Sharing a bit about my personal story & how it’s serving to embrace an authenticity for ‘owning’ what I offer in my Independent Practice

 

Introducing me – the ‘Occupational Therapist & Mindfulness Practitioner’
So, I began the initial steps of setting up my Mindful Occupational Therapy Practice around early spring of 2024, with my expertise in fatigue management, pain management, managing stress & burnout, managing mental & emotional wellbeing (following a long clinical career in the NHS).

It’s been a slow process…..It’s now autumn 2024, and I’m wanting to share a bit about my personal story – the part it played in setting up my (online) Independent Practice, and the authenticity it’s given me in what I’m delivering.

Here’s what my practice is all about…………..

It’s a creative integration of Occupational Therapy & Mindfulness, underpinned by my intention of supporting people to learn & understand more about themselves, their pain, their fatigue, their stress, the challenges for their mental health & emotional wellbeing.

 

By learning more about ourselves we can support a greater understanding of our responses, our reactions, how we manage our pain & suffering, whether it be mental, physical or emotional.
We can build an understanding of our unique way of engaging, relating & connecting with daily life, and with the world around us.

 

It’s about learning more about what helps, what isn’t so helpful, and how we can start to build helpful shifts, practices, concepts & strategies into our lives.
It's about interweaving self-compassion into our daily experiences to support helpful shifts and intentions for change.

 

Working alongside personal values and what has meaning for each of us, we can build confidence to embrace our own path, moving towards personal recovery aspirations & a sense of hope for living life more fully.

 

My intention for supporting people to live more fully
The layers of personal learning, knowledge & understanding are weaved into & throughout my sessions, with the aim of supporting people to live more fully through the therapeutic interventions I deliver.
This can include lifestyle management; supporting behavioural change and helpful habits; self-management & principles of self-care; mindful therapy techniques & practices; emotional regulation techniques & practices; mindfulness in daily life.

Writing my personal story to include where I’m at now has been incredibly cathartic for me. It’s given me a valuable opportunity to truly reflect on my recent life experience, what I learned about myself and what helped to support me with ‘starting over’ and beginning this new chapter.  
In this blog piece, I talk about a period of being my own Occupational Therapist & Mindfulness Practitioner, a creative and personal integration of being my own support, guide, enabler, coach – to help me manage the personal stressors, emotional exhaustion & feelings of overwhelm I was experiencing, to help me move towards living more fully.

 

Introducing me – the personal story
So, starting my own practice superseded a sudden family bereavement in the summer of 2023, which changed my teenage family’s life forever, along with my own.
It’s followed a long, slow, painful journey of more than a year of grieving, re-building our lives, gradually re-engaging with the rhythm of daily life to where we’re all at now in the autumn of 2024….

As a single parent, I’d been a ‘warrior’ woman for many years up to this point – juggling family life alongside ongoing personal stressors, demanding work roles, trying to keep my passion alive through studying & life-long learning, dealing with life admin & household demands.
So, when tragedy struck, I initially got on with what needed to be done, a default mode of not really having a choice……a tenuous belief & hope that I’d somehow be able to support my grieving children, deal with my own complex grief reaction, manage my recent new work role, look after my wellbeing as best I could, manage the range of other demands that I could feel beginning to overwhelm me…..

 

Listening to my body
It was only a matter of weeks when my body had the final word. Signs in my body had obviously been building up but I’d kind of ‘managed’ it through ‘my toolbox’ of wellbeing & mindfulness practices, helped with regular emotional outpourings on solitary, early morning dog walks when the sadness was most overwhelming.
Following a second full weekend of migraines alongside an insidious mental & emotional exhaustion, symptoms of brain fog, feeling anxious, feelings of overwhelm, I was faced with the stark reality that I just couldn’t go on like this……the stark reality that my priority had to be the wellbeing of my teenage family, along with my own wellbeing….. my body had made the decision for me, and I had no choice but to take time off work.

I’ve since reflected that it was only really when a respected colleague stated I was in burnout that I really felt able to give myself ‘permission’ to take time out.

The judgements we put on ourself, those thoughts of ‘I ought to be able to cope with this…’ are so helpful for me to reflect on as the ‘striving’ that perpetuated and increased my exhaustion, stress & bodily discomfort, that goes hand in hand with how we’re so used to ‘pushing through’ & ignoring the signs that are there…

I’ve also reflected that it had initially felt easier for me to term it as ‘emotional burnout’ in the context of what we were going through as a family,

but it’s really burnout, it feels like a sense of shame, a sense of failure, but ‘allowing’ myself to ‘stop’ has also allowed me to ‘own’ the fact I needed to look after myself…

We’re also probably talking about a build-up of too many years of ‘pushing through’, too many years of adapting my patterns and routines so I could function in ‘survival’ mode, a kind of high-functioning burnout that so many of us in today’s society are maybe used to living by….

 

So, what happened when I finally ‘stopped’?
Looking back, taking time off was the most important thing I could have done – supporting myself & my family through the coming months, the first year anniversaries, the differing ways everyone grieved, navigating how we all engaged in daily life, school, college…….gently reminding everyone of the need to be kind to each other, despite the range of emotions we were all experiencing.

Starting with meeting myself where I was at in these initial few months, I had to validate the sheer emotional exhaustion I was feeling. I had to acknowledge having to initially prioritise getting through the basics of the day for us all, prioritising my role/my occupation for being a mum & the caring/supporting/guiding roles this now required.
There were also things to sort out which were quite overwhelming, in fact, so much was overwhelming, often having to take ‘emergency’ rest periods – which could be curling up with the dog & dozing off or finding an ‘immersive’ programme to watch so my brain could finally switch off.
Any ‘structured’ relaxation or formal meditation practice was too challenging in these early months, my mind would be ‘whirring’ with overwhelm. At these times, I could only really engage in short breathing practices to momentarily anchor my mind & help to step back & calm my fears and worries.
I had awareness of being thankful for being outside/out in nature & walking the dog which allowed me to, at least, tenuously support a mindfulness practice through ‘listening’ to the sounds of birdsong around me.

It was during these early months of finally ‘stopping’ that I reached a moment of clarity & came to the decision that I could no longer return to work & decided to leave behind my lengthy NHS career. There were many reasons for this decision, but the most pertinent was needing to be around, present, available for my family as they navigated their way through the coming months and supporting them to get back on some kind of track.

You hear about life-changing events people experience, an initial sense of ‘how am I ever going to get through this’, and the transitions that can then evolve from this.

For me it evolved into a ‘light bulb moment’ of using this precious time at home to somehow set up my own practice. Borrowing money from relatives to tide me over the coming months & a plan to live very simply, so I began a slow, slow journey of starting to set the wheels in motion.
Having my own practice was something I’d always dreamed of doing – the autonomy to deliver my own creative approach & specialist intervention, doing what I truly loved and believed in, using all my skills, knowledge & experience…….I had no idea at the start of this journey how important my own lived experience would be in supporting my personal values of authenticity & integrity to really ‘own’ the intentions I had for my practice.

 

What did I notice in the following few months?
What did I learn and begin to understand about myself? 
It is very cathartic writing this, as I reflect on how very, very slow it was for me to initially get going on anything in the early months of 2024.

There was the complete fogginess of my thoughts of where to start or whenever I tried to write anything to begin my website. There was a lack of any mental clarity, initially just a vague awareness of how much my mental & emotional energy was being used up through the immediate demands of the day and ongoing feelings of concern/worry/responsibility of supporting my family as well as I could.

Any energy I had left for the mental activity I wanted to get going on was minimal and I just wasn’t able to ‘push through’. I often had to succumb to rest, which I began to recognise as more ‘emotional rest’ for me to be fully restorative, and is something I’ve carried forward to this day as being a key understanding of myself and my self-care needs.

This also links in with the role of relaxation, essentially where our mind and body are at ease. It’s something I’ve always been interested as it’s been increasingly noticeable during my client work that people have great difficulty relaxing & have often remarked they don’t know how to relax…..and this was something I greatly resonated with at this time.

During these early months, I also noticed a move towards ‘over-resting’ at times, beginning to recognise a link with strong emotions like overwhelm, sometimes frustration with how slow everything was going……and sometimes erring into a sense of ‘languishing’, which was a truly uncomfortable feeling for me with flashbacks of the covid lockdown periods at home…..

 

What helped in these early months to begin supporting a helpful rhythm into my day?
In these early months of trying to get my life going again, I began to re-engage in self-compassion practices, helping to support an intention of showing up to my life every day as best I could, words of kindness & gentle encouragement to ‘trust the process’ that the light would eventually come in.
Cultivating practices like mindfulness of breathing helped when I began to notice strong emotions & feelings of frustration trying to take over – this helped with breathing alongside these strong feelings, a gentle reminder that we can’t help our feelings & helping to see them as valuable signs that we’re suffering, so making the role for self-kindness ever more meaningful.

 Other mindful therapy techniques took the form of mindful grounding pauses; helping me to step back from overwhelm and re-set for my next moments; also helping me to pause when I noticed feeling really tense in my body, so building in next steps for how I could take care of my body.

At times, this included other breathing and emotional regulation techniques when I felt more stressed and had those uncomfortable ‘high alert’ signs in my body. These techniques helped to calm my mind & body and just step back a bit, which was so helpful in these early months alongside the above mindful practices for stress relief.

It was through gently cultivating the above practices that the space started to open up to start re-building my mindfulness and self-management practices: gentle stretches to ease tension, short daily meditation practices, and, most notably, re-exploring the area of relaxation for myself & building on what helped my mind & body to properly relax (so really helping to ‘top up’ my energy).

And then a little more space opened up to start pacing my day, initially setting small intentions and moving on to gently prioritising and planning my daily activity……This did involve allowing myself some ‘slack’ in these early days (through ‘the magic’ of self-compassion & kindness to myself), and I would take a range of ‘comfort breaks’ when my body gave me the signs of needing to stop/pause or when my head felt ‘full’.

It was through ‘topping up’ my energy in these regular ‘comfort’ breaks and easing up on myself, that I was gradually able to build in short periods of my ‘important’ mental activity alongside the other demands of my day.

For someone who’s always been an ‘all or nothing’ mindset, this slow, steady approach was really not something I found easy as a means of moving on with my life. It was, however, something I’d always validated with my clients as not being easy….and here I was with my own lived experience and slowly building on what was helping……

As the months passed, what did I notice? What have I learnt or understood about myself?
As the months passed, I reflected on my own lack of awareness of how exhausted I’d been, and how important it’s been to slowly build on these practices and techniques through the weeks.

It’s also brought an awareness of the strong emotions of impatience and frustration at times of ‘not doing enough’, and the value of acknowledging and responding to these understandable emotions with a sense of kindness and self-compassion to help ease a build-up of tension and conserve my mental & emotional energy.

I’ve also built on my understanding and awareness of the layers of frustration and ease of which it reared up on some days – it so helped to bring awareness to the impact of things like how I’d slept, along with other stressors that might have come up in the day, which could easily contribute to my ‘inner critic’ and sense of frustration with myself…

One of the key learning points for me has also been to bring awareness to the pull of my strong ‘doing’ mode, my default mode of ‘striving’ and ‘getting things done’.
The role of pacing had obviously been important in the early months, yet as I could feel a bit of ‘mojo’ returning, as my brain fogginess started to clear a little, I started to ‘go for it’ again….. it was having periods of total exhaustion for a few days after these immersive and productive periods that I had to take stock again. I reflected on the fact I'd fallen back into old habits of 'pushing through' and back into 'automatic mode', in my head and ignoring my body, paying little heed to the practices and techniques I'd been building back into my life.

I’d essentially fallen into a ‘boom and bust’ pattern of activity and behaviour, got carried away with a sentiment of making up for lost time, feeling totally inspired…. I reflected on how easy it had been to fall back into this pattern of being on automatic.

This again resonated with the challenges faced by so many of my clients in their management of fatigue, pain and stress-related conditions, and the role I’d played in validating and supporting them, which I was now doing to myself….

I have since reflected on how this doesn’t mean my life can’t be filled with periods of inspiration, creativity or being productive.
But it’s about continuing to be supportive through awareness & understanding about myself, building on what helps, where my pitfalls are, what makes me ‘tick’…….

For now, it’s building on what helps to bring balance through my day, creatively pacing myself to support this, alongside my mindfulness practices, listening & responding to my body, building in quality rest, interweaving self-compassion through my day…..

 

 

Final words
Writing my story, my journey to where I’m at now has been very cathartic but also written as a means of inspiring hope, towards personal paths of recovery……

It's about befriending ourselves, getting to know ourselves, really getting to know ourselves. Maybe finding ourselves again, understanding the barriers we face and our relationship to this, building on what helps. It’s about enhancing a realisation of our values that can help us towards living more fully, supporting shifts and engagement in this.

We can begin to understand the patterns of our ‘amazing, powerful, creative, sometimes unkind, tenacious’ minds, learning how we can calm & regulate our thinking patterns.

We can begin to understand our emotions, how they move through our body, we can learn to move towards ‘allowing’ them. We can’t help our emotion, they’re a product of our experiences, our conditioning – learning to cultivate how we can be with them, responding with kindness to them.

We can begin to bring greater awareness to our ‘amazing, clever’ bodies, a body that may be in pain, discomfort, fatigued. Our body giving us signs all along when something’s ‘off’, that it needs attention, learning to respond and enhance connection with our body, caring for our body……

 

I hope you’ve found this interesting to read & maybe inspire an interest in future posts I plan to write, all still quite steadily at this stage (and likely a future plan)!

 

If any of this has resonated with you and you want to consider individual support, please feel free to reach out.

You can email me natalie@mindfulotpractice.com for a 30mins (free) online consultation, where we can talk further.

 

Warmest Wishes

 

Natalie