Written by Tamsin Ward, Founder of Drums4Health Drums4Health exists to move the body and wake up the brain through rhythm-based movement that supports physical wellbeing, brain health and community connection. What if one of the clues to how well we are ageing is sitting quite literally in our hands? Handgrip strength is increasingly recognised in research as a simple marker associated with overall physical function, healthy ageing and mortality risk. It is also an area that has made me look at Drums4Health, the rhythm and movement programme I founded, through an entirely new lens. Because when we drum, we aren't only making music. Our hands, wrists, arms, brains and bodies are working together repeatedly. That has led me to an important question, "Could the simple act of drumming and moving also help us maintain some of the physical capabilities that become increasingly important as we age?" Why does grip strength matter? Grip strength sounds like a very specific measure. In reality, it can tell us something much broader about physical capability. It is normally measured using a handheld dynamometer, which records how much force someone can generate when they squeeze it. Research has repeatedly found associations between lower grip strength and poorer health outcomes. A major systematic review and meta-analysis published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) examined physical capability and subsequent mortality across tens of thousands of participants. Higher grip strength was associated with lower subsequent mortality. That does not mean having a strong handshake will make you live longer. Grip strength is better thought of as a useful marker, one small measurement that can provide information about wider muscular strength and physical resilience. That distinction matters. Rather than chasing longevity as simply “living for longer”, I am far more interested in how we help people remain capable, independent, socially connected and engaged in life for as long as possible. The Drums4Health connection When I first developed Drums4Health, grip strength wasn't at the front of my mind. My background spans music, education and fitness, and I was fascinated by what happens when we bring rhythmic learning and physical movement together. Drums4Health combines repeated drumming patterns with movement in an inclusive session that can be completed standing or seated. Participants aren't expected to be musicians, and they don't need to think of themselves as particularly fit. They simply move, drum, learn and connect. But the more sessions I delivered, particularly with older participants, the more I started looking beyond the obvious cardiovascular and wellbeing elements. Think about what the hands are doing during a drumming session. They are holding and controlling the sticks, repeatedly striking the drum, adjusting force and direction, coordinating left and right hands, changing rhythmic patterns and responding to movement and music. The wrists and forearms are continually involved too. That doesn't mean I can currently claim that Drums4Health increases grip strength. We haven't completed that research yet, but it gives us a very interesting question to investigate. Why everyday hand strength matters The importance of our hands becomes very obvious when we think about daily life, opening a jar, carrying shopping, preparing food, holding a handrail, gardening, turning a key, picking something up and getting dressed. These aren't athletic achievements. They're ordinary actions that contribute to independence and perhaps that's one of the problems with the way we sometimes talk about fitness and ageing. Exercise can become associated with gyms, sportswear, weights and structured workouts. For some people, particularly those who haven't exercised for years or who live with mobility limitations, that can feel like a world they don't belong in. I wanted Drums4Health to feel different. People can participate seated or standing. Movements can be adapted. Intensity can change from person to person. Instead of concentrating on completing repetitions, participants are concentrating on rhythm, learning a pattern and joining in with everyone around them. The exercise is still happening. It just doesn't necessarily feel like exercise. Movement plus rhythm gives the brain something to do too The hands are only one part of this story. One of the reasons I became so fascinated with drumming and movement was the cognitive challenge involved. Learning a rhythmic pattern requires attention, timing, coordination and memory. Add movement, and you are asking the brain and body to work together. Research into rhythmic movement in older adults is encouraging. A systematic review and meta-analysis involving 44 randomised controlled trials across 20 countries examined activities including music-based exercise, dance and drumming. The researchers reported improvements in physical function, global cognition and quality of life. That combination is particularly interesting to me. Why should we always separate physical health, brain health and social wellbeing into different activities? Perhaps some of the most useful approaches to healthy ageing are the ones that allow us to work on several things at once. There is another ingredient we shouldn't overlook: Connection There is something very powerful about a group of people drumming together. People look at one another. They laugh when a pattern goes wrong. They concentrate together. They hear themselves contributing to something bigger than their individual sound. I've watched people arrive at sessions unsure of themselves and gradually become part of the group. For me, that matters just as much as the movement. If we want people to remain active throughout their lives, we have to create activities they actually want to return to. The theoretically “perfect” exercise isn't much use if somebody hates doing it. Enjoyment, belonging and connection aren't optional extras. They can be part of what keeps people coming back. Now I want to measure what is happening This is where the next stage of Drums4Health becomes particularly exciting for me. As we grow and work increasingly with older adults, dementia organisations, community groups, schools and research partners, I don't simply want to say something works because people tell me they feel better. Their experiences matter enormously, but I also want evidence. Grip strength is one of the measures I am particularly interested in exploring. Could we measure participants' grip strength before and after a period of regular Drums4Health sessions? Could we look at changes alongside measures of mobility, coordination, wellbeing or cognitive engagement? Could the benefits differ between people participating seated and standing? And could we identify which elements of rhythmic movement create the greatest benefit? These are questions, not claims, but they are questions worth asking. Healthy ageing shouldn't start when we're old Perhaps the biggest lesson for me is that healthy ageing shouldn't suddenly become important when somebody reaches 70 or 80. The capabilities we want later in life are worth supporting much earlier. Strength, mobility, coordination, cognitive challenge and social connection. These things matter across generations. That is why I am increasingly passionate about creating something that isn't labelled an “older person's activity”. At Drums4Health sessions, people of different ages and physical abilities can participate alongside each other. Someone may drum seated while the person next to them completes a much larger range of movement. Both are part of the same experience. That inclusivity is fundamental to what I want Drums4Health to become. Perhaps longevity isn't really about adding years When people talk about longevity, the conversation can quickly become dominated by supplements, technology, expensive treatments and ways to extend lifespan. I'm interested in something much simpler. How do we help people keep doing the things that make life feel like life? How do we maintain enough strength to remain independent? How do we keep challenging our brains? How do we keep moving? How do we make sure we're still connecting with other people while we do it? I don't believe drumming is a magic answer to longevity. But perhaps the future of healthy ageing doesn't always have to look clinical or complicated. Sometimes it might look like a room full of people holding drumsticks, learning something new, moving their bodies, challenging their brains and laughing together while they do it. That is what I want Drums4Health to continue exploring. Move, drum, connect Drums4Health is an inclusive rhythm and movement wellbeing programme created by Tamsin Ward, combining physical movement, rhythmic learning and social connection. Sessions can be adapted for seated or standing participation and are being developed across community, education and wellbeing settings. As Drums4Health grows, we are particularly interested in partnerships with organisations and researchers who want to explore measurable outcomes around healthy ageing, physical function, brain health and wellbeing. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Tamsin Ward Tamsin Ward, Founder of Drums4Health Tamsin Ward is a former music teacher and headteacher, a qualified Personal Trainer, and holds a Master’s in Education. She founded Drums4Health to harness the combined power of movement and rhythm in supporting physical and brain health. With regular classes growing rapidly in popularity, Drums4Health is now expanding across the UK as an innovative and inclusive approach to wellbeing. You can contact her directly here.

Written by Luannah Victoria Arana, Mentor, Author, Healing Facilitator, and Visionary Luannah Victoria Arana is a transformational mentor, international #1 bestselling author, and founder of the SoulSpectives Institute and Serenity By The Sea. Drawing on over three decades of study and practice, she explores trauma, resilience, emotional mastery, embodiment, and what it means to truly come alive. Something profound happened for me recently, and it continues to reveal deeper layers of insight and understanding. Interestingly, the doorway was technology. Technology has probably been one of the greatest activators of expansion in my life, even though I actually used to avoid it like the plague. Fun fact: there was a time when I was afraid of computers. I wanted nothing to do with them or the internet. AI? Forget it. Now here I am building apps, creating courses, working with AI, learning new programs, running businesses and doing things I genuinely could not have imagined myself doing even five or ten years ago. In many ways, technology has become one of the places where I get to witness our extraordinary human capacity to expand beyond what once overwhelmed us. I think this matters enormously in entrepreneurship and leadership because building something asks us to continually enter territory we don't yet know how to navigate. We solve one problem and meet another. We master one skill and discover the next. We make decisions without guarantees. We adapt. We stretch. We fail. We learn. We try again. At some point, every entrepreneur meets an outer wall that touches an inner one. Sometimes the wall we're facing in our business isn't only a business problem. Sometimes it touches something much older. When the problem in front of us activates the story behind us Recently, while I was working on something new, I hit one of those technological walls. You know the ones. You've followed all the instructions. You're doing what you're supposed to be doing. Still, it isn't working. I kept trying and trying. Eventually, I could feel something happening inside me that was much bigger than the technology in front of me. My nervous system was becoming overwhelmed. In my mind, I knew I would eventually find a solution. But my biology was moving in the opposite direction of that knowing. I could feel the surge of activation in my body. Anxiety was rising. My ability to think clearly was beginning to disappear. It was a perfect lived reminder of something I teach: Knowing something cognitively is not always enough to help our biology shift. Underneath the activation, I could feel an old, familiar message beginning to rise: I can't do this. Why can't I do this? As the overwhelm rose, I did what I have spent years learning and practicing. The more I've healed my own nervous system, the greater my capacity has become to land in the moment when I'm activated and to become present enough to recognize what is happening inside me rather than simply being carried away by it. This is the work I teach, and it is also the work I continue to live. Healing doesn't mean there are no more layers. It means that when another layer reveals itself, we have greater capacity to meet it. So instead of forcing myself through the overwhelm, I became curious about it because this feeling had a history. What if avoidance isn't where the story begins? Over the years, as I've unlocked more of my own trauma patterns, I have thought of avoidance as one of the things I've had to overcome. Yes, I can avoid things. Give me paperwork that needs completing, invoices to send, emails to answer, forms, fine print or too many tiny steps, and there's a pretty good chance they'll find their way into the I'll do that later pile. I've even given that part of myself a nickname: Last Minute Lucy. I've become vastly better at this over the years, yet the pattern can still appear. But as I stayed with the experience this time, I saw something I hadn't seen quite this clearly before. Avoidance wasn't the first movement. Overwhelm was. My nervous system had learned to protect me from overwhelm through avoidance. That distinction may sound small. Inside of me, it changed everything. I followed the felt sense in my body deeper, back toward its roots. I found myself connecting with the little girl I had been after my mother left, after my sister's accident, while I was also being bullied at school. At seven years old, I had lost the life I knew. My nervous system was overwhelmed. In those days, we didn't have the trauma-informed understanding we have today. Nobody was looking at this little girl and asking, What happened to her? What is her nervous system trying to cope with? Instead, people looked at what I could and couldn't do. I couldn't focus properly. I couldn't retain information. I struggled to learn. Teachers became frustrated with me. I was teased. I was called stupid. Eventually, I was placed in a special education class. During this experience, I didn't simply remember those things. I felt her. I accessed a deep, guttural emotional pain that had been held in my body from that time, the pain of a little girl who had already lost so much, whose inner world had been turned upside down, and who was then being told, directly and indirectly, that something was wrong with her because she couldn't function the way everyone expected her to. Because I have spent years building the capacity to stay present with myself, I could sit with her there. I could witness what was emerging. I could use EFT tapping. I could let my body feel what it needed to feel. I could be with the pain she couldn't possibly have known how to be with then. She didn't fail to learn Then another memory came. I remembered being about fifteen years old and desperately trying to study for a test. I would read a sentence and try to remember just three words. Three words. By the time I reached for the pen to write them down, they were gone. I couldn't hold them. I remember what that felt like. I can see something now that I couldn't possibly have understood then: That little girl didn't fail to learn. Her available capacity had been consumed by survival. Nobody around me understood that. Because they didn't understand it, neither did I. So I interpreted the consequences of trauma as evidence about my worth and intelligence: I can't. I'm not smart. I'm stupid. I'm not enough. That's where “I can't” became more than a thought. It became embodied. Those beliefs didn't appear out of nowhere. They were conclusions a young nervous system formed while trying to make sense of experiences it didn't yet have the context to understand. This is where I think the layers of healing are extraordinary. What happened that day wasn't some magical moment in which I suddenly overcame something I had carried all my life. Quite the opposite. It was the fruit of all the capacity I've been building for years. Years of learning how to become present when my nervous system is activated. Years of learning to listen rather than override. Years of healing the ripple effects of those early experiences. Years of practicing what I now teach and share with others. Because that capacity exists now, I could descend another layer. I could witness what was there. I could feel what had been waiting to be felt. Then I could return to my life differently. Capacity changes what becomes possible Decades after those childhood experiences, I was sitting in front of a computer feeling the echo of that same response. Except something was different. I was different. The overwhelm came, but I didn't leave myself in it. I noticed. I breathed. I did my EFT tapping. I reassured the part of me that was becoming frightened. I felt my biology begin to move back toward regulation. Eventually, I lay down for a few minutes and allowed my body to settle. Then I got back up. I returned to the computer, and I did the thing. That's when I saw the two pathways so clearly. The old pathway had been trigger, overwhelm, then escape. Through years of healing and repeated practice, another pathway has gradually become available: trigger, overwhelm, awareness, regulation, rest, then return. What struck me most was this: Overwhelm exists in both. Healing didn't remove overwhelm from the human experience. It expanded my capacity to meet it. Ohhhh. There it was. Perhaps this is what expansion really requires We talk so much about healing as releasing the past, resolving trauma, regulating the nervous system and changing beliefs. Yes. It is all of those things. But what are we doing all of that for? To become more available to life. To expand beyond the places where our biology once had to say, Too much. Not safe. I can't. Get me out of here. Discover that today, another possibility may exist. For entrepreneurs, creators and leaders, I believe this matters profoundly. We often talk about expanding a business as though expansion were primarily strategic: better systems, better marketing, more visibility, more revenue, a larger audience. But every outer expansion asks something of the person creating it. Can I tolerate greater uncertainty? Can I remain present when something doesn't work? Can I learn what I don't yet know without turning temporary incompetence into an identity? Can I stay in relationship with myself while solving the problem in front of me? Can I meet complexity without immediately interpreting discomfort as evidence that I'm incapable? Our businesses can only expand sustainably to the degree that we develop the capacity to remain present inside the expansion they require of us. This is why I don't believe capacity is built by forcing ourselves beyond overwhelm. Capacity is built by repeatedly returning from overwhelm without abandoning ourselves. Every time we do that, we expand the possibilities of how we can meet the next moment. The circumstances that once defined the edge of our world can eventually become the very places where new capacity grows. I know that intimately. I didn't learn this territory only through books or trainings, although I've spent decades studying healing and transformation. I've lived it. I've walked the miles. Nature has been one of my teachers. Creativity has been one of my medicines. Movement, spirituality, sound, relationship, the body, the soul, and an almost relentless curiosity about why we are the way we are and what actually allows us to change have all shaped this journey. I've fallen down and gotten back up more times than I could possibly count. Gradually, the life available to me became larger. Not because life stopped activating me. Not because I became some perfectly regulated human being who never gets overwhelmed. God, no. But because fewer and fewer moments require me to abandon myself in order to survive them. That, to me, is freedom. Leadership from the inside out Perhaps this is also one of the most overlooked dimensions of leadership. Before we lead companies, teams, communities or movements, we are continually being asked to steward what happens within ourselves. Not control it. Not suppress it. Not pretend fear doesn't exist. But develop enough awareness and capacity that an activated nervous system doesn't automatically become the author of our next decision. I have often said that being an entrepreneur has been one of the deepest spiritual schools of my life because business doesn't only ask us what we can create. It reveals us to ourselves. Our businesses, our relationships, our challenges, even the things that frustrate us, can become remarkably accurate mirrors of our inner world. Where do I become intolerant? Where does fear surface? Where do I doubt myself? Where do I become defensive, impatient, controlling or overwhelmed? Where am I afraid to be seen? Where do I want to leave when something becomes difficult? We can deal with each of those experiences only at the level where it appears: solve the problem, manage the conflict, fix the technology, change the strategy, push through the frustration. Sometimes, of course, that's exactly what needs to happen. But I've discovered that every trigger can also become a doorway to know ourselves more deeply, if we choose to open it. That technological wall could have remained a technological wall. Instead, it became a doorway. This has happened again and again throughout my entrepreneurial journey. Every doorway I've been willing to open, every trigger I've become curious about, every inner limitation I've learned to meet differently has expanded more than my capacity to handle that particular situation. It has expanded my business. It has expanded my creativity. It has expanded my capacity to take risks, solve problems, communicate, navigate uncertainty, remain in relationship and meet the moment in front of me. Perhaps this is why entrepreneurship can be such a profound spiritual unfolding. When we create something of our own and bring it into the world, we are making ourselves vulnerable. We're bringing our ideas, our creativity, our values, our vision, some expression of who we are, out of the safety of our inner world and into relationship with other people and with life itself. There will be feedback. There will be uncertainty. There will be rejection. There will be things that don't work. There will be moments when our vision exceeds our current capacity and asks us to grow into the person capable of carrying it. Business gives us endless opportunities to discover where we are still protecting, contracting, doubting, controlling or leaving ourselves. But it also gives us endless opportunities to expand. That's the spiritual school. Not because business itself is inherently spiritual, but because anything that continually brings us into relationship with ourselves, other people, uncertainty, vulnerability, creativity, and life can become a place of profound self-discovery. Sometimes we need tools. Sometimes we need practices. Sometimes we need support to understand what our biology is doing instead of judging ourselves for it. Life has shown me that it is absolutely possible, even when we have spent years believing that our nervous system defines the limits of our lives, to gradually discover that those limits are not necessarily fixed. With presence, compassion, awareness and repeated practice, we can build new capacity. We can learn to remain where we once had to leave. We can meet differently what once overwhelmed us. The places that once seemed to mark the edge of what was possible can become the very places through which our possibilities expand. That's where the magic is. So if you recognize yourself somewhere in this, if overwhelm becomes avoidance, shutdown, procrastination, reactivity, perfectionism or simply that familiar “I can't,” perhaps there is another question available. Not “Why am I like this?” but “What became too much for me once, and what would allow me to meet it differently now?” That's a very different doorway. Perhaps the next time business or life brings us to one of those seemingly immovable walls, alongside asking “How do I solve this?” we might also ask, “What is this moment showing me about myself?” Healing for me isn't about becoming someone else. It is about becoming increasingly available to ourselves, to our purpose, to our leadership and to the life that was always waiting for us beyond the places we once had to leave. Trigger to overwhelm to awareness to regulation to rest to return. Then, possibilities open beyond our wildest dreams. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Luannah Victoria Arana Luannah Victoria Arana, Mentor, Author, Healing Facilitator, and Visionary Luannah Victoria Arana is a transformational mentor, international #1 bestselling author, and founder of the SoulSpectives Institute for Personal Transformation and Serenity By The Sea Healing Retreats. For more than three decades, she has studied and practiced approaches to trauma healing, emotional resilience, embodiment, and personal transformation. Her work bridges lived experience, therapeutic and somatic practices, traditional wisdom, and contemporary understandings of the nervous system. Through her writing, retreats, mentoring, and courses, Luannah helps people move beyond survival, reclaim trust in themselves, and come fully alive.

Written by Kylie Gallaher, Clinical Hypnotherapist & Strategic Psychotherapist Blending innovation with compassion, Kylie Gallaher brings cutting-edge expertise in clinical hypnotherapy to empower lasting change. Grounded in evidence-based practice, her professional journey is dedicated to helping clients overcome challenges and thrive with confidence. Over the past year, I have written about Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) as it deserves to be understood, not as picky eating or a passing phase, but as a complex, trauma-informed, neurologically rooted experience organised around safety and threat. I have written about why awareness alone has not been enough, and why recognition without meaningful change leaves families and adults suspended in a difficult in-between. This article is where that conversation opens outward, because everything ARFID has taught me about the nervous system, about safety, and about how a single relationship with food can quietly reshape a whole life does not stop at ARFID. It reaches into how I have come to understand eating disorders more broadly, the inseparability of mind and body, and why an approach so often dismissed as “alternative” may, in fact, be one of the most logical places to begin. This is the natural continuation and expansion of the work I have shared so far, and I’d like to share it here. What ARFID taught me that applies to every eating disorder ARFID is distinct in its primary drivers. For people with ARFID, food avoidance is not about weight, shape, or control. It is about threat, a nervous system that has learned, often early and implicitly, that eating, swallowing, certain textures, sensations, or internal bodily cues are dangerous. But the deeper principle ARFID exposes is not unique to ARFID at all. What ARFID reveals with unusual clarity is that eating disorders are rarely, if ever, really about food. They are about what food has come to represent, which can be almost anything, safety or danger, control or predictability, comfort or punishment, a sense of worth or of identity itself. The behaviours we see on the surface, the restriction, avoidance, bingeing, purging, or rigid rules, are not the disorder itself. They are the visible expression of a nervous system and a mind that have quietly organised themselves around survival. Once you understand ARFID as a safety-seeking response rather than a behavioural problem, it becomes very difficult to look at any eating disorder the same way again. Eating disorders were never only about food When we widen the lens from ARFID to anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, or orthorexia, the surface presentations look strikingly different. The drivers differ too. Body image, weight, and control feature far more centrally in some presentations than in others, and those distinctions matter and should never be flattened. Yet, beneath the differences, a familiar architecture appears. In each, food and eating become the arena in which something far larger is being managed, a threat to be contained, an internal state to be regulated, a sense of control to be reclaimed in a life that feels uncontrollable, or a way of coping with distress that has no other outlet. The specific meaning varies enormously from person to person, but the underlying pattern is consistent, the relationship with food is doing work that has very little to do with nutrition. This is why approaches that focus only on the behaviour fall short. You can change what someone eats without touching why eating became so loaded in the first place. When the underlying drivers remain, the behaviour tends to return, migrate, or simply go underground, adapting rather than resolving. This is also why I tend to reach for a different word than “recovery.” Not because recovery does not matter, it matters deeply, but because, for me, the goal is not simply returning someone to a previous baseline or managing a condition indefinitely. It is freedom. Freedom to eat, to connect, to move through life without fear quietly running the show. There is a quieter shift underway that speaks to exactly this, even the field's own definitions of severity are moving beyond the scale. For a long time, how ill someone was assumed to be could be read, more or less, off the scale. That assumption has been loosening for years, and the field’s own language has moved with it. More than a decade ago, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) let go of anorexia’s rigid numeric weight cutoff in favour of the more qualitative “significantly low weight” and dropped the amenorrhea requirement altogether. The direction of travel has only continued. The body mass index (BMI) based severity bands still written into the manual are increasingly questioned, with cross-cultural research showing that thresholds drawn from Western norms travel poorly and wrongly cast a disproportionate share of patients as “extreme.” Atypical anorexia, the presentation in which someone can be seriously unwell while sitting at a normal, or even higher, weight, is now understood to be every bit as serious. Systematic reviews find eating disorder distress as high as, or higher than, in classic anorexia, and adolescent studies find that a substantial share need hospitalising for medical instability despite never being underweight. In 2026, a proposal led by eating disorder researcher Timothy Walsh went a step further again, setting out dedicated diagnostic criteria for atypical anorexia so that it is no longer treated as a lesser cousin of the “real” thing. Running through all of it is a single, quietly radical idea, that danger lives in the trajectory, not the number. The body responds to how far and how fast it has fallen, not to where it has landed. The picture itself does not stand still. Tracking three decades of presentations, longitudinal data from Japan has found people with restricting anorexia arriving progressively more unwell, lower in weight and higher in distress than those a generation before. These conditions, and the thresholds we reach for to measure them, are moving targets. In other words, the profession is arriving, in its own language, at something many people with lived experience have long known, stability on the surface is not the same as safety underneath. A living model: How eating disorders shape the whole person One of the most important things I have come to understand, first through ARFID and then across eating disorders more broadly, is that these are not conditions confined to the plate. They are whole-person, whole-life experiences. They behave less like a single problem with a list of side effects and more like a living, interconnected system. Consider how far the effects actually reach. An eating disorder shapes cognitive function because the brain, deprived of consistent, adequate nourishment, struggles with concentration, memory, flexibility, and emotional regulation, and because chronic threat narrows thinking toward vigilance and away from possibility. It shapes immune function, as nutritional compromise and sustained stress quietly erode the body’s capacity to protect itself. It disrupts sleep, which, in turn, worsens mood, cognition, and physiological regulation the very next day. It reshapes psychosocial engagement, as meals, celebrations, travel, dating, and everyday spontaneity become negotiated, narrowed, or avoided. It strains relationships, as those closest reorganise themselves around food, safety, and worry, often without recognising how much they are carrying. It profoundly affects the digestive system, where stress, restriction, and fear alter the gut directly, producing nausea, bloating, discomfort, and unpredictability. Crucially, these effects do not occur in isolation. They interact, reinforce, and compound one another over time. Nutritional deficiency affects the brain. Cognitive strain increases psychological stress. Chronic stress disrupts sleep, immunity, and digestion. Gut discomfort intensifies anxiety and avoidance. Social withdrawal deepens isolation, which feeds the very distress the eating disorder was attempting to manage. An eating disorder, in other words, is not a single problem with multiple consequences. It is a dynamic system that shapes how a person thinks, feels, heals, relates, and functions in the world. It does not simply affect what someone eats. It affects how they live, often in ways that remain unseen until the costs are significant. Once you see it as a living system rather than a discrete behaviour, one question becomes unavoidable. If the disorder lives everywhere in the body and the mind at once, why do we so often try to treat it in only one of those places? The mind and body were never separate We inherited a way of thinking that treats the mind and the body as different territories, cared for by different sets of professionals in different rooms. The psychologist attends to thoughts. The physician attends to the body. The dietitian attends to intake. Each offers something genuinely valuable. But when a person is treated in silos, the parts of their experience that most need to be understood together are the very parts that fall through the cracks. I know that gap intimately. My own journey into this field began when my son was falling through exactly those cracks, seen by specialist after specialist, each treating a piece, none holding the whole. Watching his world shrink because food was unsafe, I came to understand something I have not since been able to un-know. The mind and the body are not two systems that influence one another. They are one system, in constant conversation. For a long time, that conversation was understood mainly through the nervous system. But there is something prior to it and even more fundamental, the limbic brain’s appraisal, its rapid, largely subconscious assessment of safety and its vigilance for threat. This appraisal is a distinct neurological process. It precedes the state of the nervous system and sets it in motion, and it is, in turn, shaped by the signals the nervous system sends back. The two are intimately related, but they are not the same thing. One is the assessment of danger. The other is the bodily state that follows from it. Every fear, every memory, every sense of threat or safety is not only a thought. It is a physiological event, unfolding in the body, shaping heart rate, digestion, muscle tension, and the release of stress chemistry. This is why an eating disorder can begin as an emotional experience and end up written into the gut, and why a physical experience, such as illness, choking, or pain, can reorganise the mind around fear. At the centre of all of it sits the limbic brain, and within it the amygdala, the deeper structure that appraises, faster than conscious thought and largely independent of it, whether we are safe or in danger. That appraisal is then translated into a state of the nervous system, the body’s shift into mobilisation and vigilance, or into settling and ease. Emerging neurobiological work points the same way, implicating the brain regions involved in interoception, our sense of the body’s internal state, and in sensory integration, the very channels through which appraisal and bodily state continually inform one another. This is the part of the story most treatment models quietly leave out, and not because the science is unknown. Leading eating disorder clinicians, Carolyn Costin among them, have long recognised the amygdala’s central role in these conditions. The recognition is not the gap. The gap is what follows from it. The amygdala does not take instruction from the top down. It cannot be reasoned or willed into standing down because it responds to safety rather than to argument. So a model built on conscious, top-down change can name the amygdala accurately and still have no means to reach it. If safety and threat are appraised at the limbic level, beneath language and reasoning, and the nervous system takes its cue from that appraisal, then approaches that work only from the top down, through conscious thought and willpower, are speaking to the wrong floor of the building. They can be genuinely helpful, but they are often addressing the presenting issue more than the place where the pattern actually lives. The gut-brain axis: Where mind and body become undeniable If you want to see the mind-body connection at its most vivid, look at the gut. Digestive symptoms that once earned normal test results were long dismissed as “functional,” “stress-related,” or simply “in your head.” We understand them very differently now. Many are recognised as disorders of gut-brain interaction, conditions driven by altered communication between the gut, the brain, and the autonomic nervous system. The symptoms are real. They have biological and neurological foundations. Tellingly, they respond to approaches that support the nervous system, not only the digestive tract. I came to specialise in gut-directed hypnotherapy not as a separate interest, but as a direct consequence of working with Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) and eating disorders. Again and again, woven through presentations of anxiety, restrictive eating, trauma, and burnout, were the same quiet companions, nausea, bloating, pain, urgency, appetite changes, and an ongoing sense of internal unease. The body was speaking, even when the gut was not the reason someone had come to see me. This overlap is now being mapped in the research itself, with a 2025 scoping review documenting just how frequently ARFID and disorders of gut-brain interaction travel together. What makes gut-directed hypnotherapy so significant is not only that it works, but why it works. It is now recognised in clinical guidelines, including those of the American Gastroenterological Association, as part of the gold-standard behavioural treatment pathway for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and related gut-brain conditions. In the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) similarly recommends hypnotherapy as an option for IBS that has not responded to first-line treatment. In Australia, researchers at Monash University have been central to the evidence, with a landmark trial finding gut-directed hypnotherapy as effective as the low-fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols (FODMAP) diet for IBS, and later work extending access through app-delivered programs. A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis by Adler and colleagues reinforced this, finding that gut-directed hypnotherapy meaningfully improves symptoms, with around six in ten people achieving a substantial reduction in symptom severity. It directly influences visceral sensitivity, interoceptive awareness, autonomic activation, and conditioned fear responses, the very machinery of the gut-brain axis. In other words, one of the most evidence-based psychological treatments for a physical digestive condition is a form of hypnotherapy. Sit with that for a moment. A treatment addressed to the mind is a leading, guideline-recognised approach for a disorder of the body. The gut-brain axis does not simply hint that mind and body are connected. It demonstrates that they were never separate to begin with. The gut is the most vivid example, but not the only one. The same principle runs through psychoneuroimmunology, the study of how psychological states, the nervous system, and immunity continually shape one another. It is why the immune strand of the living model is not a side effect sitting off to one side, but part of the same integrated system, and why hypnosis, which has been shown to help protect immune function from the effects of stress, belongs in a genuinely whole-person approach. Why hypnotherapy is not alternative, but almost obvious Here is where the whole thread draws together. If eating disorders are organised around threat and safety, if that threat is appraised at the limbic level beneath conscious thought, and if the mind and body are a single system in constant conversation, then a treatment that can speak directly to the limbic brain’s appraisal, and through it to the nervous system state and the subconscious patterns that maintain fear, is not a fringe curiosity. It is a logical response to how the problem is actually built. This is what clinical hypnotherapy, at its best, is. Not mind control, and not a magic wand, but a deeply collaborative process that works from the bottom up as well as the top down, engaging directly with the subconscious, where patterns are stored and where the sense of threat is held. It allows change to happen at deeper, more integrated, and more sustainable levels than working with conscious thought alone. It is not about overriding the nervous system. It is about helping the limbic brain reappraise safety so that the nervous system can settle and new possibilities can open from the inside out. Positioned this way, hypnotherapy stops looking like an “alternative” to “real” treatment and starts looking like an obvious partner to it. It works alongside medical monitoring and nutritional support. Rather than sitting apart from psychological therapy, it is delivered within it. In my own practice, clinical hypnosis is integrated with evidence-based psychotherapy for eating disorders, principally Specialist Supportive Clinical Management (SSCM), carried with a cognitive behavioural scaffolding. SSCM is worth knowing about. It began as the comparison condition in a landmark trial by McIntosh and colleagues and went on to outperform both cognitive behavioural therapy and interpersonal therapy for anorexia nervosa, which is precisely why I chose to train in it. It has since become an established treatment in its own right, recommended in current clinical guidelines for anorexia nervosa in adults. Holding the psychological, physiological, and subconscious layers together, rather than parcelling them out to separate rooms, is what allows the work to reach the limbic and nervous system level where eating disorders are quietly maintained. For a condition that lives in the whole body and the whole life at once, this is not exotic. It is close to essential. Freedom as the point I keep returning to one word, and I return to it deliberately, freedom. Not management. Not compliance. Not a lifetime of shrinking carefully around threat. Let me be careful here, so this is not misread. It is not a case against recovery, and not a suggestion that recovery is anything less than worth every effort. It is that I have come to hold a different goal, one I believe reaches further. Recovery is often constructed as a return to a threshold, measured by whether someone can eat enough or tolerate enough to satisfy an external benchmark. Freedom is a different thing. It is not a line to cross, but a way of living no longer organised around fear. Real change, the kind that lasts, begins where the appraisal does. It happens when the limbic brain relearns safety so that the nervous system can finally settle into a different state. When that shift occurs, the effects are not confined to food. They ripple outward through the same living system the eating disorder once occupied, into cognition, sleep, immunity, relationships, digestion, and a person’s sense of themselves. I have watched this happen. I watched it first in my own home, where a world once built around three safe foods slowly, unforcedly, expanded into curiosity and confidence. I see it in clients whose lives have been quietly limited for years by food, by fear, by patterns running beneath awareness. When the limbic brain reappraises safety and the nervous system can follow, people do not simply eat differently. They live differently. They move from survival to safety, and from fear to the freedom to thrive. That is the thread running through everything I have written this year and everything I hope to keep exploring. ARFID opened the door. Eating disorders more broadly widened it. The mind-body connection, seen most clearly in the gut, explains why. Freedom, the real, embodied, whole-life kind, is what becomes possible when we finally treat the whole person at the level where change truly begins. A thoughtful next step If this article has shifted how you think about eating disorders, or about the relationship between your mind and your body, consider sharing it with someone who might need to see themselves in it, a partner, a family member, or a clinician walking alongside you. If you are living with an eating disorder, ARFID, or persistent gut symptoms, seek out practitioners who understand nervous system safety, the mind-body connection, and survival-based patterns, rather than behaviour change alone. If this way of working speaks to you, and you would like to see how it translates into care, reach out whenever you feel ready to take a first step. You can explore more of my writing, including the companion article to this piece and its full reference list, on the Newcastle Clinical Hypnotherapy blog. There is more to come, and every piece points toward the same possibility, that a calmer relationship with your body, your mind, and your food is achievable, and that you do not have to navigate it alone. Freedom to live, connect, and move through life without fear running the show. That is what this work is really about. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Kylie Gallaher Kylie Gallaher, Clinical Hypnotherapist, Strategic Psychotherapist Kylie Gallaher leads Newcastle Clinical Hypnotherapy, the region’s only specialised hypnotherapy team, offering comprehensive support in all areas where hypnotherapy is beneficial. With advanced qualifications and a focus on evidence-based methods, she has established herself as a leader in the field. Kylie specialises in ARFID, eating disorders, trauma, anxiety, and related conditions including gastrointestinal disorders, and is committed to reshaping treatment approaches in Australia. Her professional journey reflects a dedication to blending science with compassion, delivering measurable results and raising the standard of clinical hypnotherapy nationwide.

Written by William Dean Durrant, Chirologist, Consciousness Facilitator & Author William D. Durrant is a Chirologist and spiritual guide with experience in energy work and soul growth. He blends the analytical mindset of the architect with natural intuition. He uses Chirology to empower individuals to decode their own blueprints and transcend modern conditioning, to walk their path with clarity and purpose. Modern science often reaches its limits not because the data is insufficient, but because the framework used to interpret it may be too small. By drawing parallels between consciousness, chirology, neuroscience, and higher dimensional cosmology, this exploration asks what becomes possible when we stop forcing complex realities into incomplete models. The foundational error in modern models There is a quiet error at the heart of modern science. It is not that our models are wrong. It is that we have forced a larger reality into a smaller frame and then invented new entities to make the frame hold. I have spent years reading hands. Not to predict the future, but to reveal structure. Through chirology, consciousness mapping and behavioural pattern analysis, the hand becomes an instrument. Like any good instrument, it is indispensable. It does not answer every question a life creates. That principle- what can this indispensable instrument illuminate without settling on its own? Now it sits at the center of a collaboration I am undertaking with a theoretical cosmological physicist. It may reshape how we think about both the cosmos and consciousness. When models strain: Brain and cosmos side by side The brain’s limitations: Neuroscience has given us an exquisite map of the brain. We can trace firing, chemistry, networks. Yet when we ask the brain to account for the entirety of lived experience, meaning, intuition, the felt sense of being aware of awareness, the model strains. The cosmological parallel: Cosmology faced the same strain. When we forced the observable universe into a strictly four-dimensional metric, the mathematics did not balance. To make it balance, we invented two placeholders, dark matter and dark energy. Together they make up 95% of what we call the universe. We have never directly observed either. They are necessary to save the 4D frame. The brane and the bulk: My collaborator’s work, rooted in 5D bulk brane cosmology, asks a different question. What if there is nothing missing? What if the dark sector is not a substance, but a shadow, a geometric artifact of a higher-dimensional reality projected onto our four-dimensional perception? In this paradigm, our universe is a brane, a membrane, within a five-dimensional bulk. Gravity can leak. The influence of the bulk creates what looks, from inside the brane, like extra attraction and extra expansion. We do not need to invent dark entities. We need to allow for a larger geometry. We are exploring whether a non-local damping, a kind of cosmic friction, arises from this bulk interaction. A subtle effect that would suppress the clumping of matter just enough to explain why the universe looks smoother than our standard model predicts. If correct, it would mean our accounting of the cosmos has been off by an order of magnitude, not because we lack data, but because we lacked dimensionality. The hand as a geometric instrument Pattern vs. Prediction: This is where chirology becomes more than a personal practice. It becomes a philosophical test case. For years I have said, I read hands to reveal, not to predict. The hand shows pattern, not fate. It shows mechanism, constraint, capacity, timing. It cannot tell you whether a relationship is real, whether you should take the job, or what your pain means. Those questions belong to consciousness, not to dermatoglyphics. The brain is the same. It is indispensable to the study of a life, but it does not settle what a life means. To ask the brain to prove or disprove consciousness is to ask the hand to prove or disprove love. It is a category error. The step 1 and 2 error: My work in consciousness mapping tracks this error in daily life. A thought arises, Step 1. Fired from the catapult of the seeking mind. Then we take Step 2. We build a mental construction around it, argue with it, identify with it. The suffering does not live in Step 1. It lives in Step 2. Yet most therapeutic and performance models try to fix Step 1, as if we could stop thoughts arising at all. I once worked with a woman who believed she was “always choosing the wrong man.” When she placed her hand on the table, the geometry didn’t show a flaw in judgment. It showed a long pattern of self-abandonment followed by brief periods of clarity. Her relationships weren’t failures. They were repetitions of the same interruption. When she saw that, she stopped treating her past as evidence and started treating it as a map. The hand didn’t tell her who to love. It told her where she kept leaving herself. The 5D paradigm suggests the universe does the same thing. Step 1, observation. Step 2, we force that observation into a 4D construction and invent dark matter and dark energy to hold the construction together. The invitation in both cases is to stop taking Step 2. Integration without reduction: A new standard The philosopher and physicist Jason Padgett articulated this beautifully- integration without reduction. What can brain data illuminate without settling on its own? That is the standard we are holding. We are not saying the brain is not real. We are saying the brain is not the whole account. We are not saying the hand is mystical. We are saying the hand is geometric. It records, through form and line and texture, the negotiation between an individual’s awareness and time. When you sit with someone and see in their hands a prolonged period of self-interruption, and they tell you they have spent ten years starting and stopping the same project, you are not performing magic. You are reading geometry. The bulk brane model proposes the same for the cosmos. What we experience as separate forces may be the geometry of a larger negotiation between brane and bulk. Consciousness, in this view, may not be an emergent property locked inside the skull, but a field property of that larger geometry, something the brain tunes, like a radio tunes a signal, rather than generates. Why this matters in daily life The human implications: If this direction is correct, the implications are practical. It changes the question in mental health. Instead of “how do I stop this thought?” we ask, “who released the bolt, and why am I building a home around it?” It changes the question in self-understanding. Instead of “what does my hand say will happen?” we ask, “what pattern is my hand revealing that I am currently renting space to, and do I need to keep eating its bread?” It restores wonder without requiring superstition. We do not need to invent invisible substances, in space or in self, to explain why things feel heavier than they should. We need to allow for a larger room. I will not publish equations here. The work is ongoing, peer-reviewed, and belongs to its proper channel first. What I can share is the orientation. We are testing a universe that is more connected, less lonely, and more geometric than the standard story suggests. The hand, long dismissed as too small to matter, may be one of the most honest places to begin studying it. It is where time becomes flesh. Where pattern becomes touchable. We have been arguing with the ink. Perhaps it is time to study the page. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from William Dean Durrant William Dean Durrant, Chirologist, Consciousness Facilitator & Author William D. Durrant is a Chirologist, spiritual guide, and author, and is dedicated to the art of soul ascension. With over three decades of immersion in energy work and martial arts, he bridges the gap between ancient wisdom and the modern, often chaotic, world. William helps his clients look past the concrete of everyday life to find the seeds of growth hidden in the cracks. His mission is to provide the tools for self-discovery, helping you stand firm in your truth during transformative times. If you are ready to stop navigating the mystery and step onto the path of your own soul's journey, connect with William to begin the work.

Written by Dr. Louise Hurst, Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach Dr. Louise Hurst is a Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach and Narcissistic Abuse Specialist whose work sits at the intersection of neuroscience, embodiment, and lived experience. With a PhD in Neuroscience and 16 years in healthcare communications, she brings scientific depth and emotional attunement to her coaching sessions. Have you ended a relationship with a partner who appeared kind, funny, and attentive in the beginning, only for the dynamic to shift into betrayal, abandonment, or emotional withdrawal? If so, you may have been targeted by a covert narcissist, one of the most dangerous forms of narcissism to encounter. Covert narcissists hide behind a façade of niceness and humility in public but devalue and control their partners in private. Their victims often do not realise what is happening until significant psychological harm has occurred. In this article, you will see how covert narcissists operate, who they target, and the psychological injuries they leave behind. What is narcissism? The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR) describes narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) as a collection of nine traits, including lack of empathy, fantasies of success and power, a sense of uniqueness, grandiosity, arrogance, entitlement, exploitation, envy, and a need for excessive admiration. To meet the diagnostic criteria for NPD, you must have five of the nine traits. Some people display narcissistic tendencies, while others meet the full diagnostic criteria for NPD. There are several narcissism subtypes, including overt, covert, malignant, vulnerable, somatic, cognitive, and communal forms. In the US, prevalence rates of NPD are 0.5% to 6.2%, however, many people with NPD never seek psychological support, suggesting real prevalence rates are actually much higher. Victims, not perpetrators, are usually the ones who seek help. People experiencing narcissistic abuse often present with symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), including anxiety, depression, panic attacks, emotional dysregulation, self-harm, and suicidal ideation. Related article: How to Spot a Narcissist on the First Date What is covert narcissism? Covert narcissists are among the most difficult personality types to identify because they operate behind two distinct masks. Their outward persona is often gentle, helpful, insecure, or self-effacing, the “nice guy” who appears caring, supportive, or vulnerable. This is not genuine humility but a strategic presentation designed to lower defenses and build trust. Beneath this surface lies a very different identity. The covert narcissist’s hidden self is marked by entitlement, arrogance, emotional coldness, and a deep need for control and validation. This inner persona drives manipulation, subtle cruelty, and psychological domination, all delivered in ways that are difficult to detect and even harder to prove. The target, the empath Covert narcissists frequently target people who are emotionally intelligent, empathic, competent, and high-achieving. Many targets share similar developmental histories. They may have grown up in environments where love was conditional, boundaries were punished, or emotional chaos was normal. In these families, the child was often the one who was scapegoated and forced to abandon their own needs to maintain any form of connection. A crumb of affection was a lifeline, and this pattern carries into adult relationships. Covert narcissists recognise this pattern instantly, they sense who will over-give, who will tolerate emotional inconsistency, and who will work harder to “fix” the relationship. Related article: How to Heal From Family Scapegoating The emotional abuse playbook 1. Superficial charm and love bombing We often let our guard down around people who seem charming. Charisma itself isn’t harmful. Many people are naturally warm and engaging, but covert narcissists use charm strategically in a process called love bombing. Their goal is to lower your defenses, create a positive image of themselves, and establish a psychological contrast that becomes deeply confusing once the abuse begins. Covert narcissists are very subtle when love bombing, using techniques that involve attention, validation, praise, or intense eye contact, all of which trigger dopamine and oxytocin, creating a biochemical surge that feels like connection. This is the beginning of a trauma bond. Related article: Could You Be Falling For A Love Bomber? – Discover The Warning Signs 2. Trauma bonding and intermittent reinforcement Once the connection is secured, the narcissist can begin to trauma bond through intermittent reinforcement, a cycle of unpredictable reward and withdrawal that mirrors the neurological impact of gambling. Between the moments of reward, the narcissist withdraws, triggering anxiety and fear and increasing levels of adrenaline and cortisol. As the relationship progresses, the time between rewards grows longer. The victim becomes neurologically conditioned to chase connection, soothe anxiety, and hope for the return of the person they met at the beginning, a person who never truly existed. Covert narcissists often use subtle tactics rather than overt cycles to trauma bond. Instead of explosive arguments or dramatic reconciliations, they rely on stonewalling, withdrawal of warmth, quiet sabotage, or emotional ambiguity. Related article: Trauma Bonds and the Addictive Cycle of an Abuser’s Control 3. Gaslighting Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation that makes the victim doubt their own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. The term originates from the 1938 play Gas Light and its later film adaptations, in which a husband manipulates his wife into believing she is losing her sanity. At its core, gaslighting is about power and control. Gaslighting affects every part of a victim’s life. When someone is repeatedly told that their emotions are irrational, their memory is faulty, or their perceptions are wrong, they begin to question their reality. These tactics keep the victim anxious, confused, and seeking reassurance from the very person who is destabilising them. Covert narcissists use a variety of tools to control, including withholding information, circular arguments, word salad, manufactured drama, and strategic ambiguity. 4. Triangulation Triangulation is a manipulation tactic used by narcissists to control narratives, destabilise relationships, and maintain power. It is closely related to the Karpman Drama Triangle, a psychological model first described by Stephen Karpman in 1968. In the drama triangle, someone is always the victim, rescuer, or perpetrator. These roles can shift between people, but covert narcissists are always either the victim or the rescuer. They never take up the position of the perpetrator because they use blame as a defence mechanism to protect their ego. Essentially, the covert narcissist needs a scapegoat in their life to maintain their psychological system, hence why the empath is targeted. Triangulation is one of the most destabilising tactics used by covert narcissists. They may create jealousy in the relationship to erode your self-worth, or they might paint you as the “bad guy” to their friends, family, and colleagues. When real-world triangulation isn’t possible, covert narcissists may use work, drinking, gaming, or pornography instead. 5. Hoovering Hoovering is the narcissist’s attempt to pull a victim back into the relationship after the victim begins to see through the manipulation or sets a boundary. When the victim withdraws, the narcissist experiences a profound threat to their sense of control. Rather than tolerate this loss, the narcissist attempts to re-enter the victim’s life. Hoovering may involve messages of longing, promises of change, or declarations of love, but these gestures are not genuine repair. They are a power play designed to restore control and prevent the victim from leaving on their own terms. For the survivor, hoovering is one of the most confusing stages. It blends longing, fear, hope, and trauma bonding. Understanding the mechanism behind hoovering can help victims recognise that the narcissist’s return is not an act of love, it is an act of control. 6. The smear campaign Smear campaigns are often already underway long before the relationship ends. But when the relationship does end, the covert narcissist will set out on a campaign to ruin and destroy the victim’s life through gossip, rumours, and manufactured concern. The smear campaign has two core objectives: To destroy the victim’s character and reputation To control the narrative so the narcissist is seen as the injured party For them, relationships are competitions, and they must “win.” Winning means maintaining admiration, avoiding accountability, and ensuring the victim is discredited before they can disclose what happened to them in the relationship. 7. Discard, or grand finale The discard phase is when the narcissist’s mask finally falls away. The charming, attentive, “nice” persona disappears, and the victim is confronted with the abuser’s true emotional landscape: coldness, indifference, and a complete withdrawal of the connection that once felt real. In romantic relationships, the discard can be deeply traumatic for the victim. Cognitive dissonance has often protected the victim for months or years, allowing them to hold onto the belief that the relationship was genuine. When the mask comes off, the victim must confront the devastating truth that the life they built was a façade for the narcissist. This sudden realisation can trigger intense grief, despair, and symptoms aligned with C-PTSD. Start your journey today Healing from covert narcissistic abuse is rarely straightforward. Victims often experience cognitive dissonance, struggling to reconcile the charming, attentive persona they first encountered with the manipulative behaviour they later endured. Many people also feel isolated because they may be one of the few who ever saw behind the narcissist’s mask. The psychological impact can be significant, many survivors experience symptoms aligned with C-PTSD. With the right support from a trauma-informed practitioner who understands narcissism, survivors can begin to rebuild their sense of self, restore emotional stability, and reclaim their identity. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Dr. Louise Hurst Dr. Louise Hurst, Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach Dr. Louise Hurst is a Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach and Narcissistic Abuse Specialist. With a PhD in Neuroscience and 16 years in healthcare communications, she brings scientific depth and emotional attunement to her work. Her lived experiences of narcissistic abuse - both professionally and privately - led her to become a coach dedicated to helping others heal. Through her own therapeutic journey, she learned that trauma can't be processed effectively without including the body. She is the founder of Beauty for Ashes Coaching and Henka Medical Communications Ltd. Her mission: Helping survivors thrive after abuse. Further reading: Carnes, P. J. 1997. The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitative Relationships. Health Communications, Inc. MacKenzie, J. 2015. Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships with Narcissists, Sociopaths and Other Toxic People. Penguin Random House LLC. McMillan, D. L. 2007. But He Says He Loves Me: How to Avoid Being Trapped in a Manipulative Relationship. Allen & Unwin. Thomas, S. 2016. Healing from Hidden Abuse. MAST Publishing House.

Mamta Pranjivan is an Ayurveda practitioner and co-founder of MANJULA Essentials, a wellness and beauty brand rooted in the timeless principles of Ayurveda. She studied Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Toronto and built an early career in pharmaceuticals and clinical research before pursuing formal studies in Ayurveda at Middlesex University, London. With over eight years of clinical practice, Mamta integrates Ayurvedic wisdom with modern scientific understanding to educate and empower others in cultivating balance and resilience in everyday life. Mamta Pranjivan, Ayurveda Practitioner, Co-founder What first inspired you to bring Ayurveda into modern life through both your clinical practice and MANJULA Essentials? I grew up in a culture where Ayurveda was not simply a healing system but a way of life. Its knowledge and wisdom were passed down through generations in my family, making it a natural part of my upbringing. As I went on to study pharmacology and toxicology and later build a career in the pharmaceutical industry as a clinical research associate, I continued to embrace Ayurvedic lifestyle practices in my daily life. My scientific curiosity about the healing properties of kitchen spices, herbs, and traditional Ayurvedic formulations inspired me to pursue professional studies in Ayurveda. Alongside my understanding of herbal pharmacology, I developed a deeper appreciation for Ayurveda's holistic approach to health and well-being, particularly its emphasis on maintaining health and preventing disease through daily and seasonal self-care routines. This reinforced my belief that many of Ayurveda's timeless practices are remarkably relevant to the health challenges we face today. In clinical practice, I have seen firsthand how Ayurvedic self-care wisdom empowers people to take an active role in their well-being. Co-founding MANJULA Essentials with my daughter was a natural extension of that vision. It has allowed us to share authentic Ayurvedic knowledge and self-care rituals with a wider audience. Rooted in traditional Ayurvedic principles, MANJULA Essentials thoughtfully blends science, nature, and heritage to bring enduring wellness practices into everyday life. Our goal is to inspire curiosity and make these authentic traditions accessible in ways that fit seamlessly into modern lifestyles while remaining true to their origins. It brings me immense satisfaction to help people reconnect with these practices and experience their benefits in a meaningful way. Your products are inspired by generations of family traditions while being developed with modern cosmetic science, so how do you decide what should be preserved and what should evolve? Respect for heritage, guided by scientific inquiry, is the foundation of MANJULA Essentials. Our hair oil is a perfect example. It began as my mother's family recipe, passed down from her grandmother and rooted in generations of Ayurvedic wisdom. Our role has been to honour its essence while refining it through modern pharmacology and formulation science. We preserve the core Ayurvedic herbs that provide the oil's therapeutic benefits while thoughtfully incorporating complementary botanicals and nourishing oils to enhance texture, stability, and bioavailability. Every ingredient is chosen with intention, ensuring it aligns with Ayurvedic therapeutic principles while meeting contemporary standards for quality, safety, and efficacy. The same philosophy guides our face and body oils, where Eastern and Western botanical knowledge come together to create formulations that meet the skincare needs of today’s diverse global community. This thoughtful balance of tradition and innovation allows my daughter and me to evolve our family heritage while preserving its authenticity, therapeutic integrity, and enduring wisdom. How has your background in pharmacology and clinical research shaped the way you practice and explain Ayurveda today? My background in pharmacology and clinical research has profoundly shaped the way I practice and communicate Ayurveda. It has given me the ability to bridge Ayurvedic knowledge and modern clinical perspectives, drawing on the strengths of both healthcare systems. Rather than viewing them as opposing approaches, I see them as complementary, each offering valuable insights into health and healing. My research background guides me to evaluate evidence critically while remaining deeply respectful of Ayurveda's centuries of empirical knowledge. I continue to expand and enrich my knowledge base by following the evolving discourse and scientific literature in modern clinical and integrative medicine alongside traditional Ayurvedic texts. This enables me to explain Ayurvedic principles in a way that is authentic, scientifically sound, and accessible to contemporary audiences. What have you found is the biggest misconception people have about Ayurveda when they encounter it for the first time? One of the biggest misconceptions people have when they first encounter Ayurveda is that it is about herbal medicine and an Indian diet, a detox protocol, or a spa treatment. While these all have a place within the Ayurvedic healing modality, they represent only a part of a much more comprehensive and intelligent healthcare system. Ayurveda is fundamentally a way of understanding health and longevity that recognizes the unique constitution and context of each individual and seeks to restore balance through personalized nutrition, lifestyle, daily and seasonal self-care, herbal medicines, and therapies. With the growing interest in holistic health, herbal supplements, and natural therapies, it is increasingly important that people receive personalized guidance from qualified Ayurvedic practitioners. I hope that people come to see Ayurveda not as another wellness trend but as a traditional and practical knowledge system for living a healthier, more nuanced, and balanced life. What has practicing Ayurveda taught you about living well that extends far beyond physical health? Ayurveda, which translates as "the knowledge of life," embraces every dimension and stage of human existence. It teaches that our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being are deeply interconnected and cannot be viewed in isolation. Through nearly six decades of learning and living Ayurveda's practical wisdom, I have come to understand that the true art of living extends far beyond physical health. It lies in cultivating self-awareness, living in harmony with nature, and nurturing every aspect of our being with balance, purpose, and intention. When we care for ourselves in this holistic way, we build the foundation for greater resilience, a healthier lifespan, and a deeper connection with ourselves, others, and the natural world. For me, Ayurveda is not simply a system of healthcare but a timeless philosophy for living well, one that inspires us to care for ourselves so that we can, in turn, contribute more meaningfully to the well-being of others. You often speak about rituals instead of routines, so what simple daily practice has the greatest long-term impact in your experience? Beyond self-care routines, rituals are a way to celebrate life, honour tradition, and bring joy to the ordinary. They transform everyday actions into moments of awareness, stillness, and connection, helping us remain grounded in a world that often feels fast-paced and overstimulating. In an age of constant sensory input and cognitive overload, I treasure simple daily rituals such as spending quiet time in nature, cooking with wholesome ingredients, self-massage with herbal oils, yoga, music, and dance. These activities nourish not only my body but also my senses, mind, and spirit, and reconnect me with my natural rhythm. Over time, simple personal rituals cultivate inner calm, clarity, resilience, and balance, qualities that ground us and naturally ripple into every aspect of our lives. Why do you think preventive wellness is becoming more relevant in today's healthcare conversations? Preventive wellness is becoming increasingly relevant because, while people are living longer than ever before, many are spending those additional years managing chronic health conditions that are often influenced by poor lifestyle and nutrition choices, chronic stress, and socioeconomic and environmental factors. As a result, the healthcare conversation is gradually evolving from a model focused primarily on sickness care to one that includes improving healthspan and enhancing quality of life, beyond simply treating diseases to increase life expectancy. I believe there is tremendous value in educating both the general public and healthcare professionals about evidence-informed complementary wellness approaches, including Ayurveda. Preventive wellness empowers individuals to take an active role in their health by cultivating self-awareness and supporting overall long-term well-being. In many ways, this renewed emphasis on prevention and health preservation reflects principles that Ayurveda has offered for thousands of years, principles that remain remarkably relevant in addressing the healthcare challenges of modern life. If you could leave readers with one mindset shift that would transform how they approach their wellbeing, what would it be? I would invite people to stop looking outside themselves for the perfect formula for health and begin listening more deeply to themselves. Ayurveda reminds us that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to wellbeing. We are all unique, and our needs naturally change with the seasons, our stage of life, and the circumstances we are moving through. In a world filled with constant wellness advice, I believe one of the most powerful things we can do is simply pause. Take regular digital breaks. Create moments of stillness. Step away from the noise and ask yourself, "What do I truly need right now? What would genuinely nourish me, body, mind, and spirit?" Often, the answer brings us back to the simplest things, nourishing food, restorative sleep, mindful movement, meaningful connection, time in nature, and small rituals of self-care that make us feel grounded and cared for. True wellbeing is not about doing everything perfectly or attaining some ideal of perfect health and beauty. It is about developing a deeper relationship with yourself, learning to recognize your body’s signals, honouring what you need, and making conscious, informed choices in response. When we learn to listen inwardly, we stop chasing wellness as something we need to attain and instead begin to experience the joy of truly living. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Mamta Pranjivan

Gabrielle’s journey into nutrition began through her own pursuit of health and healing. After losing over 50 pounds in early adulthood, what appeared externally to be a commitment to wellness became a deeply challenging relationship with food, exercise, and her body. Beneath the pursuit of “health,” Gabrielle found herself disconnected from the very foundations of wellbeing, navigating restrictive patterns and a mindset that left her feeling anything but healthy. Gabrielle Lewis-Lungo, Licensed Dietitian Nutritionist Your own health journey changed the way you think about nutrition. How does that experience shape the support you offer clients today? I’ve had a complicated relationship with food since I was a teenager. I was always the girl on a diet, constantly looking for the next way to lose weight. That obsession with nutrition is actually what led me to study it. I knew every diet trend, read every magazine and blog post I could find, and eventually lost almost 50 pounds before entering college. I went into my degree thinking I had figured out what worked and that I could help others do the same. What I didn’t anticipate was how easily that same pursuit of information could feed into my own disordered relationship with food. I loved learning about food chemistry, nutrition research, and different food cultures, but I became increasingly aware that knowing more didn’t necessarily mean being healthier. That experience fundamentally changed how I practice. Knowing what to eat is often the easy part. The harder work is understanding the values, beliefs, and ideologies we attach to food and how those shape our behavior. That’s why I’m less interested in giving someone another list of rules and more interested in understanding what is actually driving the way they eat. You often talk about helping people rebuild trust with their bodies. What does that process look like in practice? My favorite way to explain a healthier relationship with food and your body is the ability to navigate between the hedonic and homeostatic portions of the brain with little to no effort or cognitive load. The hedonic system guides food choices toward pleasure, joy, and connection, while the homeostatic system supports nourishment, energy, and physiological function. Both are equally important. Problems arise when one aspect consistently outweighs the other. Some people become so focused on calories or making the “healthy” choice that they lose touch with enjoyment or pleasure. Others may ignore hunger, fullness, or energy signals and become disconnected from their body’s needs. My role is to understand what disrupted that relationship in the first place and help clients create a more functional relationship with their bodies. That may mean relearning hunger and fullness cues, becoming more comfortable with pleasure and satisfaction, or challenging the food rules that have taken over their decision-making. The goal is to make those decisions feel more natural and less cognitively demanding over time. Gut health has become one of the most talked-about areas of nutrition. Where do you think the conversation is still missing the mark? In my view, the gut health conversation has become too focused on what we can add rather than what may be contributing to the problem in the first place. There is a tendency to reach for probiotics, digestive enzymes, L-glutamine, or elimination diets before looking closely at an individual’s eating patterns and digestive function. Probiotics are a good example of why this matters. Their effectiveness depends on variables such as the specific strain, dose, timing, and the individual’s existing gut microbiota. If someone has impaired gastric acid secretion, for example, the conditions in their digestive tract may affect whether a particular probiotic survives long enough to reach the intestines. Simply adding a probiotic without understanding the environment it is entering may miss the underlying issue. That’s why I often look first at what isn’t being addressed, nutritional deficiencies, stomach function, motility, dysbiosis, meal timing, consistency, composition, and volume. Many of these factors can be influenced through strategic changes to the environment in which someone eats. Sometimes the most important intervention isn’t finding the right supplement; it’s understanding what the body is being asked to work with in the first place. You connect digestion, hormones, metabolism, and the nervous system rather than treating them separately. Why is that integrated approach so important for lasting health? The body’s systems are interconnected, even though we often talk about them as if they function independently. Stress and nervous system activity can affect sleep, appetite, and digestion, while digestion influences how we absorb and utilize the nutrients that support energy, hormones, and metabolism. Sleep also plays an important role in hormone production and synthesis, while those hormones then influence metabolism, appetite, energy, and recovery. Each system is constantly responding to the others, creating a feedback loop that makes it difficult to meaningfully change one area without considering what is happening around it. I often tell my clients that they may find more success giving 15% to several important areas every day than giving 100% to one area half the time. When we consistently support the systems that influence one another, we create a stronger physiological foundation for the body to function from. Once those foundations are in place, we can identify where more attention is actually needed. An integrated approach isn’t about trying to fix everything at once. It’s about understanding how the pieces influence one another so we can put our resources where they will have the greatest impact. For someone dealing with bloating or digestive discomfort, what is the first change you usually recommend before turning to restrictive diets or supplements? For someone who is otherwise healthy, the first thing I usually look at is when and how they eat before I start removing foods. I see many clients who don’t eat until noon, go long periods without food, and then consume a large portion of their daily intake later in the day. That pattern matters because digestion is not static throughout the day. The gastrointestinal system has its own circadian rhythms, and the timing, size, and consistency of meals can influence gastric function, motility, appetite, and blood glucose levels. If someone has gone most of the day without eating, I don’t necessarily want my first intervention to be taking away another food. Can we create a better environment for digestion by distributing food more consistently throughout the day? That might mean introducing an earlier meal, shortening long gaps between meals, or reducing the size of an evening meal. Of course, persistent or severe symptoms require a more individualized evaluation, particularly when conditions such as Hashimoto’s, POTS, or endometriosis are involved. But for many people, the first step is not restriction. It’s changing the conditions under which their digestive system is asked to do its job. When people feel overwhelmed by conflicting nutrition advice online, how can they tell the difference between evidence-based guidance and wellness trends? A key indicator is whether someone speaks in absolutes. Nutrition is rarely as simple as “this food is bad,” “this hormone is stopping your weight loss,” or “this one thing will fix your gut.” Fundamental health principles are often less marketable than trends, which is why they are sometimes overlooked. I also remind my clients that much online content contains a partial truth, which makes misinformation difficult to spot. Often, a legitimate study or concept is exaggerated to support a misleading conclusion. Professionally, I think you have to. Science evolves, and our understanding of nutrition should evolve with it. You shouldn’t have the same viewpoint today that you had ten years ago. Being willing to change your mind when better evidence emerges isn’t a weakness, it’s one of the clearest signs that you understand how science works. For reliable information, I recommend starting with reputable professional organizations, authoritative health organizations, and qualified nutrition professionals who can interpret evidence within the context of your individual health. What have your own experiences taught you about the difference between pursuing perfect health and building a healthy life? Pursuing perfect health often mirrors the internet’s focus on constant self-optimization. A common misconception is that we can control every variable and outcome related to our health. In reality, you can do everything “right” and still face health challenges such as autoimmune conditions, weight gain, digestive issues, or difficulties with your relationship with food. I understand the perfectionism that can accompany the pursuit of “perfect” health. For me, this led to isolation and losing touch with my true self. I became withdrawn, hungry, tired, and in pain, so focused on health that I lost sight of who I was. Building a healthy life looks very different. Health is fluid. It will ebb and flow through different seasons of your life, and your needs will change along with them. The bones of that framework remain the same, though: nourish yourself, move your body, rest, and care for yourself. The goal isn’t to live perfectly within those principles every day, but to have a framework that can bend and adapt as your life changes. Health should give you more life, not become the life you’re constantly trying to perfect. If every reader could change one habit that would have the biggest long-term impact on their health, what would you encourage them to start with? If I had to choose one habit, I would choose consistency. But if you’re asking me what I think people should consistently do, I would choose two things: move your body and eat regularly. When it comes to movement, I’m particularly biased toward strength training because of what it allows the body to do beyond appearance. Building and maintaining muscle gives the body greater capacity to utilize glucose, supports metabolic health, and helps preserve strength and physical function as we age. We are not meant to spend our lives trying to make our bodies require less from us. We are meant to build bodies that can do more. I also think consistent eating is incredibly underrated. When people repeatedly under-eat during the day, skip meals, or wait until they are ravenous to eat, it becomes much harder to regulate appetite, energy, and digestion. Eating regularly gives the body a more predictable supply of fuel to work with. These aren’t complicated interventions, but that’s exactly why I like them. Long-term health is built through the things we are willing to do repeatedly, not through the things we can do perfectly for a short time. Follow me on Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Gabrielle Lewis-Lungo

Written by Daryl Henderson, Transformational Facilitator & Creative Visionary Daryl Henderson is a master coach, facilitator, and artist known for blending spiritual traditions, shadow work, and leadership training. He is the co-founder of Odyssey of Man, the creator of True North Coaching, and the founder of One11, a health & wellness brand. It's hot, and the sun is blazing above. At this altitude, the midday July sun goes from warming and hot to scorching. It's 9 am, and Megan and I are sitting in a set of chairs with a group of 12 other pilgrims after being thoroughly searched and giving up our cell phones. I'm reciting a mantra in my head and gathering myself for what feels like a poignant and pivotal moment in my life experience, even though I have no idea what to expect other than that it will go quickly. "Prosperity, longevity, and lasting peace." I repeat this over and over in my mind, silently, as hundreds of people and security personnel move around me. There's a row of eight Tibetan monks, all in their maroon and gold robes, sitting quietly and contemplatively across from me. Each of them is holding a white scarf or lotus bead mala, a traditional offering. I can't help but think that they look a little nervous under their trained and calm exterior. There's a sense that they too feel the power and presence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama looming in front of them. That's what we're all here for and what all the hubbub is about: the extraordinary privilege and opportunity to spend just a few moments in front of the 14th Dalai Lama and receive a blessing from one of the only truly enlightened beings I know of on this planet. I've run through a thousand scenarios in my mind, and yet, seeing the volumes of Indigenous Ladakhi people in their local garb amongst a host of faces from across the region and globe, I can't help but think just how small and insignificant the questions I've been contemplating really are. Each time I think of something, I feel as if His Holiness is already answering it through my consciousness with his simple yet profound truths. The lengths our egos will go to just to feel better about themselves My ego wants to come up with something profound. Something so profound that he stops, looks at me, and sees my depth and spiritual roots, so much so that he decides to talk with me. Even invite me into his home to bear witness and be a student of his teachings. I even went so far as to fantasize that maybe I, a middle-aged white man who's got no formal training in Tibetan Buddhism, could be dubbed the next Dalai Lama. It's amazing the lengths our egos will go to feel better about themselves. Anywho, so here I am, now standing in the blessing line that is moving at a steady pace, and I'm looking around at all the other people, and I realize there's nothing I could say in such a short interaction and that I was better off just being. Being grateful and loving and sending blessings for his longevity and recovery after a recent knee surgery. As we approach and get closer, I feel something take over me. "Prosperity, longevity, lasting peace. Prosperity, longevity, lasting peace." Over and over in my head, I keep reciting the mantra, and then I see him. It was like seeing a sunset for the first time. Awestruck doesn't quite cover it because you'd need to be present enough to be in awe. This was different. This was like being overtaken by a large wave you didn't see coming, except I was overtaken by presence. Nothing more, nothing less. What lasted less than twenty seconds As I approached His Holiness with my mala beads in my hand, as directed by one of the many kind and supportive staff and devotees, I felt as if my mind just went blank. Everything else faded away: the people, the sounds, the photographers, everything. All I could do was bow in reverence with my hands open and my mala presented for his blessing. He touched my hands so lightly that I'm not sure I even felt it. Then I looked up into his eyes, and I'm still trying to understand what happened. It was like being in a vision. It was as if he was staring through me, into and past my soul, and into my lineage. His gaze wasn't fully of this world; it was something else. The only way I can describe it is that his eyes looked like the eyes of the Buddha on one of the statues we'd seen in a monastery. There was everything and nothing in his gaze; there was compassion and caring, as well as the true depth of a master. There was eternity in those eyes, lifetimes and hundreds of years carried in this human form over and over again, each time learning and growing ever more. It was a truly psychedelic experience because those few moments seemed, and still seem, to stretch out into eternity. What lasted quite literally less than 20 seconds burned a memory so indelibly into my brain that I believe I will be processing this for years to come. Why does any of this matter? I'll tell you why. It's a reminder for us to be humble and to remember that no matter how far we've come, we're still human and therefore flawed, immensely so at times. That's where the practice of presence and compassion comes in. We live in an accelerating world, one that seems hell-bent on breaking us down into something we're not by feeding us constant social media and television programming that says that we need to be more, better, taller, faster, stronger, and that our work is never over until we retire and get the tiny pittance we've accumulated to live our sunset years in happiness. So, if we're just trying to get to happiness, we know that consistent habits can help support our wellbeing. Research has shown time and again that this is true. While you cannot simply snap your fingers and choose to feel happy, research suggests that you can choose habits that build resilience and support long-term wellbeing. So what gives? Why are we at a pivotal point where so many people across the world are depressed and lonely? I think it's because we've forgotten who we are, and that, in order to remember, we need to be shaken up a bit. We need to get stirred internally by something so powerful that it wakes us up to a new reality. That's what meeting the Dalai Lama did for me, and it's something I will be reflecting on for years to come. It shook me to my core in ways that I didn't expect. From the outside, it probably looked like just another blessing from His Holiness. But inside, it sent shockwaves through my soul. Not everyone can get to India Now, not everyone can get to India to meet the Dalai Lama, but you can choose to do something that you know will carry you deeper into yourself and awaken dormant parts that need your love and awareness. This is what will save the world. Not some new invention that sequesters carbon or an AI that can run governments in an ethical and sustainable way. That would help, but the real answer is staring back at you from the mirror every morning as you brush your teeth and comb your hair. So I ask you, do you want to arrive in a new world of harmony and understanding or keep hiding in the old familiar pain that will never go away unless you choose a new path? The choice is up to each of us, and I hope you choose harmony because it's going to take all of us to turn this ship around. Whatever you've been through is worthy of your effort, and so are future generations. See you on the other side. Namaste. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Daryl Henderson Daryl Henderson, Transformational Facilitator & Creative Visionary Daryl Henderson is a master coach, facilitator, and artist with over two decades of experience blending creativity, men’s work, and spiritual practices. He has photographed top brands and artists worldwide, including Nike and Michael Kors, and documented indigenous and peace gatherings across the globe. Drawing on this experience, Daryl guides high performers, artists, and businesses to express their stories through soul-aligned photography, branding, and personal transformation. He is the co-founder of Odyssey of Man, the creator of True North Coaching, and the founder of One11, a health and wellness brand. His work is playful, transformative, and designed to unlock authentic expression.

Written by Elif Köse, Founder and Editor Former awards winner, fashion designer turned architect of internal revolutions, Elif built businesses, burned them down (strategically, not accidentally), and kept the parts that mattered: the ability to see exactly where someone is lying to themselves and the precision to call it out without making them feel small. There was a season of my life when my whole business fit inside a backpack on a bike. I had come to the United Kingdom (UK) from Turkey as an au pair, carrying a business degree, a set of sewing skills I had built with my own hands, and a determination that no amount of exhaustion could talk me out of. I cycled door to door offering alterations because I could not afford anything else. No booking system. No invoicing software. Just a notebook, a needle, and a promise to myself that I would build something real. That business grew into a fashion house rooted in creativity, trust, and exceptional service. But I want to be honest with you about something most success stories leave out. Growth did not simplify my life. For years, it complicated it. More clients meant more spreadsheets. More visibility meant more platforms. More success meant more of me, spread thinner, holding it all together with sheer will. I share this because I know I am not talking to strangers when I write this column. I am talking to women who are brilliant at what they do and are actually drowning in the doing of it. The bicycle and the sewing machine Every woman in business I mentor today, whether she is running a wellness practice, a design studio, or a leadership consultancy, tells me some version of the same story. She built something beautiful. She is good, often exceptional, at her craft. Somewhere along the way, she became the receptionist, the bookkeeper, the social media manager, and the customer service line, all at once, all unpaid roles stacked on top of the work she actually loves. This is not a failure of discipline. It is a failure of systems. You cannot mindset your way out of a business that was never built to hold you. Why simplify became my business philosophy My work today blends mindset, somatic awareness, and strategic clarity because I have learned that the outer chaos of a business and the inner chaos of its founder are rarely separate things. When your systems are scattered across a dozen platforms, your nervous system knows it. You feel it in the tightness before you open your laptop. You feel it in the dread of another password reset, another tab, another tool that promised to save you time and instead became one more thing to manage and, most likely, learn. True confidence is not something you perform through a polished Instagram grid or a flawless launch sequence. It is something you uncover when the noise settles enough for you to hear yourself think. Noise, in a modern business, is rarely emotional. It is structural. It is fifteen apps that do not talk to each other. The real cost of doing everything by hand Let me ask you something. How many hours this week did you spend manually sending a follow-up email you could have automated? How many client details are sitting in three different places because your booking tool, your email platform, and your invoicing software have never once spoken to each other? Here is what I have seen, both in my own fashion house and in the women I mentor. The cost of manual systems is never just time. It is the version of you that shows up exhausted to your own genius work because you spent the morning chasing admin instead of creating. It is the client who slips through because a follow-up never happened. It is the slow erosion of the joy that made you start this in the first place. Many women I speak with know, deep down, that automation exists and could help them. But there is a very real block in the way. They do not consider themselves technical. They have tried a tool before, felt lost, and decided that this simply is not their world. I understand that feeling completely. I built a fashion house with a needle and thread, not a computer science degree. Technology intimidated me for a long time too. What changed when I stopped collecting tools Here is the shift that changed everything for me and for the women I now guide through it. I stopped trying to string together the perfect combination of separate apps and moved everything into a single, aligned system instead. I want to be precise about what I mean by aligned because this is not a technology conversation for me. It is an inner work conversation wearing a technology outfit. When your outer systems are fragmented, your energy is fragmented too. When everything – your website, your bookings, your emails, your client communication, your payments – lives under one roof, something settles in you. There is less to hold. There is more room to lead. This is at the heart of why I now work with HighLevel and why I honestly recommend it to the women in my community. Not because it is trendy, but because it solved the exact problem that once had me cycling between platforms the way I used to cycle between clients, except this time, the exhaustion was digital instead of physical. One roof, not a hundred passwords If you have ever opened your laptop and felt your shoulders rise just looking at the number of tabs pinned across your browser, you already understand the problem I am describing. A booking platform here. An email tool there. A separate system for funnels, another for invoicing, another for your customer relationship management (CRM). Each one asking for its own password, its own login, its own slice of your attention. HighLevel replaces that entire, scattered ecosystem with a single system. Your website, your funnels, your email and text marketing, your calendar, your invoicing, and your client pipeline all live in a single place. You are not managing ten relationships with ten different companies. You are managing one, and it was built to hold the full arc of a client relationship from first contact to loyal customer. For a woman who does not consider herself techy, this matters more than any feature list. It means one login to remember instead of a dozen. It means one place to look when you want to understand how your business is actually doing, instead of piecing together a picture from five different dashboards that were never designed to speak to each other. Support that doesn't leave you stranded I will not pretend that trying something new, especially something technical, is not vulnerable. It is. This is why the piece that mattered most to me, beyond the platform itself, is the support behind it. HighLevel offers a free help line available twenty-four hours a day. Not a chatbot that circles you back to a help article. Real support, available whenever you get stuck, at two in the afternoon or two in the morning. For the woman who has avoided automation because she was scared of getting lost in it, this changes the entire equation. You are never actually alone in learning it. That safety net is often the difference between a tool gathering dust after week one and a system that genuinely transforms how you run your business. The investment that pays for itself I want to speak plainly here, the way I speak to every woman in my community. Hiring a team to manage your bookings, your follow-ups, your email marketing, and your client communication costs a great deal more than one monthly investment in a system that does all of it under one roof. I have built and run a business with a full team before. I know the overhead that comes with that. What I have found with HighLevel is genuinely one of the best investments I have made, not because it replaced people, but because it freed me from needing to hire people just to hold the basic architecture of my business together. That is not a small claim, and I do not make it lightly. I make it as someone who has paid for a full back-office team and who now runs a leaner, calmer, more profitable operation because the system itself carries so much of that weight. An invitation to simplify to amplify If you recognise yourself in any of this – the exhausted admin hours, the scattered platforms, the fear that you are not technical enough for automation – I want you to hear this for a second. You do not need to become someone else to simplify your business. You do not need a computer science degree, and you do not need to hire a team you cannot yet afford. You need one system that was built to hold the fullness of what you do, so you can stop managing tabs and start leading again. This is the same invitation I extend to every woman I mentor through inner alignment work. Simplifying your outer systems is not a betrayal of the depth of your work. It is what makes the depth of your work sustainable. If you are ready to explore what that looks like for your own business, you can start a thirty-day free trial and see the difference for yourself here. What you cultivate within becomes what you give to the world. Let your systems finally reflect that. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Elif Köse Elif Köse, Founder and Editor Elif Köse is a dynamic editor, speaker, and strategist dedicated to helping women overcome self-doubt, reframe limiting beliefs, and step into their highest potential. Known for her authenticity and actionable insights, Elif combines neuroscience, mindset reprogramming, and deep empathy to guide leaders, visionaries, and change-makers toward lasting transformation. From fashion designer to transformational coach, she draws on her own story of reinvention to inspire others to reclaim their voice, purpose, and impact as empowered female leaders.

2028 – Award-winning filmmaker, producer, musician, and Indigenous rights advocate His Royal Highness (HRH) Josh S V Chauhan I, will release his highly anticipated original mystery thriller, The Word From the Wood, exclusively on YouTube in 2028. Watch the teaser trailer here: The Word From The Wood (2028) Official Teaser Trailer. Blending neo-noir detective fiction, psychological horror, and dystopian science fiction, The Word From the Wood presents a world standing on the brink of cosmic extinction. Humanity has entered its final chapter as scientists confirm the Sun has only a handful of years before catastrophic collapse, leaving civilisation fractured by fear, authoritarian control, and societal decay. Against this backdrop, an unprecedented wave of ritualistic murders spreads through the remnants of society. Entire communities vanish without explanation, bodies are discovered bearing enigmatic symbols, and whispers emerge of an ancient phrase, "the word from the wood", said to connect every victim. Tasked with unravelling the mystery is an elite detective whose extraordinary deductive abilities have earned an almost mythical reputation. Racing against both an elusive serial killer and the countdown to humanity's final dawn, the investigation becomes increasingly personal as each revelation blurs the line between rational evidence, forgotten Indigenous folklore, and terrifying truths hidden within the forests themselves. Indigenous rights and ecological sovereignty at the core At its heart, The Word From the Wood deeply embeds themes of Indigenous rights advocacy, post-colonial land sovereignty, and sacred environmental guardianship. As corporate and authoritarian factions exploit the earth's remaining natural sanctuaries in a desperate attempt to survive the solar collapse, the narrative foregrounds the ancient knowledge, traditional ecological stewardship, and autonomy of Indigenous nations. The film explores how colonial exploitation of land mirrors the broader ecological collapse, positioning Indigenous sovereignty and ancestral wisdom not as forgotten lore, but as the central key to understanding humanity's true place within nature. Directed and produced by HRH Josh S V Chauhan I, the film explores themes of mortality, justice, ecological collapse, Indigenous rights, destiny, and the fragile nature of civilisation when confronted by inevitable extinction. Speaking about the project, Chauhan said: The Word From the Wood is not simply a murder mystery. It is a story about what humanity chooses to become when tomorrow is no longer guaranteed. It asks whether truth and Indigenous land rights still matter when the end of the world is already written, and whether listening to the land's original guardians is our last remaining hope." Featuring a distinctive visual style inspired by dystopian futurism, atmospheric suspense, and psychological tension, The Word From the Wood promises an immersive cinematic experience that combines relentless mystery with philosophical science fiction and post-colonial advocacy. The production marks another ambitious creative project from HRH Josh S V Chauhan I, continuing a multidisciplinary body of work spanning film, music, visual storytelling, and human rights advocacy. The Word From the Wood will premiere globally on YouTube in 2028. Additional information, trailers, and release dates will be announced closer to launch.

Written by Andrea Adams, Transformational Coach Andrea Adams is the creator of The Haamiah Method, a trauma-informed framework helping women break free from toxic workplace dynamics, dysfunctional family systems, and emotionally unsafe relationships. She guides women back to emotional clarity, self-worth, and sovereign self-trust. There is a particular kind of suffering that rarely gets talked about. It isn't the suffering of a toxic workplace. It isn't the suffering of burnout. It isn't even the suffering of failure. It is the suffering of a holding pattern, the suffering of knowing that a chapter of your life has ended while having no clear idea what comes next. I call this place the waiting room. In my previous article, The Hidden Cost of Workplace Turbulence, I explored what happens when we finally begin to recognise the storm around us and trust what our experience has been telling us. But reaching solid ground does not always mean knowing where to go next. Sometimes, when the turbulence finally quietens, we discover that the person who has emerged from it no longer fits comfortably into the life that existed before. The storm may be over, but the way forward is not yet clear. That is where another, quieter kind of struggle can begin. Most of us will find ourselves there at some point. A relationship ends. A career no longer fits. A business changes. The children leave home. A life transition arrives unexpectedly. Something shifts internally, but our external reality has not yet caught up. From the outside, we often look fine. We continue functioning. We keep showing up. We pay the bills, fulfil our responsibilities, and carry on with daily life. But inside, something has changed. The life we are living no longer feels like home. That is where the waiting room begins. The psychological departure One of the biggest misconceptions about change is that people leave because they are unhappy. In my experience, many people leave because they have already changed. Long before they physically leave a workplace, relationship, or role, they begin leaving psychologically. I remember sitting in senior leadership meetings years ago, listening to conversations that everyone around the table seemed deeply invested in. Targets. Budgets. Performance metrics. Strategic priorities. The discussions were important, and the people were capable. Nothing was obviously wrong. Yet I increasingly found myself disconnected from the conversations taking place around me. At first, I assumed I was tired. Then I wondered if I was burnt out. Perhaps I needed a holiday. Maybe I had simply lost my motivation. But looking back, I can see something else was happening. I had begun to leave psychologically long before I left physically. The environment had not changed. The conversations had not changed. The expectations had not changed. But I had. That distinction matters because when we change internally, we often find ourselves caught between two realities: the life we have outgrown and the life that has not yet arrived. That space in between can be deeply uncomfortable. Why we stay When people find themselves in the waiting room, the assumption is usually that they are afraid of change, that they lack courage, that they need more confidence, or that they are unwilling to take action. Sometimes that is true. But I have come to believe there is another reason many people remain stuck. They are not afraid of moving forward. They are afraid that moving forward means going backward. They believe the only visible exits from the waiting room require them to return to a version of themselves they have already outgrown. The executive who knows she cannot continue living for titles and status but sees no alternative path. The entrepreneur whose business no longer reflects their values but cannot imagine walking away. The parent whose identity has been built around caring for others and no longer knows who they are without that role. The professional who psychologically left an industry years ago but cannot yet see another future. From the outside, these people appear indecisive. From the inside, they often feel trapped, not because they cannot move, but because every available direction appears to lead backward. The hidden suffering The greatest cost of the waiting room is not uncertainty. It is what prolonged uncertainty does to us. Human beings are not designed to remain suspended indefinitely. We are designed to participate, to contribute, and to engage with life. When we remain in a holding pattern for too long, something begins to happen. Our energy contracts. Our confidence fades. Our world becomes smaller. We begin mistaking waiting for living. The waiting room slowly becomes normal. Days become weeks. Weeks become months. Months become years. Because nothing dramatic is happening, we often fail to recognise the toll it is taking. This is the hidden suffering of the waiting room. It is not the absence of answers. It is the absence of movement. The false choice What finally changed things for me was recognising that I had unconsciously created a false choice: stay where I was or go back. Those appeared to be my only options. No wonder I felt trapped. If the only available future requires you to abandon who you have become, remaining where you are can feel like the safer choice. But eventually, I realised something important. The problem was not that I was resisting movement. The problem was that I was resisting regression. That insight changed everything because the moment I separated those two things, new possibilities became visible. I no longer had to choose between staying stuck and becoming somebody I used to be. There were other doors. I simply hadn't seen them yet. What I failed to recognise at first was that I was not responding to a practical choice. I was responding to everything that choice represented. The opportunity in front of me had become emotionally fused with an older version of myself. It wasn't simply a role, a career path, or a familiar environment. It had become a symbol of a life I believed I had already left behind. That is often what happens when we remain in the waiting room for too long. We stop seeing possibilities clearly. Instead, we begin attaching layers of meaning to them. A job becomes an identity. A relationship becomes a measure of our worth. A decision becomes a verdict on who we are. No wonder the choices feel overwhelming. The emotional intensity is rarely about the opportunity itself. More often, it is about the story, history, and identity we have unconsciously attached to it. Sometimes clarity arrives not when the opportunity changes, but when we finally separate the opportunity from everything it has come to represent. Participation before certainty Many of us believe we need certainty before we move. We want the full plan, the guaranteed outcome, and the complete roadmap. Life rarely works that way. More often, clarity emerges through movement, not before it. The waiting room ends not when certainty arrives, but when participation begins. One conversation. One application. One idea. One decision. One small step. Not because we know exactly where it will lead, but because we are no longer willing to remain suspended. Moving forward without going back Perhaps the greatest lesson I have learned is this: moving forward does not require you to become somebody you used to be. You can honour a chapter without living in it forever. You can be grateful for a role while recognising you have outgrown it. You can appreciate a past identity without resurrecting it. You can leave something meaningful without believing you have failed. Most importantly, you can stop waiting, not because you have all the answers, but because you finally understand that the future does not require the sacrifice of who you have become. The waiting room feels permanent when we are inside it. It isn't. The door has never been locked. Sometimes, the most important step we ever take is realising that the only thing standing between us and the next chapter is our belief that the only way forward is backward. Read more from Andrea Adams Andrea Adams, Transformational Coach Andrea Adams is a Certified Transformational Coach and the founder of The Haamiah Method. She works with high-functioning women who feel trapped in toxic workplace cultures, dysfunctional family systems, or emotionally draining relationships. Drawing from lived experience in trauma and mental wellness, and years of mentorship and personal development, Andrea helps women untangle emotional conditioning and rebuild a life rooted in clarity, boundaries, and self-trust. Her work focuses on emotional sovereignty, nervous system safety, and breaking generational patterns of dysfunction. Through her writing and coaching, she guides women back to their true essence - not stronger, but safer and more whole.

Written by DJ Jesse Hudson, AI-Driven Cognitive Health Advocate DJ Jesse Hudson is a cognitive health advocate, media creator, and founder of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Fight (CTE Fight). Through The Rabbit Hole, he documents lived experience with brain injury while exploring how artificial intelligence (AI), storytelling, and community can support cognitive awareness, recovery, and resilience. Artificial intelligence is often debated as a threat to creativity, but for some people, it can be a vital accessibility tool. Jesse Hudson explores how AI can help bridge cognitive barriers, why blanket judgments about its use can become ableist, and what this means for the future of creativity and human expression. Not once. Someone decided to go through my DJ and artist page and repeatedly post an image declaring: “Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the mark of a talentless loser.” Different posts. Same message. Normally, I'd tell someone like that exactly where they can put their opinion and continue with my day. But this one deserves a longer answer because I'm brain-injured, and AI isn't simply something I use to make pictures. AI is an accessibility tool for me. The idea is still there One of the strangest things about living with brain injury is knowing that something is still inside your head while sometimes struggling to get it out. The idea can be there. The story can be there. The image can be there. The solution can be there. But the pathway between thinking it and expressing it doesn't always work the way it once did. Memory can fail. Words disappear. Concentration collapses. Organizing several thoughts simultaneously can become exhausting. Sometimes I can work at an extraordinary pace. Sometimes something ridiculously simple becomes difficult. That's neurological injury. So I use tools. One of those tools is artificial intelligence. AI can help me organize thoughts, retrieve structure, explore an idea visually, develop concepts, communicate, write, edit, and turn something inside my head into something another human being can actually see. Does the machine contribute? Of course it does. That's why it's a tool. But the intention didn't originate in the machine. It originated in me. Accessibility doesn't make someone less creative We don't tell a person using speech-to-text that the computer wrote their thoughts. We don't tell someone using a screen reader that they didn't really read something. We don't tell someone using a wheelchair that getting somewhere doesn't count because technology helped them move. Accessibility technology exists because human beings encounter barriers. Cognitive barriers are barriers too. That's the part of the AI debate we're barely talking about. When someone automatically declares that anybody using AI is talentless, they have no idea why that person might be using it. For someone else, AI might be entertainment. For another person, it might increase productivity. For me, sometimes it's a bridge across a damaged neurological pathway. You don't get to look at the bridge and decide the person crossing it has no talent because they needed one. No, I haven't replaced human artists Here's where today's accusation becomes particularly ridiculous. I recently put out a call for artists. I want painters. Digital artists. Video creators. Designers. Musicians. People working in physical media. People working in digital media. Yesterday, I recorded a podcast with painters who create artwork and clothing. I now have a video artist involved in what I'm building. I'm talking with other creators. They're starting to come out of the woodwork. That's exactly what I wanted. I don't see a future where humans compete against machines for permission to be creative. I see humans using technology and working with other humans to create things none of us would necessarily create alone. AI doesn't have to replace collaboration. It can expand it. The hypocrisy gets interesting There's another wrinkle to being repeatedly attacked for using AI: the attacks are happening on one of the world's largest technology platforms. Modern digital platforms already depend heavily on algorithmic and AI-driven systems: content recommendations, ranking, advertising, moderation, image processing, accessibility, personalization, and detection systems. People interact with AI-mediated infrastructure constantly, often without thinking about it. That doesn't mean everyone using a modern platform must support every application of artificial intelligence. There are legitimate arguments about generative AI. Copyright matters. Consent matters. Compensation matters. Training data matters. Employment matters. Bias matters. Environmental impact matters. Governance absolutely matters. We should debate all of those things. But the meaningful question isn't: AI or no AI? That world is already gone. The questions now are: Which AI? Used for what? Controlled by whom? Accountable to whom, and for whose benefit? That is a much harder conversation than posting a meme calling somebody a loser. When anti-AI absolutism becomes ableism This is where I think the technology conversation has a blind spot. If you don't like AI-generated artwork, say so. If you believe a particular model was trained unethically, challenge it. If you believe creators deserve compensation, fight for them. If you believe corporations are deploying artificial intelligence irresponsibly, demand accountability. I probably agree with you on more of those things than you might expect. But when you see someone using AI and immediately decide that person is lazy, fraudulent, or talentless, you've skipped an important question: Why are they using it? Because when the answer is accessibility, that blanket judgment starts looking very different. If you're comfortable benefiting from AI when it's buried invisibly inside the infrastructure you use every day, but ridicule a person with cognitive challenges for visibly using AI to overcome barriers created by brain injury, perhaps your problem isn't actually artificial intelligence. Perhaps you never bothered to understand the human being using it. Creativity is more than execution We're also going to have to reconsider what creativity means. Is creativity the physical execution? The original idea? The judgment behind thousands of decisions? The ability to recognize what works and what doesn't? The intention? The story? The emotional meaning? The responsibility for the final result? Probably some combination of all of them. AI complicates authorship because machines can increasingly generate, critique, revise, and iterate. That's precisely why human responsibility becomes more important rather than less. As AI becomes more capable, the fundamental questions increasingly become: Who chose what should exist? Why? Who benefits? Who can be harmed? Who has authority? Who takes responsibility? We've just left the argument about AI art. Now we're talking about governance. Don't judge the tool before you understand the barrier I don't know exactly where artificial intelligence is taking creativity. Neither does anybody else. We're figuring this out while the technology develops underneath our feet. There will be extraordinary uses. There will be terrible uses. There will be exploitation. There will be empowerment. There will be people with disabilities who discover that something everyone else considers a novelty gives them back an ability they thought they'd lost. Those people deserve a place in this conversation. So criticize AI. Challenge it. Question it. Regulate it where necessary. Build better systems. Protect artists. Protect human beings. But before you look at another person's work and decide they're a “talentless loser” because they used artificial intelligence, ask one question first: What barrier might this tool be helping them overcome? Because sometimes the technology isn't replacing the human. Sometimes it's helping the human get back into the room. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from DJ Jesse Hudson DJ Jesse Hudson, AI-Driven Cognitive Health Advocate DJ Jesse Hudson is a cognitive health advocate, media creator, and founder of CTE Fight. Living with the long-term effects of brain injury, he uses storytelling and lived experience to raise global awareness around cognitive health and recovery. Through The Rabbit Hole, he explores how artificial intelligence (AI), media, and community can support resilience, continuity, and human dignity. His work bridges advocacy, innovation, and culture to make complex brain health conversations accessible and real.