I had plans yesterday to write some things about the inner critic, and how it gets a bad rap because often when we're thinking of our inner critics, we're thinking of an unhealthy version that's mean or vicious or thinks that shaming us is useful. The one that tells us we're bad or wrong and nothing we create is worthwhile or will ever be good enough. But, this isn't all an inner critic can be. There is such a thing as a healthy inner critic, who can grow to be one of our greatest supports.

And I will write more about that next week.

Because yesterday had other plans for me, and it was necessary instead to take a moment of grace.

We are made of stories. Who we think we are, our histories that have led us to come to know ourselves. The values that we live by. It's all stories.

I'm creative. I'm a victim of this circumstance or that one. I'm someone who hates the cold.

Because I hold these stories about myself, they influence my actions in various ways.

Because I tell the story of hating the cold, I live in the tropics and refuse to go south in the winter.

What if I tried on the story of being an Antarctic explorer? Perhaps I'd buy some warmer clothes and go south for the winter, treat it like an expedition into the unknown… it'd be a very different experience of life from my current one.

I read a question somewhere a while ago that I liked.

Instead of striving to be your 'best self' or trying to figure out what your 'higher self' would do, instead, ask:

Who is your most favourite self?

The version of you that you like being the best.

What if you were a landscape?

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

How would it feel?

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.

Creativity is for you. Singing. Dancing. Making art. Not just for people with 'talent'. Not just for professionals. For you.

Humans are inherently creative, but many of us have been taught to believe that 'creative' means 'able to paint a masterpiece that will end up on a gallery wall'.

How might your life be different if creativity was something you did, the way that birds just sing, rather than something to ‘be good at’?

Short answer: no. That sounds kind of creepy. But it’s a question I get asked a bit.

The reason why I can't look at something you drew and see into your psyche is because your creative process is unique to you. The colours you choose, the way you express yourself on the page, the images you create relate specifically to your thoughts, beliefs, emotions, dreams, fears, trauma, lived experiences, etc.

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 can't draw."

I hear that a lot from people. I used to hear that a lot from myself. For decades. I made a lot of art, but it was all abstract or stylised because I couldn't draw "real" things.

It was true that I couldn't draw, but only because I hadn't learned how yet.

Learning to draw is like learning to read - when you've learned the letters and the basics of grammar, you can read whatever you want. When you've learned the basic principles of drawing, you can draw whatever you like.

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.

Did you know you could go to the future and meet your future self?

How far in the future is up to you. A week from now. A decade. Longer - what if you met yourself after you'd passed through the veil from life to death? What stories would that version of you have to share?

Our future selves know things we don't know - these challenges we're living through? They've already found their way around them. And if we go to meet them, we can ask them how they did it. And they can offer us perspectives and paths that we can't see from where we're standing.

When you're feeling out of sorts, anxious or irritated by everything, up to and including someone standing on your shadow - it's easy to get stuck in a loop of 'why?' trying to figure out the underlying cause.

"Why?" can feel like a good question. You're being self reflective. You're taking responsibility for how you're feeling, trying to figure it out, understand it. And sometimes this is useful… until it isn't, when you keep spinning in the feeling.

When that happens, "what" can be a better question.

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.