Today, ten people told me I am beautiful. They were not referring to my personality, but to my body. My 57-year-old, plus-size, battered, resilient, brilliant body. I am in Soweto, South Africa, where Bigger is Beautiful and Aged is Revered. Today I facilitated a workshop for 40 women living in the townships. I wore a [...]
Sleepless in Soweto, my first night here in over a year, I feel blessed to be back in South Africa. Three years ago I had never been to this glorious, multi-faceted country with its troubled history, although when I was 17 I was selected as a volunteer for a six-month programme here which ultimately did [...]
In January 2015, while running a workshop in Botswana, I mentioned to a young participant that I was planning to visit Soweto en route back to the UK. She responded “You have to go to Soweto Theatre!” Back then, I had no idea that I would fall in love with Soweto and it would become [...]
For many people, Happiness is a holy grail; longed-for, searched for, but elusive. We invest huge amounts of time, energy and money in the search. We work to be able to buy what we believe we need. We strive to be what we believe we ought to be, sometimes losing sight of who we really [...]
Until my fifties, I was an enthusiastic meat-eater. I had always felt vaguely uncomfortable about this, aware as I was of the multiple evils of industrialised agricultural farming, and I tried to eat free-range chicken or game when I could. Beyond that conscience-appeasing concession, I did not allow myself to think too much about what [...]
Beyond Coaching Workshops
Waking inexplicably at 3.30am and frustrated by continuing sleeplessness, I just logged on to twitter, where I found a post by a woman whose therapist suggested she write a letter to herself to read when she felt suicidal. I was catapulted to a different time, 28 years ago, when I was young and also [...]
One of the great joys of my life is in spending time with younger women - something which, as the mother of two daughters aged 32 and 22, I am privileged to enjoy a lot. I love younger women's vibrancy, their perspectives on a world quite different from my own, their fresh enthusiasm and questioning [...]
Many of the women I work with, in my workshops and one-to-one sessions, are unhappy regarding relationships. Perhaps their partnership lacks vitality, or they are single and despairing of ever being happily paired with a compassionate other. I can empathise with both these states which, amazingly, I can also now look back upon through the [...]
The AccepTTranscend Model for Transformation , which I developed in 2012, explores, in part, the power of the stories we tell ourselves, and others, about our lives. We tend to think we cannot change the past. But we can change the way it has affected us, and affects us still. We can rewrite our story with [...]
