What if you were a landscape?

A place, deep and wide, full of weather and tides?

How would it feel?

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…

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 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.

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.

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…

It’s an easy trap to fall into, given the culture we live in, to believe that parts of ourselves aren’t right. To find ourselves thinking that it’s not okay to be needy, to think that we need to kill off our people pleasers, exorcise our anxiety, stop being a victim and claim our empowerment. To beat ourselves up for finding it hard to take off the suit of armour and be more open, more soft, more vulnerable.

It’s like we’re trying to chop ourselves into pieces and only keep the good bits.

But that’s not how healing works. That’s not how growth works. That’s not how we get what we want.

Imagination is sometimes dismissed as childish or frivolous (it’s ‘just’ your imagination), but it’s one of the most powerful tools we have. Before we can create anything, we have to imagine it, from something as simple as a sandwich to something as complex as a skyscraper.

Everything we create is born from our imagination. Imagination is what shapes our world - the stories we tell about ourselves and our place in the world, the meaning we make from the things we experience - imagination is the glue that holds us together.

What if you were a tree?

Humans are creatures made of stories - it’s how we make sense of the world and of ourselves. We use all kinds of metaphors to communicate our experiences. I slept like a log. I’m feeling kind of batty. They’re keeping on the straight and narrow. It’s raining cats and dogs.

Art therapy is a great way to explore, understand and change our metaphors and stories. Read on for more…

There’s something delightful about stepping outside of routine and doing things differently. Interrupting our regular patterns with something interesting or beautiful or curious or nurturing.

It’s also sometimes quite hard to do, given that it’s easy to get into ruts and routines, and the point of a rut or a routine is that you don’t have to think about it. And if you’re not thinking about what you’re doing, it’s hard to make a choice to do things a different way.

Which is why it can be nice to enlist support to interrupt our patterns.

Please bring strange things…

This poem by Ursula K. Le Guin always moves me. Perhaps it will move you, too.

Getting caught up in the question, "What is my purpose?" is like looking for shoes instead of walking forward.

While most people think of reality as something that happens to us, the shamanic approach is to 'get behind the creation' of your story.

Life isn't only happening to us: we are happening to life.

-Toko-pa Turner

Worry is a hungry beast. It’s always looking for its next meal.

Sometimes, worry comes from things that aren’t how we think they should be. When I figure it out, whatever it is, I’ll feel okay.

And maybe these things will make a difference. But maybe they won’t - so what to do? We have this hungry beast roaming loose around our mind causing havoc.

Well, maybe we could tame the beast.

This is your invitation, into delight - allow yourself to be delighted.

Make yourself available for small moments of unexpected beauty, calling you into presence. Let yourself feel the lightness that comes from these tiny moments of connection with something magic.

Follow these ten steps and you’ll get results in just seven days. Take my three month program and you’ll be the you you wish you were. And when we reach step ten and we’re not where we were promised, we think there’s something wrong with us and we look for the next solution.

There’s nothing wrong with us.

In my experience, on my journey through life, literally nothing has worked like that.

Everything I have that brings me joy and satisfaction has taken time.

In a nutshell - when we jump into personal development from a place of ‘not enough’, looking for ‘the thing’ that will fix us, we don’t find it.

When we come to it from a place of absolutely enough, coming from curiosity, magic happens. We find there’s nothing to fix, and we’ve been solving a problem that doesn’t exist this whole time… 

...and we smile at ourselves because we know there’s still nothing to fix - we’ve just been following a harder path than we need to, and now we can follow a different one.

Creativity is freedom.

When you write or draw or make things or sing - you can do anything you want.

Put red here. Blue there. Burn it and begin again.

Write some words, fit them into sentences, read them back and reorder them so they sound like poetry.

Creative freedom is absolute within whatever limits exist.

It’s a nice puzzle. You’re not free, because there are limits, but within these limits, you are completely free. 

In past years I’ve have goals. This year I have curiosities.

Golden threads, asking me to follow them, posing the question - “what if…”

“Someday” is not a real day. Tomorrow is also not a real day. Not until it turns into today.

Today is a real day. Today is the ONLY real day.

Because the only real time is now.

Yesterday is a memory, tomorrow is a dream… today is what we have.