There's a saying:

How you do anything is how you do everything.

Have you heard it?

What does it make you feel? What do you think about when you read it?

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.

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 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.

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?

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…

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.

Do you remember your dreams?

Musings on what dreamwork means to me, and an invitation to be part of a new dreaming group, starting soon.

Dreaming isn’t like being awake - different rules apply.

What’s something that’s feeling a bit challenging in life right now?

What if you had a fantastical creature or being who could help you with that?

What if these imaginings weren’t “just” your imagination? What if they weren’t childish, what if they weren’t a frivolous waste of time? What if they could be powerful allies to help you navigate life with more creativity, more lightness, more playfulness?

Want to give it a shot?

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.

How much mental real estate is taken up by things you feel you should do, but haven’t? The endless to do list that gets bumped from day to day and week to week (and in some cases, month to month or year to year…).

What if that weight wasn’t there any more?

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…

Reflecting on your past self, present self, and future self is a powerful practice that has many benefits, including insight into your personal growth over time, making more informed choices in your life, and ultimately, it can lead to a more satisfying and fulfilling life.

Read on for more!