For the last year or so, I’ve been working with a kind of mantra — a spiral of questions that guides both my life and my work:

• What is mine to learn?
• What is mine to create?
• What is mine to contribute?
• What is mine to let go?

These questions aren’t linear. They circle, repeat and deepen. You could argue the spiral might begin with “What is mine to let go?”, but the beauty of a spiral is that it has no fixed beginning or end. It’s ongoing and iterative.

They support reflection, journalling, sitting with complexity and ambiguity. They help me live when I don’t have answers. They help me tolerate what is unknown and unknowable — whether in life, in love, or in loss.

This quartet of questions has become a kind of inner compass. Regenerative. Nourishing. Stretching. Clarifying. The kind of inquiry that expands rather than contracts.

Alongside it, four elemental, rhyming words have found their way into my practice — sparked in part by Caroline Ward’s Finding Your Flow programme, and inspired by nature’s own wisdom and rhythms: Flow – Sow – Grow – Glow

Another spiral. Another rhythm. Another way of being in the world.

Each invites its own reflection:

• Flow – What am I sensing or allowing? Where can I soften or let go, to be in flow?
• Sow – What intention or action feels ready to be planted?
• Grow – What is asking to be tended, strengthened or stretched?
• Glow – What is ripening? What wants to be seen, honoured or shared?

 

During a recent Holotropic Breathwork session, I invited these dynamics into my journey. What came was a powerful image:

Me, resting in a slow-flowing, shallow stream. Not drowned like Hamlet’s Ophelia, but peacefully held by water and nourished by earth. Life pulsing through me. And from my body — specifically my chest and belly — lotus flowers were growing. (Yes – really!)

I often sense stars, galaxies, and ancestral presence in these sessions — a gentle web of connection holding me through time and space. A deep sense of being part of something vast and intimate at once.

And even in breathwork, my mind continues to weave away. I found myself wondering:

How do these questions and these dynamics relate to one another?

Do they relate — could they relate — to the classical elements: Water, Air, Earth, Fire?

Could these spirals — one of inquiry, one of motion — be brought together into a deeper map of transformation?

 

What’s emerged for me so far is a kind of double spiral:

An inner compass of reflection: Learn – Create – Contribute – Let Go

An outer flow of movement: Flow – Sow – Grow – Glow

And threaded through both, the four elements — evocative qualities that help us name where we are and what might be needed.

 

Here’s what’s landed for now:

Flow ↔ Learn – Water: Letting life, love, or grief soften and teach. Releasing resistance. Being shaped by what is.

Sow ↔ Create – Air: Breathing new intentions into being. Naming desires. Making meaning visible.

Grow ↔ Contribute – Earth: Rooting into what matters most in order to serve well. Offering something steady, tangible, or enduring.

Glow ↔ Let Go – Fire: Radiating with purpose, living what is to be lived. Releasing with grace. Honouring what has been.

 

These cycles invite a becoming — not a prescription for how to live, but a possibility to live into.

The cycles and their framing feel spacious and versatile. I don’t feel they relate just to grief, though they’re certainly informed by my experience of living with it intimately. They feel just as relevant to leadership, change, transitions and transformation — any threshold we cross during our lives: endings and beginnings, identity shifts, moments of reckoning or desire for regeneration.

I believe this framework has relevance for larger-scale change too — for organisations navigating complexity, seeking to become more purpose-full, regenerative, and fit for the future we so need to create together.

These threads are already weaving themselves into the tapestry of my work. While I imagine they’ll inform many of my offerings in time, I plan to begin with a grief-focused suite under the banner Grief-Wise:

1-1 Grief-Wise Coaching – A supportive container for those navigating the mess and upheaval of significant grief — whether personal, professional, societal or ecological.

Grief-Wise Retreats – In-person gatherings for rest, reflection and renewal in community. Spaces that honour grief as a regenerative force, relevant to the bereaved and to those navigating significant loss or transition in other realms of life.

Grief-Wise for Coaches – An online programme to support fellow coaches in becoming more grief-literate, confident, and resourced in walking alongside whatever grief their clients may carry.

 

The image of the lotus keeps returning. A flower that blooms from the mud — not in spite of it, but because of it. A reminder that pain and beauty are not in conflict. They coexist. They accompany one another.

“No mud, no lotus,” wrote Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Vietnamese Zen teacher whose words support so many of us, especially in these challenging times. Suffering, he teaches, is not the opposite of happiness — it’s the very ground from which happiness grows.

And so I wonder…

• Which question are you most living right now — to learn, to create, to contribute, or to let go?
• What could begin to bloom in you, even through the mud?

And if you feel drawn to the spiral of Flow – Sow – Grow – Glow:

• Where are you flowing freely? Where does your flow feel blocked?
• What do you long to sow? What’s needed to support that seed?
• What in you is ready to grow — and what might it take to tend it?
• And what wants to shine, to glow — to be seen, acknowledged, or celebrated?

Feel free to share in the comments or reach out directly. I’d love to hear what this stirs in you.