Creativity 
Creativity is a natural resource that every person has in them. We need it for solving problems, managing and maintaining relationships, raising families, running projects and much more. It’s our creativity that enables us to keep looking at things in new ways, to adapt when things change or to exert our influence on things we want changed. The path to our own creativity runs directly via our spontaneity and curiosity. We all lose access to our curiosity sometimes and when that happens we repeat ourselves and hit walls. I do it, you do it, we all do it. Luckily there are things we can do about this. It’s not a quick fix, it’s a life-long project but having some tools helps!

Frustration and Autonomy
I work with a method that offers you a chance to access the energy of your frustration so you can direct it towards your goals. This is completely different from simply feeling angry or acting from angry impulses, both of which are completely normal human behaviours. Exploring our frustration and free-ing up the energy we otherwise manage with tension, outrage, complaining and dozens of other hard-wired survival strategies is ultimately about finding something new in ourselves, and represents a crucial step towards our sense of self and well-founded life choices.

Frustration and anger nevertheless get bad press. We are more prone to move away from it than towards it. Yet, getting frustrated when things don’t go the way we want them to go is part of life. We can’t help it it just happens. The world can be a very frustrating place! Having access to the life-energy it holds is essential for creativity, for directing energy towards what we want, for changing what we can change and even for accepting realities we have less influence over. The life energy that our frustration contains is also the foundation of our sense of authority and autonomy in the world.

From the moment we learn to walk we find ourselves in a never-ending conflict between what is socially acceptable behaviour and what isn’t and, ultimately, what in ourselves is acceptable or not for us to feel in relation to ourselves and others. At some point in our lives we are all confronted with the reality that the world can be a frustrating, cruel, unjust and often frightening place. Even if we leave the state of the world out of it, we don’t have to look far to find sources of frustration. They are literally everywhere. We have our parents, our friends and loved ones who can frustrate us to begin with. When we draw the bow wider, there are our institutions, governments, global issues like inequality, environmental issuses and so on. No matter who you are or what your background is, there will most likely be things in all of these realms that frustrate you sometimes. But, here’s the thing: frustration is not the problem. Yes…read that again. Frustration is not the problem. Although we might tell ourselves that it’s “wrong” to feel frustrated, that it is “negative” energy, it’s not. It’s just energy and energy is neither “good” nor “bad”. What we need to get interested in is how we habitually manage the energy our frustration contains and how these repetitive management strategies are more likely to lead to acting out or withdrawing and less likely to lead to solutions. This is not easy to do as we are generally more inclined to move away from our frustration than towards it. We commonly do this by discharging it in outrage against others or ourselves or locking it up in bodily tension and we rarely do this intentionally. Becoming tense and stressed is unintentional. We can also become compliant or defiant, we can scare ourselves or others, we can withdraw, lash out, lose our energy, become avoidant or depressed. We can also complain, gossip, argue, rant, yell, blame, go numb, become indifferent, mutter under our breath, convince, attack, defend, walk-away, pace about, grind our teeth, criticize, sulk, and implode. We might even manage to fool ourselves that we aren’t frustrated at all and tell ourselves that its all just “too sad to bear” when really, we are cooking inside. These very human behaviours are some of the many many ways we habitually manage the energy of our frustration in order not to really feel it. It’s never just “sad” to be living in a world that is far from perfect, or to not to have relationships we want, or the access to resources we want or the the love and support we need. Despite what we tell ourselves, our bodies will fill with the energy of frustration when something happens we don’t like whether we are aware of it or not. It’s what our bodies do. Many of our strategies, such as our opinions for example, feel gratifying, familiar and trusted. They may even escalate us. Others, such as withdrawing or self-attack can make us feel downright awful, numb or empty. But none of these behaviours have the solutions we need for change, creativity, autonomy and even for the connection with others that we want. And our sense of authority in relationship to others is also blurred when we are caught up in our very human tendencies to either act out or withdraw our energy when we don’t like the way things are going.

I work with a method that I believe offers you a chance to do something different with the energy of your frustration than what you do by default when the going gets rough.

Connection
Connection and attunement are essential in working with people. We are innately relational, social and hard-wired for bonding with others. A sense of connection to others is not only good for our well-being, it’s as necessary to our survival and development as food, shelter or water is. From this perspective, it’s easy to understand the intense reactions we have when our relationships are compromised, and they often are. And, naturally, we then develop all kinds of strategies to deal with the mis-attunements we experience every day in a world that is never perfect. Losing connection with a partner, child, parent, sibling or friend can feel like a matter of life and death. Either way, when connection is threatened a gut-level experience will occur that we will try to manage in some way so we can survive. Some of us may be overwhelmed, others may feel cut-off and adrift, we may experience despair and isolation and we will develop strategies not to feel what is too painful to feel.