Helena Clayton Newsletter - View this email in your browser

Leadership Developer • Coach & Facilitator • Writer

Welcome to the January 2025 Newsletter

Welcome to a new year, folks.  2025 feels like it might be full of Big Things for the world but I hope it's started well for you, and that you made it intact through December with all that that month brings. 

It was a month of two halves for me - the intensity of getting things done before Christmas and getting caught up in the consumerism of it all - and then the sweet dropping into slowness and darkness with time off including 4 nights in a cabin with no Wi-Fi or phone signal up a Welsh mountain. 

I love those days in that cabin.  Just me and a log burner, some books, enough food for 4 days, walks from the door (almost always in pouring rain - but this time also some amazing winter sun) and a yoga mat.  I go every year around this time.  A ritual, for sure. 

There was also less intentional time to kick back that was Covid induced.  Dom was laid low before Christmas which meant we cancelled a trip to his grandkids and had a week of living socially distanced to make sure I didn't get it. I used the time to get an assignment done for the end-of-life training I'm doing, so useful in the end. 

More recently Tiu de Haan's review of the year was a lovely chance to look back.  And looking ahead,  I've set myself up with a poetry course on writing poetry in times of crisis which will help me keep the main thing the main thing. 

This month:

• an invitation to Acts of Love for Tough Times workshops in Jan and Feb  - an open invitation, freely gifted, for anyone wanting to connect around what matters most and what keeps us all going in tough times.  
• something for those us wanting or needing rest
• a way to consider designing our lives so that it would be ok to live again if we had to
• a bold experiment in creating curiosity and connection
• a new word and concept to help us live well in these difficult times
• and a reminder of the power of questions that are not necessarily meant to be answered. 

Almost all the lovely images this month are from Beautiful Illustrations, a new Facebook group I've recently come across. 

I'll be back with you in February, by which time we'll have passed Imbolc - but that won't necessarily mean that I'm out of hibernation and so I'm hoping that you, too, take all the time you need.   Until then, wishing peace for your heart, and for your neighbour's heart. 
 

With love
Helena x

(pic: Natasha Newton)

What sustains us in tough times? How do we honour the pain of the world? How do we stay connected to love when things around us can feel unloving?

ACTS OF LOVE FOR TOUGH TIMES (online - and always free)

Book HERE for Jan 14 0800-1000 GMT when the focus will be on what resources us - what are acts of care and self love - during tough times.

And HERE for Feb 12 1600-1800 GMT. 

That's pretty much what we explore together in these (always free) monthly online sessions. We begin with a connection to what we're finding difficult, because in the wise words of James Baldwin, not everything that we face can be changed - but nothing can be changed until it is faced.  

And then in each session we take a couple of different things each time and ask 'how might this be a form of necessary love for these tough times we find ourselves in?'. In January, we'll be looking at what resources us, as we start the journey into 2025.

...and also see the section on thrutopia below ...

(pic: Jo Grundy)

The last couple of months have seen me sleeping poorly - waking at 2am or 4am and finding it hard to go back to sleep.  Always an early riser, I can handle 5am but those earlier times are a bugger - and no amount of magnesium makes a difference. 

So at those times of the morning,  I've been diving into yoga nidra - a form of guided meditation that takes you into deep states of relaxation - as a way to either help me drop off again or at least to know that I am getting some deep rest. I can recommend Ally Boothroyd, Grainne McAnallen, and Kamini Desai for some great recordings.

 ...also, I'm also now taking CBD oil at night - and that's really helping.  Either that or the decompression effects of not being at work for the last few weeks! ...

(pic: Hester Cox)

I once met Sam Conniff at a workshop, years ago.  You might know him from Be More Pirate.  But I just came across one of his new projects and he's still doing super interesting stuff.  In this social experiment, he is asking men to paint their nails and see what happens - how it feels to them and what changes in them as a result, what sorts of responses they get from others, what sort of new conversations are created ...

'Hard As Nails aims to transform the conversation around gender norms by inviting men from all walks of life to paint their nails to spark dialogue, break stereotypes, and demonstrate solidarity'. 

It's been going since April 2024 and you can read more about it including what impact it's having on the Hard as Nails website including:
 

• 80% of participants reported stepping outside traditional masculinity expectations, like emotional suppression or fear of judgment.
• 75% had meaningful discussions about mental health, gender norms, or allyship—topics they’d typically avoid.
•  80% felt more connected, and 65% described emotional release and joy moments.

I'm always intrigued when I see a man with painted nails and coming across this makes me way more likely to start a conversation now. 

(pic: Pascal Campion)

So I did Tiu de Haan's 'reviewing 2024' class as I always do and it was lovely.  I do love a look back.  These days I just post one weekly Facebook post on a Sunday evening, with some stuff from the week and I love that Sunday night ritual of looking through my diary and my photos to remind me of what was odd, funny, lovely...

I've never done Tiu's 'looking ahead to the following year' class as I always feel I want to let the year decide what it wants with me. 

But I did come across this.  And I'm very drawn to it.  

I've been reading Staring at the Sun by Irvin Yalom, an existential therapist who is writing about how he works with people around their fear of death.  He writes about one thought experiment that came from Nietzsche.  Nietzsche asks what if:
 

'this life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh and everything unutterable - small or great - in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence'. 

 
So, what if you had to live an identical life, over and over again until eternity?  The question would be how would you live this life, so as to make it bearable to repeat, and repeat? And Yalom offers this as a way to design a life that you can live inside of, a life that allows you to live without accumulating regrets, or at least, as few regrets as you can. 

I notice the impact it's having on me so far to focus me more on the micro choices I make ...

(pic: Simon Palmer)

There's a new word that kept appearing to me in the last half of the year.  More than a new word - a new idea, a new concept.

Thruptopia.

We know that utopian ideas and visions are naive and unachievable and they don't last.  And it's only too easy - and also perhaps deeply unhelpful - to hold a dystopian view of the future. So how about this - the idea of a thrutopian vision for what might be - a vision and a way of being in the world that considers 'how we get through what's coming in the best possible way'. 

It's a word and an idea brought to life by the eco-psychologist Rupert Read and you can hear him talk about it in this short BBC interview.  There's an article from him here.  And Manda Scott also picks up this idea a lot in her work and podcasts, and even has a self directed writing programme that focuses on it.

(and I think I'm coming to see that my Acts of Love for Tough Times workshops take a thrutopian approach ...) 


(pic: Ulla Thynell)

I do like a question to ponder.  To ponder and not necessarily to answer. 

Rainer Maria Rilke encouraged us to 'be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.'

Saturday's Guardian last week was a good source of questions.  And not the yes/no sort.  Here's the introduction from Oliver Burkeman, a good stand-alone piece.  But I can't seem to find the whole seven page article in the Guardian called You. What, When. Where. Why?  I guess I should have checked that before writing this section - sorry!   But I could find this extract, the section written by Susie Orbach - which is something (if an annoying tease for you) and hopefully your search engine might be able to track the full piece down.

(pic: Sarah Warren)

The Well

But the miracle had come simply
from allowing yourself to know
that this time you had found it, 
that some now familiar stranger
appearing from far inside you, 
had decided not to walk past
it anymore; that the miracle
had come in the kneeling to drink
and the prayer you said,
and the tears you shed
and the memories you held
and the realisation that in this silence
you no longer had to keep
your eyes and ears averted
from the place that could save you, 
and that you had the strength 
at last to let go of the thirsty,
unhappy, dust-laden
pilgrim-self that had brought you here
walking with her back bent,
her bowed head
and her careful explanations.

No, the miracle had already
happened before you stood up,
before you shook off the dust
and walked along the road
beyond the well, out of the desert
and on, towards the mountain,
as if home again, as if you
deserved to have everything
you had loved all along, 
as if remembering the first
fresh taste of that clear cool spring
could lift up your face
to the morning light and set you free. 


David Whyte

(pic:Charles Robinson)

Heaps this month.  

I discovered Linda Grant's The Story Of The Forest just browsing in Waterstones - wonderful, and have ordered a couple more second hand. Struggled with Zadie Smith's The Fraud for most of the time but just about ok with not having abandoned it (it got great reviews).  Dom bought me Elif Shafak's There Are Rivers In The Sky for Christmas and that, kept me wonderful company through the wet afternoons in Wales. 

Non-fiction-wise, finally finished Weathering from Ruth Allen, a geologist-turned-therapist not least because I wanted to use it as the basis of an assignment in my Supervision as Spiritual Practice studies, as well as the wonderful Irvin Yalom's Staring at the Sun, about our fears of death, and how he approaches that in therapy (ditto). Loved them both not only for what they've got me thinking about in regards to supervision.  Oh, and Robin Wall Kimmerer's The Serviceberry, a tiny book on the gift economy.  

I took poetry away with me too, and this year often read it out loud (to myself) which made all the difference.  To my hideout in Wales, I always take and read David Whyte's Still Possible.  It seems perfect for this time of the turning year.  And new to me, the extraordinary collection Like A Beggar, from Ellen Bass.  I took some Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes in case I needed them too.  I didn't. 

I stopped work on 18 Dec but the intensity of the final few days means I'm going to have to put a buffer in next year to make sure I book no meetings in on that last day!  Heaps and heaps of wrap-up admin for two big autumn projects was many more hours than I'd thought, plus responding to requests for new work in 2025 - two Leading from Love programmes for a global charity; a new team development assignment and two new coaching relationships. But it mostly all got done. 

2025 looks like it has some interesting new work in it - and plentiful (much gratitude for both those things ...) and I'm putting in many week-long breaks to give me some space. I find I'm rubbish at holding boundaries about weekend working - but a week off is a proper circuit breaker for me. I'm also booking August off.  I didn't do it this year and really regretted it. 

I'm back at work this week, when this lands in your Inbox, but it's a buffer week - no meetings or calls, just some time on my own schedule to get some emails and prep done, and warm up to the idea of being back at work. 

(pic: Elizabeth Orton Jones)

Do get in touch and let me know how you're finding these Newsletters, or if you'd like to see more info or anything I could include.   I love hearing from you.  You know where I am on LinkedIn, or connect via Email. Or call me of course, whichever suits.

Helena x

helena@helenaclayton.co.uk
07771 358 881

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