Twenty-seven years ago, on 11 August 1999, there was a solar eclipse.
I was sitting on the settee holding my first baby, Connor.
I cherished him.
He was my firstborn, and I loved being his mum. Yet I remember sitting there, with this beautiful little baby in my arms, looking at the strange light outside and having an equally strange thought.
What is the point of all of this?
Not motherhood.
Life.
I remember having this overwhelming feeling that I didn't quite belong here. As though I didn't really understand what I was doing on this earth or what any of it meant.
It seems such a strange thing to remember thinking while holding a new baby.
But now, 27 years later, another solar eclipse is approaching, and I find myself thinking about that young mum on the settee.
If only she could have known what was coming.
A whole life happened
That little baby was only the beginning.
There was my husband, Andrew.
There were two more beautiful children.
There was family life and laughter and holidays and adventures. There were ordinary days and Christmases and school runs and cuddles and arguments and celebrations.
There was New Zealand, Australia and Spain.
There were friendships.
There were moments when I felt completely alive.
I have had some truly wonderful experiences in these 27 years.
And I've had some absolutely heartbreaking ones too.
I lost Andrew.
I've experienced the enormous pain of losing the relationship I once had with Connor.
Losing Andrew changed the life I thought I was going to have. And losing my relationship with Connor, is a different kind of loss. A loss without the finality that allows grief to settle.
There have been times when life hasn't looked anything like the life I thought I was going to have.
I've loved.
I've grieved.
I've been frightened.
I've felt completely lost.
I've started again.
More than once.
And somewhere amongst all of that living, I've slowly begun to understand the answer to the question I asked while holding my baby all those years ago.
Maybe the point isn't to feel good all the time
For a long time, I think many of us were taught that some emotions were good and others were bad.
Happy was good.
Calm was good.
Anger needed controlling.
Sadness needed fixing.
Fear needed overcoming.
But life has taught me something very different.
Our emotions are part of what makes us human.
We aren't supposed to be happy all the time.
We are supposed to feel.
Our bodies react.
Our emotions arrive.
Our minds try to make sense of what is happening.
Sometimes the stories our minds create help us.
Sometimes they don't.
Sometimes we need another person to help us feel safe before we can even begin to understand what is happening inside us.
And none of that means there is something wrong with us.
We can experience the same world differently
One of the biggest things I've come to understand is that we don't simply experience what happens to us.
We experience what happens to us through our bodies, emotions, thoughts, memories and beliefs.
Two people can stand in exactly the same situation and experience it completely differently.
Even the same person can experience the same situation differently on two different days.
That doesn't make either experience wrong.
It makes us human.
And when we begin to notice what is happening inside us, something changes.
We gain a little space.
We can listen to our bodies.
We can calm and connect.
We can notice our feelings.
We can question the stories we're telling ourselves.
We can use our voice.
We can imagine another possibility.
And gradually, we begin to realise that although we cannot control everything that happens in our lives, we can influence how we meet it.
I didn't sit down one day and decide to create a framework because I had all the answers.
Quite the opposite.
The Feel It Framework grew from years of trying to understand.
My own experiences.
My children.
The children I've worked with.
Grief.
Trauma.
Relationships.
Behaviour.
Connection.
And what it actually means to be a human being with a nervous system, emotions, thoughts, needs and a story.
Eventually those ideas became six simple layers:
Body.
Calm.
Reflection.
Voice.
Imagination.
Inner Power.
Not a ladder.
Not a journey from "bad" feelings to "good" ones.
A way of understanding ourselves.
And at the very heart of it is something I wish every child could grow up knowing:
Every emotion is welcome.
You don't have to be happy to be okay.
You don't have to hide the difficult parts of yourself to be loved.
You can learn to understand what is happening inside you.
Your experiences can shape you without having to define you.
And you are already enough.
Twenty-seven years later
Tomorrow, I will watch another eclipse.
But this time I won't be the young mum sitting on the settee wondering why she is here.
I still don't have all the answers.
I don't think any of us ever do.
But I know that I love deeply.
I have been loved deeply.
I have experienced extraordinary happiness and devastating loss.
I've made mistakes.
I've changed.
I've survived things I never imagined I would have to survive.
I've had experiences I wouldn't trade for anything.
And somehow, through all of it, I've found something I want to give to other people.
Especially children.
I want them to understand themselves earlier than I understood myself.
I want them to know that their bodies aren't betraying them when they react.
Their feelings aren't problems to get rid of.
Their thoughts aren't always facts.
Their voices matter.
Their imagination can help them see another way.
And underneath every changing emotion, every difficult day and every chapter of their story, there is something I hope they never forget:
You belong here.
You are loved.
You are enough, exactly as you are.
Twenty-seven years ago, holding my baby beneath an eclipsed sun, I wondered what the point of all of this was.
Perhaps I couldn't have known the answer then.
Perhaps I had to live it first.
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