We’re adrift, I said.

One day a close friend of mine said, in the middle of a conversation: “Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a space of our own, where we make time for ourselves, where we talk, and where, in the chaos of this life, we discuss practical ways of ‘becoming better’?”

“We’re adrift,” I said.

Do you know, to keep from drifting, every day I keep small rituals that remind me of my purposes in life.

Where curiosity took me

During the pandemic, purely out of curiosity about the parts of the human being I had not yet studied, I trained in Family and Relationship Counselling. For three years now I have been working with clients in this field. I am waiting for an exam date for my Regression diploma, and completing my courses in EMDR, sex therapy and addiction therapy. What these subjects have in common is that each one opens the door to another room in a person’s own story. And I cannot help being drawn into that adventure 😊

My Best Version

Last spring I began a series called EN İYİ VERSİYONUM, “My Best Version”. For exactly this reason!

It was a free programme. Each stage lasted two hours and took place in the evening.

The three stages drew 122 applications in all!

Why did I assume?

I didn’t announce it on LinkedIn. I thought Instagram was the better fit. Or rather, that is what I assumed!

Thinking about it now: why did I assume that?

LinkedIn is taken to be a “business” place. Yet the people who build that business, who carry it, and who are sometimes worn down beneath it, are people themselves; in other words, us! What made me think the people there would not want to join a community like this to reach their own best version? And in every training I give I tell people “your prejudices are your shackles”, so how did I come to assume it? I have taken this seriously. I am even curious about what else I have been assuming in the same way.

What comes next?

A last word

A friend’s “wouldn’t it be lovely” became a space that 122 people applied to join. So I was not the only one adrift.

What these evenings have taught me is this: in two hours set aside for themselves, a person can say a sentence they have been putting off for years.

So what sets us adrift? We tend to think it is the things that happen to us. Yet more often it is the emotions we have not named. Anger never spoken, hurt never talked through, an anxiety covered over for years, the uncertainty that comes with moving forward and the fear at its root… They are invisible, but they steer. And we try to trim the sails without ever seeing the wind.

We often hear the sentence “I need to manage my emotions.” In fact, our brain never, ever takes the sentences we build around “need to” into its plans. It is usually hard to manage something you have not got to know. First you have to sit in the same room with it, look it in the face, give it a name. That can be frightening sometimes, I know. And postponed emotions have a habit of knocking at the door when we least expect it.

Are you ready to meet your emotions?

On the evening of 24 September, in Stage 4, that is exactly what we will meet. My Emotions and Me begins at 21:00 Türkiye time (20:00 CEST) and runs for two hours. Free again, and there is meditation again too!

In my next piece I will open up a little more what it means to meet our emotions. Because emotions are too wide a subject to fit into a two-hour evening 😊

Perhaps the sentence you have been putting off for years is the name of an emotion. The question is which evening you will say it, and who will be standing beside you in that room…

Go on, be brave!