Welcome
My heart’s work is to deeply understand and sensitively respond to suffering, adversity and relational harms. I’ve worked as a community educator in school settings with young people in conscientizing our gendered violence contexts, in foster and kinship care settings to support and nurture relational care for children and families who’ve known irreparable harm and loss, with adolescents and early adults who have been made homeless, with those living in homes where intimate familial terrorism happens everyday, with children and families impacted by physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological, sexual and colonial harms¹.
Indigenous communities globally have been offering invitations and calling those of us with other ancestral root systems into relational care perspectives for a long time. So many of these invitations have been silenced, ignored and misheard. I’m hoping to make a small contribution in tending to the conditions needed to be able to perceive, learn, practice and respond in multi-perspective ways. As we hospice modernity, I’m hoping to nurture and enrich our ways of understanding, organising and relating to ourselves and those we are interwoven with².
My offerings here on this platform ‘The Heart Field’ are a small way of me metabolising, integrating, reflecting on and sharing what I learn from different themes that arise in my life work. Cultivating my listening practice in therapy spaces allows me to grow and learn so much more than I can share individually with people. This writing space is one way of attempting to honor the individual and collective insights I experience, in a way that protects privacy, yet illustrates how personally and professionally moved I am by the relationships I have with those who consult with me.
I don’t know who might find this kind of offering helpful and anyone who is intrigued is welcome. I am imagining that others who know what it is to live with a heart capable of breaking open and opening to love might find something that resonates here.
What is The Heart Field?
“There are no new ideas - only new ways of making them felt”
A Shelter
An online home of resources grown and gathered to nurture relationship with our hearts. In a world which often denigrates feelings and idolizes cognition, this is space to become more acquainted with your embodied heart and felt senses. It is an offer of shelter to those of us with weary, lonely, broken and suffering hearts. We live in times of deep grief, loss and unfulfilled longings. Many of us are in the midst of life experiences of chaos, collapse and breakdown. Shelter here for a moment and take time and space to tend to your heart.
A Field Guide
We are experiencing complex and intersecting crises across all domains of life. All of us are impacted by psychological, emotional, biological, relational, cultural and environmental dis-ease, distress and devastation in one way or another. Many of us have inherited legacies from ancestors which have and continue to generate harm to humans and more than human kin.
We need practices within and without therapy rooms that are capable of responding to immediate symptoms of distress, impacting the broader contexts that give rise to suffering and transforming status-quo approaches. This is an offering of ideas, questions and art that hopes to contribute in a small way to such practices. Lets consider how we can honor the complexities we live with and the blurred realms of personal and political, brain and body, individual and collective.
This guide doesn’t presume to know where we might be going, but it hopes there may be something helpful here for the path we make by walking.
A Companion
There are many experiences we have in life which attempt to convince us of our separation from the intricate web of life we exist within. The suffering that is generated from this belief is profound. This space offers fragments of my incomplete and often muddled up thinking-feeling to invite you into new ways of relating and connecting with ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.
From my Heart-Field to yours,
References
Australia, where I live, is a colony of the British Empire established on unceded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lands, whose sovereignty was never ceded and continues today.
I am not currently using the terminology ‘decolonising’ to describe my work, as I believe a decolonising process requires far more than I offer here. I feel this term is better reserved for those who are doing important work to dismantle colonial structures. My work operates in a different register and doesn’t qualify for the title ‘decolonising’.
