The Dreamer Awakes

For the last four years, Lucky Cow has been the place where I've road-tested my life and the person I wanted to be...

I wrote and wrote until people started to say, "You know, when I read your blog I can hear you speaking. It sounds just like you."  I found my 'voice', that elusive thing I spent years chasing across the pages of notebooks and short stories, through creative writing classes and epistolary email relationships.

I explored my inner world and laid it bare: not in all its gory (and sometimes self-absorbed) glory - that I saved for my journals as I wasn't the only combatant on the field.  I may have been an embedded journalist in the drama of my own life, but there were reporting restrictions.

And as I learned, I shared it here. And at the end of a now nearly ten-year exploration of my inner world, all I can really lay claim to is my humanity, my ignorance and the unshakable faith I have in my heart's ability to keep growing big enough to cope with anything that life throws at me.

My soul, it appears, learns from it all: good or bad, which is why I love the 1 Giant Leap track 'Wounded in All The Right Places'.  Oh, and the other thing I've learned is that it's time to take myself less seriously... life, after all, unfolds whether I want it to or not, so I might as well laugh as cry!

And so now the dreamer has awoken and found that the life I've been dreaming into existence is here. Right now.

When I was a child, as soon as I realised that the OXO advertisement flashing O... X...O... in mesmeric neon over Piccadilly Circus was not just a pretty pattern, it was language (I was about five and in the back of my parent's Mini Cooper, a child of the 60's) I fell in love with words.  I started writing stories just as soon as I could, and wrote and directed my first play for the Brownie Christmas Review when I was eight.  It got a lot of laughs from the grown-ups when I hadn't written any jokes, but that's life in a nutshell really!!  To this day, writing is much more than what I do (www.jodyday.com), it's a huge part of who I am. And this blog has helped me own and honour that.

One of my other dreams as a child was to leave the world a better place than I found it.  I didn't know that I would grow up to become a social entrepreneur, but this year I founded an organisation called Gateway Women to support, inspire and empower childless women.

I believe there's a whole generation of women who didn't get to be mothers sitting at home feeling like they've failed as women - and Gateway Women aims to support, mobilize and catalyze all that juicy nurturing energy and release it back into the world to make it a better place.

The world needs to be taken better care of, and www.gateway-women.com hopes to do something to change that. 

When I was a child, I was often told off for 'day-dreaming'.  

And now I'm grown up, I get to make those day-dreams come true.

And so the title of this blog, Lucky Cow, is no longer ironic.   

***

If you want to subscribe to my new blog at www.gateway-women.com it'd be great to see you over there.  And if not, thank you for sharing this journey with me.  I'll be leaving this blog active, but probably only posting here from time to time.  

This entry is dedicated with gratitude to Tim Berners Lee.  We owe you one Tim. Jodykat xx

The top ten tips for inner peace, happiness & well-being

After almost ten years of personal development, culminating in co-writing a self-development title due out later this year and studying to be a psychotherapist, it sometimes amazes me how simple the core of all this stuff is.

So I thought I'd make a list. I could have made it twice as long, but I thought it'd be fun to see which tips would make it to the blockbusting top ten.

So, my top ten tips for inner peace, happiness and well-being are:

1. Be kind to yourself and talk to yourself as you were a much loved friend.
2. Take your dreams seriously. Daydreams too.
3. Stop giving your reflection a hard time, appreciate what you've got and dress in a way that shows it.
4. Eat less white food and, if your grandparents wouldn't recognise it, don't eat it. Never diet.
5. Walk everywhere and observe nature passing through the seasons. Unplug.
6. Stop watching the news for a while and see if you still know what's going on. 
7. Meditate. It's actually a lot easier that you'd imagine
8. Every day, do something to make someone's day.
9. Keep your promises to yourself. 
10. Believe in miracles.

What's in your Top Ten?

Please comment and share.

The Alchemy of Feeling Shitty

Really feeling our feelings is the goal of so much therapeutic work, whether it’s 12-Step work, personal therapy or countless kinds of workshops and coaching.

But what if feeling our feelings feels like shit? How is that going to help any of us get our shit together!

Well, it turns out that, as Jung said, 'the gold is in the dark'.  And this 'dark' that he wrote of is our 'shadow' - that part of our psyche where we’ve dumped all the bits we don't like or feel ambivalent about.  We start creating our shadow as soon as we are born and begin to become aware of ourselves as tiny social beings.  We have a need or desire that Mummy doesn't like, or doesn’t respond to, and the scariness of this is so huge that we literally split this part of ourselves off and stuff it out of awareness and into our shadow. Never mind if the part of us we dump is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ - delightful, creative, necessary, normal, loving, playful, naughty or selfish. In it goes.

Rinse. Repeat.

And then we arrive as grown ups with a social self that goes to work, gets married, pays the bills and functions pretty well much OK, and a shadow that acts out all the stuff that we've repressed and denied.

Our shadow shows up in those self-defeating behaviours that make no sense.  The extra food we eat when we're determined to lose weight, the drink we have just after we've got our first sobriety chip in AA, our inability to take care of ourselves by saving money or staying out of debt, the exam we don’t revise for, the sex we have with the wrong person, the rage that blows in out of nowhere and slams into the people we love.

Self-sabotaging behaviours,  self-destructive behaviours, criminal behaviours.  A persistent belief in a way of thinking or behaving that repeatedly trips us up and trashes our life. 

The politician who campaigns on family values whilst paying for sex with prostitutes.  The perfect wife with a shopping and debt problem. The academic daughter with an eating disorder.  The sporty son with a drug habit and an ASBO.

How does your shadow show up in your life?

However scary the shadow might seem, and however much private (or not so private) chaos it causes, our shadow is not our enemy.  Because, locked inside the shadow, along with all those things we've  decided aren't OK about us, are a whole load of amazing qualities such as passion, joy and vitality. 

The poet Robert Bly writes of the shadow as "the invisible bag we drag behind us," and says that:

We spend our life until we're twenty deciding what parts of ourself to put in the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.

The longer we wait to open the bag, the scarier the contents seem.  The repression cooks, perverts and distorts the original impulses.  But in my experience, once we allow air into the bag, the good stuff rises to the surface. But to do so, we have to accept the bad stuff as part of us. 

This is the alchemy of personal transformation. Turning shit into gold.  

But first of all, we have to feel the shit. And let it be, let it go.  And trust that there's gold undeneath.  This requires a huge dollop of courage and self-belief when we may actually only have a tiny sliver available because the rest is somewhere in the bag. 

It's never going to get any easier.  Better start today, now.  

Time to start feeling shitty. 

* * *

Jodykat's Best Shitty Reads

: : Make Miracles in Forty Days by Melody Beattie  (admit it, couldn't you do with one?)

: : The Dark Side of the Light Chasers: Debbie Ford

The Writing is on the Wall

Sometimes when I haven't done something for a while I forget how much I love it. And then I start to feel guilty that I haven't done it. And then the guilt curdles my desire. And then I try to push the thing out of my mind that I love doing to get rid of the guilt. And then, at some point, usually by accident, I end up doing the thing I love. And wonder why I don't do it more often.

Writing can be like that.

Do not ask for success unless you're ready to conquer the behaviours that would sabotage success, writes Melody Beattie in The Language of Letting Go.

Sometimes the grooves of my mind run so deep that I feel like I'm imprisoned in a featureless canyon with only a thin blade of sky above me to remind me of the outside world. I wonder how I'll ever find a way out of the canyon because it feels like I've been here forever, and that it's going to be so hard to get out.

And yet, it isn't always a trek I think it's going to be. Sometime, all it takes is one sentence, one moment, and I can see the way out. It was there all along. The writing was on the wall.

*

What grooves do you need to get out of to have the life you're trekking towards? What if it turned out that it wasn't as hard as you thought? Could you handle the life you dream of...

Start worrying: details to follow

Photo by Sally M

New Year’s Resolutions are a strange ritual of yearly self-flagellation. They don’t work for me. Actually, I'm not convinced they work for anyone. All they seem to do is to set me up to start the year feeling shit about myself. When in reality, feeling shit about myself rarely triggers anything apart from a sudden need to eat lashings of buttered toast. 

Yet, if I choose instead to look back over 2010, I'm filled with gratitude for a really quite amazing year: a book co-written and due to be published in the Spring, my first year of training as a psychotherapist completed, an exciting new business being built with an inspiring partner, health returning after a four year illness... In many ways, 2010 was the year when many of my dreams started to come true; one in which I've definitely started to notice that all that bloody ‘self development’ I've been up to these last eight years seems to have finally started ‘developing’ me…

Obviously, I still have a lifetime of learning and growing-up to do, but still, I thought I'd look back at some of the nuggets of wisdom that have cracked open for me in 2010. With love and gratitude to the nutcrackers who’ve helped along the way… 
 

Growing older is a process of getting to know myself. It’s sometimes said that growing older is about coming to terms with loss, and I know there's a lot of truth in that... But it’s not all doom and gloom. Because if you’re prepared to acknowledge the reality of growing older (and many of us aren’t… or not yet anyway) then what’s you might also notice is a gorgeous ripening of awareness… and with that comes an increasing perceptiveness about ourselves - about where we’re strong, where we’re weak, where we’ve been and where we’re going. When I'm an old lady, I want to be sitting on a park bench with my friends laughing unselfconsciously. I’m in my mid-forties now, and I reckon I’m on track. Obviously, I hate what my neck’s up to… but that’s middle age for you… gravity is a great character builder.

: : Best reads: Everyman by Philip Roth; I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron

Loneliness is a taboo. Strangely enough, in a culture with more people living in single occupancy homes than ever before, we’re not allowed to talk about ‘loneliness’. Well, we can talk about it in a ‘societal’ sense, but not if we’re experiencing it ourselves… there’s a shame attached to being lonely… and that shame holds us back from the one thing we need to do … which is to seek authentic connection with others. I have massively limited my use of Facebook recently, as I realised it was increasing my sense of isolation. It was as if everybody except me was at a party, on a beach, with their kids, in their beautiful home/garden/cottage, or in love. And then I realised that my Facebook persona looks much the same as everyone else’s: up for it, well travelled, tanned, happy and popular. Which I am, sometimes. Just not all the time. And certainly not when I'm feeling lonely or out of the loop. In 2010, my second year of living completely by myself, I’ve learned to appreciate the different between ‘emptiness’ and ‘space’. It’s a tentative relationship, but a fertile one.

: : Best reads: The Secret Language of Feelings by Calvin D Banyan; DailyOM

Being with the One. Loneliness is a rite of passage, the creative pregnant void from which all is birthed. Drop the ‘L’ and ‘loneliness’ becomes something closer to ‘oneliness’. Being With The One. Sitting with the One can be uncomfortable because it’s a place of truth. And modern Western culture does a pretty good job of helping us avoid this... so it’s hardly surprising that so many of us (me included) are unprepared for it. I’ve had some very uncomfortable, sad & lost times getting comfortable with living alone these past two years. I've had to face the 'void' within me that sometimes I feared had fangs, and which now instead feels more like a deep velvetly night-sky wrapped around the edges of my personal universe… sparkling, mystical, gentle - brimful with possibility. It’s a wonderful homecoming back to the adventurous, curious, mystical child I once was (and still am, deep inside). And if I get panicky, or feel lonely, or start freaking out about the future and who’s going to look after me when I’m old, and what the hell am I going to do about (insert worry here) I try to catch it quickly, and dip into The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (an old favourite, but it keeps on delivering).

: : Best reads:  The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Learning to be a best friend to ourselves is the kindest things we can do for others. It’s a way of taking care of our needs so that we don’t unconsciously project them onto others… and then get mad, angry or disappointed when those needs aren’t met. I’m a pretty good friend to others but up until 2010 I was a lousy friend to myself. The big change has been in learning that being kind to myself is not the same as self-indulgence. Whether it’s staying home when I'm knackered, learning to live within my means (that’s a work in progress!), taking pleasure in cooking for one, or just learning to talk back to my internal critic, I can feel a deep shift. I’ve learned that I would never give anyone else the hammering I've been giving myself! And, ironically, in taming my savage inner critic, I’m finding that my ability to take on board genuinely useful critique is growing. Whereas before I'd either run away, sulk or just stick my metaphorical fingers in my ears la la la … not listening… la la la.

: : Best reads: Thoughts without a thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective by Mark Epstein MD

Letting go of control is such a relief. And for me, the biggest one is letting go of my expectations of how others ‘should’ treat me. I’m learning that my ‘outraged innocence’ (to use the Buddha’s expression) is a big flag to take a very close look at my beliefs and my part in things. And that there's a big difference between being victimised and being a victim: much of which lies in our relationship to ‘control’. Years ago, I found life-saving relief in learning to ‘let go’ with regard to my ex-husband’s addictions. I thought I'd learned my lesson then, but what I hadn’t realised was that it wasn’t a 'lesson', something cognitive to be grasped, but a way of being. Whether we call it 'mindfullness', 'awareness' or whatever it's called this year, I’ve realised that unless I let go, life won’t unfold. By holding on too tight to my idea of ‘how things should be’ I refuse the possibility of grace and change. I've realised that control is a neurotic response to the unknowability of the future. And an antidote to spontaneity, authenticity and peace of mind.

It’s sounds easy, ‘letting go’, perhaps even rather passive and weak to some…but it couldn’t be further from the truth… letting go is the ultimate in emotional risk-taking. It’s about being open to the risk and adventure of life itself. It’s about having complete faith in your ability to adapt and thrive, whatever the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It’s about courage. There's a great joke that nails the insanity of control in a Jewish haiku: Mother sends her son a text: "start worrying; details to follow."

: : Best reads: The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie (daily readings for the control freak in all of us)

Being me is lot less tiring than not being me. Speaking my truth frees up an enormous amount of energy, creativity and passion. I may not have been ‘popular’ in my early twenties, or ‘easy’… but boy was I alive and full of noise and fury! I lost that roaring beauty along the way because I thought I had to surrender ‘me’ in order to be loved (unconscious ‘deals’ are powerful juju). I exiled myself from my own kingdom, and it’s taken me a long time to find my way back home. In my Hero’s quest, I have slain many dragons, drunk many potions, loved many souls, learned many tricks, met angels and devils and have travelled far. I come home weaker in body, but stronger in spirit. Now there is honest work to be done. Bridges to be built, gardens to be tended, gratitude to be shown, books to be written, wisdom to be shared. And more of my awkward, arsy, uncomfortable, bitchy, impatient and less-than-perfect self to be given an airing.

: : Best reads: The Dark Side of the Light Chasers by Debbie Ford. (Terrible name for a wonderful introduction to ‘shadow work’. I had the pleasure of meeting Debbie at her UK workshop in 2010 and I’m happy to tell you that I found her quite tricky and not all that likeable - and respected her all the more for it!)

Conflict in personal relationships is not the end of the world. There’s a great line in Bill Clegg’s achingly brilliant memoir “Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man” where he quotes Haven Hummel: “when it feels like the end of the world, it never is.” For me, the most difficult emotion to deal with is anger (both my own and others). As a result, I’ve developed a sixth sense for conflict, and sometimes I’ve joked that there’s no problem too big that I can’t find a rug just a teensy bit bigger to put it under. But the side effect of all this avoidance is that I often don’t speak my truth. I keep schtum about things. Well, I think I do. Because often my unspoken truth leaks out by me not honouring commitments, weaselling around things, writing a note when I should have called, saying ‘yes’ when I meant ‘no’ or getting ill. And then, when I get called on my behaviour and accused of a lack of integrity, I feel hurt. Goddamn it but my avoidance creates conflict! And the really bonkers thing is this – often when I do share what I think’s going to be a really big deal, it turns out I’m wrong. And even if I was right and things do blow up into a bit of a scene… “when it feels like the end of the world, it never is.” Life goes on. The truth hurts, but the pain passes.

: :Best reads of the year: Radical Honesty by Brad Blanton (This book hurts. Ouch.) Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg. (Everyone should read this book… it’s beautiful, powerful, heartbreaking and addictive… I defy anyone not to read it in one sitting…)

We are all recovering children (Hanif Kureshi). Every single one of us. We’re all operating on opinions so ingrained we think they’re truths. If you were in a sticky personal situation, would you ask a 5 year old for advice? Thought not…

I did really well at psychotherapy college this year and got an outstanding mark in my dissertation, with the top mark. Yet rather than feel happy and proud of my result, I felt withdrawn, ashamed and anxious. Why? Well, it took a few days to work it out (and if it weren’t for the loving support of the group I’m training with, it would never have come out), but it turned out that I was convinced I was going to be punished and ostracized because I'd done so well. And the belief driving this strange reaction was a very old one; one that had protected me as a child in a violent home: 'don't draw attention to yourself'. In the act of unmasking this ‘truth’ as the 'belief' it really was, I freed myself from the limiting power it's had over me for decades.

As Nelson Mandela said in his inaugural address, quoting the poet Marianne Williamson:

Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, handsome, talented, and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.

It is not just in some; it is in everyone.

And, as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Happy New Year.

May we all shine.

Warning: Brain Reaching Blog Limit. Delete. Delete.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johanna/

The last few weeks, I've become an avid reader of blogs, and not just a writer of one. And it's taken me just 3 short weeks to get to burn out. Yikes.

Yes, I've filtered them so that they don't sit in my in-box, but still they sit there, brooding in their bold unreadness. Just 3 weeks to get to total blog-paralysis, an afflication akin to a kind of mild panic, as if I've had too much caffeine and am temporarily unable to think clearly. Nothing fatal, but hardly pleasant - and it kills my productivity.

As a writer, this has really pulled me up short. Because I've realised that the kind of blog I feel most comfortable writing is exactly the kind of blog I'm starting to avoid reading. Ooops.

So what have I learned:

1. There are too many opinions out there already; putting mine out there is the web equivalent of vanity publishing. Nobody's really interested in how I 'feel' about my life. Except my friends and my therapist, and they already get it straight from the horse's mouth anyway. There are exceptions (drum roll here for LA fiction writer & blogger Justine Musk) but they usually contain a mixture of experience and insight, not just introspection and passive-aggressive digs at someone in the bloggers life.

2. The posts I really value contain hard-earned 'real' experience and hints how to do things I'm learning about. Some people are amazingly generous in how much insight and knowledge they share. These are the ones I go back to; these are the ones I find worth reading. (Drum roll here for writer & blogger The Creative Penn, Chris Brogan & the scary/fascinating Tim Ferris)

3. There's only so much guff anyone can read about 'the future of ebooks' or 'social media' without feeling ill. These seem mostly to be written by publishers and agencies who really ought to be getting on with some, er, work. They remind me of either Dr Pangloss or the man who used to stand outside the rush hour tube in London's Oxford Circus with a board telling us that 'the end of the world is nigh' and to eat 'less protein'. Hmmm. Many of the articles recycle the same stats and quotes from each other. They are the Big Macs of online journalism, and either leave you faintly nauseous or hungry for something with some real meat in it. Don't get me wrong, I'm no social media refusenik - I'm a big fan (and user). And I got that way without ever reading an article about it.

4. And as for blogs about 'slowing down', 'minimalism', 'information fasts' and 'life-work balance', I'm unsubscribing to the lot of them. They're stressing me out. I don't need a cyber-nanny from the bloody West Coast to tell me to smell the daisies and get outside more. I've managed to get enough oxygen in my lungs on a moment-by-moment basis up until now, so I'm pretty sure I can take it from here. Thanks guys... maybe I'm just not 'evolved' enough yet to need an oxygen coach.

From now on, I'm going to write the kind of blogs I'd like to read. Opinionated (rather than recycled opinion); helpful (to someone other than my therapist or biographer) and occasionally self-indulgent. Let me know if I start spouting social media stats, and I'll take myself outside for some fresh air and a stiff talking to.

Do my values look big in this?

There's a strange synergy between what's happening in business, government and self-development. A few years ago, you could park a large gas-guzzling Chelsea tractor between these areas, but things appear to be changing.

This week, British PM David Cameron launched the 'Happiness Plan' he spoke of before the election, and I've also noticed that a focus on the 'meaning' of work is becoming more acceptable in business discourse generally, and on the Harvard Business Review blog in particular. It would appear that our constrained economic reality is allowing discussions of our humanity, even such lofty subjects as 'purpose', to surface once more. Phew.

As reported in The Guardian (14 Nov), David Cameron is quoted as saying that: "Well-being can't be measured by money or traded in markets. It's about the beauty of our surroundings, the quality of our culture and, above all, the strength of our relationships. Improving our society's sense of wellbeing is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times." (Allegra Stratton, The Guardian: 14 Nov 2010)

Now, galling as some may find this pronouncement from the mouth of a privately-educated and economically comfortable member of the establishment, it's still a welcome turn away from the doublethink dogma that claims that money solves every human problem. Ask any stinking rich person if that's true, and you'll probably hear that in reality money just buys them more expensive problems. Now I'm not daft, nor do I subscribe to any prelapsarian fantasies about the dignity of poverty. It's undoubtedly true that money fixes the problems money can fix - those bills that keep many of us awake. Maslow understood that it's hard to think about lofty matters when you're worried about paying the rent this month. But somehow we've bought into the idea that money fixes the other stuff: the death, divorce, betrayal, aging, disease, disappointment and loss that we all face. When in truth, it comes to us all - rich or poor. Perhaps that's why celebrity meltdown sells so well... perhaps we have a need to be absolutely sure that they're not getting away with it either...

Umair Haque, author of the forthcoming The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business is a regular blogger for the HBS and a thinker whose Tweets I value. A London-strategist and self-styled 'thinker, blogger & advisor to revolutionaries' his Tweet on 17 Nov said:

The 20th century's best just might not be good enough to create 21st century advantage. You might just have to master the art of mattering.

Along with Cameron, there's a strong scent of Oprah in the air. And I mean that as the sincerest form of flattery. Values are hot again.

Die Hard Humility

When I first thought about becoming a psychotherapist, I thought I'd better wait a bit. I didn't think I knew enough about life to really be of use yet.

Well, the 10 years that followed taught me a lot. Life gave it to me with both barrels, as it's wont to do for all of us. And as I staggered out of the wreckage with a wry and reluctant smirk worthy of a Die Hard film, I thought I was ready. I felt wise. Battle-scarred, yes. But wise.

Hah!

Because the great irony of training to become a psychotherapist is that it turns out it isn't about wisdom. Of course there are techniques, and models, and methods and lingo and rules. But at its core, it turns out that what really matters is learning to get the hell out of your own way. About fully and humbly acknowledging how little we can ever know about anyone else. About coming to savour the exact contours, textures and tastes of your own interior world so fully that you are able to push it to one side, and thus stop trying to make your take on reality the take on reality.

Psychotherapists are no more 'fixed' than the rest of us. They just know where they're broken.

It turns out that it's as much about humility as wisdom.

The Wisdom of Desperately Seeking Susan

When I first moved to London in my early 20s and began travelling by tube, there was one thing that consistently astonished me. Why did everyone look so unhappy?

As I strap-hung my way to my groovy job in a West End fashion PR company (well, 'job' is slightly overstating my first role as the office dog-walker, meter-feeder and delivery girl) I would stare deep and hard into the lined and collapsed faces of silent old people around me. They must have been at least 40...

And what I saw was so much misery. Distant, lost expressions. Couldn't-care-any-more-clothes. Dulled eyes and mouths with sharply turned-down corners like off-duty Covent Garden mime artistes.

What was wrong with everyone, I thought, as I stared at them, another arrogant 80's chick, pantomimed-up in my Madonna biker-chic-meets-Fame wannabee outfit.

But this wasn't a new thought for me. I'd been thinking something along the same lines since I was very young. I'd look up at the grown-ups and think, they go to bed when they want, they eat what they want, they watch as much TV as they want, they get to tell me what to do and they've got all the money... so why aren't they happy?

It just didn't make any sense in my 6 year-old world view.

Fast-forwards 40 years and see me at a recent party full of arrogant twenty-somethings, oblivious to the world, oblivious to me, wrapped tight and hard in their gilded carapace of youth.

I swear everyone was 24, skinny as a thoroughbred, with a double-barrelled name and cheekbones you could cut a line of coke with.

I felt both invisible, yet also queerly protective of them, like some ancient Sybil surveying the young troops the eve before battle. Because no matter how beautiful, how privileged, how powerful, how rich, how well-connected... nobody gets away with it. Life is a constant process of living with loss, and nobody gets out alive. I kept my thoughts to myself, and smiled. They probably thought I was there to pick up my daughter.

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think, I thought. It's a line from an old crooner's song... I heard it on Mad Men. Analog wisdom.

So now I get it. Happiness... it isn't bedtime, suppertime, TV or pocket money. It isn't even about being in charge. It's about following your groove. Because grooves are easy to lose, and hard to find. Until they turn up at the down-turned corners of your middle-aged mouth, that is.

God bless Madonna and her ballsy alter ego Susan. Nobody knew (not even me) what it was I loved about that film so much, but I went to see it at least 10 times. Those were the days before video, folks.

You take your wisdom where you find it. Even in Desperately Seeking Susan.

Anyone who looks like they know what they're doing is faking it

Creating something new is a fascinatingly human experience. Dogs don't make new things.

Now that the manuscript for our book is complete (as long as our publishers don't want a rewrite, which is looking, fingers crossed, reasonably unlikely), it has taken on a sort of objective reality. It's 'the book'. It exists. And now we're working out a PR and marketing campaign for it, finalising design elements, thinking about the Twitterverse, etc.

Strangely, now that 'it' exists, it's as if it's always been there. Rather like giving birth, there's no going back. It can be a failure of course, and sink without trace, but it can never cease to exist. There is something in the world which wasn't there before, and it's there because we made it happen. It's quite a feeling.

In Chip & Dan Heath's book Switch: How to Change when Change is Hard, they quote Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter who says that:

“Everything can look like a failure in the middle.”

I think this is true of all creative endeavours, including life itself.

This evening, as I walked home past my local pub, I saw some friends standing outside in the soft Autumn evening, and stopped for a glass of wine. Noel, who's a fellow writer, is married to a journalist, and she asked me what I did for a living. I told her that my CV made me look either like a psychopath or a compulsive liar, and we all laughed. I've done so many different things in the 25-odd years since my first job that creating a coherent overarching narrative is an increasing struggle... and this evening I realised that I had now crossed the entrepreneurial Rubicon into the land of the 'unemployable'. It's a country where there are no bosses, which is a relief, because I'm pretty sure that I couldn't ever cope with having a boss again...

It was Kierkergaard who said that "Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forwards." Philosophers usually having pretty funky CV's too.

:::: News Flash ::::
Anyone who looks like they know what they're doing is faking it.

I wish I'd realised that 25 years ago; it would have saved me a great deal of time paying respect where none was due, whilst still accepting that I had things to learn. I have an overly respectful nature, and it can really slow me up sometimes. Because, in fact, we're all beginners. Every day, we just wake up and make it up as we go along, and maybe, if we try really hard and get lucky, we might create something of value for others to find. Something we made happen. When we weren't waiting to see if we were allowed to do it yet.

The Harley Davidson "Unconscious"

The mid-life crisis is such a hackneyed phrase now, and culturally amusing when one hasn't got a clue what it might mean. Unfortunately, it's not a destination that you pass through quickly, but rather a phase you grow through... slowly. Mine started when I woke up and realised that I was unhappily married to a man trying to kill himself using fun as a blunt weapon. One night as I slept next to him, I dreamt that I was sitting in the passenger seat whilst he drove us, Thelma & Louise style, towards a cliff. In my dream, I knew that I could either jump out of the car on my own, or go over the cliff together. So what did I do? I held his hand... I loved him and wasn't yet ready to hear this message from my unconscious. I wasn't yet ready to jump out of the speeding car and land in a crumpled heap on the side of the road. Not yet.

You have to be ready to listen to your unconscious. It's always talking to you, but it's fairly easy to tune it out. You can eat, watch TV, work, work-out, party, gossip, sleep, travel, romance... really anything that stops you sitting with yourself for just that wee bit longer than you're comfortable with. Because then it starts up and starts bothering you with niggly little nudges. This isn't the life you wanted, it says to you, and you heartily disagree. But deep down, you know that it's not. And you don't want anyone telling you otherwise. Least of all yourself.

Talking Heads captured the hallucinogenic quality of this mid-life moment in their song "Once in a Lifetime," as David Byrne 'wakes up' from the American dream... and wonders how he got 'his beautiful wife, his beautiful car'...



There's a financial term called 'sunk cost' which, if I've understood it correctly, is the amount of money you've already invested and which you can't get back. And in mid-life, one of the most troubling aspects of things is that you can't retake the decisions you took in your twenties, you can't have that time back... and yet you're living with the consequences. But there's that voice again... are you really going to allow the rest of your life to be hostage to those decisions? Because if the answer is no, then it's going to involve walking away from some pretty big investments, and straight into the arms of the unknown.

Quite frankly, if buying a Harley Davidson helps you sleep through the night at this point, buy several, and give one to each of your friends.

This is it. This is the mid-life crisis point. As the wise man said, 'a crisis is a terrible opportunity to waste' and so this is the moment to really start listening to your unconscious. Your conscious mind, no matter how much it thinks it's in the driving seat, is actually like the Captain on the Titanic, blithely having a cup of tea at full steam ahead. It may be what got you here, but it probably won't get you there. Because you're no longer sure where 'there' is. Your unconscious is neither friend nor foe, because it's beyond such labels. It just is. It's all that you are, all that you were, all that you can be, all that is. It's where all the ancient bits of being human are kept on file, including everything that got us this far that we didn't need a pencil for.

Jung wrote in Man and His Symbols:

A man likes to believe that he is master of his soul. But as long as he is unable to control his moods and emotions, or to be conscious of the myriad secret ways in which unconscious factors insinuate themselves into his arrangements and decisions, he is certainly not his own master.

The unconscious has things to tell us that can be hard to understand, for they often undermine our belief that life is going according to plan. Our plan. It talks through coincidences, verbal slippages and most of all, through our dreams. Because they operate symbolically (which is a higher order of meaning than language) it's easy to dismiss dreams as gobbledy-gook. They require our interpretation, and that requires some serious effort as we each have our own relationship to symbols (despite what those 'dream dictionaries' would have you believe). Indeed, Freud saw dreams as both the 'Royal Road to the unconscious' and as a sort of psychic rubbish bin. He and Jung parted company on that road.

I have always been an epic dreamer, and suffered horrendously from nightmares up until the time that I finally 'jumped out of the car'. Now, with Jung as my guide, I am opening up the rich vein of unconscious meaning that lives within and through me. It's like coming home to the mystical child I was. My mid-life crisis involved giving up everything for nothing; and yet after eight years on the hard-shoulder of life, I feel sure that I'm back on track. What looked like a sunk cost turned out to be sunken treasure, and out of the wreckage has come the life I dreamt of as a child. Writing a book, working with inspirational people, doing meaningful work, helping people, living alone, having wonderful friends. Dream by dream, I am relearning all that I once knew, before I decided to forget.

Warrior Training with Postman Pat

So, how's it meant to go then? Er... anyone got the manual? Surely there must be somewhere I can download it.... www.areyoureallystillnotsurehowitworks/jodycat.com. No?

Life: the pursuit of the unknowable by means of the improbable. I guess, like all of us, it's unlikely that I'll ever get any answers (angelic epiphanies being relatively short on the ground these days... maybe it's because we're all out at work and they just don't know when to call?)

The only guidance I seem to have to my actions is some rather wonky and patchy intuition, like a bad wifi signal. And if I do have a copy of The Manual, it must be one of those mysterious fax-paper palimpsests I sometimes find in my filing cabinet now faded to a gentle smudge. Perhaps I should adopt that as my 'Native American' name... Gentle Smudge. Sounds about right. Vaguely unthreatening and slightly combustible. Hardly the person that God's going to reveal his plan to. If he's actually got one. Because maybe he's scrabbling about too... trying to read the printout.

Last night I dreamt that I was no longer in the driving-seat of my life. Hah! What an illusion. Gotta love that ego of mine. Like Postman Pat in the ring with Muhammad Ali. You go girl!!

Rituals for Good Times

By nature, I'm a regular Pollyanna, liable to see the universe as uniquely and exquisitely oriented in the direction of my well-being. As a child, I was a sunny, easy-going girl, hanging upside down from trees to enjoy the world from a different viewpoint, marvelling at the infinite sparkle of the night sky, talking to fairies and other imaginary friends and generally seeing the world as a place of goodness, and me as an integral part of that. Even the darker episodes of my childhood I reframed as a 'test' of my mettle; a test that would be rewarded when I grew up. I was a relentless optimist.

Fast forward to a few decades later, and the shattered and tattered remains of my life going into boxes and me into what felt like exile. The archetypal long dark night of the soul. Pollyanna took to wearing sackcloth and ashes, and although she was probably due for a wardrobe change, I may have taken my newborn nervousness and pessimism too far. I no longer saw the world as the backdrop to my life and dreams, but as a vale of tears. Something to be endured rather than enjoyed. I stopped trying to control things, and perhaps in my search for spiritual truth forgot about the joy of making things happen. An overdose of acceptance can easily turn into a refusal to take personal responsibility for one's life.

And so now that my life is starting to take a beautiful new shape... a wonderful joint book project with an amazing & inspirational co-author... an exciting & creative new business venture ... autonomy... a sweet place to live... I find it hard to own. I get nervous about being happy about it in case it all goes 'pouf' and disappears. Silly, isn't it?

As in all things, balance is the key. And whilst a healthy dose of reality will keep me working hard to fulfill all the opportunities that are coming my way, I also want to give myself permission to enjoy it. To own it, embrace it, welcome it. I think I'll light a candle tomorrow morning when I meditate and dedicate the day to welcoming this good fortune. Rituals shouldn't just be about warding off the bad times; let's remember to celebrate the good times too.

Meditation & Chocolate

Life is a continual process of having the
rug pulled out from under your feet

writes Pema Chodron, my favourite Buddhist teacher. It sounds harsh, but it's actually one of the most helpful things I've ever heard.

I first came across her book 'When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times' about 10 years ago, during a profound period of painful personal transformation, and it was a great gift. One of life's lightbulb moments. It was also such a relief to know that my pain was not unique to me, and that my very personal, private wound was part of a much bigger one, that of the collective experience of human suffering.

"Life is suffering," said the Buddha, which has got to be one of the crappiest sell-lines going, but if you can stay with it for even a moment, and let it work its magical softening on the tight righteousness of your awareness, there is real peace to be had.

Sure, it all goes against the happy, up-beat, we-can-fix it tone of our times, but actually leaning into our pain makes sense. Because the alternatives are usually worse... and the distractions we employ to avoid our pain often end up becoming more of a problem than the pain itself. For example, I like to eat when I'm unhappy. There's some bio-chemical thing that soothes me when I eat and it's as if the part of my brain that feels sad is literally silenced whilst I'm chewing. Now, there may indeed be some deep biological wiring going on here that I've piggybacked into helping me deal with pain. And in small doses, it's handy to be an emotional eater, as feeling shit with no-way to self-soothe is a kind of torture. It's only a problem when the over-eating itself becomes an avoidance tactic for ever coping with the pain in the first place. Notice that I use the word 'coping' with the pain rather than the much more popular 'dealing' with the pain. It's deliberate... because I don't think emotional pain is something that can be 'dealt' with... it's a manifestation of what it is to be human.

For example, sadness is a response to loss; it's an ancient biochemical way of telling us that we've lost something important to us, and it motivates us to either find a way to get it back, or to find another one. Whatever it was. Quickly. But then, hopefully, our more rational brain knows that it's not always possible or advisable to just 'get another one', so we have to put up with the sadness for a while.

This can be hard, not just because feeling sad is unpleasant, but also because we live in a culture that thinks there's something wrong with sadness - that it needs to be fixed. That sadness is a moral weakness, or shows a lack of backbone. That perhaps with the right medication, mantra or mania it can be sidestepped.

But such an attitude misses something profound about suffering. Because suffering can be a doorway to change, to a deeper understanding of the precious and precarious nature of life.

So, back to Pema Chodron's rug. It's a metaphor for change, and for accepting that everything is changing, all the time. That security is an illusion. Because, in reality, having the rug pulled out from under our feet is not a problem, it's a gift. Because it's in that rawness that we really see what's going on, and really appreciate that, as Pema says that "we can't find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep."



Today, in London, the sun is shining for the first time this year (at least that's how it feels). Life keeps pulling the rug out from under my feet, but I'm still here, riding my magic carpet, eating chocolate and waiting for the first blossom of Spring to waft down my street.

Not all change is for the worse. It's not the most exciting of mantras, but it goes down in bite-sized chunks.

Full Mental Jacket

One of the expected perils of training to be a psychotherapist is that one's going to have to get intimate with one's own internal landscape. And that's a good thing, right? After all, isn't the entire self-help industry built on that premise? But what if what's lurking when you lift the lid isn't merely 10 day old pizza, but festering body parts?

Denial gets a bad press these days, but it serves a powerful purpose... it's a cunning ploy our consciousness has created to protect us from information that we'd rather not deal with. And indeed, denial as a mechanism only becomes a problem when it in itself causes more problems than the information it serves to conceal. Unfortunately, coming out of denial, like getting older, is a one-way street... you can't turn around as it comes towards you and say... "you know what, I've changed my mind... you were right... I really DIDN'T want to know this!"

Once something is known, it can't ever be unknown again. It's the fall from grace, over and over again. But just as Adam & Eve had to deal with the consequences of curiosity, so do all of us who choose to look inside ourselves. Being human is messy, incoherent and fragile, and it's usually only by embracing that ambiguity fully and courageously, or ignoring it entirely, that any of us make it through the night.

Going underconscious? Wear your full mental jacket against the flak.

Party time in Salem

The publication this week of Sarah Palin's book, 'Going Rogue: An American Life' has brought a flurry of articles about her in the press. It seems that like Margaret Thatcher before her, Palin is someone we can all have an opinion about. Personally, I dislike her politics and her obvious naivety terrifies me when one considers the high office she aspires to, but I find I'm less and less amused by the hysterical vitriol dumped on her.

It seems that, like Thatcher, because she's a right wing politician, she's a lightning-rod for all the latent misogyny in liberal circles. If you can't beat 'em, burn 'em seems to be the prevailing mood.

Unpacking the hysteria around Palin for a moment, I find it distasteful that she's pilloried for being fit (she's a runner), being a mother and daring to being a politician too... all things that most left wingers would approve of in 'one of their own'. She's a gun-toting, God-fearing, working-class 'hockey mum' and her views on life, liberty and the right to bear arms are as terrifying as Regan's or Bush II's, yet rarely does Palinmania focus on this. Instead, it's all about her scarily hot appearance in running shorts (with Blackberry) on the front cover of Runners World (and then reprinted slyly by Newsweek as their cover above). Runners World deny any involvement in this, saying on their website that the photographer sold on the image without their knowledge. Palin, in commenting on the Newsweek cover on her Facebook page, says that their use of the Runners World shot was "out-of-context (...) sexist and oh-so-expected by now" and I'd have to agree. But then again, there's that naivety again... a photo in skintight running shorts with a Blackberry and the Stars & Stripes? It's just one step from 'Chicks with Guns'... a strand of particularly American-gunporn-meets-cheerleeder video that would be funny if it weren't so... scary.



But all of those left-wingers giggling at her cheesy smile and blogging about her knees should stop sniggering and pay attention at the back. Palin's views grow more right wing and hawkish at each city stop of her book tour (look closely and you can almost see the track marks from the Cheney-infusions), and her popularity amongst all those Americans who didn't vote for Obama grows unchecked. Her recent appearance on Oprah caused the biggest spike in viewing figures since Oprah hosted the Osmonds in 2007. Yes, she made mistakes accepting clothes and jewelery during the Presidential Campaign, but what she lacks in intellect she makes up for in whining and by the end of her book tour we'll all be aware that it wasn't her idea. "He made me do it" is the classic playground defense, and pretty well much the limit of her oratory.

Naomi Wolf, writing in The Times this week wrote that:

She is like an itch that the nation needs to scratch, and I have watched popular culture long enough to know that, when a country can’t get enough of reviling or scrutinising or sexualising or exalting a woman, something is going on that has less to do with her and more to do with the way our collective unconscious projects on to certain women contemporary fears, hopes and anxieties from deep within.

Sarah Palin is already an icon, a Protestant-Pioneer who can kill her own food. Princess Diana had no political power, but she almost brought down the House of Windsor. Imagine what she could have done with the American Presidency. Time to stop sniggering folks.

Dogs on Valium

Remember remember, the Fifth of November,
The gunpowder, treason and plot.
I know of no reason,
Why the gunpowder treason,
Should ever be forgot.

November 5th. Bonfire Night. Does anyone remember Guy Falkes? Guy who?

You know, "Penny for the Guy" Guy. Guy Falkes. The Catholic ringmaster of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot who tried (and nearly succeeded) in blowing up the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster. Our very own, home grown fundamentalist.

No, didn't think so.

And perhaps that's a good thing. Tonight, as I stood in a posh leafy London square watching tens of thousands of pounds of gunpowder blast a smoky sparkly stream into the darkness to the martial strains of Beethoven, I wondered why I was there. I don't really like fireworks all that much. They make me jump. They're just too much like explosions. Funny that. And on a day full of news from Afghanistan of bomb experts blown to pieces, of the gnarly charred leg of a suicide bomber left in the corner of the destroyed UN guest house, and of troops shot by the very police force they're trying to train, the whole spectacle made me uncomfortable.

A night sky lit up by munitions is a normal and horrific occurrence for so many sad, frightened and bereaved people around the world. So what are we doing celebrating the execution and martyrdom of a religious fundamentalist? Better the drift to Halloween, with all its commercial tackiness. At least it's a celebration of the dead that walk the earth amongst us; of the human hope of a life immortal, however vampiric. And the worst it can teach our children is that too many sweets will make you sick, and that it's OK to knock on a neighbour's door. Surely that's got to be better than burning effigies of terrorists and exploding make-believe bombs?

The dogs in Notting Hill are on Valium and their owners are drunk on mulled wine watching some of the most expensive real estate in the UK lit up by explosions. The Daily Mail couldn't make this shit up.

The Death of the Authentic

Twenty-five years ago, when I was a wee slip of a thing with the oyster of the world cracked open and glistening before me, therapy was something Woody Allen did. It was comic, tragic and foreign. If you were heartbroken, blue, boyfriendless, bonkers or maybe just a bit blurred at the edges you just got on with it. Or not. You talked to your girlfriends, and maybe you wrote to a letter to the Agony Aunt Claire Rayner.

Even if you wanted to go and see a therapist, nobody would have known how to find one. It would have been easier to find a mini-cab on New Year's Eve 25 years ago than to get a personal recommendation to a therapist in London.

However, times change, and the language plays catch-up, and before you know it, the guy at the next table in the pub is talking about his 'issues' without a shred of irony, and everyone's looking for 'closure'.

Don't get me started on 'closure', which must be one of the biggest lies around... it's rather like when I first started going out again after my divorce and some random date asked me if I was 'over' my marriage. "Over?" I said, "it wasn't fucking flu you know!" End of date, strangely enough.

But really, does anyone over 40 really still believe that we ever get 'over' anything? Certainly, as the world around me gets younger and younger, my treasured compensation is a much improved bullshit detector. Because I certainly don't believe we ever get 'over' anything... we just get more skilled at living with the scars. They fade in time, and we can look at them without wincing, but they never completely disappear. The stuff we weather, the disappointments we face, the betrayals we live through - this shit matters. It shapes the one thing you can't live without, and the only thing that survives into old age: character. Unless you're unlucky enough to have your video taped over by absent minded Professor Alzheimer.

Which brings me to 'Authenticity', the latest therapy, twelve-step, Oprah-fied jargon to start grating on me. What is this Authenticity we're all meant to be 'striving' for (and notice how it's always paired with 'striving' - a word adopted from the Old French verb to quarrel or dispute). What are we disputing? It's as if we're being told that we're not real; which of course implies that there's a more real version of us lurking somewhere else. But how is that possible? How can I be anything other than my authentic self at any time? Of course, there are different 'versions' of me, and just as each conductor brings his own interpretation to Mozart, it doesn't make the music suddenly not the 'real' Mozart. I have the Me that talks to the check-out girl in the supermarket, the Me that talks to my Landlord, the Me that talks to my girlfriends, the Me that sleeps, the Me that makes sweet noises to my lover, the Me that mooches around my flat on my own, the meta-Me that I create as I'm writing this. All are authentic; all are Me.

I don't have an improved version of myself that I'm saving for best, like a wedding hat. And if I was to buy into that, it would be a very fast way to make myself feel shit about myself. So which self would it be feeling shit about itself, if not my Authentic self?

Probably the only truly authentic people are autistic: they have wonky emotional filters and often can't read social clues. So they say and do exactly what they feel, much to the discomfort of others and anxiety to themselves. The rest of us learn to stop being so authentic by the time we're about three. We want to fit in, we want to be liked, we want to be understood, we want to be taken care of. It strikes me that the authenticity that we're be encouraged to strive for is just plain old selfishness dressed up in a shiny new coat. We used to have 'wants'; now we have 'needs.'

I never thought I'd quote Janet Street Porter, but she's turned into a wise old bird who's seen through it all, and she has the same advice as Buddha:

"Don't fall for the impossible dream of creating a new you. Learn to like yourself just the way you are. It's cheaper. It's less demanding. It's a lot more fun."

Are you decent?

For a generation brought up on Demi Moore and Julia Roberts as femme fatales, seeing Rita Hayworth for the first time is like being cut adrift on a sea of silken femininity in a boat made of sass, lingerie and carmen heated rollers. It's a sensuality overload.

I was a really Lucky Cow because I first saw Rita Hayworth as Gilda (1946) at The National Film Theatre on London's South Bank as part of their 'Femme Fatale' season earlier this year. Rita Hayworth was a name I'd grown up with, like Ava Gardner, one of those names that grandfathers mentioned with a reverent hush, yet which meant nothing to me. And then I saw Gilda and I melted off my seat and into a pool of admiration on the floor. I can only begin to imagine her effect on anyone equipped with a lifetime's supply of testosterone.


It's a strange film about the life of a nightclub owner's beautiful young trophy wife, and the love of her life who washes up there from a boat called 'the past'. Set in an unspecified seedy South American country and with a tag line that reads:

I was true to a man once... and look what happened!

this is not a mushy weepy, but a film noir full of double-crosses, sinister gangsters and fabulous costume changes. And a drunken cabaret dance (Put the Blame on Mame) by Hayworth that should make grown men weep for every lapdancer that's ever given them a hard-on.

You've been warned... this is not a date movie.

That Back to Skool Feeling

Call me a weirdo (you'll be in good company) but I love the first day back at work after the August Bank Holiday... because it's September. And September for me is a time of new pencil cases, clean notebooks, new timetables and the joyous optimism of the fresh start. For me, school was always a joy, and a lifetime love of learning hasn't stopped yet (I think the bouncers at Birkbeck College have been told to turn me away if I attempt to sign up for any more post-grad courses). But the joy of September and that back to school mood is not just about learning, it's about a sense of possibilities, of horizons as yet unseen. And of course, new pencil cases, notebooks, rulers and binders. There's something sensually thrilling about stationery - a statement which will either have you nodding in agreement or scratching your head in bewilderment: 'stationery? sensuous? Jeez, this girl should get out more.' But beware, we are legion. And our armies come in matched sets. You think I'm weird... check out the blog 'Stationery Fetish'. But be warned, this is hard core propelling pencil action.