“Metamorphosis isn’t always pretty but it is always awesome and absolutely essential.” – Oprah Winfrey

A blogger I admire once wrote a post about her cupboards being bare.  I didn’t really understand her until this month.  My own cupboards have been incredibly bare for the past few weeks.  Writing of any kind has felt foreign and impossible.  My inbox is full and unanswered. My journal is gathering dust. I have neither read nor written a word since my last post. Just when I was getting to the point of re-vamping my blog and getting on with all kinds of exciting writing, ‘real life’ intruded rudely and I retreated.

I wonder how other people do it. How do you work full time, have a juicy marriage and family life, keep up with friends and have a creative life? I have begun to find simply the wanting of those things exhausting.

So when health and work slid, so did my writing.  For a long, long time.

But there is the delightful and – if I am honest – stressful thing about our creative wild souls:  they will not be silenced for long.  I finally sat down this week to finish the vision/ dream board that I started on my 37th birthday in October and felt myself relaxing deeply.  There I was.  Finally.

My vision for this year does not have anything on it that resembles the tense, dry, sick, sad soul who has been inhabiting my body for the last month.  No, that vision is rich and lush and wild and whimsical and strange and sacred. In fact, it is deeper and more connected than any of my boards in the past.  Just looking at it makes me excited for the year to come.

In the spirit of fallow times and cocooning, I am taking a short break from my blog. We are going on holiday until just before Christmas and then my live-in tech-guy will help me make a few changes to my site so that I am ready to greet you again just before the new year.  What will be here then will be as chock full o’ sacred, feminine, powerful wild writing as I can possibly get in. I promise.

I hope you’ll come back then.

In the meantime I wish you and yours a happy, healthy, delicious festive season.

Take care of you!

with love,

P.S. I am temporarily turning my comments off because I get so much comment spam, but I’d love to hear from you if you want to connect. Please contact me here.

“Drugs that are abused by only a few (such as heroin) get outlawed, while drugs that are abused by everyone (such as caffeine and sugar) receive legal immunity. It’s mob rule. And the mob is addicted to sugar.” – Mike Adams (NaturalNews.com)

I don’t talk about food on here very much because although it is a real interest of mine, I am not a nutritionist or a chef and there are plenty of those people writing blogs.  But I have been on a food adventure for the past couple of months and I really wanted to share it with you – because it has been life changing. I promise that this has not and will not become a food blog!

Three years ago I was diagnosed with Celiac (Coeliac) Disease, and after both of us eating gluten-free for three weeks and then going to a friend’s for pizza and beer we discovered the hard way that my husband also couldn’t eat gluten.

Cutting something as pervasive as gluten out of your diet requires constant attention. I read every single label and question every single waiter, so I was well prepared for my latest adventure: cutting out sugar for three months.  I decided to try it out because Kris Carr and Dr. Mark Hyman both talked me into it, and the best part about changing your diet is that if it doesn’t work, you can easily change it back.

It’s not easy.  It’s actually easier to cut out gluten than it is to cut out sugar. Gluten-free is gluten-free and that is all there is to it. Sugar-free gives manufacturers license to put in all kinds of other crap.  Yes, I said crap. Sweeteners, while being lovely and sweet, still make me and my body want sugar. So I skipped the question of what is and isn’t a healthy sweetener and I cut out the lot. I mean no maple syrup or honey or aspartame (the devil) or even stevia. I wanted to stop my body from wanting sugar so why would I eat that stuff and give my mouth mixed signals?

Hard? Yes.

Worth it? Absolutely.

Within a month I lost 17lbs without even trying.  Now I am not being smug because I didn’t get all virtuous over night. I did largely replace sugar with salt, but still the weight fell off.

The eczema which has always plagued my hands? Gone in the first three days.

Weirdly, where my eyebrows had been sparse before, they grew in.

But the very best part of all is the way that my mind and body feel.  I feel like I have stepped off of the crazy train.  I feel stronger, clearer, healthier, saner, and more rational.  I can stand back from the dessert menu and know that I will feel sick and fuzzy and tired if I eat anything on it.  I have been so much more productive and steady and focused that I feel like a different person. I feel like I have my power back.

So the question is which is sweeter: a mouthful of something with sugar in it or the feeling of having a clear, powerful head on my shoulders?

Easy.  I choose me.

“…get off the sugar and save your brain.” – Dr. Mark Hyman The Ultramind Solution

Last week I flew home for 5 days, turned 37 while still in the air on the way back, and had surgery requiring general anesthetic.

Anyone who knows anything about energy and change would now tell me to be still and let all of that integrate into my cells.  My body feels sore and strange, but my brain is straining to write and create and get on with the process of a whole new year of my life.

I’ve decided to spend today gently working on a dream board and a gentle plan for my year ahead.

In the most recent Circe’s Tribe call (I highly recommend Circe’s Circle!) Jamie asked about the conditions that we need to flourish. This is a perfect question for me today as I feel like I am well placed to begin my fresh new year.

In the past, making vision boards always made me irritated and disillusioned because the things weren’t showing up and I got depressed when I tried to be positive and bad things still happened over and over and over.  I read and meditated a lot about this and I have finally realized that instead of being specific on my vision boards about things I wanted, I should focus on my ultimate goal because I know that the Universe/ God/ Goddess/ the Divine (whatever feels right to you) actually has bigger better plans than I can possibly imagine.

What if me putting big things on my vision board was actually limiting the amazingness that could be??!

So I think that in order for me to flourish what I really need is the ability to get out of my own way.  When I set my compass and my vision for happiness and joy and connection (which is what all of the things I want actually represent) and I try to make decisions that will bring me closer to those things rather than push them farther away, and I have faith that what is coming is better than what I could imagine, I feel a lot better.

Following Jamie’s lead and calling it a Dream Board rather than a Vision Board has helped too – it’s not about what I want, it’s about how I want to be.

What else do I need to flourish?

• Beauty. I need it like I need water and sleep!
• Sleep/ water/ nourishing food. – I’ve been eating no sugar for the past 2.5 months and I feel 100% clearer and gentler on myself. It has been life-changing. (I’ll post about that later this week.)
• For me I also need an element of the sacred in my life. It’s the bit I didn’t realize/ didn’t allow/ didn’t embrace for years and years, so I am stretching myself and letting that really growl and stretch and grow within me. I don’t have a template or a mentor to show me my way – nobody I know of is doing what feels right for me – so I am trying to embrace and integrate what is showing up for me and let it come out.

Here at the beginning of my 38^th year, I have finally accepted that flourishing is such a personal state that it isn’t until we allow ourselves to embrace all of ourselves and accept it and let our freak flag fly that we can move into that flow. The only resistance we have to it is our own.

What do you need to flourish?

(Can anybody tell me who to give credit for this picture?)