What do you need, and how will you get it?

These are two of my favourite questions. They’re deceptively simple, and deceptively powerful.

They can give you almost anything…

There’s something to be said for having no idea where you’re going in life. When you don’t know where you’re going, the journey is the point. And when the journey is the point, you have all the time in the world. To me, this is a thought that feels kind and soft.

When there’s no destination, there’s no pressure to get anywhere. No pressure to do anything. No pressure to be any particular way. A weight lifts and all my fears ease. Fear of judgement, fear of not being enough, fear of failing.

It’s so spacious, having all the time in the world. Time to stop and smell the roses. Time to be curious and follow that curiosity. Time to try things out just because they look fun. Time to wonder and delight. Time to share a story or two. Time to pick up feathers and stick them in your hair. Time to dream.

And… dreaming is where it begins.

Right now I’m feeling…

This is a little but powerful prompt I use to check in with myself whenever I think of it throughout the day. I make a game of it to find the exact words to describe how I’m feeling, and I know when I have it right because part of me lights up and I feel seen when I get it exactly spot on.

For any healing process, we need a quiet moment.

There’s something about that sentence that settles me, helps me take a deeper breath. A quiet pause.

Lots of us want to feel better. Not many of us take the time to create a quiet moment to plant the seeds of whatever feeling better is to us. We don’t create quiet moments to tend to those seeds as they grow.

We’re so often caught in our heads, so removed from the physicality of our own bodies that sometimes we get around in a state of ‘body? What body? I’m just a floating head’.

And yet… our bodies are where feeling better starts.

Today’s public service announcement:

Do nice things for yourself. Treat yourself kindly.

Find small things that make you feel cared for, and do those things.

Find small things that make your days feel brighter, and do those things.

I read someone's Instagram post the other day with these words, and it struck a chord.

I sat down to write my own list and it went: read, write, draw.

And that was the end of the list.

About a second later, I got an attack of the guilts that I hadn’t put moving my body on there. Or eating amazing food, or the work I do in the world, or having interesting conversations with interesting people, or spending time outside in nature.

These are still important parts of my life, but right NOW, this day, this week, all I want to do is read, write, and draw.

And when I stopped trying to sneak other stuff onto that list, I felt a lot of different things…

I want to offer kindness, as a lantern in the dark.

Kindness as a recognition of our own humanness. Kindness that tends to our fears and hurts. Kindness that sees we need a loving word or a gentle touch, and offers it to us, unasked. Kindness that feels like a gentle breath, a softening through our bodies, knowing that we've got this, knowing that we're here for ourselves, knowing that we're walking with ourselves through the woods, knowing that we're deserving of this kind of solid, unwavering love.

We are worthy of kindness from ourselves.

Seasons never get stuck. Have you noticed?

They roll on, one into the next, in their own time. Sometimes winter will be long, or sometimes summer will be cooler than usual, but the seasons keep on moving through their cycle, one after the other.

The moon is the same - it’s never stuck. It cycles through its phases, one into the next, drawing the tides with it as it goes.

There’s something comforting about seasons and the way they keep on moving. Maybe we don’t like the season we’re in, but if we’re attuned to our internal seasons, we can have some idea of where we’re at, and of what might be coming next.

Calm is the eye of the storm.

Calm is safe harbour.

Calm is a regulated nervous system that has the capacity to handle the challenges of life with grace.

Calm is a super power when holding space for others - like the doctor, other people’s nervous systems pick up on the calm of mine, and they start to feel that things are okay. They start to feel that nothing’s wrong here. They start to feel like THEY’RE ok, exactly as they are.

Recently I had the great pleasure of talking with my friend and colleague Kellie Stirling about grief. It was a rich and rewarding conversation - I hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

You know that song from the Sound of Music that goes:

Let's start at the very beginning
A very good place to start?

Sorry (not sorry) if you now have that stuck in your head for the rest of the day.

She has a point, though - the beginning is a very good place to start. Another good place to start (I think maybe the best place to start), is right where you are. When I think that thought, I feel light and hopeful. Beginning right where I am means that I must be in the right spot to begin, and that feels freeing.

Spontaneous gestural drawing is one of my favourite things to fill my art journal pages with.

That’s a lot of big words - what do they mean?

It's a way of making an image that encourages stepping away from our thinking mind and letting a different part of us choose colours and marks.

Instead of thinking about what colours, and what shapes, I like to let my eyes go a bit soft, a bit blurred, and instead FEEL the colours and shapes. What colour jumps out at me? Start with that. What shape feels nice to draw? Draw that.

I don’t have a 10 step process to anywhere.

My lack of answers sometimes dismays me.

I want to be able to tell you - here’s the path. Do these ten things, one after the other, and then you will arrive, and live happily ever after.

Alas…

Life, relationships, healing and growth don’t really work like that.

Know what they DO work with, though? Curiosity.

One of the reasons I think grief is so hard is because it’s kind of sticky. It sticks together with other things, and sometimes it’s hard to untangle them.

Here’s one way to tend to some of the sticky, tangly emotions when they show up in our lives. I hope you find it useful.

Really, grieving the end of my morning coffee is perfect - it’s perfect because everything ends, specially cups of coffee, and it’s a strange idea that some grief is more valid than other grief, that there’s things that are acceptable to grieve for and things that are not.

It's a strange idea that grief is for special occasions and is not our constant companion, that it's not a very human thing to feel, that it should be avoided if possible.

We have forgotten how to feel it. We have grown afraid.

Imagine if, when someone is grieving, we collectively knew what to do. Imagine if we had the kind of culture who gathered round grief, made space for it, gave time to it. Imagine if we had the kind of culture that wasn’t afraid of it. Imagine if grief was acknowledged and shared. Imagine if we knew how to move with grief, to move it through our bodies and our hearts, and to let it change us, soften us, open us into love again.

Trees (and the rest of nature) have no concept of progress. They grow because the conditions are right.

What if we did the same? Instead of trying to force progress, instead of frantically reading more self help books and beating ourselves up for not healing fast enough, what if we recognised that perhaps right now the conditions aren’t right for us to be where we’d like to be?

And instead of forcing ourselves, we started creating the right conditions for us to heal, grow and thrive?

What if (see what I did there) we stopped playing the what-if-anxiety game, and instead learned to transform it into what-if-curiosity?

What if (see? I’m doing it again…) we stopped using ‘what if’ to keep ourselves small and safe, and instead used ‘what if’ to encourage ourselves and each other out of our comfort zones, to expand our horizons, to explore what might be possible?

What if the hardest part of doing anything was making the decision to do it? And what if every decision you made was the right decision?

Grief isn’t just sadness.

It contains a whole world of emotions, in so many different flavours. Sadness is one - and rage, anger, frustration, ‘it’s not fair!’ and railing against what we can’t change. Numbness and shut down, depression and dissociation. Sometimes guilt. Helplessness, hopelessness. Sometimes grief is a howling whirlwind, sometimes it’s a soft and tender melancholy. Grief is raw, and real, and very human.

And many of us (most of us?) are afraid of it.