The Art Of Embodiment

20/07/2025

13/02/2025

The fact that our parents were doing the best they could, within the capacity and understanding they had at the time, is true...

But the reason this can feel so hard to accept is that sometimes a parent’s ‘best’ can fall so very far short of what we actually needed as little ones.

Sometimes a parent’s ‘best’ can be so actively damaging to us in mind and body that our little systems were wholly unable to metabolise the reality we found ourselves living in.

Instead we constructed a fantasy of the ‘good’ parent, imagined them into a better version of themselves than they really were, and came to believe that what was happening to us must somehow be our fault.

Because if it’s my fault, then maybe I can do better, be better... maybe I can do something to change it...maybe I’m not as powerless and frighteningly vulnerable as I appear to be.

06/06/2024

"Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being seen and accepted, even by loving parents.

Trauma of this kind does not require overt distress or misfortune...and can also lead to the pain of disconnection from the self, occurring as a result of core needs not being satisfied. Such ‘non events’ are what the British paediatrician DW Winnicott referred to as ‘nothing happening when something might profitably have happened.’”

- Gabor Mate

23/04/2024

On Addiction:

“I now have such compassion for those in the clutches of obsession/compulsion/addiction. I understand more deeply than I ever have before what an act of mercy to ourselves those activities are.

They actually are a part of ourselves that love ourselves so deeply that they will do anything to protect us from potentially shattering pain and truth.

I believe they are holding out hope, keeping us in a holding pattern, until we are capable of allowing the truth of what happened to our exquisitely tender souls to come to consciousness and transmutation.

The counterpart to this is that it makes it very clear that you can’t get in between a person and what they are doing, what they are using, to be able to live in their own skin. You will never make them stop doing what they need to do to preserve themselve. The will to live is that strong.

But we can offer them love, empathy, dignity, and prayer.”

Pat McCabe

18/04/2024

What began to heal my wounds in the end was not the love of other human beings, which - oh-so-important as it was – was always imperfect, and likely to stray at inopportune moments.

What began heal my wounds in the end was discovering that the Earth herself embraced my presence, that she welcomed the fall of my footsteps...that the world had a place for me...and that, at last, I was not alone.