What’s your North Star?

Figuratively, a "North Star" can refer to a guiding principle or goal that provides direction and purpose in life. It represents a constant reference point or guiding light that helps us navigate our path through life and make decisions aligned with our values and where we’d like our life to take us.

Colouring in is good for your brain. Here’s a few reasons why you might want to give it a try, particularly if you’re like me and find that other kinds of meditation are more frustrating than helpful!

Boundaries are easier when they’re FOR something, not against it.

Here’s a trick to support knowing how and when to set a boundary.

So, why art therapy? I’m glad you asked (she says, pretending that you did). Here are a few ways that art therapy can be a very enriching thing to engage in.

What does ‘good’ feel like in your body?

Many of my clients are very familiar with this question!

When someone asks us how we are, it’s easy to say ‘good’, but how often do we stop and think about (or feel into) what ‘good’ actually means as we say it?

Here's a Wednesday thought experiment:

What might it mean if our lives aren't lived in straight lines, from beginning to end? What if our lives were like ripples, past, present, future, all flowing into and through and around each other. Our present changing our past, our unseen futures rippling through our presents, all of it moving, changing, vibrating, in flux.

If nothing is as it seems, what might it be instead?

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

There is a way for change to be a bit easier without us having to ‘effort harder’.

What if instead of trying to change our identity and our behaviour at the same time, we changed our external world so it’s easier to do the thing than it is to not do the thing?

Kind of like we’re the river – we’re going to run down the path of least resistance.

How do you change the river? Shift the banks that guide it.

What’s it like to work with me?

This is a question I get a bit, given all the different things I offer, so here’s an idea of the different things we might focus on together if you were a client of mine.

What’s the difference between art therapy and using art as therapy? Is there a difference?

Short answer - yes! There is some overlap, but they are different things.

Read on for more…

Here’s an art therapy exercise you might like to try - a body map.

A body map is good as a check in – it’s a way to pause and notice: where are you right now, how are you feeling, and what might you need?

This can be really useful, as can help you to notice patterns you might not be aware of otherwise.

Art can be healing, and can be used as a therapeutic tool - but when you’re just getting started (or when you’ve been doing the same old thing for a while) - how do you know what to draw?

This is the first in a series of posts offering some suggestions. We’ll begin with spontaneous drawing. These suggestions are written as if you’re going to draw in an art journal, but you can give these a go on a piece of loose paper, on a wall… whatever you have to hand.

Don’t be silly, it’s just your imagination.

For many people, imagination is downplayed and discouraged as we grow. We’re expected and encouraged to grow out of flights of fancy, to be realistic, to put our feet on the ground and pull our heads out of the clouds.

But here’s a thing - imagination is one of the most powerful tools we have, for healing, for growth, for joy and delight, for getting what we want, for creating a life we love to live.

Read on for a couple of reasons why.

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.