It's the time of year when we tend to spend time with family.  Which can be wonderful.  Or stressful.  Or both.  So let's have a look at how and why we let our buttons get pressed, and what we can do about it.

I often focus on how we create the problems in our lives by misunderstanding our power, and today is no exception.  Our imaginations are powerful tools.  They can be put to use to create wonderful things in our lives.  And sometimes, without realising it, we can use them to create suffering for ourselves.  In this episode, we examine some of the ways we can turn this around and use our imaginations for re-empowerment.

In a world where thoughts are valued above feelings, we get very used to trying to push our feelings down or avoid them.  But this just makes us fear our own feelings.  In this episode I discuss  how we can go about undoing all that.  How we can make friends with our feelings and be healthier for it.

Evolving our consciousness isn't a matter of being right ahead of everybody else, or being wrong behind them.  We evolve when we expand, when we see that the truth is larger than our beliefs, when we incorporate the perspectives of others, when we understand from a viewpoint which is broader than our own.  Letting go of the need to be right allows us to relax into a more open and accepting way of being.   This episode starts with rigid viewpoints and expands from there, towards greater wisdom, acceptance and joy.  

When people pleasing becomes a habit, it comes at a cost to our own wellbeing.  But it isn't an easy habit to break, because we people please to cover our sense of lack of worth, and often when we try to change something like this, we do so with little compassion towards ourselves, further causing harm to our sense of worth.  This episode helps us to let go of that.  There's a visualisation at 6 - 14 minutes, so you might like to find a quiet space for that.  

Healing can be instant and miraculous, and it can be lengthy and arduous, depending on the life lessons we are seeking to learn.  The lengthy and arduous stuff is often associated with the things we have acquired in childhood, often from our parents or families.  This episode looks at how these relationships may forge our limiting beliefs about ourselves, what makes us cling to them, and what it takes to start to heal from them.  

I have a friend whose mind used to be so busy that she would interrupt herself with a new topic of conversation while still in the midst of the last one.  All this changed with the discovery of yoga.   Daily habits add up.  

In this episode, I discuss some ways we can build some calm habits into our daily routine, to improve our everyday experience, and to help us to keep calm in more extreme conditions.  

As we go into lockdown again, I'm noticing a new wave of hopelessness as friends and clients start to wonder if this will ever end.  But how much of our current experience can be eased by releasing the patterns of our past, which create the way we look at the world?  This episode touches briefly upon the work of trauma specialist Peter Levine, and looks at the various ways we can unfreeze ourselves from a hopeless response to events.  

Struggling to meditate?  Perhaps you can't seem to stop thinking.  Or it sends you to sleep.  Or you're just not experiencing what others talk about?  If so, this episode is for you.  My thoughts on meditation, drawing from my own checkered history with the process.  You too can learn to love meditating.  Honest.   

We all have a set of beliefs about who we are.  And sometimes those beliefs cause all sorts of problems.  But when we start to look at those beliefs and change them, doesn't that mean that we are trying to become someone else?  This episode looks at why it can be difficult to let go of negative ideas we hold about ourselves, how to go about it, and why it's worth it.