6. March 2026
Our Bodies Are Amazing
This week I have been undertaking some Continuous Professional Development, and it got me thinking about how incredible our bodies are and what they can do. Hollie McNish, (a fabulous poet who I encourage you to follow) has written a poem called Butter Knife, which she read out at one of her live sessions I went to last week in Diss, that captures the essence of what our bodies are capable of.
To learn more about Hollie, here’s a link to her website or follow her on social media https://www.holliepoetry.com/
On my creative development day, I was asked to imagine a scene and then to draw it, adding in something that represents me. Now I’m going to confess, even though I work creatively, my Achilles heel is drawing – I can make a good stick man picture at best! Even with my limited drawing ability, however, I was able to create a rough representation of what my mind could conjure up. This is nothing special, you might think, we’ve been doing that since childhood where we imagined the big monster hiding under the bed and then could draw it (think Monsters Inc.), or we remembered granny’s garden and painted flowers. In this exercise we were encouraged to consider aspects of ourselves, what we might need, what might need to change but using the picture as the metaphor. Using metaphor and image in this way helps us access deeper parts of ourselves which may be hidden from our conscious rational brain and can lead us to knowing ourselves better and what will support us.
Imagery can be a powerful tool for supporting our feelings and when we use crayons or finger paints we connect to our younger selves, and our younger self can speak through their art. How amazing that our bodies store those encoded memories and can transport us back, we will likely have had similar experiences of catching a particular smell which transports you back to a time, place or person. For someone who has Post Traumatic Stress or childhood trauma, there can be memories which have been locked away or ones that haunt us. Counselling provides a space to safely explore these encoded memories and messages in our bodies, and imagination, so that you can be released from their unconscious grip. Often in the case of childhood trauma, some of our experiences may be pre-verbal so we don’t have the language to express how we felt, images can support us where words often can’t.
By sitting with the emotions and images, we can understand them and notice when they impact our lives now. Feeling emotions which may have been buried and the process of counselling is a bit like a Windows update, it can take time, the circle of doom gets us impatient to move on or feel painful if it freezes mid update, but once the update is here, we realise there are more features and functions which can support us and some have been retired because they no longer serve us (Word paperclip tool, I’m looking at you!).
Our bodies are amazing because they store our experiences deep within and make us who we are, our values, beliefs and our uniqueness but sometimes, they have a faulty operating system, and we get stuck. Through counselling we create new neural pathways which are a bit more updated to your current life, therefore creating more choice in the way you think, act, behave and relate to others.
To learn more about how creative counselling can work for you, book an initial consultation with me and come see me at my practice in Rackheath near Norwich or online. I look forward to welcoming you