circumstances. It’s why I know these tools work. And I have been blessed with wonderful teachers, both those who trained me, and all those who honoured me with their trust.
I’m sixty-three. I’ve created Ways to Be Well to share the practices I’ve learnt that contribute to happy, healthy fulfilling lives. My work includes acknowledging the collective challenges of our time. We live at a time of crisis – opportunity and danger, which we can no longer ignore. But we can live well and embrace the opportunities, finding both resilience and community in the process. I’ve lived the yoyo life that we, whose emotional integrity is not supported by the mainstream culture, live. I am emotionally intense. Sometimes that’s uncomfortable. We live in a world that devalues emotional responses and redefines them as mental illness, so for example ‘eco-anxiety’ redefines legitimate concern as a mental health problem’. I see depression and anxiety as valid emotional responses to situations in which we experience helplessness and/or overwhelming stress.
I’m Rogerian trained and have had so many different hats over the years – counsellor, facilitator, lecturer, therapist, mentor, coach – I don’t know what to call myself. Which isn’t exactly helpful when it comes to marketing Ways to Be Well. Neither, I suspect, is the fact that I see what I do as walking a while of the road with you, helping you to work out where you want to go and how to get there.