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Category: ponderings
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So Long 2020
So Long, 2020
It hardly seems possible that we’ve reached the end of this year. I don’t know about you, but for me it was both the slowest and the fastest year I’ve lived through, so far at least!
Looking back to the start of 2020 is like looking through binoculars the wrong way round. It seems so far away; a distant time, far off in another land, way beyond our reach. Of course the reality is that it’’s really not that far away, it’s simply a trick of the lens.
If 2020 has taught us anything, it must be to expected the unexpected, and expect to be less surprised then you would ever have imagined when it shows up!
For me, it’s taught me that there’s little that’s more important than trying to find a little spark of magic in each day. Especially on those days when catching even the faintest glimmer of a twinkle, seems utterly impossible and way beyond your capabilities.
2020 has taught me that small joys and pleasures matter.
This year has taught me the true value of the senses, the parts of ourselves that we so often overlook as mundane, and which so many spiritual teachers declare as part of our baser, ‘3d’ ego selves. This is a profound misunderstanding of the senses which does us all a great disservice.
This year has taught me that plans are often little more than confetti tossed on the wind.
At the start of 2020 I thought that The Sensory Coach was going to go in a very different direction than the one I intend to take it in 2021.
At the start of 2020 I’d begun listening to other people instead of myself. I called my own vision into question, and got lost in trying to create something that wasn’t me. Which is utterly bonkers because the whole point of The Sensory Coach, right back at the beginning of 2018, was for it to be a place of integration for all the things I want to share with whoever feels drawn to listen.
As the 3rd anniversary of The Sensory Coach approaches, I’m stepping back into my own shoes. They might not be the most sensible pair, and I’ll undoubtedly spend more time bare foot than shod, which may make for a few stumbles along the way, but as we kiss 2020 so long, I’m recommitting to taking the path less travelled. That’s where I’ve always found the greatest learning and adventures happen.
In 2020 that path got given a corporate make over, with the ability to pivot suddenly becoming the difference between sinking or swimming. We’re all traversing unmapped territory now, which I hope will turn out to be a wonderfully liberating experience for us all.
Let’s meet whatever 2021 has to throw at us with stoicism, a sense of humour, and our senses fully engaged so that we can spot those little sparks of magic, even if they’re more often than not on the peripheries of our daily experiences.
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Life Tracking
What is life tracking? On the face of it, it’s pretty simple – you track elements of your life to help bring clarity, self encouragement and accountability.
We’re quite used to tracking fitness data, whether it’s the simple use of a pedometer to track your steps, or electronic devices that track everything from sleep patterns to heart rate. There are apps that can help women to track their menstrual cycles. Apps to track finances, time spent on devices; you name it and there’s probably an app to track it.
About 18 months ago I started to make brief notes in my daily journal (more tracking) about things I was noticing about my mental and physiological state. For the last 5 months I’ve been keeping a more detailed daily diary just for cycle related tracking. It’s been enlightening.
In the 18+ months I was doing basic tracking, I realised that I was having,what I called ‘existential angst days’,on a very regular (monthly) basis. It was enlightening when I saw that these days,when I was feeling at absolute rock bottom, were following a pattern. It meant that, when I noticed that was how I was feeling, I could check back through my journal, and see if it was the same point in my cycle. Low and behold, it was. This then enabled me to realise it would quickly pass, and that I wasn’t sinking into the depths of depression – it was simply a hormonal response, not an unchangeable aspect of my personality.
About 6 months ago I started to read more around menstrual cycle tracking, and the idea that women live in cycles and seasons within our cycles.
Suddenly everything fell into place, especially when I started noticing how this played out on a fairly predicable schedule, month after month.
I think this information is something that every young girl should be taught. I think it should be part of the discussion around women’s mental health. It’s something boys should be taught too.
For too long women have been expected to fit into the non cyclical ways of a man’s world. We’ve been mocked for our PMS moments. Where there should be understanding, there has been abuse.
The underlying assumption that women are unstable creatures continues to pervade society, including the healthcare world. I could talk at great length on this subject, but instead I’ll just refer to this post where I talked a little about how women are often dismissed by the medical profession.
If we all understood the beauty of a woman’s cycle, how we have seasons, just like the planet, imagine the world we could be living in? We’ve denied our connection to nature, arrogantly thinking we can control Mother Nature, in the same way we’ve assumed we can control the workings of a woman’s body. We have to see the correlation between the two things if we’re to stand any chance of repairing the damage we’re doing to our home.
How do we do this? We start with us, as individuals, tracking our days, getting to know ourselves and the way we interact with the world.
Instead of just tracking the metrics, we track the ‘soft data’ of our days.
We can track our mood and feelings – there are apps for that. But we can go deeper and uncover so much more information about ourselves. How?
We could track our sensory responses throughout the seasons. How about tracking our trauma responses AND our joy responses too? Once we have more data about ourselves, we can dig deep into why we do the things we do, and when we do them. Self knowledge unlocks so many opportunities to feel different, which in turn can lead us to creating the lives we’ve always dreamed of.
Women have an extra opportunity to gather self knowledge: get tracking your cycle! Even if you’re in the post menopause phase of your life – you’re still existing within cycles and seasons; you’re still part of the beating heart of the earth. And, you have the wisdom of having lived through all the seasons of a woman’s life – share your wisdom, it’s your gift to the world! Those of us who come after you need your knowledge and experience.
What will you start tracking first? I’d love to know.
In future posts I’ll be exploring sensory tracking in much more depth. If you want to know when those posts go live, do sign up for the Magic Monday emails where I bring you music, magic, mantras, and musings on things that don’t make it to the blog.
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First, Know Thyself
Versions of this aphorism have been credited to numerous men of stature through the ages. Women, not so much.
It seems to me that even now, almost 20 years into the 21st century, women are still rarely encouraged to truly get to know themselves. Our knowledge of ourselves is, more often than not, received and viewed through the filter of those around us, rather than via our own perceptions and exploration based self knowledge. This results in us receiving skewed data from sources that are working from their own agenda. This agenda isn’t necessarily bad, though often it can be, regardless though, if we put more store in someone else’s ideas of who we are, the shit is going to hit the fan eventually.
This is the same principle that I talked about at length in this post about having your feelings denied, and this one where I talk about how Reiki can turn your life upside down.
I’m slowly uncovering the ways in which I’ve ingested other people’s opinions about who this person called Techla is. What I’m discovering is that pretty much every belief I’ve ever held about myself, has been founded on someone else’s
bullshitmisunderstandingprojections.I think this is pretty normal for most women – I can’t comment for men because a. I’m not one, and b. finding men who are willing to talk about these sorts of things is rather like finding rocking horse shit.
Before I started to write this post I did a google search of the title, it brought up an interesting article that suggested that the premise of the saying is not just silly, but actually dangerous. My curiosity was obviously piqued, given that my experience has been that NOT knowing myself has been dangerous!
What the author of the article (a professor of philosophy no less) was saying makes sense, in some ways, but only in so far as we accept that who we are is a static creature of habit. Their argument was that, by knowing ourselves, we will become dogmatic in our choices, limiting our freedom to grow and change over time. I can see their point here, but I would argue that by knowing ourselves, we become much more capable of growth, and where appropriate, change.
We all change over time, and we all also remain the same in some ways too. I suspect just how much we change (or not), depends rather heavily on how prepared we are (or aren’t) to …. get to know ourselves!
I suppose that if you have a life that you define as successful (however that looks to you), then the impetus to get to know yourself is unlikely to be as strong as if you’re unhappy or dissatisfied with your lot.
If, on the other hand, your life is a stinking great shit show of despair, then getting to know yourself on a deep (not superficial) level could just be your ticket out of that awful place. It’ll take a tonne of courage, there’s no two ways about it, but the potential pay off has to be worth any discomfort along the way.
What’s perhaps even more important here is this: when you get to know yourself through your own filters, you’ll be much less likely to perpetuate the cycle of judgement. That’s one of the ways in which we can heal the legacy of inter-generational trauma, and THAT is world changing.
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Food Memories – Why Are They So Evocative?
What’s your earliest food memory? What triggers it to come up to the surface – is it a smell? A flavour? A texture? How does it make you feel? Does it envelope you in a warm, fuzzy haze of memory, whisking you back to a time and place long since gone? Or does it make your spine tingle with horror?
We often hear stories about someone’s grandma’s amazing apple pie; the recollections of Sunday’s well spent in granny’s kitchen, sifting flour, licking the spoon from the mixing bowl.
I don’t know about you, but those sorts of stories make me feel a mix of emotions, including the not so pleasant ones like envy and regret.
Neither of my grandmothers were the sort to create those kinds of memories; perhaps that had as much to do with a lack of opportunity as anything else, given we lived overseas, or several hours drive away, for most of my childhood.
Even so, I do have food memories of both of them: rancid dripping, festering on a kitchen worksurface, and the all pervasive aroma of unsmoked bacon fat. Not exactly the stuff of nostalgic dreams are they?
I do have other, nicer, food memories thankfully! Most of them originate from the years we spent living in Germany – when I first walked into a newly opened German supermarket here in the UK, the scent memory was so overwhelming that it brought on tears. Even though using those supermarkets is now a regular part of life again, those old associations remain, and it makes me smile in wonder every time.
I had a conversation with someone on instagram a while ago about an ’80s Marks and Spencer Lemon Madeira cake – a shared food memory that was so vivid, even just the thought triggered salivation! Simply typing these words is giving me the experience of the tartness of the lemon; the smooth silkiness of the icing; the finger licking (and hoover requiring!) crumble of the cake. I feel driven to go and bake so that I might satisfy my desire for that taste of a 1980s summer!
However, experience tells me that the disappointment of it not quite living up to my memories will keep my fingers on the keyboard, instead of going and grabbing the mixing bowl.
So why are food memories so powerful? It’s all because of your senses – you didn’t see that coming did you? It’s stating the obvious really isn’t it? But the key thing with food memories, over other types of memories, is that they utilise all of our sensory apparatus, along with all the nuances of the situational and emotional contexts that are going on around us at the time.
Whilst scent can create some of our most evocative memories because of the proximity of the olfactory bulb to the memory making areas of the brain – the amygdala and hippocampus – food memories have multiple layers that get laid down in the brain in a much more immersive way. To my mind it’s a fleeting from of time travel.
The Legacy of Food Memories
Before The Sensory Coach I ran an allergy friendly food business – mostly chocolate, but I also developed and sold packet mixes for bread and cookies. Before that I ran a paleo recipe website, which lead me to write two e-books: A Festive Feast and The Creatively Paleo Icecream Emporium.
The structural thread that runs through all of these endeavours is the importance of the legacy of loving memories.
When I was spending days, weeks, months and sometimes even years trying to develop an allergy friendly recipe, the thing that drove me was the desire for my own family not to miss out on what were often common cultural food memories, and for them to have a bank of family memories to carry with them into adulthood.
As an aside, whilst talking of food culture, if you have netflix then let me recommend a fascinating series I’ve been enjoying recently – Street Food – from the perspective of a person with a shed load of food allergies it’s horrifying, but if you ignore that, it’s a really good watch, and absolutely speaks to everything that I’m talking about in this post.
Tucked into a picture frame in my kitchen is a little card with the George Bernard Shaw quote:
There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
They (I don’t know who the ‘they’ is!) also say that cooking is love made visible.
This is certainly my perspective on cooking. When you take this into consideration, alongside the power of food memories, I hope, if you’ve fallen out of love with cooking, or perhaps never even been in love with it, you’ll rethink the value of spending a little time in the kitchen, laying down the strongest of memories for your loved ones; they’ll sustain them long after the kitchen has closed.
Maybe we could start thinking of nutritional value not just in terms of vitamins and minerals absorbed, but as the laying down of sustaining memories, building resilience with every dish we share.
if you need a little help getting started, then my allergy friendly chocoolate course is the perfect place to begin creating those memories.
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Poetic Problem Solving with Collage
Back in 2014 a friend reintroduced me to the joys of collage via the medium of vision pages. The premise is along the lines of a dreamboard,but using cut out words, not just images.
This was an enlightening moment for me because, even though I’m a very visual thinker, vision boards had always left me cold. But now I could shift words around on a page, and add pictures if I wanted to? Woah! And then a remembering whisked me back through the mists of time to 1987.
I had done this very thing, almost 30 years before, on the notice board of my 5th form, boarding school prison cell.
I also remembered all the scrap books I’d loved making – how had I forgotten about something that brought me so much joy?
Over the past 5 years I’ve utilised this process more and more. It’s become a kind of meditation for me. It’s helped me to home in on recurring themes, which is a big part of what lead me to the creation of The Sensory Coach.
I tend to create new pages around the time of the full and new moons each month. Sometimes I’ll just feel the urge to create a page outside of those times, if there’s something niggling away at me that I need to get out. Like journalling I suppose, except…. not!
This afternoon, as I was creating a page, I was pondering how the process works. This was connected to a question a friend had asked me a couple of days before:
‘Tell me how your idea creation process works.’
(She’s a coach, and these are the sorts of deep diving questions us coaching types love to ask.)
My response?
‘Erm… I dunno, it just sort of happens!’
Which is sort of true, but given she said she would keep me in mind as an Ideas Consultant, I figured that I should probably give this process a bit more thought. And I do love me some thinking!
Ready for a bit of Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb trail following?
I started the 100 days project at the beginning of April, having chosen the loose theme of Sensory Soul Art. It sounds a bit pretentious given I’m not an artist, but the container gave me scope to explore, and it’s been another enlightening process.
Last week I watched a documentary on Netflix called The Creative Brain, which gave me inspiration for this piece of art play.
When I was writing up the caption for it on instagram I said:
‘…The ways in which seemingly disparate input can form connections over time seems, to me, a bit like Ready, Steady, Cook! (Anyone remember that programme?) You start off with a bag of random items and have to create a dish or two that brings them all together.’
This afternoon, as I was cutting out appealing words and phrases from magazines – keeping the left brain occupied so that the right brain was able to come online to free associate (or as Daniel Pink puts it: ‘The left hemisphere analyses the details; the right hemisphere synthesises the big picture.’) – these rememberings were sifted to the front of my awareness:
- Me and my dear friend, Lisa, playing with magnetic poetry whilst waiting for an appointment with The Emergency Poet.
- Playing on the CSI game and using the lab assembly table to piece bits of evidence together.
- The book A Discovery of Witches in which the main character, Diana, problem solves by imagining all the elements of the problem as puzzle pieces on a white table. She waits for them to rearrange themselves so that she can see the whole picture – she later discovers that this is one form her magic (as a witch) takes.
- References from the book Refuse to Choose about ‘scanners’ – a term the author uses to describe people like me who love learning more than knowing.
- The knowledge that movement helps to promote mental activity, leading to faster cognitive processing.
Me and Lisa, 2 years ago, playing with magnetic poetry These recollections prompted me to consider some things about myself:
- I’m a collector (some might use the term hoarder) of things, ideas, experiences, memories, information, random junk!
- I thrive in visually busy spaces – not busy with movement or sound though, that’s exhausting.
- I have a ridiculously retentive memory.
- I’m a voracious reader.
- I’m a listener.
I appreciate that there are a lot of words here. This is one of the things that puts me off blogging, because all of that up there, took moments to whizz across my brain and form into the completed puzzle. Trying to type it up into a piece of writing that makes sense however…. hours!
But the way my brain works has value. A value I’ve really not appreciated for most of my life, which has been a shocking waste of my abilities frankly. It’s about time I started to vocalise my strengths, and demonstrate the level of background work that goes into this ‘just sort of happens’ process.
The collection of cuttings I started with 
The finished piece
My friend Kate told me that marketing is like painting and decorating: there’s an awful lot of preparation work involved that you don’t see. It’s the same with my idea generating process. It’s a culmination of every sight, sound, smell, taste, touch I’ve experienced in my life, colliding with the information that you’re giving me, when you’re asking for my input. As was said in the netflix documentary:
‘Creativity doesn’t mean inventing something out of nothing, instead it’s about refashioning what already exists.’
David EaglemanThe creation of a vision page is a tangible demonstration of how my idea generation process happens.
The words and images that stir your senses will be particular to you, how you arrange them will be a result of your very personal thought processes and associations. That’s why moving pieces of cut out paper around is a worthwhile use of time. It’s how you create poetry like this piece I came up with earlier today:
everyone deserves a
wild love
held in softness
adorned in perfumeThat’s how you can solve problems, work out what your underlying passions are, and just have a bit of fun with glue and paper, like you did when you were a child.
Give it a go and let me know how you get on. If you want some guidance, then might I point you in the direction of my friend Angela? She’s running a programme on Patreon called Resonance, where she’ll be teaching her process.
I must apologise for the dreadful formatting, I just can’t get to grips with the new wordpress block system.
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The Power of Story
What is the power of story? Let me take you on a little journey to explore some of the ways it shows itself.
Who doesn’t love a good story? Our world is built on them; countless billions have been poured into creating stories on screen, with actors as the modern day bards, casting a spell over us as we watch, enthralled as their weave their tales in this modern medium.
The bards of old were magicians of the mind. Through the tools of their trade they could take their audiences out of time and space, just as modern day films do. But, the action happened in our minds eye, not across a giant screen. Each member of their captive audience would have seen, heard, smelt, felt and perhaps even tasted, a slightly different scenario as the tales unfolded, everyone adding their own unique spin.
Storytelling is in the midst of a renaissance as evidenced by festivals such as Settle Stories (my much loved, local, award winning treasure trove of stories). Not only are there festivals, all over the country storytelling clubs are popping up – social gatherings where you can go to listen to stories and share your own carefully crafted tales, honing your skills in front of a live audience.
We each have our own stories: what else is life if not a collection of tales bound together in the bindings of our flesh? Our stories are written in our bodies; often visible on our skin, hidden in the depths of our DNA. We carry our family stories with us there too: strange, mysterious, hidden stories, ones that we’re not necessarily aware of on a conscious level, but which form part of our psyche, and our genetic inheritance,nonetheless.
When we reach a certain age, these ancestral stories take on a greater importance. Sadly, we tend not to develop this desire to learn more until after the story keepers have shuffled off this mortal coil. We’re left to leaf through dusty old documents, and if we’re lucky, annotated photos, hoping to gather a sense of the lives they lived before we knew them as Mum, Dad, Grandma, Grandad, Aunty, Uncle.
Of course nowadays we have access to geneaology websites, which is a far less sneeze inducing way of going through old documents! They can be frustrating though as trails can end thanks to a typo, or worse, due to lost or none existent documents which could have given you a greater insight into aspects of an ancestor’s life. We’re left to fill in the imagined details; joining dots that may create an idea of a life that looks quite different from the one that was really lived.
But does it matter? Isn’t the beauty of a story what we ourselves take from it?
I’m an avider reader. Last year, having come late to the Outlander series, I ate the entire collection of books. As gloriously satisfying to the eyes as Jamie …. I mean, the series… is, the books, as they so often do, took the stories to a whole other level. It was one of the characters , Mr Willoughby, who inspired this post in the form of this quote:
‘A story told is a life lived. Once I tell it I have to let it go.’
Just sit with that for a little while, see what it brings up for you.
Once we share our own stories they start to lose their power over us. The act of speaking, or writing them, transfers them to another dimension. A dimension in which they gain another kind of power: the power to heal, not only ourselves, but others.
Until really quite recently, our individual stories have been kept locked within us. We rarely heard tales of the ordinary man, and less so the ordinary woman. Only the great and the (not necessarily) good were on offer to us in the form of memoirs and autobiographies. No wonder, as Plato said:
Those who tell the stories rule society.
Perhaps this is one reason why so many ‘ordinary’ people believe that their own stories hold no value.
Each person’s story has value! None of us have lived someone else’s life – we may have had similar experiences on the face of it, but we all bring our own perspective to bear on what happens to us.
To bring this back to a sensory perspective for a moment, we each have our own unique take on the world – we very literally see things differently to the person standing next to us, no matter that we may be looking at the same scene. We see, hear, smell, taste and feel our experiences through our own unique filters of perception. These are then all woven through the collection of memories we have stored in our minds and our cells, adding a splash of colour, or an underlying darkness to our life tapestry. Our stories are held in our DNA, waiting to be passed on to the next generation, or tied off if the thread ends with us.
Collectively there might be an overarching consensus, but that just means that the people who could shout loudest got to tell it their way. Other voices are often drowned out; their stories go untold or unheard. But what if the perspectives the quiet ones bring to the mix tell an entirely different story? One that has the power to change minds, to heal and make lives better?
One of the greatest gifts stories can offer is in their power to humanise the other. Our world is in flux right now, and stories are helping to create much needed change. The #metoo campaign took what was the story of many (most?) women, and refused to allow it to be drowned out by the overarching consensus. The collective ‘ME TOO!’ made people sit up and listen to stories that were shocking, but unfortunately oh so very ordinary. Stories help us to develop empathy. This, to me, is the super power of story.
As Umberto Eco so perfectly summed up:
The person who doesn’t read lives only one life. The reader lives 5000. Reading is immortality backwards.
I believe that goes for those who listen to stories too.
Every business guru worth their salt is trying to get across the power of story to businesses big and small. They understand the power of story to connect us. Story can enchant the mundane, and in the hands of a master wordsmith, can cast a glamour that draws us in, parting us from our hard earned cash, often ending in dashed hopes, and a reduced bank balance! Story requires then that we become discerning.
When we learn to listen carefully to story, we develop an ear for the subtext, the underlying rhythm. We learn to spot if we’re been taken down a path that isn’t quite what it seems. With experience we can learn to identify the wolf dressed up as granny, the beast who is really a prince. Some of the time at least for there are always plot twists that none of us saw coming! There will always be the beguiling tale that tricks us, leaving us feeling foolish for having fallen for such pretty deceptions. Stories can be tricksters.
More and more I’m noticing a trend for what are described as immersive experiences. It seems that our modern mind wants bigger and better ways of being taken out of ourselves. Whilst these sorts of experiences look very exciting, and are something I too seek to offer, be that through the Halloween parties I used to hold, my chocolate, drumming workshops or sensory work, you don’t need all the bells and whistles for a truly immersive experience, you just need a good story teller –though a crackling fire and darkness help enormously!
Stories are magical – they teleport us to places beyond time and space – I’m all about the magic! But that’s a story for another time.
Stories always come to an end. That ending may leave us feeling deeply satisfied or heartbreakingly bereft. We might hold off from reading the final book in a series because we don’t want it to end. We might beg a storyteller for ‘just one more’.
Stories keep us curious, they teach us about the world, but more importantly, they teach us about ourselves.
Stories can give us hope when we thought it had deserted us. They can give us a reason to go on, to live another day.
Stories save lives.
As the semi colon project says:
A semi colon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence, but chose not to. The author is you and the sentence is your life.
A story cut short is a tragedy for us all.
The world needs more stories, please tell yours, you don’t know who needs to hear it.
That is the power of story.
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If you would like to have this post read to you, just click play on the video below – I couldn’t fathom out how to edit just audio without paying a load of money for an editing app, so you’ve got a video of the shadows on my gong to accompany it! Also… yes, I said geneology not genealogy – red face!