We make decisions from three places, not one.

Firstly, there’s the head, where we reason, use logic, refer to our memories of experience, where we line up what we perceive against what we know and try to make it all add up. It's also where we store everything we've ever learned and picked up along the way, and we can't help referring to it, whether we mean to or not.

Then there’s the heart, where we feel our way through our emotions, our values, our connections with other people.

And thirdly there’s the gut, the full body knowing, where we sense what’s around us and simply know, before we’ve had any time at all to think about it, whether something is right or wrong.

Many of us have a favourite. One centre we use most, and one, or even two, that we tend to neglect. True clarity comes when all three are talking to each other instead of one of them taking centre stage.

These are some examples of the words that seem to fit the different ways of knowing, and they are examples rather than a complete list.

Some of these concepts belong clearly in one place. Logic and Analysis are the head’s, Compassion and Connection are the heart’s, and Survival and Instinct are the gut’s. Other concepts turn up in more than one. Judgement can be a thought, a feeling or a knowing in the body, and Boundaries can be a rule we hold in our heads, something we feel in our relationships, or a clear “no” that our body gives..

Self-preservation is one that sits in all three. The head protects us by predicting, scanning for what might go wrong and holding on to rules about what is safe. The heart protects us through other people, so we please, we give, we read the room, or we close down and keep our feelings to ourselves. The gut doesn’t wait for either of these, so fight, flight or freeze or fawn happens before we’ve had a thought.

Maybe write out your own lists and notice what you choose to include.

Three Centres Collage

This exercise is a way of getting to know each one of the three centres. To feel the particular energy of your head, your heart and your gut from the inside, so they stop being concepts and start to become familiar embodied experience.

You’re going to make three drawings, paintings or collages, one for each centre, and let each centre tell you through colour and shape and torn paper what it’s like.

You’ll need magazines and papers, scissors and paint or ink if you have it. Feathers, sequins maybe or ribbons. Glue would be good. Three sheets of paper. You could do all three in an afternoon, or one at each sitting.

Something to hold

Before you begin, bring to mind something that’s live for you at the moment. It needn’t be a big decision. Just something with a bit of charge in it, something you have feelings about. We’re not going to try to solve it. You’re bringing it along so each centre has something to relate to, and so you can feel how differently your head, your heart and your gut respond to the same thing.

Choose something that matters but not the biggest, most consequential thing in your life. Hold it lightly. You don’t need to think about it. Just let it be there while you work.

You might choose to put on some music to work with. Perhaps a different genre for each of the three centres.

The head

To come into your head centre, work with colour and image rather than words. Spread the papers out. Let your eyes wander over the colours and shapes without deciding anything. This is the centre that perceives, sorts, filters and reasons. It likes to make things add up.

The head itself works at two speeds. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman called these System 1 and System 2 in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow: one fast and automatic, the other slow and effortful. Most of the time it thinks fast: automatic, effortless, leaping to the answer before you've noticed you were asked.

Try to stop yourself finishing this one — cows eat grass, cows drink...

That's the fast mind, running on association and pattern, often right and now and then caught out. But it feels right either way at first because it is so immediate.

The other speed is slow: deliberate, effortful, the thinking you can feel yourself doing. Work out 17 × 24 in your head, or read a tricky sentence back to check it actually says what you meant, and you can sense the mind shift gear, taking its time. Both are the head. Part of getting to know this centre is noticing which gear it's in.

Bring your situation to mind and notice how your head meets it. Not what you are thinking, but what actually happens up there when you hold this thing. Maybe you get an urge to write a list or draw a logical diagram of some sort. Then let that become the collage. Tear and place, gather and arrange, and let the quality of your head’s thinking choose the pieces. Add colour or images. Let it be finished when it’s finished.

The heart

To come into your heart centre, place your palm flat over your chest. Hand over heart. You can do this anywhere, and you’ll want to remember it later, in a meeting or a hard conversation. For now, just feel the warmth of your own hand and let your attention settle there. Bring to your awareness the feeling of connection between you and other people you care about. Notice what happens in your body as you do this.

This is the centre of feeling, of what moves between us and other people. Bring your situation to mind again and notice how your heart meets it: the warmth or the guarding, the tenderness, whatever’s actually there. Notice what emotions come into your body and the sensations these bring. Let the collage hold the colours that come, the images that fit. It doesn’t have to be pretty. The heart carries the places we’ve been hurt as well as loved, and the image can show either, or both.

The gut

To come into your gut centre, get up and move. A walk is best, outside if you can, and better still if you’re anywhere near water or sand. If you can’t move far, put both feet flat on the floor and your hands on your knees and sit like that for a moment. Let yourself drop out of your head and into what your body senses at its core. Start with bringing your awareness to your setting - where in the world you are. Then your close surroundings. Then your belly. Your gut.

This is instinct, the quick yes, the quick no, the knowing that arrives before thought. Bring your situation to mind and notice the gut’s answer, the one that just arrives before you’ve even started to consider anything.

Then let it become the collage, and let this one be made more by impulse than by plan. Colours? Images? Connections between them? Everything placed because it feels right and not because it makes sense. Trust what comes.

Afterwards

Lay the three creations side by side and just look. It’s not about the outcome for its artistic value. But about the attention paid to the three ways of knowing.

Notice how each centre met the same thing differently: the head’s version, the heart’s version, the gut’s version, all of them responding to one situation. Notice which centre came easily to you, and which was hard to feel, or faint, or far away. That tells you where you tend to live, and what you’ve lost touch with.

There’s nothing to fix and nothing to decide. Knowing them is the whole of it. The more familiar these three become, the more easily you can reach for those you’ve been neglecting, hand over heart, feet on the floor and find your way back to all three at once.

Here’s what the three centres looked like for me.

Head - Heart - Gut

Head
Head centre is about Gypsy jazz. I felt focused and organised, cutting out pictures and applying glue neatly. My head centre was drawn to definite things with a shape and a name. Things with little relation to each other, and things that go together in terms of colour or function or cause and effect. And the spatters of paint felt like they represented my brain cells and their firing in recognition of things and their relationships.

Heart
Yo-Yo Ma playing cello. As I breathed into my heart area I was aware of the brokenness and the reinforcements where the brokenness had healed. The hidden places in my heart. The kintsugi nature of my heart. Its weatherbeaten nature.

Gut
This is Andreas Scholl’s voice, which bypasses everything and touches me deeply below the heart, behind everything. Tuning into all that is. I think the red might be my blood, as in blood and guts. And the shards of organic matter being my DNA, individual and shared with humanity and beyond. A little basket weave pattern that wanted to be created. Seems that this is about the gut biome and its healing power.

What are some of the words that you choose for each of the three centres?

And I would love to see how yours turn out if you do the collages.

Or perhaps just identify a colour and an image and a meaningful phrase for each one.

If you would like to explore more deeply, my Three Rooms Decision Explorer app is available to all paid subscribers.

Three Rooms Decision Explorer

Three Rooms is a quiet, beautiful web tool that guides you through three inner rooms — the Head, the Heart and the Knowing — that reflect the three centres of knowing. A timer holds the space and gentle music plays in the background.

Enter your situation, sit for two minutes in each room, then write for a minute or longer. A few reflections follow, and at the end you receive an illustrated report of everything you wrote, printable or downloadable as a PDF. You may not get an answer, but you’ll have a much more complete picture of what you think, feel and know.

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“It is like being held digitally, all of the senses and somatic observations coaxed out with tenderness, clarity and truth. It is very easy to use. Luxurious, in fact.”

Rachael Smart - poet

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No AI. No data collected. Everything you write stays yours, on your device. Works in any browser.

A reflective aid, not a substitute for professional advice.

The link is here for all my paid subscribers, to use as many times as you choose.

Read more

Loving and grieving are joined at the hip, for all the beauty, soul, and travail that brings. Grief is a way of loving what has slipped from view. Love is a way of grieving that which has not yet done so.

I reflect often on these words by Stephen Jenkinson and I feel their truth in my life.

Reading ’s piece, When Grief and Love Become Entangled: Maybe We Cling to the Pain, I was thinking about how closely my own love and grief often seem bound together, and how difficult it can be to imagine one without the other especially after losing a child.

My love for my son was shot through with fear for his wellbeing even before he died. As his mother, I wanted to protect him, to keep him safe, to know that he was okay. I think this is part of the vulnerability of loving someone so deeply. Their wellbeing matters to us in ways we cannot fully control, and we live with the knowledge, however conscious or unconscious, that we cannot guarantee their safety or happiness. I feel this dynamic in action now around my children and grandchildren.

The biggest psychological impact of losing my son, beyond the personal devastation, was that the world I thought I knew seemed to have shifted on its axis. I had to confront a reality I had never known — our own children can die, and no matter how much we love them, we cannot guarantee that they will live. It wasn’t just that I had lost my son. I had lost the world as I understood it.

Twenty-two years later, the pain is still here. But I have grown sufficiently internally to hold it, rather than have it spill out of me at every opportunity as it once did. I have learned to recognise when it needs my attention and to tend to it in the ways I need to now. The pain hasn’t disappeared; my capacity to live with it has changed.

Something else has shifted, too. The devastating questions of “Why me? Why us? Why him?” have changed as my understanding of the societal pressures and expectations, especially on young men, has deepened. I have come to see suicide as a devastating reality within our society, not inevitable for any one individual, but an ever-present possibility. Understanding this hasn’t taken away the loss, but it has changed how I understand the world in which it happened and how personally I take it.

I think, too, about those moments of pure connection and love for a young child asleep in their bed. That overwhelming tenderness, the sheer preciousness of their existence, the depth of love we feel simply watching them breathe. In those moments there is an awareness of how vulnerable they are, and of how little control we ultimately have over what life may bring.

Perhaps love carries the possibility of grief within it because to love someone is to be vulnerable to their absence. But I wonder whether there is a distinction between grief being inseparable from love and grief having to dominate our experience of love.

Nikki’s question about whether we cling to pain resonates with me. I wonder how much of that clinging is conscious, and how much comes from the fear that easing our suffering might somehow loosen our connection to the person who has died. Like Nikki, I remember in the early days paradoxically not wanting to stop feeling the pain. If the pain is so closely associated with remembering, perhaps we begin to experience it as evidence of our love, or even as a way of keeping our child close. The thought of feeling better can then become complicated — we desperately want relief, yet some part of us fears what that relief means.

After losing my son, my memories of him became inextricably connected to the pain of his death. Thinking of him meant remembering that he had died, and remembering that he had died meant experiencing the pain all over again. So sometimes I wanted to avoid reminding myself of the days of his childhood and couldn’t even look at the photos. For a long time, I couldn’t imagine thinking of him without feeling that pain. Perhaps, in some way, I was also afraid that if the pain lessened, something of my love for him would lessen with it.

I wonder whether, in those early years, grief also offered a way of remaining close to the enormity of what had happened. The pain was a constant reminder that he had lived, that he mattered, that he was loved, and that his life had made an indelible difference. To loosen my grip on the pain might have felt like loosening my grip on him.

I feel the ache of his absence, and still have times when grief demands the whole of my attention. And I can also experience joy, connection, and the fullness of life.

Perhaps this is the distinction I have slowly come to make: I cannot change what happened, and I cannot eliminate the pain of losing him, but I can change my relationship to that pain. I have written here about the epiphany I experienced when I realised I couldn’t know, on a soul level, that he shouldn’t have died. I can remember my son and feel tenderness, gratitude, affection, and even joy, alongside the sadness.

I don’t think this means that grief and love become entirely separate. Perhaps they never can. But there is a difference between carrying grief as part of loving someone and feeling that we must keep suffering in order to continue loving them.

I remain his mother. I will always love him.

It started with my grandchildren. The oldest, who is now twenty, had virtually no secondary education since no school was able or willing to accommodate his differences or his intensities. He attended four different schools and they mainly understood him as being wilfully disruptive.

Then his younger siblings, ten and twelve years younger, arrived, each with their own strong patterns of neurodivergence.

I won’t say much more about them here. Suffice to say that their qualities, sensitivities, intensities and traits started showing up when they were very young and are now unmistakable.

My granddaughter reminds me of myself as a child. Which is both lovely and disconcerting. Gifted and highly sensitive she tunes into others’ needs seamlessly. And makes her own needs known vociferously when she feels safe to do so. (I would not have dared do that - my daughter is so much better at parenting than I was.)

And all of this has inspired my daughter to think about herself and her own experiences growing up. How she used to turn up in my classroom (I was a teacher in her secondary school) in distress and beg to be allowed to go home. How her pastoral head suggested I should look into getting Prozac prescribed for her. (I didn’t.) How I moved her to a different school house as a consequence.

And then I thought about her two brothers through this lens. Both of them had complexities that simply weren’t met. One, you know about—Sam was gifted and had unrecognised and unmet neuro-complexities— the other severely underachieved and being not so outwardly expressive of his frustrations was passed over and seen as mildly disruptive.

Once I started asking the questions I could see so much. And I gained a much more comprehensive understanding of what went on at school, and otherwise, for all three of them.

And I then turned to myself and their father, Danny.

I’d been sitting with what I knew about myself—the overexcitabilities, the giftedness, the late-identified ADHD.

I looked across at him in my mind and saw it there too. The psychomotor energy, the dyslexia, the ADHD. We had been circling the same territory from different directions without the map.

I considered my parents.

Colin, my father.

Intellectual giftedness running deep, multipotentiality, autism tentative as a question in my mind. A master engineer, and a master communicator and wordsmith with the driest of wit.

Tremendous ability for hyperfocus.

Commitment to order beneath apparent chaos. Strong anxiety when things weren't as they should be. When plans suddenly changed.

Miranda, my mother.

Lifelong deep existential questioning. Willingness to follow her own unique path. A mind that questioned everything. Deeply. Gifted pianist and musician and too shy to perform. Talked, often without pause, of her eclectic interests in metaphysics and spiritual matters.

Dressmaker extraordinaire, talented cook dedicated to organic food and wholefoods. Creating beauty in the garden. An influencer of her time.

And both of them continually immersed in doing: working, making, creating, mending, fixing, maintaining.

A long term marriage survived through parallel interests. Both often struggling to relate emotionally with their children.

And then I went further still. My grandparents. I knew both my grandmothers but not my grandfathers. so much of this is tentative. But I believe it is there.

Women of the Edwardian generation were not necessarily offered arenas in which their giftedness could show itself.

However, my maternal grandmother Sheila ran a professional translation service in her sixties. Then she wrote a book about my grandad's fascinating life which she finished not long before she died. She was a resilient woman, single-parenting three children, plus a refugee nephew throughout the war. And she always made sure she had a half crown in her purse to tip the cab driver.

My maternal grandfather Percy was a polyglot—an engineer and manufacturer who spoke and wrote multiple languages fluently, and he travelled across the world for work aged just seventeen. Strong psychological resilience - he survived kidnapping and serious physical and psychological torture at the hands of the Iron Guard in Romania.

My grandfather Cyril. Engineer. Man of habit. Careful, measured, eminently sensible and practical. Awarded a medal for bravery for going out to repair communication wires under enemy fire during WWI. I never knew him as he died young but my father inherited much from him.

And grandmother Cecilia. Born in 1886. Skilled stenographer. Late for her generation to marry and then widowed just fourteen years later. I do remember that she was intolerant of her grandchildren's energy, asking us to sit still for hours while she and my father talked endlessly.

It is a map—provisional and to be held lightly. Providing a way of seeing yourself in context, and visualising where the threads you carry may have come from.

When you begin to see the threads running through a family, a few things tend to shift.

You see yourself in context and you see your children differently. What school calls defiance or disruption may turn out to look remarkably like Grandad, or like you aged eight.

You might be able to see the generations before you more gently. Parents and grandparents who were hard to reach, or who never quite fitted, often make more sense once you see what they may have been carrying.

And it is something to keep. A record you can return to, add to, bring to a conversation with your family or your therapist.

This new tool, The Ancestral Neurodivergence Map, helps you to trace overexcitabilities, gifted profiles and diagnosable differences across your own family tree, as many generations as you have knowledge of, with as much or as little certainty as you actually have.

I’ve included overexcitabilities and giftedness alongside the diagnosable differences deliberately. They too are ways of diverging from the majority neurotype, part of the same rich spectrum rather than something separate from it.

You add people generation by generation, and on each person’s card you mark the traits you recognise in them. One click gives a question mark, for possible. A second marks it as present. For diagnosable differences, a third click records a confirmed diagnosis. Anything you don’t know, you simply leave blank.

Much of it will be guesswork, and that’s all right. You will be working with fragments: family stories, second-hand accounts, impressions, what you sensed about someone at the kitchen table forty years ago. That is enough. There will be people and traits with no evidence left at all, and women of earlier generations in particular may never have had the chance to show themselves fully for who they were.

You can expand it to include half-siblings and second partners, aunts and uncles and cousins. Names and roles can be edited, and clicking any label in the key brings up a description of that trait.

When you’ve filled in what you can, you can save your map to your own computer and load it again later to carry on, or save it as a PDF.

There is also an option to generate a reflective report, a short narrative drawn from what you’ve marked. It uses AI (Claude) and is offered as a prompt for reflection, not a clinical assessment or a diagnosis. The report appears on screen only and isn’t stored anywhere, so copy it or save as a PDF if you want to keep it.

Here is my report as an example:

Your map is designed for private exploration, so if you do share it with anyone, please protect names and identifying details.

This tool works best on a laptop or desktop — worth knowing before you dive in.

I’ve built this for my paid subscribers, but I’m opening it to everyone for a limited time, with my compliments. I’d love you to have a go.

Click the button to access.

Ancestral Neurodiversity Mapping Tool

And I genuinely want to know what you think — what landed, what confused you, what you’d love to see added. This is early days and your voice will shape where it goes.

Warmest wishes,

Davina 💙

I start catching my breath with the pain of loss when I notice the chill in the air and realise that Autumn has arrived. Again. The twenty-second Autumn since I lost my boy.

The Canadian geese gather on Looe Island at this time of year and for weeks they have been flying over a couple of times a day in their familiar vee formation, honking their way across the bay, but now they have moved on again.

It is alarming to witness the accelerating speed of the turning of the world.

Sunny and crisp Autumn days used to be my favourite days. I have Scottish blood and the heat of Summer, especially this record-breaking Summer, is not really my thing. So what I have always liked is the end of Summer, and those precious sunny days in September and October. Until everything changed. And that October there were rainbows, one after another, each carrying the message that I craved, and still crave.

The anniversary of my son’s death came last Tuesday and I still don’t know why it matters so much to remember the actual day. With other family members I can barely recall the dates they died. With my son, as soon as the evenings start to shorten and chill, the date approaches with gathering speed. It matters to me, and not all in a bad way. It just feels so significant to recall the days leading up to when he died.

First we have his birthday at the end of August – we recognise that gently amongst family and friends, tracking the passing years. This year he would have turned forty-one. And then, nearly six weeks later – the twenty-second anniversary of his death.

There is no convenient term for that day – I generally call it his ‘anniversary’, which can be confusing for people who don’t know, but then I don’t usually discuss it with anyone who doesn’t know him or know what that means, I guess.

I didn’t know what to do on that day this year. And I never seem to.

I usually take the week off work to give myself some space, and this year was no different. On the day itself I had no plan. Some years I have walked on the coast path – about five or six miles is enough for me. Along to Polperro, sweating up the steep hills. Every year, I regret not having organised something more meaningful to do. It’s all a bit of a damp squib in many ways. Which feels like a very sad thing to think.

This year I stayed home and I phoned my dear friend Sara (pronounced Sarah). She is Sam’s godmother and it really helps to know that this beautiful, funny and deeply compassionate woman still thinks of him. She made me laugh as we talked about our five children when they were small. Sam was the eldest of the five. He was gentle and kind to Sara’s Jack, who was the youngest.

Jack would be wandering around lost in his imagination, pretending to be a sea pirate or something, and then he would leap onto Sam’s back with his arms around his neck. And Sam was so sweet with him. So patient with this dear little boy. Sam’s own brother would have got short shrift. We talked about the gentle and kind and incredible humans they all were and all are.

We are so blessed. We agree on that.

And at the same time we feel our loss so deeply. We don’t even have to talk about it. Not really. When I am with Sara I know she still loves Sam too. And I don’t know if I remember to tell her often enough how much that matters. That she has a heart as big as a house. I think she is reading these words so now she knows. I hope she already did.

I love you Sara. I love you Sam. I love all of our children.

The following day I dropped my car off to be serviced in the next village and there were no buses back, so I walked back the four miles. It was a trek, along roads and unstable grass verges, but I put one foot in front of the other, doggedly, determinedly. Then I had my overnight-oats breakfast on a bench looking out to the sea. It was a sunny but cold day, with no chance of rainbows. It didn’t really fit my mood. Dismal rain would not have worked either. Where were the fucking rainbows?

I know there are many bereaved parents who prefer just to allow it to go by unmentioned and unmarked, and I do get that, but that’s not right for me.

I feel as if it should be momentous – as if the world should stop and recognise what is happening, and the reality is that it’s just a date that looms and passes every year. Perhaps I yearn for a funeral every year. It is hard to describe the wish for the aliveness of love and loss that I remember from that day. It was both terrible and beautiful, and adorned throughout with Sam’s rainbows.

I don’t know how to achieve a taste of that terrible, beautiful experience that I wish for, but I find that I want to plan for it. And then I don’t. I wish I could say that I have this taped. I wish I could offer you some pearls of wisdom, but I feel empty of such things.

Maybe I’ll do it differently next year. Maybe I’ll do it properly next year. I think I have learned that is unlikely. Maybe this is exactly right the way it is.

And please, sweetheart, can I have the rainbows back again next year?

When you lose a child to suicide people try their hardest to be helpful but they don’t know what to say. Here are some of things they tried.

Advice

It hasn’t hit you yet.
Is there anything you’d like to add?
You might want to have someone with you.

At least you have your family round you.

It’s not your fault, it’s not his fault, it’s not her fault.
What more could you have done?

At least he’s not suffering now.

My aunt committed suicide.
My flatmate took his own life.
My work colleague was found in a wood.

At least you know it wasn’t suicide.

You must eat.
Are you sleeping?
I think you’re still in shock, do you want a cup of tea?

At least you don’t have to go back to work yet.

Your faith will help you.
You won’t see it yet but there’s a gift in this.
You’ll need to do some work on behalf of his soul or he’ll be in limbo.

At least he’s with God now.

A young man is with me.
He wants you to know he’s sorry, and that he loves you.
It was an accident. Sudden.
Here one moment, gone the next.

At least now you know he’s all right.

White feathers are everywhere.
I hear owls.
I saw a stag with huge antlers just standing there.

At least you have the rainbows.

What was he thinking?
He knew you loved him.
He wouldn’t want you to be unhappy.

At least you know you did everything you could.

You ought to go back to work soon.
You shouldn’t have to move house.
We destroyed his clothes, you wouldn’t have wanted them.

At least you’ll have closure.

Christmas must have been difficult.
Happy New Year!
Anniversaries will be the worst times.
Time is the best healer.

At least you’ll all be together.

Sorry I haven’t phoned, I didn’t know what to say.
I’ve been meaning to come round

I came home late one morning, only to change my clothes. A brief visit. My mother was at the table of the clean and well-ordered kitchen baking loaves of dense wholemeal bread. I stumbled into a cluster of empty milk bottles by the door, sending them skidding across the flour-sprinkled floor. I leant down to gather them up and fell sideways against the stove.

“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered.

“You’re drunk,” Mum said, glancing at the kitchen clock in confusion. She looked directly at me as I steadied myself.

In that instant I saw myself through her eyes.

“You reckon?” I said and a milk bottle left my hand, flew across the room and shattered on the floor at her feet.

The truth was that she was partially right. I had also been out of my head on amphetamine sulphate for days.

She told me she thought I was possessed by the devil. She wondered aloud whether I needed to be exorcised.

I was seventeen.

I was ashamed of that morning for years. My mother was a graceful person and she did not hold it against me, but I did — I didn't know how to forgive myself.

I have always met the world with an amplified nervous system — emotionally and intellectually, and, to a lesser degree, through my senses. I question and explore things incessantly and I feel things deeply.

By fifteen I had been in continual trouble and was expelled from school and subsequently, at sixteen, from sixth-form college. I now see that the drink and the drugs and the behaviour were a construction, a shield to protect me. To keep everyone at arm’s length and to avoid having to see a clear picture of what was happening in my young life. And they were a layer of insulation. To avoid feeling the shame that had grown because my intensities were deemed unacceptable, and that rejection felt, to me, like a rejection of who I was.

In Chris Wells’ recently published research article, Overexcitability Reconsidered: Domestication of a Developmental Theory (Wells, 2026) they focus on psychiatrist Kazimierz Dąbrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration in which I find some hugely helpful ideas. I strongly recommend that you read the article.

Chris explains that intensities like mine, which Dąbrowski terms ‘overexcitabilities’ or OEs, turn up everywhere — in people we call autistic, or ADHD, or highly sensitive, as well as many of those we call gifted, and in a great many we call nothing at all except difficult or disordered.

Some of the people who live with overexcitabilities could also be identified as gifted — in one study, gifted children were the research subjects — and so, over time, others wrongly narrowed Dąbrowski’s work until it seemed to apply to giftedness alone.

Chris describes how OEs started, erroneously, to be seen in two distinct ways — either as indicators of giftedness or as indicators of pathology. Additionally, they write “a Black, disabled, or low-income child showing similar behaviors was more likely to be coded as disordered, oppositional, or emotionally disturbed” (Wells, 2026) — which shines the uncomfortable light of social inequity onto the situation.

Calling it giftedness may have seemed a kinder and more acceptable label than disordered or dangerous or possessed but it moved away from the true relevance of Dąbrowski’s extensive research. But for him it wasn’t about indicating giftedness at all.

He didn’t say that overexcitability was giftedness but that it wasn’t pathology and, more importantly, he spent many years describing what it was for.

Dąbrowski called his theory Positive Disintegration. He came to understand overwhelming feelings and internal turmoil as fuel for growth. Seeing that a person can become more fully themselves not in spite of their inner conflict but through it. He saw that the process, when it’s held, is how a self comes apart and reassembles into something more authentic. He was arguing, decades before anyone else, against the pathologising of intense people.

What turns it into growth is having the opportunity for self-exploration, to feel the gap between who one is and who one might become. And having someone alongside who can stay with us through the crisis rather than treat the crisis as a problem to be cured.

Which means that intensity was not a problem to be fixed. Suppress it, shame it, tell a child over and over to calm down, slow down, sit still and stop being so much, and you do not remove the intensity. You only turn it inward, against the child. But if you can meet it and stay with the child inside the storm, the intensity is able to let them grow.

The focus is not on the internal storm but on what the storm is reaching for.

This changes the whole question. Faced with a child with OEs, we tend to ask: what is wrong here, and how do we correct it? Dąbrowski’s work asks, what is this intensity for — and how do we hold it so it can do its work?

That is a vital question. It explores the difference between a child whose fire warms them and a child whose fire consumes them. And the deciding factor is whether anyone around them can meet the intensity without first needing to make it stop.

I see that what I understood as the trauma of giftedness in both myself and my son was, in fact, the trauma of intensities, or OEs, met with correction instead of holding.

An intensity that is held can become a life well lived. An intensity that is abandoned can become a catastrophe. I have deep reason to know both are true.

My mother was not an unkind woman. She was perturbed and frightened, and she had no language for the teenager in front of her, any more than my teachers had. I see now that she had her own intensities, poured into her books, her breadmaking, her dressmaking, the garden. The intensity frightening us both was not a devil, and not a defect, but fuel that no-one knew how to use effectively.

The reframing of the relevance of the Theory of Positive Disintegration matters far beyond me. If the trauma belongs to giftedness, it is the concern of a small and rarefied group, and the rest of the world can look away. But if it belongs to intensity itself — to the overexcitable nervous system, wherever and however it appears — then it reaches every restless, questioning, deeply feeling, easily overwhelmed child who has ever been told they are too much. And the thing they most need is not a diagnosis, kind-worded or otherwise. It is an adult who understands what the intensity is for.

I was not possessed. I was not bad or dangerous. My son was not difficult or disordered or in need of correction. We were both children with amplified nervous systems and no-one who understood that it was fuel.

I am no stranger to inner work. I’ve spent much of my adult life in what Dąbrowski himself called auto-psychotherapy — the slow business of becoming your own guide — and i've spent years more alongside skilled therapists. And still, learning about overexcitabilities and his theory has been a revelation.

I find myself wondering what might have happened if that well-informed adult had been there for me. Been able to communicate to me what had been happening since I was young. Able to show me how to embrace my intensities, how to meet them and nurture them and continue to walk forwards.

How that might have been. How that might have protected me from freefalling into alcohol, drugs and unhelpful relationships. And shame.

How that might have equipped me to be of more positive support to my son.

Understanding my intensities as differences in my nervous system and my way of thinking, rather than as shortcomings, has healed a great deal of shame and allowed me to forgive myself. Forgiveness in the realisation that there was nothing to forgive in the first place. I was doing my best in the circumstances I found myself in.

There was, as it turns out, nothing wrong with me. Just an intense mind and an amplified nervous system reaching for authenticity, and a world with no understanding of what was going on.

For much of the time after my son Sam took his own life, I pointed the blame at myself. The ‘I-should-have-known’s. The ‘if-only-I-had’s. The days and nights and years I went over, looking for the things I’d got wrong through his short life.

Alongside blaming myself, I levelled the blame at others. Those who, in my opinion, had not done what they should have done. Or had done what they should not have done.

The first thing that had to happen to resolve this was to be listened to. This was difficult as none of my friends could bear to hear my thoughts and they argued against me, telling me what a great mother I was and that it really, really wasn’t my fault. But this didn’t help — if anything it just drove my painful and self-castigating thoughts underground.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in The Book of Forgiving, sets out how to be present with someone else’s deep pain. His guidance tells us: listen, don’t try to fix the pain, don’t minimise the loss, don’t offer advice, don’t turn it back to your own grief, keep confidentiality, offer love, comfort and care.

Notice how much of it is about not-doing. Not fixing, not minimising, not advising, not turning the moment back towards yourself. Most of what we imagine is about comfort is us, unable to bear another person’s pain, rushing in to make it smaller so that we can breathe again. Through their love for me, my friends could not help but to attempt to comfort me, so I needed a different place to take my feelings.

I was fortunate to find a therapist who understood what really helps. Who had the inner capacity to sit with me while I blamed myself and others. Who could tolerate the level of my pain and my anger. My rage. He told me later he had not had another client who swore as often as me.

One morning, at the end of our session, he asked me who would be at home when I got there. When I told him, “No-one,” he broke our familiar boundary by making me a cappuccino and sitting with me while I drank it before I drove home. I often think about this and wonder who it was that couldn’t tolerate my pain that day.

And slowly over those first years in therapy, from inside that holding, the self-blame and the outward blame slowly began to loosen. Gradually, in the way that frost melts off a field as the sun’s rays reach it.

I began to see the mother I actually was. A young woman inside a situation far larger than I was, doing my best inside it, and getting some of it wrong.

I am the mother who could have known better. And I am the mother who could not have known better. Both are true, and for years I could only hold the first. And the shame, which had taken up so much room in me that there had been space for very little else, began at last to give some of that room back. Room for the love and the grief and the sadness about the harm that had been done.

Blaming others

The blame I had carried since Sam died was never mine and I could see that more clearly now. But I was not ready, yet, to see that it was no one else’s either. Both these aspects of forgiveness took many years to heal and even now I sometimes need a reminder.

I was at Karuna, my psychotherapy training institute, one weekend when this huge thing rose up. Not blame turned inward this time, but anger — enormous, overwhelming, at all the ways Sam had been let down throughout his education. By teachers, by education professionals, by university staff. The size of this anger was impossible to hold on my own.

When it was triggered during one of our practice sessions, I sat with my tutor, an experienced and well-grounded Buddhist practitioner, and she gave me a safe place to be with it. We sat together in her office, looking out over the quiet garden to the moors.

She asked me how big a container would need to be to hold the anger I was feeling. I searched, and I could not find anything in my imagination large enough. It was a universe full of anger, and that was about the size of all the ways my son had been failed.

I did not know at that point that my tutor herself had been one of those people who had let Sam down. That, ten years earlier, this gentle, wise and loving woman had sat as a sort of parent governor in a meeting and helped to make the decision that Sam was to be permanently excluded from his third primary school. I don’t know whether she had made the connection. I didn’t realise this until I sat down to write Sam’s Story.

She didn’t tell me to let it go. She didn’t tell me it was unspiritual, or that I should understand, or forgive. She only helped me be with it at its true size.

The Sea Pirate

Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, or Thay (pronounced ‘tie’) as his students called him, told the story of a twelve-year-old girl who threw herself into the sea and drowned after a pirate boarded her refugee boat. When you first hear it, you are angry at the pirate, and you take the girl’s side. He tells how, from there it seems simple — you could pick up a gun and shoot the pirate for what he’s done.

But sitting with it, Thay saw beyond this. He saw that if he had been born in the pirate’s village, raised in the pirate’s poverty, shaped by everything that shaped the pirate, then he too would be the pirate. Not might be. Would be. And so, he said, if you shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some degree responsible for the conditions that made him.

He put it into a poem afterwards.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

Both. Not the girl I side with and the pirate I condemn, but both, held in one heart. And the harm seen as the consequence of the circumstances both found themselves in and as the responsibility of us all.

Forgive the person, judge the failure.

After I lost Sam I had believed I was the terrible one, the guilty one, and I needed others to be guilty too — guilty enough to take the weight off me. I couldn’t forgive anyone from inside that huge pain.

Blame thrown outward and blame turned inward are both fear, both defending against the same shame. And that shame was enormous.

Forgiving other people and forgiving myself felt like two impossible tasks that I needed to attend to. And that meant putting down both the shame and the blame.

It was only once I had created enough room inside myself — once the burning ball of shame had quietened down — that I could look at us all more clearly, without needing anyone to be a monster. So many people had failed Sam, but especially the teachers and educators and officials, the ones whose job it was to see what he needed and to give it, and who did not.

What I saw, when I looked more carefully, was not a set of villains with the intention of failing a child. I saw people marinated in the systems they worked inside believing the things they had been taught — systems that had taught them a struggling child was a behaviour to be managed. They had imagined that their standards were neutral and the child’s difficulty was a choice, that a child like my son was a problem.

They were blind in exactly the way those systems train people to be blind, the way I too had been, inside my own conditions, doing my best and getting it wrong some of the time.

I am not saying what happened to my son was OK. It was not OK.

Things should have been very different for Sam in school as he grew up, and that is a true and terrible thing that I will hold for the rest of my life. But the people I can forgive and the failure I refuse to minimise are not the same thing.

I eventually saw that everyone who touched his story was themselves shaped by powerful systems they had not chosen and mostly could not see.

When I needed other people to be the bad guys, it was never really about them. It was about what I could not yet bear to hold in myself. And forgiving them was never going to come from deciding to be generous. It came, when it came, from being able at last to bear and hold both the shame and the anger and from seeing clearly what had been going on for us all.

Once I no longer needed to be spared, I no longer needed anyone to be the sea pirate.

The responsibility for what happened and what needs to change is widely held. And when the blame dissolves, it does not dissolve into nobody’s responsibility. It dissolves into everybody’s.

The responsibility for what happens when children are told they don’t belong is everyone’s responsibility. All of us who let school become a place some children cannot survive. All of us who let belonging become something to be earned rather than simply assumed. All of us who let our neighbourhoods be places where people live alongside one another without holding one another. All of us shaped by the systems, and all of us, therefore, responsible for changing them.

And this is why I write.

“But Davina,” my 6’2” little brother said across his kitchen table, “you didn’t do it.”

I was confused. I knew it had happened. The perfectly circular hole in the passenger seat of my father’s brand-new Ford Cortina GT — the exact circumference of the cigarette lighter set into the dashboard, the yellow foam showing through. My father incensed. At me. I was thirteen, I had just started smoking, and I had carried the shame of that burned seat for fifty years.

“No,” my brother told me. “It wasn’t you. It was me.”

He was nine when it happened. He described it in detail — how he’d gone swimming at the indoor pool in Slough with Dad, waited in the car, bored, pushed the lighter in, taken it out, and pressed it to the seat. How, shocked at the result, he had bundled his rolled towel and swimming trunks over the hole.

“I was too scared to admit it,” he said. “And Dad blamed you.”

He paused. “Sorry.”

I’d carried a crime for half a century that was never mine. And reflecting on that — the shame that wasn’t mine, or maybe wasn’t really anyone’s — is where I started to think deeply about blame and forgiveness. And how these aren’t really about what I was taught as a child at all.

What is forgiveness all about?

A widely held view is that sometimes people have done something wrong — something they chose to do, that has caused harm — and that forgiveness is the mercy you can choose to grant them out of kindness.

Another common view is that forgiveness is really for us, not them — that we let go of our resentment for our own peace, whether or not the perpetrator deserves it.

I’m arguing something that goes further than both these ideas. That the person who did the thing that seems to require forgiving was never a free agent choosing badly. Instead, they were acting inevitably from the conditions they found themselves in — the life they’d had, the situation they were in — conditions that would have produced the very same act from any of us.

Not might have. Would have.

See that clearly and accurately enough, and there is no bad person left to pardon. Only a set of conditions, and a harm that came out of them.

It’s not about minimising the size of the harm. The harm stays exactly the size it was. It is only that the blame has nowhere left to land. And the peace that brings, whilst real, is not the endpoint. It is what frees the energy to ask two important questions: what made this happen, and what has to change so that it happens less?

Seen this way, forgiveness becomes almost beside the point. There is no inherent badness in anyone — only situations that need attention. And once we understand this there is no need to forgive anyone to let go of any resentment as the bitterness dissolves alongside the realisation that no one person is to blame.

Instead we see that perhaps the person has something to learn; perhaps their circumstances need to change. Perhaps systems, organisations or societies need to change.

What I was taught instead

Most of us were brought up the opposite way — to see the person who caused harm as blameworthy, deserving of judgement and punishment, until they show sufficient remorse and are then forgiven as an act of charity. The focus of change was always the person, never the conditions around them.

I was taught, when I was young, that forgiveness is something you grant to others — providing they are sorry enough. That as a wronged person you stand, wounded, holding the debt someone owes you, and at some point, with effort, you can decide to let it go, to put it down. For their benefit. To rise above your own hurt for the sake of the greater good.

I remember being sent upstairs to my room, having transgressed the rules by being noisy, or mean, or careless, and being told, “Stay up there until you can come down and say sorry.” So I would stay up there, then eventually come down tear-stained, with a wobbly bottom lip, and say, “I’m sorry.” This was the ritual required to be forgiven and allowed back into the family fold.

This taught me the model: others as the judge of my behaviour, and the holders of the power to forgive.

I enacted it too. Telling on my siblings and watching them get into trouble until they were sorry. “Say sorry to your sister” meant performing something we did not feel. A required ritual.

No one spoke to me about true forgiveness. No one spoke about understanding that we had each been doing our best in the circumstances we found ourselves in — children expected to have self-control over their own behaviour in situations that were hard to tolerate. The fault was always found in the child, never in the situation. If something had gone wrong, then someone was at fault, and they had to be sorry before they could be forgiven.

And somewhere in all that saying sorry, without anyone meaning it to happen, the wrong I had done became the wrong I was. I did a bad thing turned into I am bad.

Which is exactly what had happened with the car. For fifty years I had internalised that crime as wholly mine, the blame as proportionate and rightful. And it turned out never to have been mine at all.

But even once I knew, I could see this had never been a crime in the first place. My brother, as a curious, restless nine-year-old, did what a great many nine-year-olds might have done, given a lighter and an empty car and time to fill. A hard-working man was as upset as most of us would be at the sight of the damage to his prized possession and needed someone to blame. And that someone was me. And I had taken the blame on so completely that I came to believe it really was me. In my father’s lifetime, the truth never came out.

The burning ball of blame

As a teenager I was harmed — the things that were done to me, the things I did, the things that happened, the shame that came out of it. In my early thirties I was so angry at my parents. Angry that they would not take the blame and shame from me by admitting their own mistakes. I felt I had been neglected and left vulnerable to all the things that I did and that happened to me. It was as if there was a burning ball of blame, and it seemed there were only two places it could go. To them or to me.

It took me a long time to see there was no place for it with either of us. My parents, with their background and the tools they had been given, would have done exactly what they did. And I would have done the same in their shoes, made of what they were made of. Around us all were all the forces that shape a lost teenager, none of which any of us had chosen.

The ball of blame had nowhere to land.

I had needed my parents to be the bad ones. Not out of spite, but because if the fault was theirs, it was not mine, and what I could not bear to hold was the shame. The blame I threw at them was about keeping my own shame at arm’s length. As long as someone else was to blame, I did not have to feel it.

I wonder now what might have been possible if any of us had understood forgiveness — not the ritual of sorry, but the fact that we sometimes cause harm without being bad, and that what makes us forgivable is not being let back in once we are contrite, but it being seen clearly that any of us, in the same place, might have done the very same thing.

And that the important question we are left with is not, Who has done something wrong and are they sorry? but What made this happen — and what has to change so that it happens less?

My son had a very spiky learning profile. He was gifted, neurodivergent (undiagnosed but very likely ADHD and perhaps autistic) and dyslexic and he had dysgraphia. And schools seemed to find this impossible to manage or even to understand. At ten years old, despite having been excluded from a number of schools he was studying maths and science at GCSE level but still found handwriting really challenging to do. So when I found someone writing about exactly this I was intrigued.

writes A Spiky Profile, on the challenges of supporting twice-exceptional children. Her essay on the one page profile is here and is well worth reading.

She describes attaching a summary of her son’s strengths to a diagnosis report that was almost all deficit, because the paperwork had no space available for what he positively could do. She, of course, could write it because she knew him, because she had time to notice what the report left out, and because she had learned through experience what was important to include.

Having read that, I felt that it was important to make constructing one of those one page profiles easier for parents. I started putting something together for my daughter to use for my grandson who is due to start secondary school next year.

And then I built something.

What the One Page Profile app is:

A free tool for the weeks before a move to a new school. It helps you make a one-page profile of your child — one side of A4, readable by a busy form tutor in about two minutes.

By the time term starts, a new school may hold an EHCP, a diagnosis report, a transition form and a set of primary data, and none of it says the things you most want a teacher to know - what your child is actually like, her strengths and what might really help her to be OK.

Why one page, and why so short

Schools are drowning in words. A teacher in late August is planning to teach from 30 to 150 year 7 children they haven’t yet met, and a long document tends not to get read, but filed.

So this is built the other way round. A short page where every word matters. What she’s like as a learner. The conditions that let her learn. And the one or two things a well-meaning teacher might otherwise get wrong.

The tool offers you carefully worded statements to choose from, drawn from a wide statement bank — you pick the ones that fit, add some of your own, mark the few that matter most, and put them into your own words.

Written with your child, not just about them

Much of the page speaks in the child’s own voice. For example, I go quiet when I am struggling; it usually means the opposite of understanding.

You are encouraged to agree what’s being said with your child. If they’re old enough to have a view, they should have a voice. A statement a child disagrees with is worse than no statement at all, because a teacher will, hopefully, act on it.

On the app’s privacy

There are no accounts and no sign-up. Nothing you type is sent anywhere — it happens on your own device and, unless you save the document, it’s gone the moment you close the tab. There is no AI writing your child’s profile. The photo you add never leaves your computer.

You get a clean PDF to print and send, a short covering email to send with it and an editable Word version to keep. Here is an example:

If it might be useful for you, as a subscriber, you are welcome to use the app.

It’s aimed at the move up to secondary school, but it works for any change of school. Or any change of year. Or moving from home education to school.

Print copies for the staffroom pigeonholes as well as emailing it if you choose to— a page in the hand tends to get read.

If you do make one, I’d love to know how it lands. And if there’s a section or a statement you wished it offered and it didn’t, tell me. That’s exactly how it gets better.

Many of us make decisions from just one place.

You might think it through — make a list, weigh the options, apply logic. Or go round in circles until the anxiety eventually subsides and something that feels like a decision emerges.

Or maybe you decide on an impulse from your heart as it opens to possibilities of connection or opportunity. Or perhaps you are someone who is in tune with your inner guidance and you let this take the reins.

Whichever way is your go to, we’re too often only consulting one part of ourselves. And we have three ways of knowing and each is valuable in its own way:

The head, which analyses and weighs, which is very good at thinking practical things through.

The heart, which feels and connects, which knows what we love and what we can’t bear, but can be drowned out by the noise above it.

And something quieter still — beneath the thinking, beneath the feeling — an inner knowing that sometimes, when we get still enough, has the clearest view of all.

To make important decisions we need to pay attention to all three ways of knowing. And it can really help to have a way of visiting all three before taking action or making changes.

So I’ve built something I’m calling the Three Rooms Decision Exploration Tool It’s a process that takes you into a different reflective space for each way of knowing — head, heart, and that quieter place beneath and beyond — and gives you room to write from each of them.

It takes about fifteen minutes, or longer if you choose to take your time over it.

By the end, you don’t necessarily have an answer. But you have something more useful than an answer: a more complete picture of what you actually think, feel, and know.

I use Three Rooms for my own questions

I tested the app out with something that’s been sitting unresolved for way too long.

How am I going to complete my book?

I need to decide how to make my book available for purchase. To work out whether to push forward now with publishing it, and how, when the editing costs feel out of reach and every path I consider seems to lead back to the beginning. I’ve been round this circle more times than I can count.

• In the Head room, I wrote it all out. The money that isn’t there. The attempt that didn’t work. The pull towards doing it myself, followed immediately by the fear that it won’t be good enough. It was familiar territory — the loop I know well.

• Then I moved into the Heart room. And something shifted. I noticed my energy rising, a kind of focus settling in my body. My breath felt open and spacious. Recent interactions with people who see me felt present. People who are waiting to read my story.

• In the third room — the quiet one beneath and beyond all of that — I heard Sam: Mother. Just do it. You can do anything. And then a thought arrived, quiet and unhurried: all shall be well.

I sat with it for a while after. What struck me was this: heart and inner knowing were in complete agreement. There was nothing standing in the way. The head had plenty of opinions — it usually does — but it wasn’t where the truth was.

I don’t have a plan yet. But I have something I didn’t have before: a sense of where I actually stand and what matters most.

The Three Rooms process is changing me

I've noticed that the more I use The Three Rooms the less I need it. Once you've been through the three rooms a number of times, you start to consult all three ways of knowing even when you're not using the app. I catch myself in some ordinary moment, facing some small decision — what does my head say, what does my heart say, and beneath and beyond both of these, what do I deeply know? Eventually you don't need the app to do it. You do it yourself, and you find you're more in tune with your own intuition each time.

Do you have a difficult decision to make?

Maybe you have something that keeps going round in your head. Something that you can’t decide about. That seems to be clear one minute and then you find you have changed your mind — again! Perhaps it would be good to consider all these three ways of knowing.

There’s no account to create, nothing stored, no data collected. No AI involved in what you write. You can download a beautiful pdf of your exploration.

This is just one of a growing collection of apps and tools for paid subscribers.

Tools to support your journey through the Five Roots of Belonging.

The app works on mobile phones however it might be better on a laptop, where you can type more easily. You will need to make sure you will not be disturbed whilst completing the process. 🎶 It’s lovely with headphones or a good speaker.

I’d love to know how it goes!

Warmest wishes, Davina 🙏

Nine months on Substack. There are more than four hundred of us here in this community now. When I started I couldn’t have imagined that, and how it would be to get to know so many lovely people. Thank you all for reading, for staying, and for supporting this work with such generosity.

I have written about Sam. About the system that couldn’t hold him. About giftedness and trauma and shame and the five roots of belonging to ourselves. I have written about how it has been to learn to live with profound loss.

I have written and written, and somewhere in it I told myself that the writing was the proof. Proof that I’m doing enough. Proof that I am enough. But this is not the truth.

Last week I wrote a few notes about sorting my bookshelves. I didn’t say that it took me most of a week. That I did it in ten-minute pieces with long lie-downs in between. That when it was finally finished I collapsed onto the sofa in triumph, the way other people might feel finishing a marathon.

of Creative Fix has published a fabulous book this year. It’s right there in the middle of my downstairs bookshelf. It’s a really lovely book with all kinds of inspirational ideas for creative projects and activities.

And Allegra wrote recently about the exhaustion of faking wellness — of presenting a bright, capable public self while the private one is struggling with ill-health. I read her courageous words and recognised myself, and I realised that I’ve been doing that too.

So here is my own confession.

I am a dormouse now. I sleep through the night and then again in the afternoon — sometimes for many hours, and the time that remains for writing and making and living is short, and the days disappear at a rate of knots. My body after years of being at my command is saying ‘No,’ on a daily basis. I don’t know why — over the last few years there have been clots on my lungs, twice, frightening ones, and perhaps there’s damage left behind, or perhaps there’s something else the doctors haven't named. What I know is the incessant tiredness, and that it does not often lift.

On a good day I clear the breakfast things and I am happy with that. Or I do two loads of washing. Or I pay a visit to the dentist or to service the car. Just one of these can be the achievement of the day. The bookshelves were a mountain.

I am telling myself I do not have to create anything more this month to be enough. Rest is not the withdrawal of the offering. Rest this month is the offering, continuing, while I sit down for a few weeks.

This month I am asking my typing fingers to be still, and asking the rest of me to believe something I’d tell any one of you without a second’s hesitation — that you were enough before you produced a single thing to prove it.

So I’m resting until September. I’ll still read and respond to you all throughout August, and I’ll share a few notes and a couple of the tools I’ve been building. But I will do this when the hours allow and only then.

Some of the time I’ll be with my daughter and my grandchildren, which will involve a different kind of demand alongside the delight. And some of the time I’ll spend reading my own books — the ones I spent a week putting back on those shelves, finally taken down and opened. And we’ll be marking Sam’s 41st birthday at the end of the month.

I’ll be properly back in September.

Before I go — I want you to know that you are part of why I can let myself rest without feeling I’ve abandoned my post. I did not expect to make friends here, but I have. Real ones. The kindness in this place is tangible, the way we care for one another and hold each other up. The work is held. You are holding it with me.

Integration needs fallow ground, and what I’ve written these nine months is settling. A field that is used for growing season after season without pause gives less and less, until one year it gives nothing at all. The farmers know to let it lie — to leave it bare for a while, un-grazed and un-planted, so that the ground can recover its ability to nourish.

So, the chair by the window. The kettle. A small hand in mine. The tide coming in and going out. If you need to rest too, please take this as your permission. However, I do know how impossible that word can sound when there are children depending on you.

This week, on the 12th, if the Cornish sky obliges by staying clear of mist, the Moon will cover all but a sliver of the Sun — more of it here in Cornwall than anywhere else in the country. And later that same night the Perseids will fall through a dark sky — my dear friend Lin Truman, one of our community of readers here, reminded me of the coming meteor shower only today.

And I don’t have to make either of these things happen. I don’t have to do anything at all. I only have to go outside and look across to the west.

The last time the solar system did this, we watched from my home in south Devon. My dear parents had come down from Berkshire to witness it. Sam was thirteen. I remember the strange chill, and the birds going quiet, and the light steadily dimming. And then the confused birds beginning to sing again a few minutes later with a second dawn chorus. I will be watching again this time.

Thank you for listening. And thank you for being part of this community.

Looe has filled, seemingly overnight, with people. The town beach is teeming with sunburned bodies, buckets and spades, and children running into the waves. Fathers are importantly showing their children how to catch crabs from the mud at the bottom of the harbour, keeping them in transparent buckets for a while before returning them to the water. Now and then you hear, even up here across the river, an excited shriek as one escapes and starts loping off sideways in search of sanctuary. Herring gulls swoop for chips and sausage rolls, leaving toddlers wailing desolately. The shark boats come home on the tide, their rows of blue flags proudly displayed — they don't keep the sharks, but they keep a tally with the flags. And in the early evening, couples stroll past on their way out to dinner, wafting freshly laundered clothes, aftershave and perfume.

Our theme this month is Living with Kindness and this, like everything at Belonging to Myself starts with being kind to myself. And that means that I am staying here out of the way of the tourists, up the granite steps. The sea breeze has finally woken itself to relieve the scorching heat and that is a huge kindness too.

Staying up here, out of the fray, is where I do my best thinking. And I've had a lot to think about this month.

You know about my soul portrait that painted for me a few weeks ago. She also completed a Human Design and Gene Keys chart for me and that was intriguingly interesting and affirming.

I won’t attempt to explain the theory behind this but I want to share some of the things that came from it. The reading is done purely with the information of my birth place, date and time. And this is a little of what I learned about myself.

It seems that there’s a name in Human Design for the way I’m built. Manifesting Generator. Which sounds like the petrol-run thing my dad used to fire up during the 1970s power cuts crossed with the pyramid that my mother kept under her grand piano.

What it means, simply, is that I’m not designed to move in a straight line. I’m designed to work on several things at once, to follow what’s alive and catching my attention, to leap rather than go step by step — the memoir and the Substack and the tools and this, all at the same time, all feeding each other. For years I thought that was a fault in me. Too many irons in the fire, never finishing things, changing my mind. The word people seem to like to use for this is inconsistent.

But the report explained that my pivots aren’t inconsistency. They’re course correction. The thing that looks like being scattered from the outside is, from the inside, my way of getting to where I am going — letting the threads cross, trusting that following what calls me is leading somewhere, even when I can’t see yet where. Taking that first step that allows providence to move in order to find the next change in direction. (With apologies to William Murray).

And I am not the only one. Around a third of people are Manifesting Generators apparently. Maybe you are.

So that’s my build and along with that the strategy for living that works for me comes in two parts.

The first part is to respond rather than make plans in my mind. It means bringing awareness to what the world is putting in front of me and moving from my body’s response. When I came across Sarah Wasey and her work, even though I wasn’t looking for what she offered at the time, I experienced an absolute, full body YES!

My mind never stops. It generates ideas, possibilities, whole schemes, constantly. And it’s very good at making them seem like exactly the right thing to do.

So I have needed to learn to tell a mental ‘yes’ from a body ‘yes’. A mental yes can be exciting and logical and often arms itself with cognitive justifications. A body ‘yes’, on the other hand, is something I can feel — a steady, grounded sense of calm but also strong energy, like an expansion rather than an urgency.

If your head never stops either, you might know exactly what I mean.

The second part is that I need to inform certain people what I’m up to. Before I act on something big, I need to tell the people it will affect — not to ask permission, but just so that they don’t get blindsided. I think that the idea is that a quiet heads-up can head off any potential resistance.

There's a name, too, for how I'm designed to make decisions — my Authority, it’s called. And mine doesn't live in my head. It lives in my Solar Plexus, in the emotional wave itself.

I am not supposed to take action at the peak of excitement, nor from the trough of crisis but to allow my emotions to settle back to the baseline before acting. And then to find my certainty in a quiet, bodily knowing. Which, it occurs to me, chimes beautifully with my fourth root of belonging - trusting your intuition.

And the gift in all this is that when I do finally decide, from that settled place, the ‘yes’ is wholehearted. I don't just commit, the report says, I full on commit. The things that are built from genuine emotional alignment are said to have a depth and endurance that those born of urgency don’t have. And learning to live the wave myself is perhaps what allows me to sit alongside other people in their emotional waves in my work. That seems to make sense.

When I think of how it was that writing my book took so long to even begin — I had to wait for the wave to settle before I could write it coherently. And the waves were huge. I needed to find, as I've put it before, a sufficiently peaceful heart to write it.

There is much more and I am slowly digesting it. But it mostly feels like coming home to what I deeply already knew and practice when I am at my best.

And perhaps that's why the next thing makes sense to me. Because what I'm about to tell you, I think, is the wave in action — a knowing that took its time to arrive. It brings me to the ring.

What Belongs to You is Still Yours

I dreamt of Sam last week. Not Sam grown tall, but Sam at nine — self-possessed, wise beyond his years — and his younger siblings with him. All of them playing with my jewellery, the whole lot of it in a little heap on the floor between them all tangled together. I was fussing about it getting lost or broken, harassed, motherly, cross with them, not wanting to hurt them with my annoyance but wanting my things back, and so doing what I so often used to do far too often: lecturing, taking control, mother knows best.

As I was explaining to them in the dream how easily something precious can be lost, I dropped my wedding ring myself. Watched it slip through the floorboards. And then I realised I didn’t know exactly where it went through. I thought Sam would know but he shook his head. In the dream I knew this was the second one to get lost.

The first was in real life. It was a family heirloom — I never knew quite whose, a great-aunt’s, perhaps. I was trying to read the inscription inside it with an eyeglass, standing in a room with gaps in the boards, and I had the exact thought: you shouldn’t do this here like this — if you drop it it’ll go through the floorboards. And then I dropped it, and it did.

My own wedding ring, inscribed with Danny’s and my wedding date, went when I came home from Nottingham, after Sam died. We had been divorced for many years so I didn’t wear it and I couldn’t wear it — it no longer fit me — but I carried it with me in my bag when we went to identify his body. It felt like I needed to do that for Sam out of respect for his love for us both.

And somehow on a friend’s driveway when I returned it dropped and disappeared. Just gone. I looked for a long time, and there was nothing to find.

I sat with the dream using my Dream Explorer — the little app I built recently for working with the message of a dream slowly, from the inside. It walked me into viewing the dream from the perspective of the ring. And down there in the dark the ring didn’t feel lost at all — it was safe, dry and warm and it was resting, watching us walking around on the boards, wanting only to be back on my finger where it belonged. Danny’s ring. The father of my children.

Then the explorer took me to Sam, and from where he stood I was constraining, annoying, in the way of the children’s fun — he was wishing that his mother would let them just be but he also had a half-smile as if he knew, despite this, that I was doing my very best.

What the dream wanted me to know, I think, is that what was true is still true. That I do matter to Danny and he matters to me. That Sam is still my little boy and loves me even when I am exasperating. That the ring wants wearing.

And I have the gold for it. A little tangle of it, in fact — chains and earrings and odd rings all knotted together, just as they were in the dream in my little red leather jewellery box that my father bought me in Brazil in 1977. The necklace Danny gave me somewhere in there, the one I wore all the time until the clasp wore through. Worn out, unwearable, tangled. But still gold. It can still become something. The jeweller tells me that they can melt it down to make me a new ring.

So that is what I am going to do. My engagement ring, which was also too small for me, is already at the jeweller’s being revitalised and made larger — I pick it up next week. And then I will go back, to the little place opposite the dentist, and ask them to melt the whole jumble of oddments down and make me a new gold ring to wear. The knots and the broken clasps and the odd single earrings poured into a band that fits.

And inside it I’m going to keep all of our names together. What belongs to you is always yours. Sometimes it only slips somewhere quiet and safe, waiting to be found.

My other two children will probably think I’ve lost my marbles too. But that is one of the advantages of being the age I am— I can do exactly as I please.

Warmest wishes to you all,

Davina 🩵💍🩵

P.S. If you missed last week’s post: this is just a reminder that I told you about the app for all my readers that I made last week. The link to the app - Meeting Myself with Compassion - is here.

The first week after Sam died I spent a lot of time in the kitchen whilst everyone else was in bed. I couldn’t sleep more than two or three hours at a time. So I would come down and drink herbal tea and smoke at the kitchen table. And weep.

The Aga was dark blue. When I had chosen the house a year before, it was the Aga that beckoned me — this dark blue enamelled heart of the place, something on moving in that felt like an arrival, and that I had soon learned to lean into at the end of a long and stressful day at work. Now I sat with my feet cooled by the quarry tiles, the stainless steel jug that served as a kettle on the hotplate, its lid standing open. I sat at the huge IKEA table that had seated twelve for Christmas dinner the December before. Through the pair of glazed doors was the new courtyard garden my brother had landscaped for me, with its railway sleepers and its huge empty terracotta pots — pots that had been expecting cypress trees that very day, and now stood disappointed.

On the end of the table, a pile of condolence cards. Every day, clusters fell onto the doormat, the postman’s steps on the gravel echoing that other crunch of gravel — the police, calling round at three in the morning.

I had my diary and in the pauses between crying uncontrollably I tried to catch fragments of thought into some kind of to-do list.

A coffin. A song. A scary thought. Someone else to notify. A sudden memory. His phone contract. The car tax.

And underneath the lists, something much harder. In those solitary nights by the Aga I found myself turning over all the choices I had ever made, and questioning the kindness of each one. That husband. This school. That job. This house. That baby. The new bike. This decision, that decision. The countless choices I made — for myself, for my children, for other people — and the impossibility of ever seeing where their impact would land. It was overwhelming.

Over and over I landed in self-blame and in shame. Which was not living with kindness. Not at all. And yet to let go of it, to say with any kind of conviction, I did my best, I am a good mother, did not feel either possible or helpful. I felt as if I had an intractable puzzle to solve, no matter how painful. So I stayed there for long periods of time, where the self-blame was brutal. New and shocking realisations would surface and others would repeat and repeat, without mercy.

It was so harsh that no-one was able to listen to it without needing me to stop. To reassure me, “This is not your fault.”

So I saved it for the nights. On my own.

Two things came to support me in that kitchen, and I have kept them both.

The first was a name. My ex-husband, Danny, had a joky but affectionate name for me — Weenie. And in the small hours by the Aga I found myself using it, addressing myself the way someone who loved me might. “Come on, Weenie, make a cup of tea.” Or, “Not now Weenie. That one can wait.” Or simply, “It’s OK, Weenie. It's all right.”

The second came from the title of a book.

Over the last year I had bought a small book of cartoons — pithy advice for someone going through something really hard — and put it on my shelf, vaguely thinking it might be useful for my job as a pastoral leader in a large secondary school.

One of the Year 11 students in my house lost her mother to suicide. She and I went out one lunchtime for a hot chocolate at a nearby café with a courtyard garden. The tables were enclosed by potted plants and tall palms — parlour palms, probably not, but something like them — so that we sat half hidden. Through the leaves I could see one of my maths colleagues, puffing away behind a plant of his own.

My student's hot chocolate came with whipped cream and a long spoon. I had a black coffee.

She looked around, and glanced at her bag, trying to gauge what to do. I knew what she needed. I said quietly, “You can smoke if you want to. It’s OK.” And so she got out her rolling tobacco.

I decided in that moment that if it helped her just a tiny bit, I would risk whatever criticism — trouble even — might come my way for allowing it.

And now, in my kitchen, I understood instinctively that I must afford myself every small kindness that occurred to me. I allowed myself to smoke, rolling one skinny cigarette after another.

I fetched the little white and blue book from my shelf. Cálmate, corazón. Be still, dear heart.

I don’t recall its content as being particularly helpful but I adopted the title phrase, uncertain even how to pronounce it. When my panicked thoughts raced with the harshest of self-criticisms and brought me to more floods of tears — Cálmate, corazón.

As the weeks and months went on, I was unable to return to work, and allowing myself that was part of it. I made it a practice to take the kindest route — to try to do what was kindest for myself. And for my children, and for everyone else. But it started with me. To do what was kind. To choose what was kindest — not what was expected, or sensible, or agreed with everyone else, but what was kind.

I tried not to plan for the future, and yet, of course, some of what was kind now was inevitably shaping it. I knew from the start that I would survive this. I did not know how. And it seemed to me that kindness was the best compass.

The vehicle for that kindness that I discovered in my kitchen is self-compassion.

The roots of the word tell you what it is. Compassion — from the Latin com, with, and pati, to suffer. To suffer with. To carry something alongside another.

And self-compassion is carrying something alongside yourself. The willingness to suffer with yourself. Not to fix the pain, not to explain it away, not to stand over yourself in judgement — but to stand beside your own suffering the way you would stand beside a dear friend in theirs.

Kristin Neff names three aspects to practising self-compassion. Here they are, as I understand them:

That middle one, being human, is the part that undoes the sense of isolation. When I remember I am part of humanity my suffering stops being mine, set against everyone else’s, and it becomes simply suffering, that can be met with kindness, wherever it happens to live. There is a temptation for us to imagine there is something wrong with us when we have a lot of suffering to deal with.

And when we see clearly we can see that, for example, I am having the thought that this is my fault and it is painful, without being tempted to numb it or ignore it.

This is what I have come to understand self-compassion to be: kindness turned towards my own suffering. The same kindness I would offer anyone.

I started to learn this it by the Aga, saying Cálmate, corazón to a heart in deep pain that I did not yet know how to comfort. And by holding myself with love through a name that was coined in love. Weenie.

We are sometimes encouraged to fill our own cup in order that we have enough to give to others — as though self-compassion only earns its place by making us better for other people. But I did not deserve kindness in that kitchen because of what it would let me do for anyone else. I deserved it because I mattered. And I deserve it now because I matter. As do you.

There was, at that time, all manner of kindness and compassionate action coming towards me from others. But kindness to myself as self-compassion was vital too.

That kitchen was where I began to live more actively with self-compassion. Well — maybe not the start, but where it became a daily vital practice. And part of the ground I aspired to stand on.

And I did not always get it right. Sometimes, I fell into being kind to everyone but myself. The first night in the Nottingham hotel, I shared a bed with a friend, and a room with her and my brother. They could sleep. I could not. So I left the room and sat on the floor in the stairwell so as not to wake them with my crying.

I should have booked another room. Maybe someone else should have booked it for me. I was still operating under an old illusion — that to get what I needed I must first look after everyone else’s needs, that I could not simply ask for what I needed.

But that is another story, and I will come to it another time.

I have come to believe that kindness — and the noticing of chances to practise it — is the only thing that truly matters in this world.

I do not manage it every moment. Far from it. But I have come to see it — often most clearly in other people’s lives — as a principle worth living by.

But when it goes unbalanced — when what seems like kindness to another leaves the self abandoned, disregarded — then perhaps it was never kindness at all.

Over the years since those kitchen nights I have increasingly come to realise that we are not separate. And as the line between self and other thins, the distinction between self and other begins to dissolve. I see that a kindness is simply a kindness. The same, whether it is turned towards me or towards someone else.

And perhaps that is what it means to belong to myself. Not to be apart, but to be my own — and, in the same breath, one of many. A wave and the ocean.

I saw this clearly once, in a small moment. My little grandson fell and cut his knee, and I felt the sudden sharp pain of it in my own knee, mirrored. I went to him, and I heard myself murmur it — Cálmate, corazón — to him, or to myself, I couldn't tell. Kindness to him, kindness to me — in that moment there was no difference between them.

There is a tool here which is for all my readers:

A 26 question self-assessment quiz.

A review of your results that will tell you:

• How kind to yourself are you?

• How well do you understand yourself to be a member of humanity, rather than alone in your suffering?

• How clearly aware are you about your own painful feelings?

Then:

A pdf of your reflection along with tiny practices to support you to download and keep.

The self-compassion scale itself was designed by Kristin Neff, who generously allows its use. I have added some reflections of my own, and some small supportive practices, for anyone who wants to see where they are with this. Just to notice.

My tool is here, if you’d like to try it. You are so welcome.

Thank you for listening.

Davina 💙

The doors are open for my memberships 🤗 and here’s how it works…

Paid subscribers have access to all of this:

• The full archive of posts.

• The tools and practices I am developing as they grow.

• My Roots of Belonging self-exploration tool.

• The Three Rooms decision making explorer tool

I’m currently offering a discount on the annual subscription rate — 20% off — and that price stays with you as long as you choose to stay.

Subscribe now

And for those who want to come closer still…The Gathering is opening too

This is a small, founding circle for those who want to go deeper — to be witnessed, to do the inner work alongside others walking the same path. It’s intentionally small so that it stays a place where people are truly seen rather than getting lost in the crowd.

Members of The Gathering have access to everything listed above, plus:

• A monthly story circle — an intimate space for personal sharing. For witnessing and being heard.

• A 60 minute one-to-one exploration session with me.

• Access to a private members’ forum, for connection between sessions

It’s an annual membership. There’s no discount on this one — but as a founding member your starting rate is protected for as long as you stay. And the price is likely to increase in the future.

If something in you leans towards this I would love to welcome you into The Gathering.

If what I’m offering here means something to you, and you’d like to come a little further in, I’d love to have you.

And if you are here, you belong here.

I look forward to connecting more deeply with you,

Warmly, Davina 🩵

There was nothing quite like the excitement when three of my sister’s biker friends turned up at our school wearing filthy jeans and scruffy leather jackets on a huge Triumph 750 with a sidecar. The guttural rumble as they did a circuit around the staff car park and every one of the school’s thousand girls straining to see what was going on from their classroom windows.

From the age of fourteen I was heavily into bikers and especially, Hells Angels. (There’s no apostrophe in Hells Angels, have a look on a set of ‘patches’). I decided that I wanted to marry one.

We’d meet up with the bikers in the town pubs. We girls were all well underage, especially me, and we drank glasses of blackcurrant squash while they downed pints of bitter or lager and put shillings into the juke box to play the Rolling Stones or Suzi Quatro.

Then, at just sixteen, during the long, sun-baked summer of 1976 that seemed as though it would never end, I met Danny. He was mad and bad and just out of prison. I thought he was the coolest thing ever. He treated me shamefully and then, wanted by the police for a string of crimes, he left the country with his best mate, Sean. They bought an old black London taxi cab and travelled across Europe for a few months picking up women on the way and sending me the occasional postcard that I had to grab from the front doormat before my parents saw them.

I lurched through the rest of my teenage years, drinking too much, taking drugs sporadically, laughing and flirting in the town pubs where I now had no problem getting served. Sometimes working and sometimes drawing the dole.

Meanwhile Danny and Sean had returned, got arrested and were spending several years away at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in Dartmoor Prison in Princetown, Devon. Built to house French and American captives from the Napoleonic Wars, the prison and the land it stands on belongs to the Duchy of Cornwall. This is a private estate providing income to William, Prince of Wales, although in the 1970s of course, it was Charles who was the prince.

It’s a grey and forbidding place in a roughly circular plot, built of Dartmoor granite and surrounded by stone walls with razor wire over them. It dominates the local area, which is mainly open moorland complete with grazing sheep and wild ponies. It seems to have a perpetual black rain-cloud hovering over it.

The first time, Sean’s old lady, Shaz and I drove down there to visit them both. They had these extended all-day visits with a long lunch break, during which there was really nothing else to do but go for lunch at the Prince of Wales pub nearby.

Shaz and I had a sandwich, a pint and a laugh with some off-duty prison officers before heading back to the prison for the second part of the visit. Danny and Sean were not impressed when they learned who we had lunch with.

Danny came back to Maidenhead when I was twenty. I was working as a statistics assistant near Heathrow Airport, and I was doing ok. When he called I thought he probably just knew I was working and had a car so would be a good bet to hook up with. We stayed together that night on the floor at an ex girlfriend’s parent’s place — his parole address — and then we were together for another nine years after that.

Soon after we got together I moved out of my parents’ home into a room in a shared house with Danny. The first night in our new home, I had work the next day and went to bed alone on the single mattress on the floor. I could hear Danny with his mates downstairs, the music playing, and them laughing and joking. He said, “Now I’ve got my own place things will be a lot better.” The singular echoed in my head. I felt as if I didn’t exist and I cried silent tears. But, I could see no going back.

Sean was still inside and so there was another visit to Dartmoor— this time with Danny beside me. We had driven for about forty minutes across the bleak open moorland, past the trees that looked as if they were permanently being blown sideways in a fierce wind, yellow-flowered gorse bushes and huge granite tors, to Princetown. When we got out of the car we could hardly stay upright in the cold wind.

Danny had something to give to Sean and this was hidden in a packet of Old Holborn rolling tobacco waiting to be passed over.

The room smelled of disinfectant and tobacco smoke, with a sort of school-dinners waft now and then, and the cold of the granite seemed to come up through the floor. We sat at a table in a sort of long hut with maybe eight or ten separate visiting tables, overseen by two uniformed prison officers, one grey-haired and a bit dishevelled and the other much younger and tidier, who sat at a large table on the side of the room looking bored.

Sean sauntered in, wearing his blue and white striped shirt and rough brown, prison-issue jacket, and sporting a thin moustache waxed and curled up at both ends. He and Danny had only just greeted each other when the grey-haired prison officer strode over.

“You’re prisoner B60178 Gaston! You can’t be in here. You need to leave. Come on, out!” and Danny was escorted out of the door. Ex-prisoners are not allowed to visit prisons where they have previously been inmates.

“So, what’s happening with you guys?” asked Sean, leaning back in his chair, outwardly unperturbed and twirling his Dali-esque moustache between his thumbs and index fingers.

“We’ve bought a house — got a mortgage.” I said.

“Ah, good. Somewhere to live when I get out of here.” My heart sank. “Any chance of a hand-job under the table?” he added.

"No." I said, and left it at that.

“You’re no fun.” said Sean, leaning across the table to instruct me, “Roll yourself a fag, then pass the packet to me.” He nodded towards the tobacco Danny had left on the table.

I tried to follow this instruction but I hadn’t smoked for a long time and my hands shook and tobacco fell all over the table. I didn’t want anything to do with the content of that packet.

“Forget it,” instructed Sean, “Just pass it over here.”

He made a couple of roll-ups, lit one and put the other behind his ear and then leant forward nodding across the room to the tea counter and hissed, “Get me a cup of tea, will you? Three sugars.”

As I passed the other tables conversations paused and my plimsolls squeaked on the lino floor. The two prison officers turned and watched me. I stood with my back to them all as a cardiganed WRVS woman poured the tea from a huge aluminium pot into a pale green china cup with some slightly curdled milk in the bottom of it and then stirred in the three spoons of sugar, one at a time.

Sean was grinning when I returned with his cup of sickly tea, slopping into its saucer. I noticed that the tobacco packet was lying empty on the table.

Many years later, when I was living in Broadhempston with all three of our children, I had a phone call from Sean out of the blue. He lived in South Devon now, not far from where Danny and I had visited him that day. It was odd to hear his voice as I stood in my cosy sitting room.

Sean asked if I would countersign his new passport in my capacity as a teacher. I was at work the next day so I suggested he could leave it in our shed and I would do it.

The following evening, I retrieved a brown envelope from behind the children’s bikes and looked inside. There was Sean’s familiar face, his eccentric moustache tamer these days, but the name on the document was not his.

I called him and said, “Sean, I can’t sign this.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Well, mainly because it’s not your passport. This is not your name.”

“It is now.” I could see his smirking face in my mind’s eye.

“Sean, I’ve only just qualified as a teacher and I’m not going to do something to compromise that. Sorry, but no.”

“Oh. OK,” he sighed, “I’ll pick it up and take it to someone else.” I imagined him shrugging with his palms uplifted in his pretence of having loads of other options.

1. Sam’s Story

My son, Sam. Neurodivergent, gifted, and nineteen when he died by suicide. I am writing a book about him — Sam’s Story: It Takes a Village not to Lose a Child — and it is close to being published.

• My book: Sam’s Story — What this book is, and why it has to be written.

• It Takes a Village not to Lose a Child — Every child needs to know that they belong, and that they belong exactly as they are. And much of this is beyond the reach of a mother.

2. My Story

Memoir posts about my life. These three will give you a feel for it — there are many more waiting for you in the My Story section.

• The Highest 11+ Result in the County — I pass my 11+ with flying colours, then spend the next four years trying to work out how to fit into a world where I feel as if I don’t belong.

• Two Lanterns — Two friends meet on the moors — trying to find a ritual, a gesture, anything that might help to hold the weight of profound loss, knowing before they even begin that nothing ever will.

• Make Sure I’m Buried With Grandma — How I went looking for a burial ground and found a place to belong.

3. The Worst Loss

The profound and traumatic loss of a child to suicide. I write about what it is actually like, what helps and what really doesn’t.

• Bring it on. This is what I’m here for. — A mother’s journey through profound loss, fury, and the recovery of meaning.

• A Bad Day to Stop Smoking — You were there when I needed you.

• “Hello? Is there anybody in there?” — Numbing the pain of profound and traumatic loss and why doing so doesn’t serve us.

• How Many Children do you Have? — The innocuous question that makes bereaved parents stop in their tracks.

• Somatic Symmetry — The body remembers the joy and the pain.

• Spiritual but Not Religious — Some of the practices that help me to feel connected to ‘what is’, beyond the everyday.

• All I Want for Christmas is You — What bereaved parents actually want you to know at Christmas.

4. The Five Roots of Belonging

The framework underneath everything I know about life — the five things we need in order to belong to ourselves.

The roots, and the twelve monthly themes outlined in the first post below, are what our membership Zoom meetings centre around each month.

• You Were Born Belonging - A Map For Your Return — The Five Roots of Belonging and coming home to ourselves.

Root 1: Being Sanctuary

• Being Sanctuary — How to embody safety, refuge and a regulatory resource for a child.

Root 2: Healing Shame with Self-Compassion

• From Shame to Self-Compassion — Recognising what’s yours and what really isn’t. And starting to witness and heal the shame in your body.

Root 3: Embracing Complexity

• Behaviour as Communication — What our children are trying to tell us.

• The Neurodiversity Lens — Moving from ‘What’s wrong with you?’ to ‘What is your particular way of being here and what do you need?’

• The Trauma of Giftedness - Part 1 of 2 — How gifted and twice-exceptional children learn to choose between authenticity and belonging — and why this choice itself creates trauma.

• The Trauma of Giftedness: Part 2 of 2 — What happens when gifted children can’t find belonging — and what needs to change.

Root 4: Trusting Your Intuition

• Dreaming Yourself Back to Belonging — The recovery of aspects of your self through the exploration of your dreams.

Root 5: Living with Kindness

• Rage Is Not Just More Anger. — Rage and anger are different things. And getting this wrong has consequences.

The Village — the ground the roots grow in

• Understanding Your Village — Children need other people in their lives beyond their immediate family members. We were never meant to do this alone.

5. Perspectives

My perspectives on AI, education, and other things that catch my attention.

• Why AI Can’t Be Our Psychotherapist — And why we think we want it to be.

• Mind the Empathy Gap — Claude’s child safeguarding processes leave a lot to be desired.

• Who are those SEND assessment reports really for? — What happened when Sam opened the blanket box.

And when you’re ready

• A Gift for You 🩵 & Tools for The Journey — Self-exploration and support tools for subscribers.

• Tools for the Journey: Links & Access Codes — For paid subscribers only.

There is also a monthly newsletter — a letter from me at the end of each month, with what’s been happening here and what’s coming next.

I post weekly on Sunday mornings just after 11:00 am (UK time), and some weeks I post on Wednesday morning as well.

Wherever you start, you are warmly welcome here.

Warmest wishes,

Davina 🩵

This post is only for paid subscribers. The tools are here to support you to explore the Five Roots of Belonging.

The links and access codes for the web tools included with membership are below the paywall. 👇👇👇

Roots of Belonging

This tool takes you through the Five Roots framework, asking you to rate where you honestly are in each root and to write about your situation as it stands, what would help, and what you’d like to be different. From that, it builds you a personal report with practical, time-scaled next steps. Everything in it comes from your own scores and your own words held against the framework — never generic advice about how to make friends. AI is used here to turn what you’ve said into something ordered and doable.

Meeting Myself with Self-Compassion 👈 this one is for everyone so you can just click here or on the image to use it

Most of us are kinder to other people than we are to ourselves, and we rarely notice the gap. This is a set of twenty-six questions, drawn from Kristin Neff’s Self-Compassion Scale. What comes back is a reflection written for you, along with some small practices chosen for whichever part of you is having the hardest time. You can take the results away as a PDF and return to them. Nothing you enter is saved or sent anywhere, and no AI is involved.

Holding Shame

Shame is the feeling that makes us want to disappear, and it rarely responds to being reasoned with. This is a slow, body-based practice — eight steps that ask you to arrive, breathe, bring to mind a thing you’d rather not, and then simply notice where it sits in you: the jaw, the throat, the belly, the shoulders. You’ll hold something solid in your hand, find a phrase to say to yourself, and let your own compassion turn towards the part of you carrying it. It isn’t about fixing the shame or explaining it away, only about staying with it long enough that it starts to lose its hold on you. You leave with a record of what you found, in your own words, to keep. Nothing is stored, and no AI reads any of it.

Dream Explorer

A dream can be a vivid experience, and the common response — looking up what the symbols mean can be of limited help in understanding it. This app offers a guided exploration drawing on somatic and depth approaches, where you tell the dream, then move through it: entering it from the perspectives of different figures and elements within it, feeling where it lives in your body, hearing your own words given back to you more clearly, and finding the longing underneath. AI is at work here, but never as an interpreter — it asks the questions, holds the structure, and offers tentative invitations on aspects of the dream for you to explore rather than offering and interpretations or conclusions. What the dream means is yours to arrive at. You finish with the beginnings of a small act you might take into waking life, so the dream doesn’t stay only in the night.

Three Rooms Decision Explorer

Making a decision or working out what to do when you are caught in a difficult situation can be difficult. There is more than one part of you that has something to offer.. This process gives each part its own room. You sit in the Head with its clear reasoning, the Heart with what it wants and fears, and finally the Knowing — the quieter, slower part that often knows before you do. Each room has music, a short time to simply sit before you write, and a single prompt. Nothing analyses your answers or tells you what to choose; you leave with all three voices written down in front of you, in a page you can keep, so you can make the decision with more of yourself present. There is no AI here at all — only timers, music, and space for your own words.

One Page Profile for a child transitioning to a new school

Sending a child to a new school means explaining them all over again, usually to people who have very little time to read. This tool helps you build a single page that a teacher will actually take in because it’s designed to be quick to read: you choose the areas that matter for your child, then work through four parts — how they learn, what they’re good at, what helps, and what people might need to know about them — picking from a bank of pre-written suggestions and adding or rewording anything in your own voice. It’s a picker, not a generator: the care goes into choosing few words rather than producing many, so the page stays short and every line earns its place. You can add your own statements too and you are encouraged to involve your child in the process too. You come away with a finished profile as both a Word document and a PDF, ready to send. There is no AI anywhere in it, and nothing about your child leaves your own device.

The links and access codes for the web tools included with membership are below the paywall. 👇👇👇

Read more

Over recent months I've been quietly building a collection of self-exploration and support tools to accompany the year-long journey through my twelve monthly themes, each one grounded in the Five Roots of Belonging. Every tool lives in your web browser, so there's nothing to download and nothing to install — simply follow the link and begin.

Some of you have been test driving these tools and sharing your feedback. Your generosity has helped shape them and I want to offer you all my heartfelt thanks for this kindness. Thank you to , , , , , , , , , 🤗🤗🤗

This first one is a gift — for all of my subscribers 🩵 — to say thank you for being here:

Holding Shame with Your Compassionate Heart

A gentle, guided practice for when shame arises. Shame tells us we are flawed. Not that something went wrong or a mistake was made, but that there is something wrong with us. It’s a sticky, uncomfortable feeling, and it deserves to be met with compassion.

There is more about moving from Shame to Self-Compassion in this post.

Rather than fixing it or pushing it away, the app walks you slowly through meeting shame with tenderness — grounding, breathing, and holding it with compassion until, in its own time, it softens.

All you need is yourself and a pebble or a stone.

Web app. No AI. No data collected. Everything you write stays yours, on your device. Downloadable PDF summary.

Root: Healing Shame with Self-Compassion

This is for all my subscribers — free and paid. The link and the access code are in the welcome email when you subscribe. 🩵

Current subscribers: Just message me to request the link.

Please note: this app is not a substitute for professional therapeutic support. Please ensure that you do not use this if you are in crisis, experiencing acute distress, or feeling unsafe.

All of the following tools are included with a paid subscription, and new ones will be added to the collection as I build them.

These are tools for gifted and complex people who think and feel everything deeply — people who belong to themselves.

Tending the Roots of Belonging

This is a personalised tool that invites you to reflect on where you are across the Five Roots of Belonging and what shifts or changes you might like to make, and to identify some first steps towards these.

Personalised, AI-assisted report grounded in your own words. No data collected.

Root: All five

The link for this is sent to you in your welcome email when you purchase a subscription.

This is included for paid subscribers. Link is here.🩵

This tool is not available for purchase and is exclusive to our community at Belonging to Myself.

Dream Explorer is a gentle, guided tool for working with your dreams. Drawing on somatic and depth approaches, it helps you move through a dream and arrive at your own understanding — rather than having its meaning explained or interpreted for you.

This is your exploration, in your own words. AI supports the process by asking the right questions at the right moment, but the insight is always yours to find.

Downloadable PDF summary.

Root: Trusting Inner Wisdom

To read more about the thinking behind it, see Davina, you know you are a dreamer.

This is included for paid subscribers. Link is here. 🩵

If you are not a paid subscriber you can purchase Dream Explorer separately here.

Three Rooms Decision Explorer is a beautiful web tool for those problems that go round and round in your head — the ones where lists of pros and cons never quite bring clarity.

It guides you through three inner rooms — the Head, the Heart, and the Knowing — writing from each one as a timer holds the space and gentle music plays.

Downloadable PDF summary.

“The piano music worked especially well for me in creating the sense of expansiveness needed for me to really connect to my thoughts and feelings.” —

Afterwards, some reflections surface what you already knew. By the end you have a much more complete picture of what you actually think, feel, and know.

No AI. No data collected. Everything you write stays entirely yours, on your device.

Downloadable PDF summary.

“It is like being held digitally... tenderness, clarity and truth. Luxurious, in fact.” — Rachael Smart

Root: Trusting Inner Wisdom We will be exploring making decisions in November.

This is included for paid subscribers. Link is here 🩵

If you are not a paid subscriber you can purchase Three Rooms separately here.



Please note: Three Rooms Decision Explorer is a reflective aid, not a substitute for professional advice. It is designed to help you hear your own head, heart, and knowing more clearly — but for decisions with significant legal, financial, medical, or personal consequences, please seek the guidance of a suitably qualified professional. The choices you make remain your own.

Every tool here is included with a paid subscription, as well as more still to come.

Click here to access the tools.

I hope you enjoy.

I would love it if you would message me with your feedback once you have explored one of these!

Davina 🙏

Let me know if you have any ideas for further apps that you might like to see.

I bought myself a pair of peridot earrings in a jeweller’s shop today. The light-filled green of tiny leaves with the sun behind them. I felt I deserved them.

The dentist’s surgery is just across the road. That was where I’d been immediately before.

I arrive right on time. The newly-painted black street door with its brass plaque opens into a small hallway. A panelled door on the left leads into a large, white-tiled room. On my left, following the shape of the bay window, is a blue vinyl bench seat with one man in a dishevelled suit sitting on it. Waiting. In front of me is a light oak reception desk, new-looking, the kind that comes with a corporate refit. There is no-one sitting behind the desk.

The waiting room used to be upstairs, carpeted and comfortable, and there was a receptionist who encouraged me to take as many of the free toothpaste samples as I liked. She talked to me about the weather and about her grandchildren. A photo of them, all smiles, was proudly displayed on top of the flossing supplies cupboard.

As I stand in the middle of this room, a little uncertain what to do, a young woman emerges from behind her computer screen in a small windowless office in the far corner, her long blonde hair floating behind her.

She mumbles something I don’t quite hear and instructs me to sit down, then turns on her heel and walks back to her desk. She doesn’t address me by name and she doesn’t ask me my name. So I stand instead and wonder how anybody will know whether I’m here or not. I feel tidied out of the way.

It becomes clear from murmured conversations that someone is with her in her office, so I assume she’s dealing with a patient who arrived before me. That would explain her brusqueness. The conversation continues. I wait a bit longer and start to wonder, am I actually booked in?

I walk over to the office door to ask. There’s a dark-haired woman in there sitting opposite the blond woman in a chair that I couldn’t see from outside.

“Hello?” The blonde woman turns towards me. “I’m wondering if anyone knows I am here,” I continue.

She glances at her screen. “Yes, you’re booked in.” She still doesn’t use my name so I wonder how she knows.

“Oh. Only I just wasn’t sure, because…”

“Yes, yes, you’re booked in,”

“Can I just finish the end of my sentence?” This comes out tersely and I know I am acting like the teacher I once was. I speak slowly, “I wasn’t sure because you didn’t ask my name.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, “They know you’re here.”

I’m imagining the conversation she’ll have afterwards with someone, perhaps her partner, about how awkward and difficult, perhaps downright rude, some patients are. But I am still confused and something in me won’t stop.

“So you know my name?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, and she sounds as if she is talking to a psychiatric patient, “I do.” And she still seems determined not to say it.

I go and I sit. At the other end of the bench the elderly man stares at the huge electronic screen scrolling through the virtues of the cosmetic dentistry on offer, before and after pictures of smiling clients. I watch it too.

The conversation in the office continues and is punctuated by the occasional muffled giggle. No, this is not a patient. These two are having a gossipy chat. Perhaps they are colleagues. I feel as if I am invading their space with my presence.

It’s the same feeling I get walking into shops when assistants chatting behind the counter glance at me as I walk in, go silent for a moment as they assess whether I matter enough to make an effort, then continue. I can’t wait to escape the awkward feeling of not being welcome. But I can’t leave this place.

I notice a typo on the marketing copy moving across the screen and it feels like a stone in my shoe. I feel an urge to tell somebody so they can correct it. I consider sending an email. Watching the smiles brighten and dissolve and brighten again, I think about my own teeth, and wonder just how many thousands it might cost to get mine gleaming like that. I think about how expensive this dentistry practice is and how I am helping to pay for all of this.

The visitor from the small office walks out and crosses the room. Her bag over her shoulder, she is heading for the outside door. Oh, I got it wrong. She’s a friend who’s popped in for a chat. The thing is, this really doesn’t help. Now I’m affronted that I am being fobbed off by the receptionist for the sake of her chatting to her mate.

“Excuse me,” I say to the friend, on a mission to prove my theory, before I can think better of it, “do you work here?”

“Yes.” She looks at me, one hand on the door. “And I’m on my lunch break.”

“Oh,” I say, hurriedly trying to think of an acceptable reason to have asked her. “It’s just that…you look familiar.” I smile a fake smile and she steps out of the door.

Before I have time to process this I’m called upstairs to my dentist.

My dentist is young enough to be my granddaughter, some sort of dentistry technician rather than a fully trained dentist. I’d only ever seen her for hygiene appointments before, then gradually I’ve let her do the checkups too, and the last time she told me there was a tiny little problem on one of my teeth.

“We could leave it,” she had said, “but it might get worse.”

So I agreed, reluctantly, to have it sorted. In my mind this was a tiny bit on the edge of a tooth, five minutes, some light drilling, just on the surface then squash in a bit of filling.

The thing is that I really don’t like going to the dentist.

From my early childhood I saw Mr O’Connell in the old house on the edge of town. The waiting room had chairs arranged all along the walls and a huge mahogany table in the middle strewn with torn magazines and comics and the ubiquitous Reader’s Digests. There was a smell of damp and furniture polish and every so often, from somewhere out of sight, a child would scream.

I progressed through those magazines over the years, from the Beano to Jackie to the problem pages of Woman, mercury filling after mercury filling marking the years. The dentist, who saw my whole family, used to tell me off for eating between meals every time I went.

I didn’t eat between meals. I didn’t particularly eat. I did snort amphetamine sulphate by the time I was fifteen. And I did smoke. He never asked about these, and I carried on doing them.

I now have perhaps three teeth in my mouth without at least one filling. When I was nineteen Mr O’Connell took out all my wisdom teeth in the chair, under general anaesthetic, and I woke in a cot in a room out the back that I’d never seen before. The walls of that old Victorian building damp to the touch, the bars of the cot cold under my hand. I woke up crying. My mum came to take me home. I lay under my purple patterned duvet cover with a red towel over the pillowcase so that I didn’t dribble blood onto the bedding, and she left me to it.

I still have occasional nightmares of my teeth falling out. As a child there was a government information film, cartoon characters with pickaxes chipping away at teeth in the night, chip, chip, chip in the dark while the child slept, and I knew we were supposed to clean them. And I did. But it didn’t seem to make any difference.

As I take my seat on the dentist’s chair the whispering is sitting under my skin. I feel disregarded. Disrespected. Angry, even.

I tell the dentist I don’t want an injection. I’d rather not have the pain of the needle, just have the filling. I’ve had something done to my teeth before without an injection.

“But I’ve never done a filling without giving someone pain relief,” she says. “Nobody does that.”

“It’s nowhere near the nerve, though, is it?” I say. “You said before that it was just a tiny crack.” She has an x-ray image of my teeth up on the screen opposite my chair, showing the nerve in the middle of the tooth, or what I imagine is the nerve.

“I’m going to drill out all of that old filling nearby and join it together with this new part.”

“I didn’t think I would need one,” I say, and I hear a childlike whine in my voice.

“You don’t have to. We can try without. But I wouldn’t recommend it.”

I’m dismayed. That huge needle into my gum. And all of that drilling. And now the fear of losing my teeth kicks in.

“I don’t know what to do now,” I say, and my voice cracks. My body wants to leave. My fear wants to stay. And my fear wants to leave.

“You don’t have to have it done. We can stop. You can go away and think about it, come back another time,” she says, and waits, letting me choose.

I am so perturbed. I feel that the goal posts have been moved, and I am aware that it was me who set them up in the wrong place at the outset. I take a breath.

“No, go ahead. And yes, I’ll have the pain relief. Thank you,” I say. I feel a little ridiculous. As if someone of my age ought to know better.

I close my eyes as the chair reclines further. The dentist tells me she is about to apply the anaesthetic gel and suggests I look at it. I shake my head — I don’t want to see. I feel the numbing gel taking effect, and the acrid taste of it gathers in the pooling saliva in my throat. I don’t know if I should swallow or not. I can’t remember what to do.

The injection goes in with very little pain but a lot of trepidation. My hands gripping the armrests of the dentist’s chair.

She tells me she is using a new technique, some sort of rubber sheeting to isolate the tooth so I won’t need the gurgling saliva thing in my mouth at the same time. This is unfamiliar, this plastic dam thing. I still don’t look so I haven’t seen it, I can only imagine it. Once the clips and the pushing and pulling have finished I kind of like the thought that all she can now see is this one tooth, and not my gaping mouth with its array of filled teeth. The rest is still private.

But it leaves me panicked, this thing in my mouth, a piece of it flapping against my nose with every breath. I feel frightened in case I can’t breathe, scared to swallow, scared to move even. I feel my throat closing up. I breathe into my belly and I try to swallow without moving my jaw. I feel tears creeping out of my eyes and rolling down towards my ears.

The assistant, kindly, suggests I think of my safe place. “Mine’s a beach,” she says.

And I think, you don’t know me. I know all about calming and resourcing myself, I’ve been in far worse situations than this that needed it. But knowing all that doesn’t stop every fibre of my body wanting to push them away and get out of that room.

I raise my arm. It’s the signal we agreed, if I need her to stop. She stops, and gives me a moment. I breathe. And then there is nothing to do but let her carry on, because the tooth is open and drilled and there is no going back now, only through. So I lie there and do as I am told, and this young dentist is kind and careful, keeping me informed of every step.

Finally it is over. The assistant gives me a tumbler of antiseptic blue liquid to rinse with, and as I take it I am surprised at how badly my hands are trembling. I hand back the eye protectors and the assistant removes the bib. I sit up.

And then I start to cry. I let it happen, sitting there on the end of the reclining chair while the dentist encourages me to take my time, and her assistant hands me tissues and tells me to breathe deeply. It’s such a relief it is over. The assistant is almost in tears herself. I allow myself to receive their kindness for a few moments.

“You were so good, Davina,” the dentist says. “Well done, you were just fantastic.”

I look at her, sceptical, suspecting I'm being treated like a child being placated.

“No, really,” she says looking right back and I see the steadiness of her gaze, “I could see how hard it was and you coped really well.”

I go down the stairs and have to cut through the corner of the waiting room to get out of the building. I see the previously empty reception desk is now occupied by the whisperer and I just want to get out of there. I head for the street door.

The dentist, who’s followed me down, calls after me, “Oh — did you want to pay before you go?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” I turn around with a contrived laugh, thinking, damn — get it together, woman, and saying, “I thought it was worth a try.” I put my card through the machine without removing my sunglasses. I don’t look at the whisperer. And now I’m free.

Outside, I press the button at the pedestrian crossing, and a gap in the traffic opens up before the lights change, which always makes me feel bad for the drivers. I cross the road.

Opposite the dentist’s surgery I saw a proper old-fashioned jeweller’s shop, and in the window was a pair of light green, translucent earrings. The woman behind the counter was silver all over — silver hair, a solid silver heart on a chain, rings, earrings. “Good afternoon,” she said, with a smile that crinkled her eyes. “Can I help you at all?”

I asked for a closer look, and held one up to my ear to inspect the effect in the mirror. "Peridot," she told me. She seemed to have all the time in the world for me to decide.

Another customer came in wanting a watch battery, but she didn't turn her attention away from me — an assistant appeared from the back room to deal with him.

I had a pair like these once before, I told her. When I turned forty a friend bought me some, and I went to New York and left them on the bedside table in the hotel room. I rang the hotel the moment I realised, but they were gone. “I sometimes smile thinking of the chambermaid finding them,” I told her, “I genuinely hope she enjoyed wearing them. Perhaps she still does.”

She raised an eyebrow at that.

A friend of hers had her earrings taken while she was in hospital under anaesthetic, she told me. We agreed that was perhaps a step too far — to take from someone who’d been living it up in New York was one thing, from someone vulnerable and defenceless in a hospital bed quite another.

Ignoring the part of me that whispered of extravagance, I bought them.

June has given us everything. Storms and cold and incessant rain. Then, in between, three full days when the mist came down so thick I couldn’t see the harbour, couldn’t make out the houses on the opposite side of the river. Just white everywhere. The familiar world, temporarily gone. Then scorching sun and heat so sudden and overwhelming it has felt like being in a different country.

It has also seemed, somehow, like the right weather for this month.

For some time now I have been living with a chronic tiredness that dogs my days. It moves my deadlines further and further back. It shelves intentions, gets in the way of seeing the people I love. It can make the distance between who I sense myself to be and what I am actually able to do feel impossible to breach.

I have attended to my diet and my hydration, have a regime of nutritional supplements and I have given up coffee and even the occasional gin and tonic.

Conventional medicine has drawn a blank. Perhaps Long Covid. Perhaps chronic fatigue syndrome. I have been scanned and measured and prodded to no avail. Which in some ways is a good thing.

I really miss my vitality though. And I’ve been wondering if it is possible to recover it.

Soul Loss

Many years ago a friend of mine — someone who had lost her own nineteen year old son — found healing from a debilitating and painful condition that seemed to arrive with the grief.

She did a soul retrieval session with a shamanic practitioner. She went out of deep need, more desperate than hopeful. She came back transformed. The pain was gone and it didn’t return.

I have often thought about this and how much sense it made that a part of a soul might retreat and be lost to us through such deeply shocking loss. And how that might impact us physically.

I have been reliving the events around the loss of my son through writing my book over the last two years. The same timescale as the onset of the fatigue.

I found myself recently wondering. What if?

My Introduction to Shamanism

It happens that I have a cousin who is something of an authority on the subject. Leo Rutherford — author of Principles of Shamanism, amongst other books, and founder of the Eagle’s Wing Centre for Contemporary Shamanism in the UK. Leo is ninety years old and still very active in his work. I sent him an email. He suggested finding a local practitioner, someone I could see in person.

First I thought I had better learn a bit more about modern shamanic practices.

I bought a shaman’s rattle, for goodness sake. I have a degree in mathematics and I worked as a computer programmer in a previous life — and I bought a shaman’s rattle.

I wrapped it carefully in a colourful scarf — the scarf to be used later as a blindfold. I gathered a stone according to the written instructions — smaller than a grapefruit and bigger than a walnut. I chose my mother’s yellow Buddha on his little hand-woven rug to sit on the shared altar for the weekend. I also took a transparent quartz crystal, a hexagonal prism about six inches long — also something that had belonged to my mother.

I felt, it has to be said, a bit of a twit.

A muddy lane full of potholes led to a conventional bungalow set in an overgrown garden drive. Strongly reminiscent of my elderly parents’ bungalow in all its solidity and double-glazed comfort.

I took off my shoes and felt the warmth of underfloor heating comforting me. I placed my yellow Buddha on the window sill altar but left the quartz crystal in my bag.

There were two leaders and four of us students. We drummed and rattled and whistled together, calling in the spirits of the four directions.

I established my Axis Mundi — my access point in the everyday world to travel from and return to. I chose the horse-chestnut tree from my childhood garden. I travelled to the lower world and the upper world.

In the lower world I met one of my spirit animals — a roe deer. A gentle, soft brown doe. Large dark and kind eyes. A still alertness.

I have felt for a long time the presence of a huge brown bear with fur I can bury my hands in. He was there too.

Our host sent us out into her large, wildly overgrown garden with secateurs and cloth bags of lavender — to make offerings and to gather. I wandered, clipping lilac branches and fronds from evergreens and daisies into my bouquet. I saw the labyrinth mown into the long grass.

One part of me rattled and journeyed. Another made occasional comment. What DO you think you are doing, Davina? And then — OK so now you're divining from coffee grounds. Really?

The following day a roe deer arrived in the garden, calmly grazing. She stayed for thirty or forty minutes, wandering from plant to plant and occasionally glancing in our direction and then away again, as we watched from the sitting room.

Hmmm.

I threw myself wholeheartedly into the journeying and other practices and I felt safely held by the depth and care of our leaders as well as my fellow students.

I left with new friends — unconventional, open, and delightful.

My Soul Retrieval

The following day, I visited another shamanic practitioner for my soul retrieval session. This professional woman had the most conventional house and garden, which surprised me — a very green and trim lawn and vibrant raised beds full of luscious vegetables. I won’t say too much about the content of the session. It was emotional and illuminating and reassuring.

During the final stages of the journey I visualised a cave encrusted with quartz crystals. My guide gently suggested that I take a gift from the cave. I broke off a piece of imaginary crystal and held it in my hand as I returned — along with the part of my soul that had gone into hiding.

I realised I had that very crystal still in the bottom of my bag from the weekend. That felt significant. The retrieval of something that was already with me.

I left and walked back to my car. A black cat was making his way along the pavement towards me, holding something in his mouth. As I drew closer I saw it was a bird — feathers protruding both sides of the cat’s mouth.

I felt a pull to intervene. I didn’t. I told myself: This is the way of the world. Let it be.

The cat clocked me and skulked hurriedly past me, intent on his own business. I watched him move along by the wall — and then, without warning, he stopped and simply opened his mouth. The bird flapped rapidly as it hung in the air for a fraction of a second and then it was gone, lifting straight up above the honeysuckle climbing the fence and disappearing into sky.

I stood and met the puzzled eyes of the cat.

Auto-Psychotherapy

I am thinking of all of this as part of my auto-psychotherapy practice — the self-directed inner work I have been engaged in for many years. I only recently learned it had this name, as coined and described by Kazimierz Dąbrowski within his Theory of Positive Disintegration. Thank you to for your work in this domain.

It’s a self-exploration we engage in through the challenges we encounter rather than from them. Forged in solitude and oriented toward becoming more authentic, open and connected versions of ourselves. I view this process as key to my path of establishing a deeper belonging to myself.

Alongside depth psychotherapy and group work my psychotherapy training involved in depth self-exploration and I did that through profound loss. Finding my way as my body processed the trauma and my whole self was called to reorientate to a new and different world where such a terrible and heart-rending event as losing a child is even possible.

The thoroughness and close awareness to it all gave it a particular quality and dynamism that allowed for inner transformation.

The shamanic journeying this month was part of it too as I integrate and reflect and question. Still reaching for a more coherent self through painful experience. And widening my understanding of myself as both human being and cosmic energy wave.

And now

So now I am understanding this debilitating fatigue as both circumstance and, I am slowly coming to understand, grist for the mill of auto-psychotherapy.

I am wondering if my dreams began the shamanic work. I wrote about these at the beginning of the month. My dream of the seasonal circle my dream companion and I built — filling it with wild herbs and flowers, completing the year's full cycle — carried something of what I would later encounter in the shamanic tradition: the natural world as mirror, the psyche reaching toward wholeness.

The vitality I am looking for may not be something to recover. It may be that something else is being forged. It may be a call upon me to live differently. To move from acting to being.

And now the seagull chicks have arrived on the rooftops in Looe. Fluffy, loud, and already, I suspect, in training for sausage roll snatching. They don’t always stay on the rooftops — sometimes they land whilst learning to fly, vulnerable and bewildered, exactly where a prowling cat might find them. But the parent gulls are so ferociously protective that it is, in truth, the cats who are at greater risk.

June, in all its weather, has been rich with gifts. As I type these final words my room is lit with lightning flashes and I hear the rumble of thunder across the bay as the heatwave breaks.

Which feels like the right note on which to move towards July — and the theme and practice of living with kindness.

I will be writing another post on Wednesday to tell you about my work with the wonderful who has recently created an incredible soul portrait for me.