our Words of the Year in 2024

I had a whole welcome to 2024 message, laid out at the end of 2023 all ready to send to my wonderful customers to thank them for their support and to highlight how my company’s services would be changing this year in 2024. 

I wanted to reinvigorate my message and jump start the year with our reasserted direction. 

But to celebrate the upcoming Chinese New Year, this style of post feels more thoughtful.

Over Christmas I spent a lot of time connecting deeply with my why and how I can authentically show up for my customers and clients to help them from intention.

Here are our top words reflecting our intentions in business in 2024.

So Let’s get started with the first word: Authenticity

The reason for this change of tone was that I spent almost all of my Christmas time off recuperating and valuing space and time. Time to reflect and space to heal.  

I realize now I was scared. 

I was afraid to say: 

“I’m not the finished article yet myself” 

“I still live with chronic pain myself”

And even more scared to ask:

“What does that mean for me as a therapist working with chronic pain?” 

“Am I ineffectual?”

The Next word: fear, journeying into it & Yourself

So much about what was trapping me where and how I was, was fear. 

I was afraid to say this is me right now. 

The beautiful thing is that my experience drives me. 

It gives me massive amounts of empathy. 

It enables me to value all of someone:

Someone's physical health, mental health, relationships, working struggles, spirituality and a lack or surge in beliefs. 

It also makes me seek again and again that missing piece of the puzzle for greater and greater depths of healing. 

It means I practice every single word that I speak. 

I have myself spent countless hours receiving treatments 

I’ve spent countless more reading, meditating, and listening to my body, seeing the way that mind and body intersect. 

The Next word: uncertainty in the process of going inwards

I’ve learnt to value uncertainty and appreciate insight comes in its own time and with patience and compassion.

For myself I found that my life shifted irrevocably. 

I no longer held the same beliefs whatsoever. 

I learnt so well to live in the moment that the future for me was totally uncertain. 

I realise now that the image of the future I used to have before, was just that, an image, or a sign, in buddhist beliefs. 

It wasn’t true. It was a shortcut to thinking, a map, an approximation. 

The future has always been uncertain. 

In the process of healing, I am finding that some uncertainty and discomfort in that uncertainty is actually the place I’ve grown from. 

It’s taken me a very long time to realize this, and it’s said even now quietly and cautiously that perhaps it is in fact an opportunity to see and change. 

“The hidden gift inside a spiritual or emotional crisis is the potential psychological breakthrough or awakening of the soul. The old idea is that the troubles we encounter in the world individually or collectively, are there to awaken things that are hidden inside this abundance of spirit and imagination, that can bring vital energy to the world and the human.” - Michael Mead

The Next word: finding & trusting your voice

My guiding star today has become finding my inner voice/inner self 

And listening deeply. 

I have come to realize that fear is a very old word and most of all a powerful emotion. 

Fear came from the word fare, as in thoroughfare. 

Fear in its truest form is an invitation. A mirror reflecting an opportunity to learn about ourselves. To come back into alignment with what and who we are. 

The final words: knowledge & understanding

I am learning the difference between intellectual and experiential knowledge. I am beginning to trust that we learn things experientially and they can connect on much deeper levels.

Even writing that sentence challenges the person I am and once was, who pursued a PhD in nuclear fusion materials, and who will always jump at the chance to understand something deeply.

To gather information and assimilate waiting for the moment when those disparate pieces create a beautiful whole tapestry. 

See even now I have a list as long as my arm of future courses in:

• physiotherapy

• chinese medicine 

• meditation

• psychotherapy 

That I still aspire to. 

being a knowledge seeker. 

That sounds really pretentious. 

But it is and always will be the truth for me. 

I often feel a deep need to understand, sometimes even to my own detriment. 

For a long time this part of me has been out of balance. 

It’s been the captain of the ship. 

A mind driving a body to extremes. 

But the intellectual mind, I realize now, is only one aspect of finding knowledge. 

Ever since I got injured I craved space & time…

Christmas, this year I finally understood it and gave myself permission. 

In that space I found aspects of myself that have never been given permission to shine. 

I realized that I have a voice. 

My journey, though only begun, is at the essence of what drives me to make sense and to sit compassionately and be. 

I am already gathering the information everyday to find out more and more about healing.

I already seek insight about what is truly important to heal. 

Which conditions help nourish. 

How can we stay more connected, more grounded and more rooted in a fast paced world?

What are the deep knowings, that ancient traditions around the world have seen in health and humanity for thousands of years, and of those pieces we’ve lost, can they help us heal again?

My mission statement this year is: To bring the knowledge I am continuously learning and searching for to my audience. 

It will not be from a place of authority, because fundamentally I believe this information should be available to every human being on this planet. 

I will be sharing my journey, pitfalls and all, and gosh I’ve already self-corrected a 100 times by misunderstanding something. 

I want to create a community of people searching for depth, connection and compassion in this world. 

I’ve realised lately that the depth of my own compassion for others deepened still further when I started learning to look at my own aspects of self with non-judgment and, even more -care. 

I want to cultivate a compassionate environment to feel like we are slowly creating more care, kindness, joy and thoughtfulness to the world we find ourselves in, and from that place start to heal. 

I was once trained to appreciate the care we provide in pain relief manifests from a bio-psycho-social approach.

I’ve begun to realize that it is so much more than that. 

Healing encompases every aspect of life, and self from the physical body, to the emotional, social and spiritual. 

Our beliefs drive us. 

This year I am seeking to speak with a living voice, connect deeply and start the journey of discovering the depths of healing and share those ideas from around the world. 

The very best of health to you & your family

Makepeace & Massage