Dare To Live

…just hold on. Hold onto something…anything, and simply refuse to let go, no matter what demons plague your mind with reasons you ‘should’ or even ‘must’ let go. Hold onto a family member. They don’t even have to be close to you. They may need you in the future and you want to be there for them, and strong enough to help them, if and when they do. Hold onto a friend. You don’t need to have known them long and you may not even speak in a couple of years’ time. But at this moment in time, someone knows you and sees you fairly regularly and would love to see you feeling good and happy. You mightn’t yet even realise that they are a friend. Hold onto a dream. The wonderful thing about dreams is they are even better if they don’t make too much sense. Your dream doesn’t need to be at all reasonable. No one else might support it. You might even be embarrassed to share it. But hold onto it. Because one day, standing in a place that is far happier than that in which you now find yoursel

"Worry is like a rocking chair - it gives us something to do, But gets us nowhere." In the supposedly big bad world that we live in nowadays, it may seem like worry is just part and parcel of life's experience. Sure isn't there always something to be worried about? What others think of us, what we're doing with our lives, if we'll ever get better, what could go wrong, our flaws, our failures, the unknown, getting older, growing up and the list goes on and on. Engaging in any of these fruitless worries takes up our time, energy and allows worry spread like a weed throughout our minds. Worry is a misuse of our imagination; giving it our time means we throw away our creativity and mental energy into creating scenarios we don't even want to happen. The 'what if's and the worst case stories we tell ourselves are just leading us away from our potentially brilliant reality. Worry keeps us busy - it keeps us from having to fully participate in

For many years I felt that life was about pleasing others, about taking on their opinions for my life, about doing what they wanted, about being influenced by the status quo, about how I was expected to live my life, whether this suited me or not. but now I know differently. Now I know you have the right to live your own life without expectation from others, and in a way that meets your values.   It is ok to put yourself first and believe in yourself and the power of “ I ” I have witnessed first hand how the power of positivity and the power of “ I ”,   can completely change a persons life. I had a daughter who suffered from mental health problems for many years but recently she was told that she was recovered.   This was not something that came easily or that came quickly but instead it was planted as a seed in her mind and with lots of nurturing and lots of TLC has come into full blossom only to come to full fruition when she has achieved full freedom. This

Mental health seems to go through phases of being a bit of a hot topic. As a society we’re beginning to speak about it more, opening up and channelling courage in talking about the struggles in our lives. There’s a surge in effort to break down stigma and awareness campaigns to beat the band. But what message are we actually giving out about it? Personally, I think it’s great to vocalise what would otherwise eat us up. Shame cannot survive in the spoken word so it’s important to put words to our feelings and get them out of our systems. But it’s also important not to dwell on or glamourize the ‘struggle’. That’s where our message needs to be crystal clear. We need to be aware of and believing in the fact that full recovery is always possible. This is the message I believe to be worth listening to and spreading; the honest message of hope and motivation. I’m going to come out and say straight up, I am sick of reading stories of struggle rather than stories of success over men

In life we can go chasing after various goals; beauty, success, freedom, happiness, wealth - whatever we believe to be the key to improving our lives. We might think these are the things we need, surely they’ll make everything better, and so we keep on this persistent pursuit. But until we know what these words actually mean to us, we’ll keep coming up empty handed. You can’t attain what you don’t understand. We can’t become successful if our definition of the word is warped. We've explored beauty here on the blog, took a look at   happiness  too,  so now we’re going to divulge another DareToLive definition.  The definition of success, from my experience. Success, like beauty, used to mean something different to me. I couldn’t always pinpoint it, but I was sure my life was completely devoid of it. It was a variety of vague ideas of perfection. Success was a loaded term, carrying with it high expectations, pressure and me constantly falling short. It meant mistakes we