On art-making, somatic release and finding our way back to ourselves.

"What comes out of your body doesn't make you ill; what stays inside there does." -Dr Edith Eger

When Words Don’t Reach

There are days when words arrive easily. And days when they don’t.

Something feels heavy, restless, or tender in the chest, yet defies every sentence you try to wrap around it. The words make you feel a disconnect to whats going on really deeply inside. 

I’m writing this while grieving my little Alfie, my pet companion for nearly eleven years, and finding that painting is one of the few places I don’t have to explain and I am allowed to grieve. 

On those heavier days, language can feel like an awkward container. But a colour, a feeling in the body, a movement might come closer.

A deep, saturated indigo. A restless sweep of charcoal. A streak of pale yellow finding its way into the corner of a page.

We often imagine we must understand what we are carrying before we can begin to release it. Yet one of the most generous truths of the creative life is that the hand can begin where language falters.

A page does not demand that you explain yourself. It simply offers a place for what you feel to exist before you have figured it out. Because the world rarely gives us a formal ritual or enough time off to mourn, the canvas, sketchbook, or journal becomes that dedicated space. It honors a bond built on years of pure, unconditional devotion.

Why Expression Heals

Expression, Without the Pressure to Be Happy

There is a sentiment often shared among painters and seekers: 'The opposite of depression is not joy, but expression.'

As a poetic thought, it strikes a chord because it releases us from the exhausting expectation to always be cheerful, positive, or healed. Depression and deeper healing or the feelings of grief are layered and complex; expression is not a simple clinical cure, nor is art a substitute for professional support. But within those words lies an invitation our modern lives desperately need:

You do not have to feel happy to make something.

You do not have to turn your sorrow into a polished masterpiece, or manufacture an optimistic ending. A painting can remain unresolved. A wash of pigment can stay moody and dark. A journal entry can end on an open question. 

So much of the world asks us to present our emotions in neat, socially palatable packages or even in reels. Creativity offers an antidote to that pressure. The canvas welcomes the muddle. It asks for your presence, not your perfection. 

I write this as I myself am dealing with the loss of a dear pet, a grief that comes in swirls and hits you, a grief that not many understand, either through not having experienced loss of close ones, or the unconditional love of a pet.

Pet loss is felt so deeply. The flashbacks of holding their sweet head in your hands, of your loving bond. It hits hard, deep into the heart. I feel like a different person than I was before. Not that I am hardened or less of a person, just different. My head and heart feel tired.

Grief arrives with a particular, quiet cruelty. We have built our daily rhythm around their heartbeat—the soft patter on floorboards, the warm weight resting near the corner of our yoga mat, the silent language of a gaze that required no vocabulary.

Alfie would always find me at every Savasana, tuck his little nose under my hand and snuggle up knowing this was quiet time. A special memory, I would roll over when ready to come up and take a moment in childs pose and place my forehead on his (our telepathic way of saying 'I love you'). 

He had been increasingly ill over the last few months and I had taken on the role of around the clock nurse, feeding, medicine, cuddles and pain killers became our new normal for a while it was our routine. 

Because love for a pet exists entirely beyond words, trying to mourn them with sentences often leaves us feeling stranded. The silence in the house is physical, the silence in your heart is purely emotional. 

Where that absence of joy was, I feel deeply compelled to paint, to express. It is a way of feeling my body and emotions and moving them onto canvas. Picking up a brush isn't really now about creating art, like i suppose any art therapist would tell you. It was simply a way to keep my hands moving when my chest felt full.

Laying down washes of ochre, deep indigo, or the softest moss green became a way to speak back to an ache that had no name. The canvas didn't ask me to be strong, to move on, you can get another one or to tidy up my tears. It just held the weight of an empty room until I was ready to step back into the light. 

I imagined him going back into the earth, cosy and warm and at rest and painting that made me feel connected to him and feel his peace. Nearly 11 years together, it leaves you very reflective, I have moved through so many feelings, and right now I simply love and miss him.

Some days painting brings a little ease. Other days I still feel just as sad afterwards, but I have spent that time making room for him and for what I feel.

Some things take you by surprise.

This isn’t the first time grief has found its way into my painting. 'Ceto' the painting above, was painted, during the lions gate portal a period of complete energetic openness, the sudden and unexpected death of a popular legend that I loved during my childhood, really hit hard as it bought back the same jolt of emotions at the sudden loss of a dear friend 10 years earlier. 

The shock and then the swirling of emotion in my stomach would come in waves and waves through the night and day, I would deeply breathe with it like a panic attack... 'What is this?' I would think, 'am I really ill? Is this what spiraling feels like?' I walked and walked for hours a day, just to rid the feeling - but it was my body reacting to that same feeling that I probably hadn't dealt with very well in the first place, grief, and all those deeply held emotions and walls I had put up to face the world and carry on with the daily grind of showing up, working to distraction and glazing over emotions.  

But these emotions kept flooding out, compelling me move and paint every day, walking, yoga, running, evem dancing - what started in blacks and darkest blues, lifted and calmed and became a beautiful piece of energy in art. 

Grief isn't just an abstract thought—it is a physical silence in the room. Painting fills that stillness, even for those moments that take over you. Painting becomes a somatic companion when the house feels suddenly, sharply empty. 

Abstract art, colour washes, and raw brushstrokes operate in that exact same non-verbal realm as your felt emotion. You are speaking back to that love in its native tongue.

Small Marks, Small Acts of Agency

When life feels dictated by outside obligations, choosing a colour can seem deceptively small.

Yet it is a choice that belongs entirely to you.

You choose where to touch the surface. How firmly to press. Whether to leave a wide, breathing margin of white space, or cover every inch in bold, layered pigment. You can change your mind midway through. You can honour an accidental smudge instead of trying to erase it. Your head feels like it's just somewhere else, I felt so exhausted, all I could manage was painting, my eyes still hurt, sore and swollen. 

These modest gestures carry profound psychological weight.

Chronic stress tends to erode our sense of control; picking up a tool and altering a surface restores it. You don't need a grand artist’s loft or an upcoming gallery exhibition to claim this medicine. You only need a willing minute at the kitchen table, the back of an envelope, or a quiet corner of your floor.

Some days it feels like a heavy, dark, suffocating anchor in the ribcage; other days it is an unexpected burst of golden sunlight remembering their joy, their love of laying out in the late afternoon sun, or running up and down the stairs. Painting lets both coexist without needing to tidy them up. 

Tenderness Is Pure Expression of the Soul

This is a painting from earlier in the year, whilst exploring my own divine feminine and reflecting on that through all my connections. What started as gestures of warmest marks and love, turned to a piece centered about Tenderness.

My re-imagining of a world where the dearest love is felt and given to u all. All genders, all ages and through all societies, a world centered around tenderness, can you imagine the human potential? The balance of the masculine and feminine together in the community, men being able to express their feminine from birth, the balance of yin and yang. 

The soft orbs of feminine light, the touches of dripping texture and pastel marks. This was painted earlier this year, it is warm and bright, just as the universal spirit holds us in tenderness. The very thing that terrifies us the most will utterly transform us if we can trust it. That is the artist's journey, to connect within and to  expression of our soul. 

A soft and loving embrace, Tenderness, in it's very softness it is insurmountable, invincible an inevitable.The divine feminine in all its power. I am still on my expression story - as always - I want to truly reflect my own humanity and perhaps spirituality through painting. What I wish I could say fully everyday to all my friends, family and people I touch. 

I am exploring my own universe through creativity and right now, my work is not that pretty, maybe thats a reflection of loosing my precious pet, my imagining of him returning to the ground, as we come into winter and think of nature going into the ground and it's eventual re-birth, I think I am rather on my own journey here. It may take time to feel better, and that's ok too. 

'Interconnectedness' in blues - a piece imagining the spiritual realms, of the soul lifting to other dimensions

Expression as Somatic Release

When emotions feel trapped, they rarely resolve through intellectual thinking alone. Grief, anxiety, and burnout don’t just live in the mind—they settle into the body, manifesting as tight shoulders, shallow breathing, and physical heaviness.

Somatic release is the gentle process of letting those stored energies move through you. When you unroll a mat to move intuitively, take deep, conscious breaths, or put paint to paper without overthinking the outcome, you create a physical exit route for what you’ve been holding.

I feel grief in my body as much as in my thoughts. Movement and painting give me ways to respond to that heaviness, even when I cannot explain it.

Movement, breath, and art become mechanisms of emotional circulation—restoring flow where stasis once took hold. You aren't forcing yourself to feel better; you are simply allowing your inner world to be seen, felt, and released.

From that swirling depths at the start of painting, Ceto, came in healing, came in forgiveness and came in light. Soft and gentle touches explored, I wasn't planning on doing anything with this painting, it was for me, I could feel it - but following a studio visit from an artist friend, I decided to try it as another expression and this is now one of my favourite mats to practice on.

Really grounding, it feels safe, I find the blues so calming and fluid, I moved with the breath deeper, to practice on this mat inspires my flow, turns my senses inwards in practice and the breath - to true flow. Movement helps emotional suppression, it helps to move the pain and release it with the breath. 

There is an effortless conversation between painting and movement. My two healing loves of art and yoga, my spaces for true expression in my soul. One to get out of my head and really feel with the brush and one to feel into my body and my emotions, to connect, somatic movement, to flow and feel where my energy is stagnant, in pain, grief or otherwise. 

Of course there is time for discipline, a time for alignment, a time for learning and historic texts. But there is also time for expression, for movement to heal, for feeling in the body and expressing yourself, with tenderness. 

In both spaces, we can easily become seduced by performance:

• How does this pose look?

• Is this drawing good enough?

• Am I doing this right?

And in both spaces, true presence only arrives when we abandon performance for inquiry:

• How does this movement feel from the inside out?

• What happens if the brush slows down?

• Where am I bracing against the ground, and where can I soften?

Neither practice asks you to arrive in a state of enlightened calm. You can step onto your mat feeling fractured, tired, or impatient, you can arrive in pain, in grief or in joy. You can come to the easel with trembling hands. You can feel it all in the body and not know how and what to say to the human sitting right next to you.

A line can wobble; your balance can give way. Neither is a failure—both are simply evidence of being alive and in presence. 

Practical Ways to Express Daily

A Quiet Ritual for the Week Ahead

If your chest feels full today, give yourself permission to step away from words.

1. Gather Simple Tools: Don’t overthink it. A piece of scrap paper, a stub of charcoal, school pastels, watercolours, or even a soft graphite pencil.

2. Arrive Without an Agenda: Take three slow, expansive breaths. Notice the texture of your mood without naming it good or bad.

3. Ask the Colour: If today’s feeling had a temperature, a weight, or a tone, what would it look like? What am I drawn to in this moment? 

4. Make the First Mark: Let the paint run together until the boundaries blur. Journal in jagged, breathless strokes. Smear pigment with your fingertips. Allow your wet tears to soak the paint. Your emotions are valid, your loss is felt. 

5. Release the Need to Show It: You do not have to photograph this. You do not have to explain it. You can fold it up, tuck it into a drawer, or let it dry quietly on the windowsill. Collect them into a file for later reflection, sometimes there is beauty in some of the marks you make, a story hidden behind your work, that's nice to look back on when you are ready. Just like in a journal or diary. 
   
   

Returning Home to Yourself

We live in a culture obsessed with output, metric, and validation. But creativity was never really meant to be a performance for others, I suppose for some it might be. But for me, it was meant to be a homecoming.

You do not create to prove your worth to the world. You create to give whatever you are carrying permission to speak, to soften, and to be witnessed.

Pick up the brush. Roll out the mat. Breathe into the quiet space you have carved out for yourself. I invite you to gift yourself ease. Especially to those of you going though high emotions, the gift of grace is something we often don't allow ourselves. Feeling emotions are hard work and exhausting - so invite more ease into your life during these times. 

What if we pushed less? Could we create more?

What if we could trust more of our own essence to support our daily lives. What if we engage with ourselves fully? With the breaths of being human?

I am opening up to a place to lean more softly into the challenging, hard and prickly places of growth, to be with my grief and feel it fully, where before i would distract or run away, reply with a 'fine' - I am going to express it fully to myself. To express my love and loss through every mark and movement in my body. To sit and feel what comes up and not run away or delve into my lifetime of grinding. 

Create, explore, soften—and let the beauty of your own presence be enough.

My Little Alfie working on the mood boards before a client meeting... 

Alfie waiting patiently for Savasana. He was there designing logos with me on the floor, choosing artworks and colourways, dreaming in colour, testing and eating all my samples and any paper tear sheets, fabric swatches and his favourite cardboard and natural rubber! Nearly 11 years of sitting under my desk while I type away, munching hay or testing out all our lovely mats! 

Over to You:When was the last time you made something just for the sensation of making it, with no audience in mind? Tell us of your own pet loss or feelings and how art or movement has helped you? We would love to hold space for your reflections in the comments below.

Journal Prompt: "What emotion am I currently withholding from being seen?"