You are worthy of receiving support. Piles of it. As much as you need - it doesn’t make you weak, it doesn’t mean you’re not enough on your own, and it doesn’t mean you’ve failed.

Going to say that again - receiving support is not proof that you’re not good enough.

What do you need, and how will you get it?

These are two of my favourite questions. They’re deceptively simple, and deceptively powerful.

They can give you almost anything…

Right now I’m feeling…

This is a little but powerful prompt I use to check in with myself whenever I think of it throughout the day. I make a game of it to find the exact words to describe how I’m feeling, and I know when I have it right because part of me lights up and I feel seen when I get it exactly spot on.

For any healing process, we need a quiet moment.

There’s something about that sentence that settles me, helps me take a deeper breath. A quiet pause.

Lots of us want to feel better. Not many of us take the time to create a quiet moment to plant the seeds of whatever feeling better is to us. We don’t create quiet moments to tend to those seeds as they grow.

We’re so often caught in our heads, so removed from the physicality of our own bodies that sometimes we get around in a state of ‘body? What body? I’m just a floating head’.

And yet… our bodies are where feeling better starts.

Seasons never get stuck. Have you noticed?

They roll on, one into the next, in their own time. Sometimes winter will be long, or sometimes summer will be cooler than usual, but the seasons keep on moving through their cycle, one after the other.

The moon is the same - it’s never stuck. It cycles through its phases, one into the next, drawing the tides with it as it goes.

There’s something comforting about seasons and the way they keep on moving. Maybe we don’t like the season we’re in, but if we’re attuned to our internal seasons, we can have some idea of where we’re at, and of what might be coming next.

When your feelings feel bigger than you, what do you do? There’s not enough room in you for all of your anger, there’s too many tears for you to ever cry them all, the heaviness pins you to the floor, life is overwhelming and confusing, the bigness of what you’re experiencing is too much and it’d be so nice to have somewhere else to put it.

That’s one of the things that art therapy can help with - it gives you somewhere else to put some of those things.

Often our grief feels bottomless, like it’s too big for our bodies to contain. And so we make the choice, consciously or unconsciously, to stay a bit numb, to keep busy, to look the other way.

Wise choices.

Grief is a land we’re not made to travel alone.

What if we remembered how to create a solid ground for grief, and travelled it together?

This simple tool is a way of attuning to yourself more deeply in a way that feels really good. Taking the time to check in shows you you’re listening to yourself. Taking the time to find the right words shows you that you care. And as you learn the subtle nuances of how you feel, moment to moment, you’re validating your own experience (which is a powerful way, over time, of dismantling unworthiness and not-enoughness).

Give it a try!