December offers us a natural moment to slow down and reflect on the year we are closing.
At the start of 2025, I committed to focusing on the quality of Connection — one of the 8 C’s of Self within the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model. Looking back now, what stands out most are the many ways that intention has been lived, tested, deepened, and reshaped.
Professional reflections: learning, community, and holding things lightly
This year, connection showed up first and foremost in my relationship with myself. I learned to listen more carefully to my body — tuning into my physical cues, my senses, and my internal signals. Paying attention to both biological needs (interoception) and emotional needs became a daily practice rather than a theoretical idea.
Mentally, I also made a commitment to engage with something each day that stretched me. It reminds me of the “Just for Today” reading from 12-step fellowships, which invites people to read something that “requires effort, thought and concentration.” That ethos shaped much of my learning this year. Just for Today Card
I intentionally deepened my understanding of several areas that felt clinically, ethically, and personally important:
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Polyvagal Theory, which has deepened my understanding of nervous system regulation and safety https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org/whatispolyvagaltheory
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Burnout and compassion fatigue, particularly through the lens of professional quality of life
https://proqol.org/ -
Neurodiversity, with a particular focus on nervous system dysregulation in women
https://www.additudemag.com/dysregulated-nervous-system-women-adhd/amp/ -
The new BACP accreditation standards, and how these evolving frameworks shape professional identity and practice
https://www.bacp.co.uk/news/news-from-bacp/2025/5-december-new-accreditation-routes-to-open-wednesday-11-february-2026/
All of this learning mattered — and what became increasingly clear was how I learn best: in community. Through engaging in group learning spaces — exploring subjects that I hadn’t planned, including social justice, menopause, and the joining of a lively supervision group — I experienced learning as relational, embodied, and alive. Sharing experiences, growing alongside others, and allowing humour and laughter to be present helped me go deeper, take myself less seriously, and remember that laughter really is good medicine.
Reflecting on my “grand plans” for 2025 has also been humbling. Plans are useful — and then life happens.
I had hoped to deepen connection with friends and family through more artist-date experiences, travel, and adventures. What I hadn’t planned for was the impact of friends and family navigating illness, health challenges, and the shock of bereavement.
- I planned, with my husband, to rehome a dog — without fully appreciating how different the experience would be to welcome a young Doberman compared with my previous experience of Labradors.
- I also cleared my diary to act as a Programme Assistant on an IFS Level 1 training. What I hadn’t anticipated was how profoundly that experience would change me — widening my connections within the IFS community, opening doors, deepening relationships, and shifting my understanding of what it means to live in a Self-led way.
One resource that feels especially important to name here is a talk by Derek Scott — therapist, teacher, activist, and father — whose work continues to influence how I understand Self-leadership as a spiritual practice:
https://internalfamilysystems.pt/multimedia/webinars/spiritual-practice-self-leadership
Once again, I’ve been reminded of the importance of holding things lightly. We make plans — and life has its own intelligence.
I will be teaching Working Introduction to Transactional Analysis on Sunday 25 January 2026. I’ve offered this CPD since becoming fully self-employed in 2016, and as I approach my ten-year anniversary, this workshop will mark a temporary closing chapter in my CPD teaching.
Much has changed since I first delivered this training. Alongside the core content of Transactional Analysis, my professional and personal development — including training in transpersonal psychology and Internal Family Systems — which has fundamentally reshaped how I teach. While the structure remains familiar, the depth, perspective, and relational quality of the work have evolved significantly.
If you’d like to book this workshop, you can do so via this website. https://heliostestingdomain.uk/courses/
More broadly, this moment has led me to pause the development of new CPD offerings until at least spring 2026. I’m taking time to review my diary and reflect on feedback about what has been most meaningful and supportive. If you have ideas, suggestions, or interest in future collaborative offerings — whether in-person or online — I would genuinely welcome hearing from you.
Up until now, I’ve written in quarters — deliberately, consistently, and with intention. That structure has served me well. But as I move into 2026, I’m choosing a different rhythm.
That choice reflects not a stepping back, but a deeper alignment.
Personal reflections: the Year of the Hermit and integration
As 2025 closes, I’ve been reflecting through the lens of the Year of the Hermit. In Tarot, the Hermit corresponds with the number 9 — and numerologically, 2025 (2 + 0 + 2 + 5) also reduces to 9. That convergence has felt deeply meaningful, giving symbolic shape to a year that has been inward, integrative, and quietly transformative.
The Hermit invites introspection, patience, and a willingness to listen inwardly. Holding a lantern, the Hermit doesn’t illuminate the entire path — only the next few steps. This year asked me to slow down, not as a withdrawal from life or work, but as a way of deepening how I inhabit both. It has been a year of learning to trust what becomes visible when I don’t rush ahead.
In my work with clients, this has shown up as an increased capacity to stay with complexity. I’ve noticed less urgency to move towards insight or resolution, and a greater ability to accompany people as they come into relationship with their internal systems. Working through an IFS lens continues to reinforce for me that healing doesn’t come from fixing parts, but from creating the conditions in which they feel safe enough to be known.
In supervision, I’ve felt a growing confidence in holding space for uncertainty — my own and others’. Rather than needing to have answers, I’ve become more comfortable modelling curiosity, humility, and trust in the supervisee’s internal wisdom. The Hierophant energy of my own life path has softened: less about authority as expertise, and more about authority as grounded presence.
In teaching and supporting others on their IFS journey, I’ve experienced a shift from delivering content to facilitating integration. What feels most alive now is helping people sense IFS in their bodies and relationships, not just understand it cognitively. There has been an opening — an increased emotional availability — that allows learning, supervision, and therapy to be relational rather than transactional.
As I close this Hermit year, what I carry forward is integration: a felt alignment between how I live internally and what I offer professionally. I feel less divided between roles — therapist, supervisor, teacher — and more rooted in a steady Self-energy that can adapt to each context without losing its centre.
Looking ahead to 2026, the numerology shifts. The year reduces to 10 (2 + 0 + 2 + 6), which in Tarot corresponds with the Wheel of Fortune. Where the Hermit has been about stillness, discernment, and inner alignment, the Wheel speaks to movement, participation, and change. Ten is both an ending and a beginning — a number that holds completion and the momentum of what comes next.
As I step into this new cycle, I’m consciously choosing courage — not as force or performance, but as a willingness to stay present as the wheel turns. The Wheel of Fortune invites trust in life’s rhythms and a readiness to engage with change rather than resist it. For me, this feels like an invitation to embrace all of me: the reflective and the visible, the grounded and the emergent, the inward listening and the outward expression.
This past year hasn’t made my work louder or more public. Instead, it has made it truer — quieter, deeper, and more embodied. That feels like a foundation I can trust as I step into the movement of the Wheel, meeting what arises with courage, and allowing my writing, like my work, to emerge when it is ready to be spoken.
As this chapter closes, I’m holding a deep respect for courage — my own, and that of the people I work alongside. The courage to speak when there is something to say, to reach out rather than withdraw, to stay curious, to connect, and to keep walking the path of becoming more fully ourselves. In that spirit, I’ll continue to write — not on a schedule, but when something feels ready to be shared — trusting that this, too, is part of the ongoing invitation to Be All of You.
