There are things that are private and best left out of blogs. I don’t suppose I can say what those things are for anyone else but I can say what they are for me. What I’m going to write about is one of those things. A contradiction, no doubt, and something of a surprise to me but I’m not going to force too many of my feelings on you. Hardly any of you knew my dad so what I have to say won’t mean much but it would feel dishonest and a disservice to him to leave his passing unacknowledged when what I write about are things that are important to me. They might largely be ephemeral or even trivial but they felt important at the time so to leave out my dad, who was and is truly important to me in a deep and permanent way, would feel wrong.

 

Dad, Eric Adams, was a kind, thoughtful, intelligent,witty, active, stoic and engaged person. He loved my mum and us dearly. His tolerance and constancy provided a rock to which we were all anchored, even if the chain was sometimes long. Of course, he didn’t do that alone. He and Mum, married for 51 years, came as a team, each bringing their own qualities but combining them to shape a reliable whole. We, my brothers and sister and I, have been fortunate to have them all this time, so actively involved in our lives and those of our children.

 

I don’t think I miss him yet because it doesn’t seem real but I know I will and probably very soon.

 

I would like to acknowledge him and his life, just as I’d like to acknowledge the miracle of care provided by Mum in these last few months. Love love.    

In Part 1 I spoke generally about what a bandwidth is and how we might operate in that. Did it seem like a theory of everything? Not really. Today’s missive will hopefully be a little more inclined toward the all-encompassing. Apologies in advance for the sheer length.

 

It goes like this:

We do seem to train ourselves and each other to view changes in ourselves and out there as very gradual. Revolutions occur, of course, and volcanoes suddenly erupt, but on the whole we take the view that some tiny wee adjustment happens each day and builds to an overall effect that is often imperceptible as it happens. We might only notice a difference after not seeing something or someone for a long time. Sometimes a very long time. Weight loss, geology, the development of a pregnancy bump, an increase in fitness – all of these things seem slow, steady and gradual.

Well, I beg to differ.

 

Consider the bump. Yes, a baby takes 9 months to grow, give or take, and cells multiply producing a gradual increase in size, but is that what it looks like on the outside? You might see that pregnant person every day at work and you’re hardly noticing the daily change but you know it’s there because that bump is bigger than it used to be. BUT.. somewhere in there, at least once and maybe more than that, it will happen that the lovely, glowing pregnant lady will show up on a Monday looking 2 months more pregnant than when she went home on Friday. Something big happened. I think it’s a jump into a new bandwidth. I can’t really say much more than that here but I can say a lot about it in the next example.

 

Consider the person losing weight. I’m going to say “she” because the odds are it will be a woman. That person is diligently following her eating and exercise plan for the vast majority of the time. She occasionally falls off the wagon but she’s usually losing a couple of pounds a week. That’s 4 packs of Lurpak so imagine scraping those off a body each week and you’d expect to see very noticeable changes all the time but you don’t. You know they look better, their clothes seem to fit better and they obviously feel better but it’s hard to put your finger on what has changed and where then, boom, suddenly it looks as though they’ve dropped a stone overnight. Bandwidth jump, ladies and gentlemen!

 

There’s more to this and I think this is what makes the theory relevant and useful instead of just the observations of someone who is too nosey and has too much time on their hands.

I’m going to continue with weight as an example but use gain as well as loss.

Speaking as a fairly frequent loser and gainer of weight I can tell you this: once one of those boom! moments has happened and you change pretty suddenly, other things change. The scales are not the most important thing here but they help. I had a boom! in the Spring last year. I lost nearly 2 stone altogether but it was hitting just over a stone of weight released that produced that drastic change. I lost those first pounds and some people began to notice but not many then suddenly, almost overnight, my body was really different and everyone noticed. After that, the further 8lbs or so didn’t have much impact other than on my frame of mind which was much improved and encouraged. Any changes became really gradual again. I’ll tell you why. I think that boom! was a leap into a new bandwidth. Up until then I was still in my old bandwidth, albeit getting lighter. With that boom I moved into a new bandwidth where I remained. I lost a good bit more but not enough to shift to yet another bandwidth. I don’t know how wide a bandwidth is in terms of pounds but I think it’s probably a very individual thing and for me it was more than a stone on the way down the scales but more than that on the way up.

 

I think it’s important in terms of weight loss to know about this stuff because of what happens if you begin to gain weight again. I had a difficult summer and eating regularly and well was not very easy. By the end of the summer I’d regained at least 5 lbs but it didn’t seem to make much difference to my body. Neither did 7,8,or 9. The suddenly I boomed the other way. This time it wasn’t as visible to the outside world. What happened was that, almost literally overnight, I developed what felt like a rubber tube full of water across my lower abdomen suspended, it seemed, from my hipbones. It was horrible but fascinating. I’d never had any such structure before and it didn’t appear to have developed gradually. It wasn’t dense, solid fat but I believed it was ready to turn into that if I didn’t take action. It was if, after messing about and eating badly for a while, I’d allowed it out of the ether so I could do something about it while it was relatively easy. So my bandwidth was smaller this time.

 

What I concluded from all of this was that once you’re in a new bandwidth you have room for manoeuvre. Pounds lost and gained seem not to make too much difference until you lurch into the next bandwidth up or down. I’m using weight here, partly to let people know that you don't have to obsess about a few pouns, but I think you can apply this to other things such as fitness. When I was able to begin to physically do the running the ease with which I lengthened my runs increased gradually until I hit some kind of threshold where all of it was suddenly easy and I was able, however briefly, to step it up a significant notch. (That's the running mention I promised at the end of Part 1)

 

The Arab spring – there weren’t a couple of people demonstrating one week, then a couple more the following week, increasing gradually over a year or two until there were thousands in Tahrir Square. Pressure was no doubt slowly building over years and decades of oppression but then suddenly there it was, showing up in the collective reality, and a whole new world opened up.

 

My instinct is that it’s a manifestation thing. It’s all happening, changes are being made, but it’s “elsewhere”, then we, for whatever reason, suddenly allow those changes to be here in the material world. We’ve made a new reality in a particular bandwidth and that’s where we’ll play for a while, maybe for always.

We can, of course, move down as well as up. And remember Part 1 – we’ll only be able to relate to what’s in our bandwidth.

It seems to me that we have room for manoeuvre in our own bandwidth and small changes won’t show up to the naked eye. As we develop, or lose more weight, or do more training, etc, we approach the higher frequencies in our bandwidth so when we take the next step up a whole new set of frequencies will open up. We’ll have moved up a bandwidth. Our old one and the things and people in it won’t seem as relevant. New horizons have opened up. We may or may not allow ourselves to stay there. We might continue our ascent or old baggage might kick in and drag us back down. If that happens then we have the work to do all over again. That’s one of the reasons it’s important to clear our stuff. (And that's the healing mention)

 

If we drop a bandwidth ( and we don’t have to have gone up a notch first – we can simply drop lower than our starting point) then it’s easy to feel hopeless and stuck. That lower set of frequencies can feel harder to escape from.

 

Maybe the resilience of a mentally healthy person is simply a reflection of that room for manoeuvre that is available in any bandwidth. It can hold up pretty well even going to the bottom of its available frequencies, but if it drops through the lowest into the next bandwidth down then a change for the worse will be apparent, resilience will have reduced.

 

I told you it was a theory of everything.

 

Sue x

 

Last week I enjoyed a long and interesting chat with an old friend. In amongst the meanderings we talked about resonance; vibrational resonance to be more precise. If you resonate with something then it feels right to you, you recognize it and probably instinctively know how to interact with it. The same is true with people. If you resonate with someone then you “get” them and they “get” you. It’s easy, there’s no strain.

If you don’t resonate with something, such as an idea, then it’s meaningless to you, it simply doesn’t land. And if the same is true of a person then the odds are that, if you do it at all, communication is not easy. There’s no common ground or even a recognisable shared language.

If something or someone resonates with you then you’re drawn to them. If not then you may feel actively repelled but you could also feel nothing at all, they simply don’t register on your radar. You’re not being ignorant; your best and most comfortable interactions simply lie elsewhere.

 

At first glance it might seem that this idea of resonance means, for example, that our scope for relationships might be severely limited.  Fortunately, it seems you don’t have to be an exact vibrational match to be able to resonate with someone, you just have to operate in the same bandwidth.

 

Let’s take the example of an old radio to illustrate this. There was a knob that you turned to tune into a particular radio station. That station might be available over a bandwidth of, for example 94 to 97 FM. Within that there would probably be a best frequency which might change depending on atmospheric conditions and other factors, but you’d be able to receive the signal in the vicinity of that signal. It might not be perfectly clear but you’d be able to hear the music, recognise what was being said and know what you were dealing with. Once you moved out of the bandwidth, either to a lower or higher set of frequencies, you’d have no chance of picking up that station up at all though you'd soon move into the range of another.

 

So our potential vibrational matches -  be they people, ideas, art, books, looks – are not as restricted as they might first seem. There’s room for manoeuvre.

 

There’s also room for growth and for opening ourselves up to whole new bandwidths. But that’s Part 2. It will include at least something about running and something about healing.

 

Ooh, cheeky teaser. I might prefer the outright cliffhanger .

Sue x

Hi. Long time no blog.

Life has been busy and interesting but not necessarily in ways that warrant sharing. Now that's changing and I'm back on the horse.

First let me wish you a very happy, productive, exciting, fulfilling and generally marvellous new year. 2012 will see such changes on every front in every way. I aim to make the most of them and I hope you do, too, in the ways that suit you best.

2012 is already a year of change for RPT. I've spent several hours this week soaking up the videos Simon has posted so that I can update my students on the new developments. As I've said on my home page, I love that we share the evolution of RPT with everyone concerned. This is not primarily a business. As teachers we have to make a living  but we are not motivated by squeezing the last penny out of everyone, coming up with endless courses. The energy of that would be horrible and I wouldn't be involved. It's still just Level1 to learn how to use RPT, Level 2 if you want to learn another way of applying the method or to begin the process to officially practice, Level 3 if you really want to get into your stuff or would like to begin to qualify as a teacher. 

I'll be doing an update workshop to get the new method out to students at the end of January but not everyone can get to that so I'll also offer a couple of online teleconferences. Cost will be minimal. I do think it's important to make an investment to demonstrate the value to yourself. I certainly find that.

So why the changes? If RPT was so great in the first place, why should it change? Well, it was great. It was simpler and quicker than anything else I'd come across but the mindset was that we had to find original trauma. We quickly learned that we don't and we've since learned what we do need to do that makes the healing simpler, quicker and even deeper. Those realisations have  come with trust in the process and with increasing clarity. Simon and Evette work really hard and no doubt there will be other developments to come. I really hope so. If we decide that's it, if we think it or we is perfect, then we shut ourselves off from growth. The clearer we get, the more becomes available to us so it would be a pity to decide there is no more. Of course there is, otherwise Simon would be God.

 He's good, but he's not God. Sorry Simon.

 So I'm glad it's changing and I hope it changes again. I can't wait to teach the new stuff in Level 1 courses this year.

It's not always a curse to live in interesting times.

love Sue x

I Loved the Book, I just Didn’t Do the Running

 

Yesterday I retweeted someone’s link to a how-to video for barefoot running. I followed up with my enthusiastic recommendation of the book “Born to Run” by Christopher McDougall.

I read it then re-read it last year and loved it. It’s about how man is a natural runner, as lived and breathed by some indigenous peoples. A tribe in Mexico is the main subject of this book but there’s a great story in there about our hero running down an antelope with a trio of bushmen in Africa. He survived but it was close.

We evolved as long distance runners, it’s how we survived and came to evolve in the way we have. Something has to explain our uselessly massive backsides and running is that thing.

Born to Run is a fascinating and inspiring book that I urge you to read for a gazillion reasons, spiritual as well as physical and intellectual.

That’s not what this blog entry is about. It’s about what I said in my tweet which landed in my own brain with a resounding clang while the wind whistled and tumbleweed rolled by.

This is what I said. I said, I loved the book, I just didn’t do the running.

Cue lightning flashes and thunder as I realized that I do that (or don’t do it) all the time.

I’ve read thousands of amazing books. I’ve highlighted the best bits and made copious notes. I’ve been on courses and learned amazing techniques that I use and some of which I teach. BUT, do I mindfully practice all that I know that could help me? No I don’t, at least not as often as I should. Am I disciplined? Not really. Has my life improved through the application of what I know? Well, yes, but not as consistently and wonderfully as I believe it could have if I’d only done all the running. Every day, consistently and with conscious priority regardless of messy old life stuff that gets in the way.

Now maybe I’m harshly exaggerating to make my point but probably not as much as I’d like to think.

I make the same mistakes over and over and wonder how that happened. I get stuck in stories where I’m definitely the victim but also, and this is just awful to me, the persecutor. There’s a big dollop of rescuing, too.

Maybe all of this is self-evident to everyone else and I may be overstating my lack of running but it was a moment of clarity for me.

Doing the running equates to taking full responsibility, to becoming the adult in relation to myself and others in the best Transactional Analysis and Empowerment Dynamic kind of way. There can be no excuses, there can only be intention and action.

Doing the running definitely equates to taking action and that is the part that is so often missing from people’s efforts at manifesting joy and abundance in their lives. I just said “people’s”. I should have said “my”. See!

In fairness to my currently bludgeoned self I do take action, just not always the right action or in a consistent enough way.

So, better get running.

There is a footnote (hee hee J) here as I did actually start to run again while reading the book. Not barefoot, I hasten to add, though it appeals enormously. On my first time out I only got as far as the end of my road when I did something awful to my Achilles tendon. This developed into something terrible in my calf and finished up as a hip problem. So I stopped myself running almost before I started.

That’s a whole other metaphor I do believe, one best kept for another day.

“Your work is to discover your work, and then with all your heart, to give yourself to it.” Buddha

Marcus Aurelius puts it this way in Meditations “Everything—a horse, a vine—is created for some duty. For what task, then, were you yourself created? A man’s true delight is to do the things he was made for.”

If you’re doing what you love to do then it isn’t work. That is so true. Think about your own life and work. If you hate your job then your life might feel less than perfect. But think of those times when, regardless of whether you were at work or simply working on something at home, you were completely in the moment. You were focused in the easiest way and you felt good. Everything flowed, you flowed. Odds are you were doing something you enjoy, that interests you,  that you’re good at.

 

I’ve recently concluded that what I most love to do is teach. I view teaching as sharing, as exploring together rather than me stood at the front, imparting knowledge. If you’re doing it right you learn from your students. It’s definitely a joint enterprise and that’s partly why I love it so much.

 

I also love how it feels both during and after. In the middle of a course I’m fully immersed, checking out the students, making sure everyone is getting it, working out different ways to explain. Time has no meaning even though I’m a stickler for punctuality and non-infinite breaks - the day has a way of sorting itself out when you set the intention up front. The best thing, though, is the shared feeling, the space that’s held and that we inhabit together as we realize just what we can achieve. Magical.

 

Afterwards there’s a warmth and a glow that I can best describe as general benevolence and well-being. All is right with the world. I’ve seen and felt people change and step into their true selves. I’ve learned and grown myself. What could be better? It’s love all round, really.

 

There will be a whole new dimension to this later in the year as I have the opportunity to teach Reference Point Therapy in Ecuador. I’ve never been and I can’t wait. The Vilcabamba area looks gorgeous and there’s a growing community there of conscious, ecologically aware and generally mindful people that is very appealing. The surroundings you’re in when on a course do have an effect as do the quality of the biscuits and lunch so I fully expect and anticipate a wonderful few days in excellent company. Excitement and gratitude abound in the Healy household. Better learn some Spanish!!

 

Sue x

 

For details see www.suehealy.com and www.referencepointtherapy.com

Have you heard of the enneagram? It’s a system of nine personality types.  The starting point is a questionnaire to establish what type you are likely to be. You may groan but we’re not talking Cosmo quizzes here. The enneagram is very detailed, relevant, practical and has a huge spiritual aspect to it.

 

The nine types are:

1 The Reformer

2 The Helper

3 The Achiever

4 The Individualist

5 The Investigator

6 The Loyalist

7 The Enthusiast

8 The Challenger

9 The Peacemaker

 

You may have a good idea of what you are just by looking at the list but of course we are all a mixture of all types with the balance changing at different times and in different circumstances. But we usually have a dominant type, occasionally two.

There is a wealth of information available to you once you identify your main type. Your strengths, your weaknesses and ways in which you might develop are all offered with compassion, directness and humour. There are descriptions of healthy and unhealthy manifestations of your type, too. I hope I don’t make this sound like an intellectual exercise as the experience can be pretty gut wrenching. To see words YOU’VE ACTUALLY SAID !!! written on the page certainly puts a new slant on your perception of yourself as unique, original and spontaneous. When I first did this I spent an unpleasant week loathing myself for my secret motivations. Indeed, discomfort might be an indicator of having found exactly your correct type. But it can be heartening, too, as you recognise yourself in the positive as well as the negative descriptions.

 

So what’s the point? Awareness and development, of course. The measure of this system is just how valuable the insights gained are, either into yourself or another person. I’ve used it and benefited in a personal way. That in itself would be sufficient to make this worthwhile. But I also use this in my work.

How? you might ask. More to the point, you might also ask why, given that I’m such a flag-flying practitioner of RPT. Please let me explain.

RPT is all about getting right to the very bottom of things and acknowledging that root. (See www.referencepointtherapy.com for tons more information). So if RPT gets to the bottom why do I need to use anything else? Simple. There's nothing better for clearing your stuff than RPT but it helps to get to that point if you can get hold of your feelings and some people really struggle with that. I can do it for them but it’s much more empowering if they are consciously involved in the process. One of the ways I can engage them is to have them do the enneagram questionnaire, find their type and discuss it a little. As they recognize themselves in what I’m saying they open up to themselves. Sometimes they open up a lot. After all, they are acknowledging who they truly are.

The enneagram describes not only the characteristics of each of the types but also their motivations, the ways in which they lose their centre, the messages they received in childhood and the messages they lacked. But the key points available here are these: for each type there are details of their basic fears, their basic desires and the superego message.

For example, the basic fear of Type 6, the Loyalist, is of having no support, of being unable to survive on their own. The basic desire is to find security and support. The superego message is that you are good or ok if you do what is expected of you.

Bingo! Here are our bottom survival instincts. These are the things that need to be acknowledged in order to clear old patterns and programs right down to their very root and make instant and lasting changes.

 

Maybe this seems a roundabout way of getting to the bottom line with a person but remember that the point is that they be empowered and consciously aware of what’s going on so they have a real part to play in their own healing. To “do it to them” can keep them in a place of victimhood and I abhor that. Maybe more on that in a later posting.

 

What also interests me about this is that it seems to me that we must be predisposed in some way to develop a certain personality type as a way of navigating our human experience. Maybe karma, maybe not. Maybe genes or maybe epigenetics. How interesting to consider that the experiences of our parents and grandparents might set us up not only with a set of physical characteristics and predispositions to disease but also with a broad personality framework before we directly experience a single thing. Now there's something to work with.

 

Take a look at the enneagram. You’ll be riveted. There are many courses you can do and practitioners abound as do teachers. I value it enormously but I haven’t gone down that route.

I use a book – “The Wisdom of the Enneagram” - and a website – www.enneagraminstitute.com -to get my information and they serve me very well.

 

 

Love Sue x 

 

Isn’t it great when a plan comes together? I’m not sure whose plan this is but it seems as plain as the nose on your face that the worlds of science and spirituality/healing/therapy can’t completely avoid each other for much longer. I exaggerate, I know. Plenty of people on either side of that particular divide have been blurring the boundaries for many a moon but it’s getting more and more difficult for your average hard-liner to deny the obvious.

 

There is information aplenty for you to get hold of. A good place to start looking at how the effects of what the spiritual/energetic end of the market practices can actually be measured is with Lynne McTaggart’s books “The Field” and “The Intention Experiment”. Lynne is a journalist rather than a scientist or healer but she’s done a marvellous job of bringing together scientific data on all kinds if issues in an easily accessible and digestible way. Even better, she’s organising mass experimentation to demonstrate the power of thought in affecting physical reality. Fascinating.

 

Today, though, I’d like to be a bit more specific and talk about the field of epigenetics. Why epigentics? Because it’s startling stuff but also because I see such a clear link with Reference Point Therapy (RPT) which is the therapy I mainly practice these days. www.referencepointtherapy.com

 

 It’s incredibly effective and looking at epigenetics has helped me to understand why. And I’d like to share that with you. As the name suggests, epigenetics is to do with DNA. To kick off with, here’s a description from our good friend Wikipedia:

 

“ In biology, and specifically genetics, epigenetics is the study of inherited changes in phenotype (appearance) or gene expression caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence, hence the name epi- (Greek: επί- over, above) -genetics. These changes may remain through cell divisions for the remainder of the cell's life and may also last for multiple generations. However, there is no change in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism;^[1] instead, non-genetic factors cause the organism's genes to behave (or "express themselves") differently.^[2]

The modern usage of the word in scientific discourse is more narrow, referring to heritable traits (over rounds of cell division and sometimes transgenerationally) that do not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequence.^[7] The Greek prefix epi- in epigenetics implies features that are "on top of" or "in addition to" genetics; thus epigenetic traits exist on top of or in addition to the traditional molecular basis for inheritance.”

What epigenetics says is that what we are like is not straightforwardly determined by our DNA. Rather, the reality of it is pretty dynamic as our environment switches genes, and groups of genes, on and off. Our environment affects how our genes are expressed. It also affects how our children’s and grandchildren’s genes are expressed. The implications of this are enormous as we look at our environment today and for the last 50 years.

For a really clear explanation of this take a look at the documentary “The Ghost in Your Genes”. You can find it on youtube in five 10 minute parts. Part 1 is at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toRIkRa1fYU&feature=related

 

There are “aha” moments aplenty.

 

It’s a big subject so I’m going to concentrate on one little bit to get us going. The egg. An egg? Any egg? Your egg, actually. The egg which, when it combined with the winning sperm, created you.

 

That egg, along with millions of others, was formed inside one of your mother’s ovaries when she was a 9-12 week foetus inside her mother. What a thought!!

 

That egg had DNA inside it. As a cell inside your grandmother’s body it was directly affected by her environment. Directly affected. We’re not talking inheritance here. The DNA was already in place. But your grandmother’s environment had an epigenetic effect on the DNA in that egg cell.

 

The film “The Ghost in your Genes” looks at research done in Northern Norway in a village often afflicted by famine. The effects of famine in a woman could clearly be seen in her grandchildren. Not in her children, though they would have been directly physically affected themselves, but in her grandchildren.

 

So the effects of the external physical environment are illustrated. But there are other environments at work. It is now accepted that emotions are actually present as chemicals in the body. Our cells bobble around in a soup of these emotional chemicals. To read the science get “Molecules of Emotion” by Candace Pert, the researcher who actually did the work.  There’s an illustration of her findings in the movie “What the Bleep Do We Know”.

 

These emotional chemicals have a direct effect on our cells through receptors on the cells’ surface. Our mood, our state of mind, our feelings, then, create an internal environment that has an epigenetic effect which is picked up by that egg that has just formed in mum inside granny. Oh my!

 

It’s easy to feel doomed genetically and epigenetically but there’s no need. Genes that are switched on can be switched off and vice versa. How? Well I’m sure there’s science happening right now to come up with ways and means but we can do it ourselves.

 

RPT is all about getting down to the very root of an issue, the very bottom vibration or association that, in effect, switched on our sensitivity to something. Then we get back to the point at which that switch was flipped which is to say the point at which a gene or groups of genes was epigenetically switched on or off. Then we acknowledge it from our highest, shiniest, perfect selves. Acknowledgement is the key. It doesn’t DO anything, it simply allows us to Be our already perfect selves. The change then just IS. (More on this in the future).

 

So, there we are, science and healing together in the same room getting along just great.

 

For lots more information on RPT got to www.referencepointtherapy.com  You’ll find Simon Rose’s wonderful blog on there. There's a specific and really detailed post on epigenetics which you can find at http://www.referencepointtherapy.com/blog/2010/09/epigenetics-part-1/#more-613

 

For more on epigentics take a look at Bruce Lipton’s book “The Biology of Belief”. He’s an engaging and relatable writer as well as a very experienced scientist. If you google him you’ll find plenty of video clips of him speaking on this subject.

The EU has funded (yes! Put actual money into!) research into epigenetics. You’ll find the website with lots of interesting articles at  www.epigenome.eu

 

I’m sure we’ll revisit this subject but meanwhile I’d love to hear your views.

 

Love Sue x

Day 1 of the blogging age. Well, it is as far as I'm concerned.

There are fears, of course. Will I get it? I don't get Facebook and so many people rave about it I think I must be missing something huge and obvious, probably elephant-shaped and too close to see.

I refuse to Twitter and blogging seems morally superior to that somehow. Do people really want to know what a person is doing every minute of every day? Is every passing thought worthy of note? I suspect not. I'd forget to do it, anyway.

But how is a blog different? For one, it won't be about me. I know this post is but the rest won't be. Honest. They'll be about real things that really matter. 

Like what? Like how we can help our children understand themselves and the world a little better.

And how we can provide ways to help people raise their sights just a bit and wake themselves right up without having to pretend to be something other than what they really are.

There has to be a way in and up for everybody. That means that there can't just be one way. There are endless legions of blogs and sites that are way more "spiritual" than this one will be (at this point I really must point out that I never, ever use quotation marks lightly or without due consideration. I'd sooner have my bottom set on fire) and plenty that are way more disciplined and worthy (note the lack of quotation marks. I'm not taking the mick there) but neither of those suit me too well. I like practical ways and means that reflect the fact that we live here, now, on this earth and in these bodies.

We still have to go shopping because, here in the darkest depths of Wigan, no matter how much meditation I do (and I do), how much baggage I clear (and I do)  or how sparkly my aura is (not so sure about that one), squirrels will not leave gifts of fruits and nuts on my window sill so that I may be nourished without compromising my stratospheric vibrationary levels. I still have to pay the bills, do the laundry, work, cook, find time to talk to friends and family and still do the spiritual thing. I know that's going on all the time but you do have to pay focused attention once in a while. And I happen to believe that there are a lot of people like me. Millions.

La-la, twinkly practices and language, lovely as they are and much as I enjoy them, seem somewhat alien and exclusive to many people as does the prospect of practising yoga and meditation six hours a day. For people to change in great numbers I believe we have to find more inclusive and possible-seeming ways. That's what I do in my practice and in my courses, hopefully. Find stuff, change it, with the person rather than for them wherever possible. Explain as I'm going along in normal words in a normal voice. You'd laugh if I didn't.

This is a time of transformation. There is simply no denying that. My hopes for the world are enormous and sparkly and I'm sorry if I've given any other impression. There has to be a way for more people to find themselves, a leg-up for Joe Bloggs (ha-ha, see what I did there) that is relatable and accessible. It is my mission to get stuff out there in exactly that manner. Relatable and accessible. I hope it's how my classes come across and I hope it's how my clients see me. I also hope that the people I know who do not operate in this end of the market also see me in that way.

In future posts I will inevitably talk about Reference Point Therapy (RPT) because it's what I mainly practice and teach. It's a technique that I believe represents everything I've just said. It's simple, though very profound, and very effective. I acknowledge that there are other amazing techniques out there. The whole point is that you find and use what suits you.

I hope you'll find stuff that suits you here, too.

Enough rambling.

Love Sue X

PS Julia Roberts as Elizabeth Gilbert!!! Are you kidding? The book is fab, though, if a little la-la and twinkly and worthy on occasions. "Eat, Pray, Love".