Possibility. Oh how I love me some possibility. When I'm in my Light half of the month I'm all about the possibility. I'm enthused and inspired; I believe in everything and my intuition sings at the top of my voice.

Then the switch is flicked, I'm in my Dark half and suddenly I want to hide. Nothing seems possible and I feel like a failure. My intuition is shut outside and ignored.

I've long maintained that the Dark half feels like being possessed. It's not me, it's the hormones. I'm not really like that.

But I am. It's still me and they're still my hormones. It's half of who I am and I can't keep disowning it if I'm truly searching for balance and strength. My family history tells me I've a few years of the monthly switcharound to go through yet so I need to stop fighting.

The Light me, who craves sunshine and heat and believes in what ifs and possibility and potential...well she lives mostly in the future.

The Dark me, who likes dark days and the sound of rain and silence and who dwells on lessons learnt the hard way and failed attempts...she lives in the past.

Finally, I'm beginning to understand the concept of now. Of living mindfully and grounding yourself in the moment. I'm trying to realign myself at a deep, deep level and live that way as much as I can because that's where the past meets the future, the Light meets the Dark and reality lives - a blend of all things. It's where the tension between 'back then' and the 'one day' is perfectly equal and you can release your hold on both.

Luckily, I am woven into the internets where wise people share what they know in the absence of a communal fireplace or field. They share their stories and their lives and the ways in which they are planted in the present. I've read them for years and known in my head that they were speaking the truth but now I'm understanding it with my whole body. This body that can communicate again since I found a translator who is helping me reintegrate. Oh and I also live with dogs - Zen Masters, all.

Lesson One

So I think a blog break is in order. Recently this place has become somewhere I come to voice my inner dialogue and that's really not interesting to anyone but me. It's better suited to a journal or a conversation with myself while I'm driving (oh you know you do it too). I'm tired of coming here and making claims about this is going to happen or that is going to happen and decisions have been made etc etc, only to have that change within 24 hours and...oh you know what I'm saying. Yawn.

This is a real time of transition for me and my family. It turns out that although it's been hellish painful to live through, it has also - on balance - been a positive thing. We are stronger, better defined and changed forever. Living in the moment, mindfully, aware that each moment you must choose and create what you want and need while listening to your body, heart, mind and spirit...that's tough work when you're a novice. I don't know, maybe it'll always be tough work but having seen the rewards I'm choosing in this moment to keep trying.

One thing is sure, life will change some more when Evie starts school in September and it feels - as it always does at that time of year for me - that it will be a new start for us all. I'm thinking I may rest this blog until then. Of course when the Light me comes around again next week I may change my mind. For once, I'm not going to make a prediction.

- Liz Kozlowski

The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung or even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream.

To confine the beauty and value of the body to anything less than magnificence is to to force the body to live without its rightful spirit, its rightful form, its right to exultation.

When women are relegated to moods, mannerisms and contours that conform to a single idea of beauty and behaviour, they are captured in both body and soul, and are no longer free.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

When you first begin questioning your core beliefs, you don't try to fix or change or improve them. You take a breath, then you take another. You notice sensations in your body, if there is tingling or pulsing or warmth or coolness. You notice what you feel, and even if you have always called this feeling "sadness", you are curious about it as if there is no word associated with it, no label describing it, as if it is the first time you have ever encountered it. Is it a lump of blue burned ashes in your chest? Does it feel like a hole in your heart? When you notice it, does it open or change?

This kind of questioning provides a bridge between who you take yourself to be and who you actually are. Between what you tell yourself based on stories from your past and what you sense based on your direct experience now. It allows you to distinguish between outdated familiar patterns and the current, living, truth.

- Geneen Roth

Deep work requires lots of rest.

- Leonie Wise

"Our trouble is, we believe what we think."

- Liz again, in conversation.

I should be outside and I will be outside but before I go, some things I want to spill onto the page:

• The thing I demonstrated in the vlog is for scattered energies. When you're overwhelmed and can't get a straight thought out of your head. Do it 2-3 times a day and feel everything click back into order. Seriously. I have another for you too. Which means..uh oh...another vlog on the horizon. I might brush my hair this time.
• I fought a migraine for three days and won. Sleep, sleep and more sleep.
• I dug out an old sketch pad and drew. And didn't judge the results.
• I took my camera out at 10pm with my dogs and took some beautiful photographs.
• I picked up my hoop last night for the first time in a very long week. I needed to feel good and it never fails me. I side-stepped (or rather didn't, heh, hooping joke) the walking spin and tried something else. I span the hoop on my hand above my head (Wild West) and then I dropped it down over my shoulders onto my waist and kept it going (Float Down). I KNOW! I did the same from an overhead spin on both hands at once and it felt amazing. I also learned how to spin the hoop on my neck. This morning I ache like f*** and have bruises all over my hands and can't wait to get started again. Except this time I'll try not to bash myself on the nose with a 44" hoop.
• At some point yesterday I was thinking about wildness and how when I was younger my wild side was in her element when she was leaping about to very loud music. Namely the music that she felt in her bones. Namely the guitar sound of The Edge. And then overnight the Universe did something amazing and Tor tweeted about it and I cried happy tears and it was awesome.
• And Tracie mentioned she'd been listening to Black Prairie and I loved them too. Perfect summer night listening (apart from Edge and Muse, natch).
• Also, I read this:

Wolves never look more funny than when they have lost the scent and scrabble to find it again: they hop in the air; they run in circles; they plow up the ground with their noses; they scratch the ground, then run ahead, then back, then stand stock-still. They look as if they have lost their wits. But what they are really doing is picking up all the clues they can find. They're biting them down out of the air, they're filling up their lungs with the smells at ground level and at shoulder level, they are tasting the air to see who has passed through it recently, their ears rotating like satellite dishes, picking up transmissions from afar. Once they have all these clues in one place, they know what to do next.

- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

This has been my weekend. I hope yours is/was as fulfilling.

It struck me today that Style Statement works. Remember mine? Sacred Natural. And this week it seems I'm closer to living that than ever. It feels good.

I'm writing this as part of my 800 words for Bindu and shall be following up with some Legs Up The Wall. I know it's an easy yoga option but I'm clear about my needs at the moment and they include some rest.

I'm reading about ways to raise my spirited child and discovering that life is much easier and nicer for us now I've acknowledged the clash between her extravert nature and my introversion. If I take time to make sure both of us get what we need in terms of company and intense communication for Evie and quiet and alone time for me, then she is able to spend time alone while I do, and my brain doesn't meltdown while I play many, many games of ninja turtles or dog rescue centres (what? she's my daughter) with her.

Of course there's hooping - my newest love. It was Sara (yes she of the wonderful dreads) whose newest blog showed me the way and already I'm falling asleep visualising myself hooping. Have you seen what she can already do after SIX WEEKS??? Now I'm waiting for this to arrive tomorrow, watching the lovely AHni and Beth and knowing you don't get much more Sacred Natural than that. You know I'm going to be practising a few spins before I hit the yoga wall.

I'm still working through what happened with LK, the creative kinesiologist and things I'd long forgotten are floating to the surface. I'm drinking a lot of water and doing my energy unscrambling exercise (that I forgot to blog about but yeah). I'm doing reiki self-treatments and sifting away the crud with some cool drumming from Fabeku.

I've got some mind-blowing business advice from the former Ms Style Statement herself, now giving the world her White Hot Truth in the Firestarter Sessions, Danielle LaPorte. All thanks to my sweet Kiwi sister, Sas (watch out for her, she's about to start some big old fires of her own).

And as if to prove that all this good stuff is bringing me home, today I got my first client for Wag Bark Love. He's 14 weeks old, his name is JJ and he looks remarkably like this.

It's a dirty, sacred, natural job...but someone's gotta do it.

Sometimes the Universe puts up signposts.

During a recent trip to our local town of Bradford-on-Avon I picked up a pile of leaflets from some of the people advertising therapies in the area. B-on-A is a bit of a hub for That Kind Of Thing; one of the reasons I love it.

One leaflet was for a woman who offers hypnotism and various other things, including creative kinesiology. It got left in a pile on the coffee table. Somehow, that particular leaflet ended up on top of another pile in Charlie's office and he thought it was me dropping a not too subtle hint, because we'd been talking about him getting hypnotism to help with the vestiges of a stammer he has from his schooldays (it wasn't). So he called and made an appointment.

And it was astounding. Not just because a day later, he didn't stammer once during the type of phone call that would usually have found him completely locked on a consonant, but because it also opened up memories that his mind thought it had forgotten. His body hadn't.

So I decided the time was right for me to address my emotional eating issues before my poor old bones crumpled under the 30 pounds of extra weight I'm carrying. Or my body became so toxic that it fell into serious illness. Or my exhaustion got so extreme it tipped into CFS or something. Or my head exploded. I made the appointment.

The first one is 90 minutes - 30 minutes consultation over a long questionnaire you've already filled in and 60 minutes of treatment. I'd thought hypno was the way we'd go but the kinesiology just took off so we went with it.

In brief, my energy, immune system and strength/resources are all running at about 50%. I thought this was great - way better than I'd imagined - LK did not. She was pretty horrified.

She was more horrified by my confession that I don't really drink water. And I don't get thirsty. She muscle-tested me with water (I held a glass of water in my right hand, against my stomach, while she tested my resistance with my left arm) and - as my arm repeatedly flopped like a limp lettuce - said,"That? Is not right."

My body rejected the water as an unknown substance. Which meant something on a meridian somewhere was broken. She worked on a couple of points (think acupressure) and tested me again. Loving that water. Arm as strong as an ox.

She muscle-tested me while asking my body how much water it needs a day and it said 2.1 litres. So that's what I'm drinking. Minimum. And for once it's actually easy. I want it. I feel thirsty.

We did some other minor adjustments and then got onto the eating stuff. She took me back (asked my body what age it wanted to return to) to when I was about 5. We talked and tested over an issue that I had at that time that has stayed with me as deep shame. I was horribly affected by the birth of my second brother at that age and my jealousy was HUGE. I so wanted to take it out on him (I didn't) and we talked through those feelings. Where in my body I was feeling them, what words were coming up in my head, anything I was feeling. I felt it in my arms as an almost overpowering urge to push, reject and shove and had interpreted those feelings as being how I felt about my brother (whom I've always adored btw).

Cut to the chase, through various tests and acupressure and sitting with my feelings and just spilling what was coming to the surface, I came to see that my issue was not over the jealousy - I was FIVE and my Dad had a new favourite, how else was I going to feel? - but over the depth of my feelings. ANY feelings. Because I am someone who feels things BIG and my family liked to feel things small. Big feelings are undesirable. Inappropriate. Unlikeable. Wrong. Inconvenient. Not welcome. Not nice.

Hi, I'm British.

And so I learnt that I needed to suppress those feelings by hook or by crook. I had to be good. And in the past I've used nicotine and running away to deal with them but now that neither of those options are available to me, I eat. I literally push down those feelings with food. I swallow them up.

I also learnt, throught the consultation part, that I'm a textbook kinesthetic learner which makes perfect sense to me and puts a lot of things I already knew into a nice tidy package that I can refer to.

So that was the first session. It rocked. I have another booked for later in the month. We have no idea what will happen then. More of the same or something else to look at? We'll see.

Weirdest thing? I've had chronic knee pain now for a couple of months. Very bad. Almost unable to drive bad. It's gone. I haven't had it since I walked out of LK's therapy room and yet we did nothing to directly address physical problems.

We talked about my (recent) inability to commit to regular exercise. What could I do that would stick? In my childhood and teens I was a ballet dancer. In my 20s I was a farm-hand, a waitress and later an aerobics queen. In my 30s I taught various kinds of fitness. In my 40s I got a desk job and 30 pounds of extra body.

I'm over aerobics and its many cousins. I like the idea of running but not the reality. The gym bores me silly and my schedule is a mess so it's easy for me to skive. Money and childcare keep me from regular classes of any kind and yes, I'm great at making up excuses.

After my appointment the internets brought me to Bindu Wiles's brilliant 21.5.800 for which I duly signed up. And then yesterday, freewheeling through blogs, years after it was actually cool, I discovered hooping. And fell in LOVE. Within a couple of hours I'd been shopping and bought the makings of a hoop for me and a hoop for Evie. I'd watched numerous hooping videos on youTube and subscribed to some hoopy blogs.

This morning, at about 7.30, while Evie and her cousin (who had a sleepover last night minus the sleep.) played in her room, I was in the garden with the chickens. Trying out m'hoop. It's a humbling experience when you realise you've lost all co-ordination and can't spin a hoop for more than four spins without it knocking seven shades out of your anklebones. I persevered and pretty soon had it up to 17. Which probably sounds a bit crap but it made me skip around the garden punching the air.

So, kinesiology, water, yoga, writing and a big old hoop. It's feeling good.

I'm loving the process.