U Parallel (2025)

16/05/2023

Purpose-in-life | Curious? 🧑‍🔬

How often do you think about purpose in life? What does having a sense of purpose even mean? How do I know if I have purpose in life?

The quality of your life will nearly always be determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself and most importantly how honestly you answer these.

There’s a science to discerning and organising components of purpose for better understanding of it, but more importantly there’s an art to living with purpose!

My talk is only £17, but purpose is priceless! 50% of your money goes toward funding the development and delivery of a ‘purpose potential’ education initiative known as AGENT-P, focused on preparing today’s children for tomorrow.

Link in Bio.

🍎📚✏️✂️

16/05/2023

Purpose-in-life | Curious? 🧑‍🔬

How often do you think about purpose in life? What does having a sense of purpose even mean? How do I know if I have purpose in life?

The quality of your life will nearly always be determined by the quality of the questions you ask yourself and most importantly how honestly you answer these.

There’s a science to discerning and organising components of purpose for better understanding of it, but more importantly there’s an art to living with purpose!

My talk is only £17, but purpose is priceless! 50% of your money goes toward funding the development and delivery of a ‘purpose potential’ education initiative known as AGENT-P, focused on preparing today’s children for tomorrow.

Link in Bio.

🍎📚✏️

24/01/2023

The length of time we spend on not resolving issues in our relationships, self or not isn’t the best strategy for bringing satisfaction into our lives.

Time to decompress and reflect when conflict or uneasy feelings show up is important. However, if that time is spent fizzing about what happened instead of focusing on healing and learning, then nothing useful will have been achieved.

Fizzing is useful. You’re fizzing because you care. Take time yes. See if your thoughts and emotions (fizzing😂) are useful in moving you toward resolving and closing the conflict gap or are they moving you further away?

As my good yoga-hero-teacher reminds us “where our attention goes, energy flows”.

And so in this context,

- attend to what’s going to close the gap in a timely manner.
- use your energy on what truly matters to bring you life satisfaction in the relationship.

Easier said than done. Start small, practice and observe what happens.

19/01/2023

We hurt where we care. Why else would we hurt? If we didn’t care it wouldn’t hurt!

All that we care for and the hurt that goes with it, becomes part of us. The process of acceptance to what hurts will be different for everyone. Take your time, & it in.

17/01/2023

The problems with problems in relationships is that we all have them. However, the real problem isn’t that there is a problem (still following?)…the real problem is how we relate to the content of the “problem” i.e., how our mind evaluates, fears, judges, fuses, or reacts to it. The “problem” is only the content, and how we interact with the content is the real problem. Reacting usually involves the “I have to solve, resolve or fix this”…. An imposed verbal rule, that’s just really unhelpful.

What if you didn’t give up your mental energy to solving the problem. What might that be like?

12/01/2023

How do you handle tough thoughts & emotions that show up for you to do with your relationship?

Do you…

Dispute them “oh I don’t know…they’re not true, I’m just crazy, it’s just me being an idiot, foolish…how can this be happening, why am I thinking like this, just shut the f**k up, go away. If this isn’t true then why is it I keep thinking like this”

Challenge them “how can I be a ghost if I’m alive. Obviously I’m not a seashell I’m a human, stupid!”

Or

Change them “right, think positive. I’m worthy. I’m full. I’m enough. I am alive. Think happy thoughts…look on the bright side, could be worse”

Know this: Us humans try to dispute, challenge & change a lot of our private internal experiences. It’s exhausting!!BUT…It’s very normal to do so. Who wouldn’t want to not feel this way. The reality though, when we try to push down what’s there, without allowing proper processing and time, we prolong our suffering and we miss out on what golden information it has to share with us.

Being fully with our experiences & still choosing to do what matters to us in life or in our relationships isn’t easy. We suffer because we care, why else would we suffer?! If what we go through didn’t matter then I there would be no suffering. We wouldn’t waste energy on it.

We hurt where we care the most! Be with your suffering, allow it & still do what matters to you anyway.

11/01/2023

When problems or actions outside of your control, lead to you feeling caught up in your head, hooked, distracted, disconnect or avoidance - sometimes focusing on doing what matters and what works to lift you up is more helpful to you, your well-being & your relationship in the long run.

Find what works for you, look for what it is that you know connects 🔗 you to what lifts you up especially during times of stress & conflict in your relationship(s) and when you know you’re being pulled down.

Know this: All of this is behavioural and therefore can be undermined. Being pulled down albeit very hard to not be at times, CAN be influenced & changed by focusing your energy on what’s going to be effective at lifting you up.

Find what lifts you up and do that when you notice you’re being pulled down. Practice. Practice. Practice.

not

10/01/2023

Is your relationship unbalanced?

The magic ratio | 5:1

On a personal note, this research resonates and explains (in part) why I believe my own LTR lasted as long as it did. We listened, we respected, we cared, we loved & we showed these through actions. It also explains, in part, why it broke down after 15 years, with criticism & stonewalling playing a HUGE role. Hoodwinked by archaic brain strategies used to keep us safe, now verbal behaviour adaptations. Both of which function to alleviate emotional control relating to a fear response / a private internal event that we do not even realise is jerking us around and causing us to behave how we are behaving. If you do not have the skills to recognise these behaviours because you’re so caught up in the conflict, then things will spiral.

So, what to do?

Find & learn what works. Relationships are a living organism that require active participation to keep them alive, especially during times of conflict.

First, know your why? Why is this person and this relationship really important to me. Hard to know your why if you yourself are struggling emotionally and stuck in your head. If so, prioritise seeking support from loved ones, or professional help so you can learn to untangle from the mind and get clear on what will work for you.

Also,

Try to become aware of your pos-neg interactions during times of conflict. Observe how you and your partner interact. For every negative interaction that happens, are there more positive interactions, or negative?

Consciously observe what you and your partner say & do, how you say & do it, & when you say and do it. Start tracking your interactions. Awareness of how unbalanced your interaction ratio might be, is crucial if you’re wanting to resolve matters, be healthy in your behaviours, improve communication and most importantly stay together.

09/01/2023

Love is something we ‘do’ for the self & others by being ‘intentional’ in our behaviours and taking action to express them.

Consciously creating bite-size actions communicates you value yourself & your romantic or intimate partner/others. It’s a healthy commitment to doing what matters with awareness that you’re doing it because you know this is a meaningful action done because it helps sustain healthy functioning relationship(s). Intention switches us from autopilot behaviours to a manual actions.

06/01/2023

When we do behaviours that we know do not serve us or our relationships, it’s often the case that we internally feel shame & we self-criticise. Outwardly, we might laugh it off or become a dismissyologist, minimising it’s negative affect & effects on us & others.

Giving up habitual behaviours is hard. Knowing it’s contributing to our pain points but not doing anything because we feel like we can’t stop, is hard.

When you’ve identified what that one thing is and you’ve recalled all the times this thing hasn’t worked to bring you longer-term life satisfaction or improvement. Instead of self-criticising or beating yourself up try this exercise.

Imagine you were someone who has in the past been a huge support to you and shown you love & compassion. See if you can get behind their eyes and imagine being them, here & now. What do you think they would say to you about how hard it is for you to give up that one thing that you struggle with? What kind words would they use, how would they express support to you?

Know this: if self-criticism or beating yourself up was effective at getting you to change your habits, wouldn’t it have worked by now?

When making a change, firstly get yourself to a willingness level of 7-10 (anything lower you’re not motivated enough) & secondly, give yourself the same love, kindness & support you would give others, or they would give you.

Use self-compassion over self-criticism or judgement.

05/01/2023

How am I self-ing within my relationship? Am I being flexible & effective in my behaviour or am I being rigid & ineffective?

We want to look at our current & past elements contributing to ineffective actions that reliably lead to very unpleasant relationship interactions - the ones we all dread. We want to equip ourselves with the skills, tools & techniques so we can show up as best we can in our relationships, for us & for others.

How?

We’re looking at the functional relationships (purpose of doing what we do) between behaviour’s & elements of the context (how behaviour is influenced).

For example:

1) When we notice the impact of the context, we might say to ourselves “I can see that I was experiencing guilt (emotional behaviour that serves a purpose - makes us feel bad so we don’t do it again) for shouting at my partner this morning (verbal behaviour that serves a purpose in that moment, likely to alleviate unpleasant sensations e.g., frustration/irritability or to avoid unwanted emotions e.g., sadness, anxiety).

2) And, what things can I think of that might have characterised that day that led me to act like this?”

You might be able to list a number of contextual variables e.g., 1. Worrying, 2) Lack of sleep, 3) Pressure at work or dreading it, or a big one but often ignored, avoided, unaware 4) unresolved trauma.

The goal of ‘noticing the context’ is not to absolve you of responsibility, it’s to point out that context matters and variables within the context also play an important role in influencing our behaviour. When you’re aware of the impact of these variables on you, you have the ability to catch otherwise automatic ineffective behaviours & change what you do for a more effective response to the situation.

ALL behaviour is contextual and ALL behaviour has a function & purpose. The idea that we are just being a dick or bitch is just not helpful or useful and it doesn’t bode well for change.

04/01/2023

Love is so much more than a feeling - it’s something you do & experience. It’s an action, a process & a commitment.

So, think about what love means to you, who & what comes to mind when you think about it. And, express that meaning through actions, gestures and words.

03/01/2023

Why it’s important to develop a balanced sense of responsibility in relationship interactions?

There are two opposite positions of an unstable sense of responsibility (I’ve definitely been both over the years).

In the first case, usually you’re someone who experiences a lot of shame, you self-criticise & you beat yourself up for not being able to change to get what you want. You spend a fair amount of your time *trying* to change a self (who you fundamentally are) seen as the primary cause of your relationship difficulties.

In the second, you are someone who feels hopeless, out of control, feel insignificant and think that change is beyond your ability. You think you are who you are and the circumstances you find yourself in is because of external factors that you have no control over to make a difference in your life.

Responsibility sets you free. Learn how to become responsible, consider the role you play in causes & consequences to do with your relationship pain points.

02/01/2023

When you commit to self-improvement and transcend old versions of the self, versions that no longer serve you, you begin to realise the relationship you have with yourself is the foundation for all other relationships.

When on your growth journey, it’s useful to stay curious; to observe and track your growth and the behaviours that work for you (and those that don’t) but how can you know you’re in a happy relationship (with self or others) that’s both good for your health and everyone around you?

What do you notice, what do others notice? Are you asking yourself and others these questions, or for feedback?

#2023

01/01/2023

New Year New You, huh? 😂 Hold up. Before you get going, give your plan some thought.
is hard.
Know your ‘why’.

Today is Day 0
& but know what’s driving your choices, why, why, why? If your why is not in the service of who & what’s really important to you about this change, then it will not stick. Also, accept that change is not linear, you’ll zig-zag the s**t outta it, set-backs will happen & they are , you will suffer & this is normal too.

🎊 HAPPY NEW YEAR 🎊

23/08/2022

'There's as much life in a moment of pain as there is in a moment of joy' - Kirk Strosahl

You cannot have one without the other. Turn toward your pain, go through it, stop and work with it; it teaches you about who and what’s important, and how to live.

Treat your pain and suffering, your difficult thoughts and emotions like welcome house guests.

Acknowledge they’re there.
Allow them in.
Accommodate them.
Appreciate them.

Remember. You wouldn’t be suffering if it didn’t matter. You suffer because it matters.

09/01/2022

Today’s value of was very fitting! 14km of connection time with a lovely bunch of people!

Such a great pic thanks 🙏🏻 (hope you don’t mind me sharing)

& a

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U Parallel

16/05/2023

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24/01/2023

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