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There are two places left on the Father wound workshop this coming Sunday. It’s an opportunity to connect more deeply to the role your father has had in your life and your relationship to him, and in particular to your own male energy. Your father, in many ways, is the doorway to your own male energy. If your father struggled with being an empowered, balanced man, you will also struggle with creating a healthy and empowered balance in your male energy. You will then connect more to the shadow male energy as described below. You will experience this either directly or indirectly depending on whether you are a man or a woman. There are two main expressions of shadow male energy. One is the more externally directed energy which manifests in working very hard, pushing yourself and going over your own boundaries. In it’s most negative manifestation this can develop into aggressive, tyrannical behaviour. The other end of the spectrum is that you become passive and lack direction and focus. Your male energy is like and old motor which you struggle to get going. In this case there is a clear disconnection to the healthy manifestation of male energy and

Last week I received a present consisting of 3 feathers from one of my clients. The feathers were from an owl, a buzzard and a Vlaamse Gaai (Flemish Jay) all of which came into my client’s life whilst walking in nature and now she has gifted them to me. I also feel that these feathers are a gift from spirit encouraging me to continue revealing more of myself, my vulnerability and humanness to my clients. And, in particular, helping my clients to connect to and own the power of feeling unsafe and to integrate this inside themselves to create more wholeness, which has definitely been helping my client who gave me the feathers. I believe that feeling unsafe is at the core of all our (psychological) pain and vulnerability. Acknowledging and owning this is essential! Failing to own feeling unsafe sentences us to either: 1) Isolation (fleeing or freezing) 2) Fighting (making someone else feel bad so you can feel better, well actually safer) 3) Peacekeeping (adapting, pleasing, carrying the responsibility/burden, etc.). In all these options we end up dissociating from our core pain and vulnerability. Owning feeling unsafe is like a Tom-Tom for our central nervous system, every time

When we experience psychological trauma our sense of self, the ‘I am me’ gets fragmented. The deeper and more painful the trauma is, the more fragmented we become. Self-hate is often our last option to gain control of a situation in which we otherwise feel powerless. Hating ourselves can validate and even justify what we have experienced along the lines of ‘we deserved it’ or ‘there must be something seriously wrong with me’. The part of us which carries the pain of the trauma is silenced and rejected by the part of us which is self-hating. The trauma part is consistently being retraumatised each time it gets rejected and hated by the self-hating part. It’s a vicious circle. So we need to end this one-sided war and work towards restoring the connection between the two. I imagine there is a connective tissue between them and that this connective tissue represents the part of us which didn’t understand what the fuck was going on, which couldn’t get it’s head around what happened. Why we were bullied, rejected, abandoned, abused, put down, etc? For me, the part of us which didn’t understand was unable to stay true to our intuition, our gut-feeling,

Yesterday evening I attended a friend’s book presentation and found myself sharing my views, to a big room full of people, on how passionate I feel about connecting to the humanity and vulnerability of my clients. To let go of my expertise and bless my clients with my own humanness. I felt quite nervous doing it but after the presentation and talks many people came up to me and responded in such a positive and encouraging way to what I had earlier shared. They all asked, ‘What type of therapy do you give?’ After answering this question several times it became clearer to me that I am pushing the boundaries of what I am doing in my work and that this is a creative, organic process driven by my heart. And that in each and every encounter and session, in each true connection with another person, there is a two-way healing process going on. As I write this I realise that this is actually pioneering work, not just for me but for all of us, who are on this path of opening our hearts more. And on this path we will be challenged, it will sometimes be scary but our inner