Growing your Sustainable Self:
Within and Beyond
A book by Nickei Falconer
Energised people can grow a healthy, sustainable planet. Health and sustainability are not just ‘out there’, but also here – within you. There's a clear link between the increase of people experiencing anxiety, depression, and physical burnout and the erosion of our planet’s bio-diverse health. We can’t have an eroding world without being affected by it.
Rather than feel overwhelmed and helpless in response to climate change and the erosion of personal and planetary health, you can be an active agent of change and health: by growing your sustainability, within yourself, and then extending it: beyond.
I’ve been working with people and the planet for years to grow sustainability and wellbeing.
Imagine a way forward that harnesses our capacity for both personal growth and planetary sustainability.
Learn how to grow sustainability within the three realms you inhabit:
Heart: with yourself.
Grow your personal sustainability by learning how to support the relationship you have with yourself, through your thinking, your feelings and your physical body. Your sustainability will be eroded or enhanced by how you relate to yourself.
Hearth: with you and other.
Learn how you can grow greater health and sustainability in your physical and social environments, through how you relate with someone or to something, other than yourself.
Earth: your relationship with our Earth.
Learn how you can contribute to growing greater planetary health and sustainability from where you inhabit, by how you relate to our Earth.
This book is for you if you are experiencing anxiety, burnout, or are exhausted, or you feel there could be more to your life. If you worry about the state of our planet but feel the problems are too big, or you think there’s little you can do to make a difference.
It’s not too late for you to have energy and to enjoy your life. Once you know how to grow and maintain the sustainability of your personal environment, then you have increased energy to grow greater sustainability beyond – within the physical and social environments you inhabit upon our beautiful Earth.
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About Nickei:
I’m a relational counsellor and psychotherapist based in New Zealand, with 30 years’ experience with whole person health, working with both individuals and groups. I’m passionate about empowering people to fully inhabit their lives and to shine with energy, purpose, and joy.
I’m also a gardener, and many of the rhythms and wisdom which grow a healthy garden also relate to our wellbeing as humans — we often don’t see this because we’ve increasingly disconnected as we’ve become more ‘civilised’.
I’ve presented workshops and trainings on Growing your Sustainable Self within New Zealand, and abroad.
Mental health … or Whole Person Health?
Currently, you’ll find many messages, articles, or podcasts about mental health. Either the problems people are having with their mental health, or tips to improve your mental health.
I don’t like the term ‘mental health’. I prefer to talk about ‘whole person health’ with my clients.
The way you think and the way you feel is either supported or eroded by the quality of your physical health. Mostly, you won’t have been taught about our physiology and how to support your physical health. This can contribute to you being in ‘protection’ mode. Rather than ‘connection’ mode, which assists you to feel relaxed and at ease within yourself and within the world.
Your physical health is either supported or eroded by the quality of how you think about yourself (your self-talk) and the way you feel within yourself (your sensations and feelings) and about yourself.
There’s little teaching in our developed world about how to have a relationship with yourself. You may have learned algebra at school, or the difference between an isosceles and acute triangle, but were probably never taught about how to acknowledge and identify the feelings you were having, or how to express them. And surprisingly, you have sensations and feelings every day — probably a lot more often than you have to identify the type of triangle you’re dealing with!
You grew your IQ. But there were probably not the same opportunities for growing your EQ. This is usual for most of the people I work with (and also for my own experience growing up). What this means though, is that you become illiterate about your feelings, emotions, sensations, hunches and body wisdom. You don’t know how to be supported by the ongoing information system occurring within you as you interact with life around you. This part of you is foreign to you, even as you continually experience this within you, and you become disconnected from yourself.
This can be scary, or anxiety provoking.
You can feel that you’re losing it because you’re experiencing feelings and emotions. If you never learn the language of your sensations and feelings, nor how to support your whole person health, you can start to believe you’re having episodes of mental illness.
Learning what comprises your personal biodiversity, and how to support your whole person health and grow your sustainability, can be so useful. You’ll improve the way you feel, the way you think and restore energy in your body. You become self-empowered when you know how to look after yourself.
That’s why I dislike the term ‘mental health’: it’s singular focus, and not a systemic approach.