Tag: reframing

The millimetres mean more than the miles

The millimetres mean more than the miles

We often imagine change as something dramatic. A sweeping transformation. A moment where everything shifts at once through a bold decision. But in lived experience, change is rarely like that. It’s quieter and smaller. It can be almost imperceptible. Perhaps a millimetre shift.

Maybe the millimetres matter more than the miles.

Meaningful movement in our inner life happens in tiny increments. A slight softening in the shoulders, a moment of noticing rather than spiralling, a half-breath of awareness, a quiet choice to pause instead of push. These are not grand gestures. They’re millimetres. And they accumulate.

In continuing to explore trauma-informed spaces over the past few years, I often find myself coming back to something TRE teacher Steve Haines once said: “the quickest way to heal trauma is to go slowly.”

This is because in trauma and emotional overwhelm, the nervous system doesn’t respond to big leaps; it responds to the smallest possible foothold. Sometimes that’s just a point of steadiness in the storm, or a sensation that feels even slightly less threatening, or a breath that opens things by a fraction. Even if we can only touch that anchor for a second, that second matters.

Many people discover that trying to force calm only creates more tension. In my own practice, I began to notice how quickly the system could tighten when there was even a subtle push to settle or fix what was happening. Over years of working with these practices, what became clear to me was that support often arrives through something much smaller and more understated.

In moments when things inside feel chaotic or flooded, the most helpful anchor is often subtle.

It might be the faint feeling of feet on the floor, the weight of the body in the chair, or the movement of a single breath. Not a profound grounding or a wave of relief, just the smallest point of contact. It can often only be touched for a second or two before attention is pulled away again.

This kind of noticing doesn’t happen by accident. It develops through the gentle, repeated training of awareness, through returning attention to small, embodied moments again and again over time, until the nervous system begins to recognise them as familiar ground.

Even a second of contact matters. Touching it, losing it, and then touching it again, this small rhythm begins to show the nervous system that some ground is still there, even briefly. Over time, that point of contact becomes something more reliable to return to, because even though the storm hasn’t disappeared, we begin to learn where our ground is.

This is the kind of capacity we begin to build, gently and step by step, inside the 7-week SIT course, where we explore cultivating capacity through different spheres of awareness, including the body, thoughts, emotions, the senses, and self-compassion.

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We often overlook these micro‑shifts because they don’t feel impressive. They don’t announce themselves. They don’t give us the satisfaction of saying, “Look, I’ve changed.” But they are the change. They’re the quiet repatterning of how we meet our experience.

It might be the faint feeling of feet on the floor, the weight of the body in the chair, or the movement of a single breath. Not a profound grounding or a wave of relief, just the smallest point of contact.

None of these moments look like much on their own. But over time, they begin to alter the trajectory. A one degree shift in direction doesn’t look like anything at the start. Walk far enough, though, and you end up somewhere entirely different.

This is why mindfulness, or any embodied practice, can be so powerful. It teaches us to value what is subtle and to trust what is small. Over time we begin to recognise that the nervous system doesn’t transform through force, but through repetition, through these small, compassionate nudges.

The miles are made of millimetres.
And the millimetres are where real change happens.

When we stop waiting for the big breakthrough and start honouring the small ones, something softens. We stop treating ourselves like a project to be fixed and begin relating to ourselves as a process to be tended.

This is where real change begins, not in dramatic leaps, but in the quiet, steady accumulation of millimetres.

27/02/2026
Frustration Unleashed: a Candid Rant…

I’m always on the lookout for podcasts that align with my values around embodiment, and different journeys of healing approached with depth and care. Last night, I listened to an ‘expert’ claim that mindfulness should be avoided in trauma work: encouraging people to stay present teaches the nervous system that the present isn’t safe, he claimed.

This once again frames mindfulness as just another option, in some wellness toolkit, showing limited understanding of its true nature and potential.

If you’ve ever been told that learning mindfulness doesn’t apply to your situation, especially because of the trauma you’ve lived through, I want to say this plainly:

That’s not true.

Mindfulness isn’t a neat little practice reserved for quiet minds or calm mornings. It’s for this: for grief, fear, exhaustion, and the kind of pain that doesn’t always have language.

Personal Story: Mindfulness in the Midst of Trauma

Five years ago, my parents both died within two weeks.
The lead-up to their deaths was a relentless combination of palliative care for my Dad alongside the upheaval of hospital and intensive care visits for my mum. It was a punishing regime marked by exhaustion, sadness, and a fear beyond words. My whole system didn’t settle during those years; it never had the chance. I was already carrying the weight of secret miscarriage, the disenfranchised grief of childlessness, relationship rejection due to my own physical condition, and early life trauma that had yet to surface in my awareness. (I have since learnt that old pain can only be released from the body proportionate to the amount of safety you feel internally.)

How could I have navigated this level of uncertainty and suffering without anything to hold onto?
The small seeds of understanding I had begun to cultivate in the years prior were all I had. Mindfulness wasn’t a practice I ‘chose’ in calm circumstances, it was the only thing truly available to me. The only thing big enough, wise enough, intelligent enough, loving enough to hold all that I came to it with, trauma included.

The idea that mindfulness forces us to ‘stay in the present’ at all costs is a misnomer of Titanic proportions, and it needs calling out.

Because an equal part of navigating presence is knowing when it’s too much to stay with, too much to bear.

Distraction as a Vital Component of Presence:

In contrast to the narrow view that mindfulness demands constant presence, we need to clarify what it really teaches: how to stay when it serves us, and how to step away when it doesn’t.

Because distraction, when done with full intentionality and awareness, is an entirely different thing. Instead of shutting out pain blindly, we recognise what is tolerable in a given moment and make a conscious choice to shift focus if necessary.

Not only that, but the kind of discernment which knows when presence serves and when it overwhelms, doesn’t come by accident. It requires training in presence itself, so we can recognise our limits not as failures, but as signals. When tuned into with full awareness these signals deepen our self-understanding, not just emotionally, but somatically, cognitively, and relationally.

Notwithstanding all the misconceptions, it was the training in presence itself which led me to a potential of peace I hadn’t known was possible. Through learning this practice intentionally, we tolerate more with greater ease: we actually can be with more than we could before.

In other words, being present doesn’t imply pain for the sake of pain.

Expanding Understanding of Mindfulness

You see, in trauma, reality is often fragmented, overwhelming, and deeply alive. Mindfulness, when taught with integrity, doesn’t ask us to bypass that. It meets us inside it, with choice, with nuance, with care.

To dismiss mindfulness outright in the face of trauma is to miss its depth and versatility as a practice that evolves with the person and the situation. It isn’t rigid: it’s fluid, adaptive, and built to meet the full complexity of life.

When mindfulness is stripped of its roots, reduced to a quick fix or productivity hack, we lose what it was always meant to be: a compassionate, discerning way of meeting reality as it is, not as we wish it to be. This is a sad consequence of the fact that so much of the original depth and nuance of these teachings has been shaved down to the extent that what we’re left with is a hollowed-out version, presented as lifestyle advice rather than a path of liberation.

So rather than rejecting mindfulness in the context of trauma, we need to reclaim it. Not as a tool of control, but as a practice of relationship, one that invites us to turn toward what’s here, and just as importantly, to turn away when presence would be too much.

That’s not avoidance. That’s wisdom.

And it’s time we made more room for this wholeness. The kind that doesn’t fracture under pressure, but softens around it, steadily, intelligently, and in service of healing.

To make whole, sweeping claims implying the appropriacy of mindfulness, we need a wholer understanding of what mindfulness is. Not a lifestyle edit. The whole practice: complex, compassionate, deeply relational.

19/06/2025
Loneliness Reframed

How Society Frames Connection

Is loneliness necessarily the absence of company, or the result of how ‘connection’ is framed in society?

Similar to the majority of people, most of what I do is in pursuit of connection. As a social person who seeks and thrives from connection I value relationships with people and with the world around me. And at the same time circumstances have urged me to feel an increasing pull towards the richness of relationships beyond traditional frameworks or definitions.

The way society defines connection, tying it to roles rather than experience, often diminishes the ways in which true belonging actually unfolds. Furthermore if these traditional structures elude you for whatever reason, the sense of belonging and of inclusion can be elusive to non-existent at times.

I believe connection can extend to presence itself; a way of being fully engaged with moments as they unfold.

Navigating Exclusion and Assumption

Childlessness was one of the hardest realities I navigated through my thirties, filled with uncertainty and exclusion. Not knowing why it couldn’t ‘happen for me’ or whether I’d ever ‘join that club’ made those years feel isolating and highly fear-driven. I was also not lacking other circumstantial challenges during this time.

Then, after losing both my parents at 45yrs, I realised I had no immediate family in the traditional sense.

What struck me as much as my own grief, however, was the way it was sometimes assumed that these realities made my life… lesser, and how unhelpful this was.

The Structural Exclusion of Connection

When institutions cater to predefined groups, the exclusion isn’t just incidental; it’s structural. It’s striking how often this divide is reinforced, in church services centred around families, social events that assume certain relational dynamics, even casual conversations that frame family as the ultimate marker of fulfilment.

These structures don’t just overlook those who exist outside of them; they implicitly cast them as “missing something.”

Over several years, this conditions the nervous system to crave something broader in pursuit of meaningful survival and belonging.

Mindfulness and the Depth of Connection

The ancient, universal teachings of Buddhism, discovered on my part via mindfulness training, offer a depth of wisdom so reassuring as to be genuinely restorative. The relevance is such that they often illuminate what I’m experiencing in this very moment as though they were speaking directly to me.

One of my favourite of the contemplations of the body is in terms of the four natural elements; from this perspective we connect these elemental forces around us and within us and they offer us their gifts. This frames the body as the doorway to love, because the body is the doorway to every experience.

This kind of love is expansive, boundless and free of assumption. It doesn’t measure belonging by lineage or biological markers but simply recognises existence itself as a form of inclusion. Our experience of this is deepened through meditation which, over time, increasingly permeates our waking moments.

I had never previously come across such intelligence and care that truly considers every nuance in terms of every breath, every sensation, and every interaction without the labels and categorisations that can unintentionally exclude.

Connection Beyond the Human Experience

Within this, connection itself reaches beyond the human experience, woven into the fabric of being, unbounded by species or expectation. This brings to mind the unrivalled love that exists with my cat, the bond untethered from assumption or hierarchy, rooted purely in presence, trust and the profound understanding that needs no words.

For some, this same depth of connection is found in nature, in the quiet communion with the land, the trees, the movement of water and air with little separation of that inside and outside of the body. This relationship exists from participation and reciprocity where one becomes part of something infinite, held by the rhythms of the world itself.

A New Way to See Love and Belonging

This reframing is not only profound but deeply helpful because of the acknowledgement of experience as the foundation of connection, rather than predefined relationships. It moves away from social constructs and towards the immediacy of being, the way we engage with life at its most elemental level.

Society often assumes that loneliness is inevitable, as if connection can only be validated through specific roles. Mindfulness can show us that the absence of traditional family ties doesn’t mean a life devoid of richness. True connection isn’t determined by a family tree as much as it’s found in the world around us, in every moment we inhabit fully.

Mindfulness allows us to engage with love and connection beyond external validation and rooted instead in the immediacy of experience.

That is worth more than any predefined role or expectation.

To learn more about the HMB course please visit: HMB Course

06/06/2025