Breaking Promises

If you make a promise to your mother, or your child, to anyone you love, you don’t break it do you? Not unless you have a really good reason and it’s completely unavoidable.

So I ask you why you find it so easy to break the promises you make to yourself. The class you were going to do, the better food you were going to eat, the early night you were going to have. You know the things - yours will be unique to you, but they tend to be the vows you make to yourself when you are at a low ebb, when you see the light of how to help yourself and you pledge to make things better so that you can feel better.

Then you abandon yourself again.

I wonder why you, who would not do this to anyone else, continue to do this to yourself.

We get these little messages sent to us from time to time, these little whispers. You need more sleep, they say, you need some time alone. You need to do some yoga every day. You need to say no to that person next time. And we think we are going to do them. We really mean to do them.

Then life intervenes - things get busy, other people need your attention, you spend two hours looking at your phone.

I ask you, dear ones, to write down the promises you make to yourselves and to be as honourable towards yourself as you are towards your beloveds.

Don’t you want to feel happy and well? To burst with health and generosity? Don’t you want to smile at the world and have it smile back at you?

Start keeping your promises.
See what happens x

Advocate for Happiness

I’ve been thinking about what makes us happy.

I’ve been thinking (and there is nothing new to you about this) that what makes us happy is time, room to breathe, hanging out with the friends and family that we love, letting our minds wander in free space without the intervention of screens or technological platforms of any kind, good sleep, good books, nourishing food, regular exercise of one kind or another and being in nature.

Therefore we need to reappraise what we mean when we talk about prosperity - true wealth is not an affluent life, but a happy one. As humans we should not be proud of our riches, but proud of the quiet, contented joy of living a good life.

Therefore the idea of economic growth is an outdated concept and we need instead to focus (at an individual and a national level) on personal growth, which is to do with knowing and valuing our own worth and integrity, which is to do with good relationships (with ourselves, with others, with nature), which is to do with having enough, not having more.

I’m not advocating for a hairshirt-wearing life of sanctimonious self-denial. That does not bring happiness. I am advocating for a careful life of gratitude and choosing wisely. Choosing wisely what you buy and who you buy it from, how you spend your time, how much exercise you get, what you look at on your phone and how often you do it.

How might the world - education, health systems, working environments - look different if this was a shift that we all made?

And this is what we do here, in this tribe of ours: we advocate for happiness. It’s what we encourage and celebrate in each other. When we are pulled too far one way (work, no time, exhaustion, headache, stress) we make space to draw back across to the other side (breath, peace, moving slowly, gentleness), so that we learn how to spend most of our lives in quiet happiness, helping and serving in our communities, thankful for this simple and healthful practice that changes us for the better, basking in gratitude for what we have, who we love and who we are.

Long may we continue.
So grateful to know you x

Cobwebs

I like to imagine that my body is a cobweb.

We were born to be free and clear like a brand new web - life should breeze through us and past us, as the joys and sorrows come and go. But it doesn’t.

Sometimes life throws us something that is so knotty and difficult that it gets lodged in the clear web of ourselves. Losses and bereavements of all kinds, the small wounds and tribulations of a normal life. We are unable to let them go straight away and sometimes we hold onto them for years, as we quietly go about the process of attending to our heartache.

Occasionally we get attached to those knots and we start to think that they define who we are. We are wrong of course, but we are human and prone to making mistakes of this kind.

Other times, we manage to work through our knots and we learn how to release them - perhaps even to be grateful for the gifts and wisdom those injuries have left in their wake.

As all spiderwebs demonstrate, a mended web takes on a new and magnificent shape - there is beauty in the repairs we make to our soul. We are clear again, but in a new way.

Work at clearing your web. Locate those things that you are ready and strong enough to release, let go of your fear. Understand and appreciate the many ways that you have tended to your web over the years. Know that the work is never done, but that we approach our web building with more finesse as we grow older and we spend less time risking the integrity of our web in the face of the strong winds of what others say and think or in wilfully causing ourselves pain or on that awful waste of time - trying to prove our worth to others.

Happy spinning.