New beginnings
This month I’m happy to draw your attention to our new website. Based on our flyer, our designer has used colours and images that we hope will welcome all visitors and provide clear and detailed information. As our site sets out who we are, what we do and how we love to help lots of people find peace of mind, we invite you to share this information with others so that, in many cases, people may begin to truly live a new life.
Life is all about regular and individual, new beginnings! Every age and every stage bring difference, change, education, challenge and growth. If you take a moment right now to revisit yourself at pre-school age, from that moment on, engraved in your memory will be circumstances surrounding each or all of those four influences. And each of those influences, among the joy you have also experienced some level of pain. And each time you survived it and were able to move forward accordingly!
When I first wrote my personal experience of overcoming anxiety, that word was largely unknown in our vernacular. For me and for many others, anxiety was practically a forbidden word. Although today, anxiety has been brought to public attention and it rates public concern, let’s also remember that the individual is always alone, and feels that alone-ness deeply. It’s excellent to notice this raised awareness and the level of negativity that exists in today’s world. More and more articles on the subject and endeavours by health professionals, through the internet and now at government level, spell out that anxiety exists and may be managed through a range of possible measures. But most importantly, the individual needs personalised hope for a new beginning.
This too is spelled out by way of example in the words of one person recently: “what I’ve learned from you is resilience and the knowledge that I wasn’t alone in this ordeal”. Resilience has led her to try something different, to change, to learn about herself, and to meet day to day challenges as they arose … all of which have resulted in huge personal growth. Somehow, knowing that she wasn’t alone in this journey enabled her to stay steady and not diverge from her commitment to facing a new beginning. And so healing has taken place.
But her remarks aside, when life-crippling fear has become a constant companion, it’s not difficult to imagine that an individual may be unable to picture a positive outcome. Subdued by a range of alarming thoughts, the prospect of any kind of change may waver: am I facing a lifetime of mental ‘illness’; what if I never recover from the constraints of fear; what if the hesitancy, the headaches, the churning, the avoidance and depression and all the hideous symptoms of anxiety will always rule my life? But thoughts are transient and it’s very important to remember right now that life is all about new beginnings!
As do all other people, over the years I’ve experienced many new beginnings – many positive and several quite negative – and I look forward to meeting many more to come! Even the book itself (and I’ve mentioned this in an earlier blog), was first typed on an Olivetti portable and, because whiteout didn’t exist, I literally cut and pasted with scissors and glue, many pieces of paper that, after much laborious photocopying, eventually became a manuscript and eventually, a published book. The ease of the computer didn’t exist. The internet didn’t exist and nor did the comfort and security of the mobile phone. And now our exciting upgraded website represents another new beginning!
We travel long roads in a lifetime and we never know exactly what’s around the corner. When approaching those corners however, the one thing we can be sure of is that whatever’s around there will inevitably be linked to a new beginning!
Have a wonderful month!
Pauline McKinnon (C)
June 2017, Melbourne
