Focus on what keeps repeating.
Notice the thought, reaction, tension or behaviour that keeps returning.
You cannot change what you cannot see.
From bracing against life to embracing it.
All of us have places where life feels easy to meet, and places where something in us pulls back.
- Money
- Trust
- Relationships
- Conflict
- Sex
- Being seen
- Change
- Nature
- The unknown
Sometimes we notice it. Sometimes we don’t.
Welcoming all of life is the practice of expanding our capacity to meet more of it.
As that capacity grows, life becomes less something to fear, tolerate or just get through, and more something to enter, experience and enjoy.
More of its depth · beauty · intensity · stillness · mystery becomes available to us.
What this looks like in the body
Welcoming more of life has a tangible expression.
- A nervous system that is steadier under pressure, quicker to recover, and increasingly able to grow through challenge.
- Greater vitality, stronger immunity and healthier hormonal function.
- More emotional range and capacity, with greater access to peace, warmth, care, connection and choice.
So how do we work towards this?
It helps to begin with exploring two fundamental qualities of life itself:
Understanding these two principles gives us a way to see where something is strained, stuck or asking for more capacity.
Life is interconnected
One of the clearest places to see this is the living human body.
- The lungs bring in oxygen.
- The heart circulates it.
- Digestion provides energy.
- The nervous system coordinates how we respond.
Each part has its own role. Together, they sustain the whole.
When one is strained, the others adapt.
Life moves
A plant grows.
A river flows.
The body breathes, digests, repairs, adapts and rests.
When life is moving well, things can change when and where they need to.
Sometimes that movement becomes restricted.
It may show up as stuckness, procrastination, low energy, burnout, indecision, overthinking, emotional overwhelm, difficulty following through, or the sense that something should be changing, but isn’t.
At other times, life is already moving.
Then the work is to build more strength, range or capacity for what comes next.
Putting the two together
Life is interconnected, and life moves. A wheel holds both ideas at once.
Its spokes support one another, and together they determine how smoothly the whole can move. Our lives work in much the same way.
The Wheel of Life
I use an adaptation of the Wheel of Life, a coaching framework commonly associated with Paul J. Meyer.
Health · Relationships · Family · Work · Home · Money · Purpose · Community · Enjoyment
These are simply useful lenses for looking at a life. You may name or group them uniquely.
The invitation is to notice:
- Where is life moving well?
- Where is there strain?
- Where is something asking for attention?
When one area weakens, the whole wheel can become harder to move. When one area strengthens, movement can return elsewhere too.
Strain travels across the wheel. So can recovery.
The wheel helps us see where something is happening (or not). The next question is: what is underneath it?
NextWhat is underneath it?
The Wheel of Life helps us see which part of life is under strain.
But every part of life is lived through us.
- Through what is happening in the body.
- Through how we think and make sense of things.
- Through what we feel.
- Through what we do.
So when something is difficult in work, money, relationships or health, we can look within the experience itself. This is where we can begin to work directly.
Where can movement begin?
Once we see where life feels stuck, strained or limited, the next question is: What actually needs attention for movement to return?
We can look in four places:
Body
Rest · Resourcing · Strength · Regulation
Mind
Clarity · Perspective · Understanding · Reframing
Emotion
Feeling · Expression · Release · Completion
Action
A decision · A boundary · A conversation · A next step
There is no fixed order.
- Body can shift emotion.
- Emotion can shift perspective.
- Clarity can make action possible.
- Action can change the rest.
A practice for welcoming more of life
Once we see where attention is needed, the next question is how to meet it. FACE is a simple practice for working with what we find.
Admit where you are not free yet.
Acknowledge where the pattern still overrides your intentions or keeps costing you.
Freedom begins with admitting where you are not free.
Connect with the pattern from a different place.
Return to the feeling, trigger or situation with more steadiness, support or space.
What is met can begin to move.
Embody a different response.
Practise what was not available before: pause, speak, choose or act differently.
Practice turns insight into instinct.
Some things shift quickly. Others take repetition and time. A pattern returning does not mean progress is lost.
The more we face, the more we can embrace.
You do not need to know which session you need.
We work that out together.