Kate Barnes Counselling

03/01/2024

Happy New Year. 💫

When I say ‘happy new year’,
I’m not for a moment,
expecting this to occur,
for that is not possible,
a year must be all things.

Happiness must come and go,
like the tides and the winds,
just as sadness,
and all the emotions in between.

When I say ‘happy new year’,
I’m really wishing you,
a baseline of peace,
of gratitude.

Because if you can sit with these things,
for the most part,
happiness will thrive,
when it does arrive,
and sadness will know its place in the mix.

If you can nourish these things,
daily,
you will also grow hope,
for it flourishes in such soil.

And hope is the key,
to this enigmatic state
of ‘happiness’ we seek.

When I say ‘happy new year’,
I’m really wishing you more happy days,
than sad days,
more joy than misery,
more laughter than tears…
and the wisdom to accept,
that they all belong.

Happy new year, my friends.
Happy new year.

Donna Ashworth

Beautiful art by

10/10/2023

World Mental Health Day. 2023

27/07/2023

11/05/2023

“ Experience the human spirit in its rawest form with REAL” 💜

16/04/2023

Trauma is stuck life energy.

Wild, creative, natural, playful life energy that was not allowed to flow when it first emerged and it tried to flow. It wasn’t safe to let it flow and you didn’t know how.

And so it got stuck in your body. It’s not your fault, dear one.

The words you wanted to scream. The ways in which you wanted to move your body. The healthy human feelings you intelligently squished in order to protect yourself, get love, be “okay”, stay alive.

The truth you needed to express, but couldn’t.

But it’s a new day, and anything stuck in you yesterday can be given permission to move again today. This will take courage, the willingness to feel old pain and breathe through it, to trust the body now instead of giving in to the mind and its fears. To tell the truth. To come out of hiding and let yourself be seen.

In the safety of your own presence, or in the safe presence of another who can hold you and trust your process, can you turn towards the sore place, the tight place, the dark place, the aching place, and bring to it the light of your awareness, the light of love?

Life only wants to play in you, dance, tremble, vibrate, surge and move through to completion. The rage, the terror, the impulses and urges and desires you learned were ‘sick’ or ‘dangerous’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘shameful’ were always natural, and normal, and healthy, and they won’t damage you as you turn towards them now and give them the love and attention and safe passage they always deserved.

You don’t have to act them out. Just feel them, shine light on them, bow to them. And allow, allow, allow. Moment by moment.

Be a vast Heart now, a loving curious welcoming Heart, and trust this intelligent storm of feeling as it emerges, roars and passes in its own time.

Your wounds, your turbulent and sorrowful places, your traumas, are not mistakes; they are the sacred places in you desperately yearning for love, waiting to be penetrated by your curious Light.

So scream, shake, tremble, weep, vomit, make a holy mess - you are a warrior and you are alive and you are healing and learning to play.

Through the pain, to the glory!

And behold:
The place in you that was never traumatised.
Your innocent Heart.
Your indestructible
Self.

- Jeff Foster