and family, walks that put you in touch with nature and your spiritual self, meditation, massage, reading. Whatever it is, book an appointment in the diary with you!

This is just the beginning, and living responsibly, lovingly and pro-actively will eventually become a way of life. Not looking after you will no longer be an option. Not having your healing time will feel wrong. Surrounding yourself with people you love and who love you, eating lots of fresh wholefood and taking responsibility for your health will define you, not the label that brought you to a place of surrender and change. This point is the beginning, the beginning of a journey that will take you beyond your wildest dreams…

 

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.

Top Ten Books That Have Inspired Me

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

When I look at posts about the top ten books of inspiration, they’ve always got the same drivel on them. Make a Million in 30 Minutes, Your Life is Awful-Let me Hypnotise You, Get Rich and get Rich Now….I know I’m being flippant but you get my drift. When I think of the books that have inspired me, they are a mix of fact, fiction and perosnal development. So here goes, my Top Ten Most Inspirational Books list (in no particular order)!

You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay

This was the first book that I read and understood and taught me the concept of Self Love. This book literally changed my life.

Making a Living Without A Job by Barbara Winter

An entire book written about the life I wanted…

Forget You Had a Daughter by Sandra Gregory

Sandra Gregory’s story of life in prison after getting arrested in Thailand in possession of drugs…

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

Teachings of life for everybody.

Single Mother on the Verge by Maria Roberts

Well socially observed story about life as a single parent, the strange relationships available and finding yourself amongst all the chaos.

Stuart, a life backwards by Alexander Masters

Beautifully observed and compelling book about Stuart Masters, a thief, homeless, alcoholic, lost man….told backwards to the age of 12 explaining most poignantly the life one might have to lead one to the life he now has and a life that will inevitably end early.

Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach

“…people who know there’s more to this living thing than meets the eye; they’ll be with Jonathan Livingstone Seagull all the way.”

Laws of the Bandit Queens by Ali Smith

If ever I am to remembered in a book, I would want it to be a book about Bandit Queens. Oh yes!

The Four Faces Of Woman by Caroline Ward

A profoundly inspiring book about a woman’s spiritual journey.

Golly In The Cupboard by Phil Frampton

A moving story about Phil Frampton…growing up in the North West of England in the 50′s and 60′s, parentless in the care of Barnardos dealing with rejection, rascism, abuse and deception.

I hope you see something here that inspires you to read on.

Positivity in the face of Adversity

Emotional Health, Love, News, Personal Development, Spiritual Health

There are many discussions to be had about positivity. Are we born with it? Can we learn how to have it?  Are we destined to be whatever our genetic predisposition has dished out to us, in other words, if your glass is half full or half empty, will it always have to be that way? As an irritatingly positive person who in the face of just about abolsutely anything will look for the good points, I feel incredibly blessed in managing difficulties becuase I have that to fall back on should all else fail. However, it would be misleading of me not to be clear that I still have to use techniques and strategies from time to time to regain my positive strength  in certain situations. So here are my top suggestions for remaining positive when it all feels a bit much.

  1. If you’re having a particularly bad day, go to bed – accepting of course that this may be in a metaphorical sense on occasion! (You weren’t expecting that were you?) Sometimes, it’s better just to accept that things aren’t working, it’s a bad day, and fortunately, tomorrow brings another 24 hour period within which to start again.
  2. Write a gratitude list. Pen and paper in hand, write down at least five things that you are grateful for. If all you can muster is that there is food in the fridge and you haven’t drank yourself into oblivion, then so be it (worked for me in the early days of Recovery a treat)!
  3. Smile at a complete stranger….particularly a sad looking stranger. Chances are they’ll smile back and you’ll both feel better.
  4. Do something for someone else without them asking….there has been plenty of research to demonstrate the power of helping someone else. There was nothing that I found more sad and pretty disgusting actually, than Simon Cowell saying that he hadn’t realised that helping someone else made you feel so good. How on earth you get to 51 without knowing this is a complete mystery to me!.
  5. Eat Green and Blacks Mint chocolate…..even writing down those words on paper makes me feel like heaven is on earth.
  6. Making mistakes is good….someone once said to me, treat mistakes as incredibly cheap (or sometimes free) training. Its just another learning opportunity so treat it as such and give yourself a break, and if the people around you won’t give you a break, tell them you’re on training for the day in “life” and all normal services will resume tomorrow!
  7. When you feel bad about yourself, the world, and the universe, it’s not really a good time to engage with other people apart from those who love you no matter what. When the world looks like a hostile place, it’s hard to feel the love and this is where reacting in a way that you wouldn’t normally can kick in. Not good. This is known in the trade as “likely to make things worse!”
  8. Find the most positive person you know and make them talk to you by buying them a large skinny cappuccino and some Green and Blacks!
  9. Accept that the ideals presented to us on a daily basis simply aren’t true. Children do smell, bathrooms get very dirty, people at work drive you nuts, (lets face it, people you love drive you nuts sometimes too), sometimes the evening meal has to be pasta pesto. In other words, rejoice and accept the imperfections as part of life, not something to be managed and controlled. And whether we like it or not, bad days come with the territory of being alive otherwise how would we know what a good day looked like?
  10. And finally, think of people in terms of light and heavy. When you are around ‘heavy’ people, that is how you feel. They bring you down, sap your strength and energy. ‘Light’ people on the other hand make you feel good and accepted and these are the people you need to spend time with.

I have been a little ‘light’ in my writing but I know that feeling negative is an incredibly draining place to be and we are all susceptible to ‘down’ times. Just remember, self love is the cornerstone to everything and everything else will follow (washed down with a bar of Green and Blacks of course).

The Wedding of course…

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

I suspect there will be a lot of blogposts about The Royal Wedding today and I surprised myself by taking the time out to watch it. What surprised me more was how much I enjoyed the The Lord Bishop Of London‘s speech on what marriage is. He talked about how marriage is about how two people help and support each to each become the best person they each can be, or from his Christian perspective, the best that God intended them to be. That in giving this to each other, there was no room for selfishness.

A stunning description of what we should all be seeking as individuals, but as a married couple, giving each other the love and support to enable and underpin this, was an articulate message….one that I was desperate to text to my ex-husband! This made me wonder what sort of emotional reactions people may be having to watching this very beautiful event.

For me, it brought with it a sense of tradition within my own family. I watched Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding when I was around the same age as my daughter and it might be that she watches their children’s wedding with her daughter, which gave me a few goosebumps. I also thought how much we’ve moved on now that we have a Royal wedding that has a foundation in love for one another as opposed to lineage and money. I thought about Diana and how she might feel as a mother watching her son, now a man, going through what she had experienced.

And I felt sad. Sad that my own rather humble (in comparison), but no less beautiful wedding had resulted in a divorce…such a beautiful day filled with hope and promise and commitment but in the end, lost through a lack of understanding as to what The Lord Bishop Of London is describing.

It is understood that Christmas, weddings and funerals bring up all sorts of emotions that we need to deal with…even when they are not ours events, or our family events (like Diana’s funeral for example). So don’t be surprised if today triggers any emotional reactions today. Just remember, you’re not alone….

Being authentic…

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

I have worked with lots of women lately through running workshops, through hosting  Networking events and also with my own individual clients and I am picking up a general theme that concerns me. I constantly hear women talking about the pressure that they feel to be living in a certain way. Whether it is that they should start to be having children, or that they ought to be settled down now, or that they work to much, or they think they should be a certain type of wife/mother/sister/lover. There’s always rather to many ‘shoulds’ in these discussions for my liking and I am always intrigued by where these ‘shoulds’ come from. Largely, I’m told when I ask, the perception seems to come from society and family.

Yesterday in our Cheltenham Networking Women meeting, our speaker, Cathy Dean was talking about guilt and how we manage it. This generated an interesting discussion about why this mechanism might be in place. We concluded that guilt used to keep your own moral belief system in check, is ‘good’ guilt. Feeling bad about behaving in certain ways is what allows us to live in society. The guilt which is hugely problematic is when it is driven by others’ needs to control and cajole you for their own benefit. People very much associated this type of behaviour with parents and partners.

I feel very blessed that I don’t seem to suffer with guilt. I can only conclude that because I had to drag myself off the floor at the end of a turbulent adolescence that I had to learn to hard way how to communicate my needs, wants, hopes and desires and I learnt the shortness of life. There is little room in my life for anyone to try and get me to behave in a certain way or live in a certain way (as my ex husband and his family can confirm). I have one life and I shall live it well and kindly and I shall live it how I wish!

So if being authentic means to be true to yourself, then this is very tricky indeed if we are always trying to fit in to someone else’s ideas about who we should be, how we should behave and what dreams and goals we should or shouldn’t pursue. So a few questions for you….If you are not being yourself, then how do you attract the right kind of people to you? How do people know who you really are and how do they know who they are having a relationship with? If you deny all of your wants, needs, hopes and desires to satisfy the needs of another person, you are telling everyone that you are not important and this will be reflected back at you. The only person who can change the way you feel is you! How liberating is that? Being guilt free or authentic isn’t about being disrespectful or unloving or self obsessed. It’s about saying, I am me and this is what I love to do and this is what makes me happy and I am important…..just as you are.

The Cycle Of Life

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

I absolutely love the John Lewis advert that travels a woman’s entire life journey against the back drop of the song ‘She’s Always a Woman’ sung by Fyfe Dangerfield. Do you know the advert I mean? I must have seen it several times before I really ‘saw’ it and it actually made me feel quite emotional  when I last watched it. The little girl turns into the young woman who then falls in love, gets pregnant. She then has a couple of children biting at her ankles who then start their life cycle. But the advert stays with the mother, the central character and she struggles through their teenage years, into their early 20′s and then she is a grandparent and at the end, she is coming to the end of her life….a life lived. She is happy and she is at peace with herself enjoying what is left, enjoying her now large family. Its a huge amount to portray in 2 minutes but being never undersold, the John Lewis advertising team pull it off beautifully.

Its all very conventional and quite idealising of the process but basically, and even with my unconventional approach and somewhat complicated background and lifestyle, I recognise and connect with this woman’s life. When we truly connect with the Cycle of Life, we understand how short it really is. We start to understand the importance of gratitude for having the gift of life and appreciate that it is not to be wasted.

The greatest tragedy of all, however, is that we only truly understand and know what we need to know, long after we actually needed to know it. It’s a cruel joke that life dishes out but one that if we understand early enough, we can laugh along too and a very good time on our short visit to this thing called life….