Written by Céline Kusters, Yoga Teacher Céline Kusters is a certified yoga teacher and founder of Namunyak Yoga. Driven by the mission to show that yoga is for everybody and every body, she offers simple, accessible, and down-to-earth practices, on and off the mat, that help people cultivate balance, ease, and presence in everyday life. Starting yoga can feel a little intimidating, especially when you’re surrounded by perfect poses, flexible bodies and unfamiliar Sanskrit terms. It certainly felt intimidating for me before I started practising. I used to think you needed to be flexible, know what you were doing or somehow already be “good” at yoga before stepping onto a mat. But if I’d known then what I know now, I probably would have started yoga much sooner. Because in reality, so much of what I worried about simply didn’t matter. In this article, I share 10 things I wish I’d known before I started, because they probably would have saved me from waiting so long to begin. What no one tells you about yoga I spent a lot of time worrying about whether I was “good enough” for yoga. There are so many little assumptions that can make yoga feel intimidating before you’ve even stepped onto the mat. Things like thinking you need to be flexible or strong, worrying about what to wear, or feeling like everyone is watching when you can’t quite get into a pose. But the more you practise, the more you realise that none of these things are the point. Yoga is about so much more than how a pose looks, it can change the way you see yourself, how you move through the world and how connected you feel to who you really are. These are the 10 things I wish I’d known before I started practising You don’t have to be flexible: Not being flexible is the number one argument I hear when someone says yoga isn’t for them. But it turns out that you don’t need to be able to touch your toes or fold yourself into complicated poses to start yoga. Flexibility is something that can develop with practice, not a requirement you need to meet beforehand. You don’t have to be fit or strong: When you see all those super fit people on Instagram practising yoga, it is easy to think that you need to be fit before you practise yoga. But yoga is for all bodies and all fitness levels. You might find some poses challenging at first, but you’ll gradually build strength and confidence simply by showing up and practising. Most of yoga isn’t even physical. You can wear whatever you want: All those people practising yoga in their expensive matching workout clothes may have made you believe otherwise, but there’s no special yoga uniform you need to buy before your first class. Wear whatever makes you feel comfortable and allows you to move freely, even if that means you practise in your pyjamas. You don’t need the perfect outfit to have a meaningful practice. Using props is not embarrassing and doesn’t mean you’re bad: For some reason, people see using props as a failure. But using blocks, straps, bolsters and blankets isn’t a sign that you’re struggling or that you’re bad at yoga. In fact, I use props all the time because that’s what my body needs. Props are tools that can help you find more comfort, stability and awareness in a pose, no matter how experienced you are. Falling is not embarrassing: You’re going to wobble, lose your balance and probably fall out of a pose at some point, and that’s completely normal. Everyone falls out of poses sometimes. The real practice is learning to laugh, reset and try again. It doesn’t matter if you can’t do all of the poses: Not every pose is made for every body. There will always be poses that feel uncomfortable or unfamiliar, or simply aren’t right for your body. Yoga isn’t about being able to do every pose. It is about paying attention to what feels right in your body. No one in your class is paying as much attention to you as you think: It’s easy to feel like everyone in the room is watching you, especially when you’re new. But most people are focused on their own practice, their own balance and whether they remembered to breathe. They don’t care if you fall out of a pose or take a break. It is so much more than just the poses: We often talk about yoga as a physical practice, but yoga is so much more than that. Actually, most yoga practices happen off the mat. Breathwork, meditation, how you treat yourself, how you treat other people, how you move through your day, how you handle change or frustration. It is all part of your yoga practice. It will help you truly become yourself: Nothing has helped me connect to myself more than yoga. Yoga gives you space to slow down and pay attention to what’s going on beneath the noise of everyday life. The more you connect with yourself, the easier it becomes to understand what you need, what matters to you and who you really are. It will change your life: You might start yoga because you want to become more flexible or try something new, but eventually you will discover that it does so much more than that. Yoga will help you feel more present, grounded and connected, and that can gradually change the way you experience everyday life. Looking back, I wish I’d known that I didn’t need to change anything about myself before I started yoga. I didn’t need to be flexible, strong or confident, and I certainly didn’t need to be able to do every pose. I just needed to show up and be willing to try. But most importantly, I wish I’d known how much yoga can change your life. Because ultimately, yoga isn’t about perfect poses or how you look on the mat. It’s about learning to listen to yourself, letting go of expectations and becoming more comfortable with who you are. You don’t have to be ready for yoga. You just have to start. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Céline Kusters Céline Kusters, Yoga Teacher Céline Kusters is a certified yoga teacher and founder of Namunyak Yoga. With a background shaped by personal healing and professional training, she’s dedicated to making yoga accessible, inclusive, and practical. Through her classes, social media, and writing, she shares practical, down-to-earth ways to integrate yoga into daily life and help people find ease, balance, and connection. Céline’s mission is to show you that yoga is for everybody and every body, and that even a few mindful breaths can change how you move through the world.

Written by Sarah Hurst, Coach & Creator of the Mind Medicine Movement™ Drawing on her own healing journey through cancer, Sarah Hurst is a coach and creator of the Mind Medicine Movement™. She helps people calm the nervous system, reconnect with themselves, and take back their power to heal body, mind, and soul. Cancer or serious illness can fundamentally change the relationship you have with your body. A sensation that once meant very little can suddenly feel loaded with possibility, while scars, treatment effects, fatigue or physical changes can leave you wondering whether the body you once moved through life in without much thought can ever feel like home again. Even when treatment has finished or scans are reassuring, it can be surprisingly difficult to simply return to the way things felt before. Rebuilding trust does not mean ignoring symptoms or convincing yourself that nothing difficult will happen again. It means gradually learning to listen to your body without living in fear of it, while also trusting yourself enough to respond when something genuinely needs attention. That can be a delicate balance, particularly when experience has already taught you that sometimes the body really does have something important to say. What is body trust? Before illness, many of us barely think about whether we trust our bodies. We simply live in them. We get tired and assume we need sleep. Our back aches and we wonder whether we slept awkwardly, or we notice a headache and think about hydration, stress or too much screen time. Most ordinary sensations are allowed to come and go without needing to mean very much. Cancer can change that innocence. After diagnosis, the body can begin to feel like something that needs monitoring rather than simply inhabiting. A pain, lump, unusual tiredness or change in digestion may no longer feel neutral because experience has taught you that bodies can sometimes deliver frightening news. The mind learns that physical sensations can carry significance, and once that has happened, it can be very difficult to completely unlearn. For me, body trust is not the belief that your body will never become ill again. That would be an impossible promise. It is developing a relationship in which you can notice what is happening, listen and respond without every sensation immediately becoming a threat. It is trusting yourself enough to know that if something genuinely concerns you, you can seek appropriate medical advice, while also allowing your body to have ordinary aches, tired days and changing sensations without instantly assuming the worst. That middle ground between ignoring the body and constantly policing it is where trust can begin to grow. Why illness changes the relationship Cancer treatment can alter both how the body looks and how it feels. Surgery, scars, weight changes, hair loss, fatigue, menopause, altered sensation, fertility changes and many other effects can all influence how someone experiences themselves physically and emotionally. The National Cancer Institute’s guidance on self-image and cancer recognises that changes related to treatment can affect how people feel about themselves, sometimes bringing anger, grief and concerns about appearance, relationships or sexuality. Macmillan also acknowledges something I hear frequently in my work: after cancer, people may feel as though they have lost part of themselves or that they cannot trust their body anymore. There is another layer that goes beyond appearance. Your body may have become the place where frightening things happened. It was examined, scanned, injected, operated on, treated and monitored, often while you were dealing with an enormous amount emotionally. Decisions may have been made quickly because they needed to be, and during treatment the body can begin to feel less like somewhere you live and more like something being medically managed. When treatment slows down, that emotional relationship does not automatically reset. The appointments may become less frequent and other people may assume life is returning to normal, but internally you can still feel very different. The body you once took for granted may now feel unpredictable, changed or somehow less trustworthy, and rebuilding that relationship can take time. There may also be grief within this. We sometimes rush too quickly towards body positivity, encouraging people to celebrate their scars or feel grateful for what their body survived. That can be meaningful for some people, but it should never become another expectation. You are allowed to dislike what happened to your body, to miss how you felt before treatment or to grieve energy, fertility, sexual confidence, hair, breasts, reproductive organs, physical strength or simply the freedom of not thinking about your health every day. Acceptance does not require pretending those losses do not matter. Sometimes compassion begins with allowing yourself to say, “I wish this had not happened,” without immediately trying to turn the experience into gratitude. When awareness becomes surveillance Paying attention to your body after cancer is sensible. New or persistent symptoms deserve appropriate medical attention, and follow-up care exists for good reason. But there is an important difference between awareness and surveillance, and understanding that distinction can make a huge difference to the way we live. Awareness might sound like, “I have noticed this. I will keep an eye on it, and if it persists or concerns me, I will seek advice.” Surveillance feels more like, “I must constantly check because danger could be anywhere.” One is attentive and responsive, the other can become exhausting because the body is being continually searched for evidence that something might be wrong. Fear of recurrence can make that constant monitoring feel almost impossible to switch off. You may press the same area repeatedly, compare one side of your body with the other, analyse fatigue, inspect your skin, search symptoms online or mentally catalogue sensations that previously would have passed unnoticed. The more closely we scan ourselves for danger, the more sensations we find, because the body is never completely silent. This can create a difficult loop. Fear increases monitoring, monitoring produces more sensations to analyse, and those sensations then create more fear. Before long, listening to the body no longer feels like connection. It feels like interrogation. The answer is not to stop listening. It is to change the quality of the listening. Trust is different from certainty One of the biggest things cancer taught me is that certainty and trust are not the same thing. Certainty says, “Nothing bad will happen.” Trust says, “If something happens, I will respond.” For me, that distinction changed a great deal. Trying to guarantee that nothing would ever be wrong with my body again was impossible. Every scan, blood test or unfamiliar sensation could potentially reopen the question, and no amount of reassurance could permanently remove that uncertainty. What I could begin building, however, was trust in myself. I could trust that I would notice meaningful changes, ask questions and seek medical advice when needed rather than disappearing immediately into internet searches and fear. Most importantly, I could begin trusting that I did not have to spend today rehearsing every difficult possibility that might happen tomorrow. That does not mean dismissing symptoms or talking ourselves out of legitimate concern. It means recognising the difference between what is happening in the body and the story fear immediately builds around it. Suppose you wake with back pain. The sensation itself is real, but the mind may rapidly add, “What if it is cancer? What if it has spread? What if this is how it starts?” Within seconds, a physical sensation has become an imagined future. A gentler approach is to separate the sensation from the interpretation: “My back is aching today. I have noticed it. I will see how it changes, and if it persists, worsens or concerns me, I will contact my healthcare team.” This is not dismissing the symptom. It is responding proportionately to the information currently available. Body trust is not about ignoring signals. It is about allowing the body to communicate without fear immediately translating every message into catastrophe. This connects closely with what I explored in Why Your Body Still Reacts After Stress or Trauma. The nervous system learns from experience, and sometimes the body reacts to what happened before rather than what is happening now. Part of rebuilding trust is learning to recognise when an old alarm has been activated, while still knowing when it is appropriate to seek medical advice. Rebuilding through experience Trust is rarely rebuilt through one dramatic mindset shift. More often, it develops through small experiences repeated over time, many of which seem almost too ordinary to matter. You take a walk and your body carries you. You rest when you are tired and discover that listening did not make you weak. You notice an ache, monitor it sensibly and it passes. You attend an appointment, feel anxious and still get through it. You stretch, swim, dance, garden, practise yoga or simply stand outside and notice your feet on the ground. Gradually, these experiences widen the relationship you have with your body. Instead of the body being primarily a source of threat, it also becomes the thing that allows you to experience warmth, movement, pleasure, laughter, touch, nature and connection. Research into positive body image after cancer supports this broader relationship. Studies of women following breast cancer have identified themes including self-care, supportive relationships, valuing what the body can do, and developing a sense of worth beyond appearance. This does not mean forcing yourself to love every part of your body or pretending treatment did not change you. Sometimes a more realistic starting point is simply becoming willing to live in your body again. Function can become particularly meaningful here. What does your body still allow you to experience? Perhaps it allows you to hug somebody you love, walk along the seafront, feel warm water, taste food, hear music, sit in the sunshine or hold a grandchild's hand. Some days, the answer may be less poetic. Your body simply got you out of bed, but that still counts. A study exploring positive body image among breast cancer survivors found that some women increasingly valued body functionality and health rather than focusing primarily on appearance. This does not require gratitude for cancer or denial of physical loss. It simply broadens the lens through which the body is viewed. The body becomes more than the place where illness happened. It is also the place where life continues to happen. Touch, choice and connection Touch has become an important part of my own work because illness can leave people feeling strangely disconnected from their bodies. During cancer care, so much touch has a medical purpose. There may be examinations, cannulation, surgery, procedures, scans and monitoring, and even when that care is compassionate, the body is still being touched because something needs to be assessed or treated. Safe, nurturing touch can feel very different. Within an appropriate scope of practice, consensual therapeutic touch can become an experience of being cared for rather than examined. There is nothing the body has to perform and nothing being searched for or diagnosed. This is something I explored more fully in my Brainz article on how touch therapy supports nervous system regulation. For some people, massage, touching their own body, skincare or simply placing a hand gently over the heart can begin to soften the relationship with the body. For others, direct touch may initially feel difficult, particularly after invasive treatment or trauma, and that boundary deserves complete respect. The purpose is never to force connection, but to allow the body to experience choice, safety and gentleness again. This is one of the reasons I believe choice itself matters so much. Illness can create periods where much of life feels beyond our control, and medical treatment often involves doing what needs to be done rather than what we would necessarily choose. Small acts of choice can therefore become surprisingly meaningful, whether that is deciding when you want touch, how you want to move, when you need rest or what kind of support feels right for you. Reconnection begins when the body stops feeling like something being done to and starts feeling like something you are in relationship with again. Self-compassion builds trust We often assume trust will return once the body behaves differently, once the fatigue disappears, the scan is clear, the pain stops or we look more like the person we remember. But there is another route, and that is changing the way we respond to the body we have today. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 24 studies involving more than 3,600 people affected by cancer found that higher self-compassion was associated with lower psychological distress, including anxiety, depression, and stress. The findings do not mean self-compassion removes the emotional impact of cancer, but they do support its value as a psychological resource throughout the cancer experience. Self compassion can sound soft, but in practice it can be very grounded. It means noticing when you are exhausted without calling yourself lazy, recognising fear without judging yourself for having it and respecting the limits of your body today without deciding those limits define your future. It also means offering yourself some of the patience you would instinctively give somebody else who was going through the same thing. Trust struggles to grow in a relationship dominated by criticism. If we are constantly angry with the body, disappointed by it, comparing it with how it used to be or demanding that it recover according to our timetable, it is very difficult to feel connected to it. Compassion does not mean we have to like every change. It means we stop making the body our enemy. That shift can be profound. Instead of asking, “Why is my body doing this to me?” we may gradually begin asking, “What does my body need from me today?” Knowing when to seek help Rebuilding body trust should never mean ignoring genuine medical concerns. If you notice a new, persistent or worsening symptom, or something simply does not feel right to you, contact your healthcare team. You do not need to decide by yourself whether something is significant enough, and appropriate medical reassurance can itself be part of rebuilding trust. The same is true when anxiety becomes overwhelming. Macmillan advises speaking to your healthcare team when concerns about body changes or anxiety begin to affect daily life or prevent you from doing things you would normally enjoy. There is no prize for coping alone, and different forms of support can play different roles. Medical care, psychological support, coaching and complementary wellbeing practices are not interchangeable, but they can work alongside one another when used appropriately. Part of taking back your power is knowing when something belongs with your doctor, when it needs emotional support and when a restorative practice may simply help you feel more connected to yourself. Trusting your body also means trusting yourself enough to ask for help. Learning to be on the same side Perhaps rebuilding trust after cancer is not really about trusting that the body will never change, hurt or frighten you again. Bodies are human. They age, ache, heal, adapt and sometimes become ill, and cancer can make us painfully aware of that in a way we may never have considered before. Maybe the deeper trust is knowing that you will listen, respond and ask for help when you need it. You can choose not to ignore your body while also refusing to spend every day interrogating it. You can acknowledge fear without making fear the only voice you listen to. Gradually, the body can become something more than an object of surveillance. It can begin to feel like home again, although perhaps not exactly the same home you lived in before cancer. There may be scars, changed rooms, unexpected limitations and parts you are still learning to understand, but it is still yours. Healing is not always about getting the old relationship back. Sometimes it is about building a new one, with more awareness, more compassion and perhaps a deeper appreciation for what it means to live inside a human body that has been through something significant. If cancer, illness or treatment has changed the relationship you have with your body and you would value support in rebuilding safety, trust and connection, you can explore my coaching and the Mind Medicine Movement™. You do not need to force yourself to love your body. Sometimes the gentler place to begin is simply learning how to be on the same side again. Follow me on Facebook and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Sarah Hurst Sarah Hurst, Coach & Creator of the Mind Medicine Movement™ After walking her own path through cancer, Sarah Hurst discovered that true healing isn’t just physical, it’s emotional, spiritual, and deeply personal. She went on to create the Mind Medicine Movement™, helping others calm their nervous systems, rediscover purpose, and reconnect with themselves through her SIPS™ framework: Slow Down, Identity, Purpose, Self-Love. Today, Sarah supports people living with or beyond cancer and anyone seeking calm, clarity, and wellness through her coaching, meditation, and touch therapy practice in Hove, East Sussex. She also offers an online coaching service.

Written by Richard Harrison, Founder of Compassionate Breath | Breath, Sound & Meditation Facilitator Richard Harrison is a breath, sound & meditation facilitator and founder of Compassionate Breath. With a rich background in yoga, meditation, and breathwork, he empowers individuals to transform trauma into resilience through his unique blend of breath, sound, and symbolic geometry. In a world of constant connectivity and competing demands, the workplace can be a source of achievement, but also of stress and depletion. Organisations increasingly recognise the importance of employee wellbeing, yet the pressures of modern working life can leave little room to pause, reflect and reconnect. What if workplace wellbeing included not only how we think and move, but also how we breathe, listen and experience the environments around us? I use the term energetic wellbeing to describe our felt sense of vitality, balance and connection, and how this can be influenced by our breathing, surroundings, interactions and opportunities for stillness. It brings together practical wellbeing approaches with a wider interest in awareness, resonance and our relationship with the world around us. By incorporating breath, sound, stillness and creative exploration into working life, organisations can offer people opportunities to pause and experience a different rhythm within the working day. Understanding energetic wellbeing Energetic wellbeing is not a single clinical measure or a formally defined scientific discipline. In this article, it provides a framework for exploring how our sense of energy, attention and connection relates to our internal experience and the environments we inhabit. Four elements are central to this approach. Breath: Returning to the present Breathing is something we do continuously, often without noticing it. Bringing gentle awareness to the breath can create an opportunity to pause and settle. Slow, comfortable breathing has been associated with changes in heart rate variability, a measure of variation in the time between heartbeats.[1] Sound: Creating space to listen Sound influences how we experience an environment. Music and gentle acoustic sounds can become part of a relaxing or reflective experience, offering a change of pace from the usual workplace noise. Singing bowls, chimes and other instruments can be incorporated into guided sound sessions, although individual responses will vary and the evidence for specific therapeutic effects is still developing.[2] Stillness: Making room for awareness A brief period of quiet, meditation or reflection can interrupt the momentum of a busy day. Stillness is not about emptying the mind or achieving a particular state. It is an invitation to notice what is happening, without immediately needing to respond. Creative exploration: Seeing things differently Visual art, reflective prompts and creative practices can offer alternative ways of engaging with an environment or an experience. Thoughtfully chosen artwork and quieter spaces may help create an atmosphere that feels more conducive to reflection. Their value lies in the experience and meaning they offer, rather than any assumed universal effect. Together, these elements provide a flexible approach to creating moments of pause, awareness and reconnection. The cost of ignoring wellbeing When people spend prolonged periods under pressure, the effects can become visible in many ways. Tiredness, irritability, difficulty concentrating and a feeling of disconnection can all make working life more challenging. These experiences rarely have a single cause. Workload, uncertainty, the physical environment, relationships and the degree of control people have over their work can all play a part. Individual wellbeing practices cannot resolve every workplace difficulty. A breathing exercise will not compensate for an unmanageable workload, and a relaxing sound session cannot replace supportive leadership or healthy working conditions. However, creating opportunities to pause can be one part of a wider culture that recognises people as human beings, not simply as units of productivity. For me, this understanding is personal. From survival to a different perspective There was a time when I felt caught in a cycle of stress, anxiety and depletion. I woke up tired, carried tension through the day and measured my experience by how much I endured rather than by what I found meaningful. Gradually, I began exploring breathing practices and ways of managing stress. Conscious breathing gave me an opportunity to pause, notice my experience and approach difficult moments differently. Over time, this became part of a wider personal journey involving yoga, meditation, relaxation and sound. These practices did not remove every challenge, but they helped me discover the value of creating space rather than remaining caught in the momentum of everyday life. That experience helped shape the work I do today through Compassionate Breath, sharing practices that invite others to pause, breathe and reconnect with themselves. It also influenced my interest in bringing these experiences into the workplace, where the pressures of modern life can make such pauses especially valuable. Bringing wellbeing into the working day Energetic wellbeing need not begin with a substantial programme or a complete redesign of the working environment. Small, voluntary practices can provide a starting point. 1. Introduce breathing pauses Invite employees to take a few minutes to settle before a meeting or at a natural break in the day. Encourage gentle, comfortable breathing rather than demanding a particular rhythm. For those who find paced breathing comfortable, a simple pattern is to breathe in gently for about five seconds and out for about five seconds, without holding the breath. The timing should be adjusted to the individual, and anyone who feels uncomfortable or light-headed should return to their natural breathing. A simple practice: The coherence breath Sit comfortably, with your feet supported and your shoulders relaxed. Bring your attention to your natural breathing. If it feels comfortable, gradually allow the breath to become slower and steadier, without forcing it. Continue for a minute or two, noticing the gentle rhythm of breathing. If helpful, use a simple reflection on the inhale, such as “I am here”, and on the exhale, “I allow myself to pause”. There is no need to achieve a particular result. The purpose is simply to create a moment of awareness within the working day. 2. Make space for sound and stillness Consider offering optional guided relaxation, meditation or sound sessions as part of a wellbeing day or staff programme. Live instruments and gentle sound can provide a distinctive experience, while quiet spaces can offer employees somewhere to pause away from busy environments. Preferences differ, so participation should be voluntary, with quiet alternatives available for anyone who does not find sound-based practices comfortable. 3. Consider the surrounding environment Lighting, noise, layout and visual surroundings influence how a space is experienced. Plants, artwork and thoughtfully arranged quiet areas can help make spaces feel more welcoming and provide opportunities for reflection. Some people also find symbolic imagery or geometric artwork personally meaningful. These can be included as creative or aesthetic choices, without assuming that any particular design has a proven physiological effect. 4. Let leadership set the tone Wellbeing is influenced by the wider culture of an organisation. Leaders can help by taking breaks themselves, encouraging reasonable boundaries, listening to staff concerns and making time for reflection. The aim is not to add another obligation to an already busy schedule. It is to make wellbeing part of how work is approached. Evaluating what works Workplace wellbeing initiatives should respond to the needs of the people taking part. Simple feedback can help organisations understand whether a session feels useful, accessible and appropriate. Anonymous feedback, voluntary participation and short follow-up questions can provide insight into how employees experience an initiative and whether they would like similar opportunities in future. Heart rate variability may be useful in specific research or biofeedback settings, but it is not a simple measure of an individual's wellbeing, resilience or workplace performance. There is usually no need to collect physiological data to evaluate a short relaxation or sound session. The most useful measure is whether an initiative offers something genuinely valuable to the people involved, while sitting alongside wider efforts to create healthy working conditions. A more human approach to work Energetic wellbeing invites us to broaden the way we think about our experience of work. Alongside physical health and mental resilience, there is value in paying attention to our breathing, our surroundings, our interactions and our opportunities to be still. Breath, sound, reflection and creative exploration are not universal solutions, and they should not be presented as substitutes for addressing the underlying causes of workplace stress. They can, however, offer accessible ways to create moments of pause within the working day. For me, the principle is simple: when we make room to breathe, listen and reconnect, we create an opportunity to meet the rest of the day with greater awareness. The future of workplace wellbeing need not be about adding more to the schedule. Sometimes, it begins by making a little space. Bringing energetic wellbeing into your workplace Compassionate Breath offers workplace experiences combining guided breathing, live sound, stillness and creative exploration. From shorter workplace resets to immersive sessions and bespoke team retreats, each experience can be shaped around the people, environment and intentions involved. For organisations interested in exploring a different approach to workplace wellbeing, visit here. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Richard Harrison Richard Harrison, Founder of Compassionate Breath | Breath, Sound & Meditation Facilitator Richard Harrison is a breath, sound & meditation facilitator and the founder of Compassionate Breath, where he integrates compassion, stillness, and remembering to help individuals transform trauma into resilience. Through a unique blend of breath, sound, and symbolic geometry, he empowers others to reclaim their sovereignty and live authentically. Richard’s mission is to harmonise the human experience through coherence and compassion, offering transformative practices that resonate deeply with those seeking healing and alignment. References: [1] Laborde, S. et al. (2022). “Effects of voluntary slow breathing on heart rate and heart rate variability: A systematic review and a meta-analysis.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 138, 104711. [2] Cai, Y. et al. (2025). “Therapeutic effects of singing bowls: A systematic review of clinical studies.” Integrative Medicine Research, 14(2), 101144.

Written by Stacey Jane, Founder, Life Coach, & Radio Host Stacey Jane is a Self-Leadership Coach who helps capable women and business owners stop betraying themselves and lead their life, relationships, and decisions under pressure. She is known for helping capable women and business owners stop betraying themselves and learn how to lead their life, relationships, and decisions under pressure, with clarity, regulation, and integrity. We love to separate things that are not actually separate. Health over here. Career over there. Relationships in another category entirely. As though these areas of life exist in neat, independent compartments that do not influence each other. But they do. The way you look after your body is directly connected to the way you show up for your work, your relationships, your family, and yourself. Your physical health is not a lifestyle choice alongside your goals. It is the infrastructure your goals are built on. The gym is the most selfish place you will ever walk into I mean that as a compliment. No one can go for you. No one can do the reps on your behalf, lose the weight in your place, or build your strength for you. It is one of the only things in life that cannot be outsourced, delegated, or shortcut. You either show up or you don’t. The results reflect exactly that. In a world where we can pay someone to do almost anything, this is radical. In that constraint is something quietly powerful: the daily proof that you are capable of showing up for yourself, doing hard things, and earning a result through effort alone. What a health and fitness journey actually builds When people begin a fitness journey, they think they’re building a body. They are. But they are building far more than that. A genuine, sustained commitment to your physical health, not a crash diet, not a 12-week challenge abandoned in week four, but a real practice, builds: Determination: the ability to show up when you don’t want to Discipline: doing what you committed to, independent of how you feel in the moment Patience: trusting a process even when you cannot yet see the result Resilience: bouncing back when you fall off, without making it mean everything about who you are These are not fitness qualities. They are life qualities. The same qualities are required to build a business, sustain a relationship, raise children, and lead yourself through every challenge life puts in front of you. What you build in the gym does not stay in the gym. It follows you into every room you walk into. The science is not separate from the story Beyond the mindset, there is well-established science connecting your physical health to your cognitive performance, emotional regulation, and quality of life: Exercise increases blood flow to the brain, directly improving focus, decision-making, and creative thinking, all of which matter enormously in business and career performance. Consistent movement regulates the nervous system. A person who exercises regularly is physiologically better equipped to stay calm under pressure, communicate without reactivity, and manage their emotions in high-stakes situations. The gut-brain connection is well documented. What you eat and how you move directly influence your mood, your mental clarity, and your energy levels throughout the day. Strength training in particular has been shown to reduce anxiety and depression, build self-efficacy, and improve sleep quality, all of which affect everything else. You cannot separate your physical health from your mental and emotional health. They are the same system, operating together. What this looks like in real life I am not talking about perfection. Not six days a week in the gym and a restrictive eating plan that leaves you miserable. I am talking about a sustainable, consistent practice that supports the life you are building. When you move your body consistently, you think more clearly. When you eat in a way that nourishes you, your mood stabilises. When your energy is high, your patience increases. When your patience increases, your relationships improve. When your relationships improve, your home life settles. When your home life settles, you perform better at work. Everything is connected. The question is not whether you have time to prioritise your health. The question is: what is it costing you not to? Leadership without physiology is unstable You can have the clearest strategy in the world. You can know exactly what you need to do. But if your nervous system is dysregulated, your energy is depleted, and you are running on poor sleep and chronic stress, your execution will suffer. Every time. The most underrated performance tool is not a new program or a better coach. It is a body that is strong, rested, and well. From that place, you make better decisions. You communicate more clearly. You hold more under pressure. You enjoy the work. You actually show up for the life you are building, rather than just surviving it. Your body is not a side project. It is the infrastructure your entire life runs on. Start where you are This is not a call to overhaul everything overnight. It is a call to stop treating your body as the last item on the list, the thing you will get to once everything else is sorted. Because everything else will never be sorted if you keep deprioritising the one thing that makes everything else possible. Start small. Start consistently. Start now. Not because it will change how you look, although it will, but because it will change how you feel, how you think, and how you lead yourself. That version of you shows up differently everywhere she goes. Movement and embodiment are two of the core pillars inside the Good Girl Gone Bad world because I know firsthand how much a consistent physical practice changes everything else. If you’re ready to build from the inside out, start here. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Stacey Jane Stacey Jane, Founder, Life Coach, & Radio Host Stacey Jane is a Self-Leadership Coach, business mentor, and founder of Stacey Jane Coaching and the Good Girl Gone Bad movement. Before coaching, she built what looked, from the outside, like the right life, the career, the marriage, the house, the stability. Underneath it, she was disconnected, self-abandoning, and running on autopilot. So she made the decisions most people avoid. She ended her marriage. Sold her house. Walked away from corporate. Not to start over, but to finally start leading herself. That shift became the foundation of her work. With a decade of experience in corporate construction and over six years in coaching, Stacey helps her clients break patterns, communicate effectively, and follow through consistently, with clarity, emotional regulation, and integrity. Through her private coaching, Good Girl Gone Bad Academy, courses, podcast, radio show, and speaking, she is known for her direct, no-fluff approach that creates real, lasting change.

Written by Helen Kenworthy, Artistic Director Helen champions the arts as a tool for change. Now, as CEO of RYTC Creatives Community Interest Company (CIC) and Give Get Go Education, she mentors young people, creates pathways for them to thrive in the arts, and helps launch successful careers. There is a particular kind of doubt that arrives just before a parent asks for something different for their child. It usually sounds something like this: Am I overreacting? Is this really necessary? Will people think I am giving up too easily? That doubt rarely reflects the strength of the evidence in front of them. It reflects how strongly parents have been taught to distrust their own read of the situation. Helen Kenworthy's work through Of Course You Can!™, serving the brilliantly underestimated, starts from a simple but often overlooked truth. A parent who senses that their child is not, in the fullest sense, available for learning inside their current environment is not being unreasonable. They are noticing something real, and that noticing deserves to be taken seriously rather than second-guessed into silence. Being available for learning means more than simply being present in a classroom. It means feeling safe enough to concentrate, regulated enough to engage, and understood enough to try without fear of getting it wrong. A child can attend every day and never once reach that state, and a parent who notices this is not exaggerating a minor issue. They are describing exactly the kind of barrier that genuinely prevents learning. Many parents who eventually seek an alternative describe the same pattern beforehand: months, sometimes years, spent quietly wondering whether they were the problem or simply not managing their child well enough before finally trusting what they had suspected all along. That delay is rarely caused by a lack of evidence. It is caused by a lack of permission. This article looks at why parental instinct is so often doubted rather than trusted, what it actually means for a child to be unavailable for learning, and eleven practical ways that validating a parent's instinct changes what happens next for their child. Why parental instinct is so often doubted Parents are frequently the first to notice that something is wrong, and yet they are often the last to be believed, partly because a parent's account is treated as emotional rather than evidential, and partly because questioning a system is far less comfortable than questioning the parent standing in front of it. This creates an uneven starting point. A teacher's observation, recorded briefly during a busy day, can carry more institutional weight than a parent's detailed account built from months of close, daily attention. Not because the parent's evidence is weaker, but because it arrives without the authority a system automatically extends to itself. Over time, many parents learn to soften their own language to avoid being dismissed, describing a serious concern as a small worry, or a clear pattern as a vague feeling. This makes them easier to overlook, precisely at the moment their instinct was most worth listening to. What it actually means to be unavailable for learning A child who is unavailable for learning is not simply a child who is misbehaving or falling behind. They are a child whose nervous system, emotional state, or sense of safety is too occupied with managing the environment around them to have any real capacity left for actual learning. In practice, this might look like a child who spends the school day monitoring noise, movement, or social threat rather than listening to a lesson, or a child whose anxiety about being wrong is so constant that no new information can genuinely land. It might mean a child who has become so focused on simply surviving the day that curiosity, the very thing learning depends on, has nowhere left to exist. Recognising this distinction matters enormously. A child who is unavailable for learning does not need more instruction delivered more forcefully. They need the underlying barrier addressed before any instruction can reach them at all. Signs a child is not truly available for learning A child rarely states plainly that they are too overwhelmed to learn. More often, a parent notices it through a collection of smaller signals building over time. These may include: Coming home each day exhausted in a way that seems disproportionate to what actually happened at school Retaining very little of what was taught, despite appearing to sit through the lesson Increasing dread or physical symptoms in the lead-up to school, particularly on a Sunday evening Meltdowns or shutdowns immediately after school that seem to release a whole day of held tension A widening gap between how a child manages at home and how they are described at school Losing interest in subjects or activities they once genuinely enjoyed Describing school primarily in terms of what they had to survive rather than what they learned None of these signs are proof on their own. Together, over time, they form exactly the kind of pattern a parent is best placed to notice, because no one else observes their child as closely or as consistently as they do. The professional's role in believing the parent first Within Helen Kenworthy's approach, a professional's role begins with believing a parent's account before testing it, rather than testing it before believing any of it. This does not mean accepting every detail without question. It means starting from respect rather than suspicion. A professional who believes the parent first will ask what they have observed in detail, will take a pattern seriously even before formal assessment confirms it, and will treat the parent as a genuine partner in understanding the child, rather than an obstacle to be managed or reassured out of concern. This shift matters because a parent who feels disbelieved becomes far less able to describe what they are seeing clearly. Trust, extended early, tends to produce exactly the honest, detailed account that good decision-making depends on. What genuine validation from a professional involves Listening fully: hearing a parent's full account before offering an interpretation of it Taking patterns seriously: treating repeated observation as meaningful evidence, not anecdote Avoiding automatic reassurance: resisting the urge to say everything is fine before genuinely looking Naming uncertainty honestly: admitting when more information is needed, rather than dismissing the concern instead Respecting parental expertise: recognising that daily, close observation is its own form of genuine evidence Acting without unnecessary delay: treating a credible pattern as worth responding to promptly, not eventually Where dismissal teaches a parent to doubt themselves, genuine validation teaches them that their attention was worth trusting all along, and that trust often becomes the foundation for everything that follows. Why this matters for the brilliantly underestimated Parents of brilliantly underestimated children are especially likely to be told they are overreacting, precisely because their child's difficulty does not always match the more familiar, easily recognised patterns a system is trained to look for. A child who is highly capable in some respects and deeply overwhelmed in others is often the hardest to advocate for, because their evident intelligence is used, unfairly, as evidence against the parent's concern. Surely a child this bright cannot really be struggling this much. Yet capability and genuine struggle are not opposites, and a parent who insists on this distinction is not being difficult. They are being accurate. Validating parental instinct protects these children from a particular kind of harm: being kept in an environment that quietly exhausts them, simply because their difficulty was too easily explained away by how capable they otherwise appeared. Turning this into action through the Creative Pathway Methodology This is where the philosophy behind The RYTC, Education Selection Box, and the guidance in When School Doesn't Fit becomes especially important. All three begin from the position that a parent seeking something different for their child is responding to genuine evidence, not behaving unreasonably. Education Selection Box works directly with families who have already reached this point, treating the search for an alternative not as a last resort born of failure, but as a sensible response to a clear and well-evidenced mismatch between a child and their current setting. The RYTC offers a different kind of environment entirely, one where being available for learning is built into the structure of creative participation itself, giving children who have struggled to engage elsewhere a genuine route back into curiosity and confidence. When School Doesn't Fit exists specifically to validate the instinct this article is built around. It gives parents language, evidence, and confidence to say clearly that their child deserves an environment where they can actually be available for learning, and that seeking one is not something that requires an apology. 11 ways validating parental instinct changes what happens next Trusting a parent's instinct does not happen through one reassuring conversation. It happens through repeated, deliberate choices to treat their observations as genuine evidence rather than as anxiety to be managed. The following eleven outcomes show what becomes possible once that trust is established. 1. It shortens the time a child spends in the wrong environment When a parent's concern is believed early, action can follow sooner. This alone can prevent months or years of unnecessary struggle. 2. It restores a parent's confidence in their own judgement A parent who is believed stops needing to fight simply to be heard. Their energy can shift towards actually helping their child instead. 3. It turns a vague worry into a shared, workable plan Once an instinct is validated, it can be examined properly rather than dismissed. This makes it far easier to agree on sensible next steps. 4. It reduces the guilt parents carry about seeking change Believing a parent's instinct removes the implication that they are giving up too easily. Seeking an alternative becomes a reasonable response rather than a personal failure. 5. It protects the parent-child relationship from unnecessary strain When a parent is not constantly fighting to be believed, they have more capacity to simply support their child. The relationship benefits when advocacy stops requiring constant self-justification. 6. It encourages earlier, more honest conversations with schools A parent who trusts their own observations brings them forward sooner rather than waiting for a crisis. Earlier conversations tend to lead to calmer, more constructive outcomes. 7. It makes space for capability and struggle to coexist A child does not have to be failing academically for their environment to be genuinely wrong for them. Validating instinct allows both truths to be held at once. 8. It reduces the risk of a child masking their difficulty for longer When a parent's early concern is taken seriously, a child is less likely to spend years learning to hide how much they are struggling. Early validation protects against a much harder problem to unpick later. 9. It gives parents the confidence to seek the right alternative Once a parent trusts their own instinct, they are better able to evaluate whether a new setting genuinely fits their child. Confidence in the diagnosis supports confidence in the solution. 10. It models to the child that their struggle was real and understood A child who sees their parent believed and acting on their behalf learns that their difficulty was genuine, not imagined or exaggerated. This can meaningfully protect their self-esteem going forward. 11. It builds a foundation of trust for whatever comes next A parent who has been validated once is more able to trust their own judgement the next time something feels wrong. That confidence tends to serve the child well beyond the original concern. Taken together, these eleven outcomes are not about encouraging parents to remove their child from school at the first sign of difficulty. They are about ensuring that when a parent's instinct is this strong and this consistent, it is finally treated as the reliable evidence it usually is. Seeking an alternative is a considered choice, not a failure Choosing a different educational setting is sometimes framed as an admission that something has gone wrong, either with the child or with the family. This framing rarely survives close contact with the families who actually make this choice, most of whom have exhausted every other reasonable option first. A parent who seeks an alternative after careful, sustained observation is not failing their child, or the system, or themselves. They are making exactly the kind of considered decision that good parenting requires, based on evidence very few other people have had the chance to gather as closely as they have. Conclusion A parent who senses that their child is not truly available for learning is not being unreasonable, oversensitive, or quick to give up. They are describing something real, gathered through more careful and consistent observation than almost anyone else in their child's life has the opportunity to make. Helen Kenworthy's work through Of Course You Can!™ treats that instinct as valuable evidence rather than a concern to be managed away. For the brilliantly underestimated, having that instinct validated, rather than doubted, can be the difference between years of quiet struggle and a timely move towards somewhere their child can genuinely thrive. Trusting your instinct as a parent is not the alternative to good decision-making. It is very often where good decision-making begins. To explore more about this work and the wider Creative Pathway approach, please visit here. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Helen Kenworthy Helen Kenworthy, Artistic Director Helen Kenworthy’s career embodies the transformative power of the arts, from her early roles in the prestigious West End with Bill Kenwright to her impactful work in regional theatre. As manager of the Oxfordshire Youth Arts Partnership, she created pathways for young people to thrive in the arts, with many going on to successful careers. Now at RYTC Creatives CIC and Give Get Go Education, Helen continues to inspire and mentor the next generation of theatre-makers and community leaders, offering invaluable opportunities for growth and professional development.

Written by Donna Wilding, Life & Business Coach Donna Wilding is a former corporate advertising executive turned life and business coach who helps female entrepreneurs build strategic, soul-led businesses. She works with the innate intelligence of their ideas, alongside her signature past life regression experience and heart-forward coaching techniques. What if you could experience someone else's life for two hours, and return with a whole new understanding of what's possible for yours? “It was like a psychedelic experience, without the substances.” That's how a client recently described her past life regression session with me. Imagine closing your eyes and finding yourself in another life. Rather than observing it as you would a movie, you're experiencing it from within. Who are you? You're a wildly confident, sexually liberated, unapologetically wealthy woman who takes up space like she owns the place. Meanwhile, in this life, you've spent three days agonizing over whether your Instagram caption sounds too self-promotional. I'd have questions, too. Because for a little while, you've experienced moving through the world with a confidence you've never known, making choices that would seem entirely foreign to your present-day personality, and barely giving a second thought to things you've spent decades worrying about. Then you open your eyes and return to the life you know. Same name. Same body. Same collection of unread emails. Except now, you have an experience of being someone you never knew you could be. That makes the world you return to rather different. The limits of what we can imagine We arrive on this planet with an imagination capable of conjuring entire worlds. We've imagined flying machines, entire fictional universes, and ways of communicating across oceans that would have looked like sorcery to our ancestors. And yet, when it comes to imagining our own lives, we can be surprisingly conservative. Perhaps because we spend the first few decades being told to get our heads out of the clouds, make sensible decisions, and for heaven's sake, get a real job. Then, around 40 years in, we pay someone to help us remember how to dream again. (We're interesting creatures, aren't we?) Our families introduce us to their understanding of how life works. Our cultures supply the rules. Our experiences provide the evidence. We inherit a whole collection of ideas about money, love, success, safety, belonging, and how much happiness one human being is reasonably allowed to have before someone raises an eyebrow. We get rather good at mistaking what we know as familiar for what is inevitable. The sneaky thing about these inherited beliefs is that they don't announce themselves as limitations. They masquerade as reality. So when we’re dreaming of what might be possible for our lives, we’re still unknowingly working within the same old boundaries. Consider how difficult it can be to imagine a feeling you've never experienced. You can read 47 books about confidence, wallpaper your bathroom with affirmations, and tell yourself you're a powerful, magnetic woman until the cows come home. But if your entire body is still convinced that being seen is a spectacularly bad idea, your affirmations are going to have a hell of a time convincing it otherwise. You can spend years trying to be ok with taking up space, while having very little idea what moving through the world without that question would actually feel like. But during a past life regression, people can encounter different experiences of what it’s like to be human. They might experience a life of great wealth and discover that money occupies very little of their attention. Or find themselves in a life with almost nothing materially, yet feel a richness of connection they've never known. There are endless possibilities to imagine. For a little while, the familiar rules of their present-day existence aren't running the show. When they return, they might start questioning why those rules applied to them in the first place. When the imagination acquires new evidence and experience All the thinking, wishing, and visualizing in the world can't quite give us what a felt experience can. Consider the difference between reading about the ocean and standing in it for the first time. You could study its currents, learn the composition of salt water, and watch a thousand videos of waves breaking against the shore. You could become remarkably knowledgeable about the ocean without ever getting your feet wet. But none of it would tell you precisely what it feels like when a wave lifts your body off the sand. Suddenly, the ocean is no longer an idea. You know something about it with your whole body. I believe our inner worlds have oceans like this, too. Vast territories of feeling, perception, and possibility that we may never have visited, even while carrying the capacity to experience them. Perhaps one of the more peculiar things about being human is how readily we dismiss the imagination, considering how much of our lives it helps create. Every invention began somewhere in the imagination. Every business, every work of art, every movement that challenged the prevailing order first required someone to entertain a reality that didn't yet exist. Yet, when someone emerges from a vivid inner experience, we can be quick to ask, “But was it real?” It's a reasonable question, particularly with past life regression. A vivid hypnotic experience doesn't establish that the events depicted actually happened. Some people understand their regressions as literal past lives, while others experience them as symbolic narratives or expressions of the imagination. I'm comfortable allowing that mystery to remain open. I'm more curious about what happens afterward. What did the experience make available to you? A feeling you've never felt? A perspective you've never considered? A relationship with yourself that you didn't know was possible? The images may arise within consciousness, but the meaning someone makes of them can become part of how they approach their waking life. We're so accustomed to personal growth being a long, noble slog up the mountain with years of unpacking our childhoods, examining our beliefs, and journaling about our journaling (I love a good journaling sesh). But I also love the possibility that consciousness might have a few trapdoors. That you could tumble through one, spend an afternoon experiencing a life you couldn't possibly have dreamed up, and come back wondering who the hell wrote the rulebook you've been living by. Perhaps that's what my client was getting at when she compared her regression to a psychedelic experience. For a couple of hours, the ordinary boundaries of who she understood herself to be had loosened. She got to see what else might be possible. It’s so delicious to think that the future you haven't yet imagined might be waiting just beyond the edges of the self you've grown accustomed to being. The life you'd envisioned for yourself may have been ambitious, beautiful, and expansive by every measure you knew. Until you encountered something you hadn't even known was possible. Suddenly, there's more sky. Follow me on Instagram and visit my website for more info! Read more from Donna Wilding Donna Wilding, Life & Business Coach Donna Wilding is a life and business coach and former corporate advertising executive who walked away from conventional success to build a more honest way of working and living. She supports women in creating businesses that are both profitable and deeply aligned, combining strategic clarity with past life regression and energetic work. At the core of her approach is the belief that every idea has its own guiding intelligence, and that business becomes easier when you learn to work with it. With over a decade of experience in transformational practices, Donna’s work bridges the worlds of strategy and soul.

Written by Sarah Wittl, Health & Wellbeing Transformation Coach Sarah Wittl is a Health & Wellbeing Transformation Coach and founder of Sarah’s Wellbeing Hub. She helps individuals and organisations build sustainable physical, mental, and emotional health through self-guided tools, coaching, and leadership wellbeing programs. Most people, when something feels off and they want to be healthier, reach for the same two things: eat better, move more. So you try. You commit to the program, clean up your meals, and push yourself harder. For a while, it works, until it doesn't fit your real life anymore and you quietly fall off. You tell yourself you failed. You didn't. You were just solving the wrong problem. What if you've been solving the wrong problem all along? Here's the pattern almost everyone falls into: when we feel a need to change something about our health, the physical aspect is the only puzzle piece most of us know to look at, including nutrition, movement, sleep, and energy. It's not really our fault. The health industry has spent years training us to see health this way, with more information, more trends, and more programs, all pointing to the same narrow picture: move better, eat better, and life will flow. But that's not the whole picture, because we're not purely physical beings. We're emotional beings. Far more of what we do is driven by feeling than by logic. So when something feels off, the real question isn't, "What should I eat or do differently?" It's: where does this feeling actually sit? In the body? In the mind? In the emotions? The gap between feeling like something's wrong and knowing which pillar it's actually coming from isn't a knowledge gap. It's a pause. The answer isn't more information. It's already sitting right there, in the silence, in the space between noticing and understanding. When we pause long enough to actually read our own data, what the body's saying and what the mind's saying, the right pillar starts to crystallise on its own. It's the same gap I unpacked in You Don't Need a Better Plan. You Need Your Own Map. The space between noticing and understanding is where the real answer always lives. Why "eat better, move more" isn't always the answer I've seen this pattern again and again. Over the past few years, new members have come to me wanting to start their physical health journey, arriving with real confusion and frustration. One woman came wondering why her usual training program had stopped working. She used to thrive on high-intensity training, but now it left her feeling worse than before. It wasn't until we unpacked what was actually happening in her life that it became clear: she had lost someone. Her nervous system was already heightened. The exact tool that used to help her release stress, high-intensity training, was now doing the opposite because the real issue was never physical. It was nervous system regulation. Emotional processing. A completely different pillar from the one she kept pushing on. And this is the thing: when our seasons and environments shift, our internal needs shift too. We're far more complex than "move more, eat better." We need tailored solutions because health was never only physical to begin with. It's physical, mental, and emotional, and all three are interlinked. I see this constantly with clients who arrive wanting to lose weight, move more, and feel better, purely physical goals on the surface. We build the real physical program together: strength training, nutrition, rhythm. But almost always, something else surfaces along the way, beliefs that have been keeping them stuck for years, permission they've never given themselves to want something, to be aspirational, or to sit inside desire without guilt. That's not a physical block. The moment it gets named, I watch something spark: real excitement about a new chapter and the release of a pattern someone's been quietly carrying for a very long time. What actually tells you which pillar needs you first The biggest shift starts with one question most people never actually ask themselves: what does health and wellbeing mean to you, not to society or to whatever trend is loudest this year? That answer changes by season. Before grief entered my life, my definition of health was fast, agile, sharp, and physically strong. After grief, it became something else entirely: calm, at ease, peace. Same person, completely different truth, because the season had changed. Once you know what you're actually aiming for, the practical signal check is simple: pause and notice what's showing up right now. Is it physical? Emotional upheaval? Mental fatigue? Just observe what's there. Then ask, what do I actually need right now? It's the same simple practice I shared in You Don't Have a Productivity Problem, You Have an Energy Problem. Real data about yourself doesn't require an overhaul, just a few honest minutes of noticing. Physical health will almost always be the first place we look, and it's rarely the whole answer, simply because it's the most tangible. We can see food, see movement, and see sleep. Mental and emotional patterns sit underneath the surface, less visible and sometimes not even something we feel ready to look at yet. You can't fix what you haven't identified There are a million possible solutions out there. But only one actually solves the specific problem you're carrying, and you can't find it without first identifying what that problem really is. Without that identification, the cycle looks like this: try one solution this month, it doesn't work, try another next month, and another the month after that, not because the solutions themselves are bad, but because none of them were ever matched to the real issue. Years pass. You're still standing in the same place, just with a longer list of things you've tried. That not knowing has its own quiet exhaustion, the tiredness of trying hard at something that was never going to work because it was never the right thing to try in the first place. But when someone can finally see clearly, in one place, exactly which pillar actually needs their attention first, everything changes. Practically, they finally have a real starting point: a clear reference for where they are and where they want to go, so they can take strategic, well-informed steps instead of guessing. Emotionally, what shows up is relief, the slow, real feeling of finally understanding what's been missing all along. Where you go from here If you've been trying everything, eating cleaner, moving more, meditating better, and pushing harder, and it still hasn't held, this is why. You've been solving the wrong problem because no one ever showed you which pillar actually needed your attention first. Take the free Wellbeing Independence Score and find out exactly where you stand across all four pillars, Set-Up & Environment, Physical, Mental, and Emotional, so you finally know not just that something's off, but where and what to do about it first. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Sarah Wittl Sarah Wittl, Health & Wellbeing Transformation Coach Sarah Wittl is a Health & Wellbeing Transformation Coach and founder of Sarah’s Wellbeing Hub. With over a decade of experience in executive coaching, neuroscience-based leadership, and physical training, she bridges personal and organisational wellbeing through her unique self-guided approach. Her work empowers individuals and teams to create lasting balance across body, mind, and emotions by focusing on sustainable habits and self-leadership. A former Australian National Karate Champion and lifelong martial artist, Sarah blends strength, compassion, and science to help others thrive from the inside out.

Written by Julie Zdravkovski, Spiritual Advisor & Medium Julie Zdravkovski is a spiritual advisor and thought leader redefining how we engage with intuition, transformation, and personal power. Known for her direct, no-bypass approach, she challenges spiritual narratives and guides people back to grounded, embodied truth. There is a moment that almost everyone has at some point in their life when they consider having a reading. Perhaps a friend has recommended someone. Perhaps you have seen a name come up in your feed one too many times to ignore. Perhaps you are in the middle of a season of your life that has left you looking for insight beyond what your own reasoning can offer. Whatever brought you to the possibility of sitting in front of a reader, there is often a quiet uncertainty that accompanies it, because unless you have grown up in a family or a community where readings were a normal part of life, you may not know what to expect, how to prepare, what will actually happen, or how to tell whether the person you are about to see is the real thing or someone who has learned how to sound convincing. This piece is written for the curious reader who has been circling the idea, has perhaps already had a reading or two but has never had anyone actually explain what any of it was meant to be, or how to receive it well. It is written from over three decades of doing this work, and it is written with the intention of demystifying something that has been made either far too mystical or far too dismissible by the wider conversation around it, when the truth of what it actually is sits somewhere quieter, more human, and more useful than either extreme. The different types of readings, and what each is actually for Before you book a reading, it helps to know what kind of reading you are actually booking, because the word covers a wide range of very different experiences, and knowing which one you are looking for will save you time, money, and frustration. A mediumship reading is a session where the reader connects with those who have passed. It is often what people book after a loss, whether recent or long ago, when they are looking for confirmation of survival, closure on something left unsaid, or simply the felt experience of being connected to someone they love who is no longer physically here. A good mediumship reading brings through evidence, personal detail, and the tone or personality of the person who has passed in a way that makes it undeniable to the sitter that a genuine connection is happening. A psychic reading is different. A good psychic reader is not reading you as a person; they are working with the energetic information around your life, the timelines that are forming, the influences that are present, and the possibilities that are unfolding based on the trajectory you are currently on. Psychic readings tend to be forward-looking, though they will often include insights about what is happening in your life right now and what has shaped the current chapter you are in. A spiritual advisory session, which is a form of work I offer, sits at a different level altogether. It draws on all of the above, but its reach is much wider because it taps into universal consciousness itself to access information beyond this life, this timeline, or this particular version of your reality. A spiritual advisory session can address what is happening now, what is coming, and how to work with its energy. It can also unravel the existence of parallel lives, past lives, multiple dimensions, and the higher levels of consciousness that are quietly shaping the story you are actually living. Because of my investigative experience in cold cases and missing persons, the delivery of that information tends to be more structured, more grounded, and more precise in the actual details and next steps that come through, because information of that depth is only useful when it is brought through with the discipline to be acted on, not left to sit as something abstract or mystical. Beyond these, there are tarot readings, oracle card readings, astrology readings, Akashic record readings, energy healing sessions that include intuitive guidance, and many other forms. Each of them has its own particular strength, and each of them will serve you differently depending on what you are actually looking for. The clearer you are on what you want, the better you can choose who to sit with. How to prepare for a reading Preparing for a reading has very little to do with what you eat, drink, or do in the hours before the session, because a real reader is not reading your physical state to do their work. Preparing for a reading is about your inner posture. It is about the willingness to actually be present, to receive what comes through, and to release the need for the reading to unfold in a particular way. You do not need to prepare a list of questions unless you genuinely want to. Some readers appreciate them; others prefer to work with what arrives first and address specific questions later. What matters more is that you have thought, even briefly, about what you would most like to understand, and that you have released the need for the session to follow the script you may have quietly written for it in your head. Bring an open mind, a willingness to be surprised, and the honesty to be present with whatever arrives. If you can arrive in that state, everything else will take care of itself. What to expect during the reading Every reader works differently, and part of preparing well is understanding that no two readings look the same. Some readers work quietly and speak only when something specific comes through. Others speak almost continuously, describing what they are receiving as it arrives. Some use tools like cards, crystals, or other divinatory objects. Others work entirely from what they are perceiving. None of these approaches is more or less legitimate than another. What matters is whether the information landing in the room is accurate, useful, and honest. During the reading itself, you may feel a range of things. You may feel emotional, sometimes overwhelmingly so, particularly during mediumship readings or when something long buried is being spoken to for the first time. You may feel physical sensations, tingles, warmth, or tears without knowing why. You may feel relief. You may feel confusion. You may find yourself laughing at something surprising or crying at something you did not know you had been holding. All of it is normal, and all of it is part of the reading doing its work. The part almost no one tells you about is how messages actually land Here is the piece almost no one prepares you for. A reader can only pick up on what you are allowed to receive in that moment, and what comes through will very often arrive in a shape that is different from what you were expecting to hear. Most people go into a reading with a quiet narrative already running in their mind. They want to hear about a particular person, a particular decision, a particular outcome, and they are, whether they realise it or not, listening for the words that will match the version of the story they have already been telling themselves. When the reading arrives in a different shape, when the message uses different language or points at something they were not expecting to explore, they often dismiss it, try to bend it to fit the narrative they came in with, or leave feeling that the reading did not land, when in fact the reading landed exactly as it was meant to. They were not open enough in the moment to receive it as it was. This is one of the most important things to understand. Listen to the nuances. Listen to the threads that come through, even when they do not immediately make sense. Let the messages land without trying to fit them into a box and without changing the narrative to suit what you needed to hear. Because what tends to happen, again and again, is that a piece of a reading that did not resonate in the moment will suddenly click into place weeks or months later, when the situation the reader was pointing at actually unfolds. You find yourself remembering what they said and realising it was more accurate than you had allowed yourself to hear at the time. The reader is not there to tell you what you already believe. The reader is there to bring out what is actually present in your energy, your path, and the layers of your life that you cannot always see for yourself. The more open you are to receiving that in its own language, and the more patient you are in waiting for the messages to reveal themselves in their own time, the more valuable your readings will become, both in the moment and long after they have ended. How to tell a real reader from a fake one This is the section I most want you to read carefully, because there are people offering readings who have no gift, no training, and no genuine interest in your wellbeing, and they can be extremely difficult to spot from the outside. But there are also patterns worth knowing. There are three general types of readers you will encounter. Some are naturally gifted, having grown up with a strong perceptive ability that comes through them without a great deal of formal training. Some have trained deeply, starting with a lower level of natural sensitivity but developing it over years or decades through study, mentorship, and disciplined practice. Some are neither gifted nor trained but have learned to sound as though they are, and this is the group to be cautious of. The gifted and the trained often produce readings of similar depth and accuracy because the same underlying skill is at work; one has arrived at it differently from the other. The distinction between those two categories does not really matter to the person receiving the reading. What matters is whether the person in front of you is either genuinely gifted, genuinely trained, or ideally both, or whether they are performing rather than perceiving. A real reader gives specific, personal detail that they could not have known. Names, small facts, particular memories, precise turns of phrase, unique family dynamics, or moments that could not have been guessed at from anything visible about you. General statements that could apply to almost anyone are not evidence of ability; they are evidence of a lack of it. A real reader is comfortable saying they do not know something or that they are not receiving a clear answer on a particular question. Anyone who claims to have complete access to every aspect of your life, past, present, and future, and never encounters a moment where the reading pauses or comes up blank, is very likely performing. A real reader does not push fear. There is a specific and unfortunate pattern in which a reader will tell you there is a curse on you, a dark energy following you, or an ancestral pattern that only they can remove. It will conveniently cost you a great deal of money to have it addressed. This is a sign to leave. Real spiritual work does not operate through fear, and no legitimate reader will hold you hostage to something they claim only they can solve. A real reader does not tell you what to do. They may share what they perceive, what patterns they see, and what possibilities are forming, but the decisions are always yours. A reader who tells you that you must leave your partner, move to another city, make a specific decision, or return to see them repeatedly to avoid disaster is overstepping in a way that is a red flag every single time. A real reader honours your intuition alongside their own. If something they say does not feel right, a legitimate reader will invite you to sit with it, consider whether it lands over time, and trust your own knowing above theirs. They will not insist that you accept what they say simply because they said it. And finally, a real reader leaves you feeling more yourself, not less. You may leave a reading emotional, tender, opened, moved, or with a great deal to think about, but you should not leave a legitimate reading feeling smaller, more anxious, more fearful, or more dependent than when you walked in. The direction of good work is always toward you becoming more of who you are, not less. What to do afterwards The hours and days after a reading are often more important than the reading itself, and this is another part almost no one prepares you for. A good reading opens things. It stirs energy. It brings up emotions, insights, and awareness that may take time to settle. Give yourself space afterwards. Do not schedule a heavy afternoon of meetings, do not rush from your session into a social event, and do not spend the evening dissecting every word with a friend before you have had a chance to sit with it yourself. Write down anything that stayed with you, particularly the pieces that did not immediately make sense, because those are often the ones that reveal themselves later. Allow yourself to feel whatever came up, whether that is grief, relief, hope, sadness, or a strange mixture of all of them at once. You may feel tender for a day or two, and that is completely normal. Something has shifted, and shifts take time to integrate. Do not book another reading immediately. One of the patterns I see most often is people who move quickly from one reader to another, hoping to get confirmation or additional insight. What tends to happen is that the multiple readings begin to blur together, contradict each other, or reinforce a dependency on external voices at the expense of your own knowing. A good rule is to let a reading breathe for at least a few months before returning, unless something specific has genuinely arisen that warrants a follow-up. What you already know You already know what you are actually looking for from a reading. You know whether you are hoping for connection with someone you have lost, whether you are seeking clarity on a decision you have been avoiding, whether you are wanting to understand what your soul is moving through, or whether you are simply curious about a world you have not yet explored. And you know, underneath all of it, whether you are ready to actually receive what a reading might offer you, or whether you are still hoping to have your existing story confirmed. The most valuable reading you will ever have is the one you arrive at with an open mind and the willingness to let the messages land in their own language. The rest, the choice of reader, the type of reading, and the tools they use, all of it matters less than what you bring to the room yourself. Because a reading is not a performance you are watching; it is a conversation you are participating in, and the depth of what comes through is always partly a reflection of what you were willing to allow to reach you. A note from me, and an invitation If something in this piece raised a question you have been carrying, about a reading you have had, a reading you have been considering, or the wider question of how to work with this kind of guidance in your life, send it to me. Each month, I choose questions from readers and channel a response in this column. You will not be named; you will be heard, and through you, others sitting with the same thing will be heard too. Send your question to julie@moderndaymedium.com.au. If at some point you want to work with me more directly, you can find ways to do so at www.moderndaymedium.com.au, where spiritual advisory sessions, classes, books, and more are available when you are ready, not before. I am Julie. I am a medium. I am genuinely interested in what you already know but have not yet trusted. Follow me on Instagram for more info! Read more from Julie Zdravkovski Julie Zdravkovski, Spiritual Advisor & Medium Julie Zdravkovski is an international spiritual advisor, teacher, and thought leader known for challenging the norms of the spiritual and self-development space. With over 30 years of experience, she cuts through surface-level spirituality to deliver grounded, direct insight that prioritizes truth over comfort. Beginning as a child medium, Julie has spent decades refining her intuitive abilities while also building a corporate career in leadership and human behavior. This dual lens has allowed her to bridge spirituality with real-world application in a way that is both practical and transformative, propelling her in building a professional, spiritually-led business, Modern Day Medium.

Written by Howaida Abdalla, Life Coach Howaida Abdalla is a survivor of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and a life coach who has experience when it comes to the trauma that a survivor goes through and the journey it takes to heal. She helps women to reconnect and love themselves again. She is the founder of The Growth Hub Coaching and Women Empowerment edition: Impact for Change Podcast. Sometimes, the deepest wounds are not only caused by what happened to us, but also by how people respond when we finally find the courage to speak about it. For survivors of female genital mutilation (FGM), speaking about their experiences can be incredibly difficult. It may take years to find the words, the courage and a safe space to share something so personal. When a survivor finally opens up, the response they receive can make a profound difference. A compassionate response can help someone feel seen, believed and supported. A careless comment, even one made with good intentions, can reinforce shame, deepen isolation and make a survivor regret speaking at all. We must understand that FGM is not simply a difficult subject to discuss. For many survivors, it is a deeply personal experience that can affect their relationship with their bodies, their identity, their emotional wellbeing and their sense of control. If we want to support survivors, we must learn not only what to say, but also what not to say. 1. “Why didn't you speak up earlier?” This question may seem like a reasonable attempt to understand, but it can sound like blame. Many survivors experience FGM during childhood, when they may not understand what is happening or have the power to challenge the adults around them. Others may remain silent for years because of fear, shame, cultural expectations, family relationships or uncertainty about whether anyone will believe them. Speaking about trauma is not always straightforward. Silence does not mean that the experience was insignificant, and delayed disclosure does not make a survivor's experience less valid. What to say instead, Thank you for trusting me with your story. You can share as much or as little as you feel comfortable with.” Give survivors the freedom to speak in their own time, without making them defend their silence. 2. “But it's part of your culture.” Culture should never be used to dismiss someone's pain. FGM is a complex and sensitive issue, and communities are not all the same. Many individuals and community leaders actively work to end the practice. Describing FGM as simply a cultural tradition can minimise its impact and make survivors feel that their suffering is being excused. Respecting cultural diversity does not mean overlooking harm. We can approach conversations with cultural sensitivity while firmly upholding the dignity, safety and rights of women and girls. What to say instead, “I want to understand your experience without making assumptions about you or your community.” Listen to the individual. Do not expect them to represent an entire culture or explain the beliefs and decisions of others. 3. “At least it happened when you were young.” This statement can unintentionally suggest that an experience is less painful because it happened during childhood. But childhood experiences can have lasting effects. Some survivors may struggle with feelings they cannot fully understand until adulthood. Others may only begin processing what happened when they feel safe enough to reflect on it. There is no deadline for trauma to matter, and no age at which someone's pain becomes insignificant. What to say instead, “What happened to you matters, and you deserve support with whatever you are feeling now.” Do not measure someone's pain against the passage of time. 4. “You need to move on.” Healing is not a switch that can be turned on or off. It is a personal process that looks different for every survivor. Telling someone to move on may communicate that their emotions are inconvenient, that they have been struggling for too long or that they should be further along in their healing journey. Some survivors may feel ready to speak openly, while others may need privacy. Some may seek professional support, while others may find comfort in trusted relationships, creative expression or community connections. Moving forward does not mean forgetting, pretending or forcing yourself to feel better. What to say instead, “You do not have to rush your healing. I am here to support you in whatever way feels right for you.” Healing needs patience, not pressure. 5. “Are you sure it was that bad?” Questioning a survivor's experience can make them feel that they must prove their suffering before they deserve compassion. FGM takes different forms, and survivors' experiences and consequences vary. Not every survivor will experience the same physical difficulties or emotional responses. The absence of visible injuries or obvious distress does not mean that an experience was harmless. No survivor should have to provide graphic details or demonstrate their pain to receive respect and support. What to say instead, “I believe you, and I am sorry you have had to carry this.” You do not need to understand every detail of someone's experience to respond with kindness. 6. “You should be grateful your family did what they thought was best.” This statement can place an unfair emotional burden on survivors, particularly those who have complicated feelings about family members or the circumstances surrounding their FGM. A survivor may love their family and still feel hurt, angry, confused or betrayed. They may struggle to reconcile their relationships with the impact of what happened to them. These feelings can exist together. Survivors should not be pressured to defend their families, forgive anyone or choose between acknowledging their pain and maintaining relationships. What to say instead, “You are allowed to have your own feelings about what happened. You do not have to justify them to me.” Support means allowing space for complicated emotions without imposing your own conclusions. 7. “You look fine. You don't seem traumatised.” Trauma does not look the same in everyone. Some survivors may speak openly about their experiences, while others may avoid the subject. Some may appear confident and composed while privately struggling with difficult emotions. Others may not identify with the word trauma at all. We cannot determine someone's internal experience from their appearance, personality or ability to function in everyday life. Assuming someone is fine because they appear fine can make it harder for them to ask for help. What to say instead, “How are you really feeling, and is there anything you need from me?” Ask with care, listen to the answer and respect it. 8. “Tell me exactly what happened.” Curiosity is not a reason to ask a survivor for intimate or distressing details. FGM involves deeply personal experiences, and survivors have the right to privacy. Asking intrusive questions, particularly without permission, can make someone feel exposed, powerless or reduced to their trauma. If you are a friend, colleague or community member, you are not entitled to hear every detail simply because someone has disclosed their experience. Professionals may sometimes need to ask sensitive questions to provide appropriate care or fulfil safeguarding responsibilities. Even then, questions should be relevant, respectfully phrased and explained wherever possible. What to say instead, “You do not have to tell me anything you are not comfortable sharing. What would help you feel supported right now?” Remember that trust is built by respecting boundaries, not testing them. 9. “You are so strong. You can handle anything.” Calling a survivor strong can be affirming, but it can also create pressure to remain strong all the time. Survivors are often praised for overcoming adversity, yet this praise can unintentionally leave little room for exhaustion, vulnerability or asking for help. They should not have to be inspirational to deserve support. They should not have to transform their pain into advocacy, share their stories publicly or prove that they have overcome their experiences. Survivors are allowed to have difficult days. They are allowed to need help. They are allowed to be human. What to say instead, “You do not have to be strong every day. You deserve support, even when things feel difficult.” Recognise resilience without making it another expectation. 10. “Why are you still talking about it?” This may be one of the most painful things a survivor can hear. Speaking about FGM can be part of raising awareness, finding connection, seeking justice or making sense of a personal experience. For others, talking may not be helpful at all. Both choices deserve respect. When survivors choose to speak, they may be challenging stigma that has kept the subject hidden for generations. Their voices can help professionals improve services, communities question harmful practices and future generations access better protection. We should not demand silence from survivors simply because their experiences make us uncomfortable. What to say instead, “Your voice matters. I respect your decision to share your experience, and I will listen without judgement.” If a survivor chooses not to speak, respect that decision too. What survivors need most: Compassion without conditions We do not need perfect words to support survivors. We need the willingness to listen, learn and recognise when our assumptions may cause harm. Before responding to a disclosure, pause and ask yourself: Am I listening to understand, or am I asking questions to satisfy my curiosity? Am I respecting this person's boundaries? Am I allowing them to define their own experience? Am I offering support without telling them how they should feel? Am I making space for their choices, even when they differ from what I would choose? These questions can help us move from good intentions towards meaningful support. Healthcare professionals, counsellors, teachers, social workers and community leaders also have a responsibility to ensure that their language does not reinforce stigma. Appropriate training, trauma-informed practice and clear referral pathways can help survivors access support without feeling judged, exposed or dismissed. Friends, families and allies can make a difference by challenging harmful comments, learning about FGM and creating environments where survivors can speak safely, or choose not to speak at all. Above everything, we must remember that each survivor is an individual. There is no single story, no universal response and no one-size-fits-all healing journey. Beyond FGM: Let us change the conversation As the author of Beyond FGM, I believe that moving beyond FGM means more than raising awareness of the practice itself. It means changing how we listen to survivors, how we speak about their experiences and how we support them in reclaiming their voices, choices and identities. A survivor is not a tragedy to be discussed, a story to be questioned or a problem to be solved. She is a human being who deserves dignity, understanding and the freedom to define her own future. Our words can either close doors or open them. They can reinforce shame or offer reassurance. They can make someone feel alone or remind them that they do not have to face everything by themselves. We may not be able to change what happened in someone's past, but we can change how we respond when they trust us with their story. Let us stop asking survivors to justify their pain. Let us stop placing expectations on their healing. Let us stop confusing silence with strength. Instead, let us listen with compassion, respond without judgement and support without conditions. Because sometimes, the most powerful thing we can say to a survivor is simply this, “I believe you. Your experience matters. You are not to blame. You deserve support, and you have the right to decide what healing looks like for you.” That is how we begin to move beyond FGM, not by speaking over survivors, but by creating a world where they are finally safe to be heard. Beyond FGM. Beyond shame. Beyond silence. Towards dignity, healing and hope. Follow me on Facebook and Instagram for more info! Read more from Howaida Abdalla Howaida Abdalla, Life Coach Howaida Abdalla is a life coach who helps women (survivors) of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) to reconnect & love themselves again. She was seven years old when the FGM procedure was done on her, which left her lost and disconnected not only from people, but also from herself. She has since dedicated her life to helping other survivors reconnect and love themselves. She is a founder of "The Growth Hub Coaching," where she helps & coaches survivors. Her mission is to help, inspire, and empower.

Written by Juna Ting-Wei Chang, Forest Therapy Guide Juna Ting-Wei Chang is a forest therapy guide and founder of Shinrin-Yoku Taiwan, specialising in evidence-based forest therapy and Shinrin-yoku. She supports individuals and organisations in slowing down and gently returning their attention to themselves and the more-than-human world through nature. Same trees, same trail, completely different walk. A light look at what sets forest therapy apart from hiking, and why the simplest thing a guide does may also be the hardest. Picture a hike. There is a trailhead, a route, maybe a step counter, and almost certainly a summit with a photo waiting at the top. Now picture a forest therapy walk: a group of people who have spent an hour covering the length of a few city blocks, and nobody is in a hurry. Both happen among trees. Both are good for us. But they ask very different things of the people walking, and that difference is what I get asked about most often, usually followed by two more questions: why would I need a guide for this, and couldn’t I just do it on my own? Hiking asks “How far?” Forest therapy asks “How are you?” Hiking is a wonderful practice, and I love it. But it is built around a goal: reach the peak, finish the loop, beat the daylight. The forest becomes the route that gets you there, and your attention tends to point forward, toward the next marker. Forest therapy has no peak and no finish line. There is nowhere to get to. The invitation is to arrive, again and again, right where you are. Two ways to walk in a forest: Hiking has a destination, such as a summit, a viewpoint, or a finish line. Forest therapy has none. Hiking measures progress in distance, time, and elevation. Forest therapy measures it in what you notice. Hiking keeps the body moving and the eyes ahead. Forest therapy invites you to stop, sit, and look around. Hiking rewards you at the end. Forest therapy offers the reward all along the way. Can we do it on our own? Honestly? Yes. Nobody owns the forest, and nobody needs permission to sit under a tree and be still. If you can do that, please do. The catch is that most of us carry our habits into the woods with us. We walk at our usual speed, we plan the next stop, we reach for the phone, and our minds keep running through the to-do list. Without noticing, we turn a quiet forest into one more thing to get done. Slowing down sounds easy until you try it alone. So what does a guide actually do? The purpose of a guide is simple: to help you slow down. That is really all there is to it. A guide is not there to teach you the names of trees, entertain you, or lead you to the best view. A guide offers a few gentle invitations, looks after the practical details so you don’t have to, and then makes room. Think of it like a friend who sits down beside you on a bench and says, “Shall we stay a little longer?” You could have said that to yourself, but somehow it is much easier to hear it from someone else. The art of keeping blank Here is the part that surprises people: the hardest thing for a guide is to do less. Every instinct says to fill the silence with a fact, a story, or a clever exercise. Learning to keep blank, to hold space and let the pause be a pause, takes real practice. Holding space means trusting that the participants don’t need to be fixed, entertained, or led anywhere. They need time. When the guide stays quiet and steady, people can slow all the way down, and something interesting happens. They find the in-between. The place between arriving and leaving, between busy and still, between the person who walked in and whoever walks out. There is no peak to reach and no finish line to cross, so there is nothing to win. You can simply be there, and explore. A tiny experiment for your next walk You don’t need a guide to try the spirit of it. Next time you are near trees, borrow these three invitations: Three invitations to try: Leave the goal at home. Skip the step count and the summit. Pick a spot and let that be the whole plan. Walk at the speed of your slowest curiosity. Stop whenever something catches your eye, even if it is only a leaf. Sit and keep blank. Let the place do the talking, and notice what shows up when you stop trying to make anything happen. If it feels harder than it sounds, that is normal. It is also exactly why having a guide can help. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Juna Ting-Wei Chang Juna Ting-Wei Chang, Forest Therapy Guide Juna Ting-Wei Chang is a forest therapy guide and founder of Shinrin-Yoku Taiwan, now part of Green Shower. She is the first Taiwanese guide certified by the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT) and also holds the Taiwan Forest Therapist Certificate. With a background in languages, cross-cultural experience, and landscape and recreation management, Juna brings science, tradition, and lived experience together in a warm, grounded way. Her work supports individuals, organisations, and international groups in cultivating emotional resilience, presence, and sustainable wellbeing through nature-based practices.

Written by Ileana Weynberg, Guest Writer Most of the time in the workplace, I felt I had to work a lot harder than everyone else because my brain didn’t function in the same way. I noticed it when I worked in insurance and sales. Sometimes things just didn’t click. I needed things explained more than once. I had to write instructions down. I wanted to do a good job. But I didn’t quite feel right in the work environment. I didn’t feel like I fitted in. I would people-please and mask so much, trying to please everyone. It started in interviews and carried on in the workplace. I never really felt like I could progress either. Looking back, I wish I’d had my AuDHD diagnosis sooner. AuDHD means I am both autistic and have ADHD. I wish I’d understood why certain things were harder for me and had the support I needed, especially when my mental health wasn’t good. Now, as a coach working with late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults, I care deeply about how those experiences affect our confidence and self-trust. Because when you spend years feeling like you’re getting things wrong, it can become difficult to recognise what you are good at. We are already trying When an employer says an ADHD employee needs to “try harder”, I want them to understand something. We are often already trying incredibly hard. We need tools to help us do the job we are good at. For me, that could mean having instructions written down, being able to ask someone to explain something again, or having less noise around me when I’m trying to concentrate. Remembering information and keeping track of tasks can be difficult for me. Being overstimulated makes things harder. An employer might see that someone has finished a task without seeing how many times they checked the instructions, how anxious they felt about asking a question, or how exhausted they were afterwards. Getting the work done does not always mean the way we are working is sustainable. Someone else with ADHD might need different support. You need to speak to the person to understand what helps them. “Just prioritise” doesn’t explain the priority “Just focus.” “Just write a list.” “Just get started.” If only it were always that simple. Sometimes the thing someone is being told to do is exactly what they need help with. If three managers have each given an employee an urgent task, telling them to “prioritise better” still leaves them working out whose urgency matters most. “Finish the client report first. The presentation can wait until Thursday. Let me know by two if you need more time” gives them something clear to work with. There is a task, an order and a chance to raise a problem before the deadline. That clarity also makes it easier to discuss performance fairly. Everyone understands what was agreed. The words we use matter The language side of NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming, is relevant to this conversation: what words are we choosing, and what assumptions are we making about someone? “He’s lazy” is a judgement. It doesn’t explain what happened. “The report was submitted two days after the deadline” gives us something specific to discuss. “She’s difficult” tells us very little. “She has asked for more notice before her schedule changes” gives us a starting point. From there, we can ask: “What got in the way?” “Which part was unclear?” “What would help you meet the next deadline?” Changing the wording needs to lead to a useful conversation and practical support. A kinder sentence on its own won’t fix an unmanageable workload. Neuroinclusive language also means listening to how someone describes themselves. Some people prefer “ADHD person”; others say “person with ADHD”. There isn’t one preference shared by everyone. Ask and respect their answer. You don’t need to tell someone “everyone is a bit ADHD” to connect with them. “Thank you for explaining. What would be helpful for me to understand?” leaves room for their experience. “You’re too sensitive” If someone is upset by how they have been spoken to, how quickly do we decide they are “too sensitive”? Do we ask what upset them? Do we consider how the feedback was delivered? Or does their reaction become the problem, while what happened beforehand gets forgotten? Some people with ADHD use the term rejection sensitive dysphoria, or RSD, to describe intense emotional pain around rejection or perceived rejection. RSD is not a formal diagnosis, and research is still developing. This doesn’t mean employers should avoid giving feedback. People need to understand what is expected of them and when something needs to change. But there is a difference between explaining a mistake and making someone feel like they are a mistake. “The instructions weren’t followed here. Let’s look at where things went wrong” gives someone something to work with. “You never listen” makes a judgement about the person. You can be clear and respectful at the same time. Someone should not have to explain RSD for their feelings to be taken seriously. Telling me to try harder didn’t give me a way to do the task. It made me feel small, unworthy and like I wasn’t good enough. I have spent enough of my life feeling that way. Do they get an explanation or an eye roll? An employee doesn’t understand something and asks another question. What happens next? Do they get an explanation or an eye roll? Do they feel comfortable asking again, or do they go back to their desk and try to work it out alone because they don’t want to look stupid? They still need the information. Now they also have to worry about asking for it. Workplaces can have inclusion statements and still make an employee feel awkward for needing instructions written down. They can run an awareness session and still respond with, “I’ve already told you that.” I want workplaces to pay attention to those everyday moments. The sigh, the eye roll, the comment made in front of colleagues. They may seem small to the person doing them. To the person asking for help, they can be another reason to stay quiet next time. Support starts with the person Receiving a late diagnosis doesn’t mean you suddenly know every adjustment you need. You may still be working out what helps, what drains you and what you have been forcing yourself through for years. Someone waiting for an assessment may also need support now. Acas advises employers to offer support whether or not a worker has a neurodivergence diagnosis, including considering reasonable adjustments. Start with what the person is telling you. Depending on their needs and their role, you might discuss written instructions, clearer priorities, meeting agendas in advance, a quieter workspace or time without avoidable interruptions. Agree what you will try. Check whether it helps. Make changes together. And please don’t assume every ADHD employee needs the same things. The question I would have wanted someone to ask me is: “What would help you do this?” Then listen to my answer and work with me. Inclusion needs to happen in the working day I don’t want support to depend on an ADHD employee being exceptionally creative or having an impressive talent that makes their difficulties worth accommodating. Their needs still matter when they are doing ordinary work on an ordinary Tuesday. If your workplace says people can ask for support, what happens when they do? Who makes sure an agreed change actually happens? Can an employee say something isn’t working without feeling they are being difficult? These are the things that give an inclusion statement meaning. For the employee reading this who has spent years wondering why work seems to take so much out of them: struggling does not make you lazy, and asking for support does not erase your ability. You are allowed to need clarity. You are allowed to ask for a way of working that helps you contribute sustainably. Neuroinclusion isn’t about lowering expectations. It’s about removing unnecessary barriers. That starts with listening, and it becomes meaningful when something changes. Follow me on Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Ileana Weynberg, Guest Writer Ileana Weynberg is an empowerment and mindset coach, speaker and founder of Force Of Mind, supporting late-diagnosed ADHD and autistic adults to rebuild self-trust and find their voice. Drawing on her own late AuDHD diagnosis and background in mental health advocacy, she helps people understand their needs and build lives that work with their brains. Her message is simple: you are not broken, and you deserve to be heard, understood and supported.

Written by Davian Bryan, Self-Confidence Coach Davian Bryan is the author of Vulnerable Soul (published in 2025). Through Storytelling Power, he helps brands strengthen their storytelling with creative communication. As a self-confidence coach at Dare Your Lifestyle, he empowers introverts to embrace their God-given confidence. What if the person who hurt you stopped speaking years ago, but you never stopped listening? Perhaps they called you stupid, ugly, too quiet, or a disappointment. Maybe they laughed when you struggled to speak. The moment passed for them. For you, the words followed you into mirrors, conversations, and opportunities you were afraid to take. The hardest part is not remembering what someone said. It is noticing that you have started saying it to yourself. I know that feeling. When their laughter became my silence For years, I lived with a stutter, shyness, and jokes that made speaking feel like a risk. I began treating silence as protection. If I stayed quiet, perhaps there would be less for people to laugh at. But silence had a cost. I wasn't only avoiding their reactions; I was denying myself the chance to be heard. That's why I created Dare Your Lifestyle: not because I became flawless, but because I grew tired of letting other people's judgments decide how much of myself I could show. You may not stutter. Your wound might be about your appearance, personality, intelligence, or sensitivity. Yet the question underneath is similar: Who taught me to see myself this way, and why am I still agreeing with them? Why hurtful words can feel true long after they're spoken Repeated criticism can become familiar enough to feel factual. When we fear being judged again, we may avoid experiences that could challenge what we believe. The NHS guidance on low self-esteem explains how negative messages, particularly in childhood, can shape self-beliefs. StopBullying.gov's overview of bullying's effects also notes that shame and self-esteem difficulties can persist into adulthood. That doesn't mean every unkind remark becomes a lasting wound. It means your response deserves understanding, not another round of self-blame. A painful memory is evidence that something happened. It is not proof that the insult was accurate. Sometimes an insult attaches itself to a difficulty. I do stutter. That is a fact about how I speak, not a verdict on the value of what I have to say. Likewise, making a mistake does not make you stupid, and needing reassurance does not make you weak. Accuracy matters; cruelty distorts it. 5 ways to stop believing hurtful things people said about you 1. Identify whose words you're repeating When you think, "I'm embarrassing," pause. Who first made you feel that way? Was it a classmate, relative, teacher, or someone whose approval mattered deeply? Write down the exact label. Then put quotation marks around it. Those marks create an important distinction: This is something I was told, not necessarily something I am. 2. Separate the experience from the identity Maybe you froze during a conversation. That happened. "I'm incapable of communicating" is an interpretation. Try writing two sentences: What happened: "Someone laughed when I struggled to finish a sentence." What I concluded: "My voice is something to be ashamed of." The first deserves compassion. The second deserves questioning. 3. Look for evidence beyond the insult Ask yourself: What experiences contradict this label? When have I shown courage, kindness, intelligence, or resilience, even imperfectly? The NHS recommends examining evidence and considering more balanced interpretations through its thought-record exercise. You don't have to jump from "I'm worthless" to "I'm extraordinary." Begin with something believable: "One person's cruelty cannot measure my entire worth." 4. Do one thing the old belief discouraged If people mocked your voice, contribute one thought. If they belittled your creativity, share one small piece of work. If they called you strange, allow one genuine preference to be seen. Choose a step that feels manageable and safe. Confidence isn't always a dramatic announcement. Sometimes it's refusing to abandon yourself during an ordinary moment. 5. Stop giving cruel people the final say Not everyone deserves continued access to your vulnerability. You can set boundaries, seek supportive relationships, and stop revisiting conversations that repeatedly diminish you. If painful beliefs feel overwhelming or persistent, a qualified mental health professional can help you work through them. Reaching for support is not surrender. Your past may explain the wound, but it doesn't own your identity I cannot rewrite the jokes about my stutter. I can refuse to organize my future around them. So can you. Here is my dare: Write down one hurtful sentence you still carry. Beneath it, write: "That was their judgment. It is not my identity." Then choose one small action that reflects who you want to become. You don't need their apology to begin questioning their verdict. If you're learning to release shame and see yourself through a kinder lens, explore Vulnerable Soul, my 30-day devotional of honest reflections, poetry, and faith-centered encouragement. Your voice deserves a future bigger than somebody else's cruelty. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Davian Bryan Davian Bryan, Self-Confidence Coach Davian Bryan is a freelance creative specializing in brand storytelling and communication strategy, and the author of Vulnerable Soul (2025). After overcoming insecurity and rebuilding his confidence through faith and discipline, he now helps introverts embrace their God-given confidence through Dare Your Lifestyle. He operates Storytelling Power, where he supports brands with strategic content creation and communication systems. His mission: Build clarity. Build confidence. Build something that lasts.