It began just over a week ago with my throat, which felt like razor blades, and an ache through my whole body. So I did what I know how to do. I rested, I dosed up on all the things, and I cancelled my classes and clients for the week.

But I didn’t get better. My voice turned hoarse. My emotions became overwhelming. And underneath it all, my heart was aching in a way that had nothing to do with being sick.

When I was 21, something happened that changed my life, and not in a good way. (I wont share the details here as later you will come to understand that sometimes the stories that live in us, also live in our loved ones and they are not ours to share, but to simply hold close.)

I did not know how to say this is hard. So I did what I always did back then. I partied harder. I looked for comfort in other people’s bodies and called it freedom. I thought that if I kept moving, I wouldn’t have to feel it.

I have gone back to that version of myself many times on my healing journey. I truly believed I had met her. I thought that chapter was closed. But this week had other plans, showed me there was still so much grief I hadn’t touched.

When we think about grief, we think about grieving for a loved one, grieving for something we have lost, but there is always more……

What caused this stir in me was not my own 21-year-old self, well not directly. It was my daughter, who is 21 now and living through her own experience, one that mirrors mine. Watching her, something in me recognised everything.

So I stopped. I sat without distractions. Well first I binge watched Netflix, ate my way through my feelings, and even tried to smoke a cigarette. I didn’t light it, just put it to my lips.

But then I snapped out of what felt like a coma. I created my own ritual. I created my own ceremony. I let cacao and music carry me deeper …….. and then I saw her. Then I felt her, as sitting across from her: me, at 21. Right there, in front of me, the way she had always been.

It was time to acknowledge what I’d been outrunning for so long.

I cried and could not stop. The tears came like a tap had been turned on. I won’t pretend it was pretty or neat. It was messy, so fucking messy. It was deep, old grief, finally given somewhere to land.

I think my throat knew before I did. Maybe the hoarseness was the voice of a young woman who never got to say I’m not okay out loud.

What I’ve learned is this: because I let myself feel it, I could be with my daughter differently. I didn’t try to fix her or numb it or rush her through. I saw the same patterns rise in her that have always been there. Ways she numbs, anger she feels, blame to puts on to those around her. But I could witness her with presence and love. Truly witness and hold her in the way she couldn’t yet hold herself, the way I couldn’t hold myself then.

Our patterns are patient. They wait for us. And sometimes the thing we have healed “enough” is still asking, gently or not, to be met a little deeper.

If you’re in a season where your body is speaking louder than your schedule, I hope you listen. And if there is a younger you waiting across the table, I hope you sit down with her.

I have just facilitated a retreat, and once again I have been reminded of something I can never quite say often enough: healing is not linear. And no two journeys look the same.

Across the five days I witnessed the women move through their own weather. Someone would arrive at lunch glowing, light, laughing, feeling better than she had in months. An hour later, a wave would roll in. Sometimes it had a name, sometimes it didn’t. It was just something, rising from somewhere deep.

More than once I heard it said, quietly, almost like an announcement to the room: “There’s definitely something rising in me today.”

I love that sentence. Because in everyday life, what do we usually do when that wave arrives? We push it down. We push it away. We put on a podcast, answer the emails, start another load of washing, say yes to one more thing. We keep busy so we don’t have to notice. And we are remarkably good at it, and most of the time we don’t even realise we are doing it.

A retreat takes away the places to hide. There’s no to do list, and nowhere to be. There’s an invitation instead: what if you let it rise?

And when we truly honour what is alive in us, it is rarely pretty. It is uncomfortable. It is tender. Sometimes it is tears that seem to come from nowhere. Sometimes it is heaviness, or anger, or a deep weariness. And underneath it, there can be an entire ocean of emotion that has been waiting, sometimes for years, to be felt and released.

I have been thinking about how much this process resembles a migraine.

When a migraine comes, we don’t power through it. We know better, in fact it is the things that paralyses us. We close the curtains and lie down in a dark room. We find a soft place to land. We give it time and rest. We stop demanding that our body perform and simply listen to what it needs.

Our emotional healing asks for exactly the same things:

A dark room. Less stimulation, less noise, less doing. A pause from the constant input.

A soft place to land. Safety. Being held without being fixed, and witnessed without being judged.

Time to rest. Healing cannot be rushed. The wave moves through at its own pace.

Space to listen. Because underneath the discomfort, something is always trying to tell us something.

We would never shame someone for needing to lie down in a dark room with a migraine. Yet we so often shame ourselves for needing the same gentleness when our hearts are hurting.

So if you are in the middle of your own wave right now, one minute fine and the next undone, please know that nothing has gone wrong. You are not going backwards. You are not failing at healing. This is the healing: the rising, the feeling, the releasing, the resting, and then, eventually, the light again.

Be as kind to yourself as you would be to a body in pain. Close the curtains if you need to. Find your soft place to land.

And when you feel it rising, you might even try saying it out loud:

“There’s something rising in me today.”

Then let it.

With love,
Helen

During that session, something shifted the air in the room. I felt them before I understood what I was feeling, a gathering of celestial beings, a presence so strong it was palpable. A council of light I recognised, somehow, as one I had once belonged to through many lifetimes.

They had many messages for me that day. But one has stayed, louder than the rest. The wisdom we carry is ancient. It has traveled with us across many lifetimes. And it does not need to be taught to us so much as remembered. A remembering that switches on when we are witnessed, when we are still, when we finally let the noise fall away into silence.

They asked why I had chosen to incarnate in human form; the most dense and contracted vessel one could choose. In human form we get so caught up in the body, the material world, the chaos, that we forget why we came. It was a reminder to get out of my head, to remember the spirit that lives within me. To honour the wisdom within me, and to teach others to do the same.

I have spent over a decade in this spiritual space, and in that time I have read the books, listened to the podcasts, scrolled the feeds, sat at the feet of teachers whose words I still quote today. There is nothing wrong with any of that. But somewhere in all that seeking, I think many of us, myself included, quietly handed our authority to someone else. We started to believe the guru was out there. Someone with more training, more certainty, more light than us.

And yet.

Inside each of us is our own guru. Ours. Waiting.

I remember when I first began practicing reiki on others, all those years ago. Words would arrive. Imprints, impressions, things I somehow knew without knowing how. Sometimes I spoke them. More often, they felt too strange, too unearned, and I swallowed them instead.

What is different now, all these years on, is trust. If a word wants to be spoken through me, I let it. Not because I’ve proven myself worthy of it, but because I have finally stopped auditioning for my own voice.

Since that night with the council of light, I’ve noticed myself listening differently. Less scanning outward for confirmation, more settling inward for it. Not because I have stopped valuing teachers or lineages or the wisdom of others, but because I’ve remembered that I am also a lineage. I am also a teacher, to myself, if I’ll only be still enough to hear it.

Maybe that is the invitation for you too. Not to abandon the guides , but to ask, quietly: what happens if I trust the voice already inside me?

It has been there the whole time. It has always known.

But I want to share with you something I was reminded of this weekend. Abundance hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still here, waiting patiently, in the places we’ve simply stopped looking.

On the weekend I was lucky enough to attend a Kirtan event, a celebration of Krishna. For those who haven’t experienced it, Kirtan is beautifully simple: a mantra is chanted in Sanskrit by the kirtanists, and then it is chanted back by everyone in the room. Call and response, over and over, until the boundary between the two starts to dissolve. It is such an expansive practise that takes you on a journey into such presence.

We were asked to bring a flower or an offering. The ticket was by donation. The moment I walked into that room, I could feel it before I could explain it; colour everywhere, and love so palpable you could feel it so deeply in your body. Everyone was welcome.

There was a meal to share on arrival and chai flowed throughout the night. There were people from every culture, every walk of life, every story you could imagine, all gathered for one single purpose: to celebrate, together, in the most beautiful way we know how. We were reminded at the beginning of the evening of how incredibly lucky we were that we were able to come together when others could not.

No one there was wealthy in the way the world usually measures it. And yet the room was overflowing.

I think this is the part we forget. In a world that constantly tells us abundance is something to chase, earn, or purchase, it is so easy to miss that so much of it is already freely available to us, and it always has been.

Yesterday I spent the day walking in nature with a dear friend. We stopped again and again, for no reason other than to take in the beauty around us. We shared warm cacao and a picnic on a wet park bench somewhere along the track. Nothing fancy, nothing planned, just two people, some chocolate, and the trees. We came home tired and so very happy.

That’s it. That’s the whole story. The walk and shared experience cost nothing at all,

Abundance isn’t only in the big, extraordinary moments, though a room full of chanting strangers turned family is certainly one of them. It is also in a shared meal, however simple. A friend willing to sit on a wet bench with you. A flower brought as an offering, not a transaction. The quiet beauty of a track through the trees.

None of these things require wealth. They require presence. They require showing up, and being willing to notice.

So if the weight of the world feels heavy right now; and I know, for many of us, it does, I want to gently offer this: abundance hasn’t disappeared. It is simply waiting for us to turn our attention toward it. It’s in the chai shared between strangers, the flower offered without expectation, the walk that has nowhere in particular to be.

We just need to know where to look.

We keep the wound close, we let it speak first, we let it speak the loudest. A voice from a wounded place; sometimes not even ours, sometimes carried down through a lineage, spoken into us from lifetimes before we ever arrived in this body. This voice tells us what we lack, what we are not enough of, what is still missing. And we believe it. We file it away as evidence. We build a whole case around it.

But where is the case for the other truth?

Where is the file we keep for the moment someone looked at us and saw something we couldn’t yet see in ourselves? For the compliment that landed so gently we almost missed it? For the words spoken to us from love, from a tender place.

I think we need to become collectors of that instead.

On my women’s retreats, one of my favourite things we do is to write love notes; anonymously, to every woman who has shared the space with us. Not just to each other in circle, but to the therapists holding us, the chef feeding us, the women beside us who we may have only known for a handful of days. We write down what we noticed. The way someone’s laugh changed the room. The quiet strength in how she showed up even when it was hard. The way it simply felt to be near her.

And every single time I read these notes aloud, and when read in silence, how often the first thought was, I didn’t know anyone saw that in me.

That is the whole point. We are so busy gathering proof of our lack that we walk straight past the proof of our magic. It is sitting there, in the exquisite, ordinary moments. Someone’s kindness, someone’s presence, someone’s unprompted gentleness toward us; and we don’t collect it. We don’t let it count.

So this is an invitation. Take all those small, exquisite moments, the ones where you were met with love, where someone saw you clearly and told you so, where you felt the warmth of simply being wanted in a room; and start looking for where else they live in your life. Start keeping the file.

Because the proof was never missing. We just weren’t the ones gathering it.

s

A couple of years ago, my daughter made some choices that took her to a genuinely dark place, spiritually, emotionally, all of it. She spent months clawing herself out of a hole that seemed to emerge so quickly in her life. And while she was doing that hard, invisible work, I was doing my own kind of hard, invisible work: trying to keep my own mind from going back there every time it had a spare moment to wander.

Silence was the problem. The second I had nothing to occupy me; driving, doing the dishes, lying awake at 2am; my mind would go straight to the thing I was most afraid of. Not a memory. A fear. The worst version of what could happen again.

I didn’t know how to stop the freight train that was moving through my mind and nothing I did seemed to stop it. I just knew it was exhausting, and that I seemed powerless to stop it.

I was sitting across the table from a Tarot reader I had seen once before, not really looking for answers about my daughter, if I’m honest, just needing a bit of quiet, outsourced wisdom on a hard week. And she brought up, unprompted, almost word for word, exactly what I’d been sitting with.

She told me something I have thought about almost every day since: that by constantly rehearsing the thing I was most afraid of, I was putting it out into the field of awareness. Giving it energy. Feeding it airtime it hadn’t earned.

Easier said than done, obviously. Knowing you shouldn’t think about something is famously the fastest way to think about it. You can’t just decide to stop fearing. But she gave me something to do instead of just something to stop doing, which turned out to be the whole trick.

Her suggestion was simple, almost embarrassingly so. Each morning, light a candle. Sit with a photo of my daughter, and a photo of Jack her much loved dog, gone by then, and just send thoughts of love. Nothing more elaborate than that. No mantra, no method, no app. A candle, two photos, a few quiet minutes, and love as the only instruction.

I did it every morning for about three months, probably longer. I stopped counting.

What I expected was that it would calm me down for those few minutes and then release me back into the day, fear intact. What actually happened was different, and so much better. The ritual didn’t just live in that ten minutes each morning. It followed me out into the day. Because I had spent that time consciously choosing love over fear, I got much quicker at noticing the moment fear showed up uninvited. In the car, in the silence, at 2am, and I could catch it. Take a breath. Choose again.

The ritual wasn’t the point. The ritual was training.

That was over two years ago now and I am pleased to report: so far, so good.

But the more interesting thing isn’t that the original fear faded. It is what else changed alongside it. I find myself rarely in a place of not trusting anymore. And somewhere along the way, without deciding to, I started turning that same practice on all my other doubts and fears too, including, maybe especially, the ones I’d quietly been carrying about myself.

I think that’s the part people skip when they talk about “the power of positive thinking,” and it’s why the phrase has earned a bit of an eye-roll over the years. Said on its own, it sounds like a bumper sticker. Like you are supposed to grit your teeth and think happier and the universe will comply. That’s not what this was. This was never about pretending the fear wasn’t real, or forcing myself to feel good. It was about refusing to let the worst-case version of my daughter’s story be the one I kept rehearsing on autopilot, and putting something in its place, deliberately, every single day, until the new habit was stronger than the old one.

The candle didn’t fix anything on its own. What it did was give my attention somewhere else to go, at the exact time of day it was most likely to go somewhere dark. Repetition did the rest.

You don’t need a Tarot reader to hand you this. You need:

• A few quiet minutes, ideally at the start of the day, before the day gets its hooks into you.

• A candle, or any small physical cue that tells your body this time is different from the rest of the day

• A photo, an object, a name. Something that anchors you to who or what you are sending love toward

• No goal beyond that. Not fixing, not solving, not manifesting an outcome. Just love, sent, on purpose

The fear will still turn up during the day, and that’s fine. That was never the part you were trying to control. What changes is what happens in the half second after it turns up. Instead of following it down, you notice it, take a breath, and choose again. That half second, repeated enough times, is where the actual power in “positive thinking” lives. Not in never having the dark thought. In getting faster, every day, at not staying there.

I gave my usual answer first: Intuitive Healing sessions, Soul Work Coaching, predominantly one on one. But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t the whole truth. The real answer, the one I feel in my body, are the group offerings I have been co-creating for the last few years. That’s where the magic happens. That is where my passion keeps growing; in the room, with others. Others that have often felt isolated, alone, not sure where they fit in or who they are beyond the roles they play.

So much of our early life is spent trying to fit in. Fitting the expectations of our family. Fitting the shape our environment asked of us. Fitting the roles handed to us inside our relationships, long before we were old enough to question them.

We shrink. We mould ourselves. Not out of choice, but because it seemed like the price of belonging. Belonging somewhere we could finally feel valued, seen, honoured. And after enough years of doing it, we stop noticing. It just becomes the way we move through a room.

Last year I took part in a charity event raising money for Mental Health awareness where a large group of us spent twenty hours in a warehouse, each confined to our own two metre by two metre square. Each of us not allowed to talk.

Throughout our time together there were activities we could opt into. In one, we were invited to walk around the warehouse, and whenever we felt drawn toward someone, we had stop a metre apart and simply hold eye contact. No words, just witnessing each other. The time was completely up to you, until you were ready to move on to repeat it with someone else.

I sat that one out.

I didn’t move. I didn’t want to take part, and that surprised me, because I am someone who is has learned to sit with discomfort. In fact, I teach this as part of my work. So why was I frozen this time?

I stayed in my square and watched everyone else walking toward each other, choosing each other, and I felt myself go very small and very still. I felt emotion rise from a place within me that felt so hard. I felt the tears begin to roll down my cheeks.

And then I understood why.

I was thirteen or fourteen again, standing in line in the school year. while teams were picked for sport. I was always the last one chosen. I knew the feeling before the captains even opened their mouths. That slow shrink as the line thinned around me and I was still standing there, waiting, already bracing for it. In my teenage years I was carrying, what felt like the weight of the world, but really it was the weight of self loathing. I used food to numb my feelings and spent many of my teenage years overweight. No one wanted the fat kid on their team.

That was what the warehouse floor had quietly uncovered. Not the activity itself, but the question sitting beneath it: what if no one chooses me?

Decades later, in a room full of strangers, that same feeling was still there in my body, fully intact, just waiting for the right moment to surface again.

This is exactly why group spaces have become so central to my work.

In a one-on-one room, it’s just the two of us, and that has real value when deep work requires true privacy, there’s a particular kind of safety in it. But it doesn’t reach the same place the schoolyard did. It doesn’t touch that specific old fear, the one about being chosen, being wanted, belonging in a room full of people who are all, quietly, wondering the same thing about themselves.

Group work does. That’s exactly why it matters so much. When we gather and are given permission to show up exactly as we are, not the shrunken, moulded, edited version, but the real one, something in us that’s been braced for years gets to soften. We get to discover, with real people, in real time, that we can be chosen. That we can be seen. That we belong here, as we are, without having to make ourselves smaller first.

That kind of proof doesn’t come from a single relationship. It takes a room. It takes witnesses. It takes other people, also a little nervous, also hoping, choosing to stay anyway.

I don’t know if everyone carries a memory quite like mine, a specific moment that taught them what it feels like to not be chosen. But I’d guess most of us carry some version of it. A line we stood in. A room we shrank ourselves to fit. A time we made ourselves smaller for a better chance at belonging.

The work I love most now is building rooms where none of that shrinking is required, where belonging was never something you had to earn by editing yourself down in the first place.

You are already chosen. Exactly as you are.

But it wasn’t until I found myself with plenty of time to just witness the world on a recent holiday in Bali that I truly understood how rare this perspective has become.

With nowhere to be and nothing to do but observe, I began watching the dance of human interaction unfold in hotel lobbies, cafes, and restaurants and some of what I witnessed left me feeling sick, embarrassed, ashamed.

Many of the tourists I saw treated the Balinese staff as if they were less. No eye contact. No acknowledgment beyond barked orders for food and drink. No recognition that the person taking their order, cleaning their room, or serving their meal was a human being with their own story, their own dignity.

I watched a woman snap her fingers at a waiter like he was a dog. I saw guests walk past hotel staff as if they were invisible, despite warm greetings offered in careful English. I witnessed people speak *about* servers to their companions while the staff member stood right there, as if they couldn’t understand, couldn’t feel the dismissal.

At first, I made excuses for what I was seeing. Cultural differences, perhaps. Language barriers. The awkwardness of unfamiliarity.

But the more I watched, the clearer it became: this wasn’t about culture or communication. This was about a fundamental failure to see the person behind the service.

These weren’t people having a bad day or caught up in holiday stress. This was systematic dehumanization dressed up as normal behavior. It was entitlement masquerading as cultural difference.

And it forced me to confront an uncomfortable truth: this same dynamic exists everywhere, not just on tropical holidays. How many times do we walk past service workers in our own communities without truly seeing them? How often do we reduce human beings to their function in our lives?

The homeless men and women outside my supermarket know this feeling intimately. Society has trained most people to look through him, around him, anywhere but at him. His humanity has been stripped down to an inconvenience, a problem to step around.

But here’s what struck me most during those long days of observation in Bali: kindness costs absolutely nothing. A smile, eye contact, a genuine “thank you”. These require no special skills, no cultural translation, no extra time. They demand only the recognition that the person serving you is exactly that: a person.

Kindness doesn’t care about your bank balance, your status, or your holiday itinerary. It doesn’t require you to speak the local language or understand local customs. It only asks that you remember the fundamental truth my mother taught me decades ago: we are all equal in our humanity.

The most heartbreaking part? Every act of genuine recognition I witnessed. Every tourist who made eye contact, learned a server’s name, or simply said “please” and “thank you” with intention, was met with such genuine joy and surprise that it became clear how rare these moments had become.

In a world that seems increasingly divided, where we debate complex solutions to human suffering, perhaps we are overlooking the simplest tool we have. Kindness. Recognition. The radical act of seeing another person as worthy of basic dignity.

It costs nothing. But as I learned in Bali, its absence costs us everything that makes us human.

This wasn’t just another wellness retreat. This was a commitment to my healing, to going to places within myself I had only dared to glimpse before.

When asked what were some of the physical symptoms I noticed that I wanted to change, these were definitely my digestion, my hormones, the changes that come with menopause. We were also asked to write down a wish for our time which we honoured a water blessing ceremony on arrival; mine was to stay open to whatever rose to the surface of my heart, mind and body and to meet it with love.

Ten days at One World Ayurveda in Tegallalang became a deep excavation of what I could no longer stomach in my life; not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been called an “old soul.” Independent, capable, always stepping into the role of leader, organiser, the responsible one. I have worn these labels like badges of honour, but underneath them lay something more vulnerable: a desperate need to be liked, to be needed, to be wanted.

Those 10 days truly felt like a month. There was time to rest, time for silence, time for deep contemplation while being held by the sacred land beneath me. But here is what I know about deep healing work: when you have nothing to do and nowhere to hide, quite literally; every story, every demon, every carefully constructed narrative shows up for examination.

If you’re looking for proof of your shadows, you’ll find them in abundance during Panchakarma. But if you’re willing to look beyond the stories, that’s where the real truth lies.

I have been truly fortunate to have a few extra days in Bali to integrate this experience before returning home. But as I prepare to leave this sanctuary, where fresh clothes appeared daily, medications were dispensed with care, and nourishing meals honoured my body as the sacred vessel it is, I am acutely aware that the real work begins now.

How do I honour this transformation when I return to the loudness of the real world? How do I maintain this connection to myself without the external structure that held me so beautifully?

My Sacred Commitment

As someone who is a natural early riser, I am committing to making the first hour of each day my Ayurvedic practice. Gentle yoga, warm water, self oil massages, and most importantly, stillness. This isn’t just about maintaining healthy habits; it’s about honouring vitality, longevity, and devotion to the deeper healing that has just begun.

The true test isn’t what happens in the sanctuary of a retreat centre. It is what happens when we bring that sacred awareness home and weave it into the fabric of our everyday lives.

I don’t typically practice active yoga, I am definitely more the restorative kind, my body feels restricted in all the places it demands: groin, hips, knees, and shoulders. Some limitations are structural; others are definitely holding onto emotion at a deeper level.

Each morning and evening, there is a yoga class here. Though not mandatory, everyone seems to shows up. In my first session, thankfully the restorative kind,I can felt it all: the restrictions, the inevitable comparisons to how others can bend, the relentless busyness of my mind.

Then come the treatments, two daily sessions that unfold like sacred rituals. But they require the vulnerability of undressing in a sun-drenched room with light streaming through open windows. No dimly lit sanctuary to gently frame the body.

I have spent years cultivating comfort with my form, but nothing prepares you for what menopause delivers. There is a thickening and softening that seems to arrive overnight, something I am working hard to accept but it is definitely a work in progress. So when you are nearly naked in that bright space, it feels overwhelming.

But then something begins to shift in that very first session. As each session opens, there is the most exquisite singing, a prayer that feels like divine recognition of who you are beneath it all. It is as though nothing else exists in the world and there is only presence and love in that room.

Through this bodywork, not only is my physical form softening, but I am discovering a deep acceptance of my body’s story. There are definitely still stories on repeat in my head, but they are quieter now. In my yoga practice, I find myself breathing into spaces that have been holding for so long, and letting them open to whatever is available in each moment.

There are definitely still restrictions, still discomfort. But I am surrendering to meet them with grace, patience, and love.

About five months ago we adopted a tiny mini dachshund we called Winnie. She was the runt of the litter; so small she fit into the palm of my hand. So of course, she was aptly named, Winnie the Minnie.

At the time we already had a Red Heeler, Eddie, who had lost his long time companion Jack, our family Jack Russell of 15 years. We were also carrying the weary, brittle pain of navigating mental health, addiction and sexual abuse in our family, and the slow ache of things that felt fractured between us. Like many families, looking for a different focus, we believed a dog might help change up the energy in our home. We just weren’t ready for just how much.

From the day Winnie arrived, something shifted. It wasn’t dramatic or obvious at first; no miraculous conversations or sudden reconnections, in fact I was wondering why I thought having two dogs and five humans in one house was a good idea; but something loosened. We had been living like parallel lines: the kids in their private dramas, my husband and I negotiating the edges, the house full of the small silences that come from something deeper under the surface. Winnie, with her ridiculous confidence and urgent tiny body, didn’t know any of that. She only knew she needed food, warmth, play, and company. She insisted on presence.

The ways she pulled us toward each other were small and steady:

The kids who had retreated to their rooms would show up because a tiny puppy was barking at the door, insisting she was heard. Hubbie would arrive home from work to an overexcited puppy just wanting a cuddle and some time. And Eddie, The Red Heeler, who had been grieving since Jack died, began to stop panting and pacing every night.

Beyond our walls, Winnie rewired our edges, too. Walking her turned a quiet wander around the suburb in which we lived into an hour of small connections. Strangers paused to comment on her tiny legs, to tell us about the dog they once had, to exchange a laugh over how a creature that small could make so much noise. People who would have passed by now stopped. Conversations that would have been awkward or superficial suddenly had an easy opener: a small daschund named Winnie.

Why a small animal can do this, I don’t fully understand. Maybe it is that pets bypass our defences. They ask for nothing but presence and give, in return, unconditional attention. Maybe it’s that caring for something that depends on you lets tenderness leak into places that have hardened. Or maybe it’s simply that a tiny, urgent life breaks routines and asks us to respond; and in responding, we remember how to respond to one another.

We didn’t adopt Winnie to fix what was broken. We adopted her because something called to us to take her home. But what she did was teach us how to be available; to each other and to strangers. Five months in, we are not perfectly healed. The old hurts still exist. But the household feels different: softer, more incidental with care, more likely to intersect than to drift apart.

If you are waiting for connection to arrive on schedule, consider the unplanned ways it might. A tiny body, a daily walk, a smile from a stranger. These are small places to start. They won’t erase the hard things, but they will change the architecture of your days enough that people living within them can find their way back to one another.

Nineteen years ago, I was a different woman entirely.

I was packing boxes in a regional town in South Australia, preparing to follow my husband to Melbourne for his dream, not mine. With our very young family in tow, I was leaving behind everything that felt safe, familiar, known. I knew nobody in our destination city. If I am honest, I wasn’t thrilled about any of it. The move stirred up a cocktail of resentment and anger that I carried like stones in my chest. He was following his passion, stepping into an industry he had mastered over two decades, while I felt like I was being uprooted from my own soil.

That woman could never have imagined the person that I have become.

The New Moon in Taurus asks us to honour what is ending so we can make space for what wants to emerge. Taurus, ruled by Venus, teaches us about values, what we hold dear, what we’re willing to nurture, what deserves our steadfast devotion. This earth sign doesn’t rush; it knows that real transformation happens slowly, deliberately, like roots growing deep in fertile ground.

As I reflect on these 19 years, I see so many endings ready to be acknowledged:

The ending of placing my value solely in my role as mother and wife, roles I have cherished but that became cages when they were all I allowed myself to be.

The ending of saying yes when my body, mind, and spirit were screaming no.

The ending of making myself smaller so others could feel more comfortable.

The ending of believing that putting myself first was selfish rather than necessary.

This lunar cycle carries the energy of profound closure and rebirth. The 19 year Metonic cycle represents a cosmic reset; the universe giving us permission to honour how far we have traveled and to plant seeds for who we are becoming. In Taurus, this energy is particularly potent. We are being asked to get real about our worth, to tend to our own garden with the same devotion we have given to everyone else’s.

The boundaries I’ve had to establish, once foreign and uncomfortable, now feel like acts of deep self-love. Each “no” to what doesn’t serve has been a “yes” to my own becoming. Each choice to honour my needs first has been a reclamation of the woman I glimpsed 19 years ago but was too afraid to fully inhabit.

Taurus reminds us that we are not meant to be uprooted forever. We can choose our soil. We can decide what deserves our energy, our time, our precious life force. This new moon invites us to plant ourselves where we can truly flourish. Not just survive, but thrive.

That young mother who packed those boxes in South Australia was beginning a journey she couldn’t yet understand. She was being asked to trust a process that felt like betrayal at the time. Now I see it was the first step in learning to trust myself.

As this 19 year cycle closes, I’m filled not with resentment but with gratitude; for the woman who made the move, for the one who learned to set boundaries, for every version of myself that brought me to this moment of choosing myself, fully and without apology.

The seeds I’m planting under this Taurus new moon are different from any I have planted before. They are not about who I think I should be or what others need me to become. They’re about the woman I have always been, finally given permission to root down and reach up toward her own light.

We were greeted by Rachel, our facilitator, with homemade chai and the most delicious raw treat. We sat in the paddock, sipping and warming into the moment. We began simply: a few breaths, grounding into our bodies, and speaking our intentions into the quiet. I hadn’t come with a neat list of problems to fix, only a deep, persistent pull, a soul calling that said yes.

As I settled, clarity arrived. I realised what I had been carrying: the weight of responsibility for my daughter, who has been struggling in the darkness of addiction. I have been the anchor for her for years, a role that, in some deep way, had roots in lifetimes of agreed exchange. On a soul level we had made a pact: to be teachers and to sacrifice, to hold and carry. And I had been carrying. Exhaustion opened like a plain before me. I needed to release the responsibility for another person’s journey. Saying that aloud felt terrifying and liberating at once.

What followed is difficult to put into words. I lay on a table beneath the trees. Two of the horses settled on either side of me, and before they even stepped close I felt their presence, a rippling of energy, a kind of wordless transmission that moved through me. It was as though they recognized something I needed to let go of and simply held the space for that release. Their bodies, their breath, their quiet attention became a bridge between my ache and a softer knowing.

The experience was intensely somatic, sensations pooled, shifted, loosened. Tears came, and then a calm threaded through me that felt both ancient and brand new. Even days later, I feel the echo of their steadiness, as if two warm, patient presences are still standing beside me, supporting something tender inside. It’s not that the problem is solved, but the burden I had been carrying was reshaped: no longer a crushing anchor, but a mantle I can set down without guilt. The horses offered permission to be human and fallible, and that permission felt like a healing itself.

Why do horses help this way? They are large, sentient, exquisitely present animals that mirror our nervous systems. They read energy, shifts in breath and posture, and respond instantly. Not with judgment, but with truth. In their presence we are invited out of the perpetual doing of modern life and into being. That nonverbal, embodied witness can alter physiology: it calms the nervous system, expands the heart, and creates a felt safety that allows us to loosen grip on fixed roles we have carried for too long.

There was also ritual in the day. The chai, the welcoming, the intention setting, the trees overhead. Those small, deliberate acts framed the encounter and made it safe enough to be vulnerable. Rachel’s holding was gentle and unobtrusive; the horses did the deep work by simply being themselves: enormous, steady, responsive. I left with mud on my shoes and a new kind of lightness in my chest.

If you’re carrying someone else’s journey — especially the heavy, complex story of addiction — know this: love does not require perpetual rescue. There is a distinction between compassionate presence and carrying another’s path for them. Horses taught me that in the most elemental way possible: through presence, through pulse, through being. They reminded me that letting go of control is an act of love, not betrayal.

I am so grateful I honoured that inner yes. That afternoon in Drummond North felt like a homecoming to my own body and boundaries. The horses didn’t fix everything; they offered me a doorway back to myself. For anyone who senses that inner tug to try something different, to step out of the story you’ve been enacting for decades — consider the power of these animals to help you feel and then choose differently. Sometimes the most profound healing arrives on four soft feet, with the quiet of a creature that asks only that you breathe and be.

If you’ve had a healing experience with animals, or are curious about trying one, I’d love to hear your story or questions. There’s something tender and radical about learning to let go, and sometimes the best teachers wear hooves.

A few weeks ago I began working with a nutritionist to navigate the changes of menopause, and we started with a liver protocol as preparation for my upcoming Panchakarma in Bali. What has surprised me most is how much suppressed anger the liver seems to be holding. While I own my part in this, much of the heat feels inherited, expectations passed down from the mothers, wives, and grandmothers who came before me.

As the physical detox has unfolded, a deeper cleanse has followed. Feelings that were simmering have erupted in the last few days. The timing of this has led me to look at the full moon energy as I have been sitting with her the last few nights. This Full Moon on May 1, 2026 lands in Scorpio opposite the Sun in Taurus, an axis that asks what grounds and nourishes us (Taurus) while exposing what needs transformation and what we hide (Scorpio). When a full moon sits here it lights up buried emotional and ancestral material, calling for honest excavation and integration.

Going deeper into this anger, I see how much I’ve absorbed in my roles as a mother, wife, space-holder. In younger years, feelings of inadequacy pushed me to seek validation in doing and caretaking. I learned, implicitly, that a woman’s job is to hold everyone else together. A friend once called us “keepers of the kin”, and she was right. We keep everyone else afloat until we are barely treading water ourselves.

Whilst I have really worked hard on prioritising my own self-care in recent years, there are years, even lifetimes, of patterns and beliefs I have pushed aside or avoided meeting directly.

I am incredibly grateful that this full moon has pulled those truths up into the light. Now my work is to acknowledge them, stay rooted in my heart, and meet what arises with grace. And let me tell you, that feels incredibly hard when it feels like a fire rising in your belly but that is the joy of being human……..

Gratitude is often spoken about as something we do. A list we write, a ritual we visit at the end of the day, a practice we try to remember when things feel good.

But in truth, gratitude is something far more than that.
It is a state of being. A frequency we can choose to embody. And right now, when the world feels chaotic, uncertain, and fast, it becomes even more powerful.

Because gratitude does not deny what is hard.
It doesn’t bypass the grief, the confusion, or the challenges we are meeting.

Instead, it gently widens the lens. It reminds us that alongside the tension, there is still breath moving through the body. There is still warmth in a cup of tea held between our hands. There is still the steady rhythm of the earth beneath our feet.

Gratitude brings us back into relationship with life as it is, not as we wish it to be. But as it is actually unfolding.

And from this place of soften, something can begin to shift.

The nervous system softens.
The walls begin to come down, and the heart opens, even just a little.
We move out of contraction and into presence.

This is the real power of gratitude.
Not as a fleeting thought, but as a vibration we learn to anchor into.

When we stay here, when we practice really staying. we begin to see differently.

We become less consumed by what is missing, and more attuned to what is here.
Less pulled into urgency, and more rooted in trust.
Less separate, and more deeply connected to the everything that is around us.

And perhaps most importantly, we remember that even in uncertain times, there is still beauty. There is still support. There is still something that we can’t quite see.

So this is your gentle invitation. Not to force gratitude. Not to perform it.

But to soften into it.

To pause, even for a few breaths, and ask:
What is here, right now, that I can receive?

Let that be enough.

Because the more we return to this place, the more it begins to return to us. And over time, it doesn’t just become something we practice, it becomes the way we live.

Gratitude is not something I do.
It is something I allow myself to feel.

There is something about loss that doesn’t just touch grief, it rearranges you. It shifts something quietly but unmistakably inside. The way you see time. The way you hold your days. The things you once thought you had plenty of.

When I was younger, 56 felt like a lifetime away. It felt… old. Now, as I stand on the edge of that very age myself, alongside so many of my friends, it feels anything but. And for many of us, it has rocked something loose.

Because if we are truly honest, so many of us are coasting. We tell ourselves we’ll start when the timing is better. When there’s more money. More space. More certainty.

We delay what we long for, placing it gently into the hands of “later.” But later is not promised.

That truth can feel confronting, but it is also incredibly clarifying.

Because if not now… when?

We all have those unspoken whispers within us that yearn to be heard.

A place you want to go.
A way you want to live.
A practice you want to deepen.
A conversation you have been avoiding.
A version of you that feels just out of reach.

And yet, we override these whispers with logic. We tell ourselves we’ll come back to them. But what we don’t often acknowledge is this: Every time we delay what we deeply yearn for, we disconnect a little more from ourselves. Until one day, we realise we have been living a life that looks full… but doesn’t quite feel it.

So maybe it is time to create a Living List. Not a bucket list. A living list.

A list that breathes alongside your life now, not one that waits for retirement, or someday, or the “right” conditions.

Your living list is not about grand gestures (although it can include them).
It’s about choosing to be in relationship with what matters to you TODAY.

It might include:

• Watching the sunrise once a week

• Booking the holiday you keep talking about

• Starting the creative project that has been sitting quietly in your heart

• Learning to speak another language

• Reaching out to a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while.

And remember, It is not about doing everything at once. It is about no longer postponing your own aliveness.

Let this be the moment you ask yourself, what does my soul need to feel nourished and alive today……

In our family, the birthday person always chooses the restaurant.
This one, she told me, was “Instagram famous” which I understood the moment we arrived.

We were led down into this underground space that felt like a cave. Soft lighting suspended from the ceiling, everything glowing in that carefully curated way. The food that came out wasn’t just food, it was art. Every plate placed down felt like a moment to pause and take in.

It was truly beautiful. And yet, something felt off.

At the top of the stairwell, a group of girls stood there for almost an hour. Taking turns. Posing. Adjusting. Retaking. Again and again, chasing the perfect shot.

When I went to the bathroom, I could barely get through the door. Three young women stood shoulder to shoulder at the mirror, completely absorbed in their reflections through their phones. Not one of them looked up. Not one of them seemed to notice anyone else in the room. In fact, their unawareness was almost comical.

And I found myself thinking…
What are we actually doing?

I’m not separate from this.

Social media is part of my work. It’s how I share, how I connect, how I reach people I may never meet in person. I understand its place. I see its value. But this felt like something else.

When I looked around the restaurant, it felt like I had stepped into an alternate reality.

Tables full of people not speaking. Phones out. Photos being taken.
Scrolling between courses. Moments being captured, but not actually lived.

And what struck me most wasn’t judgement. It was sadness.

Because the magic was right there.

The warmth of the space. The beauty of the food. The quiet hum of people gathered together. The once in a lifetime moment of celebrating a 21st birthday.

And yet so many seemed to be missing it. Not because they weren’t there, but because they weren’t in it.

There is something about this human experience that cannot be translated through a screen. The way a room feels in your body. The subtle shifts in energy between people.
The taste, the texture, the laughter, the eye contact.

The presence.

No photo, no matter how perfect, can hold that. And I wonder if, somewhere along the way, we started believing that capturing the moment was the same as living it.

It’s not.

One lives in your phone. The other lives in your nervous system. In your memory. In your body. And they are not the same thing.

I left that night feeling both grateful and unsettled.

Grateful for the experience. For the beauty. For the time with my daughter and my beautiful family. But unsettled by how easy it is for all of us to slip into a version of life that is curated, performed, and slightly disconnected from what is real.

This isn’t about rejecting social media.

It’s about remembering that it is not the main event.

Life is.

And the magic of being human is not something we can document our way into.

It’s something we have to feel.

Fully. Messily. Presently.

Without reaching for our phones.

Or as my husband likes to refer to it—Man-On-Pause.
Of course he would make it about him.

And in some ways, that says it all.

Because from the outside, it can look like this has arrived out of nowhere. But inside the body, it is anything but. This time has come for me in much the same way adolescence arrived for my girls. As though I went to bed one person,
and woke as another.

There was a fire in my belly. And I mean that quite literally.

The hot flushes that rose without warning, starting somewhere deep, moving up through my body until I am completely overtaken by heat. I still remember the first one. Sitting on the couch in the middle of winter, when suddenly this wave of heat surged through me as though it had come from nowhere.

But here is the thing…

For many partners of menopausal women, it does seem to come from nowhere.

The shifts.
The reactions.
The sudden intolerance for things we once held.

And while I have never been someone afraid to speak my truth,
to say what needs to be said. As a fiery Scorpio, when I am overwhelmed, tired, or stretched too far, my words can arrive with heat. Sharp. Direct. Sometimes like a fire-breathing dragon.

But what I am beginning to see is this.

This is not something that has suddenly appeared. This is something that has been waiting. As women, we move through cycles. And in each one, we learn how to be in the world by watching the women who came before us.

Our mothers.
Our grandmothers.
The women who shaped us.

We learn how to hold ourselves. How much to give. When to stay quiet. When to push through. And often, we don’t question it.

We allow life to arrive as it always has. We meet it in the ways we were shown. That is, until the we hear the internal scream that shouts no more…..

Not loudly at first, but in quiet refusals. A tiredness that envelops you, a tension that contracts within. A knowing that something is shifting.

And then it becomes undeniable.

The things I once tolerated feel like too much. The ways I once gave feel unsustainable. There is less capacity now, less willingness to abandon myself
for the comfort of others.

From the outside, it may look like mood swings, like something has changed overnight. But from within, it feels like truth.

Unfiltered.
Unapologetic.
Sometimes confronting, even for me.

This stage of life is not asking me to become more. It is asking me to become more honest. To notice where I have overextended. Where I have stayed quiet. Where I have shaped myself to fit.

This is the initiation. Not marked by ceremony, but by the body itself. A shedding of who I have been to make space for who I am now. A deeper knowing. A voice that no longer asks for permission. A body that will not be ignored.

The closing of one cycle, and the beginning of another.

One where I belong to myself.

Somewhere along the way, spirituality became something to strive for.

A set of rituals to follow.
A morning routine to perfect.
A way of being that looks a certain way from the outside.

Wake early.
Sit longer.
Do it right.

And yet, the most spiritual people I have ever known do none of this with force.

They are not trying to master anything.
They are not performing their spirituality.
They are not keeping score.

They move gently through the world and there is a softness to them. A quiet steadiness.
A way of being that feels like exhale.

They listen quietly to themselves, to others, to life.
They respond, rather than react.
They know when to step forward, and when to retreat.

There is no urgency in them.
No need to prove.
No grasping to become more.

Just a deep trust in what is already here.

We have been taught, in so many ways, that growth comes from effort.
That healing requires work.
That spirituality asks something of us.

And sometimes, it does.

But what if the deeper truth is this?

That the most profound shifts happen not when we add more, but when we begin to let go.

Let go of the noise.
The pressure.
The expectation of who we think we need to be.

Let go of the idea that there is a “right way” to be spiritual.

Because true spirituality is not found in complexity.

It lives in the quiet moments.

In the way you pause before responding.
In the way you place your hand on your heart and simply breathe.
In the way you choose kindness, even when it would be easier not to.

It is found in presence.

A clear mind.
A soft heart.
A grounded, steady energy that does not need to announce itself.

This kind of spirituality never demands attention.
It does not seek validation.
It simply is.

And in its simplicity, it becomes deeply powerful.

In the spaces I hold, I see this again and again.

The moment someone stops trying so hard.
The moment they soften their grip.
The moment they allow themselves to just be as they are.

Something shifts.

Not dramatically.
Not loudly.

But in a way that feels true.

A return.

Back to the body.
Back to the heart.
Back to something ancient and deeply known.

Perhaps spirituality was never meant to be something we chase.

Perhaps it is something we remember.

Something that has always been within us, waiting patiently beneath the noise.

Waiting for us to slow down enough to feel it.

A place to be embodied.

You can feel it in the way conversations tighten, in the way people rush past one another, in the subtle hum of unease that seems to sit just beneath the surface of our days. The world, at times, feels frayed at the edges, pulled in too many directions, stretched too thin.

And in the midst of it all, it can be tempting to harden.

To close.
To protect.
To withdraw from the tenderness of being human.

But what if this is precisely the moment we are being called in?

Not out, away from it all. But in.
Back into the heart.

Kindness, in a world that feels like it is unravelling, is not a soft or passive thing. It is a quiet act of courage. A deliberate returning. A choice to remain open when it would be easier to close.

Because the heart knows something the mind often forgets.

It knows how to soften without collapsing.
It knows how to feel without being consumed.
It knows how to meet the world, exactly as it is, and still choose love.

Your heart is not naive.

It is wise. Ancient. Steady.

It is a compass that does not shout, but gently guides.

And yet, we are so often taught to override it. To look outward for direction, to measure ourselves against noise, urgency, expectation. We move faster, think harder, do more, and in doing so, we drift further from the quiet intelligence within us.

But the heart is patient.

It waits.

In the pause between breaths.
In the moment you choose to slow your pace.
In the space where you soften your gaze and truly see another.

Kindness begins here.

It is the way you speak to yourself when no one is listening.
It is the way you hold another’s story without needing to fix it.
It is the choice to meet frustration with curiosity, to meet fear with gentleness, to meet disconnection with presence.

And perhaps most importantly; it is the willingness to stay.

To stay with yourself.
To stay open in the face of uncertainty.
To stay anchored in love when the world feels anything but.

There will always be reasons to close your heart.

But there are also quiet invitations, everywhere, to keep it open.

A shared smile.
A moment of stillness.
The feeling of your feet on the earth.
The rhythm of your breath reminding you that you are still here

And from this place, from this steady, beating centre within you, you can choose again.

You can choose kindness.

Not because the world is easy.
But because it is needed.

Not because it will fix everything.
But because it changes the way you move within it.

Your heart is not separate from the world.

It is part of the great weaving.

And every time you choose to return to it, to listen, to trust, to follow, you become a thread of something stronger than unraveling.

You become a quiet force of repair.

So when the world feels loud, uncertain, or undone.

Come back.

Place a hand on your heart.
Breathe.
Listen.

Let it guide you.

It knows the way.