No matter what you are healing from the path is never a straight line and believing any different is contrary to reality: We ebb, flow, rise and fall through life. When things are good it’s important to recognise that and likewise when things start to go off-piste. Personally, I struggle to find a balance between pushing myself to move forwards and remembering the small things that keep me grounded, well-balanced and healthy. It’s a little ironic that the last post I wrote for this blog was about routine and the very things that I tend to neglect when I start to lose focus. I don’t think I’m alone in this.…

Those who have met me IRL know that not only am I likely to trip over myself at any given moment, but I am also a walking contradiction. I want to live in a hot country, but hate hot weather. I’d very much like to learn to cook but have the patience of a small child so turn everything up high and burn it. In theory, I detest routine…In life, I thrive on it. Over the years I have learned that it is a required element for my general well-being or else things tend to go awry pretty swiftly. While I don’t want life to be boring, doing the same…

Following on from the last post I wrote about Liz Gilbert’s book, Big Magic, I’d like to share some thoughts on one of the parts of the book which really struck me. Towards the end of the book is a chapter on trust and in particular an anecdote about a costume party… Liz writes about a guy she once met at a party, who told her a rather wonderful story about his little brother… Little Brother, an aspiring painter, saved up all his money and went to France, to surround himself with beauty and inspiration. He lived on the cheap, painted every day, visited museums, traveled to picturesque locations, bravely…

I do this thing, which I have adorably (cough cough) termed as “Pinterest Therapy”, where I pin everything within the wormhole of Pinterest, which resonates with me on various issues I’m dealing with at that moment, and eventually, over time, I don’t feel the need to pin on that topic anymore. (I find this a really useful practice btw and hands down my favourite time waster!) Who is INFJ? Is this the new Atticus, anonymous poet of the interwebs? I pinned it to one side and, thanks to the beauty of internet algorithms, suddenly all these other INFJ images kept floating about my feed and each and every one of…

  Love yourself enough to set boundaries. Your time and energy are precious. You get to choose how you use it. You teach people how to treat you by deciding what you will and won’t accept. – Anna Taylor   There’s something which I find happens quite often to me. I’m happily living and loving life when a person asks a favour, wants me to be responsible for something, go some place, do some thing, delegate a task they don’t want to do to me. This is life, right? We should expect this is going to happen. It’s how we interact. The issue comes only when it’s something I DON’T…

  Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. – Brené Brown   The S-word has been consistently on my mind lately, not because I’ve been researching it for a blog post, but because it’s in my life nearly every day and I’m not the only one. Shame is universal and every one of us experiences it (you know, unless you’re a sociopath…) Each of us has a story of some kind from any area of our lives. For me it’s imagining others must be looking down at me for having debt, that people think I’m a…

I’ve always said that when my hair started to go grey I’d simply let it go and embrace it. When I found my first white (not even grey!) hair a few years ago at around 26 or 27 years old, I found it more than a bit startling. I remember staring at it in the mirror before yanking it out of my head and discarding it as if that would stop the onset of the inevitable and went on about my strangely misguided twenties. Gradually, over the next year, another appeared and then another, all around the same area of my head and in pointless effort I deliberately moved my…