Good morning! I hope this post finds you well. In this post I am writing about women’s rights and my personal commitments towards gender equality. I catch up with March in Nature and offer two visual reflections for your digital wellbeing.
Good morning. I hope your weekend is soft and restful. As promised, I have backdated the January posts (here and here) for you and only posted the summary of each post on Substack. In this post, I am writing about the Slavic celebrations of midwinter with the Festival of Veles, quiet preparation for spring, enjoying reflection, the slow pace of those colder days and the practice of noticing the world around us. I will also speak about intentionally weeding out internalised patriarchy and resting from this work.
It’s been a while since I posted on Substack – over a month. My last post felt like a natural end to one natural cycle of this newsletter, so I paused for a while to think carefully about the future of this space. In a way, last November marked the end of a book project I decided to write openly about here on Substack. A book, which hopefully, when put together “on paper,” will help inspire people to reconnect with Nature and digital technologies more organically.
Welcome; I hope this post finds you well. It’s cold in Bristol; for the first time this year, we are experiencing frosty mornings. I sit under a pile of blankets, with a cup of hot chocolate in my hand, tidying up all my private and work areas. Working on a book chapter took all my energy, so I did not do my usual end-of-year organising. I am doing it now, a few weeks later. I am not even acting yet, just taking stock – in the garden, in the pantry, in our offices and in our calendars. Being relatively organised pays off, so I can see I am not far behind and things work smoothly.
Welcome to 2024. Welcome back. This post is (a backdated) the beginning of a new phase of my liberation psychologies Almanac project. The first phase was centred around the Celtic calendar. However, I have now decided to return to my Slavic roots and work with the January to December frame. I will honour the Celtic Wheel of the Year. I will also weave in Nature cycles from other cultures. Liberation psychologies celebrate diversity of views, and I work as an integrated practitioner, so it makes sense to me to invite a wide range of perspectives here. Last year, I followed my local Nature here in the UK, so I will continue with the focus on the Northern Hemisphere. However, in many cultures, January is the time to set intentions for the year ahead, so I am reflecting on this space, too.
In the autumn of 2021, we shared our tips on effective digital detoxing on our Instagram account. For many of our clients, 2023 was a heavy year, so as we enter the Holiday Season, we have decided to collate all our digital detoxing tips into a handy e-book. You can download it here.
Watch any Christmas movie and the plot line is likely to end with a couple falling in love. Christmas comes a close second to Valentine’s Day when it comes to emphasising romantic love and being in a couple. There are plenty of people out there who are content with their solo status, but if you’re not one of them, the holiday season can be tough, leaving you feeling like you failed or are unlovable in some way. What doesn’t help is facing an avalanche of seasonal togetherness on TV, in cinemas, on Christmas cards, adverts, gift catalogues, and more.
Good morning. I hope this finds you safe and well. It’s finally frosty in the UK, so I put away the remaining spring flower bulbs and pulled out the warm blankets and hot chocolate. I am working on a project related to the Witcher universe, so the timing is perfect: I spend my evenings working on a geek therapeutics essay, so I am reading about Slavic myths, the feminism of witchcraft, and the liberation of female fantasy characters. I am still a little bit busy at work, but when things are quiet, I will also cook meals from the Witcher books. Literary stories can be healing, and at this time of the working calendar, people are so exhausted that tensions are running quite high. A healthy dose of escapism (I like the word!) allows for a good restoration, balancing out the intensity of human interactions.
This is a gentle reminder that our next CPR workshop is next Friday from midday to 2 PM and you can register here. I hope you can join us!
A month of resistance not to post. You see, I started writing on Substack over a year ago to finish this autumn and publish the articles as a printed book – a digital wellbeing almanac, if you like. However, I’m not too fond of endings. Winter evokes grief anyway, and for me, the time between October and early January marks many anniversaries of losses – of close people, of significant parts of me and my identity. Both of my parents died in those months. I qualified as a counsellor this season (which shifted a lot in my inner world). A few months after receiving British citizenship in the early summer of a few years ago, in November of that same year the U.K. government introduced an immigration law which ended the certainly of citizenship of all its citizens (we can now lose the citizenship any time, with no explanation or right of appeal, and no information – we would only find out that it’s invalid upon the return to the country).