Not only is it a New Year today; depending on how you look at it, it’s also a new decade.
Yowsa. Hello, 2020.
I guess a little reflection and planning is in order?
Tag: good enough
When it comes to therapeutic modalities, I’ll admit: I’m a bit of a magpie.
I spent October attending a collective trauma online summit and another on the clinical application of compassion; I have various books on mindfulness, self-compassion and connection, and am becoming increasingly drawn to Compassion-Focused Therapy.
(Basically, if it helps folks to be kinder to themselves, I’ll wander over and give it a sniff.)
So I was pretty excited to attend Rich Bennett and Joe Oliver’s introduction to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy recently, complete with a copy of their book, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: 100 Key Points and Techniques. Continue reading “Does it help?”
My inbox is out of control. I mean, WAAY out of control.
(Like everyone else’s, I know.)
I have emails about things I have no interest in, from things I signed up for but have long forgotten, from people who assume that I recognised them by their first name alone.
I occasionally have a cull, chop the number down, have an unsubscribe session. But it often resembles the grass verge on a motorway: full of debris from past travels, unidentified random plants, and weird stuff that wants to take over the general ecosphere.
But sometimes – just sometimes – my benign form of neglect pays dividends and I get an email about an opportunity that I just wouldn’t hear about otherwise.
I experienced a lot of thinking at the beginning of this week.
Nothing major happened; my mum’s doing well after fracturing her shoulder through a fall a couple of weeks ago, and I’m doing well after going up to look after her. Continue reading “When less is more”
So it’s been a week of love – a #LoveWeek, if you will. And I hate to be a Debbie Downer on the last day, but I need to acknowledge the elephant which may or not be residing in the room.
To wit: love isn’t for everyone.
Now don’t get me wrong, it clearly is. Come on. Love makes the world go round.
(OK, at the moment it’s money, which probably explains the shit creek we’re in.)
But when I say love isn’t for everyone, I mean: some of us have given up on love. We’ve lost hope. Continue reading “LoveWeek #5 – For those who’ve lost hope”
In an ideal world, of course, relationships would be easy. You’d find someone, fall in love with each other, and POW! – the “happily ever after” of fairytales comes true.
(The clue why they don’t is in the word “fairytales”, FYI…) Continue reading “LoveWeek #4 – When the going gets tough…”
In the Western hemisphere, it’s Winter. The days are short; the nights, long.
As I sit and write at dusk I can see the darkness descending outside, the landscape enveloped in a fog so dense, so deep, that familiar landmarks have been lost. It seems appropriate, somehow, given the year many of us have had. Continue reading “Amidst the darkness”
Loving ourselves is a dirty job, which is why so many of us outsource it.
It can feel tough to wholly love and accept ourselves, made as we are of both light and shadow. It can feel vain to own the former and positively uncomfortable to be reminded of the latter. Continue reading “A dirty job”
The first month of 2016’s now done and dusted. One down, eleven more to go.
The festivities of Christmas and New Year’s Eve are naught but a hazy memory, replaced by endless sale offers, credit card statements, calamitous weather and scattered fragments of new year resolutions.
I’ve had a cough and cold virus for the whole of January (which is only now abating), so I feel I’ve pretty much done zero, zip, NOTHING so far this year. No playtime at the Museum of Happiness’s pop-up event, no tea with friends, not even further damage to my credit card in those darned sales.
I recently read that the cold virus is supposed to make us feel depressed and lethargic so that we don’t go out and pick up another infection whilst fighting the first one. Continue reading “In praise of doing nothing”
Today’s New Year’s Day: a fresh blank page of a year stretches before us, ready for us to write whole new stories.
Stories which, if they’re to be truly new, involve the unknown, take us further than we’ve gone before, involve the risks of both failure and reward. Continue reading “Risky business”
Let The Love In 