The tricky thing about our shitty feelings...

The counter-intuitive approach that actually works (+ a trigger warning: this post mentions the experience of self-hatred)

[*If you’re curious about my goal of making friends with Death, you can read about it’s origins here: making friends with death]

During the service, I enjoyed the inclusivity of this reading. Until the second last line, which, quite frankly, freaked me out.

Before I fell in love with writing and drawing, my focus was intuitive energy work, voice channelling and spiritual/personal development. I love working with people starting to see through the ‘think positive and you’ll get everything you want’ bullshit. People who want to go deeper, so that their spirituality finally starts to change their actual lives.

I still do that work, and love it.

When I first started publishing on Substack, I was confused about the connection between my more personalised spiritual work and what I publish here. Which is why its possible that you may have been reading Great Things, without knowing that the bulk of my work is based on the following:

• We all have contradictions inside of us. We can be excited AND scared. Happy AND jealous - simultaneously.

• Every feeling we have is being held by a part of us that matters

• When we try to ignore our fear¹ we are effectively rejecting the part of us that is scared

• When we ignore our fear, we repress it, which keeps it stuck

• We can’t reject a part of ourselves and feel lovable and worthy

• Trying to ignore or repress our fear GUARANTEES that we don’t get what we want. Because one part of us wants the thing and another part is scared (and therefore does not want the thing). And both parts are equally powerful

That might look a little something like this:

Sound familiar?

See how funny my reaction to the ‘a time for hate’ thing is now?

Acceptance and appreciation of ALL the emotions is my THING!

And yet…

When the big Universe decides it’s time for me to expand my perspective, it usually sends multiple (related) situations my way. It’s generous like that.

Two days after my hilarious reaction to ‘a time to hate’, a 1:1 client session provided me with a second, powerful reminder. And it is with the blessing of said client that I’m going to do something I’ve never done: I’m going to share a snippet from a client session with you.

We enter the scene between mid-session:

And there you have it folks! An insight into a 1:1 session as well as the kindly reminders the universe has been sending my way this week.

This is something I’ve been exploring for decades and there’s a lot more I wanna say about it. But we shall save that for another day.

As always, I’d love to hear anything you have to say about any of this! If you enjoy specific questions, then here are a few:

1. What was your favourite drawing this week?

2. What’s your relationship with the more challenging emotions like? Are there any that you find particularly easy to be with? Any you find particularly hard? (I’ve never been scared of sadness, but anger used to be my mortal enemy. We get along much better now though!)

3. Do you want to see photos of my dogs? The only photos I ever think to take are of them.

4. Got any recommendations for non-fiction books or non-soul-crushing documentaries for me?

Thanks again for being here! You are fabulous and you clearly have outstanding taste!

1. I’m using fear as the example here for clarity, but this applies to all our challenging emotions.