Today I have the pleasure of speaking to Peter Reading who is using his historical struggle with alcoholism to help other people to overcome their own struggles.

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In this podcast, we'll explore one man's path from isolation to recovery, discovering his true superpower along the way. Through ups and downs, arrests, and failed attempts, he eventually finds a new purpose in life.

Walk with us as he shares how nature and sobriety became his saviours, and how he now strives to help others find their own way to healing and self-discovery.

Experience the power of resilience, redemption, and the incredible transformation from a life of despair to a life filled with purpose.

This is Walking With A Reason

To read Pete's full story follow the link below:

https://www.revitalizeclinic.co.uk/2023/09/04/walking-with-a-reason-petes-story/

I talk mindset with Osteopath and Mindset Coach, Annie Osbourne

If you could be a better person, would you?

Better means different things to different people. Better physical health or mental health could be an example. Better skilled, a better husband or wife are other examples.

Even more simpler; if you could become the best version of yourself, would you?

This is Annie’s speciality.

Seamlessly, Annie compliments her osteopathic work with mindset coaching and vice versa.

Holistically, she blends the psychological and the physical for her clients.

The result? Patients who are healthier in every sector of their life.

This podcast is a treat for you. Annie will teach you how to reach your full potential, eradicate negative beliefs or even transform them to work for you.

To find out more about her work, go to https://www.osteocure.co.uk/your-osteopath

Suicide and why people take their lives…

Robust professional and personal experience are needed to answer such a question.

Diane has both.

Whilst treating Diane, our conversations often took interesting paths. Diane is a qualified mental health nurse and founder of CASAS (care and support after suicide) which she started to help people like herself who have lost loved ones through suicide.

Listen to this podcast as we discuss why loved ones take their own lives; how it affects those who are left behind and how it differs from other types of fatality.

You will find Diane incredibly insightful as she navigates a complex and deep topic with expertise and charm.

To find out more about her work, go to https://www.mycasas.org.uk

Need our help? Book in with your mental health specialist. Go to www.revitalizeclinic.co.uk/book-appointment to book in!

Why your pain may not disappear…

Has your parking sensor ever tripped when there’s nothing behind you?

Pain can be the same. And pain is more of a parking sensor than a measure of damage. It triggers before damage occurs. But often pain can be anchored by our emotions, beliefs and experiences.

Osteopath and Chronic Pain specialist, Pippa Cossens knows this too well. Pippa’s experience with fibromyalgia, emotional trauma, chronic pain and her own training as an Osteopath and SIRFA practitioner provides her an up close insight into living with pain. She uses her training and experience to help her patients become pain free.

And she wants to share with you her experience to let you know that if she can make a recovery of over 90% then you can too.

Listen to our amazing podcast that we recorded just for you.

Pippa is available in East Sussex at the Osteopathy For All clinic https://osteopathyforall.co.uk/staff/pippa-cossens/

Instagram: @osteopathyforall

Suffer from anxiety? Mind racing like a hamster wheel?

And that’s without bringing in the negative thoughts that go around and around like a broken record.

Anxiety is our brain’s way of protecting us from what might happen… but something has gone wrong. The absence of a threat should correct our brain but it doesn’t. This is called prediction error.

Ie “I’m concerned people are looking at me… no-one is looking at me… I am now calm” turns into “I’m concerned people are looking at me… I’m concerned people are looking at me… I’m concerned…” etc

Writing for 5 minutes when you feel anxious, concerned, depressed enables you to observe your thoughts rather than suffer in their grasp. It takes you from being in a burning building, so observing that burning building on a TV screen in safety.

In this video I explain how I have been able to restore sense and calmness to my mind by spending 5mins on the same laptop I’m using to write this email.

Have a watch and let me know what you think by commenting / replying to this post

Our understanding of pain is changing in a fantastically productive way. 80 years ago, if you would have died, the most likely cause would have been a work place accident, poisoning, a bacterial infection and other conditions which you had no control over.

However, times have changed.

Most of us will die of deaths that could have been delayed, and many of us live with complaints that we must be empowered over if we want to stand the best chance of recovery. Diabetes, heart disease, cancer and yes, chronic pain. Thankfully, there is a growing shift in approach to healthcare.

I talk to Danny Miller who has a fantastic story. After graduating as an osteopath, due to his frustration of not knowing enough to help his patients, Danny started to study to become a clinical health psychologist.

Danny’s understanding of pain, desire, motivation, perspective is mind blowing and he also shares the desire to empower more people over their health outcomes.

Give the interview a watch, and let me know what you think

During the lecture on black history which was televised by ITV (watch here), one of the first things I speak of is the hero story.

In summary, shortly after humans first learnt that farming seeds can produce a plentiful supply of food, we see the start of the first great civilisations. The production of food allowed time for people to think. Early humans (see online lessons on early humans here) no longer had to spend 6 hours a day searching for food and 4 hours chewing it, so they started to build and philosophise on the meaning of life, the creation of the universe etc.

Humans, being hierarchical, complex, multifaceted with complex emotional characteristics, started to create the first myths which reflect our complex internal world. God became the symbol for the potential for all being, often synonymous with the mother (ie mother nature or the deification of the virgin Mary) and a hero often emerges from this raw potential and comes into maturity (Jesus, Buddha, Hercules even Simba from the Lion King etc) who then goes onto battle symbols of the inner turmoil that we humans experience. For example aggression, jealousy, darkness, trickery, evil etc. The hero then grows or transforms, triumphs and returns to tell the story of his/ her great accomplishment.

We’re going to be exploring the importance of heroes and why it is so important for us to claim heroes in our image.

For those who are unaware, the Conservative Government commissioned a race report in the UK to examine the presence of institutional racism in the UK. This is in relation to the protests this side of the Atlantic which were triggered by the murder of George Floyd, May 2020 and subsequent protests in the USA.

The vast majority of ethnic minorities in the UK would have predicted that the report would have, without a doubt, found a presence of institutional racism in the UK. However… it didn’t.

This post is not exploring the evidence of institutional racism in the UK, but is looking at the methodology of the report which is, in my opinion, riddled with bias. Bias we can define as

“disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing, usually in a way that is closed-minded, prejudicial, or unfair”

The issue is that bias gets in the way of truth. I argue that the bias in the Race Report is so strong that it gets in the way of the truth. I.e. due to poor methodology, from an objective standpoint we don’t know if there is institutional racism in the UK. However, due to the publicity that the race report has gained, as Doreen Lawrence stated, it has potentially knocked UK race relations back ‘20 years or more’.

Tousaint Louverture is, without a doubt, the most impressive man in recorded history. A man born into slavery in St Domingue (Haiti) who purchased his freedom by 30. He was a successful businessman by 50 years of age at which point he fueled the Haitian Revolution. The Haitian Revolution was a bloody ten year guerilla war. After ten years, Toussaint Louverture had led a majoritively black army, a significant proportion of which were women and mixed raced peoples, to overthrow the French, Spanish, British and Napoleon Bonaparte himself.

A genius beyond measure and a visionary beyond belief, Toussaint Louverture eventually met his downfall as he was fatally tricked and transported to eastern France for imprisonment where he died of pneumonia, alone in the tower of Chateu de Jeux.

In his life and death Toussaint Louverture has provided us with captivating lessons. How to: live a virtuous life, take a stand, lead, defeat evil, stand against injustice. Toussaint is a diamond in our rich, black history.

My name is Elliott Reid. I teach Black History through lectures and comic books. I present to you, Toussaint Louverture and his Three Life Changing Lessons. This blog post is based on the following publications

I’ll ask you a question which I asked myself not long ago when presented with the problems many black youth face; if you want to get your house tidy, do you tidy the house or do you first stop allowing people to tread dirt through your home?

I ask this because for any community you have the internal and external stressors of that community. For example, for the black community, internal stressors may be:

This means more black people in prison, less with an education and less earning power. Every single one of these factors doesn’t just slow the rate in which black people can climb the socio-economic ladder. It may in fact mean that we fall further and further behind. This is partly due to wealth compounding, ie wealth has the potential to grow faster and faster.

The issue is that if you aren’t able to keep up, you’ll be left behind. This may be partly why the black community, despite being one of the first immigrant groups to the UK in modern history, is still one of the bottom 3 earning ethnic groups in Britain and the US, too.

These are problems we have to address, and do address, every day. Every black person I met growing up was told “you have to work twice as hard to get just as far”.

However let’s look at external barriers to our progression

“teachers “increased the severity of suggested disciplinary actions when the race of the teachers didn’t match that of the child.”

Teacher Bias, Elephant in the Room

So we can see here how our community is experiencing disadvantage which is probably predisposed from a combination of what is within and outside of our control. So what do we focus on first? Myself and K from 1 Step Away From discuss barriers to our youth progressing.