Clive Holmes

05/12/2025

You might think you're in control of unwanted emotions when you ignore them, but they control you.

Internal pain always comes out—always. The best way to cope with amplification is to sit with your emotions. Giving yourself a small moment of reflection to process a tough emotion can improve your relationships and your day to day experience as a whole. Try to really see yourself in that moment.

Ask, how can I best support myself in this moment? What do I need? The answers to these questions could be as simple as taking a few deep breaths, placing your hands over your heart or belly, going for a short walk, or making a cup of tea.

05/12/2025

Asking “What do I need?” is not selfish—it’s self-compassion in action.
When we truly care for ourselves, we’re better able to care for others. This question is like a compass bringing us closer to alignment with our values.

🌱 Next time you feel stressed or overwhelmed, try asking: What do I need right now? Then honor your answer.

15/06/2024

We receive and we lose, and we must try to achieve gratitude; and with that gratitude to embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses. Andre Dubus

11/06/2024

good advice!

One way for us to be with our difficult emotions is with what I call “'a gentle noticing.” For example, "I'm noticing that I'm feeling really depleted. I'm noticing my grief. I'm noticing my sadness or my loneliness."

When we notice our inner world with compassion and gentleness, we're no longer fighting against our emotional experiences. We are able to just be with them. And when you can just be with your emotions, your gentle acceptance defangs that difficulty or challenge a little bit, allowing you to take the next brave step towards what matters most.

26/05/2024

interesting!

24/04/2024

“I said: what about my eyes?
He said: Keep them on the road.

I said: What about my passion?
He said: Keep it burning.

I said: What about my heart?
He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?

I said: Pain and sorrow.
He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

07/04/2024

Poem In October
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart's truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

23/02/2024

He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sun rise. william blake

21/02/2024

great advice

Inner strengths are the supplies you've got in your pack as you make your way down the twisting and often hard road of life.

21/02/2024

brilliant!

Inner strengths are the supplies you've got in your pack as you make your way down the twisting and often hard road of life.

20/02/2024

maybe..

20/02/2024

happy twentieth!