Will I Still Belong If I Become Who I Am Becoming?

There is a question that sits quietly beneath many of life's biggest transitions.  Most of us never say it out loud.  Instead, we ask questions about careers, relationships, ageing, health, identity, purpose, or the future.  But underneath those questions is often another one:  Will I still belong if I become who I am becoming? With that there is often fear and also a quiet awareness that life as we know it cannot continue in the same way.  Sometimes it is a whisper and sometimes it is a crisis.  Either way we become aware that change is asking something of us.

That question lives somewhere below the throat. You might not have words for it yet. You might not even know you're asking it. But if you're in the middle of a significant life transition, becoming a new parent, a relationship ending, a career dissolving, a sudden life threatening illness, a version of yourself becoming suddenly ill-fitting, your nervous system is asking it on your behalf, constantly, in the background of everything.

It's not really a question about the future. It's a question about whether you are fundamentally safe to change.

What I have discovered is that thinking your way to the answer doesn't work. Not because you're not intelligent enough, but because the question isn't being asked by your intellect. It's being asked by something much older and much more fundamental, the part of you that is wired, before anything else, for connection and survival.

Last Saturday I sat in a room with a group of somatic experiencing and TCM practitioners and learned something that my body already knew.

We were working with the Five Elements of Chinese Medicine, an ancient framework that maps all of life onto a seasonal cycle. Metal, Water, Wood, Fire, Earth. Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, Late Summer. Each element with its own quality, its own organ system, its own emotional signature, its own role in the great turning of things.

What stopped me, what caused a kind of internal earthquake I'm not sure anyone else in the room noticed, was the moment I understood that these five elements describe not just the seasons of the natural world, but the seasons of every significant transition a human being moves through. More than that actually.  Each element carries precisely the quality of support a nervous system needs at that particular moment in the cycle.

I've been working with people in life transitions for nearly ten years. I thought I was learning something new about somatic touch work and I want to reaffirm to you that I absolutely did.  But I was also actually finding the map for territory I'd been navigating and creating by felt sense all along.  Every transition we go through has a cycle within a cycle.  These big transitions are not linear, they are fractals within a fractal.  Spirals that move in, out and around.

Digital Art, Kellie Stirling

Here's what I mean.

Every transition begins in Metal that sits with the season of Autumn. Something ends. Something is released, or taken, or outgrown. The Metal element governs our capacity for sensate awareness, the skin that registers the first chill, the gut that knows before the mind does that something has shifted, that sense we have when we experience slight arousal because our gut knows something is not quite right. The resource energy of Metal is respect. Respect for what is ending. Respect for the fragility of the threshold. Precision in how we hold what is being lost.  How might perimenopause be experienced if culturally we had more respect for what women experience at this time.  If we could offer that in a large container for them.  If getting older was not denigrated but rather respected.

In transition, Metal asks: can you let this be what it actually is?

Then comes Water, the element associated with Winter. The not-knowing. The fallow. The period that our culture is most brutal about rushing, most intolerant of sitting inside. Water is where fear lives, but also where wisdom gestates. You cannot see the shape of what's coming yet. The resource energy here is protection,  to anchor, to contain, to hold someone steady while they cannot yet hold themselves.  This is often where we reach out to others for help, trying to regulate through connection.  Our tribal need to connect to help us regulate ourselves through the fear that is rising up.  This is where providing a container of support is really useful.  In Australia, new mothers are connected with other new mothers in a mothers groups so they can have connection during this time.

Water asks: can you bear not knowing what comes next?

Wood is Spring.  Spring cannot be manufactured. But when the conditions are right, when there has been enough winter, something moves. Wood governs the mobilisation of life force, the capacity for healthy anger and also hope.  It is directed forward movement.  Life wants you to move, something new is trying to emerge. A dream that was never pursued, or a  truth that was never acknowledged. A boundary that was never spoken. The resource required here is encouragement. Encouragement is not pushing, it is standing alongside someone and quietly saying: "I think you can trust this next step."

 In our training room last Saturday, a colleague placed her supportive hands under my ankles. The intention with the somatic touch was encouragement and support in the spirit of a coach. As I was lying there I felt a moving forward energy in my body. Then an image arrived in my mind, unbidden, I was running through a field of flowers in pure delight. That's Wood. That's what an unimpeded mobilisation response actually feels like in a body that has been through enough winter. Whilst the resource energy for wood is encouragement, the felt sense is of something or someone believing in your capacity to move, even when you cannot yet believe it yourself.

Wood asks: what wants to emerge through you now?

Fire is Summer, coherence restored. This is the moment in a transition when you suddenly start to know yourself again, when the scattered pieces find their arrangement and come together in a new constellation, when connection becomes possible again. Fire governs the heart, and the heart's capacity to communicate both danger and equanimity to the whole system. The resource energy is love, not sentiment, but the agape quality of full, unconditional presence. Being truly met.

Fire asks: can you let yourself be known again?

Finally Earth, the arrival of late summer, the harvest. This is where the gristle gets digested. Where the lessons move from being things that happened to you into being part of who you are. Where the gut microbiome, the immune system, the capacity for giving and receiving, all of it comes back online. This is the time in a life transition where we have enough distance from the challenge that we can harvest the lessons we have learned along the way.  In menopause in TCM this time is known as the second spring.  The resource energy is support  coming from underneath, nurturing, a trust and knowing that the ground is holding you rather than you holding yourself up.

Earth asks: what has this made you?

Then we move back to Metal again.  Metal is both the beginning and ending of a cycle.  Life is nothing but a series of transitions, beginnings, middles and endings that keep on happening.

Respect. Protection. Encouragement. Love. Support.

Five different answers to the same question. Will I still belong if I become who I am becoming?

Yes. When we are in transition we feel like we have lost our inner compass because our nervous system is often rewiring and this affects other systems in our body.  When we experience all of this it offers a sense of what it feels like to belong within a transition.  Within each season of our life.

The reason transitions are so hard in our culture is not that we lack resilience. It's that we treat them as problems to be solved rather than seasons to be moved through. We try to think our way to summer while our bodies are standing in the frost. We pathologise winter and try to get out of it as soon as we can, often without support. We rush spring. We skip the harvest because we're already anxious about the next thing ending.

But the body knows. The body has always known. What it needs, what it has always needed is not a solution. It is the right quality of presence for the season it is actually in.

When you help someone belong to themselves through a winter they didn't choose, you are doing something that ripples far beyond the room. A nervous system that has been met in its fear, encouraged in its spring, and supported in its harvest doesn't mobilise that unresolved energy outward. It completes the cycle. It becomes available for connection, for contribution, for the next season, whatever it brings.

You don't learn this with your mind first. You learn it the way I did last Saturday through highly attuned presence of another person, sitting with you and holding space for you through it.  With that your  body suddenly remembers what moving forward safely feels like.

That's where we start. Not with the answer to the belonging question. With the conditions that make the question safe enough to ask.

Here are some reflection questions for you if this resonates with you.

Can I respect what is ending in my life? How can I protect myself in uncertainty? What do I need to be able to encourage what is emerging? Can I meet myself with love? What support do I need to foster time and space for the integration of my experience?

Leaning into longing: the distance between being heard and held.

There's something quietly poignant happening right now. People are turning to AI for something that feels like companionship.   A place to be heard. A presence that's available, patient, non-reactive. I don't say that dismissively, because I understand the impulse completely. We are living through an epidemic of loneliness so profound that we will reach toward almost anything that approximates the feeling of being held. The feeling of being connected with another, with each other.

What I keep coming back to is this, what people are actually reaching for isn't information or even reflection. It's the experience of mattering to another nervous system. That mattering to another nervous system, as much as we might wish otherwise, cannot be replicated by a machine.

That is because the nervous system is fundamentally a relational ‘organ’.  It likes to be with others to co-regulate.  It likes connection, choice and agency. What people are reaching for is not information but relationship. The nervous system develops in relationship, heals in relationship and, throughout our lives, continues to seek the regulating presence of other humans.

I must admit, I work on my own a little and I find myself craving the connection of other humans in person. When I have days when I am writing I will often go and plonk myself in a cafe just to be around other people. It might be surprising to you that these days are often my most creative.

We tend to think of connection as a social skill. Something we learn, practice, get better at. But underneath the social layer, connection is a somatic experience. It happens in the body before it happens anywhere else.

When you feel truly met by another person, that feeling of really being seen and being with a person who can hold your experience in their body and stay in connection with you, well something in your physiology shifts. Your breathing changes. Your muscles soften. The part of your brain scanning for threat quiets down just enough to let something else come forward. This is not a metaphor. It is the nervous system doing what it evolved to do: co-regulate with another.

This is why genuine connection is so hard to fake, and so hard to find. It requires two people who each have enough internal settledness to stay present, not just cognitively, but somatically, when things get uncomfortable. When the conversation touches something real. When the other person's activation starts to move through the room.

Most of us never learned how to do this. Not because we're broken, but because most of us grew up in environments where the adults around us hadn't learned either. Neither did their parents or grandparents.  The lack of capacity, inability to attune, it gets passed down through the generations.

Many people talk about the concept of moving our orientation from me to we.  This is not a new phrase, it has been around for quite a few years but what does it actually mean from an embodiment perspective?

Here's the paradox at the heart of relational work: you can't genuinely be with another person until you've developed enough capacity to be with yourself. This isn't about self-sufficiency or emotional independence. It's about having enough internal space to notice what's happening inside you without being completely run by it. To feel your irritation, your fear, your contraction and still stay in the room. Still stay in the relationship, still stay in your body and not dissociate or project it onto another person.

Without that internal witnessing capacity, connection collapses into reaction. We move fast. We get irritated, or angry and we defend. We assert. We project what we can't metabolise internally onto the people around us and then wonder why we feel so alone even in company.

The ‘me’ work isn't selfish. It's the foundation that makes ‘we’ possible.  To receive, we have to learn how to listen with our body, with all our five senses.  In a world where striving, action and constant motion is celebrated and rewarded, where people are expected to ignore their own basic bodily functions and boundaries all the time and keep on doing, this can be hard and slow work. It often feels unsafe for a body that is constantly in motion to slow down. It's also hard when your value is attached to productivity, the state becomes a trait. But it's not who you are. What if you could titrate your experience of slowing down a little bit at a time so that you could feel safe to just be. To receive the presence of another, to really listen and not have to fix anything or be fixed.

One of the things I notice consistently in my work, with individuals navigating midlife transitions, with leaders in organisations, with people doing the slow, courageous work of trauma integration, is how hard it is to receive.

Not just to receive care or support, though that's part of it. But to receive the experience of being held by another person and let it actually land. To feel it in the body rather than process it in the head. To let it matter.

For many people, especially those whose early experiences taught them that support wasn't reliable or safe, this is genuinely threatening. The nervous system that learned to survive on self-sufficiency doesn't easily soften into ‘we’. Even when ‘we’ is right there, available and real.

I've sat with individuals and groups in sessions where something quite profound has happened, a moment of genuine attunement, a shift in the room and watched them move past it almost immediately, back into their head, back into their story, because the body didn't yet have a map for what just occurred.

Building that map is slow work. It happens through repeated experience, not insight. Through the body, not the mind.

Back to AI.  Let's talk about what it can and cannot offer. I want to be honest here, because I think the nuance matters.  I think there is real value in AI as a reflection tool.

There is something useful in having a space to think out loud. A patient, available presence that reflects without reacting. I use AI in my own work to test ideas, to do business analyst work that I don’t have time to do.  That's real.

But nothing in an AI interaction is changed by contact with you. It isn't moved by your story. It doesn't carry you between sessions. It can't offer you the experience of mattering to another nervous system because it doesn't have one.  You can reflect to AI over a tricky experience you had with others and whilst it reflects back to you, nothing in it is changed by the experience that it is witnessing.  It doesn’t actually sense the relational field like our nervous systems do. It can recognise the significance of it but it doesn’t feel anything.  The mutuality of relationships is that our nervous system is changed by the interactions we have with others.  That fact is exactly what makes human relationships irreplaceable.

That mutuality, that being-changed-by-each-other, is precisely what makes human relationships the irreplaceable thing they are. Real connection leaves marks on both people. That's not a bug. That's the whole point.

There is a longing for ‘we’ that we are all desperately hungry for, that feeling of connection we receive from the nervous system of another human who is able to be with our experience and let it be.

What I believe people are reaching for in therapy, in AI, in every form of connection they can find, is the experience of not being alone with their inner life. Of having it witnessed, held, accompanied by another.

That experience is available. But it lives on the other side of the ‘me’ work. It requires a nervous system that has enough capacity to stay slow when things move fast. To receive when receiving feels vulnerable. To be genuinely present to another person without losing yourself in the process.

That's not a social skill. It's a somatic one that is learnable slowly, in the body, in relationship with others, over time. Which is, perhaps, the most human thing there is.

Permission to be slow

There is a rhythm in the body that most of us have never been taught to feel.  It is actually really hard to feel or listen to.

It is not the rhythm of the heart, though that too. Nor is it the rhythm of the breath, though that is closer. It is actually deeper than both of those and also slower than both.  It is a deep rhythm that feels a bit like it is a tidal movement in the body that pulses beneath everything else. It is two deep rhythms, like a deep tide and a middle tide. Or as my teacher described it is like the ocean, which holds both a surface current and a deep undercurrent. The body carries its own layered rhythms. Both are real. Both carry information.They are deep and they require something most of us have forgotten how to do.

It requires us to slow down enough to feel it.

This year I have been completing training in biodynamic craniosacral therapy, a modality that works with exactly this. What struck me most, is how radically unhurried it is. The touch is extraordinarily light, almost weightless actually. The practitioner's hands don't press or manipulate or fix. They listen. They receive. They create enough stillness that the body's own intelligence can begin to express itself.

Art, Vanessa Palmer, Beneath the Lillies 2019

This is a different kind of healing to the one most of us have been taught to expect.

We come to healing whether it be to therapy, to coaching, to body work, often looking for something to happen. We want the insight, the release, the shift we can point to. We have been trained, particularly those of us who live from our minds, to measure progress by what we can articulate and what we can feel ourselves changing. We are used to effort. We are used to working hard, even at our healing.  I would say that many of my clients work incredibly hard.  They show up, they invest in themselves.  I do this too.  I always have, even with my own healing work.

Craniosacral therapy quietly dismantles all of that. Before the body can heal, it needs to feel safe enough to be itself.

This is not a metaphor. It is a biological reality. The nervous system, particularly one shaped by years of high-functioning stress or early relational difficulty, is not simply waiting to be fixed. It is waiting to be met. It is scanning, constantly, for whether the environment, including the practitioner, is trustworthy enough to soften into.  I talked about this last week in my blog when I was discussing how the nervous system is always scanning for safety in belonging and trying to work out what role it can take up in the social system.  It's the same theme.

Attunement is what creates that safety. Not technique. Not expertise, though expertise matters. But the quality of presence that says, “I am not here to rush you. I am not here to interpret or analyse or pull anything from you. I am here to be with what is”.

There are things the body carries that have no words.

Not because they are mysterious or unknowable but because they arrived before language did, or at a moment when language shut down. Shock held in the diaphragm. Grief folded into the chest. A startle response stuck in the body. The memory of a moment when the body braced and never quite let go.

Talk therapy doesn’t reach this because it deals with what is in the rational and logical part of the brain, not the limbic system and primal brain, where the nervous system lives, that holds all the patterns of bracing, tension or stress we may not be fully aware of. The body stores experience in tissue, in posture, in the patterned way the breath moves or doesn't move. Sometimes what a body most needs is not to be spoken to, but to be touched, with such fine attunement, such precision of presence, that the tissue begins to trust it is safe to release what it has been holding.

This is what the lightness of biodynamic craniosacral touch makes possible. It is not passive. It is listening at a cellular level. It is a hand that says, ‘I can feel you. I am not frightened of what I find. You don't have to do anything’.

That kind of touch is a language. One the body recognises before the mind has time to evaluate it. The body is the most incredible self healer.

What continues to move me, both as a practitioner and as a person who has spent years working with what the body holds. It is not the practitioner doing the healing, it is the person on the table receiving the gentle touch.

The body already knows. It has always known. The intelligence that knows how to close a wound, regulate temperature, move food through the gut without a single conscious instruction from us; that same intelligence knows how to process and integrate experience, when it is given enough safety and enough time.

My job as a somatic practitioner is not to fix. It is to create conditions. To hold space that is regulated, attuned, and unhurried enough that the body's own healing capacity can come online.

Slow is not passive. Slow is the speed at which the nervous system's deepest layers operate. Slow is the speed at which the tidal rhythms of the body move, carrying their information. Slow, it turns out, is where the most profound healing lives.  I have constantly been surprised by how much depth and nuance can be achieved when we slow things down. It allows stress cycles that have been stuck for years to be completed.  It creates a level of unwinding in the body that can only happen when the body is not rushed.  Slow is more. 

If you are someone who has worked hard at your healing; and I suspect many of you reading this are, I want to offer you this.

You are allowed to receive.

Not just information. Not just insight. Not just techniques to practise between sessions. But the quiet, almost-nothing of being held in a regulated, attuned presence and allowed to simply be. The body does not need to be pushed into healing. It needs to be trusted to know the way.

Permission to be slow is not a luxury. For a nervous system that has been organised around effort and vigilance and productivity, it may be the most therapeutic thing on offer.

The tide is always moving. We simply need to learn to feel it.

Trauma, Joy and the Space between

I was reading the newspaper on the weekend and I saw an interview with Bessel van der Kolk.  It was one of those Q and A style interviews and he was talking about MDMA therapy which is very interesting but he was asked a few general questions about trauma.  In one of his responses he said ‘I don’t know a single person who doesn't have trauma’.  This stopped me and it got me thinking about our definitions of trauma, the clinical definitions and then what we understand about it in popular culture.

We've inherited a story about trauma that is too narrow, too dramatic. We imagine it belongs to people who've survived catastrophe, war, abuse, disasters, big accidents.  Yes it is associated with those things but there are many more categories that we work with in somatic experiencing practice.  What I have noticed with many clients is that we place it at a safe distance from ourselves and from our ordinary yet very complex lives.  The reality is most of us carry something we don't have a name for. A tightness that arrives without warning. A habit of bracing. A way of going quiet in rooms where we used to feel at home.

Trauma isn't the story of what happened to us. It's what happened inside of us in response to what happened or a series of things happening.   It is the imprint it left on your nervous system, the way your body learned to brace, to shut down, to stay small, to stay safe. It doesn't care how big or small the event looks from the outside. It only knows what it felt like to be you, in that moment, without enough support or safety to absorb what was happening.

That's a very different thing and when you understand that it changes your meaning making around the topic of trauma.

Because if trauma is that ordinary, that universal, it means we are all, to varying degrees, navigating life with some part of us still keeping watch, still waiting for something or maybe still braced for what might come next.

Sometimes it is also about things that didn’t happen.  Not being attuned to, not feeling like we are being seen or heard.  Not receiving physical touch.  Not feeling like we belong and having to disconnect from what we feel in our body to survive the environment we are in.  

It widens the lens on it a bit doesn’t it?

There is a huge cost to all of this.  It costs us presence. It costs us the easy pleasure of being in our own bodies. It costs us spontaneity, delight, the capacity to be genuinely moved by something beautiful. Not because we don't want those things but because a nervous system that has learned to protect you from pain will, inevitably, protect you from the full depth of joy as well.

Let me tell you what I know about healing.  If trauma lives in the nervous system, so does healing. Healing doesn’t only happen through processing pain, it lives and grows through joy, connection, pleasure and co-regulation.

We seem to have created this story that healing trauma means processing pain and diving into it which is not strictly correct.  In my somatic world it definitely isn’t.  We’ve over-associated healing with pain processing and under-recognised the role of pleasure and connection. I understand why because trauma often narrows interoception; we feel less, or only certain ranges. But did you know that pleasure expands interoception? We begin to feel more safe and co-regulation gives the nervous system a lived experience of safety in relationships.

So joy isn’t superficial, it is regulating, organising and restorative.

Another really inspiring thing happened last week that motivated me to write this blog.  I was watching the Artemis landing and I had been following the astronauts a little when they were in space.  Jeremy Hansen the Canadian astronaut made a comment:

"Our purpose on the planet as humans is to find joy, to find the joy in lifting each other up, by creating solutions together instead of destroying."

He said seeing the Earth from space helped them all realise this.  This brought tears to my eyes, especially with all the crazy shit going on in the world at the moment.

We are not here to be unaffected. We are not here to have gotten it all sorted. We are here, nervous systems and all, to feel as much as we can bear to feel and to help each other bear a little more.  We are here not just to heal ourselves, but to help each other feel safe enough to come back to experience and feel the fullness of life.

This is what helps us metabolise and integrate the overwhelm that we all experience often each day.

This is what I mean when I talk about integration.  It is not fixing, not erasing, not arriving somewhere unblemished. Integration is the slow, patient process of your nervous system finding enough safety to loosen its grip. To let a little more life in. To discover that aliveness is available to you again.

The signs of that are most often quieter than you might expect. A moment when you actually taste your food. A laugh that surprises you from somewhere low in your belly. The ability to receive kindness or a compliment without immediately deflecting it. A morning when your body doesn't feel like something to manage, but something to inhabit.  A changed reaction to regular dysfunctional behaviour you experience from another on the regular.

Coming full circle on my thoughts at the start of the blog, when you understand all of this it really changes how you view all the people that come into your life each day.  I think it brings us more compassion toward each other and it makes us reflect on what we can do to support each other.

When we understand that everyone is carrying something; that the person who cut you off in traffic, the colleague who snapped at you, the friend who disappeared when you needed them, the parent who couldn't quite get it right.  When we understand that all of them are navigating some version of a nervous system that learned to cope, we start to see and feel our world a little differently.  

I am not talking about excusing what isn't okay. I am talking about a kind of tenderness that makes more room for yourself and others. For the whole complicated, tender mess of being human together.

You can't think your way into feeling

Feeling your feelings is harder than it sounds.

We have increasingly found sophisticated ways not to feel. We've all heard it. Just feel your feelings. It sounds so simple , almost obvious. Yet, for most of us, it's one of the hardest things we'll ever do.

Not because we're weak, or broken, or doing something wrong. But because somewhere along the way, we learned that feelings weren't entirely safe. Then, quietly and collectively, we built an entire world that confirmed it.

The interesting thing about feelings is that they show us one simple truth, the body knows first. You know when you walk into the room and sense the emotional climate? That is what I am talking about, the nervous system reads the room first and we feel it.

Feelings aren't thoughts about emotions. They are physical events.

A tightening in the chest. A hollow opening in the stomach. Heat rising in the face. Heaviness settling in the shoulders like something invisible just landed there. The body receives experience first, before the mind has a chance to name it, frame it, or find somewhere useful to put it. Feelings don't live in your head. They live in tissue, in breath, in the subtle language of your nervous system.

So when we talk about avoiding feelings, what we're really talking about is learning to move away from sensation. From the body's own signal system and most of us have been doing it for so long, we don't even notice we're doing it.

The avoidance rarely starts as a choice. For most of us, it began as an inheritance.

We absorbed it from the culture we were born into, a culture that prizes productivity over presence, resilience over vulnerability, and forward motion over the messy, necessary work of actually processing what's happening inside us. “Push through. Stay positive. Don't dwell”. We've dressed emotional suppression up in the language of strength for so long that many people genuinely can't tell the difference between regulation and repression.

The "good vibes only" movement, for all its cheerful intentions, is perhaps the most recent iteration of a very old story; that difficult feelings are a problem to be solved rather than a signal to be heard.

Image - Kellie enjoying the beautiful Alhambra Gardens, a few years ago. A quiet moment of feeling peace, awe and wonder, …….. with an unexpected new friend.

But culture is just the backdrop. The more intimate teaching happens closer to home.

In many families, emotions, particularly big, difficult ones, were not something that could safely exist in the shared space. Not because parents were cruel, but because they were human; carrying their own unprocessed histories, their own unmet needs, their own nervous systems doing the best they could.

Children are exquisitely attuned to the emotional climate of their home. They feel the tension before anyone speaks. They notice the shift in atmosphere when a particular topic is raised. They learn, with remarkable speed, which feelings are welcome and which ones make the air go strange.

So they adapt. They make themselves smaller. They learn to swallow the tears, contain the anger, perform the calm. Not because they were told to, though sometimes they were, but because they felt what happened in the room when they didn't. The withdrawal. The anxiety. The subtle but unmistakable signal that this was too much.

This is not a failure of the child. It is a profound act of adaptation. The child keeps the peace. The child holds the system together. The child learns that their inner world is less important than the emotional stability of the adults around them. The problem with this is it is not the child’s role in the family system to hold space. They don’t have the capacity in their own bodies to do this. Their nervous systems grow well when they have support and co-regulation for parents and caregivers.

That learning doesn't leave when we grow up. It becomes the architecture of how we relate to ourselves.

For some, this went even further. Perhaps there was a parent who struggled, with depression, with alcohol, with the weight of their own unresolved grief. Perhaps the emotional temperature of the household was genuinely unpredictable, and learning to monitor and manage it became a matter of felt safety.

These children became extraordinarily skilled at reading other people. They developed a finely calibrated sensitivity to mood, to need, to the earliest signs of distress in those around them. They learned to intervene before things escalated. To soothe, to deflect, to become whatever the moment required.

What they didn't learn was how to turn that same attention inward.

When your nervous system is organised around tracking others, when your survival, in some early and embodied sense, depended on getting that right , your own feelings become background noise at best. At worst, they feel like a liability. An indulgence. Something to be attended to only once everyone else is okay.

Which, of course, is never. Because these choices were intelligent strategies that our nervous system made, that helped us survive moments when protection, choice and support was missing. Over time they become habituated responses, very strong neural pathways that keep us alive. Those intelligent responses live in the nervous system and tissues; muscles stay contracted, breath stays shallow and the body stuck in a fight response, prepared for a fight that is no longer happening.

Culturally we started to notice in workplaces that we had a problem with poor emotional regulation and here's where it gets interesting.

Emotional disconnection, burnout, relational breakdown, it became impossible to ignore so we developed a response and we called it Emotional Intelligence.

We built frameworks. Competency models. Training programmes. We gave people a vocabulary for their inner world and a five-step process for navigating it. In many ways, it was very well-intentioned a genuine attempt to bring feeling back into professional and personal life. I want to say I think it is brilliant that organisations started to highlight this because left to their own devices, many people wound never come across this content. As I always say, you have to start somewhere.

But look at what we actually did. We took the most embodied, relational, lived thing there is and…. we put it in a PowerPoint. We made emotion into a skill to be optimised. Name the feeling, manage the feeling, deploy the feeling strategically. Which means it's still, fundamentally, a head operation. You're just thinking about feelings in a more sophisticated way. The body, where the feeling actually lives, barely gets a mention.

Emotions arise from the nervous system particularly the limbic system. This is a different part of the brain to the neo-cortex which is receiving this powerpoint information, which is all about logic and reason. If you want to build emotional capacity you have to work with those parts of the brain where implicit memory lives and you do it through the language of the nervous system, which we call ‘The felt sense’.

This, I think, tells you everything about how deep the conditioning runs. That even our solution to emotional disconnection had to be made safe by intellectualising it. We couldn't let it be messy and bodily and unquantifiable. It had to have a score. A framework. A return on investment.

We looked at the problem of not feeling and responded by finding a more sophisticated way to not feel. There is a huge cost of staying ‘just north of yourself’.

When we consistently move away from sensation, the feelings don't disappear. They go underground deep into our unconscious. They show up as anxiety without a clear source, as a vague flatness, as a body that's always tense for no reason you can name. They emerge sideways in sudden irritability, in chronic pain, in the persistent sense that something is off even when life looks fine on paper.

There's also a quieter cost. When we numb or bypass the difficult feelings, we inadvertently turn down the volume on the good ones too. Joy becomes harder to access. Aliveness feels further away. We go through the motions of a full life while feeling strangely absent from it.

Perhaps most poignantly, when we can't feel our own experience, we cannot feel others’ and we struggle to feel genuinely met by others. The connection we most want keeps glancing off a surface we've spent years polishing smooth. In relationships this is a major driver of loneliness because we cannot connect with our emotions let alone talk about them and share what is deep in our heart with another. That level of vulnerability is terrifying.

The body keeps the ledger, it waits, sometimes for decades, for the conditions to be safe enough to finally put some of it down.

We often talk about feeling feelings as though it's a matter of bravery of simply deciding to stop avoiding and diving in. But that framing misses something important.

Feeling, especially for those of us who learned early to move away from sensation, is a capacity that needs to be built. The nervous system needs to learn, slowly and with support, that it can be with experience without being overwhelmed by it. That sensation can be felt and survived. That there is enough space, enough ground, enough steadiness to actually let something land.

This is the heart of the somatic work I do with people. Not pushing into feeling, but gently expanding what can be experienced without the system needing to flee. It's slow work. It requires patience, curiosity, and a willingness to be a beginner in your own inner life.

It is some of the most important work I know.

Somatic work doesn’t force patterns to disappear it meets them with careful pacing and respect. Healing begins when we attend closely to the physiology and introduce layers of support that were not present in the original moment: co-regulation, steadiness, choice, support and the permission to be and move ever so slowly. Slow is more in somatic healing.

The nervous system begins to soften and loosen. It realises that it is no longer in a fight and the body learns that it does not have to hang on so tightly. The support that was missing is finally here.

If any of this resonates, here's a gentle place to start. The next time you notice an urge to reach for your phone, or to get suddenly very busy, or to launch into problem-solving mode, pause. Just for a moment.

Ask: what's happening in my body right now?

You don't need to feel everything. You don't need to go anywhere overwhelming. Just notice. A breath. A tightening. A warmth. A nothing.

That small, curious turn toward the body, that noticing, is the beginning of coming home to yourself.

This is unlike anything you'll find in a competency framework, nobody can teach it to you from the outside. It has to be lived, slowly, from within.

If you would like some support and learn how to build this capacity so that you have more energy to cope with what life throws your way, come talk to me.

Some reflections on Nostalgia and Collective Grief

There’s a trend circulating at the moment on social media. “Mum and Dad… what were you like in the 90s?” People are posting old photos, grainy images, oversized denim, sun-faded afternoons. There’s something almost tender about it. A collective wistfulness and I’ve noticed it in myself too.

Recently, I’ve been watching Ryan Murphy’s series on John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. There’s something about it, the aesthetic, the pace, the feeling that evokes a different era. A quieter one. It stirs something. Not just memory but something deeper. The visuals evoke memories of my twenties living in London in the UK and times I visited New York in that time period.

Nostalgia is a slow form of grief where time shifts without our awareness. Chapters of our life end really quietly without much self awareness whilst we are living them. There are people, places and versions of ourselves that we never really got to say goodbye to, because we didn’t realise that we were at the end of something, until it was over.

We don’t really think of nostalgia as grief. Many of us learned that nostalgia was fondness or sentimentality. The yearning for the good old days. It is a felt sense, it’s very somatic; our senses are the gateway to our memories. A song comes on and reminds you of a time and place. You smell something and a whole era of your life comes flooding back. You might come across an old photo and as you look at it you remember the version of yourself that you see in your hand. How it felt to be that version of you. Sometimes you miss that version of yourself and sometimes you smile and think I am glad I am past all of that.

A few mornings ago, I was walking with my 17-year-old son. He’s been feeling the weight of the world lately like many young people are. The complexity of it. The uncertainty. The constant stream of information that never really lets the nervous system settle.

And he asked me: “What was life like when you were 17, Mum?” So I told him about 1989. There were no mobile phones or internet. You rang your friends on the house phone and hoped they were home. People turned up when they said they would and most of the time you waited. We used to spend a lot of time waiting around for each other. Shops were closed on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Nights were quieter. Life moved more slowly. As I spoke, I could feel something in my body soften. What was strengthened in our nervous system when we waited around was a greater capacity for uncertainty and a quiet trust that connection would come.

Digital image, Kellie Stirling. Waiting for our friends by the clocks.

Not because everything was better, it wasn’t. But because something about the pace of life was different. It was a little more contained, less exposed and relentless. I think that’s part of what we’re feeling when we experience nostalgia at the moment.

It’s often described as longing for the past but I don’t think we’re really longing for a decade. I think we’re longing for that felt sense. A way of being in ourselves when the world moved differently.

Later that day, I was in the car with my sons. My eldest, who’s nearly 20 and an engineering student at University, was driving. We were talking about fuel shortages and what might change in the future, electric cars, shifting systems, renewable energy options, the way the world is having to adapt.

I found myself asking: “What do you think we’ll learn from this?” He said, quite simply: “I think people have to realise that the only way we’re going to get through this is together. We have to collaborate. We have to support each other. We’ve got to change.”

I felt it land in my body as he spoke because in that moment, something shifted. Nostalgia looks back. But what he named looks forward. We can’t recreate the conditions of the 90s. The world is more interconnected now. It is more complex and demanding on our attention, our nervous systems, our capacity to process.

The slower pace we remember wasn’t just a lifestyle it was an environment that offered a kind of built-in regulation. There was less information, stimulation. and there were more natural boundaries between “on” and “off.”

That world doesn’t exist in the same way anymore. So the question isn’t, how do we go back? It’s: ‘How do we live well here? Perhaps this is where nostalgia becomes something more than wistfulness. Maybe it becomes a kind of remembering. Remembering not of a time but of what mattered and what was valued.

There was connection, presence and rhythm. It felt a little more spacious for our nervous systems and there was more connection and time spent in different types of community.

We are being asked to express those things differently now, not through simplicity, fewer inputs or retreating from the world, but through conscious collaboration with greater discernment. By learning how to stay connected within it.

What my son named, in that simple sentence, is something I see in my work every day. Whether I’m working with leaders, couples, or individuals navigating change the same truth emerges: we regulate in relationship and we find our way through complexity together.

So maybe the nostalgia many of us experiencing at the moment isn’t asking us to return to the past.

Maybe it’s helping us feel what we’re missing, so we can choose how to bring it forward. We may not get the slower world back, but we can create moments of slowness. We may not escape the complexity but we can learn to meet it with others, rather than alone.

I think perhaps that is the quiet invitation underneath all of this; not to go back but to become more intentional about how we live now.

Together.

When the Roots are revealed

A nervous system reflection on collective disgust, power, and disillusionment

There are moments when the collective emotional field shifts.  You can feel it, not just in headlines or conversations, but in the body. A heaviness. A tightening. A quiet sense of repulsion that sits somewhere in the triad of disgust, anger and grief.  Lately there has been a lot of upheaval in our lives and lots of information revealed that has frankly, shocked many of us to our core.

It is not just the big stuff.  I feel like every day I read the newspaper or look online and something about the abuse of power is there.

So it is not surprising that many people have been describing feelings of disgust, disbelief, and despair as more information circulates about powerful people, networks, and systems that appear far more complex and paradoxically far more human than we once imagined.

The reactions are strong and they make sense because this isn’t just an intellectual response.

It is a nervous system response and we notice that the body knows before the mind can explain.

When people feel disgust, the body is doing something very specific.

Disgust is a boundary emotion.  It is the nervous system saying, this is not safe, it has crossed a line and I need distance.  Disgust is an interesting emotion because it doesn’t say fight, it says move away.  Our visceral reactions with disgust are often really strong; recoiling, nausea, tightening in the throat and gut, facial expressions that close down intake.  It is like our body is saying, ‘do not ingest this’.  Which makes sense when you think that disgust evolved evolutionarily to protect us from contamination, like rotten food or toxins.  When you explore it psychologically that same neural circuitry extends to moral violations, ethical breaches, abuses of power and relational betrayal.  So when people feel disgust at certain events or revelations, the nervous system is experiencing something more than ‘this is wrong’.  It is experiencing a very different message.  The message is more ‘this feels contaminating to my sense of safety or moral order’.

It is a little bit different to anger.  Which we then might experience closely after it.  Anger is a mobilising energy that wants to restore integrity or fairness.  After that, for many if anger offers us no respite, then comes something heavier.  A flattening, fatigue and often a sense of despair. The moment when the body recognises that the systems involved feel too large to influence.

Now lets think about disillusionment for a minute. At a nervous system level, disillusionment isn’t just disappointment. It’s the moment when something we were orienting toward; a person, system, belief, or story, no longer provides stability. The illusion wasn’t just an idea, It was an organising principle that helped shape our mental models of how things are, how we perceive everything works together.

So when it falls away, the body momentarily loses its map. You might feel a drop in energy, a slowing or flattening, maybe heaviness in the chest or a kind of internal ‘oh…’ that comes with a sinking feeling in your belly. It is almost like our body is saying ‘I don’t know where to place my trust now’. With disillusionment, it is like relational disappointment and so we might be feeling something like a micro grief because we are carrying sadness rather than outrage (or maybe outrage too!). It might feel like we are grieving the certainty, innocence and simplicity we once knew.

In the context of what we are experiencing with information revealing abuse of power, these responses are not signs that something is wrong with us. They are signs that our bodies are orienting to what feels morally and relationally unsafe.

When trust and power collide

Human beings are wired to seek safety through connection.  Connection with trusted structures like families, communities, organisations, leaders, institutions.  When those structures feel compromised, the impact is deeper than opinion or politics.

It can feel like an attachment rupture at a collective level.

Deep inside of us we ask, Who can we trust now?  What is actually true?  How do we orient in the world?

In my work with teams and leadership systems, I often see a similar dynamic. When trust breaks in a leadership group, the entire nervous system of the team shifts. People become hypervigilant, cynical, or withdrawn. Energy that once went toward creativity or collaboration turns toward self-protection.

In society, the collective field behaves much the same way.

Digital art, Kellie Stirling

Another way we can look at it is by using a metaphor; The forest and the storm.

Sometimes a forest looks healthy from a distance.  The canopy is full and the trees stand tall. When we zoom up above and look down, everything appears stable.

But a storm arrives, and suddenly weak branches fall. Rot hidden deep within the roots is exposed. What seemed solid reveals its fragility.  The storm did not create the decay, it simply revealed what was already there.

This is often how systemic realities come into awareness not all at once, but through moments that expose the invisible networks of power, proximity, and influence that shape human systems.  The discomfort people feel is partly the shock of seeing complexity where we once wanted simplicity.

Living with complexity without collapsing

Our nervous systems like clear categories: good or bad, safe or unsafe, hero or villain.

Complexity asks more of us.  It asks us to hold multiple truths at once that people can be influential and flawed, connected and compromised, admired and deeply human.  It is asking us to hold the tension of polarity, of competing priorities.

When this ambiguity becomes too much, we tend to move toward extremes.  It can look like outrage that burns hot and fast or sometimes numbness that shuts us down.  Often we protect ourselves by demonstrating cynicism that protects us from disappointment.

But there is another possibility, a slower and more embodied stance.  That is Witnessing.

Not bypassing what we feel. Not rushing to certainty. Simply allowing the body to register what is present while staying connected to our capacity for discernment.

Staying human in a dysregulated world

When collective stories stir strong emotional responses, it helps to come back to what our nervous systems can actually hold. To orient to the present moment and to notice where we still have agency.  Can we find where we have choice in how we speak, how we relate, how we show up in our own circles of influence?

Systems change slowly and nervous systems change slowly too.  Often the most grounded response is not to harden, but to stay soft enough to feel, while strong enough to hold boundaries.

How can we rejuvenate and grow in the face of decay, how can we hold space for it?

In nature, decay is not the end of the story.  When something breaks down, it creates space for renewal. Nutrients return to the soil. New growth becomes possible.  Perhaps this is also true in human systems.  Moments that expose cracks in our collective structures can feel deeply uncomfortable, even destabilising, but they also invite reflection.

We can ask ourselves what kind of leadership we want to grow now within ourselves and what values we choose to root into, even when trust feels fragile.  The work is not only to witness what has been revealed.  It is to stay human, grounded, discerning, and connected as the system reorganises around us. The more we can stay in peace and calm and maintain a clear focus, the more easily we can navigate this time.  Can we stay connected to a vision of a much more compassionate and loving world for all of us as familiar systems shift and reshape around us?

If you are struggling at the moment with the chaos of the world, here are some reflection questions for you.

What sensations arise in your body when something feels morally confronting?

What helps you stay grounded and discerning when trust feels fragile?

What kind of leadership are you choosing to embody in your own sphere right now?

The kings and queens of the push through

I tend to work with a lot of high achievers who come to me in midlife in a quandary. They are either burned out, they have lost their motivation or they have lost their inner compass. They are incredibly capable people. Brilliant creatives, leaders and thinkers, the people everyone relies on to get the job done or come up with the solution.

When they come to me there is something fundamental happening underneath, deep in their system, that they can’t solve or workout. They have lost connection with their deepest needs and desires. Their emotions, what they value, what is important to them has become fuzzy. Something is wrong in their world and they cannot put their finger on it. They are overly tired or have lost their zest. This drives them crazy, they feel like a failure because they are so used to solving all the problems. They love solving problems and creating value.

It is a body in freeze.

For many of us, we are still functioning and functional freeze is the nervous system’s quiet survival strategy: a blend of dorsal vagal shutdown with just enough sympathetic activation to keep you moving, performing, achieving.

You look “fine,” you produce, you deliver, you impress people but you have lost connection with your internal world. You’re upright, responsive, competent but you feel dead on the inside. No real vitality, internal pulse or felt sense of self.

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling, People thawing their freeze

For many overachievers, this becomes the air they breathe until their body says No, not any more. Often it happens at midlife.

So how does this overachieving freeze pattern start?

Well most overachievers learned early in their life that there needs were either: inconvenient, ignored, criticised, overwhelming to caregivers, unsafe to express or simply too much.

So they adapted in the only way their system knew how, they turned down the volume on their body and turned up the volume on their mind. They became brilliant, fast processors, high-capacity thinkers. They became the problem-solvers, the responsible ones, the reliable ones.

But brilliance built on freeze has a cost. We stop listening to the signals from our body. We stop listening to the signs of tiredness, of what a NO feels like in our body. We learn to override our basic impulses. It is not coincidence. Is is a pattern.

Productivity culture is built on functional freeze.

We applaud over-functioning and self-sacrifice. We reward output and speed and we celebrate people who “just keep pushing through”. I think a lot of Gen X’ers learned to do this early, because in their teenage years they spent a lot of time on their own and just had to get on with life.

We call this excellent work ethic, resilience or commitment. But what if much of what we call “productivity” is actually a socially-validated freeze response?

I have had so many clients, mid forties to late fifties, post-menopausal, who make a big career change and then come to me saying, I don’t know what is wrong with me, I just feel out of sorts. I get stuff done, I am a doer. Nothing is wrong with any of them. Their body has just simply stopped cooperating with the override. Or guys who come to me and say they know their life has to change, they are on the precipice of existential change but they don’t know where to start.

When you have spent decades powering through the classic, go, go go. Your body has a way of bringing you back into right relationship with it. As we age, our hormonal cocktail starts to change and menopause has a way of stripping down and highlighting our compensatory strategies. The freeze structure that held everything together began to collapse. Remember the developmental challenge of midlife is radical honesty, come back to the truth of who you really are.

Gently and slowly we work together to slow down. My client's nervous system immediately start to show what they have been trying to outrun. The survival strategies that were created as children to stay safe aren’t working anymore. Their body is setting a boundary. The freeze is ready to be thawed.

This is why burnout in midlife spikes.

Women lose hormonal scaffolding that kept them overriding their body. and men hit existential thresholds where achievement can’t fill the inner void. Our careers peak while capacity starts to decline. Many parents carry the emotional and logistical load for teens and ageing parents. and many of us find the nervous system can’t run the childhood strategy anymore.

People think they’re falling apart. But what’s falling apart is the freeze, not the person. Burnout is both exhaustion and it’s the breakdown of the freeze scaffold. Burnout is the point where the body says, “I’m not going to keep doing this.”

Overachievers don’t lose their motivation they lose their override strategy. When the freeze starts to thaw, we start to feel all the things we have been pushing down for years. The anger, fatigue, hunger, sadness, longing, boundaries, desire and our No.

For many overachievers learning what a No feels like in their body can be a big revelation.

Many overachievers are very creative. They have lots of ideas. They get excited by their ideas, creatively, strategically, intellectually their mind is alive. They can get flooded by them too and want to put them all into action. Not doing so feels like a failure. Something I have learned personally that I help my clients with is our freeze makes us believe these ideas have to be acted on.

Every impulse becomes pressure, every spark becomes a project, every inspiration becomes responsibility something we feel we absolutely must do. This is where burnout can accelerate.

One of the most powerful shifts in my own midlife has been learning that you don’t have to act on every idea. You can feel it, sit with it and let it breathe.

Sometimes an idea is complete simply by being witnessed. Sometimes it is enough to journal it, or talk it through with a colleague or friend. Sometimes you just have to write it down and let it sit for a few months.

This is how you slowly retrain your system, that not every idea has to be acted on. You start to rewire your nervous system and you will notice that the compulsion to act will turn into more capacity. The pressure to act can turn into being present, and the need for action will become digestion.

To come out of functional freeze we work slowly, relationally and somatically. We learn to track micro-sensations and small pulses of movement. We learn how to set tiny boundaries, small steps at a time. We learn how to titrate our life. Small changes 1% more each day. We learn to enjoy receiving the co-regulation from our somatic therapists and/or coaches. We start to notice we are slowing down, 1% more each day and then we can recognise that rest isn’t a weakness it is a signal. We start to notice, that we are noticing how we feel and we let our ideas sit and percolate rather than having to act on them.

Most importantly we learn that our value isn’t earned by producing. Value is inherent because you are here, you are alive. Your body is your home, your garden, your temple. It is not a machine.

Your needs matter.

Lying in the Dark

One of the things I find most interesting is that we are all, on some level, afraid of the dark. I don’t mean the literal dark, like the night. I mean we are afraid of dark emotionality, dark times, dark moods, that dark place we go when we our life is changing dramatically, death. We are afraid of all that dark.

What I find so striking is that the dark isn’t foreign to us. It’s the first home we ever had. Before we had language, consciousness and identity, we were held in a warm, fluid, completely dark womb.

For nine months, the dark was our sanctuary. We were nourished, protected, and completely connected without ever seeing a thing. We didn’t need sight to feel safe, or light to orient. Our bodies knew how to rest and grow in the dark.

Isn’t it ironic that we spend the rest of our lives fearing the very place we began?

Popular culture treats the dark as something dangerous or disorienting, a space where we lose ourselves. But from a somatic perspective, the dark is often where we find ourselves again. Because the dark asks nothing of us. It doesn’t demand performance, productivity, clarity, or answers.

The dark invites us to rest, to slow into ourselves and just be.

The dark womb is an archetype of profound safety, not because it is soft and easy, but because it strips away everything that is unnecessary. In the dark, we are not seen for what we do. We are held for who we are.

Maybe that’s the deeper truth; the dark isn’t here to frighten us, it’s here to return us to ourselves.

There are seasons in life when everything familiar falls away. Not by choice or spiritual aspiration but because life itself becomes a burning ground. My cancer journey was one of those seasons.

I remember feeling stripped bare, not just physically, but emotionally and existentially. It wasn’t simply the fear or the medical complexity. It was the sense of being dismantled at every layer. The parts of me that used to hold me together stopped working. My usual ways of coping fell away. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide inside myself. In fact, I found the best place to be was in the present. I must admit that it felt like being dropped into the dark womb of the world and strangely, or maybe not that strangely at all, that’s exactly where the healing began.

We all have experiences in life where we feel like everything is being burned down and we are going to fall into our own dark hole. You don’t need to have cancer to experience this. Midlife, menopause, divorce, grief, trauma healing, big career transitions, or sometimes all the above at the same time. The thing is they all bring us to the same threshold.

That threshold is a place where you realise you can no longer be who you were, you feel rudderless, but if you can stick with it you have this deep sense of knowing that you are being carved into who you truly are. You are becoming yourself.

While this process can feel brutal, it’s also profoundly sacred.

Sometimes life breaks us open so the truth can finally be felt. Sometimes life drags us into the dark so we can be remade. Sometimes life strips us bare so we can emerge more honest, more embodied, and more deeply alive.

When we come through the other side of these big life transitions, we often notice that yes we are still here, but we are not the same person we were before. We will never be that person again.

There will be parts of you that survive and are the same, there are parts that are gone and there are new parts of you that are being birthed.

During my treatment I spent my days resting and I read a lot. I came across Meggan Watterson’s Divine Feminine Cards (which are great by the way) and within them I found the archetype of the Black Madonna. I would shuffle the cards and many times she would just drop out.

The Black Madonna, archetypally, represents the power we all have to emerge from dark times transformed. Jungian Analyst, Marion Woodman believes that the Black Madonna represents a new awareness or consciousness toward out bodies. She represents the wisdom we can only gain when we go through the painful fires of transformation.

The Black Madonna is not the soft, glowing mother of the light. She is the fierce mother of the dark.

She is the one who meets us in our descent, not to pull us out, but to sit with us in the shadow until something true emerges. She is the archetype of the underworld, the womb, the ashes, the grief that breaks us open.

By connecting with this energy I can tell you that I felt spiritually held; not by something that promised rescue, but by something that promised presence.

The Black Madonna taught me that the dark is not a punishment. It’s a crucible. A crucible is what alchemists used to melt down metals to turn them into gold. The dark and our grief that often comes with it, are a crucible, a container that holds us.

So what burned away for me? Well a few things, a compulsion to hold everything together and the pressure I put upon myself to be endlessly available, a need to make other people comfortable and identity shaped by survival rather than by my soul. What emerged and was born was a quieter and steadier self with clarity about what actually matters, a deeper respect for the wisdom of my body and its profound capacity to heal, an acceptance in the fragility of life whilst at the same time being able to hold a deep trust in life.

The darkness, the feeling of burning down or being stripped bare, it wasn’t destruction it was actually refinement.

If you are in your own dark season right now, feeling like you are burning down, or you are lying down in a hole and can’t move, I want you to know this. What is burning down or being stripped away was never meant to be there.

Like the Black Madonna, the dark can hold you whilst you let go of whatever you need to. It is not to rush you or rescue you, but to support you and witness your becoming.

Because sometimes the most loving thing life can do to us is strip us bare so we can finally see ourselves clearly.

Ancestral Trauma and the Midlife Body

How midlife awakens the ancestral stories we carry in our bodies

Midlife has a way of loosening what’s been tightly held. As our hormonal landscape shifts, things that once stayed neatly tucked away, old grief, inherited fear, unspoken stories, they begin to rise. This isn’t failure or falling apart. It’s the body’s way of inviting us to heal what has been carried for generations.

Our body is the keeper of our stories, and sometimes it holds the stories of our ancestors that came before us. We know through research on epigenetics that this is true.

Sometimes the ache we feel didn’t start with us. Sometimes the heaviness in our chest, the tightness in our belly, or the deep tiredness that no amount of rest can soothe, belongs to a story that was never ours to carry. We are born into other people’s stories.

We inherit much more than eye colour and bone structure from our ancestors. We also inherit their nervous systems. This is shaped by the environments, events, and relationships that came before us. The body remembers what the mind forgets.

What is Ancestral Trauma?

Ancestral trauma refers to the transmission of unprocessed emotional pain, fear, or survival patterns from one generation to the next. These are not always passed down as explicit stories. More often, they live in silences, in the shape of a family’s nervous system, or in the ways we unconsciously learn to stay safe. Ancestral Trauma lives in the body’s tissues, rhythms and reflexes.

It can show up in many different ways. Chronic tension that never seems to release, or maybe a tendency to over-function, taking responsibility for everyone else’s wellbeing. Or for some it is deep fatigue or burnout that isn’t fixed by rest.

“When you heal the wound in yourself, you heal the wound of generations before you and generations after you.”
— Michael Meade

A grandmother who survived war may never speak of what she endured, but her vigilance might live on in a granddaughter who finds it hard to relax. I have worked with many women who come to me and say they literally cannot stop working and rest, even though their body is screaming out for it and they don’t understand why. The pattern often lies in what has been inherited in their autonomic nervous system.
A father who grew up in scarcity may raise children who, even in abundance, feel guilty resting or taking up space. These imprints are adaptive, they helped someone survive once. But what was once protection can become limitation when it’s no longer needed.

Why does this show up in midlife?

To be fair it can show up earlier. It is just that in midlife, part of our developmental challenge is to come back to the truth of who we really are. This impulse can show up in a myriad of ways. Many people ignore it, so it will hang around until they pay attention. In my experience with my clients, there is a deep discomfort with life and a strong impulse or urge to seek more meaning, purpose, or something different. They find they cannot continue on the way they have been travelling so far.

As our hormonal landscape changes, our emotional landscape does too. The hormones that once buffered and balanced our stress responses shift, and the body’s elegant system of containment begins to loosen. Things that once slipped neatly under the surface start to rise. Old grief, ancestral sorrow, unprocessed experiences; they all start knocking on the door of awareness. So it is not that life suddenly gets harder it is that what has been kept buried in the dark, suddenly starts knocking on the door asking to be seen. While this can initially feel unsettling, it’s also profoundly healing. The body, in its own divine timing, invites us to metabolise what we’ve inherited, so we can step into the next chapter lighter and more integrated.

Our body is a storyteller.

In my work, I see how ancestral stories express themselves somatically. The body carries what hasn’t yet been felt or integrated. Chronic tension, gut and reproductive issues, or a sense of deep fatigue, often emerge as the body’s way of trying to resolve inherited stress.

I’ve worked with many women who, even after hysterectomy or menopause, still hold a palpable energetic imprint in the womb space. These might be a story of loss, silencing, or generational grief that predates their own experiences. When the body is met with compassion and attunement, those old imprints can begin to release. What was frozen starts to move.

Healing doesn’t always mean understanding the exact story, it means restoring a sense of safety so the body no longer has to carry it alone and the pattern that has been long held, can be expressed and completed because there is enough of a felt sense of safety in the body for it to let what has been stuck, be released.

Recognising that an inherited pattern lives within us is not about blame or burden, it’s about freedom. When we see that our over-responsibility, perfectionism, or shutdown might have roots in someone else’s survival, we can meet it with compassion rather than self-judgment. In that awareness, something softens.
We begin to relate to our own patterns differently, not as flaws to fix, but as messages from the body inviting us to complete what was once incomplete.

It is important to remember that these patterns and imprints you inherit, they come from survival and they also come from love. A mother’s hypervigilance was once love and protection of herself and her family. A grandfather’s stoicism was a protective response, grounded in love to protect himself and his family system. They did the best with what they had to keep surviving.

The ripple of healing.

The beauty of this work is: when we heal, we don’t just heal for ourselves. The nervous system reorganises and recalibrates. We slowly and gently start to change how we show up in relationships, in our families, and in our communities. That healing ripples backward and forward . It honours those who came before, and is freeing to those who will come after us.

Ancestral healing is not a thinking activity it is a somatic and relational one. The best therapeutic modalities to heal it are somatic experiencing, internal family systems, somatic attachment work like NARM, family constellations work and ritual, ceremony and nature based practices. Rarely is it one modality. It is often a few woven together to integrate, depending on what is showing up for an individual.

Ultimately the goal is about restoring flow and connection, within the body, within the family system and within the wider relational field of our lives.

As you read this, gently place a hand on your heart or your belly.
Feel your breath, and remember; you are part of a long line of survivors and lovers and dreamers.
What might shift if you allowed your body to trust that it no longer has to hold it all alone?

Burnout, chronic stress and boundaries

Every week, I meet people who are utterly exhausted, not because they or aren’t capable, but because they’re working inside systems with no boundaries left. Restructures, shifting roles, endless “transformations”, it’s like the organisation itself is in permanent fight-or-flight, constantly reacting to the next thing.

Many people finding it almost impossible to get into the ‘meaty’ parts of their role, they are simply skirting along the top, doing the things they have to do to keep functioning. Inside that chaos, people are expected to just keep pushing and pushing until their bodies finally say, no more.

They lose touch with the ability to listen to their body’s boundaries or they notice them and ignore them. When you are bored, exhausted, shutdown or unmotivated, that is a boundary. The body is saying no, not for me.

Chronic stress traps the body in survival states, fight, flight, freeze or eventually collapse. Over time, we lose connection with our most basic autonomic cues, those subtle sensations that tell us when to rest, pause, or say no.

We override those messages so often that “pushing through” becomes who we are. The nervous system becomes so used to being “on” that stillness feels unsafe.

Many of my clients tell me they don’t even know what rested feels like anymore, they only know the space between deadlines. When they start slowing down in our sessions, they’re often deeply moved by the experience. It’s as if their body finally exhales. They realise they haven’t felt that kind of slowness, safety, and presence for years.

The Myth of Resilience

In my experience, most organisations completely misunderstand resilience. They talk about “building resilience” as if it’s about pushing through, grinding harder, or coping better with dysfunction.

But nervous system resilience isn’t about endurance, it’s about return. It’s the capacity to come back into your window of tolerance, that place where you feel calm, connected, and curious, after you experienced hyper or hypoarousal in your autonomic nervous system. That’s where perspective returns, creativity awakens, and we can actually relate to others instead of reacting from stress.

Pushing through isn’t resilience. It’s disconnection disguised as dedication.

Systemic Boundaries and the Body

When an organisation has poor systemic boundaries, no clear priorities, constant change, or unrealistic expectations, people end up carrying the system’s chaos in their own bodies. The organisation offloads its dysregulation onto its people.

A nervous system can’t heal without stabilisation, neither can a culture. We need workplaces that honour pause, stabilisation, containment, and rhythm, the same sequence that helps a nervous system recover from chronic stress. Stabilisation creates the ground. Containment provides safety. Rhythm restores flow.
Without that, burnout isn’t a personal failure, it’s a systemic inevitability.

When Agility becomes agitation

Many workplaces today pride themselves on being “agile”; always pivoting, always moving. But without true systems thinking capability, agility easily turns into agitation. Instead of responding intelligently to what’s happening, organisations start grinding, pushing, and reacting. People carry the cost, through exhaustion, disconnection, and burnout.

So instead of becoming more fluid and responsive, organisations become hyper-reactive. They confuse activity with progress, speed with strategy, and flexibility with chaos. When leaders can’t see the system as a living organism, with cycles, rhythms, and interdependencies, they unconsciously perpetuate stress throughout the whole structure.

Without true systems thinking capability, “agility” gets flattened into constant motion, change for change’s sake, rather than mindful adaptation. When we don’t understand the organisational system as a living system, we keep driving it past its own capacity. The solution isn’t to become more efficient; it’s to become more attuned.

Healing from burnout and chronic stress isn’t about bouncing back; it’s about coming home. It is remembering what it feels like to inhabit your own body again, to breathe, to rest, to notice. It is about understanding what a Yes and a No feels like in your body. It is feeling safe to be slow.

True resilience begins when we stop pushing through and start listening, to ourselves, to each other, and to the quiet wisdom of our own biology.

If you are feeling overworked, overwhelmed or burned out, it is a reminder to take time out for yourself. Take a mini break. Notice your breath. Notice when your body tightens, braces, speeds up, or checks out. That’s your nervous system whispering that you’re at the edge of your window of tolerance.

For leaders and organisations, it’s time to redefine resilience, not as pushing through, but as coming back home to ourselves. Back to stabilisation. Back to rhythm. Back to the wisdom of the body, individual and collective.

Because when the system learns to breathe again, everyone within it can too.

Why the feminine is the change maker - part 2

Last week I started this conversation about why the feminine energy in our culture tends to be the instigator of change. I know this is not always true but I do find that many women whether by choice or force of life events, tend to explore themselves deeply and the fact that we have this deep inner knowing which I talked about in last week’s blog which means we tend to read the ‘tea leaves’ and know when it’s time for change.

Anecdotally, when I think about all the training and professional development I have done over the years, there has always been a much higher percentage of female participants than male participants and so we notice this and we talk about it. You could complain about it and say men don’t do the hard work, but I don’t think this is entirely true because I have lots of male clients and friends who have committed to exploring themselves, but to be honest it is usually after something going really wrong in their lives. Maybe it is that it is women who are the instigators of change in relationships, in families, in cultures. Many studies of couples on relationships and marriages consistently show that around 70% of divorces are instigated by women.

There are many ways we can explore why this happens and I always love taking a Jungian lens on what is actually happening because it always explores the shadow side of everything which I find super interesting. If we look through a Jungian lens, It is always the masculine within the feminine that changes first. In Jungian parlance, the animus (the inner masculine in a woman) seeks direction, clarity, and forward motion. When a woman begins her transformation (say, through grief, menopause, creativity, or awakening), it’s often her inner masculine that reorients first, perhaps by finding new values, boundaries, or purpose. Once that internal alignment shifts, her outer relationships must also adjust. How I notice this in clients is they cannot pretend to be anything other than their authentic selves anymore and this often causes friction in different relationships in their lives as this authentic self in them is emerging. Things can be a bit wobbly for a while as she finds comfort with meeting these new parts of self.

And yes, often this catalyses change in the masculine partner or in the wider system. But not always right away. Sometimes the feminine awakens and moves first, and the masculine (whether internal or external) resists or lags—until it feels safe or necessary to catch up. That friction can either break the container or refine it.

Digital image - Womb in the Sky, Kellie Stirling

Why does the feminine change first?

In the simplest form, we are the ones who can create life and give birth to that. Even beyond biological birth, the feminine is the archetypal womb—the container that holds, gestates, dissolves, and re-emerges. This role isn’t limited to women, but in most systems, it is the feminine energy that initiates the deep work: the descent, the death, the regeneration. Women, especially at midlife, often step into this initiatory role on behalf of their families, partnerships, and communities.

It’s like we become the crucible in which the old dies and the new is born. Let’s look at it from a few different perspectives:

• Biologically: Our hormonal cycles force us into regular encounters with change. Life transitions like menstruation, pregnancy, birth, perimenopause, and menopause demand transformation. For example, every month when we have menstrual cycles, we are moving through a cycle of change, a cycle of birth, death, rebirth metaphorically speaking that is experienced in an embodied way with our menstrual cycles.

• Emotionally: The feminine is finely attuned to relational field dynamics because we have lots of estrogen which helps creates oxytocin. Our nervous system is regulated by oxytocin which acts as a neuro-modulator. Neuro-modulators fine tune and shape how our nervous system reacts to stimuli over time. So we become more relationally attuned and attuned to social safety. We feel what’s missing, what’s breaking down, or what wants to emerge sooner. So oxytocin plays an enormous role in regulating arousal, stress responses and healing.

• Spiritual/Archetypal: The feminine holds the wisdom of the underworld. We know how to descend and return with insight. That’s where true alchemy happens.

So when it comes to relationships, often, when a woman begins to change, it upsets the systemic homeostasis of the relationship. If she holds the relational field (as is often the case), any shift she makes is deeply felt by the other. This can either provoke resistance or invite the partner to evolve too. Sometimes both. In this sense, women often become the alchemical fire that either transforms or reveals what’s no longer sustainable.

The anatomy of life transitions

Transitions are not problems to fix, they are patterns to Inhabit

We often think of change as linear but it is not at all, it is often a spiral, or a network of spirals. Life transitions are the unspoken pulses that shape our lives. Like the changing of seasons, they are natural and inevitable but they often catch us off guard, pulling us into the unknown. Whether it's the end of a relationship, a career shift, menopause or a profound personal awakening, transitions are both a death and a birth — a letting go and a stepping forward.

When big change happens in our life we are taught to treat change like an emergency. Something is really wrong with us. We search for clarity, next steps, and solutions as if something has gone wrong.

But what if transition isn’t something to fix?

What if it’s a pattern to inhabit?

I’ve come to see life transitions not as interruptions to life, but as part of its underlying design. The common model of life transitions is ending, the liminal space in between and then emergence or new beginnings. Whilst I think this is true to an extent, I believe its actually a bit more complex than that. The metaphor that captures this most powerfully for me is the torus: a self-renewing, spiralling field found everywhere in nature—from galaxies to trees, to the electromagnetic field of the human heart.

The Toroidal Field: A Natural Pattern of Change

A torus is a continuous, dynamic flow. It is not linear. It is not chaotic. It is regenerative. If you can’t picture it in your head it is a donut shaped field where energy moves up the middle and around the edges to the bottom and back up again. The heart has a toroidal field. The earth is a toroidal field.

Image source here

In nature, we see it in the vortex of a storm, the flow of sap in trees, the shape of magnetic fields, the inhale and exhale of breath. In us, it shows up in the rhythm of emotions, healing, grief, growth, and yes—transitions.

The torus reminds us that everything alive follows a rhythm of emergence, dissolution, and return. This rhythm can help us reframe how we experience life changes: not as problems to solve, but as intelligent patterns we are invited to move with.

The Four Phases of Transition (Through the Lens of the Torus)

Transitions often unfold in four phases, which mirror the toroidal flow:

1. The Known Self (Center)

This is the phase of structure and identity. You know who you are, what your roles are, and how the world responds to you. There is stability, predictability, and sometimes stagnation.

2. The Stretch (Expansion)

Something begins to shift. A role no longer fits, perimenopause starts, a relationship starts to change, a loss arrives, or a new longing awakens. You begin to spiral outward, away from the known. This phase can bring both fear and discomfort one minute and exhilaration and joy the next. It often triggers urgency—we want to know what’s next. We feel thrown off our centre - which we literally are because we are moving to the edges of the torus shape.

This is the start of what feels like a wild ride, it begins to get tough but this is a necessary unwinding.

Resistance often comes up here. Whilst this is to be expected, our nervous system feels very uncomfortable often at this point, it is bound to constrict and pull in with fear or anger as a defensive strategy if we have no context to make sense of what is happening. Or maybe we collapse into sadness and grief. This is the time to ask for help or support.

3. The Void (Outer Edge)

The old story has fallen away, but the new one hasn’t formed yet. This is the liminal phase—a sacred pause. It can feel like floating in the dark, ungrounded. We can feel like we have completely lost our connection with our north star or our rudder is missing. This is where many people feel most lost, because the inner compass that once guided them is no longer available. It can feel like being on a road less travelled—or in some cases, a road never travelled before.

This inner void is like a composting process. What no longer serves begins to break down and dissolve. Old identities, beliefs, or stories decompose in the darkness. And just like on a forest floor, that breakdown nourishes the ground of becoming. It's slow, it's unseen, and it's absolutely essential. Composting isn’t glamorous—it’s earthy, rich, and full of alchemy. Nothing is wasted here.

This space is deeply fertile. This is where integration, rest, and surrender happen. The soil of transformation is richest here. This is the time we often need the most support, to hold space for us through the via negativa, the road of letting go. This can also be the hardest because most of us have never experienced what it feels like to let go, we are afraid we may never get up if we do completely let go.

Again at this point more resistance can come up.

When we resist, it adds turbulence to the natural movement of the spiral out, and that can create loops of stagnation, denial and reactivity which shows up somatically in our bodies as tiredness, fatigue, over-activation, as our system tries to hold onto what is known but dissolving, or alternatively rush hard into what is emerging without allowing time to fully metabolise the middle.

4. The Return (Integration)

Eventually, something new takes shape. Not as a quick fix, but as a deeper coherence. You begin spiralling back inward, bringing with you what you’ve learned. You emerge changed. Not a return to the old self, but a return to your centre—wiser, more whole.

I always say to my midlife clients, the developmental challenge of midlife is to be radically honest with ourselves. So that means there is a lot of busting up belief systems, reconnecting with parts of ourselves we have pushed into our unconscious. It is time to do your healing work and come back to that very core essence of who you are. Let go of all the ego strategies that have got you here that don’t serve you well anymore in your adult life. Come back to the real you. You can see that by using the metaphor of the Torus, the core isn’t just a psychological concept, it is also physically coming back to your core.

I see this also in somatic experiencing because the toroidal field shows a natural expression of our vitality and coherence. What I learned form Brigit Viksnins, who is a pretty fabulous trauma resolution teacher is this. The core in the toroidal field is our life force, our true selves, our inner sovereignty. This supports boundaries, presence and our capacity to be with our own emotions and the emotions of others. It sets our blueprint of health. Trauma disrupts the flow of energy, we fragment, collapse in, leak outward, get disorganised, freeze and get stuck outside of our true centre. Our trauma leaves an imprint that can make it hard for us to get back to our centre.

These four phases are not steps to rush through. They are invitations to inhabit. They are cyclical, often overlapping. You may revisit them again and again in any given transition.

Inhabiting the Pattern

Most of us are conditioned to resist the stretch and rush through the void. But when we orient to transitions as toroidal patterns, we allow ourselves to stay in the flow of life itself.

In somatic work, I see how the body holds these transitions intimately: the contraction of loss, the expansion of grief, the trembling spaciousness of the void, the grounded return of integration. Nature doesn’t rush its seasons—why should we?

Whether it’s menopause, a relationship ending, a career shift, or a spiritual awakening, each transition carries the same energetic intelligence. We are being stretched, softened, and re-shaped. And the more we honour the pattern, the more we can inhabit the change with greater ease.

A New Orientation

If you’re in the middle of the stretch, or sitting in the void, you are not broken. You are in motion. You are in the field. The torus is holding you.

Transitions are not detours.

They are invitations into deeper coherence.

So the next time change arrives, try asking not "How do I fix this?" but instead:

"Where am I in the pattern?"

And then, with grace, let yourself inhabit the unfolding.

Reflection Questions for you

• Where in your life are you being stretched or dissolved?

• Can you name the phase of the transition you are in?

• What might shift if you trusted this phase as intelligent, necessary, and even sacred?

Constant Striving, the hidden fawn behind 'not enough'

So many of my clients arrive with heavy hearts masked by impressive resumes. They're driven, capable, endlessly striving. And quietly, they carry a question they rarely say aloud: ‘Why do I still feel like I’m not enough?

Often what brings them to me is they desperately want something in their life and the way they currently orient in the world is not helping them get there. So whether it is a healthy conscious relationship where they can be their true selves, or wanting to overcome burnout, or to find more meaning or purpose in their life; what sits underneath all of this is a body in desperate need of rest and a new way of showing up in the world. They are so used to pushing their way through life and they have will power in spades, that fuels that constant striving toward their goals. They are so wired for productivity and to keep on going, that it does not feel safe in their nervous system to slow down.

Striving can be a survival strategy. It looks like lots of ambition but underneath it is actually an adaptation, as the nervous system has wired itself to fawn, seeking safety through performance, achievement, pleasing and perfecting. So it is just not about saying yes to others, it is about proving your worth to stay connected to them.

Where does this strategy arise from?

It often comes from having caregivers who were conditional in giving us their attuned presence, where love or safety and connection were conditional. Often we received the love we needed when we did something brilliant, or we were easy to deal with, ‘good kids’. This is not a flaw we have but actually a rather brilliant adaptive response by the body to keep us safe. The belief system that is created is “If I can just be good enough, useful enough, impressive enough—maybe then I’ll be safe, loved, or chosen”.

It’s survival through self-erasure. And it’s so deeply ingrained in many of us that it can feel like “who we are,” when it’s actually a brilliant adaptation.

How does culture reinforce the need to strive?

This isn’t just personal it can also be cultural. I also believe that productivity culture has been a major influence on this response in many adults. It’s not just personal history that shapes the fawn-strive pattern—it’s cultural, systemic, and reinforced daily in many workplaces. Productivity becomes a proxy for worth. And in that system, rest feels risky.

Productivity culture has institutionalised the fawn response. It rewards over-functioning and punishes rest. In many workplaces, people have internalised the belief: “My value is in what I produce.” “If I slow down, I’ll fall behind, or be seen as lazy, dispensable, or weak.”

So even outside of trauma histories, entire cultural systems are designed to keep nervous systems in a low-grade state of doing to survive. Especially in organisations where performance is tied to identity, job security, or belonging.

How does this striving response show up in adults?

Striving isn’t just a fawning response that is about people-pleasing in obvious ways—it can look like:

• Overachieving to be seen as valuable or loveable,

• Taking on too much to avoid being abandoned or criticised,

• Hustling for worth, because rest feels dangerous or "lazy",

• Always being the one who fixes, leads, or holds it all together,

• Adapting your identity to meet what others need or expect,

• Over functioning in relationships.

In essence, striving is a fawning nervous system response. It says: If I can just be good enough, useful enough, impressive enough—maybe then I’ll be safe, loved, or chosen.

Cant Stop, won’t stop

We joke about ‘can’t stop, won’t stop,’ but for many, it’s not a quirky motto—it’s a trauma response. It’s the body never having felt safe enough to slow down and rest. We wear it as a a badge of honour, or even an odd personality trait—but underneath it, for so many, it’s the body saying:
“If I stop, it might all fall apart.” “If I rest, who will I be?” “If I slow down, will the pain catch up with me?”

It’s not hustle culture—it’s hypervigilance dressed in productivity. It’s a nervous system that has never known true safety, only safety-through-doing. This is so deeply woven into high-functioning, heart-centred people who’ve built their worth through care-taking, fixing, over-responsibility, and striving to be irreplaceable.

The laugh we attach to “can’t stop, won’t stop” is often a nervous system trying to normalise its own exhaustion, because admitting we’re tired or scared feels too vulnerable.

Striving is often the voice of a nervous system that never felt safe to simply be.

What are the costs of constant striving?

The costs are high for many people. They include: Transactional relationships that are based on performance not presence and this leaves many people feeling lonely and disconnected from their peers at work, feeling like they are misunderstood or that they don’t fit into the organisation they work for. This sense of belonging is not there. It is also the body never getting to rest, and after many years, we see that manifest in burnout, health issues, anxiety and disconnection from the self.

What are we really longing for?

Contentment and belonging are the deep yearning we are searching for when we are striving, So often, we think we’re chasing success, or mastery, or healing—but underneath it all, we’re chasing that feeling:
That feeling can be: The deep exhale of contentment; the relief of being with people who see us, know us, and don’t need us to be any different, the safety of not having to perform, strive, or explain ourselves, the belonging that whispers: “You are enough, just as you are, and you always have been.”

It’s the nervous system’s longing to come out of hypervigilance and into co-regulation. To be met, not managed. Held, not judged. Loved, not evaluated.

And it’s not a small thing. That kind of contentment rewires us. It gives us a new blueprint for what’s possible in connection—with ourselves and with others. It helps us to feel safe enough to slow down

Where do we start with healing?

Striving may have kept us safe, but it’s not the same as being truly seen. Slowly, we begin to rebuild safety in being, not just in doing. We need to titrate our experience of slowing down because it will feel unsafe for the nervous system to just stop. So our path is to move from fawning to feel comfortable just being. This is somatic work working deeply with the autonomic nervous system because we are dealing with unconscious trauma imprints.

Imagine your body as a riverbed that has been carved deeply by years of rushing water—this water is your striving. It’s fast, focused, and relentless, always moving toward the next bend. The river believes if it can just keep flowing fast enough, it will reach some final place where it can finally rest.

But the riverbed is tired. It longs for a gentle stream. For stillness. For the moss to grow again on its rocks. It longs for a pause so life can return to its banks.

Some things you could try on your own:

The micro pause

This is a micro-practice to do anytime you feel the drive to prove, do, or fix surging up. You can try it right now if you like.

1. Settle – Let your body arrive where it is. Feel the weight of gravity. Feel the support of the earth or chair beneath you.

2. Place a hand on your heart or belly – Choose what feels most tender or accessible.

3. Say softly, either out loud or silently:
   “Right now, in this moment, I am enough.”
   (Even if part of you doesn’t believe it—just let it land and see what happens.)

4. Notice what shifts – Is there any softening, resistance, warmth, tears, numbness? All responses are welcome.

5. Stay with the sensation for 30 seconds or so. No need to fix or change it. Just witness your being—not your doing.

When your body is giving you signs to slow down, know that you are not broken. Trust the innate wisdom and intelligence of your body and what it is trying to say to you. You have adapted brilliantly but now your body is ready for something new. If you would like to explore your pathway to slowing down, to being more present, to stop being everything to everyone, to stop hustling, come talk to me about somatic experiencing or coaching.

The fear response, a double edged sword

Fear is a master of disguise. It doesn’t always show up as a racing heart or sweaty palms; sometimes, it speaks in the language of logic, whispering that we’re “not ready yet.” It convinces us to set arbitrary deadlines, create endless prerequisites, or delay action under the guise of preparation. But if we look deeper, we often find that fear is at the root of our hesitation, quietly orchestrating our self-sabotage.

At its core, fear is a survival mechanism, designed to keep us safe from danger. But in modern life, fear doesn’t just react to physical threats—it responds to uncertainty, failure, judgment, and change. Our nervous system doesn’t distinguish between the fear of a tiger and the fear of speaking our truth, starting a business, or pursuing an intimate relationship. It just registers the discomfort and sounds the alarm.

This alarm triggers one of four responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Each of these can subtly shape our choices in ways we don’t always recognise and we create adaptive strategies to push through and avoid our feelings. Here are some examples:

• Fight: We overcompensate, push too hard, and exhaust ourselves with perfectionism.

• Flight: We distract ourselves with busyness, convincing ourselves we’re productive while avoiding the real work.

• Freeze: We get stuck in analysis paralysis, endlessly researching or seeking validation.

• Fawn: We over-prioritize others’ needs and expectations, losing sight of our own desires.

Fear as self sabotage

One of fear’s trickiest tactics is its ability to masquerade as prudence. We tell ourselves we’ll launch the business once we get one more certification, we’ll write the book when life is less hectic, or we’ll pursue love when we feel more secure in ourselves. These milestones often feel responsible and logical, but in reality, they are fear-driven delays.

Self-sabotage isn’t always about overt destruction; sometimes, it’s simply about waiting too long. The longer we delay, the more distant our desires feel. And the more distant they feel, the easier it becomes to believe they weren’t meant for us in the first place.

Ignoring our fears

Sometimes we develop adaptive strategies to ignore our fears and push through. This becomes problematic when we learn to ignore the limits of our own bodies and keep on pushing through. Some of us, to have more courage, learn to ignore our fears and push through (I used to do this a lot). The problem with this is that we are ignoring our bodies risk assessment system, our autonomic nervous system, and that ultimately can cause us to get run down, ill or so stressed that our focuses narrows so much we find it hard to function with the complexity of life. So I am not saying learn to push through your fears, I have saying learn to understand them and listen to them, what they feel like in your body. Learn to discern between levels of fear.

Making decisions from a survival state versus coherence and feeling safe

The state we are in when we make decisions matters. When we make choices from a place of survival mode—driven by fear, anxiety, or urgency—our nervous system is dysregulated. In this state, we tend to react rather than respond. Our thinking becomes narrow, focused on short-term relief rather than long-term impact. This can lead to reactive decision-making, avoidance of necessary risks, and choices that feel safe in the moment but create more complexity down the line.

On the other hand, when we make decisions from a state of coherence—where our nervous system is regulated, and we feel safe—our thinking is more expansive. We can be truly strategic, discerning, and appropriately prudent. We’re able to see the bigger picture, weigh options without urgency clouding our judgment, and engage with complexity without feeling overwhelmed.

This is why when we cultivate nervous system regulation—through practices like breathwork, grounding, or simply slowing down—we tend to make more sustainable, wise decisions. The more we develop the ability to recognise when we’re making decisions from fear in survival mode versus from a regulated state, the better we can lead ourselves and others.

“Courage does not always roar, sometimes it’s the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, I will try again tomorrow”

Mary Ann Radmacher

So how do we break free from fear’s grip and step toward what we truly want?

1. Recognise Fear’s Voice – Become aware of when fear is masquerading as logic, caution, or endless preparation. Notice when you’re setting unnecessary milestones that delay action.

2. Slow Down and Regulate – Instead of reacting from fear, pause. Use breathwork, grounding techniques, or somatic practices to settle your nervous system so you can make choices from a place of clarity rather than reactivity.

3. Make Micro-Moves – Fear thrives in the enormity of big leaps, but it loses power when we take small, consistent actions. Instead of waiting for the perfect moment, take one small step today. This goes for those of you having to make harder choices at work in your leadership role. Small iterative changes help people to adjust and accept change rather than big sweeping changes that often put people into their survival response and usually result in them trying to avoid the changes.

4. Reframe Fear as a Companion – Fear will never fully disappear, but it doesn’t have to lead. Instead of resisting it, acknowledge it: “Hello fear I see you, and I know you’re trying to protect me. But I choose to move forward anyway.”

5. Commit to Your Desire – If something truly calls to you, trust that desire. Your nervous system might resist, but deep down, your body knows what it longs for. Trust that wisdom.

In our big life transitions we often go through periods of review and reflection. The biggest regrets aren’t usually failures—they are the things we never tried, the dreams we postponed, and the desires we denied. They are often the relationships we didn’t foster or pay attention to. Fear will always try to keep us safe, but safety isn’t the same as fulfilment. The good news? We can choose differently.

What have you been delaying that your heart is calling you toward? What if you took one small step today? Because the truth is, you’re already ready.

Healing Our Trauma: Reclaiming Our Connection with Nature

For me, there is nothing better than walking barefoot in the sand on the beach, then having a dip in the sea. I love floating in sea water and the rocking that comes with floating on top of waves as they ebb and flow. It is highly restorative. It grounds me and brings me back into my body. I can feel my nervous system coming into my zone of resilience.

In the quiet of a forest, the crash of ocean waves, or the vast openness of a starlit sky, many of us feel something stir within—a longing, a recognition, a sense of home, a feeling of belonging. But for many, that connection feels distant, as if nature is something separate from us rather than a living web in which we belong.

Much of this disconnection stems not just from modern life but from unhealed trauma—both personal and collective. Our nervous systems, shaped by past wounds, can keep us in states of hypervigilance or numbness, making it difficult to truly be present with the natural world. However, as we heal, something shifts. We begin to experience nature not just as scenery but as an extension of ourselves, rich with wisdom and reciprocity.

So how does trauma disconnect us from nature?

When we experience trauma, our nervous system adapts to keep us safe. If safety was scarce, our body may have learned to stay on high alert, scanning for danger even in peaceful settings. If overwhelming experiences left us feeling powerless, we may have learned to disconnect, numbing ourselves to sensations—including the subtle, grounding presence of nature.

Maybe you are thinking but I haven’t really experienced trauma why do I feel disconnected from my body. Well, modern life is very challenging and often it is the micro-aggressions of daily life that overwhelm us and this stacks up in our nervous system. All of these moments of overwhelm sometimes hit us when we least expect it and we experience pain, illness or relational rupture.

Many of us also carry inherited trauma, passed down through generations. Our ancestors may have lived through displacement, war, colonisation, or environmental destruction, severing their relationship with the land. That rupture doesn’t just exist in history books—it lives in our bodies, shaping how we relate to the earth. The study of epigenetics has explained this to us, so we can see how this unhealed trauma is passed down through generations in both cell expression but also in the attachment system in each of us, that is formed through the maternal bond between an baby and their caregivers.

In modern life, this disconnection manifests in subtle ways as we project our internal disconnection outwards and this shapes how we relate to ourselves, others, the world and life itself. We may find it hard to slow down enough to notice the intricate beauty of a leaf, the rhythmic cycles of the seasons, or the deep nourishment that comes from being immersed in nature. We are stuck on the hamster wheel of flight and fight. Instead of feeling like we belong to the land, we often treat it as a resource to be extracted and used, a background to our human-centered world.

How does healing our trauma restore our sense of belonging within us and also to something greater than us?

The good news is that healing our trauma—whether through somatic work, deep nervous system repair, or ancestral healing—opens the door to a profound reconnection with nature. As we learn to regulate our nervous system, we develop the capacity to be present, to notice, and to receive. The very same skills that allow us to process and release trauma—slowing down, attuning to our sensations, and cultivating safety—are the ones that allow us to feel at home in the natural world.

When we heal, we begin to:

Feel the land as alive – Instead of seeing nature as an object, we start to sense its intelligence, its rhythms, and its ability to communicate. We might begin to feel the energy of trees, the presence of the wind, or the way a particular landscape holds us.

Move beyond fear and control – Trauma often teaches us to control our environment for safety. As we heal, we can interact with nature in a more reciprocal way—learning from it rather than trying to dominate it. When we feel safe in our own bodies, we can soften into a sense of safety in the world.

Trust the body’s belonging – Nature is not something we visit; it is something we are. As we learn to listen to and trust our body and appreciate its deep wisdom, we also learn to trust the wisdom of the earth. We develop a deep understanding of the rhythms of nature and the rhythms in our body. Our understanding of one pattern helps us see this replicated through our own body and other systems we interact within.

Feel the cycles of life more deeply – Instead of fearing endings and beginnings, we start to embrace the cycles of nature as part of us. We see death, decay, rebirth, and renewal not just in the world around us but in our own emotional and spiritual journeys.

Increased self-awareness and environmental awareness - When we tend to our inner landscapes, we become more attuned to the landscapes around us.

Healing give us a new way of relating to each other and a new way of orienting ourselves in the world.

As we heal, we begin to walk through the world differently. We no longer see ourselves as separate from nature but as part of an ongoing conversation with it. We listen more deeply, honour its gifts, and recognise that the earth, like us, holds both wounds and the capacity for regeneration.

Our personal healing ripples outward. When we feel connected to the land, we are more likely to protect it, not from a place of fear or guilt but from love and reverence. Our actions shift from extraction to reciprocity, from dominance to stewardship.

Healing trauma is not just personal work—it is planetary work. As we reconnect with ourselves, we reconnect with the earth. And as we learn to belong to our own bodies, we remember that we have always belonged to the web of life.

Digital Art - Kellie Stirling

What if healing is not just about feeling better, but about remembering our place in the great unfolding story of the earth?

Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to slow down, place our hands on the earth, and listen.

Healing happens in community and when we connect with something bigger than us. There are many ways we can look at nature and draw a comparison with our body and its innate intelligence and understanding of how to heal.

Just as nature moves through seasons of growth, rest, decay, and renewal, our nervous system cycles through activation, integration, and restoration. Honouring these natural rhythms supports long-term well-being. Here are some other comparisons that might deepen you understanding of both our body and nature’s capacity to generate healing and growth through the building of virtuous cycles and coherence.

Roots & Grounding – Trees grow strong by sending their roots deep into the earth. Similarly, we cultivate resilience by grounding ourselves in connection—whether to our breath, body, relationships, or a sense of purpose.

Storms & Emotional Intensity – A thunderstorm may feel chaotic, but it brings necessary rain and clears the air. Intense emotions may feel overwhelming, but when we allow them to move through us, they can bring clarity and transformation. Emotions like natures storms pass through us when we let them be expressed. When we allow ourselves to feel emotions fully, we become more open to experiencing the depth of nature.

Ebb & Flow of the Ocean – The tides rise and fall in a constant dance with the moon, just as our emotions and energy levels naturally fluctuate. Trying to force constant calmness is like trying to stop the ocean’s waves—it’s unnatural.

Symbiosis & Co-Regulation – Ecosystems thrive through interdependence; plants, animals, fungi, and microbes all support each other. Likewise, humans regulate best in connection—our nervous systems co-regulate through relationships, just as trees share nutrients through their roots.

Fire & Transformation – I have always been fascinated by the dual nature of fire. It can be a force for regeneration and a force of destruction. Wildfires, though destructive, create space for new growth by clearing out the old. In our nervous system, moments of challenge or breakdown can lead to profound transformation when we move through them with support.

Where do we start?

Of course you can start with the simple connections you can make with nature around you. Even if it is taking a walk on the grass in your bare feet start there. Do it with a friend or your partner, take a walk together. Trauma occurs in the absence of a compassionate witness, so healing happens in the connection with one and in the presence of community. We are wired for social connection, we are not meant to do life on on our own.

Pleasure: how it nourishes us, resources us and helps us to grow

Pleasure is your birthright. When I say that, when you read it, what do you notice in your body?

Pleasure is certainly a word that sets a lot of us off and that is because of the stigma of cultural shame that we hold in our body around it first and foremost. Our body has orientations toward pleasure and pain. Pleasure is opening and expansion and pain is constriction and a move away from energy. Pain tells us when something is not safe and our nervous system moves us into action to take us away from it. Maybe we’ve also had personal experiences of when we overdosed on something we felt was pleasurable and things haven’t turned out well. That is one way to stop our nervous system from letting us feel free to fell it.

Humans are incredibly sensuous beings and our senses are how we experience the world through our five senses of smell, taste, smell, sight and touch/feeling. We experience pleasure through these sensory experiences. When we are consciously doing this we are building new neural pathways for our body to feel this expansive energy. We need to do this in small doses, like microdoses, otherwise that nervous system kicks in, says I’m not enjoying this, or this is too much and that shame reaction comes back.

Let’s just talk about shame for a minute. There is a relational component to shame. It’s usually something like this, “That person made me feel ashamed by saying/doing……. “. People definitely use shame as a weapon, and shame definitely been used to stop us feeling and embracing our bodies need to feel pleasure. It’s been used to take away autonomy and choice without a doubt.

But shame occurs when there is a part of us that agrees with the other. There is some part of you and me that agrees with the shaming idea/assertion/concept and then we feel shamed. The shame that is living there in the unconscious, actually agrees with what the other is saying or their perception and ideas of you. The person might be actually saying the thing that we have always feared is actually wrong with us and now it must be true because they’ve said it.

What this shame tells us is that we are seeking external validation to tell us we are ‘good person’ and that there is a part of us thinking what they are thinking. It wouldn’t bother us if that part wasn’t there feeling the shame.

When we realise this it is liberating because we know that anyone can say anything to us and we don’t have to feel shame.

When we are children we don’t really have the life experience and inquiry skills to look at it this way. To do the self inquiry and perspective seeking work. We rely on our parents and caregivers to support our nervous system through co-regulation and to give us information about ourselves, our behaviour. What is ok and not ok, help us with our boundaries.

When we don’t get that support as kids, we tend to continue to look for external validation from others into our adult life. It would be silly of us to expect children and traumatised nervous systems to not feel shame.

So back to pleasure. That cultural conditioning that said you are a bad person if you feel pleasure, well a lot of it comes from religion and came in times of austerity when the cultural austerity came in to curb the excess of hedonism. The pendulum of culturally acceptable behaviour swang really hared the other way. Those Romans they were hedonists. The French revolution came about after years of hedonism and sensually gratuitous behaviour by the French Royal court. Kind of makes sense, but the pendulum swang too far and here we are a couple of hundred years later disconnected from our bodies because we don’t feel safe to feel pleasure.

This is why sensual pleasure is a good start and starting small is a good way because that small dose of it will feel safe in your nervous system, and that part of you that feels shame, it won’t go into overwhelm. Our sensory experiences help us connect to our bodies, they are the language of the nervous system. So by starting small we build and strengthen the nervous system. Our autonomic nervous system is beautiful and it is always working really hard to keep us safe and to regulate us. Small doses, titrate it for us. We have to practice. It takes devotion too. We have to commit to letting ourselves feel pleasure every day and the best way to do it is by starting off your day with pleasure. Our body will fight us, there will be resistance. “I’m too busy, I have work to do'“. Flight response. “I feel like I don’t deserve to feel pleasure it feels terrible putting myself first’. Flight and freeze working together. “I’m too tired to do it”, that is collapse.

Pleasure is the counter vortex. It builds that alternative neural pathway to the vortex of trauma. This is how it resources us.

So what are some pleasurable activities that are healthy choices.

• Singing, Chanting or Dancing

• Using our breath; doing breathwork or breathing exercises

• Movement, exercise, walking in nature.

• Eating nutrious food and really being present to the taste of it

• Surfing, skiing, rollerblading - they take a lot of concentration and ask of us to be truly present in the moment with our body.

• Going to an art gallery and admiring the art

• Listening to music or creating music

• Sexual self-pleasure is very nourishing and supportive

This helps us in everyday life and it helps us in the bedroom. When we know what we like we can talk to our partner about it. We can ask for what we want.

What about the pleasure we might feel from coffee, drinking alcohol and taking recreational drugs?

Well you might feel good but actually we take them to avoid, to not feel and to soothe most of the time. So coffee is great but it stimulates adrenaline in our body which creates that fight and flight energy. So if we are taking it because we are tired and need more energy, we are ignoring our bodies boundary and its message that we you need to stop and rest. Alcohol is a downer and generally distracts us from feeling. Or for some people they can only express themselves and find a voice when they are drunk which is still avoidance. Recreational drugs, the stimulus response depends on the drug, but they are a tool of avoidance from being present in the moment, to wanting to feel.

Addicted to the pleasure of shopping, that high from buying stuff? This is a little hit of external validation that elevates us to help us feeling a sense of belonging but its a super quick hit and we often feel empty afterward. Don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with shopping per say and personally I love a good spot of window shopping and looking at clothes, but when you use it as a distraction to make yourself feel good, to not feel the ‘difficult’ emotions, or can’t stop your online shopping, that is a problem.

Finally, pleasure, how does it help us grow?

Well when we build up our capacity to receive it in our nervous system, we build up our capacity to feel more expansive energy. This is an open and vulnerable energy, we can only grow from this position. We cannot grow from constriction and shutdown, from invulnerability. We are not open to other perspectives in this state, we rarely inquire, we cannot listen to another person’s point of view and we certainly find it hard to let ourselves feel bigger emotions. We are in disconnect.

As always if you like this post, feel free to share it with someone for whom you feel it might be valuable.

Slow down to speed up

I write a lot about slowing down. It has been one of the big learnings for me in my life but overall, if I think of all the people I’ve coached over the years I think on of the biggest issues most of us face is the disconnection from our bodies. This is pretty serious, it is causing lots of health issues, combined with the crazy pace that most people are expected to work at now, it is causing lots of dysregulated nervous systems. This causes some pretty poor decision making and poor behaviour to emerge.

When we slow down we are able to be more present with our life, with what is happening right now. That is where life is happening.

I think one of the most important skills we can learn is to recognise our stress responses and what our habitual patterns are when it comes to reacting to stress. Fight, flight, freeze or fawn? What do you do? Do you get angry, do you want to move, can you not stop talking, do you go into people pleasing mode, do you words escape you and your feel overcome with brain fog? These are all typical signs of a stress response. I generally want to argue or walk away. Sometimes I please, although this is a very atypical for me and the times I have done I’ve been able to observe myself in the moment and thought why are you acting like this?

When we are in overdrive we are making decisions and choices that often are not well thought through, may come from a child part of us, or we spray our emotional response all over people and that takes time to clean up. Or some of us just collapse and withdraw and this is not a great place to be stuck in your nervous system.

When you can start to be aware of your stress response in action this is when you can start to take put practices in place that help you regulate yourself back to a place in your autonomic nervous system that is a bit more grounded and calmer. Practices that help you soothe yourself in the moment. One of the best ways to do this is by learning how to listen to your body and identify the sensations that you are feeling right in the moment of the trigger.

When we slow down and check in with our bodies, take the time to ourselves each day for time out, we are actually able to access so much more information than we would guess. Do you know our body takes in 90% more data than our brains. In truth our body and brain are one but our body is reading our environment all the time. 90% is quite unbelievable isn’t it? When we don’t check in with ourselves we miss all of this.

This becomes super important when we are going through big life transitions because they are generally times of great change so we can easily get overwhelmed. Slowing down has a tremendously positive impact on our quality of life because we start to be aware of what is going on around us all the time. All those parts of life happening that we were missing, we start to notice. We start to build a bit more capacity to regulate ourselves in our nervous system when we practice slowing down techniques like using our breath, or body check ins and that brings us into presence. It is a good place to be.

What I notice in people I coach who are in midlife is that when they start to slow down, their health and wellbeing improves, their perimenopause physical symptoms often dissipate and this gives them more time and confidence to explore the existential questions that they find themselves facing. It gives you more time to reflect on how you can set yourself up to live well in your second half of life. It gives you more time to think and feel into what feels meaningful and purposeful to you.

This is why we can speed up when we slow down, we have more clarity, we are more conscious and deliberate and can take in more perspective.

What would happen if you gave yourself permission to have thirty minutes each day of slow time?

Emotional Starvation

The midlife crisis is not really a crisis. It is a slow wake up call from your bodymind asking you for big changes. Come back to who you are, come back to the body. So much of our culture does not support people thriving and being able to be their real selves. Instead it encourages the ego, those survival strategies you built as a kid to get by, to run the show. It traumatises us time and again. So many people I have worked with push themselves outside their window of tolerance time and again, just so they can function in the workplace.

Midlife is the time when you have a chance to set yourself up to thrive in the second half of life. It asks you to take a deep inward look and really commit to sorting out what needs to be healed, whether it is physical, emotional, social or cultural. Lets undo these survival strategies you have going, that are stored in your unconscious so you can come back to the truth of who you really are.

There is nothing wrong with most of us, it is the system that is broken. The culture telling us how we should be, often this is far from our own reality and lived experience.

Your body has an innate intelligence around healing. You don’t have to tell your body to do anything when you cut your finger, it knows what to do. However our brain can override many of the actions that bring us back to homeostasis. This impacts us significantly when it comes to our emotions and the feelings associated with them. We’ve been trained to ignore the bad stuff like the feeling of anger or sadness or grief in our body, so we override it using our powerful brains and coping strategies to numb ourselves.

The common survival patterns I see that are distracting us from this are: I work too hard, I eat too much, I don’t eat enough, I exercise too much, I diet too much, I drink too much, I shop too much, I give too much. And there is a still a sense of hunger within all of us that cannot be touched because really what we want is to feel.

Emotional Starvation I call it. We starve ourselves of feeling these tough emotions so that we can feel safe, fit in and belong and receive love.

We are doing all the “too much” just to keep up in a culture that numbs us to the sensations and emotions we feel in our bodies. We ignore our own need for pleasure. We ignore the warning systems of our nervous system and over ride our own boundaries to fit in and please.

Our ability to be honest with ourselves, intimate with ourselves, comfortable in our own skin become so confined and limited. We go to all the ‘too much’ activities to avoid looking inside, to avoid noticing the basic sensations, messages our body is trying to give us. When we cannot be honest with ourselves, honour our own feelings, emotions and needs it makes intimacy with another really hard.

How can we connect with ourselves? Through connecting with our pleasure. Feeling the sensations is the important guide. We experience the world through our five senses, they are what tells us if something is pleasurable or painful. When we consciously choose pleasure, and bring attention to the sensations of that, we start to recalibrate our system.

Feeling tells us what is safe and what is not, it connects us to what we really want in our life - our desires, and it puts us in touch with our nervous system, teaching us how to listen to it. Pleasure comes from inside of us, we can create it for ourselves.

Next time you feel like doing one of the “too much activities’, see if you can stop yourself in the moment and choose something that is pleasurable to your senses. Create a sensual experience that brings pleasure to you, that allows you to focus on that feeling of it inside of you.

It’s not too hard, start small, walk in the park, consciously eating nutritious food, dance to music your love. Start small, small steps are more sustainable than grand gestures. That is how change happens.

Choose you.

Dancing with Grief

I’ve been thinking about grief a lot this week, well actually I’ve been thinking and feeling it. My husband’s grandfather passed away earlier in the week. He had turned 98 on Sunday and then died on Tuesday. We knew it was coming. He lives quite far from us and we all said goodbye to him in July which was the last time we saw him. He was sharp, funny and a true gentle man. He play online Bridge with my husband and kids and anyone else who turned up online up until about ten days ago.

Grief is a funny emotion. Most of the others pass through if we let them in a matter of minutes but grief seems to come through in bursts and can stick around for quite a while. What I notice, is when I am quiet and still that is when it comes. In surrender.

Even then it comes in bursts, and can keep coming for quite some time. When our Grief last longer than six months, it is now pathologised as depression. To me this seems like a total misunderstanding of grief.

A colleague said to me a few years ago, grief is love not able to be expressed.

I loved this insight and to me this seems true because we always grieve love we have lost, over time it fades but does it ever really go away?

For grief doesn’t just occur when a beloved passes. When relationships end we grieve. When we have acute illness we grieve. When our youngest or only child passes milestones we grieve because we know that we will never see or experience that stage again as a parent.

As our bodies age and we move into a new rite of passage, stage of life, we grieve for what we leave behind and for all the dreams and aspirations that we had that we were not able to experience. We grieve for the choices we made that allowed us to walk through a door way and miss another. We think of what may have been.

When we grieve in the present we often tap into a reservoir of unresolved grief from the past. Grief that wasn’t finished, that still lives in our bodies. It is never too late to heal unresolved grief. Healing is always an option and your body will tell you someway and somehow. Our darker emotions are rooted in alchemy, they always take us some place else. When we open to the wisdom of the darker emotions, particularly grief, there is always another emotions waiting for us. Grief often gives us gratitude.

“The gift that grief offers us is the capacity to see deeply into the way things are. Life is limited. We are here for only a short time. Grief asks us to know this, not only in a disembodied, cerebral way, but in the marrow or our bones - to look into the reality of death and loss with our usual egoic blinders on”

— Miriam Greenspan - 'Healing through the dark emotions'

Unexpressed grief holds a lot of hurt. Culturally we don’t express death well. We don’t acknowledge that the journey of life is a series of death and rebirths all the time as we grow and journey into different stages of our lives. Unexpressed grief gets passed down through generations in individuals and societies and comes out culturally in often unrecognisable forms; forms that are sometimes violent and highly destructive. The lack of acknowledgement of our grief is bringing about the destruction of the planet. The symptoms; increasing busyness and consumption, increasing depression, loneliness, anxiety, boredom and apathy.

I don’t think there has been a more important time to learn the gifts of listening to our body, to be with our darker emotions and learn the transformational power that they bring.

If this post resonates with you feel free to pass it onto a friend.