I was in All Things Greener, the very excellent eco-friendly shop in Harleston, and got chatting to another customer. We started talking about work and she told me that she was working for a local council. When I told her that I had just trained MCA and DOLs (Mental Capacity Act and Deprivation of Liberty, for those not in the know) in a Norfolk residential home she commented “Dry! Dry! Dry!”

I came home puzzled. How can enabling people to make choices and decisions, supporting them to gain greater understanding and direction in their lives, be dry? Isn’t it essential to all of us as human beings? When I, and the people in my life, make active and conscious choices we feel more alive, more embodied, more adult and more powerful. I want to still be doing that when I am 80 or 90 and to feel all those things!

In fact, I want this for all the people I work for, whether they have intellectual impairments, cognitive confusion or any other situation that requires them to need a little, or a lot of, help. I want staff to be enthusiastic about that, too! Following an extensive consultation, the House of Lords Select Committee on Mental Capacity came to the conclusion, in March 2014, that the Mental Capacity Act was either not understood or not applied in practice.

If we really want sensitive, compassionate and intelligent personalised care for people, whether they have learning difficulties or dementia, putting the Mental Capacity Act into action is vital. Then they can choose and choose again, just like we do. I have chosen to come to the beach for the afternoon, in the autumnal sun, and am writing this lying on my tum drying off after a quick dip in the sea at Southwold. I understood the facts involved in the decision, I retained the information, I weighed up the consequences and I communicated it to myself and my beloved. MCA in action! Dry? Really?!

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This Summer I created a long held vision; namely to run a community camping course for parents and children around the issues of self esteem. Growing Up Well, or GROW for short, had four components; a Power of Self Esteem course focusing on parenting and family relationships every morning; activities for the children at the same time; drama and arts for the families  in the afternoons and community living – camping in tents, cooking over an open fire and eating communally.  

We had wonderful fields to camp in care of Dom Marples at Woolsey Bridge Fields near Burston in Norfolk, replete with compost toilets, a sauna, a summerhouse, an outside shower, hot water, beauty, space and freedom. We had six parents taking the course,  five volunteers on team and eighteen children, aged from 9 months to 16 years. We had fresh, organic veg thanks to Michael at http://daganyafarm.co.uk/ and wonderful meat from the local Harleston and Diss butcher dabrowne-butchers.co.uk. I have never bought 100 pork sausages at one go before!

Did all go according to plan? Hmmm, not quite! A month beforehand we had 10 people on team but Life intervened, as it is in its nature to do, and amongst its moving in mysterius ways, one team member became a participant, in-laws unexpectedly came to visit from foreign climes and lucrative work was offered to one of our freelancers. So down to half numbers…boy, did that team work hard! A huge acknowledgement and thank you to Tash, Julie, Judi, Kate and Nic,for all your generosity, ingenuity, creativity and loving care, and to Katy and Harry for joining us for one and three days respectively and bringing laughter and lightness with you. 

On 15th September I am starting a Power of Purpose course in Norwich, which will run over 3 consecutive Sundays. I started GROW with an idea and then solid work from this course. I created a RESULTS process outlining what I wanted to create and how, why and when. I used the ability to be responsive to the changing circumstances by course correcting and noticing when I was drifting into insistence that it looked a certain way. There were moments when I thought that I had simply bitten off more than I could chew, didn’t have enough time or was going to make an almighty mess up of the whole thing and lost the joy and vision of creating it. Once again I used processes from the Power of Purpose course work to challenge these fears and to move myself back  into choice and enjoyment.

Tonight, 3rd September I am offering a free preview session at The Arts Studio at Lionwood Infants School, Telegraph Lane East, Thorpe Norwich NR1 4AN so that anyone interested can come and try out some of the work and decide whether the course is for them.  It will be from 7.30 to 10.00pm. You can do the course without this taster session but it is a great opportunity to ask any questions you might have and see how you might turn those ideas in your head and heart into reality.

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2013 is an unusual year for me. As we hugged each other as the clock chimed 12 I realised that I was the only member of my birth family who would be alive in 2013. My lovely sister, Penny, who was nine and a half years younger than me died four years ago and will not be here for what would have been her 50th birthday next year. My father died some time ago (at least that’s what we all think, I have not seen him for over 30 years) and my Mum died in September. 

My Mum became ill last Summer and was in hospital for a month. She hated it! She was an independent woman who lived on her own and didn’t take to the hospital regime and even less to the food. For a person who did not eat gluten, sugar or meat there was very little that she could eat. My upbringing was complicated and my relationship with my mother turbulent, however, I had noticed a softening in her over the last twelve months which was new. I had been wondering if this might mean that she was entering the final stage of her life. Travelling down to see her in hospital and being given kind and generous hospitality by members of my wider family nevertheless brought historical events to the fore. I came home disturbed and distressed.

Over the years (I am 60 in 6 weeks!) I have noticed that when in need Life will supply the remedy. Three days later I was off to A Sacred Path retreat, a More to Life residential course, in beautiful Trigonos in Snowdonia. Surrounded by beauty I was able to wrestle with some essential questions again. Was I loved as a child? Was I wanted? Did Life intend for me to be really loved?  Having reached a satisfactory conclusion to these questions in the past wasn’t enough for this moment. My mind was flooded with doubts and my mindtalk – negative assumptions, accusations and demands – answered NO, NO, NO. With superb facilitation from MTL Senior Trainer Richard Perry I was able to see beyond the obvious and to know in my bones that YES! I was wanted by  Life and YES! my life has been surrounded by love, often found in unexpected places, and YES! my heart was big enough to hold my mother secure in her journey towards her death. And I did. More to Life and more to come!

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Last night was All Soul’s Night and we have a splatted egg on an upper story window as proof of some old customs that accompany it!

But souls, your soul and my soul, are very important to me all year round. That sounds very portentous (exciting; foreboding!) so I have just consulted some dictionary definitions regarding ‘souls’. Although there are variants, this is the first part of a number of definitions  “The animating and vital principle in humans, credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion and often conceived as an immaterial entity.”

So, on All Soul’s Night I was at the Walnut Tree Shades in Norwich, along with many other excellent musicians from the Norfolk Blues Society singing some old blues from deep in my soul, using my faculties of thought, action, emotion, and voice, to express my pleasure at being alive. At the bar a lovely woman asked me why I was so happy and could she have some of it! I said that it was because I used and taught self esteem enhancement work, which I love, and which helps me to love myself and my life….and it is true!

When I got home I was thinking about how sad she had been that night and how sad, and desperate I was feeling when I took my Power of Self Esteem course in 1989. I  doubted that my life could get any better, and many painful experiences from childhood seemed to reappear most nights in dreadful dreams and flashbacks. I was in an oppressive, violent marriage and only my children kept me from doing something irreversible to end the anguish. Whew! It was truly grim and only such a hopeless situation would have persuaded me to spend any money on myself and take the first Power of Self Esteem course run by my mentors Jo and Rod Fisher. 

Well, I found it extraordinary! Week after week it was as if a bright light illuminated why I was feeling the way I was and what the thought patterns were that were causing those feelings, and, incredibly, how to change those feelings. This course has a money back guarantee (a comforting thought) but it worked, and in a durable and lasting way! One of the things that I understood quickly was that many rather extreme things from my childhood were coming up and tapping me on the shoulder so that I could detoxify them. This required disempowering the beliefs which had accompanied them and which were causing me such misery years later. I am still amazed by the fact that we can undo the effects of trauma and not only survive but thrive and flourish. Hurrah!

This sounds a bit like that old advert that continued into “I was so impressed I bought the company”, which I didn’t. I became a practitioner and teacher of this work. The Power of Self Esteem is part of the More to Life educational programme and I don’t teach it over 6 weekly sessions but over a weekend. Every time I teach it I get excited about it, because I get to see other people taking back their lives from the past so that they can create something new for themselves and the people who share their lives. Lordy, I am sounding evangelical but it is impossible for me not to want to sing out the good news when I have seen it work over and over again over 20 years!

My next course is on November 17th and 18th at Inner Space, Norwich at Maude Gray Court, Saint Benedicts Street, Norwich, NR2 4PA. It will run from 9.00am to 6.30pm on Saturday and 9.00am to 7.00pm on Sunday. We will have a small group of about 8 people taking the course, and one or two team members, as well as myself to support each person well. We use group work, a DVD, facilitated individual and pair work in a safe, and beautiful environment. The course has a set of CDs for each participant with supplementary and explanatory material and is a mixture of experiential exercises and underlying psychology. After the course there is an opportunity to get ongoing, free, group support and there is still a money back guarantee if your self esteem is not suitably enhanced after the course!

 If you would like to know more about The Power of Self Esteem either ring me on 01379 851959 or 07813035763 or come to the free preview evening next Wednesday evening, 7th November, from 7.30pm ~ 10.15pm at The Old Manor House, 17 Old Market Place, Harleston, IP20 9BE. It would be great if you could let me know if you are coming to this evening, so that there are enough refreshments. It’s a great place to ask anything you want about the course, try out a bit of the work and talk to other interesting people.

So I love myself, I love sharing this work and I love waiting to see what news things will be created in the near and far future. 

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