Hello from windy Wales and hello from Oprah. I read this the other day:

My therapy has come from paying attention to my life

Oprah Winfrey

And I couldn’t put it better myself!

A Life Review is not therapy and a Catch-up, which can be an addition to a Life Review, is not therapy either. Both require you to think about your life and decisions and pathways your life has taken and to consider whether you are living ‘your best life’ or even nearly your best life.

I want to share a Catch-up I had with myself. My new home is called Ardwyn, which is a very common house name in  Wales and means ‘House on the hill’.

Last night there were very high winds: amber to red warnings. I was in bed fixated on listening to roof tiles. It reminded me of a night three decades ago: The Big Storm when the country woke up to the loss of fifteen million trees in the south of the country, flattened pantechnicons, ships driven up beaches and someone else’s greenhouse in the garden. Last night I thought I’d find my entire roof in mine.

A life review has a lot of different phases and last night I needed a ‘Check-in’. When have I felt this way before? (as I cowered beneath the ceiling) Was I being avoidant?

I decided to face the storm instead of hiding and worrying and put my coat over my dressing gown, pulled on wellies and picked up my Nightsearcher torch. Outside, I trained the beam along the length of the roof, above and below the dormer windows. The wind was battering the tiles and the tiles battered back, all was secure, intact, nothing seemed at risk, not a tile was out of place.

I could go back to bed and fall asleep, content that the roof was resilient and my catch-up had made me focus on my default mode ‘avoidance’ which meant I could have stayed awake all night scared silly instead of seeing what I was up against. 

If you want to know more about Life Reviews, Supported Biographies or Legacy Writing please get in touch.

Alexandra