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.
Welcome to our February Newsletter. This month, I am asking myself, my friends and my clients: how do we celebrate our achievements in a healthy, balanced way? How much time do we spend sitting with positive feedback? How much space do we dedicate to asking for feedback in the first place? I work in a feedback-informed way in my counselling and coaching practice, yet in my private life, I still often notice moving fast away from positive feedback or even dismissing it with insignificant excuses.
Envy, one of the seven deadly sins, brings with it a sense of sadness, shame and resentment. It’s a deeply uncomfortable emotion to feel and can lead to destructive behaviours aimed at ruining someone else’s perceived good fortune and luck.
But if you can view envy as providing you with information, then it can be a motivating force that helps you achieve your goals. Before this can happen, you need to understand the roots of envy, how it manifests in your life, and how to use it for personal growth rather than fuel for personal failure.
Our December news is usually shorter to allow time for restoration and rest. All I will say today is this: it feels to all of us here at Voxel Hub that it was a heavy year, so we wish you a peaceful, calm and restorative Holiday Season.
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.
Winter has fully arrived. At this time of year, nature all around us slows down, and animals begin their hibernation period. In the past, people would sleep for longer periods of the day with their animals in an attempt to keep warm during the colder months. Scientifically, your muscles move slower in cooler temperatures (based on the principles of thermodynamics, which is the branch of physics dealing with how energy relates to heat, work and temperature) and, according to the Met Office, the end of ‘the growing season’ for lawns is marked by five consecutive days below 5oC. So slowing down, resting and sleeping more in cold temperatures is normal for humans, plants and animals. Yet, in today’s society, we hardly ever slow down at any time of the year and being busy seems to be the default response to “How are you?”
What are the benefits of slowing down, and how can we do it?
Until recently, I had no real idea of what Forest bathing was. I had heard of it in passing, and that was about it. I started thinking about it more when I was looking up at the underside of trees and thinking about how happy it made me. This led to wanting to find out more about Forest bathing, what it was and how I could do it!
We are delighted to announce that we are now on Spotify with our new podcast on digital wellbeing and digital futures.
Welcome to our November Newsletter.
How are you doing? For many of my clients, things feel heavy at the moment. I am having many conversations about the online discussions escalating into conflict and the need to switch off and find peace. I agree that when the amount of incoming messaging gets too much, we need to pause. And it’s also worth thinking about peace: what does it mean to us personally? I speak a lot in those newsletters about authentic communication, as well as rest and restoration – it is a base for healthy regulation of our emotions. And we always come back to humanity – how can we be authentically ourselves, and what do we need to heal and thrive? So many questions…answers are hard, complex and not always clear.