Blog: Resolve to Rise

By Kerry Tottingham

Reflecting on the first 3 months of 2025 is bittersweet, with a punchy flavour profile that is less dark chocolate and more balsamic.

Sweetness has been fleeting, a berry burst stain washed away in its own juice.  There have been dark times punctuated with headline moments, my mums death enveloped by love, my husband recovering from brain surgery, dusted with bread flour from his slow rise business, my ejection from the specialist list, damage done by endometriosis unrecoverable, acceptance the only viable option.

How is work helping?

I run A Brilliant Thing CIC with my sisters. We want to create social change and tackle stress in workplaces with our work. The Brilliant Club and Healing-Centred Workplaces programmes mean we create change with individuals and organisations. The healing I learn from working with purpose-led people on diverse social missions is looping back and helping me personally at a tricky time of life.

Resolve to Rise

Love, slowness, acceptance.  At the end of March I clutch at these hopes but they are ethereal, more dust and steam than things I can hold. At the end of last year I chose the word ‘rise’ for 2025 and the air now is full of things rising. I thought ‘rise’ would help me move, intentionally upward.  The rooting and earthing of the last year, adding strength and foundation to a movement that stretches elegantly.  But instead things rise in me, memories, anger, sorrow, fear.  Resolute was my word for 2024 and resolve lingers, in between the stressful emotion, the tired thinking loops and the heaps of worry, resolve ascends.

Stirs

In March my work stirs, awakens. In our family a baby is due in one house, another house is quiet and empty, another has a change of pace.  These places we live, houses breathing through changes. Im back to online working, trying to fill up all the gaps and work in all these spaces in between, crowding out my needs.  The memory of burnout writhes, and I know the time has arisen for me to make changes too.

Time passed

Healing.  Designing it in.  Mending, tending, transforming.  Creativity, conversation, art.  These themes thread together our work at A Brilliant Thing CIC and they shape the things I need now.  What have I learnt from these themes in January 2025?  What did February and March open and provide?  One quarter through the year, the season of Imbolc a celtic marking the return of light and the first signs of spring.  It's associated with Brigid, goddess of healing and fertility, and the subject of one of the projects we are working on this year with arts organisation Emerald Lens.  The Chinese new year has passed, the year of the wood snake. Wood adds qualities of growth, creativity, flexibility, and compassion to the Snake’s natural traits of wisdom, intuition, elegance, and strategy. Shedding and renewing unfurls, matching the iterative process that is the ‘Live Well’ project we are navigating at work, a move forward, a circulation of ideas, a reshape and refine, another move forward.  March’s Spring Equinox arrived with a drenching of rain and a feeling of heaviness.  But the white light that dawned the next day had a clear stillness illuminating the rain-battered optimistic daffodils.

The choices

The end of a quarter offers an opportunity to make choices.  Integrating learning, the wisdom found in reflecting, with intentional decisions and actions for next steps. Centring healing, efforts to mend and tend, becoming whole again, returning to balance.  These principles guide in work and life.

Rhythm + Ritual

April, May, maybe June will have a new rhythm for me.  Rhythm and Ritual is all about creating patterns, habits and routines.  It's a principle that counteracts uncertainty and creates safety and is also my favourite coping mechanism. For all of the long months so far in 2025 it has been impossible to plan, mum's funeral was a brief respite to the unplanable but we had to do this quick and in the midst of early grief as my husband's operation was looming.  Uncertainty has been present all year, in shrugs and widened eyes, hands upturned.  In nods and hugs and rescheduling work. In the soaring ambition of possibility grinding against the thug and thief of inevitability.  I bought multiple planners and calendars that have been unusable.  But finally there is a plan.  We have a radiotherapy schedule.  My sisters maternity leave meant we tied down dates and schedules, our business planning development soared and settled into a roadmap. Ritual is about marking beginnings and endings, its about opening up and celebrating completion.  Again this principle has been challenging.  My mums long illness marked but not lingered over, as we hurtled into a new crisis.  Work projects completed with just a small smile of satisfaction or a nod of relief, the act of celebrating or recognising feeling too much.

This writing you are reading is a form of ritual.  Its a new ending/opening ritual I want to begin.  Part work, part personal, my experience of living my life and doing my work.  A reflective piece of writing to mark the end of a season, a quarter and the start of a new one. A recent event, held a Gorton Monastery that brought together many of the brilliant people and organisations I have worked with during my career, the cusp of celebration was in the air.  People wanted to celebrate, recognise, say look what we have done!  But the comedown was rough.  I fell asleep crying that night, for myself and for the everlasting nature of pain, the societal pain everyone was there fighting and the personal pain I know I wont stop feeling.  Despite my desire for validation in these big rooms with all these wonderful people, today, committing to this writing and opening up to whats next, feels enough for now.

So I choose to create a new rhythm, supported by systems and routines that scaffold it.  I will work 6am to 1pm.  I will keep afternoons for radiotherapy appointments, family time and home chores.  I will spend some of that time on my own appointments and needs.  I will have set lists of tasks and set days for projects.  I will build in flexibility but keep structure.  I will validate myself often and in small ways, I will keep notes, I will be my own witness.

Filter

Filter is about decision making, prioritising and choosing, a principle to create clarity. The element I always think of with this principle is water, and the image I see traces water down a hill, filtered through rocks, sediment filtered out, crystal clear rivulets pooling. In celtic symbolism, places like wells, springs, and pools were sacred healing sites and ‘filter’ this year feels very connected to physical spaces.

In The Brilliant Club, our learning programme for freelancers, founders and facilitators, the physical environment has come up almost weekly in response to our reflection prompts in the WhatsApp group.  Especially when people are feeling overwhelmed or bombarded by responsibilities, a clear, clean, calm space, complete with things chosen for usefulness, comfort or joy, provides peace.

And peace is needed right now.  To move into the spring season, with its blooms and early mornings and shift in perspective I need peace.  I choose to work with a new rhythm and I choose to do that work in specific, designed spaces.  I choose to not choose the sofa for comfort when I know the hubbub of the house around me will ramp up my stress.  I choose to set out my stall in a room with a closed door and clear up my space at the end of the day, packing away the decisions to be made tomorrow.

I choose to firm my boundaries around my space.

Collide + Align

I have always veered towards alignment but right now I want to collide.  2 days ago a van tried to overtake in a traffic light queue, careering into oncoming traffic at rush hour. I was late, cross and stuck in my own funk of a mood that hadn’t shifted for days. Specifically this van was lurching into my side of the road and forcing me to slam the brakes on.  I did not beep, force of habit following years of conditioning to be nice and understanding, but I did shout.  In fact I yelled!  The man started to fight fire with fire, hollering at me to move on.  But he saw the steel in my face and soon diverted his eyes, pretending he couldn't hear me- despite still blocking the road.

After a minute of angry emoting, and as the lights turned green, he swerved off.  I felt angry and powerful and exhilarated!  The rush of emotion was unfamiliar and I didn't want it to last but as it rushed though I felt a clearing of stagnation, and with this an ability to realign and shift my mood.  Later, in a much more familiar place (a hot soak of a bath) I read a magazine article on energetic clearing. It was about a meditation practice of working with light and energy to sweep your chakras clean.  As energy centres or portals to energy, situated within your body, chakras govern and guide aspects of self and wellbeing, and are central to some Indian spiritual traditions.  Alignment for me had always meant a coming together, a connection.  Something that happens after the collision (the moment where opposing or diverse forces or people or ideas meet, with or without a crash).  However I wondered if this clearing out, mental and emotional sweeping was a vital part of the move from collide and align.

In this wondering, I realised my too-quick steps to move into alignment has sometimes left me in people pleasing mode or being sidelined. The move into alignment avoided conflict yes but did it also override my needs?  Maybe this energetic clearing and cultivating the ability to do this would let me feel the depths of conflict, or allow me to get closer to difference with less fear as I could, (can?) trust my ability to do an energetic sweep and move forward without lasting damage from the conflict.

I choose to create space between collide and align.  I choose to stay with the things that cause me discomfort and cultivate practices that let me clear out energetically.  These might be grounding techniques, feeling the force of emotions, expressing freely, loudly, with force!

I choose to practice clearing and releasing.

Transition

Weirdly, this has been a time when this principle has been available in abundance.  Transition is all about pausing, reflecting and creating space to move from one place to another.  Hospital waiting rooms, waiting for test results, post operation recovery, all excellent opportunities to practice the principle of transition.  But it is so uncomfortable!

Waiting does create a container to pause and reflect, but this kind of enforced reflection has more often lead me to spiral, worry and get things out of proportion. A far better reflective space has been in The Brilliant Club.  Weekly reflective prompts which I have both shared and responded to has led to a morning practice of coffee in the garden, just for 5 minutes before others wake up, and a deeper sense of both self and the people around me.  And thats the nub of it, a waiting room is a lonely place, reflective practice is the opposite.  Even if practiced alone, reflection can connect you to others, enabling you to express yourself more clearly, be more confident in your own thoughts and be able to hold space for diverse perspectives.

I choose to drink coffee in the garden at 6am.  I choose to practice as well as share. I choose quiet moments that connect me to a bigger community.

Contribute + Benefit

Ah contribute and benefit, everyones stickiest principle.  It sounds easy, what can we give others, how can we offer? But the hardest part isnt the giving, its the receiving, and to set ourselves up to do that we have to ask.

Now I am in the habit of taking on more than I should.  Its sometimes because I genuinely think I am able to do more than is possible, sometimes because I think there is no option, sometimes because there isn't actually another option.  But sometimes its because I don't want to ask.  I can feel embarrassed to ask for help, there I said it. When you unpick this there is ego and shame and defensiveness and pride all tangled in there with the overgiving, anything but humility and the purity that ‘giving’ seems to imply.  I write about this in my book, in a chapter called Scrap the Helper.  I call for a shift in how we think of helping, how we get up these difficult power dynamics by not asking for what we need and want.  Not asking keeps you separate, asking and offering creates community- the main outcome of the principle Contribute and Benefit.

In December and January I had to ask.  I had to ask work colleagues to take on delivery work and lean on friends and family more than I was comfortable with.  Yet those work colleagues who I had to ask more from, describe me asking quite differently.  Instead of being burdened as I had assumed, they had enjoyed the stretch were grateful for the opportunities and wanted more!  This enabled us to think about how we allocate work and see that others are sometimes better placed to take on work, bringing their own beautiful skills and dynamics to projects. We have brought our Facilitator Training forward in response, a progression path for The Brilliant Club members, to keep growing this pool of people.

So I choose more of this.  I choose to invest in the people around me, creating a loop that benefits us all.  I choose to see A Brilliant Thing as a community effort, a place where multiple people can offer and receive. I choose to seek out the artists, facilitators and future-makers we all need.

5 Choices

As the next season is beckoned in, I have 5 choices to guide me and my work.

I choose an early start and early finish workday, scaffolded by systems and routines.

I choose to pay attention to physical space and the decisions I make around my time.

I choose regular energetic clear outs.

I choose to drink coffee in the garden at 6am and listen to the birds sing.

I choose to invest in the people around me, strengthening a loop that benefits us all.