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Category: storytelling
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Lavender Fields – Insta Heaven, Sensory Hell.
Have you visited a lavender farm recently? If not, chances are, if you use Instagram, you’ll have seen at least one beautiful photo of someone standing in a field of lavender.
Last summer I decided it would be fun to get some photos of me, in a lavender field, to use on this website. Yorkshire Lavender is about an hour and half away, so I persuaded the family it would be a fun day out (the promise of a pizza afterwards, at Pizza Express, was certainly not bribery…)
We didn’t have the best day for it, it was a dull and overcast, not ideal for the idyllic photos I had in mind, but hey … filters, right?
When we arrived the place was heaving. Who knew lavender fields were such a popular destination? Well, according to this article from the BBC, they’re doing a booming trade these days, thanks to instagram!
At Yorkshire Lavender there are terraced rows of lavender, with reasonably wide paths between them. It’s not the classic field full of flowers, like this one, that you might imagine seeing in France. So not such a wildly romantic photo op, but the paths make for easy access without damaging the plants, and there’s something appealing about the idea of walking down a lavender edged path. I imagined the heady aroma, wafting across, relaxing me as I enjoyed watching the flower stalks sway gently in the breeze…
Can you sense the but?
Before I start this little tale, I need you to understand something: I adore bees, I really do. But…..
Bees. Bees love lavender – I know this. I’ve planted it many times, to help save the bees. There’s some incredibly delicious lavender honey out there, that goes perfectly in a honey and lavender ice cream. I know all of this! But when I was thinking about standing for a photo in a field of lavender, bees were nowhere in my imaginings!
Have you seen the Michael McIntyre sketch about wasps and bees? If not, here you go, you might want to make sure your pelvic floor muscles are in full working order before hitting play.
My friend sent me the link because she recognised my type. She’s a wafter. I am a panicker! (Perhaps this should be a question in the Sensory Types Quiz..?)
Now before you imagine me running screaming through the lavender, I can assure you, I managed to contain myself. Bees I can just about cope with, wasps are what bring out the panicker in me.
No, the problem was something I couldn’t have anticipated.
It was the sound! I love the hum of bees, always have. But what I’ve never experienced before was walking down a bee runway!
The sound of humming surrounded me. It was incredibly loud, to the extent that I could feel it as a vibration.
It reminded me of the feeling of being on a ferry when the engine starts up.
Because the sound was constantly moving, it messed with my (very sensitive) sense of balance (vestibular system) even though I was on solid ground. It was the weirdest sensation, and I hated it!
Added to this was the fact that there were bees flying all around me as they moved from one row to another. I was desperately trying to control my panicker tendencies whilst feeling thoroughly discombobulated, which all added up to something that was pretty close to sensory hell! You may be able to detect some of that angst from the only photo that came out of the trip!
And to add insult to injury, the filters couldn’t magic away the effect of the dull skies. Hey ho. You live and learn.
I couldn’t have foreseen any of this, and to be honest, even if someone had told me it was a possibility, I probably wouldn’t have believed it could be so overwhelming.
Would it put me off visiting another lavender field? Probably not. Forewarned is forearmed after all. Having had the experience once, I’d be able to anticipate it, so wouldn’t be caught off guard. I could put some coping mechanisms in place, and go on a day when my sensory equilibrium was working in my favour. With all of those things in place, who knows, I might even ENJOY the experience!
Whilst I was disappointed that the experience hadn’t been the one I’d imagined, I didn’t beat myself up about it. I didn’t wonder what was wrong with me. I didn’t berate myself for days on end about ‘not being normal’ as I have countless times in the past. This time I just laughed, and chose to see it as another piece of the puzzle. That’s the gift that understanding my sensory sensitivities has given me, and my hope is that it’s the gift, as The Sensory Coach, I can give you too.
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Yogi Wisdom
I don’t know exactly how long I’ve been drinking Yogi Tea, but I do know it’s a long time.
I suppose most people would read the little snippets of Yogi wisdom that are attached to the teabags, and then pop them in the compost when they’d finished their drink.
Not me though. Oh no! Way back when, I decided to keep them. All.
For a while I bluetak’d my favourites to the shelf above the kettle, throwing the others into a broken mug that I couldn’t bear to part with. But then the cup got too small. Oops!
Eventually I replaced the chipped cup with a beautiful glass bowl I found in Ikea.
It has a much greater capacity, and has also turned the tags into a lovely, tactile display – great for those moments when I want a bit of quick inspiration but don’t want to pull out a deck of oracle cards.
Because I’m a big kid at heart, sometimes I like to play let’s pretend games, just like I did when I was a little girl. Here’s a for instance:
It’s been my life long dream to have a cafe, so I like to imagine that, one day, this dish will sit on the counter near the cash-till. Customers will be able to pull a yogi wisdom as they wait to pay.
As you can see, sometimes the imagining becomes less imagination and more 3D role play…
Are you beginning to see what an important role this little plugin is playing?
Last year, during the first round of my allergy friendly chocolate course, I created a mini photo set up of how the cake counter of my cafe might look, sharing it with my students over on FB.
Hey, a girls gotta dream, right? And I’m a big enough believer in magic to
thinkhope that this sort of imaginative play is bringing my desires ever closer.Plus, it’s fun! Who says adults can’t play?
Take this as permission if you need it – play is good for the soul, no matter your age. And if anyone looks at you askance, feel free to tell them that The Sensory Coach said it was good for you!
When I had the light bulb moment that lead me to create The Sensory Coach, I knew I wanted to incorporate my yogi tea tags into the site. I knew there was a reason I’d hung on to them, that was about more than me. It had to be interactive, fun, and most of all, easy for visitors to use.
Try as I might I couldn’t find a WordPress plugin that would do exactly what I wanted. I got so sick of not being able to create what I wanted, that I came up with a rubbish work around, but it didn’t have the interactive quality I wanted, and it frustrated the pants off me on a daily basis. Honestly, it made me hate my site more or less from the start.
When I decided it was a case of revamp the site or kick it into touch, I knew that getting this, seemingly tiny, element of the website right, was key if I was going to feel good about the venture as a whole.
Some might think them naff, but I like them – they’re different, they’re tactile and they serve their purpose. Maybe that sounds a little bonkers, or dramatic, but this little idea contains the heart of what The Sensory Coach means to me. I’ve even used yogi tea tags on my homemade business cards!
To you, my lovely visitors, the plugin will just be a fun way to pass a moment, which is exactly what I want it to be for you (the occasional moment of divine inspiration would be lovely too of course).
It’s highly likely I’ll never know what, if anything, visitors get from this little web toy, but I like that not knowing. It adds a lovely element of magical wonder for me, imagining how those ripples might show up in ways I can’t even begin to imagine (I have a fabulous story about the chance discovering of ripple effects, but I’ll save that for another time).
With all this in mind I went back to the drawing board, desperately trying to find a way to make the damn thing work because, try as I might, I just couldn’t get past this idea of the Yogi Wisdom ‘oracle’.
I was driving myself crackers trying to do something that isn’t my forte, so in desperation, I did what any sensible person wouldn’t do: I threw money I don’t have at the problem. Don’t try this at home kids!
I searched on Fiverr and found a highly recommended web dev, who could do the job for me.
It turned out to be one of the best things I’ve ever spent money on!
As well as solving the problem, it also gave me a little insight into how much easier life can be (if you have the money) when you outsource the aspects of your business that bring you to tears, or simply suck your time.
He made it really easy for me to implement behind the scenes, he tinkered with the first version to get me exactly what I wanted, and the whole process from start to finish took just a few days. All for $84.
I don’t mind admitting that I balked at the idea of spending that much on what is a super simple looking, free piece of interactivity, but OMG! It saved my nerves, it save me countless hours of frustration, and it gave me something that fills me with joy when I see it sitting there in the side bar.
And of course it also has the potential to bring a moment of pleasure to who knows how many website visitors in the future. So yes, it was absolutely worth the overdraft fees!
If you want his details just give me a shout, he deserves all the custom he can get. I’m not on any kind of commission, I just genuinely think the guy is brilliant!
Finally, here’s a little side story about the photos of the yogi tea messages:
Having tried out lots of different props to showcase the tags, I settled on a beautiful glass Scottish thistle drinks stirrer.
I bought it when we’d completed our own version of the Lands End to John O’Groats challenge, back in 2012, during our epic 9 months in a campervan.
I love that the colours lend themselves so well to the bluebell wood header of the main site.
Secret messages of hope At the time, I also bought one as a birthday gift for my friend Lisa. Sadly she died very tragically in 2018, so it’s a really nice way for me to include her here. Here’s a little section of her noticeboard where she kept a couple of meaningful yogi tags.
So there you have it: the whole story of how a seemingly simple little plugin came to exist. Bet you never imagined it was so detailed huh? That’s the thing though, once we start exploring something, we can find all kinds of surprising little snippets and details that add an extra element of meaning to life. Which is ultimately what The Sensory Coach is all about.
If you haven’t given the yogi wisdom generator a try yet, what are you waiting for? Head over to the drop down menu under the Bluebell Wood, and see what message the Yogi has to share with you today. There are 250+ different messages (I told you I drink a lot of tea) so that will keep you busy for a while – why not pop back every week or so for a new one? And if you happen to feel so inclined, you could treat me to a cuppa via Ko-Fi so that I can continue to discover new nuggets of wisdom to share with you.
Enjoy!
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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!