New Year Message
Hi All,
I wanted to write to wish you a beautiful and nourishing New Year.
Take what serves you here, and leave what does not.
Feel free to reply and share your own learnings or thoughts from the year as I love to hear you.
I would like to begin by reminding you that it is not necessary to head into the new year with resolutions, with achieving, with doing more. Social media can be very overwhelming for this, so give yourself permission to step away from the crazy and towards the quiet.
Winter can be a time for resting and nesting, for reconnection with Self, consolidating what we have learned from the last year, appreciation for who we have become and are becoming, and acknowledgment of our experiences. Of eating warming and grounding foods that nourish us and fill our inner battery for our next season.
Ritual can be a kind and reverential way to give ourselves permission to take what serves us into 2024 and leave what does not, and to simply hold our shared human experiences like grief and gratitude.
Winter can also invite us to consider what seeds; in line with our values (not societal pressures) that we might want to plant and how we can nourish them day by day. And how can we best support our unique needs to do this. When we spend time in this slower, more in tune with nature way of being, it allows us to engage in life when ready, without force, and without overwhelm or urgency.
Highly sensitive people especially are invited to be in tune with nature’s seasons and therefore our own seasons. It is ok to be where you are, how you are. A life well lived is reality minus pressures and conditioned expectations. An imperfect and very beautiful reality, just as it is.
Accepting this allows us to support ourselves and our body without rigid fear based approaches. We live in a disembodied hyper rational society, driven by separation and collective trauma. This is not our innate way of being in the world, hence our wise bodies guiding us in the language of physical and psychological symptoms to more mindful living, more authenticity, more loving kindness. And less separation from Self and others as this separation is an illusion that causes so much pain collectively.
And without pressure to get anything ‘right’, because there is no such thing in life. There are only choices, and more choices that spring from that. And there is always choice.
As ever please lean into the small moments of goodness and beauty, because these are actually the big things in life. This is a muscle to train. No one can do it for us. Complaining I think is one of our most damaging habits that robs us of energy, health, and our innate joy of being. What we focus on, will grow.
The new year reminds us that change is always a constant in life, again as in nature. So learning to meet changing seasons in life with acceptance and compassion is a gift that keeps giving when we practice this daily. Change is not easy for us as a humans as we get attached quite easily to facets of our identity, to stories, to chapters of life. This is just part of being human, for us to grow aware of and work with kindly.
Recovery requires profound personal change in ways that can feel very threatening to our known identity, the familiar ‘I am’ and ‘I have’, our story, our beliefs. Be compassionate towards this but stay very honest about the roles we all play in our own suffering. I have learned to laugh when I notice myself lost in a pit of my own making, which of course happens still because I am human, not Yoda.
For those old enough to know the Scooby-Doo cartoons, there was often a great reveal at the end of an episode showing who the baddy was that was causing trouble and strife. This is pretty much how I see my own path of growth in my life in terms of my understanding of how much suffering I can cause myself. Until we are ready to wake up to understanding our own influence in our lives, we can often stay passive victims of circumstance. This too is not wrong. It is just a choice that will often cause suffering and invite us to the choice to wake up to our own great reveal so we can grow.
At the moment I am humbled daily with the safety we all take for granted as I look at pictures and videos from Gaza. We have so much choice. So much agency. This does not negate our unique challenges and struggles at all. But it is important I think, to allow awareness of others’ suffering and lack of agency to give us perspective on our own.
I see it as an invitation to lean into gratitude for food, shelter, physical safety, and the choices these needs being met allow us to have. I have not complained once about anything since October the 7th, a habit that was creeping back. I’m grateful for the invitation to wake up again. I invite you to consider gratitude as a primary practice that will turn into a very healing way of being. As one of my teachers says, gratitude is the ultimate state of receivership. We cannot receive in lack.
Society teaches us to reach out with disembodied fear and grasp things from outside to fill a perceived lack on the inside. It makes us great consumers, but it takes us away from our deepest medicines of self-knowing, community, song, movement, art, play and nature as our greatest healers. These practices invite us out of separation with ourselves and home to our innate wholeness. You are not lacking. You have all you need inside you to reach outside and build a life from trust and authenticity. From joy and from enthusiasm. Each of us will have a very unique path home to our wellbeing, so our mission is to learn to listen in, as ultimately we are all our own medicine.
Health is also not a static destination. It is a dynamic state of being based on nourishing our physical body, cultivating our mind, building social bonds, and caring for our spiritual self. This human body will have strengths, vulnerabilities, seasons. Nothing is ‘wrong’ with that. We have been taught to react with fear towards our body and its changes, seasons, sensations, emotions and stories it tells us. So much of my work is teaching people to instead accept the skin they are in and work WITH their mind and body, where it is, how it is. This builds trust, takes down pressure, and allows us to accept again the imperfect nature of life – and that we can live a meaningful, joyful and beautiful lifetime. The moment we stop trying to get rid of parts of our experience, things can actually move for us.
I am deeply grateful for my own year, which, as always has helped me grow, stretch out and enjoy life as it is, not how parts of me think it needs to be. I very much treat my life, my relationship, and my work as a lifetime of spiritual practice, and this perspective has helped me be present and kind with my many imperfections, and to become ever more aware how influential I am to shape my experience of life, including the tough parts. I still continue all the practices that helped me build a new life from the ashes of complex chronic illness; meditation, mindful daily life, music, dance, yoga (which continues to be the most profound practice of love and meeting myself I have ever known), plant teachers, so much laughter, gratitude, radical acceptance, gratitude, nature, adventures with my dogs, endless curiosity and no pressure for a destination.
As I messaged in September, my work is evolving to best fit my purpose, goals and life. 2023 was a transitional year for me of less one to one work and more group work. The new low cost community launching soon will be supporting chronic illness and I will have additional teachers to guide people, as well as myself. I am freeing up time to pursue my other passions; magic mushroom education, guidance and integration, which I have been doing for a decade but now can more safely teach, and also supporting HSP entrepreneurs, which is bringing me a lot of joy and greater balance. The new website is a little slower than planned after a small disaster with a web design agency who produced something that looked like my dog did it whilst under the influence of narcotics, but we are on track with a really brilliant women owned agency for Spring.
My clients continue to be my greatest teachers. I see the same themes over and over in people who recover. It is never the amount of trauma that dictates who recovers (but people that have stories about their trauma or circumstances being insurmountable will absolutely have a body that reflects that belief). Things like trauma, adhd, other differences like being highly sensitive are parts of us - but not all of us - so overly attaching to labels and stories is self limiting and blocks us from being curious about what is alive in us, our feelings, needs, and meeting those as an empowered adult. I often imagine a society without any of those labels where we just treated ourselves and others with non judgmental acceptance and curiosity for our differences. We would be invited to learn our unique processing, emotional and physical needs and meet those and shape life to work with ourselves and our gifts. Our current society often only makes space for people that fit under a narrow bell curve of attributes. So many of us do not belong under there. I love to help people celebrate this and work with it, rather than internalising it as ‘bad’ or a failing, or trying to force themselves into a mould they do not belong in.
I chose to move away from my many labels in recovery and instead commit to finding what felt good to my mind, body, being and nourishing that as a continuing life practice. I am very highly sensitive and I am not neurotypical, but it isn’t something I hang my hat on as an identity. It does give me different needs yes, but those are mine to meet and hold, not a cause of suffering or a problem unless I start to judge or shame this part of me. In fact some of the most staggering recoveries I have seen have been those with the toughest histories and biggest differences to societal norms.
Labels often shut down curiosity and possibility. So please stay as open as you can to the word AND. You may have trauma AND you have just as much inner healing capacity AND it is a right of passage to wake up to our true selves that are not separate from others AND it will be tough as shit at points AND you will gather the tools and skills you need on the way to handle this. You may have adhd AND this comes with incredible abilities for non linear thinking, creativity, different ways of being AND you may well need education and support for your unique interface with a neurotypical world. You may be highly sensitive AND this is not a weakness AND you may never be as robust in the midst of capitalism as others AND this doesnt matter at all when you learn to march to the beat of your own drum. Labels of illnesses often just describe symptoms and are really unhelpful. The quicker people create distance from those, the more their body responds with self healing.
Most recoveries in my own practice are longer in linear time than a lot of the stories I see online (often when people are selling things), but are actually very accelerated when I see the lineages and cycles people are healing in one lifetime. We think of time in a very limited way as humans and it puts so much pressure on us. When you consider a few years to grow, heal and reclaim generational strengths, after many generations of trauma and challenge – it is no time at all. We all need to stop watching time so we can put our energy in one moment at a time, in what is under our influence, and this will allow your body to heal in its own way as it knows how to.
It is interesting to me too how we do not think twice about 4-8 years of education, yet with health, our internalised capitalism makes us all feel deeply less than when our body needs time, space and support to grow and heal in its own time. Conventional medicine approaches to ‘fix’ and symptom suppression focus adds to this. Pop the pill and get back to the grind. Increasingly functional medicine is doing the same, just with supplements and protocols. Expensive few month programs to detox, to do x, y and z in a linear and quite masculine approach. Deep medicine is slow medicine, seasonal medicine, and is a beautiful art allowing for flow and fluidity, not just science. We need to make space for other ways of being and knowing outside of science, in line with thousands of years of healing indigenous wisdom that has been supressed from settler colonialism and greed. Healing is biological, psychological, social and spiritual. We have dis-ease on different levels and healing for each of us will be a blend of these.
We are also not alone when we commit to our growth. I believe we are deeply held. I do not have formal religious faith because religion has been a source of internalised guilt and shame in my own family lineage, so my own faith sits outside of that (whilst fully respecting everyone’s unique right to their own faith).
I do know God and the love that we are all made of and connected by. I know this in an embodied way from my own individual meditation practice and psychedelic plant teachers I have had the gift of working with over a decade now. We are deeply supported by something greater when we make the decision to go within and go for it in life from love, joy, enthusiasm and radical acceptance. None of us have any guarantees about what is possible and this uncertainty is very hard for our ego. But all we need is enough faith to commit. I still see my own recovery as a miracle that was not entirely of me. I handed a great deal of my fear and my hopes over to something greater than me, in order to focus one day at a time on my thoughts, habits, behaviours, all that were under my influence. As a consequence I was healed of several auto immune diseases, chronic pain, chronic fatigue and reactivity to pretty much every environmental stimulus. I was unwell since 9 years old and I have a profound and complex trauma history. I have scars emotionally and physically from it. I would not change any of it at all. As the wonderful Viktor Frankl said; “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Trauma and illness is a path of growth through life’s inevitable traumas and challenges. It is the soil from which compassion and wisdom grow, not a pathological state or a disaster to be feared or rejected.
It is such a joy and honour to witness and hold people as they walk home to themselves. A huge well done to each of my clients past and present for their courage in coming to know the only way out is in.
Viktor Frankle’s book; Man’s Search For Meaning, is a book I read when I was considering checking out of this life. His heart ignited something in mine that lead me on my own path. I recommend this book to every living soul as an example of what we are all capable of. So I will leave you with his words, which will be so much more eloquent than my own to re-affirm that you are so deeply valuable and deserving of compassion, just because you exist, because you ARE. Not for what you do or achieve.
You cannot get life wrong, so you might as well go for it and see what happens. You will never know unless you commit fully to yourself.
With love to each of you
Nadia
“today’s society is characterized by achievement orientation, and consequently it adores people who are successful and happy and, in particular, it adores the young. It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise, and in so doing blurs the decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness. If one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual’s value stems only from his present usefulness, then, believe me, one owes it only to personal inconsistency not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler’s program, that is to say, ‘mercy’ killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness, be it because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration, or whatever handicap they may suffer. Confounding the dignity of man with mere usefulness arises from conceptual confusion that in turn may be traced back to the contemporary nihilism transmitted on many an academic campus and many an analytical couch.”