rain

offerings to help you on your journey to recover, awaken, imagine, now

RAIN is a framework, rooted in Buddhism and the product of my life as an artist, activist and business-person. Having tried tools for my wellbeing in my travels in India as well as those available to me as an artist and Buddhist at home in London, I have developed a package of remedies that I now offer, having emerged from an extensive period of commitment to my own healing and recovery.

I know from personal experience the demands of the working world and the authenticity we are asked to separate ourselves from, to simply keep a roof over our heads.

I also know that having given my all to my activism for the LGBTQ+ community, I was burned out and depleted. I had been perpetuating a cycle of self-sacrifice that the conditioning of my culture had taught me. I had to learn self-compassion and establish this as a daily practice to able to make choices that do not require me to self-abandon.

My work as an artist fills me with joy, yet simultaneously asks me to bear the cost of this myself as there is no industry to support me and to bow to the mediocrity that gatekeepers require of us. We are all creative beings. We do not need permission to be so.

The Buddha identified the sufferings of birth, old age, sickness and death. Yet today we have many more challenges that we face. Our lives are more complex as we face the challenges of trauma, oppression, disempowerment and apathy. I believe these are the four sufferings of today and RAIN is the framework I have developed to empower myself and now you, to overcome them. RAIN = recover, awaken, imagine, now.

The remedy to trauma is recovery. Most of us go through our lives repeating the same patterns that were passed down to us by our parents or we develop our own coping mechanisms that harm ourselves and others. Recovery is a crucial part of our path to living happy and healthy lives if we want to build relationships and a society that mirrors this.

The antidote for oppression is silencing the voice of our own internal oppressor, which is in our self-talk and the views we have of others. When we listen to this voice, we learn it is not us speaking but the conditioning we learned from our education system, media and family. We need to change this programming by awakening ourselves to it and relearning our world view.

The disempowerment we feel is because we are being prevent from imagining a different life and world. This is intentional. To reclaim our power, we need to access our creativity which is our right, not a privilege. When we begin to create, and imagine after we have started our recovery and awakening journey, only then can we imagine a new world for ourselves and begin to dream of a new way of life. Until we recoever and awaken, we can only ever imagine the world we already have. This is what has kept us stuck until now. They don’t want us creating.

Finally, we must take action. Our biggest fight is the apathy we feel. We are all activists by virtue of being alive at this time. It is down to each of us showing up to our own individual purpose. But activism without healing, as I found all around me in my work is futile and can cause more harm than good for our communities. Unhealed people taking action only creates more oppression.