A Sneaky-Peak into the Lighter Life Therapist’s Back-Story…
I used to be what you might call a “regular person”. I had a nine-to-five job as a psychologist, lecturing at the university, training teachers, and working really really hard and in the daily grind.
My focus was on my WORK rather than on my LIFE
I was taught to be this way…
In my work I was helping people find their meaning and purpose, overcome their suffering, and work towards their healing, but, here is the truth: I felt like a complete fraud.
You see, I was getting by, going about the motions, trying my best, but thriving and feeling fully alive was something that I felt in the moments that I was away, on holiday, escaping.
In my daily life, I was existing.
How could I be promising my clients that they CAN be healed, that their lives COULD get better, if I didn’t truly live that myself?
Then, Covid-19 hit the world.
At the time I was living in London and was watching society crumple around me. All the loneliness, grief, depression, and anxiety that was probably always just beneath the surface of society started to rise, and the social isolation brought my clients, and me, to face our darkest truths. After two years of living this way, the virus hit me, and my asthmatic lungs had me in and out of hospital for a couple of months.
In the middle of all this, my friend Tim knocked on my door. Tim and I met about 15 years prior on a beach in India and have remained dear friends ever since. He travels the world on a motorbike, obviously.
If there was anyone that I needed to knock on my door at that moment, it was Tim.
He took one look at me and I knew that he could see everything…
“Get out of London woman, go to Mexico”, he demanded.
“Mexico? Why Mexico?”
“Just go!”
Tim can be quite convincing.
So I booked a flight to Mexico, thinking that it would be a couple of weeks of sunshine, just enough time to get me back to health and back to my demanding life in London.
With a backpack, and little else, I went…
THAT FIRST STEP WAS A STEP OF LEARNING TO LISTEN.
BY STEPPING INTO THE UNKNOWN WE DEVELOP A NEW RELATIONSHIP WITH LIFE
INSTEAD OF TELLING LIFE WHAT IT SHOULD OFFER US
WE ASK IT
WHAT IT WANTS TO OFFER AND WHO IT WANTS US TO BECOME
It was in Mexico that the first light of The Lighter Life was lit
I met a new world, a new approach to life.
In Mexico everyone seemed busy. Even in the poorest of neighborhoods, everyone had something to sell, some art to create or perform, something to grab your attention.
I saw innovators rather than victims.
I saw risk and innovation, lack of shy-ness.
ARTISTS EVERYWHERE.
It was in Mexico that I too started to take risks, dared to live my dreams, allowed my inner-artist to reveal herself.
and…
There I joined the circus (yes, it is true)
The circus community of San Pancho, Nayarit, Mexico was a community of wildly creative and emotionally expressive artists and performers. They lived it, truthfully: If someone didn’t want to smile, she didn’t. No people-pleasing, no fake-ness, no polite masks.
I come from a Commonwealth country where putting your elbows on the dinner-table is seen as taboo, so it took a while to settle in. It took a while to move from POLITENESS to AUTHENTICITY.
I was so alive, it was so real, that my nervous-system went into shock!
In Mexico, I met people who DID rather than complained, who CREATED rather than begged, who DANCED all-the-time!
When a bus didn’t arrive, or something went wrong, they laughed.
“In Mexico we don’t expect life to be easy, and we laugh”, they told me.
I confronted my own education, the part of me that was taught that there is a right and wrong way to be in the world.
I confronted my inner perfectionist that had always held me back from doing, for fear of getting it wrong.
I confronted a world-view that success means lots of money, a fancy house and car, and insurance.
As I was re-programming my mind, I spent a lot of time watching…
I started to watch my neighbors taking care of the elderly, children playing on the dirt roads, people taking the time to slow down and stop for a chat, and a hug.
Life, as I knew it, started to change…
