Still Human: More Capacity. More Human. More Life.

Have you ever had a time in your life when there’s a lot more space? A gap. More stillness, more silence than there was before. Maybe a relationship ended. Maybe a business came to an end. Maybe your children grew up and moved out. Something shifted, and now there’s all this stillness. But underneath the stillness there’s a discomfort. An emptiness that isn’t easy to be with. So we start trying to fill it. That’s the season I’m in right now. My kids have left home. I stepped away from something I spent a long time building and poured my heart, soul and life force into, and there’s been a real change of direction in what I’m working on and where I’m putting my energy. I’m calling it the void. This episode I talk about what shows up in that space. And for the first time I do live parts work on camera, with my friend Stacey off camera helping shape it. I talk about the parts that arrived while I was recording. The sad part, my mama heart, realising that season is actually over. The guilt part that remembers the years I was chronically ill and couldn’t be there the way I wanted to be. The part that sits in my shoulder blades and tells me stillness is lazy, and wants to know what’s next. And my narrator, the hardest working part I have, commenting on everything 24 hours a day, and a huge source of the exhaustion. I talk about the work of my dear friend Ruth Cohn on the trauma of neglect, and why she looks at the nothingness rather than only the obvious event. Because we tend to focus on the big thing that happened, when for me, the deeper wound was so much of what was missing afterwards. The nurturing that didn’t come. The pain that went unwitnessed. I talk about how I’ve filled that my whole life by taking care of other people, and the uncomfortable thing I’ve had to face, which is that in doing it I am turning away from myself, and I am abandoning myself. I bring in Richard Schwartz’s book You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For, and what happens when we make someone else the source of being okay. And then I come back to something Carl Jung wrote: “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” I talk about Bill Plotkin’s Soulcraft, descent, and my own tendency to leap straight up into all love and light rather than go down and be with what’s actually there. And I sit with the question I’m actually in. Maybe it isn’t a hole that needs filling. Maybe it’s just something I haven’t learned yet how to meet. And as always, I’m weaving together psychology, neuroscience and spirituality, and how all of this plays out in everyday life. Fair warning, I came into this one without the answers and I still don’t have them.

In our family, laughter wasn’t a break from the hard stuff. It was how we got through it. This one’s different. My first video episode, and my first guest: my sister, Mia. RADA-trained actor, comedian, and the funniest person I know. We talk about growing up in England, where being funny was the most respected currency going. About sanuk, the Thai idea of bringing fun and lightness into everyday life. About Richard Schwartz’s concept of legacy burdens in IFS: what gets handed down that was never ours to carry. And the question we landed on one night: what if what got passed down to us was the laughter? There’s science in it too. Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory, and how laughing with people we love can support safety and connection. Robin Dunbar’s research linking social laughter with endorphins and bonding. The Divine Child in Jungian psychology, and the idea that becoming more whole includes reconnecting with the playfulness we were born with rather than saving it for the end. Which is the point, really. Play isn’t the reward once the healing is done. It is the work. We also get honest about the other side. Laughter as a protector. The joke that keeps everyone at arm’s length. So the thing to sit with is discernment: is this laughter connecting me, or helping me disappear? And as always, I’m weaving together psychology, neuroscience and spirituality, and how it all plays out in everyday life. Though fair warning, this one is far less polished and a lot more us.

I sat down to record a different episode. My body said no. It was originally titled "Stepping into your power". I’d researched it. I'd written it. I was ready to go. And the moment I sat down to record, my body refused. It didn’t feel genuine to talk about stepping into my power while I'm, quite honestly, on the verge of burnout. So this episode is what came out instead. A real-time pivot into what my body has actually been trying to tell me for quite some time now. I talk about the "parts-party" that arrived as I went to hit record — or the many parts of me that all activated at once, and each with its own agenda. Like the firefighter part who won’t stop. Or the two polarized protectors with the same wound but opposite strategies. Or the part that constantly overthinks everything, and although it may look like awareness, it’s approach actually keeps me stuck in fight, flight, or freeze. I also talk about the harm of perfectionism culture and what it has ingrained in me. And I share the question I’ve been sitting with for the past few days: what price am I willing to pay for my peace? And as always, I’m weaving together psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality, and how all of this plays out in everyday life.

I spent years not trusting my intuition. Ignoring the tightness in my stomach. Explaining away the red flags. Convincing myself I was overreacting. I became very good at rewriting reality to maintain connection and keep the peace. So in this episode I talk about discernment. The inherent knowing we carry within our bodies. Our gut instinct. And how, over and over again, we dismiss our body's intelligence and allow the stories our mind create to run the show. I describe the nervous system and how it relates to discernment. I talk about the difference between intuition and hypervigilance and the impact trauma has on our ability to accurately perceive threats. How a slight pause in the middle of a recent emotional challenge changed how I now understand healing. And I get honest about a pattern I carried for years. Falling in love with the idea of a person's potential rather than paying attention to who they were choosing to be right in front of me. And as always, I'm weaving together psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality, and how all of this plays out in everyday life (with a little humor here and there).

For most of my life, shame didn’t feel like a feeling. It felt like truth. “I am bad.” Not “I made a mistake.” “I am the problem.” In this episode, I share how that belief got installed, how it lived in my body, and the way it shaped my health, my relationships, and how I saw myself. I talk about what shame does, why it keeps us hidden, and what started to change when I began turning toward it instead of running from it. And as always, I’m weaving together the psychology, the neuroscience, the spiritual understanding… and how this all plays out in real, everyday life. Not fixing. Not performing. Just staying.