Posts by tweet047

Blog Hop: Women Writing Katie from The Cat Bed invited me to be part of this inspiring group of women sharing their writing on the internet. I met Katie when we were both training as art therapists, and we bonded over our love of writing and, of course, cats. I started writing at a very young age. I remember winning prizes in primary school for stories, book reviews and spelling bees. I loved words, and I read just about every book in our school library as well as the local library. I especially loved fairy tales. English was my favourite subject and the one I did best in, except for the days we had to do speeches. I much preferred the written word to the spoken one, and still do. I thought about being a journalist but ended up becoming a psychologist which,...

Introducing the new Soulful Life Sanctuary     Are you ready to slow down, exhale, and reconnect with your soul? Would you like to connect with like-minded people and support one another on your journeys? If you’re longing to relax, share openly, and experience deep connections, I’d love to introduce you to the Soulful Life Sanctuary. It’s a space where you can be your true, authentic self, be supported, and simply BE.   The Soulful Life Sanctuary includes a loving, supportive community, a virtual classroom/retreat center, and a set of tools/resources to help you live your most radiant, authentic, soulful life. It was created by my friend, Jodi Chapman (no we’re not related, but we pretend we’re long-lost cousins) – she’s...

3 Quick Ways to Get Control of Overactive Empathy This article first appeared on AnnaSayce.com on May 31 2010. Reprinted with permission of the author. You know when you get a glimpse into someone else’s emotional experience or their pain?  You can really feel it for a moment and sometimes it might bring you to tears or motivate you to help someone.  That’s empathy. Overactive empathy, on the other hand, is when you have that experience of opening up to someone else’s emotions and experience, but then instead of coming back to yourself afterwards and being centered in your own needs and feelings, you remain ‘out there’ – absorbed in everyone else’s ‘stuff’.  In social situations, you can sense what everyone else is feeling and thinking. ...

Waking The Tiger I have always been a deep sleeper, especially when I was a teenager. Very early one morning while it was still dark, my father suddenly burst into my room waking my 16 year old self with a flood of noise and light. He flung the light switch on and yelled at me for leaving the bathroom wall heater on all night. I shot straight up in bed, deeply shocked  by the intrusion into my space and my sleep. I am sensitive to bright lights and loud noises at any time, but particularly when wrenched from the deepest stages of sleep. Then he discovered it was my mother who left the bathroom heater on all night, not me. With that, he turned the light off, shut the door, and left me to lie in bed shaking all over until the sun came up, at which point I got up...

There’s Gold In Your Shadow Our shadow side represents the person we don’t want to be, all the aspects of ourselves we don’t want to express because of feelings of shame associated with them. We lock away the parts of ourselves we believe are unacceptable and we disown them. They lie dormant, rejected, and their absence leaves us less than whole. A Golden Shadow Sometimes what’s in our shadow isn’t dark at all, it’s the positive aspects of ourselves we’ve rejected because they shine too brightly for those around us, or because a calling to a noble cause overwhelms us and we aren’t sure we’re up to the task. Jung referred to this as the Golden Shadow – our beauty, knowledge and power which we reject and even...