I’ve noticed a pattern in clients who “ghost” the coaching relationship they committed to.

They’re often people who think for a living, sharp, articulate, high achievers who learned early to think their way out of whatever difficult or overwhelming thing their young nervous systems were trying to survive. They tend to talk a lot and listen little, to summarise and conceptualise. (Remember that famous scene in Good Will Hunting?)

I recognise this pattern well because I used to do the same thing myself, years ago. I’d feel a wave of discomfort or emotion and my “unreliable narrator” would kick in, treating it as a topic to be analysed (and then fixed) rather than meeting the sensations and emotional pain directly.

I simply didn’t know how to meet it. And I don’t recall any therapist (of which there were many) ever calling me on it properly or guiding me into direct exploration of it, until finally my Buddhist teacher, with his characteristic candour, plainly pointed out that my intelligence was a sophisticated form of hiding. Even then I fought him on it for the better part of an hour before I let the actual feeling be felt. And it was messy.

My intellectual armour kept the painful material in the register of ideas a little longer, at arm’s length, instead of up close and personal in my chest where it felt too much to bear.

Somewhere around the same point in the work, after a session goes to an edgier place than the usual conceptualising can mask, the ghosting pattern can show up. I remember each of those sessions specifically. The client would feel irritation or resistance arise, followed by dismissiveness or some parental projection that they felt ashamed of, but could not hold or work through with curiosity. In those moments, the intellectual / manager parts that are usually running the show (to use IFS language) are rendered mute and the system floods with feelings that have been routinely avoided.

The only way through is to actually feel the immense discomfort of the thing. Instead, they tend to leave, and leave without a word.

We come by these unskillful behaviours innocently. But there is a saying: “the way you do anything is the way you do everything”. And whilst human behaviour is way more nuanced than any black and white maxims, there tends to be a kernal of truth to explore in such phrases that invites us to look at patterns of avoidance, or numbing out, or whatever else is a go-to way of responding.

Kinship, Not Transaction

This brings me onto the core of what this essay is really about: relationality and reciprocity.

These are my highest values. But it would be a lie to suggest I’ve always lived them well. I certainly was not raised with healthy models for this, and for the larger part of my life, co-dependency and patterns of relational fuckery were my norm. I messed up a LOT of relationships over my life - and though it’s a little humiliating to admit, one as recently as last year.

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In my defence, there were severe extenuating circumstances surrounding that relationship fracture (extreme ill health, an unstable living situation, dealing with a stalker and the fallout from an emotional crisis following a horrific ayahuasca journey), and it does take two to tango. Not all of it was on me. Nonetheless, the immense grief of losing that friendship lit a fire under my ass to really up my relational game, and I’ve been in a renewed study of the ‘village principles’ of relating, NVC and radical responsibility ever since.

My indigenous teachers trained me to think about coaching more like kinship than a transactional service, something with high stakes on both sides, which is why the quality of the endings matter.

If I were simply dispensing a service, a client going AWOL would be equivalent to a cancelled subscription and nothing more. But I don’t work that way, and I don’t believe the work that actually transforms people happens that way either. Depth is not accessed through a transaction. Depth emerges between people who commit to being in right relationship until the ending consciously makes itself known. Without that, both are left holding something unfinished.

The uncolonized, indigenous view is that healing is not a solitary project completed alone in a room and then displayed to the world fully formed. Healing happens in a web of human and non-human relations, with spirit, nature and ancestors, through friction and repair, and through the uncomfortable experience of being known by another person who is also willing to be known by you.

When someone vanishes from that web they deny the relationship, and themselves, the one piece of the work that might have mattered most: the practice of staying present in the moment the body is freaking out and wants nothing but to run or hide.

With no response from the ghost, there is no scope for relationality to be reinstated, or resistance to be tenderly explored, nor lessons that I, the coach, might potentially learn from.

Most people are just scared and don’t know what to say. And who hasn’t felt that way?

The Western Colonizer Model

But in a culture that treats therapists and coaches as something closer to a service you consume than a person you are in relationship with, perhaps the soft, therapised way of talking about this pattern lets everyone off the hook too easily.

I do not subscribe to that model, for me it is a Western, colonizer, transactional inheritance that positions the practitioner as a blank wall, a resource to be drawn on and discarded once the extraction is complete. It teaches clients indirectly, that the people who hold space for them do not warrant reciprocity, not even the basic decency of an ending.

And some of this is coaching's own fault, at least the version of it that comes out of the Western model. YOU set the goals. YOU identify the patterns. YOU regulate the nervous system. YOU grow, heal, achieve, win. It's a project of largely disembodied self-optimisation, one person steering the wheel of their own transformation, severed from the actual web of relationality that makes any of that transformation possible in the first place. No wonder people think they can walk away from it the way you'd cancel a subscription.

Of course, no-one has to stay in this work and no-one owes me their continued presence. From an IFS lens, resistance itself can be smart, and is not something to be pushed through by force. All of that is true and I hold it fully.

But coaching is a sacred relationship, one that I take very seriously, and any worthy relationship brings up difficult material. That’s really the whole point. Often the body will predict that something dangerous is happening even when the danger is really just growth that hasn’t been metabolized yet.

Naturally, I consider my job well done when people feel they no longer need the support. For me it really is a time of celebration. But avoidance of an uncomfortable conversation, or disappearing without a formal closure to a years-long relationship is not simply a neutral, private act, it also impacts the person who held the space and accompanied you through incredibly hard moments.

I am a human being on the other side of this exchange. I have a body that gets tired and a heart that genuinely cares about the outcome of my client’s becoming in a way that they often do not comprehend. The Western model might frame this as enmeshment. But relationality and reciprocity are not enmeshment. They are life skills that are being lost in this hyper-individualistic, atomised culture. Silence isn’t without a cost.

Where This Leaves Us

All that said, none of this is about blame or guilt. I am writing it because I think we need a more honest conversation about what it costs all of us, when we let disappearing pass as an acceptable way of managing discomfort. This is not exclusive to the coaching relationship, it affects ALL our relationships. I’m interested in what becomes possible for this world when we step into deeper levels of responsibility.

I often tell clients that adulthood is not the absence of the urge to run, I feel it rise up in me all the bloody time! It’s what you do with that urge. The people doing the deepest work that will actually change the course of a life, are the ones who surrender to feeling that urge the most intensely, and choose to build internal capacity for it.

I know this might read as a harsh “calling out” to some, and if you are someone this essay describes, I hope you know the door never actually closes. Stay, or leave, but with your expression intact. Either one is relational.

Where It Started

I was a kid who wasn’t allowed to want things. My parents weren’t cruel, there just wasn’t the money, and wanting became something that had to be managed out of me for the household to hold together.

I got praised for choosing a cheap, dusty picture frame from the charity shop on my birthday, the kind of thing nobody would look twice at on a shelf. I chose it because I had learned by then that choosing something small and choosing it happily was the safest thing I could do.

Other times I got shamed, and sometimes hit, for wanting things. I remember a meltdown I had, having to choose the doll I wanted so badly it felt like my chest was going to cave in, but handing it over to my friend on her birthday. And when I was given a gift I hadn’t asked for and would never use, I still had to arrange my face into gratitude, because disliking the thing I’d been given was an insult to a household that had scraped by to buy it.

My lovely Mum, to this day, cannot accept gifts without admonishing people for spending unnecessary money on her. She was raised seven people to a one-room apartment in Bombay. A whizz on the sewing machine, she used to make my clothes, and the kids on the estate used to spit on the back of the lovely Oriental jacket she made for me because they didn’t like my dark skin.

My Dad’s story was more brutal. Dumped in a Bernardo’s children’s home by my Grandmother, while his siblings were kept at home. I probably don’t need to flesh out his experience of scarcity and loss, but it was extreme.

One fateful year, my Uncle came to visit with a huge, white, fluffy, stuffed toy dog and I was beyond THRILLED. I ran outside to play, clutching this prized ball of fluff, and within 30 minutes a kid from my council housing estate rode by on his bike, punched me in the stomach, and snatched the dog right out of my hands. I remember the shock and the bitter taste of humiliation as if it were yesterday. Thrilled became INCONSOLABLE.

“Money doesn’t grow on trees” and “waste is sinful” and “we can’t afford that” were my family’s idioms, said so often they were just the air I grew up breathing. I was not allowed to leave the dinner table until every last morsel was cleared from the plate. That meant I often fell asleep face down in my food.

And underneath those ordinary, well-worn phrases sat a much more totalising equation. I know my parents didn’t consciously mete this out, but I absorbed it anyway, the way children absorb everything that isn’t said outright: Wanting was dangerous. Not wanting, when I was handed the wrong thing anyway, was also dangerous. Money is scarce or unavailable. Having more than enough is morally questionable, and asking for more exposes you to shame.

The only safe position was to want exactly the right amount, and to pretend to be delighted regardless of what actually showed up.

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Five different rules about desire, braided together tightly, shaped my developing nervous system long before I was old enough to understand the effect they would have on my life.

What I Carry Now

Even now, as a grown-ass woman, I flinch slightly when someone hands me a present, because I might have to fake liking it and I was taught early that the wrong reaction costs you belonging.

I’m also a woman who still yearns to be bought things, because somewhere in my wiring, being given something got fused with being worth something. Interestingly, and in keeping wth the programming, I never did attract people into my life who were generous with giving gifts.

So at a certain point, I decided to give them all to myself. I can trace my extravagant spending years back to this without much difficulty. If having things equalled being valued, and I had never gotten enough of either, then buying myself the things I liked became a way of giving my younger self what nobody else had. It never worked, not really. The ache would still be there underneath the new coat or art piece, completely unmoved by the purchase.

I’ve been exploring how directly all that maps onto the money beliefs I’m still working through as an adult. This is what shadow work looks like in practice. It’s rarely one big wound, it’s usually multiple contradictory rules your body-mind absorbed while very young, all still running in the background of a grown adult’s decision making process.

What’s taking longer to work through is the other side of the same inheritance, the beliefs that show up now that my work has become the thing I’m selling.

When what you’re offering is a modality you built out of your own healing, drawing on years of expensive training, dedicated study, devotional practices, embodied wisdom and lived transformation, pricing it isn’t a neutral business decision the way pricing a product might be. Naming a number like £5000 for a package of work like this isn’t just a transaction, it’s a declaration of value, and declarations were not safe for the child who learned that the correct amount to want was as close to nothing as she could manage.

Every time I sit down to write sales copy or hold a pricing conversation, I can feel the old rules surface: don’t want too much, don’t ask for too much, don’t make anyone uncomfortable with what you need and what you offer. I built an entire personality around it. And now I’m trying to run a business, which is in some sense a sustained, repeated act of stating what I want and asking to be paid for it.

Smallness as “Good Girl”

I’ve made myself smaller for a long time under the belief that smallness equates to being a “good girl”. I have kept my work accessible because charging a lot has felt morally uncomfortable to me. And some versions of spiritual and therapeutic culture reinforce this by conflating humility with self-erasure. Poverty is not proof of purity. And yet the practitioner who charges the least often gets read as the most trustworthy - at least among people who carry the same kind of money wounds as I do.

I’ve absorbed those thoughts too, as well as the opposite thoughts; that charging vast amounts of money for transformational work is vulgar and immoral, or cashing in on people’s pain. Plenty of people however, read low pricing as a red flag, not a sign of integrity. And I’m starting to see that my pricing has been selecting for clients who share my own scarcity coding, so of course they read cheapness as ‘trustworthy’. They’re projecting the same wound back at me.

These conflicting thoughts reinforce each other, even though I know the actual mechanics of what I do; the training behind it, the thousands of session hours, the years spent building a methodology that makes a profound difference to people’s lives, all backed up by several hundred effusive client testimonials. The mechanics of this are no different from any other skilled practice that gets paid properly without anyone questioning whether the practitioner is exploiting the people she helps.

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So the question I keep reflecting on, yet remains unsatisfied, is whether a humanistic, spiritually motivated practitioner can become genuinely, unapologetically prosperous without either shrinking the work into a commodity or leaning on people’s longing to make the sale. I haven’t arrived at a clean “yes” delivered with confidence because I don’t think that tension can be resolved too quickly.

Commodification does happen in this industry, constantly, masquerading as empowerment and “knowing one’s value”. There are practitioners who do exploit longing, who leverage vulnerability rather than holding it with care. Pretending that risk doesn’t exist would be dishonest.

But the opposite approach, treating every act of charging well as morally suspect, isn’t protective either. It’s like my old family equation, still insisting that wanting is dangerous and having more makes you problematic, but now applied to a woman running a practice instead of a child choosing a picture frame.

I notice now as I sit here writing this, how incredibly vulnerable and edgy it feels to expose myself on this topic, I can feel the contraction in my stomach and mildly panicked thoughts forcing their way into my awareness. That’s a surefire sign that my ego is trying to flag a potential threat and is therefore a sign to go right ahead and parade through the streets naked, metaphorically speaking.

AND b r e a t h e, little Aly. All is well. You are safe. You are allowed to have a seat at the table. Now, continue.

A New Value Proposition

What I’m working toward is something more like this: that my work can be worth exactly what it’s worth. Value is contextual. £2,000 might be an absurd investment for one person and £10,000 an entirely reasonable investment for another. My job is not to determine that for them.

My job is to make the offer, articulate the value by serving them powerfully before they sign up, establish appropriate boundaries around the work, and let the adult on the other side make their decision. Charging well isn’t an act of aggression against the people I’m serving, and the discomfort I feel when I do it is old programming, not reflective of present-day truth.

So, I ask you: how much is it worth to you to have connected, loving relationships with the people most important to you? Or to move beyond your own childhood programming into a purpose-driven life? Or to quit working for ‘the man’, and build that legacy business for your family? Or to find freedom from a lifelong, debilitating condition of body dysmorphia? Or to walk freely in nature because your childhood snake phobia dropped away? What value would you place on those freedoms? I can truthfully say that each one of my clients whose lives changed for the better, initially struggled to justify investing in my modest fees.

For me to continue to serve powerfully, I need to be resourced and nourished, especially as a single, childless woman in her 50’s who has to take care of everything alone. For me to continue doing pro-bono work (of which I too have benefited from in the past), I need to affix my own oxygen mask first. And for me to be able to circulate money back into generative projects that help build the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, I need to earn a robust income.

That might mean risking the judgement or criticism of people I’ve previously served or wish to serve in the future. There is nervous system work to be done, an increase in capacity for the high intensity sensation that comes with choosing exposure. It might mean some inner child work to support the risk of making big asks and forming strategic partnerships. And maybe some existential kink practice to help me joyfully get off on all the ways my ego loves to be stuck in the financial doldrums.

Over To You

If you’ve read this far, I’m genuinely keen to hear your thoughts on my dilemma. And if you’ve ever caught yourself doing something as an adult that makes no logical sense until you trace it back to a much younger version of you, I’d love to hear about that in the comments too.

(This essay is dedicated in memoriam to my beloved teacher Dr Carolyn Elliot.)

Permit me a question: Do you feed what matters, or do you feed what is easy?

Everything eventually turns grey if you don’t continually meet it with fresh attention, effort and discovery. And that includes the ‘self’.

There were times in my life when I heard myself saying “I’ve lost myself.” As though the real me skipped off down the road one day, and decided to have some rollicking fun elsewhere, no forwarding address given.

Obviously that’s not what happens. Yet my clients often come to me saying the same thing; sometimes after a brutal divorce, or a burnout, sometimes after becoming a parent, or upon waking up from a long habit of soul-sucking people-pleasing. Most often, during peri-menopause.

The most acute experience I remember of feeling as though I’d lost myself was when I realised that the outwardly successful, glamorous life I’d built for myself (I was a well paid, celebrity hair and make-up artist flying all over the world) felt empty and hollow, totally devoid of meaning.

Little did I know back then, this feeling was resting upon a misunderstanding of what a ‘self’ actually is.

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The Physics of a Self

There is a principle in physics called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In simple terms, everything naturally tends towards entropy and disorder unless energy is continually invested to maintain it.

If you leave a garden unattended, fruits and vegetables decay and weeds eventually take over. Iron rusts and wood rots. Your house begins to crack and crumble if you give up maintaining it. Even the stars will eventually burn out.

Order isn’t the default state of the universe.

Now, before the physicists come for me, I’m not suggesting your personality is governed by thermodynamics because human beings aren’t closed systems. We are constantly exchanging energy, information, relationships and experience with the world around us.

But as a metaphor, it’s remarkably useful, because identity behaves in much the same way.

The ‘self’ that I’d thought I’d lost, had once been held together by thousands of small acts repeated over time. That self had been influenced by all the books I’d ever read, the conversations I used to have, the boundaries I kept, or the promises I upheld. It was shaped by the way I spoke to myself, the way I moved my body over time, my morning meditation and my evening walks. The people who reflected my values back to me. My commitment to telling the truth, even when it was edgy-as-fuck. Those repeated thoughts, patterns of sensation, emotional responses, habits and actions became the structure of my identity.

When we stop feeding those life-giving structures, they don’t stay frozen in time, they slowly dissolve because everything that isn’t consciously maintained gives way to entropy.

15 years in the TV & fashion industry had chiselled away at many of those structures. The people I surrounded myself with had wildly different values to me. I no longer had the magical, awe-inspiring conversations with similarly wired weirdos and I missed important social commitments, weddings and milestone events of those closest to me because I was always in some far flung place at the beck and call of some rich people.

It’s no wonder I felt I’d lost myself.

The Brain Bit

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you’ve seen me harp on about the fact that modern neuroscience has discovered that our brains are prediction machines. And rather than experiencing reality directly, the brain constantly constructs our experience based on past learning. Every repeated behaviour strengthens particular neural pathways and every repeated thought makes certain predictions more automatic.

In other words, your brain becomes efficient at becoming the you that you think you are.

However, this is not some permanent, fixed, essential you. It’s simply the version of you that you’ve rehearsed most often.

This is both why travel makes you feel so alive, and why change can feel so damn difficult.

When you travel, for a week or two you’re allowed to ‘see’ again. Travel shakes us out of apathy. The novelty of the new piques our curiosity and releases endorphins, our conscious attention momentarily returns, and with it, excitement.

One question that puzzled me for a while though, and sent me down a rabbit hole of research was this… If the predictive brain is so obsessed with staying the same, why does it also light up like a Christmas tree when you book a flight to Barbados?

Well, it turns out researchers also wrestled with this question: if the free energy principle says organisms act to minimise surprise, why would it ever be motivated to seek out novelty, when novelty by definition means unexpected states?

What they found in dopamine research is that novelty itself is its own reward, separate from whether the new thing is even pleasant. The brain treats “this is new” as valuable information in its own right, and that response fades the moment something stops being new and starts being familiar again.

Travel is bounded novelty because you know you’re going home at some point. Your core identity isn’t actually on the line the way it is when someone asks you to become a different person. So the same brain that will fight you tooth and nail over a deep change can treat four weeks in South America as a low-stakes way to feed the exploration system without threatening the identity structure that entropy is protecting. It’s the same brain, just running a low-stakes experiment instead of a threat prediction.

But we don’t need to travel to recover that wakefulness. There is enough depth in ordinary life, and sources of renewal all around you if you develop the eyes to see them. Right now, some traveller is having the time of his life in your boring hometown. There is enough strangeness in people that you claim to know intimately to make endless new demands on your curious attention, provided you meet your experience with an active and creative mind.

Meaning is derived from how much of your self you bring into experience. It is not a property that anything permanently has, it’s a relationship we must keep alive. This is an antidote to entropy. Nothing stays new on its own.

On the other hand, change that you desire, or know you need to make, depends upon interrupting thousands of old predictions your nervous system has become exceptionally good at making.

It means having to ask your brain to spend more energy choosing what is unfamiliar instead of conserving energy by repeating what is known. Transformation is very energy intensive. And your ego wants nothing more than to stay the same. As Jane Roberts once wrote, “the ego is a jealous god, it wants its interests served.”

It’s no wonder that my clients often feel exhausted after a coaching session. I always tell them, “you’re not just changing behaviour, you’re reorganising an entire internal ecosystem that does not want to be reorganised.”

So identity needs upkeep. Fine. But upkeep by what, exactly, and how? That’s a harder, perhaps more metaphysical question that most people never even stumble upon, let alone try to understand.

The Story We Keep Confirming

Picture this: You’re across the restaurant table from someone you like, and they say something dismissive, and you feel it move through you like a jolt of electricity. Your stomach lurches, your chest constricts and your predictive brain interprets these sensations as a door closing in the relationship. This prediction builds upon itself in lightning-fast time, and other familiar patterns of sensation ripple through your body and get interpreted as grief, or maybe anger…

….But weirdly, it’s actually something closer to completion. Completion of a story you’ve been assembling for twenty years that just got its latest piece of evidence. “I am the one who isn’t seen. I never get chosen. My not-enoughness is confirmed once again.” So you go home and cry and call a friend and complain “this always happens to me”.

But underneath the pain, if you’re willing to look honestly, there’s something that feels almost like relief, because at least you know who you are again. The story of you is maintained, entropy has been warded off once more.

Do you feel uncomfortable reading that? I get it if you do, because I felt a humiliating level of cringe when I started to explore my own patterns through the lens of neuropsychology and the predictive brain.

In the example above, the mind wasn’t seeking pleasure in that moment. It was seeking confirmation, and confirmation of even a painful identity feels like stability to the predictive brain.

Far more threatening than the pain itself, is to choose to fully inhabit a moment without reaching for a rehearsed story to explain who you are and how the world is. So the mind reaches for the familiar hurt the way you’d reach for a handrail, because it stabilizes the identity.

This is not an occasional happening. It’s closer to the engine behind our emotional life, running underneath decisions we think we’re making for entirely different reasons. Feelings are not simply felt, they get used as evidence for a case the mind has been building about who you are since you were small. And once the evidence comes in, the story reifies itself, and the reification gets mistaken for reality rather than seen for what it actually is, which is a narration running slightly behind the moment, doing its best to predict what needs to happen next to keep you alive.

The Gap

So what the flaming heck do we do about all this?

Well, when someone makes an ambiguous comment (the brain hates ambiguity remember?) you begin by closely, tenderly watching the space between your body clenching and the inferences, assumptions, conclusions and identity roles that your brain predicts.

With the deliberate cultivation of presence and body awareness, you begin to see that there’s just a wave of raw vocal sound hitting your ears, nothing attached to it yet. Your brain lays on meaning a half-second later. That gap is small, and with practice, it’s the only place where you get to choose the story rather than have it choose you.

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The Weather

The weather has been offered as a metaphor across spiritual traditions through time. As you observe weather moving through the open sky, it’s obvious that the sky doesn’t need to claim either sunshine or storms as itself. The open sky is simply the space, the backdrop upon which weather plays out its patterns. The open sky is not perturbed by the weather patterns, it does not resist them, or attempt to control them. It simply is the space. It knows all weather passes.

Experience arrives a bit like that too, before we bombard it with our explanations and justifications.

Becoming someone who is more awake to all this happens deliberately - unless you’re one of the lucky few to experience some kind of spontaneous awakening or near death experience.

For most of us mere Fraggles, presence needs to be deliberately cultivated. Integrity, compassion, clarity and creativity require deliberate thought and action. They rarely happen by accident, but are the essential ingredients of motion and maintenance of energy required to prevent entropy in a human system.

Partly, my role in my client’s lives is to de-romanticise the notion of “finding ourselves”, as though somewhere deep inside there exists a fully formed, authentic self waiting patiently to be uncovered.

It’s bullshit. The truest version of you is like the wide open, unperturbed sky. The space before predictive meaning-making kicks in.

And at the same time, on this earth plane, it seems we’ve chosen to play in the playground of identity. And some identities are way more fun and generative and alive to inhabit than others. I know this firsthand, because my old identity nearly killed me, as it killed my beloved teacher Carolyn.

This current iteration of my “self” is infinitely more joyful much of the time, but it takes maintenance. True freedom comes from the recognition and wholehearted acceptance that we’re not always going to feel good. Feeling shit, my friends, is just life some of the time.

Furthermore, the “self” isn’t something you find, it’s something you continually cultivate, like a garden. Would you expect a marriage, a business, a yoga practice, even your own strength or wisdom to naturally sustain themselves? They require energy, watering, attention, love, momentum, sunlight.

And if you’re paying attention, you will notice that Life asks us every single day, in a million tiny moments, “will you feed what matters, or will you feed what is easy?”

That question never really goes away, and it shouldn’t. Be thankful for it because there are countless ways we drift away from ourselves, one compromise at a time.

Distraction. Comfort. Resentment. Fear. Busyness. Numbing. Approval seeking. Pick your poison.

The garden will always need tending. The good habits still need repeating, the promises still need keeping, ‘cos entropy is coming for it all, bish.

Maybe The Most Important Bit..

Underneath and alongside the daily maintenance, you must become aware of the predictive loop running too. You notice it one lurching stomach, one sweaty palm at a time. Learning to catch it and notice, even a handful of times a week, that half-second before the narrative grips you round the throat, and the “story of you” will begin to dissolve significantly. You will start to see that you have way more agency to respond differently than it ever felt like you could before.

And I can’t stress enough how much of a difference this makes to your day-to-day quality of life.

I have developed a proprietary, in-depth guided process called the “Mind Mirror” which does exactly this. It helps you notice the loop, but more importantly it helps you find the specific payoff your identity is getting out of running it. Your brain isn’t malfunctioning when it does this. It’s getting some hidden something that makes the pattern worth repeating even when it hurts, and until you know what those payoffs actually are (it’s always multiple payoffs), you’re trying to dissolve a story without knowing what it’s trying to protect.

If you want to find out what your loop is getting out of the “story of you,” drop me a message or book a session using my calendly link:

And if this article has illuminated something for you, please do restack and share it with your beloveds.

Everyone has an inner bitch.

In the field of Positive Psychology, there’s test you can take to identify the inner saboteurs that grab the steering wheel of your life and regularly attempt to drive you off the edge of a cliff, Thelma & Louise-style.

My scores revealed that my primary saboteur is the ‘Judge’- but I call mine the inner bitch - and apparently it’s the only Universal saboteur that everyone has across cultures.

My inner bitch was painfully, sarcastically, bitingly loud throughout the first 3 decades of my life. No surprise then that I was anxious, unhappy, depressed (often suicidally so), self-medicating, painfully limited and unfulfilled. (Couldn’t hold a relationship down either).

Her bullshit usually went something like this:

“Without me pushing you, you’ll get lazy, fat and complacent.”

“Without me scaring you shitless about awful future outcomes, you won’t work hard to prevent them.”

“Without me punishing you for mistakes, you won’t learn from them (‘cause you’re stupid), and you’ll repeat them ad nauseam.”

“Without me judging the crap outta everyone else, you’ll bend over and let them take advantage of you.”

“Without me guilt-tripping you about this circumstance, you’d never do anything to improve it.”

This primary saboteur (when believed) is the cause of most of our anxiety, distress, and suffering. It drains us of vital life force, creativity, eros and productive energy, and often creates a tonne of relationship drama and conflict to boot.

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Original Survival Function

I’m guessing that we all know by now that there was an evolutionary reason for this. Noticing and amplifying the negative has been crucial to our survival because it reduced our chances of being surprised and harmed by unanticipated physical and emotional threats. So the human brain disproportionally notices, remembers and predicts the negative. Thanks a bunch, brain.

Characteristics & Tone

This Judge character finds faults with self, others, and the circumstances of life and this in turn, often activates the other Saboteurs - of which there are many.

Judge of Self: Berates self on mistakes, failures, or shortcomings. “What the hell is wrong with me?”

Judge of Others: Focuses on what’s wrong with others rather than what is right. “What the heck is wrong with you?”

Judge of Circumstances: Focuses on what’s wrong about a circumstance rather than seeking the gift or opportunity. “What in the fuckity-fuck is up with this circumstance?”

“What ever it is, you better fix it FAST Missy, or everything is going to be terrible ALL THE TIME and FOREVER MORE!”

Most of our lingering painful emotions are initiated by the Judge (bitch): shame, guilt, stress, anxiety, frustration, anger, regret, disappointment, blame, and unhappiness.

She’s A Forecast, Not A Character Flaw

Despite over a decade of therapeutic trainings of various kinds, the thing that actually moved the needle was my habit of geeking out on neuroscience literature, most notably the work of the brilliant Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett who reorganised how I understood my own reactions.

Various other brilliant neuroscientists like Anil Seth and Karl Friston have also demonstrated that our brains aren’t just kicking back, taking in the world and then deciding how to feel about it.

The brain is constantly forecasting what’s about to happen based on what’s happened before, then checking that forecast against what actually shows up. Most of what you call perception is that correction happening in real time. You’re living inside your brain’s best guess, and that includes the guesses it makes about your own body: whether a racing heart means excitement or danger, or whether a knot in your stomach means speak up or shut up.

The bitch is actually just one of those forecasts, built from old data. For me, it was a sequence of totally ordinary (yet painful) life events; a parent whose love had conditions attached, a vicious history teacher who shamed me in the classroom so that everyone laughed at me, and various relationships where immature mistakes cost me the person I depended on.

My brain built a model that said “predict catastrophe early, so you’re never caught off guard by it again”. That model doesn’t know the tiger left decades ago. It’s still running the old forecast, because as far as it’s concerned, the forecast worked. I survived.

Why Knowing Better Doesn’t Shut Her Up

Prediction models don’t necessarily update because you understand them intellectually. In my observation and professional experience (and the neuroscience backs this up), they update when they get contradicted, repeatedly, by lived experience that the nervous system actually registers.

Sure, you can know that a mistake made in front of your team won’t end your career, but your body still floods with the chemistry of real danger, because the part of you generating that forecast hasn't accrued a different data set.

The bitch quiets down when you finally give her new evidence, over and over, in mind and body. This might look like staying present and open in the boardroom after the mistake, instead of collapsing into self punishment, and noticing that nothing catastrophic actually happens. Or letting a trusted someone see you losing your shit, and getting an updated experience of their continued regard and care for you.

Each one is a small yet highly significant contradiction to her model, and the model, however loud, isn’t immune to contradiction. It’s just slow, because it was built to protect you and it’s very frickin loyal.

That’s the actual work: building new capacity in her nervous system by living through the thing she swore would destroy you, and emerging intact.

I spent 38 years being bitch-slapped by mine. What finally chilled her boots was showing her, one unremarkable moment at a time, that the world she built her forecast around didn’t exist anymore. She’s much, much quieter these days, and that’s enough. I’m thankful for her loyal service all those years.

If you’d love help working out what your own Judge is forecasting, and what it’s actually getting out of running the show, that's what I built the “Mind Mirror Process” for. It's a way of finding the specific payoff underneath the pattern, because the brain doesn't keep running a loop like this for nothing. There's always something it thinks it's protecting or getting, and once you can see that clearly, the loop starts to lose its grip. I work through this 1-2-1 with people. [Book a 90-min session here].

My website & testimonials: AwakenwithAly.com

I am now 53 years old and I have been going to raves and club nights and warehouse parties since I was a teenager. The dance music scene has given me some of the most joyful, alive, deeply connected nights of my life, nights I still return to regularly because that world still elicits something in me that I have never found anywhere else.

I say this first because I do not want what follows to read as an outsider’s critique thrown at a scene I do not love. I want it read as something closer to family speaking honestly about family, because I have also, in those same spaces, encountered men who used their position and their access to a stage or a DJ booth, to behave in ways that were coercive and in many cases predatory.

I am not alone in this, nearly every woman I know who has spent time in this scene has a version of this story, some worse than others, occasionally involving men whose names you would recognise. I personally was sexually assaulted as I slept at a close friend’s party by a music producer and business partner of her boyfriend. (And for those who would dare to ask such a shitty question - I was completely sober at the time).

As well as being an old-skool raver, I am also a coach, hypnotherapist and mentor working in women’s empowerment and in the psychology of relationship and healing. Which means I’ve explored this pattern professionally as well as personally, from both sides of it. This is not a piece written from a safe distance. It is written from inside a scene I still love, about harm I have observed and been personally affected by.

I have no desire to widen the deepening gulf that I think everyone notices between men and women right now, in fact a huge part of my work is focussed on trying to close some of that distance rather than deepen it.

But staying quiet is not going to cut it.

There is a statement circulating right now from a DJ named Lukas Wigflex, written in response to his ex-wife and business partner Avarni’s account of ten years inside a relationship she has described as psychologically abusive, coercive, controlling, and at times physically frightening.

This is just the latest one of many DJ’s being called out, cancelled and in some cases charged with assault, abuse and even rape (see Mixmag’s & Resident Advisor’s coverage of Tim Westwood, Andre King, Schlomo, Odymel, Basswell, Fantasm - not to mention all the Radio 1 DJ’s dropping like flies).

But back to Wigflex. What struck me most about his statement was that every sentence of it was organised around his own interior experience. “Reading back on how I made her feel, he writes, I am embarrassed, disgusted, full of shame, I wish I had dealt with the stress better, I wish I was kinder.” He then went on to deny her allegations of physical assault.

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I do not assume or pretend to know the truth of this situation, or whether he is lying when he says he loved her, and I do not think most men in these situations are lying either. I think the shame is certainly very real. But notice what is happening structurally in those sentences: the woman he says he loved has become the occasion for his feelings about himself. This kind of language, rather than being incidental, is a data point in a widespread pattern.

And this pattern is something that women have carried the shockwaves of in their bodies for a very long time: that it is entirely possible for a man to feel enormous feelings for a woman, something they would call the deepest love they’ve ever known, and for that feeling to have nothing to do with love at all.

Cathexis

There is an old psychoanalytic term ‘cathexis’: which describes an emotional investment or attachment of libidinal energy to an object, person or idea. Sentimental attachment to a keepsake, a family heirloom, or a photograph would be an example of cathexis. Patriotism and other impassioned identifications with groups and systems of belief are also forms of cathexis.

The word is derived from the Greek verb “to occupy”, which suggests that the libido is sent out to “seize” the external object, as an army would seize and occupy a city. In narcissism, the ego itself becomes the object of libidinal investment - the person “falls in love with himself.” ‘Decathexis’, on the other hand, is the withdrawal of emotional energy from an object, person or idea.

So what we call “falling out of love” is often actually just decathexis.

Cathexis is not itself a moral term, you can cathect a person the way you cathect a bottle of wine or an old grievance. But I think it’s a far more precise word to describe what happens when a man’s whole emotional economy becomes dependent on a woman functioning a certain way for him, looking a certain way, needing him a certain amount or admiring him on schedule.

If she stops, pulls away, gets tired or simply inhabits more of herself as a full separate person with her own needs, that investment of emotional energy can curdle into control and coercion. What was never actually love in the first place cannot possibly survive contact with her autonomy.

I-Thou vs I-It

Martin Buber had a phrase for this, the difference between an I-Thou relationship and an I-It relationship. A person can experience an I-It relationship with tremendous intensity and passion, and still the other person only exists in their mind as a source of supply or an object that is either behaving correctly or malfunctioning. Not a fully formed subject with their own interior life running independently of your need for them.

Read Wigflex’s statement again through that lens and you may see the cathexis: he does not wonder about what she needed or reflect on how she was affected, only what he felt - upon reading her expose of him.

The inimitable bell hooks wrote the book I think every generation of men needs (and I’ve never yet encountered a man who has read it). In ‘All About Love’, hooks makes the radical and unfashionable claim that love is not a feeling that arrives, but a practice you choose daily, an active caring, a decision to extend yourself for someone’s growth even when it costs you something. There is a labour in loving well.

Patriarchal culture, she argues, raises everyone from very early on to believe that love is something you fall into. Boys are taught that a women’s role is to complete something in them, while love is something they are entitled to receive, rather than something you build with your hands, heart, energy, attention, care and time.

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Whilst I endeavour not to think in black and white pronouncements, I do think there is something to this. It certainly explains why so many men can say the words “I loved her” with complete sincerity while having never once practiced the actual verb. Men who kill their partners often stand in the dock keening with apparent remorse, because to them, they loved their wives.

But if they were not taught the verb, only the feeling, then the feeling, unmoored from any practice of actual care, will eventually demand that the world rearrange itself to keep producing that feeling in them. The woman who stops producing it becomes the problem, and then she’s fair game to be hurt, or worse.

Say it loud for those in the back now… “IT CANNOT BE CALLED LOVE IF YOU CAN HURT, WOUND, HARM, MAIM OR KILL THE OBJECT OF YOUR LOVE.”

Himpathy

The philosopher Kate Manne coined the term “himpathy”; the disproportionate sympathy that flows toward men who cause harm, especially when they perform remorse well. Maybe you felt a flicker of it yourself reading Wigflex’s statement, “he sounds like he’s really suffering!” That flicker is worth examining rather than denying, because it is exactly the mechanism Manne is describing, the way a man’s visible pain about what he did can eclipse, in the reader’s attention, the much larger and much less visible pain of the woman it happened to.

Statements

In the weeks after a story like Avarni’s breaks, the club statements start arriving in roughly the same tone, “safety is our absolute priority, we take these allegations extremely seriously, this behaviour has no place in our community”. After decades on this scene, I have watched way too many promoters and venue owners look directly at behaviour like this for years and say nothing, book the DJ again the following month, and laugh it off at the bar.

I do not think the sudden fluency with the language of safety arrived because something has shifted internally in these organisations, I think it arrived because after Epstein, the sheer volume of these accounts became impossible to ignore across every industry all at once. Being seen to respond quickly became a business necessity in a way it simply was not five years ago.

This is not nothing. A world where institutions feel compelled to perform accountability is better than one where they do not feel compelled at all. But a statement is not structural change. I’m wondering when questions like “who exactly vetted this person before booking them?”, and “what’s going to happen to the promoters who kept booking men after multiple women warned them privately?”,

Will any of the money made from these events over the years gets redirected toward the women harmed rather than toward crisis PR? Until those questions get asked, I think we have to hold the statements as what they mostly are, which is reputation management, and keep our actual attention on whether anything downstream of the statement ever changes.

I both teach and believe deeply in radical responsibility, which cuts in every direction - including toward the women who seek out value by gaining proximity to famous men. Some women justify men’s bad behaviour, some tell themselves a story about potential that lets them keep loving someone who is only cathecting them. I have done this myself, so I am not writing from a lofty position looking down at it, I am writing from inside it, having traced the threads of it in my own history.

I’m also not interested in writing a piece that sorts men into “good” and “bad”, because I do not think that is true to how harm actually works. When I told my close friend that their music producer associate had assaulted me in my sleep, she was quick to tell me that he was a “good guy”, a married man with two young children, and that I would ruin their lives if I reported it to the police. (Needless to say, we are no longer friends).

However, radical responsibility for the self does not mean refusing to name a pattern when it is this consistent, widespread, and structurally supported by an industry that platforms and enables men to hurt women, and forgives them the moment they perform enough public contrition. Both things are true. The pattern is real and needs naming in the strongest terms, and no single man inside it is only a villain, and neither of these truths cancels the other.

The instinct when a story like this enter the public domain is to sort people quickly into monster and innocent. I understand that instinct, I feel it myself every time I read another newspaper article of a woman’s untimely death at the hands of an angry man.

But I do not believe it actually serves the women living through these situations and it does not serve the project of change either. Because if he is simply a monster then the rest of the men reading his statement get to close the browser tab feeling nothing in particular, and if he is simply a monster then there is nothing to learn, no structure or system to interrupt, only a villain to point at from a safe distance.

So here is what I actually want to say to any men who might read this, and I say it as someone who works with men in this exact terrain, helping them to unwind their confusion in the therapeutic container: if the feeling you call love disappears or turns to rage the moment a woman stops meeting your needs, perhaps you’ve confused love with cathexis. Perhaps it was need or entitlement wearing love’s clothing.

And the good news, if there is good news here, is that love as a practice can actually be learned, unlike a feeling, which either arrives or doesn’t. You can learn to be genuinely curious about what she needs instead of narrating what you feel. You can learn to stay interested in her interior life even when it is inconvenient to you. You can learn the difference between missing someone and needing them to keep performing a function, and that learning is available to you right now, today.

It only requires the willingness to look honestly at what you have been calling love and ask whether it has ever, once, cost you something for her sake and not for your own redemption or self-image.

Wigflex and others like him are not an anomaly. These reports have started to feel like weather itself, like something we are all just living inside of, rather than something that was built. Because it was built. And it’s going to take all hands on deck to build something new, safe, loving, equitable, respectful and truly relational, on the dance floors and in every other area of life.

Feel free to use the comments section below to share your own experiences if you feel it would be helpful.

Peace out. <3

We all know that the prevalence of mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, and stress-related conditions has surged in recent decades, even among children. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately one in four people will be affected by mental health issues at some point in their lives.

I was one of those people for the first 38 years of my life, and this led me to a 15-year in depth study of the mind-body through the lenses of neuropsychology, meditation, somatics, Eastern spiritual traditions, psychedelics, mythopoetic studies, philosophy, Jungian shadow work, attachment theory, and MUCH more.

I don’t share any of that to establish credibility - for me exploring all that blah blah was fascinating but didn’t move the needle as much as I would have liked. The difference that made all the difference was learning something far more fundamental about the predictive brain and the nature of identity.

And I’m deeply inspired to share it with the world and uphold my Bodhisattva vow of relieving suffering wherever it’s in my remit to do so.

I hosted a free webinar last month on the topic of ‘Unlearning the Habit of Anxiety’. Everyone knows that facilitators like me host free webinars because we’re hoping that something in our work (and our character) will inspire your curiosity and trust in our ability to solve whatever problem brought you to the webinar in the first place.

I know I can help you if you struggle with anxiety, rumination or OCD. My track record of success is quite remarkable - yet I find marketing my work and writing a polished sales page pretty gruelling and uncomfortable. What I do resists being neatly packaged and doesn’t really fit into the usual categories.

It isn’t therapy, though psychologists, psychotherapists and medical doctors who’ve worked with me have said it changed them more than decades of professional training.

It isn’t coaching in the way most people understand coaching. It’s not goal-focussed and there aren’t systems and protocols to follow.

And every time I try to describe what actually happens in my programmes, the words feel either too ‘salesy’ or too mystical, even at times too grandiose. Words just can’t capture what it’s like to work with me.

So I had an idea. I have a large book of testimonials, 33 pages of them collected over a decade, from people across three continents. Nobody is going to read 33 pages, and yet social proof is the one thing that actually helps you decide whether to trust me with your inner life and your hard-earned cash.

So I asked Claude AI to analyse the patterns across my testimonials. What it found wasn’t surprising to me, but seeing it laid out clearly was super useful.

Almost everyone described some version of these things:

- Feeling, for the first time, that they weren’t broken.

- A fundamentally different relationship to their own thoughts - not managing or suppressing them but seeing through them, so they lose their grip.

- A greatly enhanced capacity for feeling their feelings without getting stuck there.

- Taking themselves and their suffering way less seriously, not in a gaslighty way but in a way that brought genuine relief and even humour.

- Feeling unconditionally accepted, deeply seen and met without judgment, sometimes for the first time.

- A fundamental shift in identity, not just in coping skills. The person who showed up and the person who left weren’t quite the same.

A psychotherapist client said it was unlike anything she’d encountered in twenty years of western training. A medical doctor who’d felt like a machine with faulty hardware that nobody could fix stopped seeing herself as broken. Someone who’d carried PTSD for over twenty years and been through every available treatment, described it as “someone turning on a light in a dark room.”

None of them credited a specific technique. More than anything, they described a quality of presence, a particular way of being met by me that changed the way they experience themselves.

There’s a concept in contemplative traditions called ‘transmission’. It’s the idea that a new way of being can pass between people through contact, rather than through information exchange. It sounds a bit woo, but it’s actually closer to physics: if you strike a tuning fork and hold it near another, the second fork begins to vibrate at the same frequency without being touched.

And when you spend time with someone who’s learned how to befriend and alchemise felt experience, someone who genuinely doesn’t fear their own mind, someone who learned the hard way how to ‘get off’ on the vicissitudes of life - your nervous system begins to loosen its grip on your old stories, revealing something much larger and truer in you.

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I don’t talk about this explicitly in my programmes, but I think it’s what those testimonials are aiming for when they say “I can’t quite explain how it changed me, but it did” over and over again.

My 6 week programme, Unlearning the Habit of Anxiety starts on Thursday 30th July at 7pm UK, and runs weekly as a live group in Zoom. Alongside the teaching and practice, there will be what I call ‘laser coaching’: you can volunteer to work with me live, and I’ll go directly into your anxiety pattern with you in real time - unpicking the hidden premises, the ego payoffs, and identity roles that are keeping the loop in place. Watching it happen for someone else is often as transformative as being in the chair yourself, because you recognise your own patterns in theirs.

If you’d like to join, the investment is £347 in full, or three payments of £121.

I understand that we’re all in a cost of living crisis and an investment into your wellbeing may seem frivolous. But it’s worth considering that everything else we give our attention to, intrusive thoughts, health worries, future fears, is a much greater investment with very bad returns. Rumination and anxiety are not free, they extract a cost, and we pay for it with our life force. The question worth asking is, which investment are you making?

The webinar recording is here if you didn’t catch it. And if something in this email has made you curious, or you have a loved one that suffers, or you have questions, hit reply. I read and respond to all of them.

With warmth,

Aly

Part one of a series about the neuropsychology of change and what actually works.

Confession time. I am a coach and hypnotherapist who has facilitated many hundreds of people through some of the most significant turning points of their lives, and I am also someone who has had enormous, bone-deep realisations about what I need to change, and then found myself struggling to change them.

I know the pain of that ‘intention-action gap’ acutely. So when my clients have an epiphany during our sessions, or move through a profound psychedelic experience carrying a hard-won insight in their shaky hands, and then a month later tell me that life has rearranged itself back into its old patterns, I understand that frustration firsthand.

Intention and motivation comes and goes like the bloody weather.

The psychologist Martin Fishbein spent years mapping what he called the intention-action gap, the distance between what we genuinely mean to do and what we actually do, and he found that sincerity of intention turns out to be an unreliable predictor of behaviour.

I’m guessing that you, like me, have hoped that wanting something passionately enough will get you there. But what actually determines what you do on an ordinary morning after a night of broken sleep, is designing mundane structures and systems in your own environment that supports the new reactive habits to become wired in.

Creatures of Habit

You already do this every morning when you make coffee. The cup, pot and coffee lives where it always lives, and your hands follow a system that your conscious mind doesn’t need to engage in. You run the behaviour without even thinking. A mental model has been created.

This is not a small thing. This is actually the mechanism through which most of human behaviour operates, and it means that when we want to change what we do, the most powerful lever we have is to create a structure that supports a new automated reaction.

If you want to write or make art consistently, set up your workspace the night before and make it as attractive as possible. If you want to exercise daily, lay out your yoga mat, block and strap next to the bed or get your whole gym outfit ready so it’s there upon waking. The automation runs on environmental cues rather than discipline.

We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” ~ Greek poet Archilochus

I also found it very helpful to identify the times of day when the gap between who I intend to be and who I’ve habitually been is at its most negotiable. That helped me understand and be more compassionate with myself which is also of vital importance - but more on that in the following emails. (For me it’s first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I’ve never been a ‘morning person’, much to my disappointment, but that’s partly because I’ve habitually stayed up too late creating stuff).

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Start Embarrassingly Small

The very first system I ask clients to implement is this: Before you touch your phone in the morning, get up, brush teeth and drink a large glass of water (extra bonus points if you drink it looking out the window at nature). I add salt and lemon to mine. Most of us are more dehydrated than we realise and even mild dehydration shows up as brain fog, low mood, and a reduced capacity for creative thinking.

When you place the glass on your nightstand each evening, you are doing something for tomorrow’s You AND designing an environment that will initiate a small sequence before habit hands the controls to your phone. That small sequence, repeated, compounds and trains the nervous system toward a different kind of morning.

IMPORTANT!! CELEBRATE EACH TIME YOU ARE SUCCESSFUL!!

The other thing I ask is this: keep a small notebook and pen with you, paper rather than phone, and write on the first page something like “stray thoughts to deal with later.” Because the real enemy of a creative working day is the cost of interruption, and the most expensive interruptions are your own thoughts.

The brain spews thoughts like digital ticker tape running across the screen of our minds, and the urge to follow them is almost irresistible because the brain has learned that following them brings a kind of relief.

The physical deliberateness of writing the thought down by hand honours the thought enough that the nervous system releases it, while the friction of the act interrupts the reflex to chase it. You’re training yourself out of the ping-and-respond loop. After the most important work is done, you will likely find that you don’t actually need to deal with a lot of these stray thoughts.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said “a goal without a plan is just a wish”. I’d add that a plan without a structure to hold it is just an intention, and we’ve already established how easily these get derailed.

So ask yourself, in what small ways can I redesign my environment so that the reaction becomes automated, which in turn becomes the behaviour I desire?

Think about how you behave when you’re on holiday. Do you check your phone as much? Do you eat when you’re hungry rather than at a habitual time of day? Do you take random walks? Sleep when it gets dark? Do you feel almost like a different person, more present to moments of the day?

That person is not more disciplined than you are at home. That person is inhabiting a different set of environmental cues, and responding to them accordingly. Holiday you is not an anomaly. Holiday you is evidence of the truth; that change is in fact the only constant.

Your brain actually had to learn across time how to ‘stay the same’, and it can unlearn it through repetition - and with the help of structure and systems.

Like and subscribe for the rest of this series, where I’ll explore the more mysterious territory of identity, shadow, payoffs and what true liberation really is.

1:10 people have a phobia so severe that it effects their daily functioning.

30% of the adult population are overweight or obese yet feel addicted to overeating.

275 million people suffer from anxiety.

What if a simple misunderstanding of the mind, and a habitual ‘bracing’ against feeling certain intense sensations and feelings in the body are driving all this suffering? And what if you could unlearn these innocent habits?

I can help you get free from all this unnecessary suffering, as I’ve helped many hundreds of others.

Join my 6 week live zoom program “Unlearning the Habit of Anxiety and Compulsive Thinking” in July 2026 - full details here.

Lately, I’ve been swimming in other people’s disappointment in me. Not because I’ve betrayed them, or abandoned them, or done anything unkind. But because I failed to meet expectations that were not actually spoken aloud.

Apparently, I was meant to intuit exactly how much time and energy I should be allocating to others, regardless of my own capacity, needs, limits of my nervous system, or the external circumstances and daily responsibilities of my life.

Needless to say, it got me pissed.

And it’s had me wondering: How often do we set people up to fail us, by assuming they only exist to fulfill a role in our emotional ecosystem?

Disappointment, when examined, is rarely about the other. It’s often the collapse of a fantasy, or the rupture of an imagined contract we never had the courage (or self-awareness) to articulate - or gain agreement over.

Psychologically, disappointment often disguises itself as sadness, but it carries the sharp teeth of covert aggression by communicating “You didn’t do what I wanted, and now I will withdraw love, connection, or approval until you concede.”

Sometimes it’s just a subtle shift in tone or energy, or a cold silence. It punishes, without admitting itself as punishment. Sometimes it’s expressed as an outright righteous indictment of another person’s inadequacy.

That’s why it’s so confusing, especially for those of us with histories of codependency or enmeshment. We pick up on the shift of energy or the withdrawal instantly, and then the nervous systems scrambles to repair the rupture, even when we did nothing wrong - except exist as an independent being.

Because deep down, we’ve equated disappointment with danger.

Disappointment as a Failure of Relational Skill

Expressing disappointment without owning our unmet needs, is the relational equivalent of lobbing a grenade and expecting the other person to defuse it and apologize for the mess. It’s deeply unskilful. Not because having needs or desires is wrong, but because disappointment weaponizes those desires after the fact, instead of vulnerably naming them in real time.

This isn’t how intimacy is built. It’s how the slow rot of smouldering resentment, victim consciousness, nervous system activation and in many cases, chronic illness is manufactured.

When people leak their disappointment all over me, it only serves to push me further away rather than entice me into deeper connection.

This doesn’t mean disappointment is always unjustified. But how we metabolize and express it determines whether it becomes a bridge or a weapon.

Disappointment also reveals our issues with attachment to the way-things-should-be. The way people should be. The way life should be. It is both a deep resistance to reality and an insistence that a mythical, alternate reality in your mind is superior to the one that is unfolding right now. We hurt ourselves with these attachments, then respond with disappointment in order to shirk the responsibility.

From the lens of radical responsibility, it can, and should, be a mirror we upraise in order to ask ourselves: Where did I give away my power by outsourcing my needs, feelings or mood to someone else’s behavior?

However, most of us have come by these patterns of relational fuckery innocently. How many times did a parent bear down on you with the phrase “I’m not mad at you, I’m just DISAPPOINTED!” without ever questioning whether laying this trip on you was good parenting?

I would go as far as suggesting that most of us were raised in the confusing terrain of codependency, where, rather than learn healthy boundaries, we learned to shape-shift and hyper-read the room, to be strategic, to make sure you’re okay so that I might one day be okay, too.

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My Father, an emotionally unpredictable insomniac, would not get out of bed (often late into the afternoon) until I had soothed his resistance to the day by making him coffee and massaging his aching back. With my Mother out working 6 days a week, from infancy I had to fix my own breakfast or go hungry.

So the original blueprint I absorbed was: to be loved, I must give more than I have. My needs matter only after yours are met. Self-abandonment is how I can remain safe.

So for a very long time, when someone expressed disappointment in me for not showing up how they wanted - without checking in, without my prior agreement - it activated a primal survival reflex:

Make it right. Make them happy in order to keep yourself safe.

And I had to learn inch-by-shaky-inch, that other people’s disappointment is not my domain of responsibility. Where once I took it as proof of my failure, I now view it as evidence of their projections and expectations.

I was not born to be all things to all people. I am not here to pre-emptively soothe every discomfort, or to act as the emotional shock absorber for unmet childhood needs that aren’t mine to repair.

I am here to love, but not to contort myself to gain love or approval. I am here to show up for others when I’m resourced enough to do so, but not to negate or neglect my own needs and lived experience.

And if I am feeling the burn of disappointment in another, I now try to view it as a clarifying fire induced to burn away the illusion of who I thought someone needed to be, how I thought they should love me, and what I expected from them without naming it or gaining their consent.

So once again, the message I’ve had to lovingly communicate to people in my life is this: “If you’re disappointed in me because I didn’t read your mind, or because I chose rest instead of over extending myself, know this: I see your pain and I honour your longing. But I will not abandon myself to make it easier for you.”

Disappointment is Not a Failure of Love.

It is the invitation to mature into a more liberated kind of love, one in which we honour the needs and desires of all parties, and stop punishing others for not playing roles they did not audition for.

(We must also stop punishing ourselves for being human when we encounter our own disappointment. We are such tender creatures after all.)

The process of unbecoming a people-pleaser and instead becoming a boundaried person who chooses not to self-abandon can feel like slow, soul-chiseling work when you don’t have the right support. But it doesn’t have to be. I’m still very much a work-in-progress, with the support of my trusted mentor.

Relational and Spiritual Maturity Sounds Like: “I notice I had an expectation I didn’t communicate. Can I own that? I feel hurt and my mind is making up a meaning that might not be true. Can we talk about it?” Not: “You let me down. Again.”

The former invites connection. The latter demands submission. Who do you prefer to be?

I coach people in the not-so-popular path of ‘radical responsibility’. Why so unpopular? Because it’s not easy to own your shit and withdraw your projections. It’s not easy to expand your tolerance for disappointment. But it’s deeply worthwhile work, and deeply needed, for the good of all. So get in touch if you’re ready to roll your sleeves up!

My client was lying on her balcony floor next to a snake this morning. A year ago she couldn’t even think about one without her body going into full panic mode.

After just two sessions. A lifelong phobia. Gone. No management or coping strategies needed.

This is what’s possible when you stop trying to fix your anxiety and start understanding what it’s actually doing, how it’s been coded, and what ‘payoffs’ you’re getting from the pattern.

Join my free ‘Unlearning the Habit of Anxiety’ Webinar on Thursday 11th at 7.30pm UK. Zoom places limited, so please register here.

Most people have thoughts they'd never say out loud — violent, strange, sexual, mortifying, seemingly out of nowhere. That's just a brain doing exactly what brains do.

In this video I explore what intrusive thoughts actually are, why every human mind produces them, how the brain's error-detection system can misfire, what distinguishes a passing uncomfortable thought from the loop that becomes OCD. And why insight alone rarely breaks it.

If you've ever wondered whether your thoughts mean something about you, or found yourself caught in a loop you can see clearly but can't seem to stop, this is for you.

Want to go deeper? I'll be covering the neuroscience behind OCD, including what the research actually shows works in my upcoming free webinar “Unlearning the Habit of Anxiety” on June 11th, 7.30pm UK.

And please do share this if you know someone who struggles with the pain of OCD and intrusive thoughts.

Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/KOdfTlKTT1-l4u_fcex6sw

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Up until my late 30’s, I was crippled with anxiety and had regular panic attacks that sometimes ended in hospital visits. I was very afraid of my mind. I remember sitting in an airport waiting to board a plane to see my estranged father, and feeling like the air was being crushed from my lungs.

I do not experience overwhelming anxiety any longer, and when it does sometimes arise, I know exactly what to do, what not to do, and it quickly subsides. It feels amazing to be free from that burden and I wish that for everyone.

Anxiety relief starts with understanding what anxiety actually is: a learned pattern of thought and nervous system activation that can be unlearned over time.

In this short video, I introduce the neuroscience behind the latest understanding of anxiety, and invite you to a free 90 minute webinar next Thursday 11th June at 7.30pm (UK) called “Unlearning the Habit of Anxiety”, where you will learn invaluable information, tools and embodiment practices to begin the process of liberating oneself from anxiety loops.

I’m incredibly passionate about teaching people these neuroscience-backed methods:

a) because they work

b) because it actually changes the way you see and relate to yourself.

I hope to see you there - and if you know anyone who might benefit, please do share it with them! (And it would be deeply appreciated if you would give my new YouTube account a follow too!)

Register here - zoom spaces are limited:

Looking forward to being with you!
Aly

I’m opening something I’ve never offered before.

Over the years, many people have asked whether I would ever teach the way I work; not simply the tools, but the deeper architecture beneath them.

Soon, I'll be launching a small, bespoke apprenticeship programme in transformational facilitation, for a handful of people who feel called toward meaningful service and want to build a livelihood around facilitating genuine human flourishing.

This training will share the core methodology I've developed through fifteen years of study, practice and client work, integrating perspectives from Internal Family Systems, shadow work, somatic approaches, hypnosis, neuroscience and non-dual inquiry. Yet the heart of the training is in learning how to see people clearly, how to work with the intelligence beneath their struggles, and how to create the conditions for profound and lasting change.

There is something extraordinary and deeply fulfilling about spending your days helping people come home to themselves. To witness someone untangle years of suffering, reconnect with their own wisdom, and step into a larger version of their life is a privilege I never take for granted. Few things have brought me more meaning.

I've heard people speculate that AI will eventually replace coaches, therapists and guides. I see the future very differently. Information has never been the thing that transforms people, otherwise the $8 billion self-help publishing industry would have already done the job. Transformation happens through relationship, trust, attunement, presence and nervous system co-regulation. We are shaped and wounded in relationship, and we heal only in relationship.

This coach training programme is not a cookie-cutter, standardised format. It will be a living community of practice, including mentorship, peer supervision and ongoing support as you develop your own coaching presence, confidence and voice.

Because of the nature of the work, places will be limited. I’m interested in working with people where there is genuine resonance, integrity and a shared vision for what this work can contribute to the world.

If something in you is stirred by this invitation, send me a message. I’d love to explore whether this training might be a good fit.

Many of us are exhausted and traumatized by the killing and abduction of innocent people under authoritarian rule, the trafficking and murder of CHILDREN, the ecocide of our only home, the poisoning of our food and water, rampant racism, misogyny, school shootings, fanaticism, proxy wars, capitalism, state violence, militarized policing…. FARK!

Whether we realise it or not, our bodies and nervous systems register the buzzing terror of power and greed that is unrestrained by conscience under the flimsy guise of order and necessity. The grief this elicits is real and difficult to metabolize.

Something else is being exposed alongside the brutality: the treachery of the structures (and people) we were encouraged to trust. We outsourced our inner authority to institutions, experts and systems that promised safety and progress.

Now, some of those very figures have been unmasked as totally corrupt (at best), but also predatory, intoxicated with dominance, and in some cases, murderous.

All illusion of benevolent oversight and governance has dissolved and we are left asking a sobering question: What have we been consenting to, and why? And what the hell should we do now instead?

My focus right now is developing a deeper trust in my instincts and a rigorous examination of anyone who tries to tell me how to feel, think, or what to believe.

Surveying the chaotic depravity

When we survey the chaotic depravity and see those responsible moving through the world without ANY consequence, it feels that hope itself is being engineered out of us.

If we’re not careful, cynicism will spread like mould in dark corners of the psyche. The constant stream of horror erodes trust in goodness and beauty, and in our own capacity to imagine the more beautiful, joyful, equitable world our hearts know is possible.

This is of great concern to me because a culture that cannot imagine an alternative becomes obedient to whatever is placed before it, or falls victim to a soul-destroying despair.

Among the many skills I teach, tools for regulating a nervous system that has been marinating in collective trauma is perhaps the most requested - but the deeper work I share is largely about the generative and creative power of imagination.

Imagination is not escapism, it is the seedbed of form. Every structure that currently governs us began as an idea someone held long enough for it to take shape. If we allow our imaginative faculties to atrophy under the weight of despair, we passively participate in that which suffocates us and the old machinery just keeps on ticking.

I sense that everyone with a functioning conscience knows that much of what is unfolding globally is profoundly wrong, anti-life in its consequences and utterly corrosive to love.

But I have found, for myself, that attending to and shouting about the specifics of every atrocity does little to shift the reality on the ground. In my observation, sometimes the loudest people are often the most confused.

This is not to say that activism does not have its place, of course it does.

But sorrow or outrage repeated endlessly does not, by itself, reorganise power. If grief alone restructured the world, we would already be living in a different century.

Volatility is the perfect time for creation

Something interesting happens to the human psyche when the future becomes uncertain and unpredictable. We contract psychologically and pull our energy inward, become hyper-focused on survival, and tend to make decisions from the experience of our wounds rather than our wisdom.

Perhaps here we should look to the Alchemists who purported that “when the fixed becomes volatile, we get to make the volatile fixed” - meaning that volatility is actually the perfect time for creation. But we need to refocus from being so afraid or worried about the volatility, and instead learn to harness the tension between where we are and where we deeply desire to be.

So the question becomes: where does our agency actually live?

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Tension seeks resolution

Everything was created through tension seeking resolution. The silence before music; the blank canvas before a painting, the empty page before the novel, the void before the stars & planets were born, and every story ever created began through something being out of balance. The tension of that imbalance drives the resolution of the story - the hero’s journey being a classic example.

Tension is the spark that ignites movement - like a bowstring pulled taut before releasing the arrow. This tension is not the enemy, it’s the force that propels us toward creation. And humans actually desire tension so much that we unconsciously create it and recreate it - but often in highly unskillful ways.

Utilising imagination that is tethered to small actionable steps is how we begin to harness that tension.

Contemplating alone and co-imagining with others, a world that protects human dignity as a baseline, where basic needs are met because we have decided, together, that this is the minimum expression of civilisation. Dreaming up a world and generative systems that treat human vulnerability - and the Earth - as something precious to safeguard.

And then taking the next, smallest, actionable step in the direction of those dreams, every day, without fail.

So, despite my exhaustion at the state of the world, I remain in service to an unsentimental love as an ethic. Love as the daily practice of imagining a new story of co-operation, collaboration, compassion and radical responsibility. Love as the refusal to dehumanise, even when dehumanisation is the dominant vocabulary. Love as the discipline of speaking difficult truths kindly and hearing difficult things without panic or collapse. Love as the commitment to the creation of beauty, art, music, poetry and community.

These are not small skills, they are what makes the future worth inhabiting.

What we choose to imagine, and then embody, is the real revolution. And the revolution will not be televised.

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Art by Dana Ellyn

There are, broadly speaking, two types of mind.

The first and perhaps most common, is the kind of mind that resists being humbled at any cost. All opposition is received as a threat. This mind feels entitled, always protesting, defending or fighting to prove itself right. Its biases are invisible to itself, and when illuminated, are doubled down upon.

It is highly opinionated, or simply obtuse - just to have something to say - and leaps from one public cause or bandwagon to another, parroting whatever moral certainty seems most strategic or tribally popular.

It seeks endlessly creative ways to discharge tension or uncomfortable energy, particularly the discomfort that arises from having a mirror held up to it.

This mind is easily threatened by the suggestion that cognitive flexibility might improve its functioning. It is deeply afraid of change, loss and how it is perceived by others. And this fear of how it is perceived drives a sense of not belonging anywhere, which it uses to justify its withdrawal.

Sometimes, as in my case, this type of mind eventually exhausts itself.

If one is very lucky, this exhaustion gives way to a shattering kind of grief that is the recognition that life will not be controlled, reality will not bend to it’s preferences or insistences, and all it’s dogmatic certainties and forgone conclusions were delusional.

In due course it releases the notion that it is owed anything at all.

If one is luckier still, this process, sometimes called a spiritual emergency, may birth the second type of mind; willing to be humbled, open to being wrong, receptive of feedback and reflection, allergic to herd mentality and driven by insatiable curiosity and wonder.

This mind seeks the deepest intimacy with life, which can only be experienced via the total surrender to, and acceptance of, life on life’s terms; warts, shit, piss and all.

Disillusioned by the surface and the shallows, it seeks to plumb the depths below the appearance of things, nonetheless finding those depths a contradictory, bewildering mix of nutrient-dense lonesomeness.

This mind seeks out others to push against its ideas in order to test their salience and structure, but delights in the presence of other like-minds because breathing feels easier in that rarefied air.

When a deeper truth is uncovered, even if it’s contradictory, this kind of mind celebrates the opportunity to let go of what is not truth.

At ease, finally, with not-knowing and not having to “take a stand” in order to be deemed morally acceptable, it’s not that this mind is without ethics or care. In fact it cares so achingly, that silence seems the only sane option when one is doubtful about having the full picture - which is only always.

This mind value deeds over words and service over slogans. It strives to be one whom others invite into circles of belonging, by practicing congruence and integrity even when, especially when, it would be easier not to.

It is not that one mind replaces the other forever. Both minds live in us. They trade places the way the tide does with the shore. At times the rigid, resisting mind runs the whole show, at other times the humbled mind has its brief reign. Sometimes they overlap in the same breath: one part grasping or defending, while another part loosens its grip, unfurls like a rose.

Maybe the task is to carry both. The self-protective mind, after all, has its reasons, its evolutionary grit. The surrendered mind, its almost unbearable tenderness. To mature may be to let them sit at the same table, to recognize in each their partial truth, and to remember, when the first begins to growl, that the second is still here, patiently waiting its turn.

Sometimes I imagine them as two rivers running through me. One muddy, frantic, charging its way through broken banks. The other clear, slow, winding toward the sea. Some days I’m swept by one, some days the other.

And on rare days I can hold them both, watching the turbulence and the clarity mingle until the difference dissolves, and I realize there is just one river: life itself, flowing endlessly.

It’s the weekend AGAIN. And weekends can be hard for me, especially holiday weekends when everyone seems to be off doing fun things with their significant others. The solitude can get deafening. I read a lot of essays.

And these pernicious little tropes tend to pop up in the stuff I read;

“Love comes when you least expect it.” “You have to love yourself first.” “When the timing is ripe, it will happen.”

I call bullshit on these neat little platitudes. I sense they are meant to anesthetize people from what is actually a very messy, uneven mystery.

Love is not a meritocracy. It never was. People don’t “earn” partnership through worthiness or spiritual progress. The universe is not a vending machine where you insert enough healing tokens and get a relationship in return.

Love doesn’t always reward effort and it doesn’t always correspond to self-awareness, or readiness. Nor does it seem to reward only virtue either. Some of the most unconscious people I know are partnered. Avoidant, dishonest, or emotionally stunted people somehow have lasting relationships.

And some of the deepest, most self-aware, beautifully loving people I know do not find love.

That dissonance can be hard to metabolize - especially for people who’ve faced their shadows, burned through illusion, opened, surrendered, and opened again.

I’ve chosen integrity when loneliness begged me to settle. I've said no to lovers who could’ve soothed the surface but couldn’t meet my depth. And still, there’s no arrival.

Love (and when I say love, I really mean relationship) - is distributed unevenly.

So I question myself. Am I blocking it? I, more than most, know the power of belief - perhaps my doubt has become the gatekeeper?

Perhaps it’s simply because this kind of love is rare, and the world doesn’t offer many templates for it. Mostly, I see a lot of painful compromise. Two people surviving each other, or numbing beside each other. Occasionally posting curated couple shots but missing each other’s bids for connection.

Some of us walk the initiatory path of longing, for a long ass time. It can feel like failure. Of course, it is not.

In some strange and feral way, it is holy. And I don’t mean “holy” in the way people say it to comfort themselves. I mean in the sense that it is a deep mystery.

This longing refuses to be consoled by tropes, and is no less sacred for it.

I do not buy the notion that Love is a reward you get for passing the test of self-worth. It visits some and not others, it will not be corralled.

I often wonder, what is this ache turning me into? What kind of love do I need to become when there’s no one here to receive it? (I whisper “little one, there’s always someone to receive it in the altar of your heart).

But even if it doesn't arrive in the form I long for, and even if I feel totally exposed as I write this, I’m committed to cultivating a fierce, lucid, heartbroken, honest, unspiritualized truth.

And that’s a rare form of love in itself.

The exact place where the ache can become a kind of hard-earned wisdom.

When there are differences of opinion, belief, behaviour, or styles of relating... bringing curiosity to that difference is how we show that Love prevails - even though we may be terribly hurt.

In the face of so much death and destruction, I sense that the reason many people feel so hopeless right now, is because we all know firsthand how difficult - how immensely challenging it is to the ego - to bring open-hearted curiosity to our OWN intimate relationships and family when conflict arises.

So if it’s that difficult to achieve in our personal lives, I think we all understand how difficult meaningful repair will be on the collective, global level.

Ergo, hopelessness.

But we simply do not have the luxury of wallowing in hopelessness. So what’s the answer?

“We will be judged on how well we loved. That’s it. That’s all that matters.” ~ Toni Morrison

The answer is NOT one we can outsource to governments, leaders, or even the “collective” as an abstract concept. It’s an inner discipline, a kind of spiritual weightlifting.

The work is to build the capacity, right here in our own nervous systems, to stay present, open, and curious when every fibre of the ego wants to armour up and defend. And in truth, lately I feel I am failing at this.

I am in another underworld descent, a dark night of the soul. Old identity layers are writhing in their death throes, fighting to remain relevant, gripping the steering wheel even while the cliff edge rapidly approaches.

It's a struggle to remain in the witnessing presence of all this. Some of my relationships have suffered. Maybe you can relate?

The micro reflects the macro.

Almost everyone I know feels overwhelmed and under capacity right now. But that capacity doesn’t arrive through wishful thinking.

It’s created in the small, unglamorous moments when we notice the spike of defensiveness in a conversation with someone, or the urge to retaliate when someone misrepresents or berates us, and we choose - just for that breath - to pause.

And after the pause, to wonder "what's it like to be you right now?"

To ask a genuine question instead of delivering a verdict. To remember that the person in front of us is as innocently shaped by their wounds and conditioning as we are by ours.

When enough of us practice this, the hopelessness shifts. We're not going to be perfect at it, we will mess up, and often. After all, who is modelling skilful repair to us? Certainly not our leaders. And probably not the generation who came before us.

The enormous global chasms will begin to close through countless micro-bridges of repair, built in kitchens, or in awkward conversations waling through the forest. Not in text messages.

So the answer is: become relentless in your practice of repair at the smallest scales. Let your intimate life be the training ground for the more beautiful world you wish existed.

Hopelessness can’t survive long when you are busy building bridges.

Most coaching models are built around achieving milestones or ‘smashing’ goals: get the promotion, lose the weight, find the relationship, hit the six-figure mark. And humans have been seduced by goals since time immemorial because of the promise of transformation. Everyone’s hunting for that new state of being.

And while achieving goals can feel amazing (briefly), this destination mindset can leave you stuck in an endless chase for the next shiny milestone, while your present moment experience of life completely escapes you.

When we fixate on the next preferred “state”—whether it’s “successful,” “married,” “hyperfit” or even “enlightened”—we reduce life to a checklist. But the problem is, life isn’t a series of destinations; it’s a single, flowing journey and can only ever be experienced in the present moment. With a goal-oriented mindset we often ignore the subtle, meaningful changes happening between the milestones.

In many of my coaching clients, I observe that this milestone mindset makes everyday life feel like a grind. It’s wash, rinse, repeat—until the next big “achievement” temporarily jolts them out of monotony. But inevitably, the high fades, and they’re left chasing the next goal.

Buddhist mythology has a story of a hungry ghost—a suffering figure representing insatiable desire. The ghost’s mouth is tiny, its stomach enormous and distended, and no matter how much it consumes, it’s never enough. In life, this plays out as the relentless pursuit of “success,” “freedom,” “happiness,” or whatever state you believe the next achievement will deliver.

The problem? Goals are inherently fleeting, and so are states. Nothing lasts. That promotion, that perfect body, that soulmate— might satisfy you momentarily, but they can’t possibly address the deeper yearning for peace, connection, and fulfillment.

What if freedom isn’t found in acquisition, but in presence? Life isn’t a series of discrete events to conquer; it’s a continuous unfolding, where each moment holds value—not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

Coaching that focuses solely on milestones will inevitably fail you because it feeds the ghost instead of liberating you from it. Real transformation requires turning toward the process—the living, breathing now.

True transformation happens in the flow. The moments you habitually overlook are where growth and fulfillment actually reside. A coach who focuses on the living process of your ongoing evolution that only ever unfolds in the present—can help you escape this hamster wheel of goals and find true meaning in the here and now.

Are you ready to stop chasing milestones and start living the journey? Let’s talk

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Central to understanding the nature of transformation is the idea that imagination, not reason, nor will power, remains our greatest apparatus for making change. Imagination is the true spark of the divine within us.

In other words, if you cannot see it, you cannot be it.

Imagination is the visionary force that sculpts our realities and dreams into being.

Hypnosis is not just a tool, it also serves as a gateway to accessing and harnessing this incredible power. It allows us to access the realm of the unconscious mind, where all your hidden scripts play out.

It’s here that we can rewrite the narrative, plant seeds of change, and cultivate a garden of possibilities that your conscious mind hasn’t even begun to fathom.

It’s where we tap into this inner wellspring of creativity, envision your highest self and activate that vision. Because when imagination takes the lead, reality has no choice but to follow.

Photo: Andrew Coop for Unsplash

Most modern day humans have an almost pathological addiction to comfort - or to avoiding discomfort.

Lost to us (though currently making a significant resurgence) are the ways of ceremonial initiation and rites of passage, desert vision quests, sweat lodge, fasting, dancing and prayer rituals that span many days in the unforgiving heat of the sun.

I challenge you to notice how many times in a day you take some kind of action to bring more comfort and ease to your experience; whether it’s adjusting the air conditioning, fluffing up your pillow, reaching for the ice cream, sending your food back because it has too much chilli - all the way through to avoiding having important conversations, or setting healthy boundaries for your kids.

Now, in and of itself, there is obviously nothing wrong with comfort. But our relationship to comfort can be a huge problem for many reasons that I may elaborate on in another post… But for now, I’ll limit it to the ways in which this addiction to comfort prevents us from realizing how powerful, capable and resilient we are.

Avoiding emotional activation and discomfort prevents people from experiencing a range of growth-inducing opportunities such as; starting a creative project, stepping into leadership, setting clear boundaries, scaling up their business, expressing their truth to their partner, parenting their kids effectively, speaking up for what they believe is right etc

And some of the biggest “blocks” to embarking upon anything new that I see my clients struggle with, are waiting until:

• They have ‘enough’ financial security

• They are certain of the *exact* path and how it will unfold

• Friends and family understand what they doing and why

• All their ‘healing’ is finally ‘complete’

• Everyone they know is validating or cheering them on

• There are no potential setbacks

• There is no chance that they might face criticism, dismissal or even rejection

• They feel completely confident

• They no longer feel like a fraud or imposter
  

...before they believe they are able to show up & ‘do the thing.’ Whatever the thing is.

Underlying these excuses is very often the false notion that life should be comfortable, and growth should be easy. More damaging still, is the belief that difficult, challenging, or emotionally intense experiences can fundamentally harm them. (This last piece deserves a whole article to itself).

Now I’m certainly not saying that growth has to be hard, that’s another false (or at least incomplete) axiom. However, our old programming inevitably rises up like a two-headed cobra when we are on the precipice of transformation, and our ability to hold the tension of discomfort is the factor between whether we shrink back in terror, or forge ahead in deep trust of our ability to handle however life unfolds.

Questions for reflection:

• Do you believe you are unsafe if you don’t have certainty?

• When someone misunderstands you, do you immediately jump to an old narrative that says “I don’t belong anywhere” and find yourself swirling in victim consciousness?

• Do you believe you can be harmed by the discomfort that arises from being spoken to (or thought of) in a certain way?

• Do you believe you can be harmed by the discomfort that arises from being seen in your full glory?

• Do you feel you are on a hamster-wheel of endless ‘healing’, but never get to actually thrive?

• Do you feel that not succeeding means something about you, or the world, or other people?

• Do you believe it’s dangerous to share your gifts with the world?

This ‘humaning gig’ is rife with both peril and triumph, and both carry an edge of discomfort - or even outright terror. To allow yourself to experience this high sensation does not mean that you are getting life wrong, or doing something wrong, nor does it mean that you are broken or weak. In fact it’s quite the opposite. It demonstrates enormous courage and fortitude, and develops a deep trust in one’s innate resiliency and the genius of the adaptive human design.

When we default to the easy, the comfortable, the known, we disconnect from our power and hold back from going after what we want for fear that we “can’t handle it.” We deny ourselves the joy of trusting our internal GPS system. In essence, we reject our divine humanness.

So what should we do?

Well, those of you have taken any classes or courses with me know that in the 3 Principles understanding, we’re not big on ‘prescriptions’ for solving or ‘doing’. We’re more about pointing people back to what is already (capital T) True before thought.

And what is True, is that we are an inseparable part of a mysterious, intelligent, adaptive system. The essence of this system is energy, the energy that gave birth to the Universe and powers all of life. Within this system everything is possible, uncertain, and unpredictable, constantly evolving and expanding.

Consciousness is inherent in this system, and we humans appeared to develop a very advanced form of it - along with the freedom to ignore it.

Our connection to Awareness (or consciousness) can be cultivated. We can also develop the skill of resting as Awareness. And, resting as Awareness, we tend to fall in love with life on its own terms, rather than fighting and struggling against it, or trying to control it.

Falling in love with life means, in part, to release our expectations of a perennially comfortable experience. To relax into the truth that discomfort is part of the human process. To understand and embody the paradox that the more comfortable we get with discomfort, the easier life feels.

And to trust the wild ride that our Soul signed up for down here in earth school.

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