My boyfriend and I just wanted a chill night in last night. Nothing special, so we put on the movie Soul from Disney+, and I wasn't expecting much, but it ended up moving me to tears. The film is about a jazz musician who spends his whole life waiting to arrive. Waiting for the moment his dream finally happens, convinced that's when his real life begins. On the day he got his big break, he had an accident and found himself on his way to the "great beyond." And what the film shows, so beautifully, is that while he was waiting, life was already happening. In the small things. The ordinary things. The things he kept walking past. Then today I was re-reading a mindfulness book this morning and came across something that stopped me the first time around, so I had highlighted and written a few notes in the margin.... It was about how we spend more than half our lives on autopilot. More than half, actually. Lost in thought, planning, replaying, criticising ourselves, somewhere in our minds other than where we actually are. And most of that mind wandering isn't even neutral. It's negative. It's self-critical... we've just learned to think that's our normal. But more than anything, it struck me that more than half our lives are spent not really here. And I thought about the film again. As we all know, it's not the destination, it's the journey. We've heard it a thousand times. But knowing it and actually living like it's true are such different things. Because the journey isn't the big moments, it's this. Right now. The morning light. The hot beverage in your hands. The slow Sunday. The in-between moments. This is what gives life its colour. This is the whole point. Presence isn't a luxury or a spiritual practice reserved for people with time to meditate. It's the difference between living your life and watching it pass. One of my favourite ways to come back into the present is a sensory scan. Because our senses cannot be in the past or the future, they are only ever available right now.

One of the questions I am asked the most is how to tell the difference between fear and intuition! In this short video, I outline 3 ways to tell the difference, and at the end, I outline a practice for you to try when you're struggling to tell the difference in a situation in your own life 🤍