On my recent walks I’ve been thinking about the huge part that hiking & fell walking plays in my life. It’s been a mental as well as a physical journey for me. Back when we started going for walks at the weekends, about 5 years ago, it was something I knew I was doing, purely because I “should” get out more. By the time i was in my 30’s my life had become very unbalanced and I was very inactive and spent most of my life indoors. As you’ll have read in my previous posts, that became a big problem when my mental health got to crisis point and forced me to think about what I needed to do t ..read more

Anyone who knows me, knows how important the topic of “personal values” is to me. At the time in my life where I felt I’d lost my anchor and had lost my sense of identity (that was if I’d ever really had it in the first place). The exercise that helped me the most was the exercise to identify just what my personal core values were. Your core values (literally the things in life you value the most) are running the show for you, whether you are aware of them or not. You filter everything in your life through these values and therefore they are what determine if you are going to be happy and in a ..read more

How do you manage your energy? What energy? I hear some of you say. Have you ever even thought about what type of energy you have. I hadn’t until I came across Human Design. The system identifies people as falling in to one of 4 energy types. We are all conditioned to believe that we all have unlimited supplies of energy and that if we don’t then we’re just not doing something right. Let’s look at the 4 types. Manifestor – The manifestor energy type accounts for about 9% of the population. This type has a lot of energy (mental and physical) but it is used in short bursts. It is not a constan ..read more

For anyone who has followed my posts you’ll know i’m a HUGE fan of journaling and using planners and organisation strategies to gather and reflect on lots of different important areas of my life. It’s been vital to the improvements in my mental and physical health and I will always say, if there is one habit you should definitely try to adopt, it’s the habit of having a daily journal practice. I’ve always been a huge fan of paper planners and notebook systems (like bullet journaling) because it’s always been the best way for me. There is a lot to be said for physically writing things down to h ..read more

When people say they are “doing the work” what does that mean. When talking about doing psychological and spiritual work we are talking about shining a light on to our behavioural and thought patterns and how and why they manifest. I’ve been actively engaging in this as a priority for the last 5-8 years now through my work with the enneagram. I’ve been gradually bringing more and more awareness to what I do habitually out of ego and digging in to WHY. I just wanted to give an example of what this can look like. Recently I came to the realisation that I’ve been carrying a self imposed need to b ..read more

As most people know I’m really passionate about the topic of ego and personality and the importance of spending time getting to know our personality patterns. When it comes to ego/personality all have one, some of us vaguely understand what we mean by ego and personality and what purpose they serve and most people have no idea. Why should I put in the work to find out what my ego/personality style is? You need to know because you are unwittingly caught in a trap. If you are unaware of the ego defence patterns you are applying liberally throughout your day to day life you don’t realise how much ..read more

One day, over a decade ago, I was going through a list of reasons why I thought my relationship was going to come to an end. I had a list of things that just weren’t right. He should be more … I should be more … He makes me so … I shouldn’t feel so … He could be less … Etc I looked at the list and realised I’d written a rule book for how our relationship “should” be. We all have these rule books, consciously or unconsciously, they’re there. We have them for all our relationships. They are there in the should and could statements we make all the time. What I had lost sight of at this dark time ..read more

I’ve had to give up quite a few old behaviours and habits in the past 5 or so years on my journey back to mental and physical health and so I’ve had to create strategies for creating habit behaviour changes that have really worked for me. This year I decided I need to give up drinking diet sodas. They were the one “bad” thing I really clung to after changing my diet and my fitness routines. I did it because it felt like a naughty treat and hey, there are no calories in it, so it was just my thing. That was ok but I was drinking A LOT of it and I’ve known for quite some time that this wasn’t gr ..read more

On this day in January 2015 i declared that I was going to get back in to my wedding dress by that summer. Spoiler Alert It didn’t happen! I think we’ve all been here all too often. Feeling like we should be making an effort to be fitter / happier / more productive but not really knowing how or even why sometimes. This resolution was wishful thinking. I remember feeling so low about my appearance. My weight was going up and up, I was having to cover my hair to stop me doing more damage with my hair pulling disorder and I just wanted to hide away. I wanted a magic wand to be waved and for me ..read more

I want to introduce a fascinating piece of psychological observation from the works of the German Psychoanalyst Karen Horney. Horney observed that people fell in to three categories when it came to how they approached getting their needs met. The categories were: Compliant, Withdrawn or Assertive Compliant Types: People who move towards other people in hopes of eating what they need. Compliant rules tend to be loyal, dutiful, hard working, and responsible due to their reliance on others feedback & reassurance. Assertive Types These are people who are the most independent when they are goin ..read more