Rose isn’t a very common herb in an average herbal apothecary, in that there isn’t a physical ailment with which someone might think, ‘ah, Philip has xxx, we’ll give him Rose’, as might be the case with herbs like thyme or cramp bark. Rose is very much a herb of...

I read this book many years ago. I really like the style of writing and I have also the book ‘The tao of fully feeling’, which was written before Complex PTSD, and the author acknowledges not fully understanding cPTSD when he wrote The tao of fully feeling,...

Before reading… This is my very personal story about living with and understanding autism. Of course everyone’s experience is different, how people find out, how their environment reacts, how they find comfort in their diagnosis and how they try to make their own...

I read this book years ago, the Dutch translation of the German original and I have recently ordered this revised English version. Whatever the language, this book is extraordinary and if I had to choose one of the trauma books that made the most impression on me this...

I am often confused about herbalism posts or articles saying this herb for this and that herb for that, especially when it’s about emotional issues like anxiety or depression. Of course there are herbs that have uplifting properties, that are calming, grounding etc,…...

My breathwork practice right now is a lot about feeling. Feeling emotions, bodily sensations, feeling into the body to connect with different energies (such as the energy of plants)… Considering that I was pretty dissociated from feeling anything in my body for...

The polyvagal theory was introduced in 1994 by Stephen Porges, and popularised by authors such as Deb Dana who made the dense scientific writing by Porges more accessible. Prior to this, the main way of understanding the autonomic nervous system was that it consisted...

I have learned about functional breathing through the book The oxygen advantage by Patrick McKeown. There are several aspects of functional breathing that are really interesting. It is claimed (is this true?) that most people ‘learn’ how to do upper chest breathing by...

I think it can be very powerful to work with affirmations during breathwork, if you are able to do it skillfully. As a practitioner I only work with affirmations as an exploration of what is present, and not as a way of trying to cover something up with positive...

Drinking tea My tea story (from what I know) starts in 1914 when my great grandmother became a Belgian war refugee in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. She married my great grandfather in the Catholic church of St Mary, and gave birth to my grandmother in Sheffield as well,...