A conversation I had with my fear this morning
Hello beautiful people,How are you today? This morning I woke up with the sensation of fear gripping my heart. An urgent, unpleasant sensation that something was terribly wrong. My first instinct was to get up and start ‘doing something about it.’ My fear usually wants to either run away and hide from everything or it wants to do a ton of stuff – right now! Take action Di. Go, do, go, do.Because my fear has this idea that if I just do a ton of things, tick tick tick off my to do list, then maybe I’ll chase away the fear.Spoiler alert: the doing […]
When we are stuck in stress, this is what we need
Hey beautiful,How are you today? When we are stuck in a state of stress we are yearning for radical change. For the stress to all of a sudden disperse and for our lives to enter a state of peace and calm. I 100% get that.The challenge though is to understand how the nervous system works and has been trained over our lifetime to respond to things it’s learnt to label as stressful.Our nervous system is meant to be able to enter a temporary state of stress and then come out of it. So we are walking along, we notice some […]
Releasing the grip of Unworthiness
Hello beautiful,When I get a whiff of feeling unworthy, I feel like my body deflates and I become like a piece of dirty tattered material on the floor.I feel like someone who is not only totally undeserving, but also to blame for my undeservingness. And it feels both breathtakingly awful, but also incredibly familiar and acceptable to my brain to think of my innate unworthiness.It’s not something I might say outright, or even when exploring why certain issues were hard for me in my life. I don’t feel like I’ve lived a life where I was consciously aware that there […]
When our feelings help us do Powerful things
Hello beautiful,Yesterday I was talking to a friend and we stumbled onto a subject that brought up a lot of feelings for me. And I thought to myself – oh wow! These feelings are still hanging out, I wonder why?It was related to a several-months’ long experience that had happened earlier this year where I had to advocate for my child multiple times over an issue at school.When this issue first arose I had a tremendous amount of rage. I mean when our kids are involved it can very easily bring up deeply protective emotions, right? Survival is often not […]
3 powerful ideas to improve your relationships
Hello lovely people,How are you doing today? When someone we are with is in the depths of some emotions, what do we do? How can we navigate tricky emotional explosions? How do we support our loved ones? I’m going to share some short and simple ideas that are important when someone we are with is in the thick of any emotions – be it anger, sadness, fear, despair etc. What emotional brain looks like:Let’s start with a brief overview of what emotional brain looks like. People, when they are in their emotional brain:Talk in a loop – repeating stories over and over again. Because […]
Sometimes I think I don’t have the time
Hello beautiful people, How are you today? This morning I woke early when it was still dark, enjoying the fresh morning air as I got my day ready. Making breakfast and packed lunches. Organising work things for the week. And then I left for a long walk and a swim. As I walked up a hill, feeling my stiff muscles and remembering how I’d been pretty sedentary these past few days, my body felt like it was both excited to be finally moving again and irritated that I had woken it up to do something that felt hard. And it […]
A story of working through Grief sent
Hello beautiful people, A few years ago I wrote a piece about how for over a decade I was stuck in a frozen world of Grief in the days before the holidays and all the way through it. How the whole period was wrapped in a blanket of bleakness, and the days were riddled with panic and unease. And I would love to share some of this piece with you again. To share why I was so stuck, but then what I did to release myself, so life around the holidays could feel joyful, exciting, and peaceful – whilst also […]
Healing our Inner Child
Hello Beautiful, Happy New Year beautiful one. How are you? One of the challenges we often face on our emotional healing journey is that we survey the world with adult eyes, but often within a body that contains much unhealed emotional pain from childhood. With our adult eyes we wonder why we still get upset by seemingly small things, or why we aren’t over this already, or why we are still reacting the way that we are. “Why am I still blowing up in a rage at people like when I was a child?” “Why do I struggle with intimacy […]
When we get trapped by blame
What to do when we are simply enduring life
What if feeling your anger was a gateway to confidence?
Hello beautiful one, What if feeling your anger was a gateway to joy, love and confidence? What if feeling your fear was a path to more fun with your kids? Less stress at work? More feelings of peace? What if feeling your shame was the gateway to deeper friendships and more joyful intimacy with your partner? What if the feelings you are avoiding are actually the key to your own emotional liberation? It may sound like we are already feeling our feelings – I mean maybe we feel totally overwhelmed by them. But most of us are actually spending a […]
Sometimes I think I don’t have the time
Release emotions to change our lives
Hey beautiful, Imagine how you’d feel after a 2 hr massage at a 5-star spa in the Caribbean… …now imagine accessing that feeling seconds after someone cuts you off in rush hour traffic, spilling coffee all over your new white blouse. This?! Is what working with me on your emotional reactions can do for you. Emotions are the most powerful players in determining how we feel about our lives. Imagine knowing how to move through anger or fear, sadness or shame with complete confidence so it no longer dominates your time or your days? What would that bring to your […]
The problem with (forced) gratitude
Hey beautiful folks, How are you doing? How is life with you? I am an even mix of English and Irish, so Thanksgiving isn’t something I knew much about until I moved to California 27 years ago. It was there that I met my American husband, and after a few years we moved back to London. We didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving much over our decades of marriage, but since we moved to Spain a small group of Americans gather every year to eat & celebrate, and it’s just wonderful. For me I love the principles of giving thanks. I love the […]
Processing the emotions you feel around your family
Why we have such intense emotions around our families
Hello beautiful one, Many of us have found ourselves highly emotionally activated around our families. Maybe it comes in the form of intense dread at seeing them, or a non-specific sensation of being unsettled, or we feel anxiety about being around them and are hoping they don’t say certain things. Maybe we have some simmering rage that we are afraid might come up, or we feel so awkward and perhaps ashamed about ourselves and our life choices when family appears. All of these are common emotional reactions around the people who are some of the (or perhaps the) most significant […]
Expectations & Families
Our bodies store our unhealed trauma – but they are also our gateway to freedom
Hello beautiful people, Some years ago I was doing an online course about learning to inhabit my feminine goddess energy. It felt exciting, I had spent many years feeling disconnected from my body, through the years of child rearing and from having long term back pain – and I was ready to reconnect to the magical mystical woman the course was so eagerly promoting. I put on some music one afternoon, some sensually beautiful Portuguese fado music and started to dance. I started to think about my sexuality, my feminine magnetism, I was swaying my hips, and then all of a […]
Our need for belonging
Hello beautiful people, How are you? This morning I woke up and I felt scared. What are you scared of love? I ask myself. That I am not really good enough. I am just a pretty useless human being. I am not going anywhere or doing anything valuable. Oh yikes, I say, that sounds like a lot. It is a lot, and it’s really horrible. I want to be useful! I want to be valuable! I want to be wonderful and wanted! And what happens if I am not valuable and useful? Noone will want me and I will be […]
Working with our emotional health is a daily practise
Hello beautiful people, For a long, long, long time my life was one long story of overwhelm. And it was reflected in the choices I made – the short term fixes, the holding my breath, the ‘it’ll be ok soon’, the urgent pushing/doing, the sensations of just ‘hold on until it gets better’. I am not sure that I had a sense of how it really would get better, but I had to hold on, I had to hope that the things I did would help. And then it became patently obvious that nothing I was doing was truly helping. […]
Disentangling yourself from other people’s emotions
Hello beautiful people, A few weeks ago, after arriving in London, my husband’s glasses were stolen at the gym. With his spare glasses in a box somewhere in a cupboard in our apartment in Spain, our only option was new glasses. A few mishaps with prescriptions followed, and so it took over 2 weeks to get a new pair. In the meantime he struggled. The physical struggle created a ripe opportunity for emotions to activate, as is natural in situations like these. Not being able to see, or work well or do what he’d planned, created a base for some […]
How families can activate our most intense emotional experiences
Hello beautiful people, How are you today? I am in London, the city of my birth, staying with family and enjoying the beauty of the city that has just burst into spring. It feels so opulent to be in such a dense and crowded place, surrounded by giant ancient trees covered in flowers and the parks and gardens full of pinks and yellows and reds. When I thought about coming back to stay with my family I realised how far I had come in my journey of emotional healing. Families are intense activators for emotions. The family we grow up with […]
What procrastination and overwhelm really need How are you today? Productivity experts say to break big tasks into little pieces. Work the 25 minute pomodoro method! But what if you can’t even get yourself to sit down and do the task? What if you are an expert in avoidance mode? What if breaking it down into little tasks makes you imagine that you yourself are breaking down? Or the idea of working in short spurts fills you with a nebulous horror? We can’t do all of these practical and logical tasks when we are still in the thick of overwhelm. […]
Why our brain can reject change
Hello lovely people, How are you today? I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about approaching the movement we need for shifting, changing and making significant steps in the journey we are on with ourselves. Change doesn’t always feel good. In fact it can feel scary and impossible, we can feel intense aversion to change when we are unhappy and feeling stuck. Because change is not something our survival brain usually seeks out. And our survival brain – with its states of overwhelm, panic, stress, sense of urgency, feeling of being trapped or doomed or blistering rage – […]
What our emotions & hearts are yearning for
Hello beautiful, How are you today? How are you feeling? Today I wanted to share some thoughts and ideas about how much our emotions need to be seen and heard. What usually happens when we share our feelings with someone is that it goes like this: I am feeling pretty overwhelmed right now, I am so worried about…. And often we’ll receive this kind of a reply: Well everyone’s overwhelmed right now, it’s a difficult time. Or Well at least you have …… going on. At least you have kids/a job/family/two working legs. Or Have you tried X,Y or Z? […]
Turning down the dial on stress, overwhelm, panic or rage
Hello beautiful people, In the work of self-exploration, on our path to find healing to the pains and challenges that we carry, it is so easy to focus on finding the answers. We set out our destination as – I need to get fixed. And I really understand this because this was my desired destination too. For so long the pressures I faced every day, the punishing anxiety, the pain of shame I was carrying, the constant shut down, freeze as well as the inability to say what I thought, wanted or felt because I was in appease mode – I […]
The Power of Releasing Shame
For a long time I was utterly convinced that I was a shoddy, not very good, sort of person. That if I couldn’t meet my expectations of myself just so, I felt like I was letting my family down, myself and probably the rest of the world. If I ate the ‘wrong’ foods. If I didn’t do a work project perfectly. If I lost my temper with my kids. Even from things that weren’t under my control. If my husband was too tired to go out with me, it meant I wasn’t exciting enough. If my friend didn’t call me […]
The Subtle Power of Shame
Shame is such a subtle but deeply powerful emotion, and I believe for many of us it sits at the heart of many of the challenges we have in life. Underneath other emotions like fear or anger, sadness or grief, shame for me feels like gravity. Exerting an invisible but powerful influence over our lives. I’ve been thinking a lot about the many ways shame has shown up in my life. And I would say confidently that shame has created the biggest, most dramatic influence over my life and my choices. Here are some examples of how shame has felt […]
9 incredible skills (that feel like superpowers) you can have
Here are 9 incredible skills (that feel like superpowers!) you will have after my program. Know exactly what to do when someone is panicking, raging, totally shutdown and won’t speak to you or generally freaking out Simple tools that can keep you in a state of calm – as well as influence the other person so they return to calm too (& no it’s not magic!) Be it your partner who won’t tell you what is wrong, your child who is panicking, your friend who is ranting and seems uncontrollably angry – these skills work on anyone. 2. Have the […]
When Shame Overwhelms us
Good day beautiful people, How are you? I like to write about what’s happening in my life because when I share what’s happening for me it’s almost always something that other people can relate to. This week I have been experiencing some previously unseen layers of shame. I have been working with some of this ancient emotion that has appeared in my life creating some unpleasant shockwaves. I say ancient because most of the emotions we experience are old. Very very old. They were laid when we were little by experiences we had that we didn’t have enough emotional understanding […]
Guided Audio For Releasing Tension & Cultivating Calm
Hello beautiful people, One thing we talk about a lot in my house is that it’s worth taking the time to work with any emotional or survival activation – that ultimately it saves time in the long run. If we are in the thick of our emotions, or survival reactivity, when we feel overwhelmed, confused, panicky or rageful – we are consuming a ton of energy on that, making other life tasks harder. We are generally no way near as efficient as we are in our executive brain state. But of course when we are in the thick of it […]
A Quick & Easy Way To Bring A Sense Of Calm Into Your Body
Hello beautiful people, How are you? When we are overwhelmed It may feel like we are just desperate to get to the end of our to-do list. Or to stop our politicians being so alarming. Or to just get our kids to behave this way, not that way. But it’s safety we are actually seeking. If there are any sensations of urgency (when the situation isn’t really urgent). Or a feeling of being doomed or trapped. When there is an obsession with the conflict/task at hand and we can’t see anything else. Maybe our heart is racing and we feel […]
Meeting Ourselves Where We Are
How are you? Some very common comments that I hear in my coaching is, I shouldn’t be feeling like this, I should be able to deal with this, I am too old to be in this position (and this is regardless of the age of the person.) And I totally understand why we have this reaction. Because it’s painful to be experiencing overwhelming emotions and not know what to do about them. It’s frustrating to see the habits and patterns of our life that we wish we could change and as much as we try to steer our life in […]
What To Do When We Can’t Relax
Hello beautiful people, How are you today? When I learnt that our brain’s top priority is our physical safety and survival, and how that affects everything we do, and how we feel about ourselves in the world.. That if we sense any threat then our emergency survival responses will turn on… But because how most of us haven’t learnt how to be with emotions in the way they need, it doesn’t have to be lions chasing us or houses burning down for our emergency responses to be turned on… Emotional overwhelm can turn on our emergency survival responses in […]
Why emotions feel so overwhelming
Hello lovely people, What I hear all the time when I first talk to people in my coaching is – I’m just an angry person Or I’m just a really fearful person Or I just can’t cope, I am super overwhelmed with anxiety The idea of a dominating emotion has become wedded to their identity and it feels like there is no way out. I can’t control my anger.I can’t control my fear.I can’t control my anxiety. But this isn’t accurate. We think we are dominated by our emotions, but most of the time the state we are in is […]
The Anguish Of Not Loving Your Body
Sometimes I feel so much sadness and regret when I think about how I’ve lived so much of my life in an intensely painful argument with myself and my body. I spent years in deep disgust at who I am, and in deep shame about how my body was formed. In anguish about all that has befallen my body – stress, health challenges, pain, imprints of trauma. I couldn’t see myself as others saw me. I couldn’t awaken the love in my heart for my body. It didn’t matter what people loved about me, that love never truly penetrated my […]
How we feel about our bodies
It was a warm summer’s day and my skin wanted nothing on it. To walk through the day with just my flesh, sweat dripping, messy hair. To have my sun caress my skin, a little cool breeze too, to lay outside in all of the beauty of the heat. Soaking up all of the sensations that summer brings. I looked down at my body laying on a towel. The round mass of my stomach that looked like it was sitting on me, the bright white skin at the top of my thighs flecked with the branches of purple and blue […]
Walking through darkness
My husband and I have been together for 23 years. And for a lot of it we were in a super s**tty relationship. Like AWFUL. We met when I was 21. We were both damaged, traumatised people who knew nothing about emotional safety. My coping mechanisms for life were drinking, making sure everyone around me was OK and if they weren’t I would be in mad fixing/helping/supporting mode, and then more drinking. We had dark, dark years. Unhappy years. Years of feeling trapped. Why we stayed together, I do not entirely know. Maybe it was the deep sadness that we […]
Our children don’t want us to fix them – they want to be heard
Fear is playing in my body….
What Your Anger Is Trying to Tell You and How to Hear It
My new article on Tiny Buddha is all about the experience and release of anger. Check it out.
Our need to be heard
When we share our feelings with someone, it often goes like this: – I am feeling pretty overwhelmed right now, I am so worried about…. And often we’ll receive this kind of a reply: – Well everyone’s overwhelmed right now, it’s a difficult time. Or – Well at least you have …… going on. At least you have kids/a job/family/two working legs Or – Have you tried X,Y or Z? My friend’s uncle’s sister tried that and it worked! And that usually doesn’t make us feel better does it? It can feel like we are overreacting because of course there […]