Tales from a Hospital Bed eBook

Just in case you missed it, I have now collated all my ‘Tales from a Hospital Bed’ into one eBook. You can now down load it for free here. You don’t even need to sign up for any newsletters (I know how annoying that can be. Although mine is fab, of course!)

I have a couple of reasons for doing this. The main one is to provide a personal story of how photography and writing can support your recovery from difficulty – in this case major surgery. I hope that other people will be inspired to support themselves in similar circumstances. Creating photos that reflect how I was feeling each day and writing about the experiences felt and lived enabled me to process the difficulty, to accept each day’s challenges and lean into the future.

My other reasons are to do with developing my own practice. By collating and sharing all the photos and stories in one place I can both see how the ongoing practice works and let it all go. These two are at the heart of personal acceptance of difficulty: seeing and understanding what has happened is the ground you need to stand on to move towards acceptance. Then you can let it all go.

This phrase, ‘let it all go’ is deceptive. It seems easy to understand and yet it can be so difficult to execute. You probably understand what it means, but doing it may be beyond where you find yourself. Perhaps it is easier to think of the concept as a softening. I am not sure that you can in one particular moment just ‘let go’ of something. You can have the intention, but sometimes the thoughts and fears that accompany the difficulty are particularly sticky. Softening with the experience, breathing into the challenging thoughts and remembering you are loved (in that very moment) are the first steps in changing your thoughts and ‘letting go’.

Creating photos to support your well-being is what this is all about, and I am making positive strides forwards towards the development of my book, ‘Photography for Well-Being’. I have started writing and doing my new photography activities, and I am keeping an ongoing workbook, which will form part of the book. In fact my next post will share some recent experiences in this wild weather we have been having. Look out for ‘Weather or Not’ early next week.