Julia Godden Therapies

04/02/2026

From the place of not knowing and not relying on the usual internal mechanisms ###

Michael Meade reflects on how, if we are able to stop and listen more deeply, we can connect with subtle sources of wisdom and guidance. He shares his experiences of receiving guidance that has taken the form of dreams, birds and animals, an inner voice and the realm of myth and story.

30/01/2026

Art21 is the world’s leading source to learn directly from the artists of our time. The mission of Art21 is to educate and expand access to contemporary art through the production of documentary films, resources, and public programs.

30/01/2026

Psilocybin doesn’t just alter perception—it temporarily erases the brain’s unique signature.

New brain-imaging research shows that psilocybin, the active compound in psychedelic mushrooms, profoundly disrupts the patterns that make each human brain recognisable as an individual. During the psychedelic experience, these patterns become so scrambled that different people’s brain scans are nearly indistinguishable from one another.

Using an advanced approach known as precision functional mapping, neuroscientists scanned the brains of seven healthy adults before, during, and for up to three weeks after psilocybin administration. For comparison, the same participants were also scanned after taking methylphenidate (Ritalin), a commonly prescribed stimulant.

The results were striking. Psilocybin caused widespread desynchronisation across functional brain networks, with the most dramatic effects seen in the Default Mode Network (DMN)—a system closely linked to self-reflection, autobiographical memory, and the sense of identity. As the DMN lost its usual coordination, the brain’s “neural fingerprint” effectively disappeared.

Even more intriguing, some alterations in brain connectivity persisted for weeks after the experience, long after the drug had left the body. This lasting rewiring may help explain why psilocybin is being intensively studied for conditions such as depression, addiction, and PTSD—where rigid patterns of thought play a central role.

Rather than simply “turning off” the brain, psilocybin appears to loosen its most deeply ingrained structures, temporarily dissolving the boundaries of the self and opening the door to long-term psychological change.

Source:
Siegel, J. S., et al. (2024). Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain. Nature.

29/01/2026

This is survival and outdated responses based on the past. - a nervous system response of lack of safety- fight flight freeze and fawn

“In my back brain I’m all action, all re-action, all jump out of the way and ask afterwards what I’m jumping out of the way of. I see things in blacks-and-whites, in all-or-nothings. I leap into the drama triangle and assume the position of victim, rescuer or persecutor. I play pre-programmed responses, of jumping to conclusions, of catastrophe, of outrage, of shame, of despair. I act only to defend myself, even before assessing the validity of the threat. I’m in survival mode, and woe betide the person who wants reason and rationale from me while my back brain is in control”

This is ventral vagal or the rest and digest aspect of the parasympathetic nervous system. More is possible, more presence. More ‘here and now’

“My front brain lets me feel my feelings, but also to verbalise them – ‘you need to name them to tame them’, as Dan Siegel says. I’m able to see that this is a feeling that I’m feeling, that it’s here now but won’t be later; that emotions have motion; that emotions present one piece of the picture, but not all of it; that feelings are meant to be felt, but not necessarily believed or acted upon. In the green zone with the front brain online, we can validate our feelings whilst also soothing them and making sure they don’t take over.”

From the Helpful article from Carolyn Spring.

Sometimes being told to use a particular grounding technique actually increases our distress. Because not everything works for everyone all the time and the primary way to reduce distress is to feel heard. I explain more here: https://www.carolynspring.com/blog/what-grounding-is-and-isnt

28/01/2026

Across the United States, where I live, strangers are not just sharing stories, glances, and shared laughter.

They are doing what my father’s neighbors did for him. They are standing watch. They are alerting each other. They are escorting children to school.

Strangers are opening their homes, their phones, their houses of worship, and their relational networks. Strangers are protecting each other, standing up for each other, and, harrowingly, even dying for each other.

I share more reflections on the people of Minneapolis, ICE, and my father's definition of a "good neighbor" in my latest newsletter: https://bit.ly/4rgx32N

28/01/2026

The true path of the soul is rarely smooth or predictable. When we know where the path is leading towards, and when it is too comfortable, too certain, it is often a sign that we are following someone else’s map rather than forging our own.

When have you chosen an uncertain path that led to something meaningful?

27/01/2026

I made this some time ago and just found it in my files!
It can be a helpful tool to notice where we feel abundant or generative and also where we feel lacking and perhaps a place to discover what is possible.

let me know, what is in your own dimension of wellness. I might now add community.
What do you consider constitutes wellness?

let me know in the comments x

27/01/2026

An invitation to be curious - When you’re not achieving, helping, or being needed — who are you then?

Let me know in the comments x

27/01/2026

“The path to developing our capacity to express love more fully is to bring awareness to our actual feelings, to observe them mindfully, to work at being non-judgmental and more patient and accepting.”
-Jon Kabat-Zinn
Full Catastrophe Living

27/01/2026

Opening the heart is not the same as becoming a leaky receptacle for someone else’s shadow.

Real compassion includes boundaries. It includes discernment. It includes the capacity to stay connected to yourself while another person is activated, projecting, or in pain.

Most of us were never taught this.

We learned instead that love meant accommodating, absorbing, smoothing things over - often because that was the safest way to stay connected in early relationships.

So we confuse openness with self-erasure. We confuse empathy with endurance. We confuse kindness with leaving ourselves behind.

That wasn’t weakness. It was adaptation. It was intelligent, creative, and often necessary at the time.

But the nervous system can learn something new.

The heart can open without leaking. You can stay present without disappearing. You can care without collapsing.

This begins with noticing where you habitually place others’ needs above your own - not from true compassion, but from an old reflex shaped by shame or fear of loss.

And then, slowly, gently… choosing something different.

Breathing. Feeling your feet. Letting your body know it no longer has to abandon itself to belong.

There is no urgency on the path of love.

27/01/2026

Many of us aren’t actually afraid of change. We’re afraid of what we’ll have to grieve if we stop holding everything together. It's understandable, really.

But staying the same has a cost. And most of the time, it’s paid quietly.

It shows up as a soul-level exhaustion. A tiredness deep in the subtle body. A sense of living adjacent to our lives rather than inside them.

As part of the density and trance of the collective, we come to accept this as just the way things are. Or, if we’re really spiritual, we tell ourselves we’re resting in the present moment - or that there’s “no one here” to be disturbed.

Those conclusions are of no interest to the Beloved, who demands something more. She will find her way into psyche, into the nervous system, into the somatic unconscious as a way to interrupt this trance.

We all have our familiar strategies of self-abandonment, most of them operating outside conscious awareness. While adaptive and intelligent at an earlier time, the price tag is a slow erosion that comes from not listening to what our bodies, our grief, our longings have been trying to say for years.

Most of us don’t resist change because we’re undisciplined, committed, or devoted enough. We resist it because real change brings loss: Loss of identity. Loss of certainty. Loss of who we thought we had to be in order to belong.

And that kind of loss doesn’t come with a checklist or a five-step plan. It’s not resolved through techniques and spiritual parlor tricks. It’s a lot more wild than that, undomesticated, revolutionary; it dismantles and reorients.

It asks us to feel what we’ve been managing. To stay with what we’ve been overriding. To let something old dissolve before we know what replaces it.

This is the part of healing no one really prepares us for.

Not transcendence. Not optimization. But the slow, honest courage to let our lives reorganize themselves from the inside out.

It’s just what the Goddess demands.

27/01/2026

As you prepare your breakfast — think of others.
Don’t forget to feed the pigeons.
As you conduct your wars — think of others.
Don’t forget those who want peace.
As you pay your water bill — think of others.
Think of those who have only the clouds to drink from.
As you go home, your own home — think of others — don’t forget those who live in tents.
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others — there are people who have no place to sleep.
As you liberate yourself with metaphors think of others — those who have lost their right to speak.
And as you think of distant others — think of yourself and say
‘I wish I were a candle in the darkness.'”

Mahmoud Darwish