• New Year, Your Way

    It’s a new year and everyone is making huge plans. There’s a new start, clean slate and another chance to get it right. What pressure! Social pressure encourages us to make big plans, live your biggest life, change the world, lean in, make it count. It can seem like everyone is planning amazing goals, but what if that’s not possible for you? I believe that we need kindness more than admonishment and pressure. (Click to Tweet!) Lasting, healing change happens organically to the schedule of your body, not when an artificially constructed calendar turns over. I’m refusing to pressure myself just because of a calendar invented hundreds of years ago…

  • Bed-bound to Business Bombshell

    I was 21, two weeks a bride and desperately, dangerously sick. Bed bound and hurting, letters became my link to the outside world. Until you are sick and imprisoned in your own home, in your own body, it is hard to understand exactly how important post/mail is. I lived for letters; that contact with the outside I could only just remember, something to focus on and hope for. We made up Healing Boxes – gifts of information, support and healing goodies for friends and family. We tried to buy healing gift boxes for friends and found none in the UK. So we just continued to make our own and more…

  • Aspiration Is Not All There Is

    Sunday 11 June Another wasted Sunday… Realise, as the long hot days freakishly repeat themselves, one after the other, that whatever I am doing I really think I ought to be doing something else…The more the sun shines the more obvious it seems that others are making fuller, better use of it elsewhere: possibly at some giant softball game to which everyone is invited except me; possibly alone with their lover in a rustic glade by waterfalls where Bambis graze, or at some large public celebratory event, probably including the Queen Mother and one or more of the football tenors, to mark the exquisite summer which I am failing to get the…

  • A Wonderful Birthday Party Alternative: Afternoon Tea Party

    But you have to, it’s your birthday! They cry. You might get pressure from other people, for whom birthday celebrations look a certain way, but it’s your day and you can choose what to do and how to do it. If people aren’t ok with that and you are struggling to explain, try Pitch Perfect: What’s Wrong with You? to help. Who says birthdays have to be celebrated with alcohol and accolades? Have you noticed that lots of the people who live ‘the high life’ ultimately find it unfulfilling and strip back to simple things? Perhaps your excitement is a letter from a friend, a Healing Box, or photographing a new flower. This…

  • Ditching the Game of Life to Celebrate You

    Why do we get upset about birthdays? Is it because we have a secret mental list of what we wanted to achieve by this age? Or what we feel we ‘should‘ have achieved? This isn’t The Game of Life, and if you are a Trail Blazer then you will have gone off track at one time or another. You may have done things you never expected and skipped the conventional achievements for something entirely different. Or maybe you feel you’ve missed out on the ‘normal’ aspects of life entirely. And since you felt like it was your right to experience those aspects, you are left feeling cheated and as if…