Daniel Lyddon

The Startling Visible Results of my “Wellness Journey”

In February 2021 I began what I referred to on social media platforms as my “Wellness Journey”, a series of positive life choices that I adopted in order to improve the way I lived my life and help me move on from a period of chronic stagnation. I had spent 15 years on medication for a mental health condition that I might not even have (I’m still awaiting re-assessment for the potential diagnosis of a neurological disorder), and was not living my life the way that I wanted to, or able to fully feel like I was myself.

During the course of a 15-year struggle with my mental health, I had allowed other people to dominate and dictate the way that my life ran, had been unable to fully access my genuine emotions and feelings, had gained 5 1/2 stone in weight, and had generally lost my way in terms of personal development and creating the kind of life that I wanted for myself.

The “Before and After” picture above is a blunt visualisation of just how much I had stagnated, and a visual representation of how dead I felt inside. In the image from 2021 I am 37 years of age and 15 1/2 stone with 29% body fat and apparently a metabolic age of 41 years. In the image from 2023 I am 40 years of age, and 11 stone, 5lbs with 17.7% body fat and a metabolic age of 35.

For those who enjoy shocking statistics, in between these two images I’ve lost almost 10 inches off my waist, and gone down 5 waist sizes in trousers. In the week that the 2021 photo was taken, I popped the button on a pair of 34″ waist jeans because I could no longer fit into them (I wasn’t so much ‘muffin-topping’ as ‘tin-loafing’ over the waistband). In June 2023 I bought my first-ever pair of 26″ waist chinos because my trusted 28″ waist trousers looked too much like baggy clown pants to wear to a conference.

The changes of the last 2 years permeate far deeper than those that can be seen on the surface. I have been completely free of psychiatric medication for almost 18 months now, having taken only painkillers for an ongoing Covid-19 vaccine injury which I picked up in 2021. I have worked my way through 4 months of privately-accessed talk therapy, 6 weeks of talk therapy and 6 weeks of systemic psychotherapy which I accessed with the help of the Film and TV Charity, 2 x 6-week courses of guided counselling which I was able to access through Mind, the mental health charity, and I am currently coming to the end of my 1st month of face-to-face counselling sessions with Mind Cardiff.

The work that I have done on myself during this period, coupled with the help I have received from multiple mental health professionals, has enabled me to reverse the mental degradation resulting from those 15-years of medication and also overcome the results of long-term toxicity and abuse in both my personal and professional lives. It hasn’t been an easy process by any means, and I have learned as much as I have lost in the two years since I chose to begin my Wellness Journey.

This has involved the gradual restoration of a personality and associated thought patterns that I had been unable to fully access since I was 21. For almost half of my life I have been living as a shadow of myself, the firebrand of my teenage years having been doused by successive combinations of medication and life experiences that had compromised me and kept me in a virtual cage that allowed others to control and contain me.

For 15 years I coasted through life, not fully in control, and certainly not making myself accountable, letting external factors steer the course of my career without fully taking the helm myself. I was results-focused, suffering from chronic stress, and felt stranded in a situation that didn’t feel healthy or positive for me, but I was nevertheless afraid to find my way out of. A negative experience in my career shook me so much at the end of 2020 that I decided to finally put into action my plan to move to Cardiff – something that had been slowly gestating for close on 4 years – and begin my Wellness Journey.

Over the coming weeks I will go into further detail to explain the changes that I made, and the obstacles that I encountered along the way. From dealing with the pain of my vaccine injury, to publishing my first novel, from replacing medication with meditation, and the discoveries that led to my new potential medical diagnosis. I will reserve a number of the details – names, dates, places – to preserve the anonymity of others.

Having come to the end of my Wellness Journey and the realisation that it was less of a “journey” with a destination, and more of a new way of living, I am finally able to contextualise and make sense of what I have been through. If, in the reading of it, my experiences somehow help others who are going through a similar process, then the forthcoming blog posts will serve a purpose greater than recounting how I pieced my life back together.

Your Creative Value Is Not The Same As Your Personal Worth

Reconsidering Creativity and Rediscovering Enjoyment of the Creative Process.

One of the hardest lessons that I have learned in my career as a creative is that my creative value and personal worth are not one and the same. Having worked in film and broadcast since 2005, and having written my first novel at the tender age of 16, it might surprise people to learn that I didn’t figure this out until I was 39. It took the publication of my novel The Devil On God’s Doorstep and the resultant sales not meeting my expectations to provide the reality check required to learn this lesson.

Creatives tend to be at odds with the world in some way; to be a creative person means that on some level we identify that the world is lacking something, and believe that our creative process can offer a solution to filling that perceived void. It’s part and parcel of the artistic ego. For those of us working in the creative industries it can be as simple as having a story that we want to tell; in the case of remakes and reboots it’s often the result of someone saying “this is how I would tell that story”.

Part of the creative process involves listening to the artistic ego when it says “I am the one to tell this story” or, more often, “this is my story to tell”. It is the artist making the decision to create something, simply because the artistic ego says that we can, and should. To quote Richard Attenborough’s character in Jurassic Park, “creation is an act of sheer will” (I’ve listened to that speech a lot over the years).

The desire to create or contribute something new isn’t limited to artistic endeavours or the creative industries. In the business startup world, entrepreneurs identify a market need or a customer pain point that their startup can address through the provision of a product or service. Being a creative is by no means exclusive to artists – nor is having the desire to make a difference, have an impact on the world, or bring something new to the market.

Creativity is a fundamental, almost primal part of the human psyche, linked in some way to the sapience that our species developed. Sapience combines our ability to think as individuals, our ability to acquire knowledge, and our capacity to develop our intelligence as a result, all of which stems from the evolution of the human brain and the development of the ego in our species.

Creativity is a very natural process, and one way for us to communicate our ideas, thoughts, and dreams to others. We are all of us creative animals whether we work in the creative industries or not, and irrespective of whether we consider ourselves to be creative artists. It is part and parcel of the creative process that, when someone creates something that they consider to be of value, they assume that other people will be able to see the same value in it. If we dwell too much on this concept, if we spend too much time ascribing value to our creative endeavours, we can sometimes confuse the perceived value of our creative output with our own personal worth.

In the case of a writer such as myself, spending twenty years to bring a novel to publication, I have lived half of my life with a story in my head. Half of my entire existence on this planet has been spent imagining, shaping, writing, and editing a single story. The personal value of The Devil On God’s Doorstep for me, the meaning that that story has, the influence it has held over my life, and the weight that the story still holds over me – those things have been incredibly overwhelming. The lengthy creative process involved in taking that story from conception in March 2001, to publication in June 2022, has dominated and overshadowed my life to the extent that when I finally let go of it and released it to the world, it was never going to live up to my expectations.

Click the Affiliate Link above to purchase The Devil On God’s Doorstep in hardback, paperback and e-book.

My story is just that – my story – it doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything to anyone else. Just because I felt compelled to write a book, it doesn’t mean that anyone else has to feel compelled to buy it, let alone read it. Just because I took twenty years of my life to tell that story, it doesn’t mean that I am suddenly owed book sales that cover twenty years of even minimum wage. It may take an additional twenty years for the book to reach that kind of value. What has become imperative is that I move on, to other stories, and to finding a more time-efficient way of telling them.

During the two decades that I spent developing, writing and editing The Devil On God’s Doorstep, and certainly in the eight months or more spent taking it through the publishing process, the weight of the story and the time and effort I had invested in it were magnified in my mind. In order to make the story “worth” my time and effort, it seemed like I needed to generate book sales that would make my efforts financially “worthwhile”, and like most debut authors, those figures failed to materialise in the first year. This led me to question whether it was worth me taking all of that time to tell the story, which led me down a dark path of questioning whether my creativity was worth anything, and ultimately whether I was personally worth anything at all to the world or anyone in it.

A year down the line I can see where I went wrong, and where I did myself a disservice. Those who are further into their creative careers that myself would probably have seen it coming from far off, having most likely experienced their own versions of it at some point in the past. The thing that I lost sight of, the signpost that I missed along the way was that I spent half of my life enjoying the process of telling a story – a story that I conceived, featuring characters that I made up in my head. The outcome of that process – a book that people in multiple countries are buying, reading, and according the reviews, enjoying – is something entirely separate to the creative process itself.

The creative process and the creative output are not one and the same. The initial idea changed many times through the six drafts of the novel and the content that was published was roughly half of what was written in the early drafts. So much was cut out that didn’t serve the story, but was a necessary part of the creative process despite not making it all the way to the final published version. There exists so much more of the story, and I know so much more about the characters, that nobody else will know, or needs to know. The book that was published is not the same as the story that was conceived, and yet both versions, at either end of the creative process, were important in the telling of the tale.

Just as the creative process and output are not one and the same, I’ve come to realise that my creative work is not the same as my entire life. I’ve often thought of writing as a vocation or calling – I’ve gone as far as to say that it is part of my identity, because it has seemed so fundamental to me from an early age. I was writing stories from at least the age of seven, if not earlier. I taught myself to touch-type on an Atari keyboard plugged into an old Grundig television set long before I had a full grasp of the English language or knew the purpose of all the punctuation marks on the keyboard.

I have been a writer all of my life, and I have been writing novels for more than half of my current lifespan. On reflection, it’s only natural that I would consider it to be synonymous with my life itself. I now know that it is only one facet of my life – one branch of the tree – it is a job, it is work. Yes, it’s work that I enjoy, but it is one singular part of my life, and not my whole life in its entirety. My creativity feeds off my life experience, but it remains separate from the experience of life itself. Exposure and stimulus are so important to the creative process – they are a part of it – but a writer has to live in order to be able to write, rather than the other way around.

In dedicating so much of my lifetime to that story, I ended up neglecting the other parts of my life to a chronic degree, and when that story was told, when the book was published and out there in the world, I realised just how little else there was. Devoting so much time, effort and energy to my creative endeavours had skewed my perception to such a degree that the book just had to provide a value to my life equal to everything that I had sacrificed or neglected in order to bring The Devil On God’s Doorstep to completion. And when that failed to materialise, I fell into despair.

I automatically focused on the financial value of the book sales, as if the numbers would compensate me for the lack of perceived worth in the other areas of my life. Of course, the desired level of book sales didn’t materialise, leading me to consider that because the creative output didn’t manifest in financial value equal to what I had hoped for, then the creative process hadn’t been worth it. The story hadn’t been worth spending all that time on, and by extension, I hadn’t been worth it either.

How wrong I was. I know now that the creative process itself is worth far much more to me than the outcome ever will be. Creative expression, and freedom of creative thought, is something that I now know carries no price tag. No book sales, no publishing deal, no screen adaptation fee, will ever come close to how I felt and the journey that I undertook in the writing of The Devil On God’s Doorstep. The creative process holds a value to me that is beyond financial, and as a result it provides me with a sense of self-worth that is personal to only me, and beyond external empirical measure.

As a story-teller I am part of a tradition that stretches back through time from the modern streaming era to the very first cave paintings. Throughout history, individuals have communicated stories to one another via creative means. It is a very human process, an interaction between those who create a story, and those who consume it. There are two sides to the creative equation – the creation of an artistic work, and the consumption of it. I know from first-hand experience that it is easy for a creative to lose themselves in consuming the creative output of others, to the detriment of their own creativity. The Devil On God’s Doorstep originated in a time before social media, before mobile internet and streaming platforms. It also originated at a time in my life when I spent less time engaging with others’ output than creating my own.

Having published the book and marketed it online during these past twelve months, I became lost in the figures, the analytics and insights that are made available to us these days. I placed far too much importance and value on what social media platforms were telling me about my ‘reach’ and ‘interactions’ rather than focusing on serving the story. If the editing and publishing process had been about refining the manuscript of the novel so that it served the story, then surely the marketing efforts that promote the book should similarly serve the story?

What matters more to me is that I find enjoyment in the marketing of the novel, in whichever ad campaigns I run or promote. It’s important that I rediscover the joy of creative thinking and the value that adds to my life, beyond considering the financial worth of my efforts. A good story will sell itself, but in order for it to do that, people must be aware that the story exists. In the case of The Devil On God’s Doorstep, the published book is a product that needs marketing, and in order for the marketing to be effective, I have to find enjoyable ways of promoting the book that re-engage my creative process.

The lessons that I have learned in the last year are as follows:

Freedom of creative thought and expression are of utmost importance to me.
If I choose to tell a story from start to finish, then everything, both within and without that story, has to serve the needs of the story.
The creative process and the creative output are separate, and must be treated as such. They co-exist, but they are also independent.
My enjoyment of creativity has to outweigh any perceived material or financial benefit in order for me to continue engaging with it.
The journey of writing a book means more to me than the destination, but as with any journey, once I reached that destination I focused on where I was, rather than how far I had come.
The story doesn’t end with publication, if anything, it grows even larger once it has been released into the world.

If you’d like to read The Devil On God’s Doorstep, click the above Affiliate Link to read a free preview and purchase a copy from Amazon.

STAGE REVIEW: The Seagull

My mini review, as posted on the StageDoor app

Making sense of creativity, with Anton Chekhov and Anya Reiss

Last month an email from the StageDoor app landed in my inbox promoting a special offer on matinee tickets for the Jamie Lloyd Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London. I can’t say that I’m a fan of Chekhov, but I’d read good reviews about the production, and the ticket offer helped to sway me. It was the first time I’d ordered theatre tickets via StageDoor and I’m so glad that I did, because what I saw was very rewarding.

I’ve always considered Chekhov’s work to belong to the highbrow, pretentious pantheon of stageplays that I find uninteresting and boring. What I watched at the Pinter Theatre was entertaining, engaging, accessible and enjoyable. If I left Anya Reiss’ reworking of The Seagull with a new appreciation for Chekhov’s writing and a desire to see more, then I hold Reiss entirely responsible. I can no longer sit in a corner and frown and say Chekhov isn’t for me, because I found this update of The Seagull to be relatable and transformative, and I’ll certainly be buying another ticket. Anya Reiss, how very dare you.

From the marketing and the reviews I’d seen online I had some idea of the calibre of the cast, and a rough idea of what the play was about without knowing the details of the plot. Jamie Lloyd directs a modern version of The Seagull that feels relevant and refreshed for contemporary audiences. Some of the less praiseworthy reviews have criticised the spartan nature of the set design and staging of the production, in light of the ticket prices and the expected spectacle of a West End play. I’ll say this for the ticket price: it’s worth it for the cast, and that’s clearly where the money has been spent.

You won’t get elaborate set pieces and synchronised choreography for your ticket money – The Seagull isn’t that kind of show. What you will get is an interesting story well-told, featuring outstanding performances from an excellent cast. All ten of the players remain on stage for the duration of both acts, completely exposed by the harsh overhead lighting. If this constant exposure is unnerving for any of the actors, it doesn’t show: as the scenes flow one into the next, the characters freeze or turn away from the audience and simply disappear from your focus, despite the fact that the actors are there in plain sight the whole time. It would have been easy to use spotlights as a device to highlight those acting in each scene, but The Seagull doesn’t cloak its actors in darkness when they’re not performing. That you don’t spend your time looking at the frozen players in the background is testament to how well each actor commands your attention in their respective scenes.

The entire stage is boxed-in by a chipboard walls with austere industrial lighting above that lends a manufactured feel to the setting – because what is theatre, if not life manufactured? The on-stage props are limited to the kind of basic metal and plastic chairs you’d find in any hospital waiting room, so there’s very little to distract the attention from the performances. The opening scene that introduces us to a troupe of actors rehearsing a play has the feel of a group therapy session, and with the way the story unfolds between the characters, perhaps that’s just what it is.

The Seagull has a meta aspect to it that develops as the scenes progress: that of actors playing actors, in a play within a play. The show’s primadonna is the formidable Arkadina, brought to life by an indomitable Indira Varma, who finds herself struggling with the dwindling affections of her younger lover, the successful writer Trigorin, portrayed with great intensity by Tom Rhys Harries. Trigorin reluctantly falls for fangirling ingenue Nina, played with a cocktail of comedy and sincerity by Emilia Clarke. Nina is an aspiring actress who desires the level of fame that Trigorin seems not to enjoy, and in the earlier scenes it’s obvious that she desires the fame more than the man. Nina, in turn, is loved by Konstantin, another writer, wracked with earnest suffering by Daniel Monks. Unlike Trigorin he has yet to taste success or find fame, so Nina isn’t drawn to him as he’d like her to be, however he is loved after a fashion by his mother, the domineering Arkadina.

The play is boxed-in by these four corners of love as much as it is by the chipboard set design, with its story structured around the formation and dissolution of their respective relationships. As heavy and involved as that may sound, The Seagull is more often than not played for laughs that are duly awarded by the audience. Every time that Clarke’s Nina or Varma’s Arkadina professes a desire for fame, or despairs at not being a recognisable actress, it’s a verbal wink or a nudge to those familiar with their work elsewhere. A physical wink or a nudge that breaks the fourth wall would have pushed the play into the realms of farce, but Jamie Lloyd’s work doesn’t take the cast that far, maintaining a balance between the comedy of these moments with the severity of the greater story being told on stage.

There is a moment in the second act, when Nina appears to realise for the first time the price of fame, and of pretending to be someone else for a living. I was aware of the mood changing in the theatre during such moments, where the laughter dropped away suddenly and the audience was exposed to the weight of the tragedy unfolding, and the reality of the fame that Nina desires sets in. Of course, the audience is going to question how much of the actors’ own experience of their craft and the fame game informs their performances, but when the scenes seem ready to buckle under the dramatic pressure, a line will be delivered that lifts the audience up with yet another laugh.

The repeated delivery of such lines with bathos also serves to heighten the irony of the perceived in-jokes, making the audience laugh time and again. The comedy isn’t restricted to the performances of Indira Varma and Emilia Clarke, however: the whole story reverberates with wannabe stage actors portrayed by an impressive array of artists whose screen credits range from Silent Witness to Obi Wan Kenobi, from Casualty to Hustle, from Britannia to Game of Thrones. The cast alone is worth the ticket price, the performances they give are worth even more. Try as I may, I couldn’t find a weak link in the chain of performers on stage. These are actors worth the watch, every one of them, and if I were a drama student or even remotely interested in acting and performance, I’d be taking notes from this cast on how it should be done.

As a writer, I found myself affected by The Seagull in a different, unexpected way, and this is why it’s taken almost a full fortnight to gather my thoughts and write this review. My initial reactions posted to social media on the day I saw the play were understandably hyperbolic given my enthusiastic response to the play – now I’ve calmed down a bit, I can relate why. I was aware that the plot of The Seagull had something to do with an actress and a writer. I wasn’t aware that the play featured two writers. What I saw during that matinee performance was myself, split down the middle, with half each given to Tom Rhys Harries and Daniel Monks. For the first time ever, I saw myself on stage, and now I know what representation feels like.

I was fighting back tears during the first act, watching and feeling the depths of Trigorin’s doubts and despair – depths that I myself have dropped to as a writer. During the second act my face was in my hands as I witnessed and experienced Konstantin’s anguish. I felt seen, I felt understood, and a I felt less alone as a writer. I am not a gregarious writer, so I have little knowledge of other writers’ experience of the creative urges and the crippling self-doubt that often accompanies my creative output. I don’t share in my writing process, and my work does isolate me to an extent. Sitting in the Pinter Theatre, watching these two strangers who didn’t know me play my thoughts and feelings out on stage for all to see, made me realise that I’m not on my own, and I took great comfort from that.

When played out and observed correctly, theatre is supposed to be transformative, and this performance of The Seagull was indeed that for me. It helped me make sense of my creative struggles, and actually made me feel better about my artistic processes in a way that I think was long-overdue. If you are a creative of any kind, not just a writer, or if you have a friend, relative or colleague who is a creative, then I would recommend that you buy a ticket to watch The Seagull at the Pinter Theatre before the play closes on September 10th.

There’s plenty more that I could write about the effect that this play had on me, much of it complimenting my wellness journey of the past 20 months, but it would involve spoiling The Seagull‘s story. I’ll definitely be buying a ticket for a repeat viewing, and I’m also considering repeat visits with friends and family just to see if they understand me any better after seeing it for themselves.

In the current financial climate I’m aware that West End Theatre tickets aren’t high on the list of people’s priority bills (nor should they be) however I believe that creativity is something that helped maintain people’s sanity throughout the pandemic lockdowns. I doubt there is a single household where someone didn’t switch on a television, read a book or magazine, play a game, listen to the radio, to a music app or a podcast. I firmly believe that engaging with creativity is what kept us going throughout our respective isolation, and that continuing to enjoy creative works is essential to our wellbeing. The Jamie Lloyd Theatre Company and ATG tickets are offering £15 “rush tickets” for select performances of The Seagull for people under 30, key workers, and those in receipt of certain government benefits, therefore making West End theatre more affordable.

Click the above picture to purchase £15 tickets

Furthermore, if you belong to or work with a group that usually wouldn’t have the means or opportunity to enjoy live theatre in London, The Jamie Lloyd Theatre Company is offering free tickets to The Seagull and future West End Shows. I really like the ethic behind this: providing access to the arts to people who may not traditionally be able to engage with the theatre. Considering that the Company was also responsible for bringing James McAvoy in Cyrano de Bergerac and Jessica Chastain in A Doll’s House to the West End in recent years, I think that it would be well worth social groups and organisations registering for free tickets for forthcoming performances.

Click the above image to apply for free group tickets

How it is that Jamie Lloyd manages to attract the level of artistic talent that he does, and then corral the cast on stage like this, I don’t know. The sparse staging is ingenious as it requires the audience to engage the imagination, designing sets and scenery in the mind, and focusing on the dialogue and performances which are well worth your attention. From Sophie Wu’s brutally deadpan Masha as a foil to Emilia Clarke’s starry-eyed dreamer Nina, to the comedic delivery and timing of both Jason Barnett as Shamrayev and Mika Onyx Johnson as Medvedenko, the whole cast serves up something enjoyable to watch. Sara Powell’s Poyna easily gives one of the best-timed laughs by bringing a game of charades to an end, whilst I was more than happy to lead the applause for Indira Varma’s Arkadina when she demonstrates in the second act exactly how to seduce a writer. Robert Glenister and Gerald Kyd often provide subtle philosophical and reflective dimensions to the play as Sorin an Dorn respectively, and I do need to return to see what I may have missed from their performances during my first viewing.

For me, however, The Seagull was ultimately about Tom Rhys Harries’ Trigorin and Daniel Monks’ Konstantin. The play’s marketing may rely heavily on Emilia Clarkes’s star power, and the story is arguably about her Nina, but it’s Nina’s conflicted relationships with Trigorin and Konstantin that give flight to The Seagull. I don’t know how Tom Rhys Harries does it, other than to say that he “gets” creatives, and is obviously a damn fine actor. As for Daniel Monks: if you see his name attached to something, no matter what it is, buy a ticket and thank me later. Although many people will be going to see Emilia Clarke’s West End debut, she is but one among a stellar line-up gracing the stage. You can tell in the early scenes that the audience hangs on Nina’s every word, but the other characters that come to the fore are every bit as mesmerising to watch.

Fair play to Emilia Clarke for not choosing a role in a play that would have been all about her for her West End Theatre debut. Stunt casting, this certainly isn’t. Other productions may utilise a token screen star to drive the play, but The Seagull really is about the entire cast. Unlike some plays that I’ve seen in the past, it’s a true ensemble piece where the entire ensemble is showcased. Whether that is particular to this production; whether it’s Jamie Lloyd’s direction, Anya Reiss’ writing, or whether it’s the same in Chekhov’s original play, I can’t say, but I am definitely glad that I saw The Seagull at the Pinter Theatre last month. As my first theatre visit post-pandemic, this has certainly reignited my passion for the stage, and it was definitely worth the wait.

Twenty Years Ago I Ran Away To Italy To Write My Novel. This Is What Came Of It…

The Colosseum. Author photo, taken October 2002

The Devil On God’s Doorstep was, for a long time, a millstone about my neck. I ran away to Italy when I was 19 having almost finished the first draft. I wanted to see and experience Rome first-hand, to add the finishing touches to the manuscript that I thought would lend it a more authentic feel. As described in the blog post below, I packed in my day job in October 2002 and flew to Italy, having been told that I was “making a big mistake”. When I look back on it now, that trip was the making of me: making the decision to do something for myself, against the advice and wishes of others. It was my first solo trip out into the world, and the very first time that I introduced myself to people as a writer.

The Day I Became a Writer

Solo travel changes a person. When you only have yourself to motivate you, when you only have your wits and your own resources to rely on, when you have to do things for yourself because you choose to, and not because someone else tells you to – it changes you. You are you, and only you – not a parent, a child, an employee or any label that we give to ourselves or is given to us. You are just you when you travel alone, and once the initial rush of adrenaline and excitement fades you have to deal with yourself, and only yourself.

A lot of people can’t do that – a lot of people can’t deal with it, and they fold. I folded, that first time out on my own in the world. I think that I lasted a month. I returned to Wales, was offered my old job back, and turned it down. Thar wasn’t my life any more. I had discovered something new: I had discovered me.

I did what most writers do when they start out. I researched online how to get published. I bought a copy of The Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook and began to approach literary agents. Back then you were ‘supposed’ to approach agencies one at a time, by mail, sending a manuscript sample hard copy in the post, with return postage so that your work was returned. An agency would on average take six to eight weeks to respond, and as ‘agents to to one another’ it was considered ‘bad form’ to approach more than one agent at a time.

Every eight weeks I would face the heartbreaking rejection of seeing my own handwriting as the thick brown return envelope came through the letterbox. Again, and again, and again, agencies rejected my work. The most common reason was that they ‘didn’t know how to place it in the market’. A religious thriller was apparently ‘a difficult sell’. After Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was published I thought that The Devil On God’s Doorstep would certainly find a place in the market, but the rejection slips changed to say that ‘the market is over-saturated with titles like this’. So my novel had gone from not being able to find a place, to finding itself in a place that was overcrowded.

What this process taught me was that, when I receive a rejection, it’s not that my work isn’t right – it’s just that it’s not right for the individual that read it. In his book Adventures In The Screen Trade (a title inspired by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’ Adventures In The Skin Trade) the screenwriter William Goldman infamously said of the film industry: “nobody knows anything”. It’s true – in any part of the creative industries the rules can be written and rewritten at any point by the innovators and the disruptors. Those who step outside the comfort zone, who challenge the status quo – the change-makers – are the ones who succeed.

The Devil On God’s Doorstep may not have been right for the market at the time – it may not have conformed to industry norms or agents’ expectations – but it was right for me. It would take 21 years and 6 drafts of the novel to complete the story and tell it the way I that I wanted to tell it. It’s entirely possible that a literary agent in 2022 would take a different view of the final draft that one of the earlier versions – I know that I do. When I revisited the novel at the end of 2021 I was determined to rescue it from years of doubt that had destroyed the story. I had read so many books about writing, read blogs, listened to podcasts about ‘how it should be done’ and I had lost my way over the years. Life…uh, got in the way.

Last year, I began piecing the story back together so that I could self-publish it via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Advances in the culture and technology of the publishing industry have enabled me to streamline the process from writing to publication. It took months of uneasy editing – knowing that I had to remove large swathes of writing from the manuscript. I wanted the book to reflect the writer that I am today, rather than solely being a testament to the writer I was as a teenager. The story also had to be changed to include contemporary advances in genetic science and reflect the way that Vatican politics has changed since the Papacy of Jean Paul II.

The final result is now an Amazon exclusive title until the end of 2022, in hardback, paperback and eBook format, available in multiple countries worldwide. When I started this journey all those years ago, I didn’t know it would take this long. I didn’t know that it would involve this much work. Now it’s done, I feel a sense of relief and release, but also an astonishing achievement. I published my book my way; a way that suits me. It wasn’t by any means an easy or ideal process, but I made the journey step by step, and I took The Devil On God’s Doorstep from concept to publication.

Twenty-one Years In The Making: How The Devil Came To God’s Doorstep

The best stories show up when you least expect them

One March 14th, 2001, a little over a fortnight before I turned 18, I found myself flanked by my parents at a Cardiff University Open Day wondering what the hell I was doing there. My generation of school-leavers had been caught up in the fallacy that in order to have a “good job” or “be successful” in life, you had to have a university degree. Some of the worst years of my life were spent in the conventional education system, exhausting myself on the academic treadmill, and by the time I was sitting my A-levels I had had my fill.

Looking back, I fervently wish that I had left school at 16. I had wanted to be a writer since I taught myself to touch-type around aged 7-8. Successive English teachers had convinced me that to achieve this I needed a degree in creative writing. If you read my blog, you’ll discover what I had always known deep down inside: they were wrong. I hold the belief that all a writer needs are the basic tools of writing: anything from a stick in the sand upwards. If you write, you are a writer. We have other terms for professional writers: author, playwright, poet, lyricist and so on. Fundamentally, to be a writer you just have to write.

More eloquent and experienced writers than myself have suggested that all writers begin as readers. Writing, whether professionally paid or otherwise, begins as a love affair with the written word. Whether the result of parents reading to their children, or teachers showing students how words are constructed, it begins with a love of words and the joy of a story being told.

On that day in 2001, I finally made up my mind that university wasn’t for me. I wanted out of the education system. I wanted to get away from the pressure of grades, and the mentality that a person’s merit or worth is based on an exam result or letters after their name. I remember listening to a lecture about Old English poetry and feeling as if I were having an out of body experience, like I was trapped in someone else’s life. I still applied for universities, got offers, accepted one, deferred it for a year at the 11th hour, and then cancelled my place on the course when I was 19. I knew all the way along, from 17 years of age, what I would do. I just kept it to myself.

That day in the lecture theatre I got talking to my parents about Professor Severino Antinori, an Italian embryologist who was in the news at the time talking about his work in genetics and cloning in Italy. I remarked on the irony of him working in genetics in a country that, at the time, seemed opposed to gene therapy due to the Catholic teachings about the Sanctity of Life of the human embryo. I coined the phrase “The Devil On God’s Doorstep” to describe Antinori’s work in genetics taking place a metaphorical stone’s-throw from the Vatican.

I remarked that it sounded like a good book title, and my mother suggested I write it down. My adolescent capriciousness told me that I’d remember it if it was any good, but Mam wrote it down anyway on the brochure for the university open day. I, of course, forgot about it, but a few weeks later I remembered she had written something down and I dug the brochure out. In my writer’s journey I have always felt that the stories that began with a title were the most troublesome. More often than not, I complete a story and then find a title that fits. The Devil On God’s Doorstep stuck somehow.

To date, it is the largest project I have undertaken that began with a title. If Mam hadn’t written the title down that day I would most likely have forgotten it as well as the conversation and the idea that it spawned. The book is dedicated to my mother for opening up the door in so many ways, and the dedication in the opening pages is a small sign of my gratitude. The Devil On God’s Doorstep is now available in hardback, paperback and eBook format as an Amazon Exclusive until the end of 2022. You can order yourself a copy using this link:

How A Childhood Act of Defiance Created a Storytelling Tradition

The Wales Millennium Centre perches on the edge of Roald Dahl Plass in Cardiff Bay as both a monument to the city’s cultured history, and a home for its contemporary creative output. The building’s exterior is fashioned of four different colours of Welsh slate arranged in a technique similar to the traditional dry stone walling seen in the Welsh countryside, with a roof crafted of textured steel that recalls the importance of the steel industry in Wales in the last century.

Wales Millennium Centre: Photo By Author

First-time visitors to the building are often awestruck by the inscription in both English and Welsh, cast in glass letters over two metres high that graces the front of the building: “In These Stones Horizons Sing” and “Creu Gwir Fel Gwydr O Ffwrnais Awen”, the words of Wales’ first poet laureate, Gwyneth Lewis, that were set to music by the Welsh composer Karl Jenkins for the Centre’s inauguration in 2004. What many don’t realise, however, is that the two lives aren’t a translation of one another. Translated into English, the words “Creu Gwir Fel Gwydr O Ffwrnais Awen” actually mean “Creating Truth Like Glass From The Furnace Of Inspiration”.

As you approach the Wales Millennium Centre through Butetown, along James Street, the word directly in front of you almost dead centre above the doors is the word that began it all: Awen. In every culture that has developed around the world there is an origin for the creative process. Ancient Greece had the nine Muses: daughters of Zeus who were the goddesses of creative inspiration. The Hindu Vedic tradition has Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, music, art and speech. In Meso-America the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl was worshipped as a god of arts, crafts, and knowledge. Each of these has been created to make sense of the source of creative inspiration. In Wales, we have The Awen.

Deriving from an Indo-European linguistic root meaning ‘to blow’, “Awen” is the Welsh word for “inspiration”. In terms of its origin, it’s very similar to the Greek: “inspire” comes from the moment that the goddess Athena breathed life into the first human beings created by Prometheus for Zeus. To be inspired is to receive the breath of the gods, which creates life. It is fitting, therefore, that “Awen” has a similar divine origin.

The Awen was the name given to the cauldron belonging to the witch Ceridwen, who tradition records lived in North Wales in the 6th Century CE. Depending on which version of the story that you follow, Ceridwen was either a witch or goddess, and so her origin most likely predates the time in which she was supposed to have lived. The Ceridwen of the 6th Century is possibly a figure created to retro-fit an ancient pagan deity as a villain in a more Christianised narrative. The Awen was a her Cauldron of Transfiguration – a source of poetry and inspiration in the Welsh Celtic tradition. She is believed to have lived on the shores of Lake Bala in North Wales with her family, and a servant boy known only as Gwion Bach.

Tradition records, rather cruelly, that Ceridwen’s son Morfran was ‘ugly and stupid’, and so the witch spent much of her time concocting elixirs and potions to try and relieve Morfran of his ‘ailments’. Gwion Bach was tasked with stirring the cauldron, and on the day that Ceridwen finally mixed the perfect potion she warned her servant boy not to taste it: the first three drops from the Awen would hold all of its magic, and the rest of the potion would be poisonous. Whether it was nervous fear at the task in hand, or whether he was just a bored child not paying attention, Gwion Bach felt the cauldron spit three droplets of the hot liquid on to his thumb. He instantly sucked his thumb to relieve the pain, and received the gifts of the Awen. In an instant, he became good-looking, intelligent, and was able to change his physical form at will.

Afraid of what he had done, Gwion ran away by turning himself into a rabbit. When Ceridwen discovered what had happened to her potion, she was enraged, and tradition records that she turned herself into a dog to chase after the servant boy. There follows a chase where both of them change shape many times – something reminiscent of the sequence in the 1963 Walt Disney movie The Sword In The Stone where the wizard Merlin and the witch Madam Mim compete in a ‘Wizard’s Duel’ for the young King Arthur’s life, which includes a shape-shifting challenge.

The chase ends with Gwion turning himself into a grain of corn only to be eaten by Ceridwen in the form of a hen. Ceridwen became pregnant, and planned to kill the child, which she knew would be Gwion Bach. When her baby was born, the boy was so beautiful that she didn’t have the heart to kill it herself, so she tied it up in a bag and threw it into the River Dyfi to let nature take care of it for her. The bag was found by fishermen who were catching the famed Dyfi Salmon (apparently one of the best types of salmon in the world) who brought it to the court of the Prince Elffin.

The baby was named Taliesin, meaning “radiant brow”, because of his good looks. After Prince Elffin placed the infant Taliesin on his saddle, the baby apparently began to recite poetry and make predictions about the future. Taliesin would grow up to earn the title bard ben beirdd (“bard of bards”). He was the most favoured bard at the Court of King Arthur, chief of the Celtic bards, and alongside the bards Aneirin, Talhearn, Blwchfardd and Cian, is one of the Five British Poets of Renown mentioned in the Historia Brittonium which dates to the 9th Century CE.

Whether the Tale of Taliesin is an accurate biographical account, or one retro-fitted to merge Celtic bardic tradition with the imported Christian stories, the seed of the surviving story is that childhood defiance, represented in the act of sucking a thumb when told not to by a parental figure, is the source of Celtic storytelling inspiration. As the Celts originally didn’t write their stories down, our stories changed subtly with each subsequent generation in the telling of oral tradition. This mirrors the way in which each generation of children in some way defies the generation above it. Children defy their parents, and do things differently, bringing up their own children in a slightly different way, and so society changes. If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t evolve.

When I moved to Cardiff Bay in 2021, during a year of intense and prolonged personal change, I would often see the word Awen inscribed at the front of the Wales Millennium Centre, and it would always make me think of Gwion Bach and the three drops from the Awen on his thumb. When I decided to self-publish my novel after 21 years of writing, I chose the name Gwion Press for the publishing company that I formed. The logo for Gwion Press is a hand with the thumb sticking up. On the thumb are three droplets, representing the three drops of potion from the Cauldron of Awen. They are arranged in a similar configuration to the three rays of The Awen – the symbol of modern druidism that has been adopted by Neodruids following the creation of the modern age Gorsedd Cymru by the poet and master forget Iolo Morganwg in the 18th Century CE.

The first book to bear the Gwion Press logo is my debut novel The Devil On God’s Doorstep which I released as an Amazon exclusive in June 2022. All subsequent releases will carry a variation of this logo, and so in some small way, the tradition continues. It’s also fitting that the first library in the world to stock a copy of the book was Maesteg Library in South Wales, which is one of the libraries in the area where I grew up, now owned by the Awen Cultural Trust.

*The Devil On God’s Doorstep* at Awen Library Maesteg. Photo By Julie Golden.

Is Joseph Of Arimathea Buried In South Wales?

The Gravesite at Blackfriars in Bute Park (Photo by Author)

As the media and music scenes converge on the Somerset Levels this month for the Glastonbury Music Festival, bringing with them legions of revellers that leave a trail of discarded wellies and broken tents in their wake, attention inevitably returns to the town’s connections with Arthurian Legend, and the quest for the Holy Grail. Whilst there is something undeniably legendary about the way that the town has cultivated its mystical and spiritual status for centuries, what is less than certain is whether it has any basis in fact. What is more interesting is that a Twelfth Century Welsh historian may have conspired to create the Glastonbury myth, possibly to conceal the truth that St Joseph of Arimathea, who allegedly brought the Cup of Christ to the British Isles, may in fact have found his final resting place in Wales rather than England.

An early convert to the Jesus movement, Joseph of Arimathea is sometimes claimed to be Jesus’ uncle. A rich merchant from the Judean Hills bordering Samaria, it was in his tomb that Jesus of Nazareth was interred following the Crucifixion. It was Joseph of Arimathea who was said to have held the cup that collected the blood of Christ on the cross, a vessel also identified as the cup used during the Last Supper as recorded in the New Testament. The conventional narrative then has Joseph visiting Britain in the years after the Resurrection, tasked by Philip the Apostle with spreading the Gospel in the Northern provinces of the Roman Empire. Joseph is believed to have settled in the vicinity of Glastonbury, planted his staff on nearby Wearyall Hill, where it took root as the Holy Thorn that remains in the town to this day. He is also believed to have founded the first Christianity community in the town, which grew to become Glastonbury Abbey.

Christ with Joseph of Arimathea by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (Italian, c. 1480u2013after.1548) is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

The renowned scribe Gerald of Wales (the subject of a cartoon film narrated by Max Boyce, which itself achieved legendary status among Welsh schoolchildren of the late Eighties and early Nineties) wrote at the end of the Twelfth Century that he personally witnessed the discovery and exhumation of the remains of the legendary King Arthur and Queen Guinevere at Glastonbury Abbey. Much has been said about the convenience of the discovery following a fire at the Abbey that required expensive repairs. That announcement identified Glastonbury with the mythical Island of Avalon, named for the Welsh word afal (apple) and the area instantly became associated with the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail, birthing a tourist tradition that has become a micro-industry all of its own.

The notoriety that the Abbey enjoyed following the Arthurian discovery was indeed lucrative, but even today there is much doubt as to whether Gerald of Wales was actually an eyewitness or whether his account is hearsay. Fast forward a few centuries to the year 1538, and the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII following his schism with the Church in Rome, and the relics of Arthur and Guinevere had mysteriously disappeared. Glastonbury Abbey was unable to provide physical evidence to substantiate its Arthurian claim, and yet the legend endures to this day.

Glastonbury – Glastonbury Abbey Lady Chapel by Chris Talbot is licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0

Even today, Glastonbury is world-renowned for its aura of mysticism, its convergence of ley lines, and yes, its lucrative arts and music festival at Worthy Farm. The town enjoys a healthy reputation for welcoming the pagan community and those with new age interests, despite the fact that its foundation is primarily Christian. The tradition is so strong and enduring that even in today’s sceptical times, it is still a draw for grail questers, fans of Arthurian legend, neo-pagans, Celtic enthusiasts, contemporary druids and the like.

Some thirty-two miles North-West of Glastonbury as the crow flies, nestled in the ruins of Blackfriars Priory in Cardiff’s Bute Park is a gravesite that tells a rather different story. Tucked away in the South-Western corner of the Priory’s Chapel of St. Mary lies a rectangular unmarked tomb, hemmed in by coloured tiles and topped with cracked concrete. It lies, quite unnoticed, in the shade of the nearby trees, more often than not in a drift of fallen leaves. People walk, run, and jog past, unaware of its existence. Children play on the recently-installed musical chimes nearby, lending the site an ecclesiastical atmosphere that eerily recalls the days of the Priory in its prime. Very few people who pass by realise that here, in this unassuming plot, hiding in plain sight in the centre of Cardiff, may rest the mortal remains of Joseph of Arimathea, the keeper of the Cup of Christ.

Order a copy of Maelgwn of Llandaff using this Amazon link

In his book, Maelgwn of Llandaff and Joseph of Arimathea, author Michael A. Clark draws on the works of M. A. Kelly to present the case for Joseph of Arimathea having been buried in South Wales. Prince Maelgwn of Llandaff, a village all but absorbed into the Northern suburbs of today’s Cardiff spoke of “Joseph of Arimathea the noble decurion, received his ever lasting rest with his eleven companions in the Isles of Avalon”, identifying the grave as lying “in the Southern angle of the bifurcated line of the Cratorium of the adorable virgin.” The Chapel in the ruins of Blackfriars Priory in Cardiff’s Bute Park was dedicated to St Mary the Virgin Mother, and indeed contains a tomb in the location described.

Maelgwn died around the year AD 547, yet although popular myth claims the monastic community at Glastonbury was founded by Joseph of Arimathea some time in the 1st Century AD, history actually records the Abbey as being founded in AD 712, over two centuries following Maelgwn’s death. It is therefore highly unlikely that Maelgwn was referring to Glastonbury as the “Isles of Avalon” where Joseph of Arimathea is buried. Given that Maelgwn lived less than a mile from the pre-existing religious community at the Blackfriars site, this is a more logical location.

There has been much debate on the identification of Avalon as an island. The purported Glastonbury theory rests on the suggestion that, prior to the monastery’s work in draining the land in the Middle Ages, much of the surrounding area was seasonally submerged, and so Glastonbury Tor and its immediate surroundings could be classed as an ‘island’ in the Somerset Levels during the winter months. The proposal for the site to have actually been in the centre of Cardiff rests on the fact that the River Taff which flows through the city actually breaks off at Blackweir, North of Bute Park, with the smaller river flowing East of the park to the walls of Cardiff Castle where it disappears beneath the city.

Over time the urban growth of Cardiff has altered the course of the river, but maps from both the 1600s and 1800s clearly show the smaller river rejoining the Taff South of the Castle, thereby making the land in Bute Park a literal island in the river. Today, the smaller river forms part of the Dock Feeder Canal, which disappears beneath the city streets North of nearby Greyfriars Road, and reappears South of the city centre. The City of Cardiff has announced plans to excavate and ‘reinstate’ much of the Dock Feeder Canal as a “Canal Quarter” with waterside cafes and restaurants which would boost the tourist trade.

Cardiff may enjoy a similar boost to tourism from the identification of the Blackfriars site with Avalon. An excavation of the tomb in 1879 discovered multiple skeletons: all but one were female. The male skeleton appears to have been the earliest burial, as it was found the furthest into the ground. If it were indeed the body of Joseph of Arimathea, the use of the grave to inter multiple women at a later date supports the romanticised tradition of Avalon being a community of Celtic/Brythonic priestesses following the Roman withdrawal from Britain during the centuries following Joseph’s relocation from the Holy Land. If the theory were publicised, Cardiff might benefit from the kind of Grail Quest tourism that is enjoyed by the likes of Glastonbury, and Rennes-le-Chateau in France.

Of course, in order to publicise the theory and use it to promote tourism, it would have to be tried and tested. The remains at the gravesite in Bute Park would have to be exhumed once again, and most likely tested for any traces of DNA or other elements that might help to narrow down a location for the birth and life of the man buried there. If the remains are remotely connected to the Holy Land, it would help to corroborate the theory; if they were connected to Britain or somewhere nearby in Europe, then we could safely assume that the bones to not in fact belong to Joseph of Arimathea. Exhuming skeletal remains to test them for tourism purposes creates a moral and ethical dilemma, so for now the site creates a paradox of near-Schrödinger proportions: until proven one way or the other, the theory is both true, and untrue.

What interests me more, is whether Gerald of Wales was aware of the purported burial of Joseph of Arimathea in Cardiff. As the son of an Anglo-Norman lord and the grandson of Rhys ap Tewdwr, the last King of South Wales, Gerald would undoubtedly have had some knowledge of the history of his country. He was a royal clerk and chaplain to King Henry II, and travelled as far as Rome where he met the Pope, and was a member of the Benedictine Order, which preserved Greco-Roman culture after the fall of the Roman Empire. This background would have provided him with access to regal and religious records dating back to the earliest days of Christian culture, and its spread through the Roman Empire.

Model of Blackfriars in Bute Park (Photo by Author)

Blackfriars in Bute Park was established some thirty years after Gerald’s death, but the ruins that remain today may have been built over a pre-existing site. The Dominican Order which inhabited the site was newly-formed during Gerald’s era, and was branching out across Christendom, establishing new sites as it spread. Whatever the site was prior to the Dominicans building there, Gerald would have likely been aware of it. If he was aware of the site and its importance, why did Gerald of Wales identify Glastonbury as the site of Avalon? I find myself wondering if he fictionalised his account of the ‘discovery’ of the remains of Arthur and Guinevere to create the Glastonbury myth as a distraction from the true site in Cardiff.

If that is the case, then by all means visit the site in Bute Park in Cardiff, but don’t tell everyone. If Joseph of Arimathea is indeed buried there, he has lain in relative peace for almost two thousand years, whilst Glastonbury became a thriving centre of neopaganism, neodruidism and modern Celtic mysticism. If Bute Park is indeed the Arthurian Isle of Apples, then let’s keep that to ourselves, so that the grave site at Blackfriars remains undisturbed.

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My Top Five Tips For Looking After Your Emotional Health

During my wellness journey of the last eighteen months, I’ve discovered and developed a number of thought processes that have helped me with my emotional wellbeing. Last year my yoga teacher spoke of a ‘box of tools’ that I could use for focusing, centring, and dealing with obstacles, stressors and anxieties without turning to external coping mechanisms such as comfort eating and drinking.

The following is a list of my top five items in that tool-kit: processes and thought patterns that you can use to help yourself through tough times. I first compiled this list for a friend who was struggling with a tough issue, and reading over it, I realised just how beneficial these practices have been for me.

1. The Self-care mindset.

This one is the most important: without this, it’s hard to make the others work. This is also the hardest to adopt and implement. In Western society we are taught from an early age that looking after our self-interest is “selfish” and “wrong”. We are told that people who do this are “self-centred” and that this is a bad thing. On the other hand, a lot of Eastern concepts of wellness and well-being talking of “centring” and “the self”. Focusing on yourself is the first step to healing yourself. It’s not “selfish” and it’s not “wrong”.

For myself, I had to ‘un-learn’ the concept of selflessness in order to become mu better, fuller self that I am today. You have to come first in your own life. This can be difficult to accept, especially if you are a parent or have any kind of dependents. Think of the safety briefings on a plane: parents are advised to put on their own oxygen mask in an emergency before they put one on their child. You have to help yourself before you can help others. You have to be your own hero before you can be someone else’s.

If you don’t feed yourself first, you won’t have the energy to feed others. You have to take care of your own interests, first and foremost, to be able to equip yourself to help those around you. Until you accept and understand this, the other tools in the toolkit won’t work for you as well as they should.

2. Change your breathing.

When I began practicing yoga last year one of the first things I learned was the importance of looking after, focusing on, and adapting my breathing. No-one ever teaches us how to breathe – it is something that happens more or less instinctively when we are born. We don’t think about breathing, we just depend on it to happen as an automated process, one that is essential to saying alive.

I learned about the practice of pranayama: the practice of focused breath work. From the Sanskrit words “prana” (vital life force) and “yama” (to gain control), pranayama teaches you to concentrate on your breathing, to focus on it so that it changes from an automated process to one that you consciously take charge of yourself. There are many different techniques that can be used to cope with different situations that you encounter, but the most useful for myself is breath counting.

Try this: breathe in for the count of four, hold for one, then breathe out for the count of eight, and hold for one again. Repeat this ten times. If you can’t manage a four:eight split, then choose a count that works for you with the aim of controlling your breathing to the pint where you can reach that four:eight split. Often, when I begin pranayama, I find that I can only breathe out for the count of five or six, signalling that I need to focus more to regulate and slow my breathing.

Adopting this breath pattern delivers a faster hit of oxygen to your body, coupled with a slower, measured release of carbon dioxide that encourages you to fully empty your lungs. Over time you will develop a greater lung capacity that allows for more efficient breathing. More focus on your breathing also means that by default, you will focus less on external pressures and problems, thus reinforcing that first tool in the kit.

3. Be present.

This one took a long time for me to master, and is in some ways still a work in progress. Staying focused in the present moment, and not dwelling on the past or anticipating the future, doesn’t come easily to me. As someone who had grown up as a ‘planner’ and ‘preparer’, I’d historically always worked towards a better tomorrow, rather than focusing on enjoying a better today.

When I added HIIT runs to my exercise routine, I found that my mind would often wander away from the exercise to other things that I had to do that day, which sometimes resulted in me quitting the workout. I learned to focus on that present moment during the exercise, not by blocking everything out or suppressing other thoughts, but by focusing on what I was doing at the time.

The best way that I discovered to do this was by engaging each of the senses. At any time that I want to feel more ‘present’ – more aware of the moment that I am in – I count off the following in my mind:

5 things that I can see
4 things that I can hear
3 things that I can feel/touch
2 things that I can smell
1 thing that I can taste

This helps me tune back in to whatever I am, and whatever I’m doing, helps me focus on the task in hand, and develops a greater awareness of the moment I’m living in. You’ll notice that by starting with what I can see, and finishing with what I can taste, my physical awareness is also shifting from an external observation of the world outside, to an internal observation of what’s going on inside my body.

4. Practice gratitude.

This felt like such a strange one to adapt because it seemed like such an abstract concept, but there are measurable health benefits to the practice of gratitude, including these, noted by UC Davis Health:

23% reduction in the level of the stress hormone cortisol in your body
7% reduction in the biomarkers of inflammation
25% reduction in dietary fat intake
10% improvement in sleep quality for those living with chronic pain

The daily practice of gratitude has also been proven to reduce depression, improve optimism, reduce suicidal thoughts, and decelerate the effects of age-related neurodegeneration. I also found it interesting that those who practice gratitude have been found to have lower levels of Haemoglobin A1c: a marker of glucose control that plays a significant role in diabetes diagnosis.

As a practical measure, when I practice gratitude, I list five things that I feel grateful to have in my life right now. They can be people, places, memories, favourite things – whatever I currently feel grateful for. As I list each one, I acknowledge it, saying to myself “I am grateful that I have ___ “. Then I go a step further and say “I am grateful that I have ___ , because ___ ” and then I attach a reason for that gratitude: it makes me feel happy, it keeps me sane, it reminds me of a happier time or whatever the reason may be.

Try practicing gratitude for a few minutes each day, then ask yourself each time you finish, how it changed the way that you feel. And if it’s a positive change, that’s something else to feel grateful for!

5. Engage your dopamine relay

Photo by Jess Bailey Designs on Pexels.com

Dopamine is a hormonal neurotransmitter that plays an important role in feeling pleasure. It affects motivation, moods, pain management, and sleep among other things. As a mental health patient, the regulation of dopamine has been of important to me. In the past, the quickest way I’ve found to release dopamine was to eat chocolate. During my teens, I used to eat a lot of chocolate to deal with stress, which led to an unhealthy relationship with food, a reliance on comfort-eating, a 34 inch waist, and the resultant low feelings of self-worth. I gave up chocolate for the best part of 17 years, and went down to a 28 inch waist at my lowest.

Last winter I returned to using chocolate as a coping mechanism, and it took me a full four months to reverse the effects that it had on me both physically and mentally. Although I haven’t completely cut it out of my diet again, I’ve managed to conquer my reliance on chocolate through nutrition, and developing my awareness of what else engages dopamine relays.

One thing that I really enjoy doing is writing. Creative writing, long-form, with a pen and paper as opposed to typing, is something that I really take pleasure in doing. I am now writing each and every day – even if it is just a half-page or page of A4 – just to engage my dopamine relay, and feel pleasure. The effects on my well-being have been quite surprising: the pleasure that I feel is better, and lasts longer, than the pleasure of eating a bar of chocolate.

Find something that you enjoy doing – that gives you lasting pleasure long after you do it, and do that every day for seven days. After a week, see how much better you feel on the whole. I hope that you are able to implement some of these measures on your own journey towards wellness, and that you are able to feel the benefits of these practices. Feel free to sound of with your own tips for wellness in the comments below.

Also, if you’ve enjoyed reading this, or if my words have inspired or motivated you in any way, why not supporting my writing by clicking the image below to buy me a coffee? I’ve recently discovered pistachio blended frappés, which have quickly become my drink of the summer to reward myself for my efforts, and motivate me to do more writing 🙂