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!

Having a regular creative practice can help you live better.

How?

It’s related to the idea that how we do one thing is how we do everything - we tend to have ways of thinking and feeling and moving through the world that are similar, no matter the circumstances we’re finding ourselves in.

Read on for more, and some examples.

Making stuff makes you feel better.

There’s something a bit magic about starting with nothing and ending up with something that wasn’t there before. Aside from the end result, there’s also something a bit magic about what happens when we’re engaged in the process of creating. The ‘doing’ bit.

If you see yourself as a creative person, you might know this already.

But if you don’t see yourself as creative, or you feel intimidated by the thought of starting to draw or crochet or restore furniture or whatever idea is trying to get your attention, making stuff can feel like a hard mountain to climb.

Have you ever tried drawing a mandala? Mandalas have become known as beautiful symmetrical circular patterns, but that’s just one expression of them. Mandala means ‘circle’ in sanskrit - so really any drawing in a circle could be a mandala.

The medicine wheel is a circle. The full moon. The yin-yang. These are all examples of circles that hold so much meaning.

So when we’re drawing our own mandalas, the circle can hold our meaning, too. Our stories. Our feelings and experiences and fears and curiosities. Our expression of who we are.

There’s a saying that drifts around the place about humans and time that says something like: we overestimate how much we can get done in a day, and we underestimate how much we get done in a year.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it was built.

To make this quirk of human minds work for you, read on for a suggestion..

This is a slightly different take on the ‘what do you want to do with your life?’ question.

What do you want to have done?

And then, what could you do today, in order to make that your reality later in life?

Here’s today’s experiment - zoom right in.

It’s a kind of antidote to the vague dissociation a lot of us live in, focussed on scrolling screens and distractions.

Zoom right into right now.

Give this experiment a try, and see what you notice.

When our minds spin in circles, as they sometimes do, or we’re feeling generally out of sorts, it can sometimes feel like there’s not enough space inside of our own heads. It’s crowded and loud in there!

And so there are a lot of benefits to putting some of that mental clutter outside of ourselves so we can hear ourselves think and feel what we’re really feeling again.

Here’s a few suggestions for why this is useful and how you might go about it.

It’s a hard game to play, the ‘not good enough’ game. And its cousin, the ‘not doing enough’ game. And all its other relatives.

If you’re playing the not good enough game, all you’ll win is a new, further away set of goal posts to aim for.

That game is rigged.

What if we started playing a different game instead?

What are your resources? The places, people, animals, sensations, objects, activities (and more) that make you feel a bit better, make life feel more doable?

Sometimes it’s good to take stock. Particularly when you are feeling well resourced, so you have some ideas for where you might turn when you’re struggling. So here’s your invitation to check in, and here’s one way to think about resources that might be useful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.