What does safety feel like to you?

For some people, the answer is 'I don't know'. Particularly for people living with a lot of trauma, or for those under a lot of stress or going through challenging times. The idea of feeling safe seems a bit abstract and unknowable in a real world sense.

Sometimes it's hard to know what safe feels like in our increasingly complex and fast paced world.

One way to begin to find a sense of safety is by starting with your imagination…

There's a concept in Somatic Experiencing (the gentle nervous system regulation and trauma healing work I offer) called 'coherence'. Coherence in this context is a measure of wholeness, as the various physiological systems in the body function together to create a feeling of wellbeing, where we are self regulating in an optimal way. Our bodies are doing what they're supposed to be doing, working as they should.

Sometimes, to oversimplify, I explain it by saying it boils down to 'what's working'. For nervous systems that are chronically under a lot of stress or holding a lot of trauma, there are so many spot fires that focussing on putting out fires really just creates more fire, more dysregulation.

When was the last time you were mind-full? With your mind too full of what you were doing in the moment to contain anything else? No worry. No stress. No thinking about that amazing comeback you wish you'd thought of yesterday. No thinking about tomorrow's deadlines. Absorbed in the present.

It's a very restful place to hang out that is wonderful for your mental health. And it's a place that's relatively easy to visit, if you know the way.

Creativity is for you. Singing. Dancing. Making art. Not just for people with 'talent'. Not just for professionals. For you.

Humans are inherently creative, but many of us have been taught to believe that 'creative' means 'able to paint a masterpiece that will end up on a gallery wall'.

How might your life be different if creativity was something you did, the way that birds just sing, rather than something to ‘be good at’?

Short answer: no. That sounds kind of creepy. But it’s a question I get asked a bit.

The reason why I can't look at something you drew and see into your psyche is because your creative process is unique to you. The colours you choose, the way you express yourself on the page, the images you create relate specifically to your thoughts, beliefs, emotions, dreams, fears, trauma, lived experiences, etc.

If you can't imagine an option, you won't choose it.

Those times where you feel like you've got two choices and they both suck? What if there are more options, but you're not seeing them yet? Or perhaps you are seeing them but they feel out of reach or unrealistic or the cost doesn't seem worth it.

Here are a few ways to expand the amount of paths you might like to take.

There's a device used in fiction to create tension and conflict between characters (which keeps readers turning pages). You give each of your characters a different script, and then make them think they're reading from the same one.

You might have a school principal calling a parent to tell them about their child's imminent expulsion.

The principal's script says: this child is a menace.

The parent's script says: this child is the highly gifted apple of my eye.

Imagine how the conversation might go?

Don't know about you, but for me, one of the symptoms of being stuck in a life rut is a co-dependent relationship with my never-ending to-do list - I can't possibly go anywhere or do anything different or interesting because look at this list, it needs me.

The inside of a rut feels like it's coated in glue. It's sticky and gets on everything and makes it really hard to climb out. Or maybe it's like wearing a velcro suit - less messy than glue but the effect is the same.

"I can't draw."

I hear that a lot from people. I used to hear that a lot from myself. For decades. I made a lot of art, but it was all abstract or stylised because I couldn't draw "real" things.

It was true that I couldn't draw, but only because I hadn't learned how yet.

Learning to draw is like learning to read - when you've learned the letters and the basics of grammar, you can read whatever you want. When you've learned the basic principles of drawing, you can draw whatever you like.

I love the sound of humming bees. For a while, I lived in a house with a flowering citrus in the yard. Not quite an orange, not quite a grapefruit. When it flowered, all the bees would come. At those times, I called it the humming tree. I would go sit under it and listen. I'd hum back to the bees and I think the bees liked that. After a while, it made me feel like the hum was under my skin, like I was made of hum, and the humming felt like happiness.

There's a reason why humming feels like happiness.

Here's one of my favourite somatic (body based) tools in my own magic stress-relieving toolbox.

This is also a tool that I regularly use with and teach to clients for easing stress and regulating their nervous systems so they feel more calm, present, easeful and able to see more creative solutions to the challenges they're dealing with (because sometimes it's hard to see the creative way out when you're stressed out in survival mode).

This particular tool is known as orienting.

You might've heard the phrase: what we resist persists.

And it's true, but why does it happen?

'What we resist persists' is one facet of a deeper truth: what we place our attention on grows.

Did you know you could go to the future and meet your future self?

How far in the future is up to you. A week from now. A decade. Longer - what if you met yourself after you'd passed through the veil from life to death? What stories would that version of you have to share?

Our future selves know things we don't know - these challenges we're living through? They've already found their way around them. And if we go to meet them, we can ask them how they did it. And they can offer us perspectives and paths that we can't see from where we're standing.

When you're feeling out of sorts, anxious or irritated by everything, up to and including someone standing on your shadow - it's easy to get stuck in a loop of 'why?' trying to figure out the underlying cause.

"Why?" can feel like a good question. You're being self reflective. You're taking responsibility for how you're feeling, trying to figure it out, understand it. And sometimes this is useful… until it isn't, when you keep spinning in the feeling.

When that happens, "what" can be a better question.

Social media is an attention stealing beast, feeding us aspirational content with the undertone of "this could be you", and its evil cousin, "this SHOULD be you". And part of us agrees - you're right, that should be me. And then we feel inadequate, and hopeful or despairing we feed the beast more of our attention, click on links and buy more things to make our lives as easy and perfect as the lives we see on our screens.

And it still doesn't work. The beast keeps showing us more parts of our lives that aren't yet shiny enough, and we still feel lost and broken, and so we stay on the hamster wheel and keep scrolling, thinking everyone else has got it together - what's wrong with me that I don't?

I'll tell you what's wrong with you - nothing.

Go gently into the year. There's a lot about the place of figuring out 2024, what our goals are, what our word of the year is, what we want, how we want to feel, who we want to be, the things we want to change or accept or call in or let go of.

It's kind of exhausting and it's only January 2.

So if you're not already familiar with the idea of marinating in your daydreams instead of rushing to set goals, here's an invitation to do just that.

We often walk through doors and across thresholds in time without really stopping to notice the transition between here and there. The moment when we're not here any more, but neither are we there yet. A change is happening, and we long for 'changing' to become 'changed' because the messy middle part is… messy.

What if we did take the time to notice? To pause there a moment. To take our time with 'changing'. What might we feel? What might we find?

Today, on the longest day of the year, I'm thinking about grace.

The world is a lot right now (perhaps it always is, in some regard).

The holidays are coming and they can be a complicated time. And then there's that weird limbo between Christmas and the new year. Another year starting - reflecting on the year that was, holding so much hope for the year to come.

And so here I am, thinking about grace.

You know the kind of scrolling where you're so checked out you're outside time and you aren't even really seeing what you're looking at? Who knows how long I'd been doing that for when I came across a sponsored post that snapped me back into time again.

And then something magic happened…

A complaint is a fight against something. Fighting against things can get really tiring. Endlessly pushing away the things we don’t want, the things that aren’t right, the things that don’t feel good.

So what to do? One thing we can do is look inside the complaint for the desire it holds. If we don’t want strawberry ice cream, what DO we want? If this feels wrong, what feels right?

Sometimes, the answer is obvious (chocolate ice cream, of course).

But sometimes it’s harder to figure out…