As I sit here and I am about to start writing this piece, my mind starts to play Mary J Blige’s, “I’m going down, I’m going down, because you ain’t around….”

What I am going to talk about here is a going Down that happens when I ain’t been around for myself; when I live upstairs in my head for too long. I love living and being up there and playing with ideas and working at my dreams, reading books, honing my craft of true-self development and my life’s work as a therapist helping to bring people back home to themselves. Bringing them back to loving and appreciating themselves and honouring who they truly are, outside of the good opinions of others. I love all that, I do. The problem is I can live up there way too much and to the extent that I get lost, and in the process lose a certain grounding in my body and a connect with myself on that level. I lose ground and a certain part of me gets down, because I ain’t around: I’m missing in thought.

And it can get so that I come to be way too far away from home, like the young person who has been absent outdoors way past the time she/he have been allowed, and now they are afraid to come home and face the consequence. That’s how it can get for me, and it does not help that historically and developmentally I was not taught to self-regulate and ‘wind down,’ as there were no reliable adults at home and around to provide that much needed and timely education and environmental support. No responsible adults sufficiently home within themselves, let alone at night times where in their company I could feel safe & protected enough to trust going into that nightly slumber. The world and night times came not to be safe enough places for me to relax and comfortably be with myself like that.

I know my current ongoing struggles in this area roots back there, but I need to address this area of difficulty as it is having a bearing. It is having a bearing on my well-being: its affects is spiralling. And I am not getting any younger and want to go out of this life experience with a great big blooming bang. I still have adventures I want to experience so I need my health, strength and vitality, and this fear and difficulty of coming down needs to dissolve. Not being able to relax and let go is taking a toll on my moods, my relationship with food, not to mention what goes on in the crazy-making world of menopausal.

In relation to my relationship with food, I am an emotional eater; a way of coping rooted in my past when food came to take on magical powers in my impressionable mind as a child. The magical power of giving my days focus, therefore helping me try to overlook the miserable turns my childhood lane took. The magical power of having something good to look forward to most mornings when I arrived back into a certain apathetic reality. The power of anaesthetising/magicking away painful troubled feelings whenever tasty food treats and I were in each other’s company. Oh I so loved my sweets! As a child I couldn’t quite get enough of it. I loved my sweets and my dolls so very much, more than I ever experienced at that time love in the company of another.

As an adult I also tend to want to emotional eat when I am tired and finding it ever so hard of an evening to wind down and take that much needed rest; becoming instead like a visibly tired child who feverishly fights sleep not wanting the day to end but stay up and see, ‘what else.’ Additionally, I tend to want to emotionally overeat when I have taken on too much and given out too much emotional energy. And to make it up to me, much like a busy mummy who tries to distract and pacify her child with sweets and all manner of things, when all her child needs is her company; like that busy mummy in place of giving that special time to myself I give that part of me delicious eat treats instead. Which means, to get on board and on top of this self emotional regulation trip, I need to simplify: I need to look at my load and make a concerted effort to unload all that, that can in all honesty, go.

I read on Facebook the other day the following quote:

” Stop the glorification of busy.”

Very true that.

Yes, bills needs to be paid, but equally, and I think of the utmost importance, lives needs to be lived, and to be lived, wherever possible, fully, as well as to one’s own satisfaction; well my life does anyway; it’s in my genes; I can’t shake it.

So if this piece speaks volumes to you, watch this blog space as I journey into this unknown place: the unknown place of ‘permission to land;’ to come on down, back home to base, to self. A state of ‘very simply being’ I have here and there had tastes of, and in those minuscule bites, came to know that there is actually nothing more deliciously nurturing & nourishing to mind, body, soul…

Peace & Love,

Light.