Learning to Trust Life Again Through Magic & Mystery

Exploring the deeper language of the psyche, from synchronicity to symbols, peak experiences to fairy tales. Our new season theme!

Come home to yourself and feel less alone, with enriching tools and insights from therapy. 🤍

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Hi friends

Have you ever had a moment that you couldn’t explain? An inexplicable happening that shifted everything for you?

When I was about thirty one, I sat on a remote cliffside in Cornwall with my then husband, looking out to sea in our raincoats. My three month old daughter lay sleeping snugly in my lap. My faithful border terrier Hazel at our side.

The wind had picked up, forcing the drizzle into our faces, so we pushed our hoods up, with little impact. So much for summer.

We had both been crying.

A few minutes earlier, we had scattered the ashes of our first baby girl, Rosie, into the winds. She had a genetic disorder and didn’t make it out into the big wide world. It had only been us who knew and loved her, so we were the only ones there.

The now horizontal rain mixed with our tears, and I had frankly had enough.

I was angry with the universe.

Did it really have to rain today? This shittest and most miserable type of English rain too, coming from all directions and wholly unsatisfying. It was always going to be a terrible day. Why make it worse, universe?

We couldn’t spend time there, our tiny, cherished, living baby in arms, but we wanted to honour Rosie in a way that marked the impact her tiny short life had already had on us. That she had been ours, and she mattered.

In my head, so as not to upset my husband, I said as sternly, firmly, and as seriously as I could to the universe:

‘This better not be it. Bloody do something!’

A few moments later, as we watched out to sea, where our babies ashes were re-merging with the elements, five dolphins appeared from nowhere, playing and diving in the waves right ahead. We had been to Cornwall 2-3 times a year for fifteen years and never saw a dolphin, not once, though we’d heard they lived out there and always looked.

Our wide yes took in their sleek blue arched bodies, shining and glinting, far out to sea. We stood up, as if that would help ascertain we weren’t imagining them. They came closer, and stayed playing in that spot directly ahead of us, out to sea for a good ten or fifteen minutes.

Not moving on, not going anywhere, just there with us, playing.

Smiles lit our faces as we jumped and held each other and tried to show our sleeping baby. Hazel span around, wagging her tail. Different tears now rolled down my cheeks.

Remembering this beautiful moment brings tears to my eyes as I write.

Of course I have no idea what happened. If I conjured this, whether the universe, or the dolphins heard my request for ‘something else’ to happen on this dreary day. Whether my baby’s soul was hanging about in limbo and speaking to us.

But in that moment I felt my trust, that I had lost in the universe return. I felt beloved and belonging that I had lost sight of for years.

When it was over, the dolphins dived and swam back out into the deep, dark green-grey ocean. The drizzle subsided a little and we headed back to the car with our precious baby and rather bedraggled but never complaining dog trotting loyally alongside us.

I let the shift in my ability to trust life and the universe again sink in, after what had felt like such a deep and dark betrayal.

Most of us have had incredible, in explicable moments of one kind or another on various scales. But we tuck them away, as I have for the past two decades until today.

We can get drawn back into the grind, and forget the mystery that lies within and around us.

I am reminded that perhaps the universe listens. Perhaps we are part of something greater. Perhaps we have more agency than we could ever know.

This season, today especially, I’d love for us to take these experiences out, and look at them again as I have. Will you let me know yours in the comments?

Making Room for Wonder This Season

Inside the Letters from Therapy Membership over the coming months we’ll be exploring where psychology meets mystery.

We’ll wander through dreams, symbolism, synchronicity, creativity, myths and fairytales, Maslow’s peak experiences, Jung’s collective unconscious, manifesting, ritual and how we make meaning, and and the hidden gifts lying in our psyche.

To grow a deeper connection to our soul and our place in the wider universe, I’ll include therapeutic journalling prompts and illuminating exercises to harness these ideas in your own life.

We don’t have to choose between science and soul. We can be thoughtful and curious, grounded and luminous.

If this speaks to something in you, I would love you to join us in the Membership if you haven’t already. I’d be delighted to have you travelling alongside us.

I invite you now to think back over your life to these luminous moments, where something shifted that is hard to explain. A pivotal moment, or strange occurrence that radically changed your life. What comes to mind? What did you learn?

Share it in the comments, however small, however strange, however long ago.

If you don’t want to share, today’s exercise is to write your experience for yourself, to bring it into the light, give it voice and substance. What was the essential message from this experience?

With love,

Kate x

Next week we’ll explore the power of visualisation with a gorgeous sunshine meditation, and mark the solstice and reflect at this half way point.

And another free therapy workbook for members is on its way!

I’ll be back soon with the next instalment for the Heal Your Past course too.