Gill Parkin Counselling & Psychotherapy

06/02/2025

I've been re-reading this little gem recently and it's packed with practical ideas for what we can do to look after ourselves when we're struggling!!

Drawing on years of experience as a clinical psychologi…

14/03/2024

Could today be one of these days?

A day is not lost if you failed to tick off a list, or a diet was broken.
A day is only lost if you forgot to say something kind to yourself, or another.
If you forgot to pause and search for a tiny spark of beauty amongst the drudgery, glimmering like gold in the mud.
A day is only lost if you forgot that life, even in the worst of times, is still a gift.
A gift you so very much deserve to live through
and not just survive.

Donna Ashworth
‘Wild Hope’ https://amzn.eu/d/08apIDA

Art by one of my favourite artists Bettina Baldassari - BettiPigna

05/03/2024

I know you’ll love this 🤣

29/02/2024

There’s a lovely line in this ‘Chase the light to stay right’ …… not a bad philosophy for life!!!☀️

Leap…

Without this extra day once every four years, we would eventually lose our seasons as we know them. This day exists solely to keep us in track with the sun and I love that thought. Chasing light to stay right. Whatever you do today, look for the light. And whilst we are doing that perhaps we can take a little leap in the direction of the sun too. Reach for something shiny you’ve been afraid to feel deserving of. It’s all about the light, this life. It’s all about staying with the light…

Donna Ashworth

Art by the amazing Catrin Welz-Stein



(Thank you all for your lovely well wishes yesterday on my paperback launch 🌱☀️ Sunday Times bestseller https://amzn.eu/d/i4ZqNVF)

14/02/2024

LOVE ISN’T ALL HEARTS AND FLOWERS

Sometimes, love is asking if you’ve remembered to take your vitamins or drunk enough water.

Love is a friend who checks in on you, even when you say you’re fine.

Love is a family member who worries you’re making the wrong choices, and that can often feel like anything but love, but the truth is, they live in fear of you getting hurt because they feel every inch of your pain along with you.

Love can come in all shapes and sizes but never does unconditional love look like an expensive gift or a romantic weekend away. That’s just frosting.
You’re more likely to find it in a cup of tea, made just for you.

Love is real and ugly and shouty sometimes.
Lots of tears and lots of pain as the people involved break and bond and grow together as humans.

Valentines Day should be about counting all the love you have in your world and giving gratitude for it - that may not look like a steak dinner for two...
and that’s okay.

If you are loved my friend, at all, you are blessed.
And if you have found some love for yourself along the way, then you are really winning at life.
That’s worth celebrating.

Happy Valentine’s Day ❤️

Donna Ashworth

21/01/2024

'Activity and rest are two vital aspects of life. To find a balance in them is a skill in itself. Wisdom is knowing when to have rest, when to have activity, and how much of each to have. Finding them in each other - activity in rest and rest in activity - is the ultimate freedom'.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Celebrating Silence
Art by Marcella Cooper
www.teallach.com

09/01/2024

When I say ‘happy new year’,
I’m not for a moment,
expecting this to occur,
for that is not possible,
a year must be all things.

Happiness must come and go,
like the tides and the winds,
just as sadness,
and all the emotions in between.

When I say ‘happy new year’,
I’m really wishing you,
a baseline of peace,
of gratitude.

Because if you can sit with these things,
for the most part,
happiness will thrive,
when it does arrive,
and sadness will know its place in the mix.

If you can nourish these things,
daily,
you will also grow hope,
for it flourishes in such soil.

And hope is the key,
to this enigmatic state
of ‘happiness’ we seek.

When I say ‘happy new year’,
I’m really wishing you more happy days,
than sad days,
more joy than misery,
more laughter than tears…
and the wisdom to accept,
that they all belong.

Happy new year, my friends.
Happy new year.

Donna Ashworth

Beautiful art by

31/12/2023

On the stroke of midnight tonight,
you can resolve to be better, if you like…
to be fitter,
to eat cleaner,
to work harder.

On the stroke of midnight tonight,
you can resolve to become a whole new you,
if you so choose.

Or, you can take a moment to acknowledge
what you already are.
Because it’s a lot.
You are a lot.

And you deserve to be truly seen.

On the stroke of midnight tonight,
perhaps you could congratulate yourself for coping.
For breaking, again,
for rebuilding, again.

For catching the stones life has thrown at you,
and using them to build your castle
that little bit more beautifully.

And if you have used those stones to block yourself in for the ‘heal’, perhaps you can realign them this year. Make a grander gate, not a higher wall.

You have endured, my friend.
Through times you thought unendurable.
You did.

And I don’t see the need to resolve
to become a whole new you,
when you are already so very much indeed.

Happy new year.

You made it.

Now let us face another 365 day-turn together,
arms wide…
accepting, embracing and ‘seeing’ one other,
for all we truly are…

breaks and all.

Donna Ashworth

If you don’t have my latest book, it is on sale today. Very important to me. I hope it will be the read your new year needs.

https://amzn.eu/d/eDGFsCs

ART by Sherine Tolba Sherine Tolba Paintings

30/12/2023

No, 2024 perhaps won’t be your best year yet.
Nor will it be the worst.
You see, a year is a mosaic of absolutely everything.
Joy, fear, heartache, loss, beauty, pain, love.
Failure, learning, friendship, misery, exhilaration.
Each day, each moment even, is a tiny shard of glass in this beautiful, confusing creation.
2024, like all the years before, will be another mosaic to add to your wall of art
A wall that shows the life, you are continuously gifted.
A wall that shows you are human.
A wall of survival.
I wish you many broken pieces of glass this year, my friends.
Because this is living.
And before you march on in to another year of ‘everything’, pause to look back, at the work you have created thus far.
It is quite something.
You are quite something.
Now on we go, my friends.
Onwards we very much go.

Donna Ashworth

Art by the amazing Eduardo Rodriguez Calzado

#2024

29/12/2023

'We enter that strange period between Christmas and New Year, when time seems to muddle, and we find ourselves asking again and again, What day is it? What date? I always mean to work on these days, or at least to write, but this year, like every other, I find myself unable to gather up the necessary intent. I used to think that these were wasted days, but I now realise that’s the point. I am doing nothing very much, not even actively being on holiday. .. I go for cold walks that make my ears ache. I am not being lazy. I’m not slacking. I’m just letting my attention shift for a while, away from the direct ambitions of the rest of my year. It’s like revving my engines'.

Katherine May
Painting by Dee Nickerson
www.teallach.com

29/12/2023

“Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson - Collected Poems and Translations, 1847.

Annie Ovenden (b.1945) - The Barn at Nighttime.