I caught Minnie at 2am the other night, mid-stretch on the end of the bed, in that particular posture cats do so well, utterly, unapologetically off duty.

No agenda. No vigilance. Nothing being monitored, defended, or figured out. Just a small white furry body doing absolutely nothing and doing it completely.

I lay there watching her and wondered that I’d spent most of my adult life not knowing how to do that.

The bit nobody mentions

We’ve talked in this series about the roots, about resilience being something already grown, already there, quietly accumulating underground. What I didn’t say last time is how it accumulates. Because roots don’t grow by effort.

They grow at night. In the dark.

While the visible part of the plant appears to be doing nothing at all.

Well, it turns out we too have a night shift.

Alongside our nervous system that gets us moving, alert, ready to meet whatever’s coming, the one we met a few weeks ago, the one that has us reaching for the phone at 3am, there’s a second system. Quieter. Slower. Almost embarrassingly undramatic by comparison.

It’s called the parasympathetic nervous system, and its job, is essentially, repair.

It’s the one that lowers your heart rate. Slows your breath. Tells your digestion it’s safe to get on with things. It’s sometimes called “rest and digest” which, I have to admit, sounds more like a spa package than a biological system, but there you have it.

Here’s the thing that struck me most learning about this. Our bodies don’t grow, heal, or consolidate memory during the alert, effortful state. It does all that work only in the rest state. The tending happens kind of ‘off duty’ and always has.

The nerve with the silly name

The main character in all this is something called the vagus nerve, coming from the Latin for ‘wandering’, which when you think about it, it feels right, because it wanders from your brainstem all the way down through your throat, your heart, your lungs, your gut, touching almost everything along the way.

Most of what it carries, curiously, travels upward something we’ve touched on previously.

It goes from body to brain, not the other way round.

Your gut is talking to your brain far more than your brain is talking to your gut. Which perhaps explains why “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” so often turns out to be right.

And here’s the detail I genuinely didn’t expect to find, and the one I keep coming back to. The vagus nerve runs straight through the muscles of your throat and vocal cords. Which means humming, singing, and chanting, again, that the low, sustained vibration of your own voice can physically stimulate it.

I’ve been chanting daily for more than 3 decades as part of my Buddhist practice, for what I understood as spiritual/life reasons. In recent years, I’ve become aware quite literally that it is also toning the nerve responsible for telling my body it’s safe to rest.

Funnily enough Minnie while not seeming impressed by my chanting, is often drawn to sit on my lap during these sessions. I like to think that she can feel the effect on her own vagus nerve, being rather more naturally gifted in that department than I am.

An older map of the same territory

I don’t think any of this would have surprised the Ayurvedic practitioners I saw for six months a few years back, while living and working in wonderful Malaysia, or the old tradition they were drawing on.

Ayurveda has a word, Agni, for something very close to what we’ve just been describing. Not just digestion in the narrow sense, but the body’s whole capacity to process. To take in what comes at it, food, yes, but also experience, emotion, the day itself, and transform it into something usable, rather than something that just sits there, ‘undigested’.

I remember doing an Ayurvedic liver cleanse partway through that treatment and feeling, for a few days afterwards, almost unreasonably well. Clean, in a way I didn’t have the language to express. An incredible energy I hadn’t felt for months. It wasn’t dramatic. It was more like something that had been clogged up had been freed and the system allowed to flow again, naturally and unhindered.

Back then I didn’t really think of it as nervous system work. I thought of it as digestion, full stop. But now, I think it was the same night shift, approached from an entirely different perspective.

Clearly it was another tradition, centuries older than any vagus nerve research. It had already worked out that the system doing the processing needs its own tending. Not just the mind, not just the muscles, but whatever in us is quietly responsible for turning the day into something we’ve actually digested, rather than something still sitting heavy.

Two maps of the same territory. And isn’t it rather comforting that they agree.

Why this matters for the garden

If the sympathetic system is what gets you through the storm, the parasympathetic system is what lets the roots actually use what the storm brings in. It’s the composting. The quiet nightly work of turning what happened into what you’re ‘made of’.

And you cannot rush a night shift.

You can’t demand your roots grow faster by staying more alert.

The tending, in this case, is not effort.

It’s permission.

It’s allowing the off-duty state, rather than earning your way into it.

Which brings me back to Minnie, mid-stretch, utterly off duty. I believe that she’s tending.

A small act of tending for this week

Somewhere in the next few days, give yourself two minutes of low, sustained humming. In the car. In the shower. Wherever nobody’s listening, if that helps.

Not for any particular tune. Just a long, low note, out for as long as the breath lasts - almost an audible sigh.

Notice what happens in your chest, your throat, your shoulders.

You are not doing a breathing exercise. You are, quite literally, sending your own body the signal that it’s safe to stand down for a moment.

The garden doesn’t grow harder when you push it. It grows when the conditions allow it to rest.

With love, Kathy ❤️

A small thing happened this week that turned out not to be small at all.

A short contract arrived in my inbox, 6-weeks, a university with a surge in presessional student numbers, the kind of opportunity that landed when the sector is otherwise contracting and everyone on the mailing list is watching their inbox closely. I hesitated. Then I thought, why not. And I applied.

A couple of days passed. Nothing came back.

And to my own considerable surprise, what I felt was relief.

Not disappointment. Not the quiet sting of being overlooked. Relief.

Tangible, physical, unmistakeable.

The kind that arrives in the body before the mind has quite caught up.

Sound familiar? We’ve been here before, haven’t we. The body knowing first.

What the relief was telling me

Here is what I realised, in the moment the relief arrived.

For the first time since moving country, navigating a temporary apartment, working through the process of purchasing a home in Cardiff, and holding my part-time university work together through all of it, for the first time this summer, I had given myself permission to do nothing.

Not nothing as in empty. The summer is full of things I love, time with people I care about, watching my cats become increasingly territorial about the seagull situation on the twelfth floor, the slow and genuinely exciting business of making a new place feel like home. There is plenty in it.

But for the first time, I wasn’t trying to fill every available gap with productivity. I wasn’t looking at the unstructured space and reaching for a task to put in it.

And when I noticed that, it felt, of all things, grown up.

The strange maturity of rest

I’ve been thinking about why it felt grown up. Because rest, in many of the narratives most of us have absorbed somewhere along the way, is what you earn.

It’s the reward at the end of sufficient striving. You rest when the work is done, which of course it never really is, which means the permission to rest is always slightly out of reach.

What I felt this week was something different. Not the collapse of exhaustion, and not the restlessness of avoidance. But a genuine, grounded choice to let the summer be what it is, to receive it rather than manage it.

That, it turns out, is what it feels like to take your own medicine.

We have talked in these posts about noticing. About tending. About the body’s wisdom and arriving before the story does. But all of that asks something of us. It requires a certain willingness to stop, to feel, to trust what we find.

And this week, I think, I actually did it. Not perfectly, not dramatically. Just quietly, and actually, without quite meaning to.

The deeper the roots

There is a line from the writings of Nichiren Daishonin that resonated. He wrote it in a letter to a follower who had endured years of difficulty, jealousy from colleagues, the threat of losing his position, pressure to abandon what he believed in, and who had just, quite unexpectedly, emerged from all of it with more than he had begun with.

“The deeper the roots, the more luxuriant the branches. The farther the source, the longer the stream.”

I think of this as a description of what resilience actually looks like from the inside.

Not armour.

Not stoicism.

Not the ability to push through without feeling it.

But depth.

The quiet accumulation of everything we have lived through, going somewhere we cannot always see.

Let’s go back to the garden for a moment.

We’ve spoken about tending the surface, the noticing, the watering, the moving toward light. But there is something the garden knows that we sometimes forget about ourselves.

The most important work happens underground. In the root system. In the deep, invisible network of everything the plant has ever grown through, survived, and learned from.

The roots don’t take a season off. They don’t need tending in the way the surface does. They simply hold. They nourish. They are always, quietly, there.

Through every season of your life, through storms and sun alike, you have been building something. A root system that is yours alone, deep and complex and far more robust than you probably give yourself credit for.

The knowledge, the skills, the hard-won wisdom, the warmth you have offered and received, the things you survived that you weren’t sure you would, all of it is in there.

All of it went into the ground, nourishing it.

Trusting the depth you already have

The relief I felt this week wasn’t the absence of something. It was the presence of something.

A kind of trust in myself, in the process of my life, arrived at quietly, that I don’t need to fill every gap in order to remain enough.

That the summer doesn’t need to be maximised.

That rest is not the enemy of growth, it is, in fact, one of the key conditions for it.

In Buddhist practice, there is an understanding that what we most need is rarely found by reaching outward. The stillness, the clarity, the capacity to meet what life brings, these are not things we acquire.

They are things we return to.

They were always already there, underneath the noise, underneath the striving, underneath the very reasonable human impulse to keep doing in order to feel secure.

The roots don’t grow through effort alone. They grow through being. Through staying with yourself across the seasons, even the difficult ones. Especially the difficult ones.

Which means that everything you have lived through, the moves, the uncertainties, the 3am moments, the mornings when you got up and tried again anyway, none of it was wasted. It was all going somewhere.

The deeper the roots, the more luxuriant the branches.

The farther the source, the longer the stream.

A small act of tending for this week

This one is gentle. Perhaps the gentlest yet.

At some point this week, find a quiet moment, nothing elaborate, just a pause between one thing and the next, and ask yourself this:

What have I already grown through?

Not what remains to be done. Not what you haven’t managed yet.

What have you already come through, learned from, survived, and carried forward?

Let yourself answer honestly. Not modestly, and not with the instinct to immediately qualify it. Just honestly.

Because the resilience you’re looking for isn’t something you still need to build. It is not waiting to be earned or finally unlocked once conditions improve.

It is already in the ground and it’s been growing there all along.

Winter always turns to spring. It always has. And it always will.

With love, Kathy ❤️

There is a little white cat sitting at my window as I write this.

Her name is Minnie. She is very still. Very focused. Watching and sniffing the air of her new environment through a mesh we installed hastily after realising that a cat with no concept of twelve floors and a great deal of personal confidence was going to nose-dive into Cardiff. On the other side of the mesh, a pair of seagulls are nesting on a rooftop below, their fluffy chick having just arrived into the world, all of it entirely new to her. Minnie watches with the absolute, unhurried attention of a cat who has decided that if she can’t be out there, she’ll at least be completely present to what’s in front of her.

I find her quietly instructive.

She’s not, as far as I can tell, composing a strongly worded letter to the management about the mesh. She’s not scrolling her phone to see if things are better elsewhere. She’s simply reading her world with her whole body, right now.

I have been trying to do the same. With, I’ll admit, considerably less grace than Minnie.

The alarm that went off before you heard it

Here’s something I’ve come to believe, and it took me longer to arrive at than I’d like to admit.

At its heart, stress is not an emotional problem.

Having spent years in the personal and professional development world, I’ve experienced and shared many practices designed to bring us back to ourselves, journalling, breath-work, gratitude lists. I’ve sat in circles where we talked about our feelings with great sincerity and really excellent herbal tea. And of course, all of that matters.

But somewhere along the way, we seem to have collectively decided that stress lives primarily in the mind. That if we could just think differently, reframe things, find the silver lining, we’d be absolutely fine.

Meanwhile, our bodies are sitting there going: “excuse me, hello. We’ve been trying to get your attention for some time…”

Because before you have named it, before you’ve told anyone, before you’ve even consciously registered that something is wrong, your body already knows. Your nervous system has clocked the threat, real or perceived, and has begun its ancient and extraordinarily efficient response.

We’ve spoken of this before. Heart rate rises. Breathing becomes shallower. Muscles brace subtly. Digestion is quietly deprioritised because when something is chasing you, lunch can wait.

This is not a flaw in the design. This is the design.

The body’s stress response is one of the most elegant pieces of biological engineering there is. It has kept human beings alive through things that would make your current inbox look fairly manageable.

The problem isn’t the alarm. The problem is that most of us have never been taught to hear it, to actually feel it, before we’re already deep in the emergency.

What the mind does instead

The mind is a storyteller. It takes the raw physical data, the tightness, the shallow breath, the braced shoulders, and builds its own narrative. It finds reasons, connects dots, and constructs, with impressive speed and considerable creativity, an explanation for why you feel the way you feel.

Sometimes it’s right. But sometimes it’s doing what storytellers do, embellishing, catastrophising, following a thread long past the point where it was useful.

I noticed this very clearly during my own upheaval that I wrote about last time, the truck lost somewhere in Portugal, the boxes in transit, the not-knowing. My body had registered something was wrong long before I had a clear story about exactly what. There was a tightness, a low-level bracing in my whole physical self. My mind, meanwhile, was running scenarios at speed, constructing ever more elaborate versions of how this might unfold.

My body was sending a signal. My mind was writing a drama.

This is the gap that costs us. Not the physical signal, that’s just honest information. But the space between the signal and our awareness of it, in which the mind has already sprinted ahead and built an entire production we’re now performing all the parts of.

You’ve been there. We all have. That particular confusion of not knowing whether you’re anxious about the actual thing, or about the seventeen things that have attached themselves to it since Tuesday.

Learning to read the room

What changes everything is learning to catch the signal earlier. To feel the physical ‘something is off’ before the mind has had time to construct one of its stories.

Not to suppress the story or to bypass the feeling. But to arrive before the narrative does.

When I started paying closer attention to this in my own life, I noticed something both obvious and startling. My body had an opinion about almost everything, long before my thinking mind did. A tightening in my chest before a conversation I was dreading. A kind of deflation in my whole physical being before I’d consciously registered disappointment. A restlessness, a barely-there sense of something-isn’t-right, days before I could have told you what wasn’t right.

The body is not lagging behind. It’s running ahead, sending dispatches, and patiently waiting for us to open the messages.

Alignment, and the lack of it

In Buddhism there’s an understanding, quiet but insistent, that we exist in an ongoing relationship between our inner and outer worlds. When those worlds are in alignment, when our actions reflect something true in us, when our environment and relationships match our actual values rather than the ones we think we should have, there is a deep quality to that. A kind of ease. Not the absence of difficulty or challenge, but a sense of being in kilter.

And when we’re out of alignment? The body knows that too.

Not always loudly. Often, it’s that sense of unease I mentioned a few weeks ago. A kind of flatness. A sense of going through the motions. A vague, formless restlessness that no amount of scrolling quite resolves.

That’s not an emotional response to nothing. That’s the body’s quiet, persistent signal that something somewhere is out of true. And it’s worth learning to hear it as information, early, before it has to get louder to be noticed.

A small act of tending for this week

Once a day, morning is good, but whenever you can, before you check anything digital, before the day’s narrative revs up, take sixty seconds for a quiet physical inventory.

Not an assessment. Not a list of what’s wrong. Just a gentle scan.

Where am I holding tension right now?

What’s the quality of my breath — shallow, held, easy?

Is there anywhere in my body that feels braced, guarded, or simply heavy?

You’re not trying to fix anything. You’re just reading the room.

Arriving before the story does and giving the signal a chance to be heard before it has to get louder.

Minnie, observing her world from the twelfth floor, seems to have this entirely figured out. She is not troubled by the mesh, or the drop, or the seagulls she cannot reach. She is simply here, present, attending with her whole unhurried self.

I’m working on it.

Winter always turns to spring. It always has. And it always will.

With love, Kathy ❤️

I have been quiet for a little while.

Not intentionally, or not entirely. Life simply took precedence in the way that life sometimes does, loudly, inconveniently, and with very little regard for the writing schedule or anything else I had in mind.

I moved house. Well, actually I moved country to move house! Spain to the UK. And in doing so, I discovered something I perhaps should have already known.

Everything I’ve been writing about, tending your inner world, finding your ground, the practice of returning, is of course considerably easier to write about than to actually live, especially when the ground itself is moving.

A truck, somewhere in Portugal

It started with a bird strike.

My flight from Spain with my partner and 6 checked in cases, was grounded for 13-hours while repairs needed to be made. That was 13 hours we didn’t budget for. Stuck in one of Spain’s small and boring airports. I was already exhausted, but such is life eh, and not entirely the end of the world. I knew that, I told myself that.

But knowing something and actually feeling it, as we’ve established, are very different things. We eventually got in the air and landed at our UK destination in the early hours of the next morning.

And then to cap it all, my boxes went missing.

Not lost exactly. Just… on an unscheduled tour of Europe.

You get what you pay for! The removal truck was picking up and delivering across southern Europe and then somewhere in Portugal, not exactly sure where, in fact nobody seemed entirely certain. But the truck broke down and was garaged there for three days while arrangements were made.

Meanwhile, my entire home, well the final belongings that I couldn’t cull, were in transit. All my worldly belongings. My books, my things, the accumulated objects of my life. All of it sitting in a vehicle that I couldn’t locate, in a country I wasn’t in, waiting.

I would love to tell you that I met this with equanimity. That I breathed, noticed the feeling, gave it ninety seconds, and returned to my ground.

But alas, I did not.

What anxiety actually feels like

There is a particular quality to the anxiety that arrives when you genuinely don’t know if something is going to be alright. Not the 3am spiral kind, where some part of you knows you’re catastrophising. This was different. This was the kind where the catastrophe was at least plausible.

I felt it in the way we talked about in Post 2.

Not as a label, ‘anxious’, ‘stressed’ but as something very physical and specific. A tightness that lived just below my sternum. A hum that wouldn’t quite settle. The relentless, exhausting loop of trying to solve something I had no power to solve.

And underneath the anxiety, anger. At circumstances, at logistics, at the sheer inconvenience of it all. At myself, a little, for not handling it better.

I noticed all of it. And for a while, noticing was all I could do.

The shift

I’m not sure exactly when it happened. There wasn’t a dramatic moment of clarity, no sudden flood of calm. It was a lot more subtle and quiet than that.

At some point, I think I was simply worn out by the circular motion of worry and frustration, so I simply decided to stop focusing on the problems and start focusing on what could actually be done.

Not what should have happened.

Not who might be at fault, the blame game.

Just what was available to me in this red-hot moment.

It sounds almost absurdly simple. And perhaps it is. But something changed when I made that shift.

It wasn’t just internally, but perhaps more importantly, it was more about how I showed up with the people I was dealing with. The logistics companies, the removal team, the various humans on the end of various phones.

Without the anger underneath, I was different. I was actually present with them rather than simply trying to extract what I needed from them. And slowly, things started to move in positive directions.

The boxes arrived. Nearly three weeks late, taking a scenic route I hadn’t planned, but they arrived.

And here is the quietly wonderful thing, the chaos of the storage arrangements actually ended up saving me a lot of money. Although now the hallway of my temporary apartment is currently floor to ceiling with boxes. I can just about navigate around them, and two cats who are deeply confused about why they no longer have a garden are now enjoying an impromptu adventure playground.

It is anything but elegant. But it is fine. It is, in fact, more than fine.

What this taught me about the practice

I’ve been sitting with this experience for a while now, trying to understand what it actually showed me.

The inner eco-system we’ve been exploring together through my articles, the tending, the noticing, the felt sense, really doesn’t make you immune to difficulty.

It doesn’t stop the ground from moving.

It doesn’t protect you from the 13-hour delay or the truck in Portugal or the creeping fear that something precious and irreplaceable might simply be gone.

However, I do believe that by consistent practice over years we develop sufficient resilience that we are able to keep a small part of ourselves available.

We are present enough to notice the loop we’ve dropped into.

Present enough that at some point, even when exhausted and frustrated and running out of patience, we really can find our way back to the one question that actually matters.

What is available to me right now?

Not why is this happening to me? Not looking to apportion blame. Not focused on the worst-case scenario?

Simply a case of what can I actually tend, right now, from here?

A small act of tending for this week

If you’re in a period of upheaval, not the inner wobble kind, but the kind where your external world is genuinely in motion, allow me to offer you something concrete.

You don’t have to tend yourself beautifully right now.

You don’t have to find the deep calm or the ninety-second pause or the perfect return to your practice.

You just have to ask, once, gently:

What is available to me right now?

Not the whole path. Just the next thing. Just the small ‘tendable’ thing that is actually in reach.

The truck will arrive. The boxes, eventually arrive.

And sometimes the chaos that looked like pure obstacle turns out, quietly, to have a huge benefit hidden inside the eye of the storm.

Winter always turns to spring. It always has. And it always will.

Have a gentle week.
Kathy 🥰

A small confession.

This series is about how to live our inside-out lives. It focuses on tending our inner worlds before the outer one sweeps us away.

It’s been about pausing, noticing, feeling our way through rather than constantly reacting. About all those things that I, apparently, know how to do.

And then I didn’t write for a couple of weeks.

Not because the world got frightening again, although that’s pretty much a constant that I guess we live with these days. But it’s been mainly because life got very, very full. Beautifully, chaotically, legitimately full. And in that extreme fullness, I somehow lost the thread.

What the last few weeks actually looked like

In February I flew to China and spent 8 weeks training my lovely Chines law students at a university in NE China. A different time zone, a different pace, a different version of myself required at every turn. I loved it completely! But writing and scheduling my Substack articles, well…

I had plans, of course. I always have plans. I was going to draft the posts during my penultimate weekend and schedule them in advance, like the composed and self-aware person I am ha ha!

And then the assessments arrived. And the marking. And the goodbyes.

This was swiftly followed by an intense week in Cardiff, Wales, trying to find a temporary home for ourselves. This meat navigating estate agents, rental agreements and the particular low-grade anxiety of not having our own home while all our things feel like they are suspended in the in-between world of moving. So, then it was back to Spain for final days of packing up the life we’ve built here and saying many goodbyes as we prepare for the final move.

So here I am. Sitting in a half-empty house surrounded by boxes, empty cupboards and the like, once again writing about the inside-out life.

The irony is not lost on me.

The thing about ‘good’ chaos

I came to realise that I often talk about the outside-in life as though it’s always the enemy. It’s the news pulling us under. Our fears taking over. The spiral we find so hard to stop before it fully starts.

But what about this? Can there be good chaos?

The chaos that’s made of things we want and have worked toward. A meaningful job, a new country, a new home, the particular adventure that spins a life into excessive motion.

That version is perhaps a bit harder to name. Because when we’re swept away by something frightening, we actually know it. We feel the dysregulation and notice the spiral and if we’ve been practising, we can pause and find our way back to our solid ground.

But when we’re swept away by something wonderful, or at least by something we’ve chosen? It doesn’t always feel like being swept away. It just feels like living. It feels like showing up. Like being exactly where we’re supposed to be.

And all the while, our inner garden quietly waits.

What I noticed, eventually

I don’t want to dress this up too much because it certainly wasn’t some profound breakthrough or insight over the South China Sea. I didn’t pause mid-marking due to some kind of eureka moment.

What happened was far more ordinary than that.

I got to the end of the past few weeks and suddenly felt a bit of weight of the things I hadn’t tended. Not guilt, exactly as I’ve been working on that one, rather it was something a bit quieter. I guess I could describe it as faint sense of being very present everywhere except inside.

I think maybe you’ll recognise this. It’s the moment when the bus-y-ness finally stops and something in you that has been waiting patiently for space, finally surfaces. Quite simply it’s a little knock at the door.

I’m still here. Have you got a moment?

The thread was never dropped

Here’s what I keep returning to, as mugs go into bubble wrap and I try to remember which box the kettle is in.

The thread was never dropped. It was always there.

Our inside-out life doesn’t disappear when we stop consciously tending it. It doesn’t punish us for the time we spend entirely in motion. It doesn’t require a formal practice, or a Sunday morning free, or the right conditions. It simply waits. Patient as a garden in winter. Already doing its quiet work underground, even when we can’t see it.

So, my not scheduling my writing wasn’t a failure or a mistake, it was all part of living. Even my crazy Cardiff week, along with all the anxiety that only estate agents can trigger (a whole other story) was also its own kind of living. It provided its own kind of data about what I need, what holds me, what I reach for when the ground shifts.

I reached for my chanting practice at odd hours in hotel rooms. I reached for my partner. I reached for the occasional ten minutes of stillness before the day began, just enough to remember what my own breath felt like.

Imperfect. Irregular. But enough.

A small act of tending for this week

I’m not going to ask you to do something elaborate. Not this week.

But I am going to ask you one thing.

Think about the last season of your life that was genuinely full. Not necessarily difficult, just busy, or in motion, or where you were taken up entirely with something real, necessary and all-consuming.

Where did you go, in there? What did you quietly let go of? And what, if you listen carefully, has been waiting for you to come back?

With much love from an almost packed house in southern Spain,

Kathy 🥰

My last post in Brushstrokes was about the quiet art of tending in relation to our inner eco system.

It was all about noticing what’s ‘growing’ inside you, what might be struggling, what hasn’t had quite enough light lately. It focused on the difference between going through the motions and actually showing up for yourself, without the drama, in the way you’d tend to the seeds or cuttings that you’re hoping will grow and thrive in your actual garden.

So, for a moment I’d like to stay with that theme but take it to a place that may feel just a little more uncomfortable.

Because the question I’ve been pondering is:

What happens when we don’t tend? Not for a day or a week, but for years?

What does it actually cost us when we get so good at functioning in the outside-in world that we plough on regardless and almost forget to feel altogether?

The body keeps the score

To understand what this really looks like, let me tell you about a good friend of mine and how she discovered the importance of tending her inner eco-system, that she shared in a recent interview on ‘Women in The Penthouse’ with Serena Wang.

The story she shared I think is, perhaps in the extreme, an indication of what can happen when we are so focused on outside-in living that we stop tending altogether.

My friend, Edith exuded success. A senior communications leader at HMRC. A CEO in her own business. A very sharp, capable and high-functioning go-getter. The type of woman who gets things done, who holds it all together, who turns up and is there for everyone. With the exception of herself!

As she tended to tasks, meetings, programmes, projects and more, inside, her body was quietly keeping a very different account.

Until one day, without warning, Edith, in her early 60s had a major heart attack. Two arteries blocked at over ninety percent. She went straight from the ambulance and into surgery.

And here is what strikes me most about Edith’s story. It wasn’t a gradual unravelling she could see coming. It was the body finally, and dramatically, doing what it had been trying to do quietly for years.

Getting her attention.

High functioning is not the same as well

One of the most important things Edith talks about now, with a clarity and courage that totally inspires, is the particular danger of ‘…growing to be very good at coping...’

Because when you’re good at coping, nobody worries about you, and of course you don’t worry too much about yourself. You somehow mistake the absence of collapse as being the presence of wellbeing.

And it’s so easy to push through exhaustion, to mask stress with a smile and more activity. You can learn to override what your body’s telling you because there are so many things to be done, so many people who need you, and a big life to keep on track.

Now does that sound even faintly familiar?

I hope that most of us will never experience a wake-up call quite as dramatic and life threatening as Edith’s. But I think her story definitely shows the extreme end of a spectrum that many of us are quietly moving along without realising it.

Our inner garden, left unattended long enough, doesn’t just go a little wild. In fact it can start taking the wall down with it.

What the body is actually trying to say

Out of that experience, Edith now writes here on Substack through her publication Thought Circles. She has been deeply inspired by the Japanese concept of Kokoro, which holds that the heart and mind are not separate. That you cannot tend one while ignoring the other.

What she now teaches from her lived experience is that the body is a faithful messenger. And even if we spend years drowning out its signals, it will find a way to make itself heard.

The whispers will grow louder and become a nudge. And the nudge then becomes a shove and a shout. Until one day they become blue lights and sirens.

This is not about fear, it’s about love.

I share Edith’s story because I think it is one of the most honest illustrations of what it means to come home to yourself, to find your ‘ground’. Not so much as a concept or wellness trend. But rather as a simple practise that your life may one day depend on.

Edith is now, in her own words, “…just getting started...”

She writes, speaks, teaches, and lives with an incredible fullness and sparkle that many people half her age have yet to find. In part that’s because she stopped and listened, but ultimately because she stopped waiting for permission to tend to herself, and finally, just got on with it.

I believe that for Edith the heart attack was the key that allowed her to unlock an immense trove of creativity that lain dormant for a few decaes, while she was busy focusing on other aspects of her career.

I am so pleased that her creativity has been given full rein and is blossoming once more. And I can also testify to her talent, having had the privilege of being a recipient of her inner wisdom and love, when I really doubted myself.

Here’s a small act of tending for this week

So, in my last post I asked you three questions about what’s flourishing in you, what needs more light, and what you’re ready to start tending.

This week I want to add just one more.

What has your body been trying to tell you that you’ve been too busy to hear?

No drama, just honesty.

You only need to be willing to listen.

Because the inside-out life doesn’t begin with a grand gesture. It begins with the simplest, most radical act of all.

Deciding that you matter enough to pay attention.

Winter always turns to spring, and the garden needs a gardener.

With so much love,

Kathy 🥰

P.S. Edith’s full conversation with Serena Wang on Women in the Penthouse is well worth an hour of your time.

You can find it on

Spotify

I promise you won’t regret it.

Last week, which seems like a lifetime ago already, I wrote about lying awake at 3am, heart racing, scrolling my phone to check whether the world was still revolving.

It was essentially about that little gap between when you know something well that you ‘should’ do and actually doing it, in the scariest of moments. It was all about finding our way back to whatever holds or grounds us.

It got me thinking about what ‘holding us,’ might look like. Not necessarily in the crisis moments like last week, but more in the ordinary ones.

Before we go any further, let me ask something.

Do you have a plant? A garden, a window box, or perhaps just a single determined succulent on your kitchen windowsill?

If you do, I bet at some point this week you noticed it. You might have watered it or made a mental note that it needed watering. You might even have moved it slightly a bit more toward the light or noticed that a new shoot was coming through.

If we enjoy our plants or gardens I guess we probably do this almost without thinking. We notice. We tend. We respond.

Now I wonder when was the last time you did that for yourself?

Not a treat like a spa day or productivity reset. But rather just an ordinary, quiet act of noticing what’s ‘growing’ inside you, what might be struggling or hasn’t quite had sufficient light lately.

Reaching beneath the labels

When a client tells me they feel stressed, I wait and rather than reach for solutions, I’ll ask a question that sometimes catches them off guard.

Where do you feel that? What does it feel like? Is it heavy, light, a hum or heat? Is it in your chest, your stomach, your jaw?

A client will usually pause for a moment before something shifts. Suddenly they’re no longer describing a category like stressed, anxious, overwhelmed, they’re beginning now to describe an actual lived experience. It’s something far more specific than ‘stressed’.

And why does this matter. Well, if it’s something specific, it can actually be tended to. Categories or labels keeps us at surface level where very little changes. But our ‘felt sense’ takes us to something we can actually begin to work with.

I think this is the difference between knowing your garden needs attention and actually getting up close enough to see specifically what it needs. Our inner world responds in exactly the same way.

But…what we do instead

I’m currently looking for a new home in the UK, with a garden. I’m not naturally a gardener, but I’ve made this one of my newest quests. However, I’ve been quite amazed at many gardens I’ve seen that have been left totally unattended and have become completely overgrown. I don’t think I’d describe myself as a person for neat flower beds and colour coded plants and neatly mowed lawns, I like a bit of wild and free. But I guess if we ignore for long enough the wild and free may become a major, negative overwhelm, and that’s when you stand back and sigh deeply, because you simply don’t know where to start.

It’s pretty much the same with our inner worlds. The neglect doesn’t announce itself dramatically, like our gardens. It just quietly and gradually withdraws. We find ourselves going through the motions. We say ‘I’m fine…’ when we’re not even sure what ‘fine’ is. We might have a sense of feeling vaguely flat without really knowing why.

So we reach for the phone, the news, the next task, anything really, rather than sitting in a moment that feels so unaligned and uncomfortable.

Sound familiar?

Interestingly, most of us don’t neglect ourselves out of carelessness. We neglect ourselves out of bus-y-ness. It’s become an ingrained habit. And all the while, something inside is just quietly waiting for us to simply notice.

Winter always turns to spring

My favourite teaching. And one I often remind myself of and return to frequently because, it’s always true and it arrives most naturally at this time of year.

Winter always turns to spring.

The tree doesn’t strive or force it’s blossom. It doesn’t berate itself for the bare months or make a resolution to do better next season.

It simply holds, quietly and without drama, a silent knowing that warmth is coming. That what may look dormant is far from being dead. That the turning is already underway, even before there is any visible sign of it.

Somehow, I find that enormously comforting. And I think our inner world deserves that same patient belief.

Take a moment and quietly look within. The parts of you that might feel ‘quiet’ right now, aren’t gone. They are simply waiting for the conditions to align. One of the most powerful things we can do at this time is to stop trying to force the blossom, and instead just tend gently to our ground.

A small act of tending for this week

You don’t need much time for this. Five minutes would be generous.

At some point in the next day or two, find a moment that is just yours. It doesn’t need to be silent or special. A cup of tea, a few minutes before the day begins, a quiet moment between one thing and the next.

And simply ask yourself three things.

What’s flourishing in me right now, even quietly?

What feels like it needs a little more light?

What am I ready to stop waiting for permission to tend?

You don’t need to answer fully, there’s no fixing to be done, just notice.

Allow yourself to look inward with the same gentle attention you’d give something you were genuinely hoping would grow.

That noticing your inner eco-system, might be exactly the right conditions for something to pivot or begin.

Winter always turns to spring. It always has. And it always will.

Have a beautiful weekend.

Kathy 🥰

I have a confession to make.

I’ve spent the last few weeks writing about tending to our inner worlds.

About noticing.

About agency.

About the quiet art of not reaching for the phone before you’ve even taken stock of where you are in your waking moment.

And then I lay awake at 3am, my heart racing, and found myself reaching for my phone to check whether Iran still existed.

I’m not telling you this because I think it makes a good story. Rather, I’m telling you because I think it’s highly likely that you might have been doing something similar. And also, because I believe that the gap between knowing something and actually living it, especially when the world feels genuinely frightening, is not necessarily a failure. It’s just being very human in very difficult times.

The night the world felt like it was tipping

There’s a particular quality to the deep-seated fear that exists when a world leader makes a threat so enormous that it barely feels real.

It’s not a simple personal anxiety, the manageable kind where you breathe through it. This is something much older and bigger than that.

This is the kind of fear that sits in your chest like a stone and refuses to be reasoned with.

I know about nervous systems, I work with them constantly. I know about the 90-second rule. I know how the body responds to perceived threat before my thinking brain catches up. I’ve written about all of it.

But still I lay there! Scrolling away, checking, as though my phone had some kind of power to make the world safer.

When morning finally came and Iran was still there, still whole, still standing, what I felt wasn’t simple relief. It was relief mixed with a kind of grief. It’s an anger that we are living in a moment where this should even be a question we wake up asking.

A sadness for what America has become in such a short space of time. Something that felt, quietly and permanently, like trust being broken in a way that doesn’t easily mend. That, I believe is an honest response to something that really does deserves to be felt.

The second ‘awake’ night

Then the next night I was lying awake again and knowing that my partner in a completely different country was also worrying away in the middle of the night. This time not Iran but a major move for us from Spain back to the UK.

Let’s get the house valued we said, It was and we were pleasantly surprised. Then it sold overnight, before it even reached the market, which felt like a clear and unmistakeable signal that a new chapter was slowly emerging. But signs don’t dissolve those niggling practicalities. Converting euros to pounds. Our ages now at 60+ brings with it an essence of worry when planning a major life transition, especially when, due to work, you’re temporarily in different countries and can’t yet do much to move things forward anyway.

Two people lying awake in the dark, each carrying their own version of what if, each trying not to pass it to the other.

I imagine that you’ll probably know that feeling. It a 3am version of yourself which is rarely your wisest or most grounded or regulated self. Mine certainly wasn’t.

Where I actually found my ground

To be perfectly honest it really wasn’t a breathing technique.

It wasn’t a body scan or a long exhale even though those things have a place and they certainly work.

But for me this week has been a point of total overwhelm from the world ending, to doubting our decision to move home/country.

What actually brought me back and grounded me. In fact what has held me constantly in my darkest moments for more than thirty years now is my practise of chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. This Daimoku is, quite simply, what holds me together when everything else feels like it’s spinning.

Not because it makes the fear disappear, it doesn’t. Neither does it deliver instant calm. But it does return me, gradually and reliably, to a point of power that exists way beneath the panic. It’s a place where wisdom is still accessible, even when I seem to have lost sight of it. Where I can stop pushing and remember that life has its own intelligence.

It’s the belief that winter always turns to spring, that what is meant to unfold will unfold, and that my role isn’t to control the outcome but simply to show up as fully and as grounded as I can.

Eventually, not immediately, but eventually, the calm returns. The wisdom returns. And I remember that I am not alone in this and never have been.

So, what I’d like to share this Saturday morning

If you’ve had a hard week, and my guess is that I’m not alone in having connected to events far greater than ourselves. I want you to know that no matter how grounded some one is, there are always moments that cause us to wobble. We forget about tending our inner gardens and living inside-out. Instead we lie awake worrying about geopolitics, moves and mortgages.

But you know, the inside-out life isn’t a destination we can just arrive at and then maintain serenely.

It’s an active, ongoing practice. Some weeks you do it beautifully. Some weeks you check your phone at 3am and lie there with your heart racing until dawn breaks and it’s just light enough to get up.

Both are very real. Both are allowed.

What matters, perhaps the only thing that really matters, is that you know where your ground is. That however quiet and personal yours is, you can return to it when the night gets long.

For me it’s my practice. For you it’s probably something different.

A walk. A person. A prayer.

A piece of music that finds you when you need it.

The particular quality of early morning before the world gets loud.

Whatever it is, tend it. Return to it. Let it hold you tight when you can’t hold yourself.

This is the most sophisticated form of agency I know.

A gentle question for this week

No practice. No technique.

Just a question to sit with quietly.

What is the thing, the real thing, not the should-be thing, that actually holds you together when the night gets hard?

You don’t have to share it. You don’t have to justify it or make it sound impressive.

Just know what it is.

And then when that 3am version of yourself reaches for the phone, reach instead for your special ground.

The calm returns.

The wisdom returns.

It always has. And it always will.

Have a grounded and gentle weekend.

Kathy 😘

Before we begin let me ask you something…

Are you here, actually here, or are you already elsewhere?

Maybe somewhere lost in a news headline, or some in conversation you’ve been dreading, or perhaps chewing over something that happened yesterday that you haven’t quite finished processing yet.

There’s no judgement. Just simply noticing.

Because that noticing is the very small act of turning the gaze inward and that is exactly what this week’s post is all about.

The direction we’ve been living in

Most of us, probably unconsciously, seem to have learnt to live from the outside-in.

We wake up and immediately reach outwards.

We grab the phone. The news. Read a message that arrived while we were sleeping.

We read the temperature of the world before we’ve even taken stock of our own inner world. We let external conditions set the pace, the terms for how we feel and how we move through the day, whether we feel OK or not.

When the world was ‘manageable’ enough we could borrow our equilibrium from it. If things outside were reasonably steady, then we too could be reasonably steady.

But we’re not in that world right now.

Right now, the outside is not offering steadiness. It is offering noise and uncertainty. And it comes with a particular type of anxiety as we watch things unfold in real time while knowing that you/we/I can’t influence any of them.

If we’ve been living outside-in, if the external world has been our primary compass, then this moment is asking something of us that we may not have been trained for.

It’s asking that we find some ground inside ourselves as our launchpad.

That is what living inside-out means. And it is, I think, one of the most important shifts or gifts, that any of us could give ourselves right now.

What is agency, actually

I want to be as precise as possible here, because this is a word that gets used in ways that aren’t always helpful.

Agency isn’t control.

We’re not in control of many of the events happening in the world right now and pretending otherwise really can’t be called agency.

Agency isn’t really ‘positivity’ either. It’s not the capacity to reframe everything as a growth opportunity, or to locate the silver lining while the building is burning.

Agency, as I mean it here, is something much quieter and more honest than either of those things.

It’s the knowledge that I have some say in what happens inside me, even when I have no say about what happens outside.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

It sounds almost too small. A bit insignificant? But I’ve come to realise that it’s one of the most radical things a person can practise. And, particularly in today, where things shaping our external world feel so vast and overwhelming, while our influence over them feels somehow negligible.

The shift from outside-in to inside-out is simply this:

‘..stop waiting for the world to settle before you begin doing it.’

How the outside-in life erodes us

After a while living outside-in has a particular texture after a while that I’m sure you’ll recognise it.

For me it often feels like I’m somehow reaching for more information, in the hope that gaining a little more understanding might help me regain some sense of control.

But in fact, the more information I find, the more it seems to deliver threat rather than relief. I get more dysregulation, and more of the ambient anxiety that was problematic to begin with.

At times it feels like comparison. I’m looking at people who seem to be managing, who are clear, purposeful and grounded, thinking they must possess something I don’t and I take this uncertainty as evidence of my own personal failure.

Of course this is almost never true. What we’re seeing is simply their outside, while experiencing our own inside. It’s definitely not a fair comparison.

And most of all it feels a bit like waiting.

Waiting for things to settle before you begin. Waiting for this particular crisis to pass, for this patch to ease, and for ‘external’ permission to start tending to ourselves.

But the outside rarely settles on schedule. And waiting for it to do so is almost like the white flag of surrender. It’s a quiet handing-over of autonomy and it happens so gradually we may not even notice it’s gone; until of course someone asks a simple question, ‘…what do you want…’ or ‘…how are you feeling…’ and you realise you genuinely don’t know.

I think it’s because we’ve been living so far outside ourselves for so long that the question feels almost strange, as we’ve learnt to live with it in an unquestioned kind of way.

What turning inward actually looks like

There’s a version of this conversation that could easily slip into the glib, so, I believe it important to be honest.

Turning inward is never just a single moment of clarity.

It’s often a significant decision, and almost always, it’s practised in tedious small steps.

It’s learning to catch the thought, just a second earlier than you used to.

It is noticing that your jaw is clenched and taking a moment to unclench before you open the email.

It is pausing, before responding to a message that triggered your anger or fear, instead of instantaneously firing back and hitting ‘send’.

It is asking yourself, before you open the news:

‘… am I doing this because I want to be informed, or because I’m looking for a hit of certainty, which I know, at this time, really isn’t there?

These things don’t necessarily feel significant in the moment. In fact, they probably feel small, maybe a little silly.

However, over time they will accumulate into something that does feel significant. We begin to live with a growing sense that we’re the author of our own ‘inside’, even when everything ‘outside’ is being written by others.

That’s the agency I’m talking about. The quiet kind that gets built from the inside and holds up, even when the outside doesn’t.

A practice for this week

So, before you react to something this week, first of all try pausing to take a single breath, a long exhale and a single question:

‘Is this response coming from the inside, or am I just reacting to the outside?’

You don’t have to change your response.

You don’t have to feel calm.

You just have to notice, even briefly, the difference between responding from your centre and being swept along by the current.

That noticing is not nothing.

Right now, it is everything.

Which takes us back to where we began in January...agency underpins our ability to regulate and comes way before willpower.

Love

Kathy 😘 Have a great weekend

Something feels different right now.

There’s a particular quality to the anxiety many of us are carrying at the moment that feels less like the personal, manageable kind, rather it’s something more ambient, a low hum in the background of everything. You wake up and it’s already there. You scroll for thirty seconds, and it seems to double. The world, quite frankly, feels like it’s standing at the edge of something, and nobody seems entirely sure what happens next.

Our nervous systems were not designed for this. They’re designed to respond to immediate, physical threat, something we can run from, fight, and survive. What they were not designed for is the relentless, globally broadcast version of threat that many of us are navigating right now. The geopolitical noise. The humanitarian weight of what we’re witnessing. The feeling that the people with the most power have rapidly become the least trustworthy.

We can’t simply exhale our way out of a world that feels genuinely precarious.

But here is what we can do. And it matters more right now than it perhaps ever has.

The room feels it before you speak

In my last couple of posts we talked about the hive of activity that is our nervous system. The scanning, the broadcasting, the interpreting, and the variety of ways in which we can interrupt those processes at the physical level before the negative chatter takes over. If you haven’t read those yet they’re worth going back to, because this post builds on them.

Today I want to make a slight shift, perhaps a little more outward facing.

Because here’s something I’ve noticed in my own life, and in the work I’ve done with people over the years.

When someone walks into a room in a regulated state, something shifts. Not dramatically. Not because they’re performing confidence or projecting authority. But because the nervous system of every other person in that room somehow picks up on it and connects.

We talked in my previous post about how the nervous system processes threat cues before the thinking brain catches up. The same is exactly true of safety cues.

We read the room constantly, at subconscious levels. We pick up signals from the bodies around us. When someone arrives who is genuinely grounded, not performing groundedness, other nervous systems notice. The temperature in the room changes slightly. The conversation takes on a different quality. And somehow something settles.

This is definitely not mystical. It is biology.

And right now, in a world where collective dysregulation is at a level most of us have never experienced before, the person who has done even a little of this inner work carries something genuinely valuable. Not because they have all the answers. Not because they’re unaffected by what’s happening. But because they’ve learned to resource themselves before they walk through the door.

This is what I mean consider the ‘voice in the room’. Not volume. Not authority in any traditional sense. Something quieter and far more durable than that.

Being regulated versus running on fumes

Most of us know the difference intuitively I think, not in our heads, but in our gut and our bodies. That feeling that tells us something before we’ve even found the words to explain it.

There’s a version of you (and me) that shows up to a difficult conversation having already run it three hundred times in your head, jaw tight, ready for conflict, half gone before it’s even begun. That version technically says the right things, but the other person feels the tension underneath, and they will respond to what the body is broadcasting, not just to the words.

And there’s the version of you that shows up having taken three long exhales, having felt feet firmly on the floor, having interrupted the ‘chatter’ before walking in. That version isn’t calm in the performed sense. It’s simply more present. More available. More able to actually hear what’s being said rather than just waiting to defend.

The difference other people feel in us is real. It isn’t about being polished or professional or having it all together. It’s about whether we’ve resourced ourselves or whether we’re running on empty and asking others to work around us.

This matters in one-to-one conversations, in leadership, in parenting. And right now, it matters in how we hold ourselves and each other while the world feels so uncertain.

The oxygen mask

There’s an instruction we’re all given on an aeroplane that most of us half-listen to and quietly hope we never need.

Put your own oxygen mask on before helping others.

Not because you matter more. But because you’re no use to anyone if you can’t breathe.

The inner work is the oxygen mask. It isn’t selfish, it’s actually sensible. And right now, it might be the most important thing you do.

What does it mean to be ‘resourced’?

For me it simply means this, that before I walk into the room, before that difficult conversation, before I open the news or pick up the phone, I’ve done something small to come back to myself. Not to feel perfect. Not to feel calm. Just to feel present. To feel like I’m here, in this body, in this moment, with some ground under my feet.

I want to be a bit careful here because this could easily tip into the bland kind of advice of ‘just take care of yourself’, which, when the world is genuinely frightening, falls somewhere between hollow and insulting.

And this is not what I mean.

Being resourced doesn’t mean being unaffected. It doesn’t mean spiritual bypassing or reaching for calm as a way of not feeling what’s real and hard.

Some things really do deserve our grief.

Some things deserve our anger.

The situation in Gaza. The erosion of order, now replaced by chaos. The feeling that cruelty has been normalised in real time.

These are not things we can lightly breathe away.

But there is a difference between feeling those things fully, which is honest and human, and being so flooded by them that we become unavailable. To ourselves, to the people around us, to whatever small sphere of influence each of us actually has.

Because here’s the thing about this particular moment in time.

The antidote to feeling powerless in the face of frightening things is not to consume more news. It is not to argue more loudly on the internet, although I often find myself so caught up in this trap.

It is, at least in part, to tend to the thing you actually can influence, which is how you show up. In your home. In your work. In your community. In the conversations that are right in front of you.

That is not small. That is, in fact, everything.

The quiet return of agency

I feel that since I began writing this series in January, we’ve almost come full circle.

Everything we’ve covered, the nervous system, the body broadcasting, the inner chatter, the physical tools, it all points toward one thing.

Agency

Not the loud, decisive, dramatic kind that gets celebrated in leadership books.

This is far more the quieter kind. The kind that says

‘I know what’s happening inside me, and I have some say in what happens next.’

That kind of agency is not given to you by circumstances. The circumstances right now are certainly not offering it freely.

It has to be built, carefully, from the inside.

It starts with noticing. Then with interrupting. And then, over time, with arriving somewhere slightly more settled than you used to. Just a little more grounded in who you actually are, beneath all the noise.

And I won’t pretend it’s easy. My own battle to spend even 24 hours without reaching for a news article at the moment is real and ongoing. It is a process. It takes time and determination to take those small steps consistently, even when the world makes it feel almost impossible to look away.

But the person who’s learning this, who’s beginning to understand their own nervous system, who catches the chatter a little sooner than they used to, who walks into the room having done even the tiniest amount of inner work, that person is exactly what this moment needs.

Not a hero. But a someone who has decided to become the author of their own inner world, even when everything outside feels like it’s being written by someone else entirely.

The brushstroke

There is a Buddhist sutra that captures this in a way I often return to.

“The mind is like a skilled painter, able to paint all the worlds…” (Kegon Sutra)

Dr Daisaku Ikeda interprets this simply and beautifully that

“…our hearts, like a skilled painter, freely create representations of all things. Our lives are faithful expressions of what is in our hearts.”

Which means that the inner work, the noticing, the interrupting, the small daily tending to our own nervous systems, is not just self-care.

It is the brushstroke.

It is you, quietly and deliberately, painting the life and living each day the way you actually want to be living.

That is agency. And it begins exactly where you are.

Something to try this week

Given everything that’s in the air right now, I want to offer something slightly different from the usual practical section.

Before you read the news today, or instead of reading it for one morning, spend five minutes sitting with one question:

“What do I actually know to be true right now, in my own life, in my own body, in this present moment?”

Not what might happen. Not what the headlines are saying. Not what you’re afraid of. Just what is actually, verifiably, true right now.

The floor is under your feet.

The people you love are, in this moment, okay.

Your breath is moving.

You are here.

This is not nothing. In fact, right now, it might be everything.

A closing thought

At this moment in time the world is loud.

It is frightening in ways that are real and not imagined, and the nervous system knows it even when the thinking brain is trying to stay calm and rational about it all.

You don’t have to pretend otherwise.

But you do get to decide, in small, daily, unglamorous ways, what you bring into the rooms you walk into. What tone you carry. Whether you arrive having tended to yourself or whether you bring the unprocessed noise of everything booming in with you.

That choice, made quietly and consistently, is not just self-care.

It’s a form of hope.

And right now, hope offered in a grounded voice, not naive, not performative, but real, might be the most radical thing any of us can do.

Have a wonderful, grounded weekend.

Kathy 😘

Next in this series:

Discovering our own pathway; what it means to start living from the inside out rather than the outside in.

At some point, most of us have been told to ‘calm down’. Perhaps less often in those exact words, more often in the form of advice.

Try to relax.

Take a breath.

Just don’t think about it.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of that ‘kindness’ while your nervous system was running at full pitch, you’ll know just how frustrating it can be.

Not because the person saying it was wrong, but quite simply because calm isn’t something you can just decide to have.

Calm isn’t an on-demand choice that’s available at the flick of a switch. In fact, it’s often the case that the more you try to reach for calm the more your nervous system digs in.

It’s important to recognise that calm and safe are not the same thing, they’re not even the same type of thing.

Calm is a state. Safe is a signal.

Calm is what our nervous systems look and feel like when they’re not on alert. It’s the output, the result. You can’t manufacture it directly any more than you can with tiredness by lying still and insisting you’re asleep!

Safe is something completely different. It’s what the nervous system is constantly scanning the environment (inner and outer) for and trying to assess in the background.

We’re not talking safe in an abstract sense such as in ‘is the world generally okay?’ Rather this type of safe is about the immediate, the physical, right-now sense.

“Is my body, in this moment, in this environment, okay?”

We’re rarely aware of this because, most of the time there’s nothing to report. But sometimes the scan brings up an uncertainty. It could be real and or it could be that our system has responded based on an old experience that triggers ‘danger’ in a situation that isn’t actually dangerous anymore.

However, once triggered it’s almost impossible to talk our nervous systems back down to a place of safety. It’s like, intellectually knowing my presentation will be fine, that my relationship is solid, that nothing terrible is about to happen today but somehow, I still feel my shallow breath, my tight chest, and the low-level alarm, that keeps me alert to the ‘danger’.

As we said in last week’s post, it’s certainly not irrational.

Basically, it’s the gap between our ‘primitive’ fight, flight or freeze centre that operates our threat detection system, and our more rational thinking brain. In fact, the amygdala (that ‘primitive’ point in the centre of the brain) receives information before our thinking brain. And as such the emotions are triggered before we can reasonably think about what just happened!

But here’s an important bit. We can actually take back control! We can send safety signals, small physical ones at first but as the nervous system receives enough of them, it will begin to update its assessment.

The nerve that connects everything

Let’s just take a closer look at what’s happening here.

The vagus nerve that runs from your brainstem all the way down your body connecting your heart, lungs, gut and other organs, plays a critical role in how your nervous systems shifts between states of alert and rest.

This process is a two-way channel. Through this nerve the brain sends information to the body, but equally the body also sends information up to the brain. It is the upward traffic that accounts for the majority of our inner communication. The vagus nerve then, is primarily providing bodily information about our heart rate, breath, gut state, muscle tension which is being sent up to the brain. So, the communication is less the verbal, worrying, narrative chatter and more about the physical hum underneath it.

Which means that what you do with your body has a direct impact on what your nervous system registers as true.

If your heart is racing and your shoulders are tensed up around your ears, your brain will act accordingly and vice versa.

So, small physical actions should be the first place to start to remedy this.

I’m sure we’ve all had those ‘in the head conversations’ that we’d rather not hear. And the more we try to still the chatter the louder it becomes. It is then, at this point, that we need to take physical action.

For example,

If you slow your exhale, the vagus nerve will carry that information upward. It’s received as data ‘Aha something has slowed down. Perhaps the threat has passed.’

You could hum quietly, which creates a vibration in your chest and throat, again a new message for the nervous system to ponder.

Put your feet flat on the floor and your nervous system gets a message of physical grounding, of weight, of contact, of presence in the now moment.

These aren’t tricks and they’re not wellness theatre.

They are inputs to a system that is genuinely able to listen and more importantly, to respond.

Why ‘performing’ calm makes things worse

There’s a particular kind of effort that goes into trying to seem calm when actually you’re not. The jaw held deliberately loose. The voice kept deliberately even. The breath that you’re consciously managing because you’re aware that it’s gone shallow.

The problem is that the effort of trying actually becomes a signal.

Occasionally if I’m finding it difficult to sleep, I listen to an audio and allow my jaw to loosen and my tongue to rest on the bottom of my mouth. And of course, the more I ‘try’ the more awake I feel!

I am working hard to lift something heavy, or I am working hard to suppress a feeling.

Effort is always read by our systems as activation. The very act of performing calm is, physiologically and it does the absolute opposite.

This is why when someone says, just relax it usually lands badly.

Relaxation can’t be a situation of ‘efforting’.

Cold water on your wrists is another good move. The sudden change in temperature gives your system something concrete to register, being present, physical, in the now.

Of course, these actions alone won’t dissolve a panic attack or resolve a genuinely threatening situation and that’s not really their purpose. The purpose is by doing something much smaller you are sending the nervous system enough data to begin to question whether full alert is still necessary.

What’s buried in all of this?

Here’s the thing that I found a little unsettling when I first encountered this.

If our nervous systems can be moved toward safety through small physical inputs, humming, breathing, cold water, ground contact, then does it follow that safety is something we can participate in. Not control, but rather influence.

And if that’s the case, then the question I ask is what have I (we) been doing instead?

My guess is that we’re really not so different. Most of us have spent years trying to think our way to calm. Trying to reason with the anxiety. Challenge our thoughts by asking whether our fear is proportionate. Enter more enhanced chatter!

These aren’t useless because our thinking brain has a role. But when the nervous system is activated, it’s not really a thinking problem. It’s often a body problem. And a body problem will need a body answer first.

It isn’t that we’ve been doing it wrong, the tools were always more accessible than we realised. We don’t need an app or a complicated breathing exercise we simply need to reach for the tools that are so much closer.

Our exhale. The floor under our feet. The hum which vibrates in our throat and chest. All of these present as data or signals to begin to soothe the nervous system.

What this looks like, practically

We don’t need to wait for a moment of crisis to practice any of this. In fact, the more we offer the nervous system these small safety signals in ordinary moments, the more accessible they become when we actually need them.

Before a difficult conversation, rather than rehearsing it in your head and therefore focusing on the chatter and effort, try two or three long exhales first. Let the out-breath run longer than the in-breath. You’re not trying to feel calm. You’re simply shifting the ratio.

When you notice the hum of anxiety, without any obvious source, try placing both feet flat on the floor and pressing them down gently. Notice the contact. That’s it. You’re not meditating. You’re just giving your nervous system different input to process.

None of these are cures. They are simply a few tools that are fully accessible to us when we need them.

A closing thought

Calm is not a performance. It’s not something the most stoic or the most zen among us have simply mastered through sheer willpower.

It’s actually what happens when we provide our nervous system with enough evidence that the danger has passed, or maybe that it was never quite as imminent as it seemed.

One exhale, one moment of contact with the floor, one small vibration in your chest, at a time. Your nervous system is definitely listening. It just doesn’t speak the language of thoughts.

Have a great soothing day

Kathy 😘

So. About that audio.🎙️

If you were one of the few brave souls who clicked play on my post early on, you may have heard me umming, stumbling, a bit of knocking on wood, generally proving that hypnotherapists are not immune to nerves.

I sent out the unedited version by mistake.

The irony of a post about the power of sound being accompanied by the wrong audio is not lost on me. 😄

The correct version is now up, but rather than just quietly pretend it never happened, I thought I’d turn my little error into something useful.

Here’s the little trick I use when recording:

When I’m recording and I make a mistake, a stumble, a fluff, an “oh for goodness sake” moment, I simply tap the table a couple of times firmly before I repeat and carry on.

That tap creates a very visible spike in the audio waveform in Audacity.

So, when I go back to edit, instead of listening through the whole thing trying to find my mistakes, I just look for the spikes. They show up instantly. I cut just before the spike, trim the mistake, and carry on.

It simple and saves so much time. Rather than retake and retake, you simply carry on with the recording and hopefully son’t tip over the words too often.

It really does make the whole editing process far less painful.

So the lesson I’m taking from this week 😳

Even in audio production, it turns out the body knows before the mind catches up.

Always listen before you publish, even when you’re a hypnotherapist who knows the power of sound” 😊

See you in the next one.

Kathy ❤️

P.S. If you’re just starting out with recording your Substack posts, do try it. Your voice is part of your story. Mistakes, bloopers and all.

Here’s the audio if you prefer to listen?

Let me set the scene.

It’s somewhere around 1am. I’ve just finished an episode of The Night Agent, very America-centric but still gripping, tense, definitely not the kind of thing you should watch before bed.

I’ve also somehow eaten (don’t ask me how) a handful of Haribo, which, as any sugar-aware person knows, is basically handing your nervous system a major explosion of energy.

So, I’m wide awake and my brain has no intention of switching off.

Here’s the ironic part: I’m a hypnotherapist. I know exactly what’s happening physiologically.

The cortisol spike from the Netflix tension.

The blood sugar surge from the sweets.

The blue light suppressing my melatonin.

I know all of it and I still walked straight into the trap.

So, what did I do? I got up and made a hot vegetable Oxo drink (don’t judge me, I think it’s a British thing 😊). After my hot drink, I put on a hypnotherapy audio, specifically one that uses sound frequencies designed to gently guide the brain into a relaxed state.

And eventually, I drifted into a deep sleep.

Which brings me to a question I’ve been quietly turning over for a while now, both as someone who uses these tools and someone also, trained to understand them:

Does the Hz stuff actually work? Or is it the belief that it works?

What the science actually says

The theory behind frequency-based relaxation audio, often called brainwave entrainment isn’t made up.

Your brain genuinely does produce measurable electrical activity that varies depending on your mental state.

These are brainwaves, and they’re measured in Hertz:

• Delta (0.5–4 Hz) — deep sleep

• Theta (4–8 Hz) — drowsy, meditative states

• Alpha (8–12 Hz) — calm, relaxed wakefulness

• Beta (12–30 Hz) — alert, active thinking

When you’re stressed or overstimulated, say, after a late-night thriller and a major sugar boost, your brain tends to run high in Beta.

The idea behind tools like binaural beats or isochronic tones is that audio at specific frequencies can nudge your brain toward a more relaxed alpha or theta level. It is essentially coaxing your brain down from that heightened state. Which in fact it connects to an article I’ve written recently about the way the body often knows ‘stuff’ before the mind even catches up.

There are studies that support this.

EEG research has shown that brainwave entrainment can shift measurable electrical activity. There’s also evidence that certain calming sounds do in fact reduce cortisol levels.

But the effects themselves are generally quite modest, reasonably gradual, and can be highly variable between individuals. Beware the claims you’ll often see online ‘rewire your brain in 15 minutes!’ as these are significantly overstated.

So, do you think it’s just placebo?

Well, it’s here that I’d like to push back just a little on the way we usually frame this question.

The placebo effect is possibly one of the most fascinating and often under-appreciated, phenomena in all of human psychology.

When you really believe something will help you relax, your brain doesn’t just pretend to relax, it actually releases neuro-chemicals associated with relaxation. In which case it becomes a physiological response that is totally measurable.

In other words, you could argue that the belief itself produces the genuine physiological response.

If someone listens to a theta wave audio track, if they expect to feel calmer, and then do feel calmer, did it work?

I’d suggest definitely yes.

Regardless of whether the mechanism was the Hz frequencies specifically, or the ritual of lying down and putting on headphones, the expectation of relief, or some combination of all three, the actual outcome was very real.

I think this is also one of the things that CBT and hypnotherapy have in common. Both work partly through shifting what the mind expects and believes is possible. The “technology” is almost secondary to the therapeutic relationship and the client’s willingness to engage.

My honest take

As a therapeutic practitioner, and having used frequency-based audio for some time, here’s where I’ve landed:

I believe that the ritual of it all matters enormously.

Putting headphones on, closing your eyes, giving yourself permission to stop (or pause!) That alone is doing a lot of significant work. The audio therefore provides something to follow rather than allowing you to spin around. There is probably some genuine neurological effect from the frequencies themselves, even if it’s more subtle than advertised.

I have come to see and accept that its the belief that it will work, that might actually be the most powerful ingredient of all.

That doesn’t mean you should trust it less.

If anything, it’s provides us with a very clear and strong reminder of just how extraordinary and powerful our minds are.

Last night, a hot drink and an entrainment audio got me back to sleep after Netflix and my Haribo did their best to keep me wired.

Was it the Hz? The warmth of the drink? The familiar voice on the recording? The fact that I finally stopped watching Netflix?

Probably all of it.

And honestly? That feels like enough.

Kathy❤️

I’d love to know your experience, have you ever used binaural beats, hypnotherapy audio, or similar tools? Did they work for you, and do you think it matters why? Drop a comment below.

🎧 Prefer to listen? You can hear me read this post using the audio above

This week I missed Monday. A long flight to China and a frankly impressive amount of jet lag saw to that. But here we are, and we're continuing our exploration of 'the pause' and 'presence', and now turning to the role our brains play in what can sometimes feel like a blurred line between the physical and the emotional.

There’s a particular kind of Sunday feeling that many of us know but rarely talk about.

It doesn’t announce itself loudly. It generally arrives around late afternoon as a low weight settling in the chest, a restlessness that you can’t quite put your finger on, or a sudden urge to scroll or snack or find something, anything, to do with your hands.

The weekend isn’t quite over. Nothing bad has happened. And yet, somehow, your body is already beginning to brace.

Or perhaps it’s something different for you. As you walk into a meeting you’ve been in a hundred times before, you notice your jaw is clenched, your shoulders are somewhere up near your ears, and your stomach has quietly tightened. You weren’t consciously thinking about it, and yet your body was already there.

It’s not weakness, or irrationality. It’s your nervous system acting exactly the way it was designed to. For us, really understanding this is what changes everything about how we relate in these moments.

The brain that acts before it thinks

Here’s something that tends to surprise people.

The part of the brain responsible for detecting threat is significantly faster than the part responsible for conscious thought.

Think of it like this.

Our nervous systems are like a ‘constantly on surveillance system’. They scan our environments, our bodies, and our social contexts for signals of safety or danger. This happens well below our main level of awareness.

By the time a thought forms in our minds …I’m anxious about tomorrow… our physical bodies have already been responding to that information for a while. So, our thoughts are often a delayed translation of something the body already knew.

This is why sometimes you can walk into a room and immediately feel uncomfortable even before you consciously register, why.

In short, your nervous system isn’t being dramatic, it’s being extremely efficient.

What interoception actually means

Interoception is the word we use for our ability to sense the internal state of our bodies. You may have heard of proprioception, which is our sense of where our body is in space. Interoception goes deeper.

It’s the felt sense of your heartbeat, your breath, the tension in your gut, the weight behind your sternum.

We tend to think of our senses always as pointing outward such as our sight, sound, smell. But we also have an entire sensory system that points inward, relaying information from our organs and tissues up to the brain.

Your heart has sensory neurons and so does our gut.

There’s a reason we speak of a ‘gut feeling’ or a ‘heartache’. These aren’t just poetic expressions, they’re imprecise translations of genuinely physical experience.

This is where I’ve found the work of Dr Jill Bolte Taylor to be so compelling in my therapeutic and hypnotherapy practice. Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, suffered a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain in 1996, and spent the four hours it took to fully unfold observing, with professional precision, exactly what was happening to her own mind.

What she discovered from the inside is something most of us never get to witness so directly. The brain receives information in a specific sequence, and thinking actually comes last!

Sensory information is processed first by the emotional centres of the brain, specifically the amygdalae, before it ever reaches the thinking cortex.

Taylor describes the amygdala’s primary job as a moment-to-moment threat assessment, essentially asking, ‘…am I safe right now?’

This happens incredibly fast, and mostly without our conscious involvement.

The thinking brain then, the part that narrates, analyses, and plans, only receives the information after the emotional system has already had its say.

Taylor also describes the right hemisphere as taking in all sensory information simultaneously, that’s sound, sensation, temperature, movement, and assembles it into what she calls ‘…a collage of the present moment…’

It is experiential before it is conceptual.

It feels before it thinks.

What this means in practice is that your felt sense of a room, a relationship, a Sunday afternoon is operating at a level you don’t have direct access to.

By the time we recognise that ‘uneasy’ feeling, our nervous system has already been running that assessment for some time.

The gap between signal and story

This is where things get really interesting, and also where a great deal of our own suffering tends to live.

The body sends a signal.

The brain needs to interpret it.

The brain, being a prediction machine, shaped by everything you’ve ever experienced, will often reach for the most familiar interpretation. Which may not always be the most accurate one.

So, a tight chest + sense of unease = something is wrong with me, with my life, with the future.

The signal was definitely real but the interpretation may not be.

That tight chest might be early information about something genuinely worth attending to. But it might also be a nervous system that learned, a long time ago, that Sunday evenings meant a tough week was on its way.

It might be your or my body associating certain environments or people with past stress, and is doing its job, perhaps a little overzealously, of keeping us well prepared.

The problem isn’t the signal. It becomes a problem only when we skip straight from signal to catastrophic story, without pausing in the space between.

Try this scenario:

I feel uneasy becomes something is wrong,

which becomes something’s wrong with me,

which then becomes it’s always going to feel like this.

We’ve left the physical information behind and immediately opted for the mind’s worst-case construction.

Listening without catastrophising

So how do we actually use what our body is telling us, without being swept into the stories it can generate?

The first, and often the hardest step, is to simply notice the signal before naming it.

Not, I’m anxious. Instead name it, there is tightening in my chest… my breath has become shallower… there’s something happening in my stomach.

This sounds so simple. But we’ve become very conditioned to skip directly to interpretation. So consciously creating a pause between the sensation and the story is where all the useful information lives.

When you can actually locate the feeling in your body more specifically, rather than just generally, a few things begin to happen.

You’ve implicitly reminded yourself that this is a physical event, not an objective truth about the world.

You’ve engaged the part of the brain that observes rather than reacts, which, in itself tends to reduce the intensity of the alarm.

And you’ve created a space to ask, what might this actually be about?

That last question really matters.

Sometimes the Sunday dread is legitimate anticipatory information, there’s something at work that genuinely needs attention, and your body is quietly nudging you towards it.

But sometimes it really could be old patterning from a time when Sunday evenings reliably preceded something particularly challenging.

It could also be simply tiredness, narrated by a weary brain, as a strong foreboding.

You can’t know unless you pause long enough to ask.

Our bodies aren’t the enemy of reason

We live with a cultural tendency to position bodily sensation as the ‘irrational thing’ that reason must override.

Don’t be so emotional.

It’s just a feeling.

Think it through.

This turns out not to be quite right.

Research has found that people with damage to the parts of the brain that process emotion often struggle to make even basic decisions. This is not because they’re too emotional, but because they can no longer access the bodily felt-sense that helps us navigate these kind of complex situations.

The body’s signals are not noise in the system. They’re important data.

I think about my own experience here.

There have been periods when I was very much living in my head, analysing, planning, trying to think my way through everything, while entirely missing what my body had been trying to tell me for months. It’s usually only in hindsight that I could see how clear the signals were.

But the goal isn’t to silence the body, nor to be controlled by it.

What we need is to develop a relationship with it.

We need to learn about our own patterns, to recognise which sensations tend to mean what, to catch the moment between signal and story often enough that we get some real choice in what happens next.

This is a practice, not an insight. It’s built over time, in small moments, when you notice the tension before a call, when you feel the tightening at a family dinner, when the Sunday feeling arrives and you put down your phone. Just stay with it for a minute. Be curious, rather than frightened.

What to do with this, practically

None of this requires an expensive retreat or any kind of specialist training.

These are a few of our simple starting points:

1. Notice the sensation before you name it. When you feel something physical tied to stress or unease, try to stop and describe it before you interpret it. Where is it? What does it feel like? Is it moving or still? Does it have a temperature, a texture, a weight? You’re not analysing, you’re just observing.

2. Find the gap, however small, between sensation and thought. You may find that the sensation is actually quite neutral until the mind arrives with its chatter and commentary. Or that the sensation itself contains something useful, once the commentary quiets enough to hear it.

3. Ask, is this new information, or simply old patterning? Sometimes the body is responding to what’s actually happening right now. But remember, sometimes it’s running a very old programme. Both matter, but they call for very different responses.

4. Let the feeling be present without feeding it or fighting it. A lot of the suffering around anxiety comes from battling the sensation, which serves to amplify it. An equal amount can also come from diving into the story it generates, which again, escalates it further. Simply allowing the sensation to be present, without either warring with it or narrating it into catastrophe is often the most effective thing you can do.

A thought in closing

Your body is not trying to ruin your Sunday. It isn’t catastrophising for sport. It’s doing what millions of years of evolution have fine-tuned it to do,

Notice-signal-prepare

The question is whether you can slow down enough to receive the signal before your mind converts it into a verdict.

That vague unease at four o’clock on a Sunday might be your nervous system telling you something genuinely real. Or it might be the echo of a version of you who once had good reason to dread Mondays, and that programme is still running out of habit.

Either way, it starts with the same simple act of noticing what’s happening in your body before you decide what it means.

Our bodies know before we do. Our work is learning to listen without letting it write the whole story.

No doubt somewhere this week, you probably experienced one or two difficulties that became challenging feelings, and maybe you held on to them longer than really needed. Not because you’re weak, or broken, or stuck. Simply because you’re human, and your mind was doing what our minds do, trying to make sense of things, turning the feeling over, looking for an explanation, a reason, an exit.

But feelings aren’t necessarily problems to be solved. We can think of them being more like waves.

Some are gentle like a soft ripple that you barely notice before it’s gone.

Some are strong and determined, rolling in with real force, demanding your full attention.

And other are wild. They build and crash. They take your breath away. They make you feel the need to hold on tight.

And yet interestingly, every single one passes.

Neuroscience confirms that this raw ‘physical sensation’ of an emotion, if left alone without us adding our story layers on top, will move through our bodies in around 90 seconds.

What allows those giant waves of emotion to grip us longer is usually our own minds that reach back in and replay the situation, rehearsing or retelling it.

So, let’s try an experiment.

Maybe this weekend, if some challenge arises and brings with it a storm of emotion, see if you can simply let it be a wave. See if you can recognise, without judgement, that it’s not something to fix. Not something to explain.

Set your clock (we all have those funny old smart phones!) and just sit with it for 90 seconds and allow it to pass.

You might be surprised how quickly it does, when you stop trying to make it stop or stop rehashing it.

Have a wonderful gentle weekend.

Kathy ❤️

Here’s something that genuinely changed how I sit with some of my most challenging emotions and it should be noted that this didn’t come rom a mindfulness or therapeutic work, rather it came from neuroscience.

So pause for a moment and consider any emotion, in its pure physiological form, lasts approximately 90 seconds.

That’s it.

A wave of anger, a grip of anxiety, a surge of dread, if left alone, without allowing our minds add unnecessary commentary, the actual chemistry will clear our bodies in about a minute and a half.

So why then does it so often feel like it hangs around for hours, days, or even weeks?

The answer is that generally we feed it!

We replay conversations. We rehearse the worst outcomes. We tell ourselves the story of why this feeling is justified, inevitable, or permanent. And in doing so, we constantly re-trigger the cycle over and over again, etching a deep groove into the vinyl, all the while believing the original feeling is still running, rather than we are constantly dredging it up.

This isn’t a criticism of how we cope. Under consistent stress, this is almost automatic. The part of the brain responsible for nuance, perspective and creative thinking goes partly ‘offline’, and we’re left in a state akin to survival mode. We scan for threat, brace for impact!

The feeling becomes almost like a weather continuum rather than just a passing storm.

But a world of new possibilities open up when we finally grasp this. We begin to notice the difference between the feeling itself, and the thought that follows it. Not always immediately. But gradually, we can start to ask, with real curiosity, is this still the original wave, or am I actually keeping it going?

You don’t need to stop the feeling, it’s there and it’s real, what you must do is stop adding to it.

That’s a very different kind of effort.

And it’s also a much gentler one.

A question for this week

This week, if/when you notice a difficult feeling, try gently asking: how long has this actually been running? You might be surprised by your answer.

Have a great week

Kathy 😘

Welcome to the Year of the Horse!

Gong xi fa cai.

The horse represents forward movement.

Strength without noise.

Energy without chaos.

Pace without panic.

It doesn’t apologise for its power.

It doesn’t rush to prove anything.

It simply moves.

Steady when needed.

Fast when required.

Always aware of direction.

This is a time for that kind of movement.

Where we stop hesitating.

Where we trust our own rhythm.

Where we move because we’re ready, not because we’re pushed.

Let’s ride with the wind and enjoy the energy that comes in the Year of the Horse.

Kathy❤️

Well, very strangely, here I am posting midweek, having missed my usual beginning-of-week rhythm.

That wasn’t the plan.

But hey ho! Life shifts. Structure loosens. Deadlines reappear.

I’m enjoying the freedom of just being and, if I’m honest, I’ve certainly stretched that freedom a little further than was wise. Now the rhythm is tightening again.

And oddly, it feels a little bit adventurous, for me

However, in my previous post we moved from pause to presence.

But what happens next?

In conversations with colleagues recently, something keeps surfacing.

When we slow down enough to become present, something else begins to stir.

Visibility.

Not the social media kind. Not performance. Not branding.

The kind that allows you to be seen before your thoughts are perfected.

The kind that says:

this is where I am, this is how I’m arriving in this moment.

We humans are extraordinary. We juggle deadlines, relationships, responsibilities, shifting technology, unpredictable news cycles… and still we create, connect, repair, rebuild.

None of this is small.

And here’s what I’m beginning to see.

We spend a lot of time worrying about who we are. Our roles. Our history. Our labels.

We pay attention to where we are. The circumstances. The deadlines. The season of life.

But rarely do we pause long enough to connect with how we are.

“How we are” is alive. It’s vital. It’s inward, and it outwardly illuminates our visibility in the world.

It’s the tone we bring into a room. The steadiness we hold under pressure. The energy we offer.

And when we root ourselves there, visibility shifts.

It’s no longer about proving something.

It’s far more like inhabiting or owning - ourselves.

If, presence is noticing, then visibility is allowing.

So, presence can never be an end point.

It is simply the doorway to being more fully here, in real time, without waiting to be flawless.

Halfway through this week is good enough for me and allows me to ask myself:

This is how I’m showing up

It’s not who am I trying to be.

And that in itself feels like freedom.

Kathy ❤️

By the end of the week, many of us don’t feel stressed exactly.

We feel slightly… absent. Not necessarily overwhelmed. Just not fully here.

We’ve been managing, responding, thinking ahead. Doing what needs to be done. And somewhere in that process, w’ve drifted a little from ourselves.

Last week I shared a short pause (audio). It wasn’t a productivity tool or a way to calm ourselves it was simply a moment of relief. A brief interruption in the constant ‘managing’ so many of us do all the time.

Without doubt a pause creates a space.

But what often happens next is this:

we stop… and then immediately start again, filling the space we just created!

So today I want to offer the natural next step.

Presence.

Presence isn’t about being serene, centred, or especially mindful. It isn’t something you achieve or perform. It’s something you allow.

Presence is simply letting yourself arrive where you already are.

A Gentle ‘Arriving” Practice

This will take about three minutes, so you can do it wherever you are.

1. Let your body settle

If you can, place your feet on the floor. Notice the support beneath you. The chair, the ground, the weight of your body being held

You don’t need to relax. Just notice that you’re supported.

2. Orient to your surroundings

Let your eyes move slowly, then name, quietly or out loud:

· three things you can see

· two sounds you can hear

· one physical sensation you can feel clearly

Nothing special is required. Ordinary is perfect.

3. Ask one gentle question

Then, without analysing or answering properly, ask yourself:

What feels most real for me right now?

Not what should matter. Not what’s next. Just what’s real.

Let whatever comes up be enough.

That’s the practice.

No fixing. No insight required.

No expected outcome.

Allowing Ourselves to Arrive

When we stop managing the moment and allow ourselves to arrive, we will experience subtle shifts.

We move from effort into presence.

From monitoring ourselves to inhabiting ourselves.

And from there, a little more internal space returns. A sense or feeling of being here rather than slightly ahead of ourselves.

If you tried the pause last week, this is a natural continuation.

Pause creates a space.

Presence allows us inhabit it.

Presence isn’t about being calm or focused.

It’s about being here enough to notice yourself again.

And when we’re here, something interesting becomes possible.

A Question to Consider Over the Weekend

As you move through the next couple of days, you might notice moments where you feel slightly absent or on autopilot.

When that happens, gently ask:

Have I arrived where I am?

You’ll know by the reduction in tension and the absence of urgency rather than the presence of calm.

Nothing more is required.

Have a gentle weekend.

There’s a moment many people recognise:

you’re stuck on a decision, or can’t see your way through something, and the answer feels like it should be obvious. So you sit down. You focus. You think harder.

And it doesn’t help.

Not because you’re not smart enough or trying hard enough, rather it’s because the problem isn’t cognitive., it’s an issue of capacity.

When you’re already carrying significant cognitive load, managing competing demands, holding multiple threads, staying responsive across a variety of contexts, your system is working really, really close to the edge. So adding more ‘effort’ at this point isn’t going to bring back clarity. On the contrary it will increase demand.

Thinking harder v thinking better.

This is a strategy that works when you have capacity but quite simply fails when you don’t.

An example that we have probably all experienced is when you open an email:

You read it and read it again. The content is straightforward, the decision isn’t complex, but you can’t quite work out how to respond. So you read it a third time and a fourth. The words start to blur and you still don’t know what to say.

Or perhaps you sit down to make a decision, something that earlier in the day felt manageable but now your mind goes blank. The same few options circle back without resolution. You tell yourself to just choose, but your choosing mechanisms feel far off and unavailable.

I used to think these were moments where my capacity to make sound decisions had become totally broken! But really these aren’t moments of indecision.

They’re moments where the capacity to process, weigh, and select has been reduced by the weight of demands already in play.

What makes this difficult to recognise is that cognitive effort would normally work.

When you have the internal resources to support it, thinking harder does actually clarify. It sorts and it resolves. But cognitive effort itself has a cost.

Like when having too many apps open on your laptop requires a lot of bandwidth, the same is true of your cognitive load! If that load/bandwidth it becomes overloaded, it results in fatigue and with that fatigue, comes a narrowing.

Your range of options become smaller. Your ability to hold perspective is reduced. The very thing you’re trying to access, clear thought, gets further out of reach the harder you try to grasp it.

This is actually a very predictable response when you’re operating at the edge of your capacity. Your system is doing exactly what it’s designed to do under load, it’s conserving, protecting and narrowing.

You haven’t lost access permanently. You’ve lost access temporarily, because the demand is too high for the available resource.

Which means rather than a ‘think harder solution’, it’s better to simply reduce demand by pausing.

And, we do that quite simply by consciously creating conditions where your system can restore its own capacity.

Pause isn’t a technique, it’s simply a conscious reduction in load.

And when the load is reduced, access begins to return. Not always immediately. Not in ways you can force.

But reliably enough to notice that when we stop ‘efforting’ we start to pause and when we pause those narrowed down channels open up once more.

If this resonates and you’d like a short, guided pause to reduce demand rather than regulate it, there’s a brief audio available here:

It’s optional of course, and the principle still holds without it.

Have a great day

Kathy ❤️