Love is an essential human emotion. But is self love? Maybe as much as self hate? Love yes, but when that love is poured out into the world for all to bath in, that love radiates from every cell in our body, and becomes a gift for all around us.

Anxiety can be illusive. We can look calm and collected on the outside, but feel chocked and nauseas inside. Sometimes our anxiety is so intense there's no way of hiding it. But no matter how hideous it is... it is sadly normal

It can feel like Panic attacks spontaneously arise, but they are often building for weeks or months, and subtle threat responses like appeasement or socially acceptable behaviours like people pleasing can underpin their rise.

Generalised Anxiety is debilitating because the brain has become expert at being anxious. But all kinds of generalising exist. We can generalise balance, maths puzzles, baking, board games, painting, playing instruments. And we can generalise ease, comfort, calm, confidence, joy, pleasure, playfulness…

If you are quick to get anxious excitement is not a great reframe. Anxiety and Excitement are highly sympathetic states - Elevated heart rate, blood in the muscles, BUTTERFLIES in the stomach, SPEEDY, wriggly and sweaty. (they share about 80% of the same neurology). What we need is something completely different.

The word triggered is becoming a catch all for feeling upset, hurt, overwhelmed, agitated, stressed, anxious, angry, embarrassed… But diluting its meaning is not helping anyone and in some cases it’s hurting the PTSD community and those who are living with serious conditions.

There’s a prevailing idea in the social zeitgeist... YOU are triggering me. My awful experience is YOUR fault. But it’s backwards and it doesn’t allow for mature consensual relationships.

Feldenkrais is one of the most consensual movement practices I know. We mostly move alone, at our own pace, respect our limits and rest when we want. As a touch practitioner I’m sensing the limits of each clients body with precision. But this last decade I’ve been interrogating what it is to be a truly consensual practitioner.

One of the tenants of Feldenkrais is to go with the flow, we call it ‘going with the pattern’. We allow the nervous system to do what it is doing. We go with its preference and its bias. This is deeply comforting for the nervous system and it softens with thankfulness.

The more I learn about the Autonomic Nervous System the more I trust it with my life. After all it's been co-ordinating the lives of animals for millions of years. I think it knows what it's doing!