The Serenity Practice

That’s how one of these ‘about me’ pages is meant to start isn’t it? I tell you an ‘X factor’ level (often very traumatic) story about how something in my past is why I do the work I do today. So yes I could tell you all about my experiences of having a breakdown from work, of being so completely burnt out that I wasn’t able to look after my kids. And how that led me to retrain as a Counsellor – work that made my heart sing – until all of my knowledge left me woefully unprepared for how terrified I was when my daughter experienced her mental health crisis. I could end the tale with an epiphany moment that didn’t come until my fifties when I was diagnosed with ADHD and finally saw how well I had masked my own struggles, how this diagnosis had opened up new understandings about myself. I don’t mean to be flippant. Of course traumatic events in our life do shape us and have to be healed and worked through. But they are absolutely not the whole story – and that is the story that I would rather tell you about. I have learned that looking to the past to make sense of the present is helpful to a point. I have discovered that if we continuously look to the past we are missing out on the present When we believe that circumstances, people, places even the weather create our experience we forget that everything we need is already inside us. This is where innate serenity, wisdom, peace and resilience live.