Newsletter

• Coaching
• Wellbeing Walks
• Travel writing and Creativity
• Wild Heart Foundation non profit work in South Africa, web address
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Coaching

More and more personal coaching psychology in my working week is incredibly satisfying and exciting. Many clients now work in creative industries or bring creativity to their more traditional workplaces. I continue to follow my own professional development working in a very practical way helping people embodying their learning, learning from the application of recent neuroscience research presented by Dr Gerhard Zimmerman, profound for personal development and managing stress. Also through personal development iMfolosi wilderness trails in South Africa. Both major threads combined with skilled supervision are contributing to my work evolving in a satisfying way, which I feel privileged to be able to use to help my very valued clients. 

0787 650 7864  / paulina@wildheartconsulting.co.uk

Wellbeing Walks

The emphasis is on slowing down, being connected with nature and yourself, a little reflecting if you wish, and gentle contact for those who want it. Small groups. Unless wet or cold makes a faster walk more relaxing, we usually take time to stop and take in our environment and replenish, and walk slowly. We usually walk a relatively short distance over a couple of hours. We navigate between us, and each take responsibility for ourselves. Be aware that walks can be hilly, on undulating rough ground, slippy, and/or wet and muddy. Use appropriate footwear, bring water. Snacks and/or sunscreen etc as needed. Meeting for lunch first or tea afterwards is usually an option.

Taking a break till May; but do contact me for details. 

No charge.

0787 650 7864  / paulina@wildheartconsulting.co.uk

Travel Writing and Creativity

Whales!

An August Afternoon in Hermanus, Western Cape, South Africa, 2013

Imagine.

Warm sunshine.

African rhythm meets steel band, a group playing mellow playful music on the brilliant green, grassy cliff edge.

Waves of the icy Atlantic Ocean crashing noisily and white, bringing salty stickiness into our nostrils and onto our skin.

Dassies, animals looking like huge gerbils with dog like muzzles yet closely related to elephants, rustling in wooden litter bins eating things I'm sure aren't good for them.

Happy looking people focusing on the sea.

Sitting on honey coloured rocks jutting into the ocean, feeling joyous calm rise up in me. Tell tale lines of shiny charcoal grey and slivers of white foam subtly different from the natural movement of the sea stirs a knowing in me. Watching closely, heart beating hopefully, sure enough, as waves part whales emerge fleetingly. An abundance, maybe six visible in Walkers Bay. 

A breach! A magnificent head emerges clear of the water, the pinky-grey rough calecites bringing home to me their individuality. A huge heart beating inside an intelligent being and I wonder if a whale thinks and how it feels. Glad and relieved they are no longer hunted here.

Now a mother and calf. It is calving season. The baby breaches over and over, perfect half circles of playful beauty.

Later in the afternoon I hear them moan. I am in heaven.

Baboons Updated

From my holiday in a Hluhluwe chalet with Jo Roberts (friend and from the Wilderness Foundation UK) in January 2015

Baboons have learned how to lift and slide the french windows, and we came home one day to fruit strewn over the floor: the housekeeper had come in and got the baboons out, and re closed the door, but had accidentally shut some baboons in my shower room! Jo opened the door, and a baboon was standing there, she got a shock and we chuckled, left the door opened and he left. I went in to start peacefully cleaning the chaos and baboon poo, the particular pungent stench of which I swear I’ll recall to my dying day. I look up and two pair of eyes fix on me from the top of the shower! My two baboon guests were utterly frozen, and given baboons have canines longer than a lions and we were in a confined space I exclaimed loudly and left like a steak of lightening! The baboons were slower to leave. One I persuaded by knocking on the window from the outside, the other we left to get himself out in his own time, but he seemed to be a frightened fixture, so Jo took control. She stationed the housekeeper at the entrance to our downstairs bedrooms, me on the stairs to the upstairs living area, both holding towels. Your guess as to their purpose as good as mine, in the event we waved them about whilst collapsing in giggles! Herself near the bathroom door and playing the noisy big-fellow. Well, it certainly had an impact, the terrified creature leaped over my head and onto one end of the 12 foot long curtain rail, one end of which promptly plummeted to the floor, the baboon more or less sliding down and catapulting himself out of the french doors.

I am always in that tension between hilarity, empathy for the terrified baboon, and stark reality when I think of this story.

The sadness to this, for me, is that rather than simply baboon proof the chalets: the “lock” was a single shallow bolt easy to shift: the chalet locks are left unfixed,  the baboons get blamed, and likely culled. Which makes me angry, so much to do in the world to help people live with wildness, and whilst I can understand  (and stay angry and feel the heartache at the same time) the desperation that leads to lion and even elephants being killed when they kill or damage crops and therefore livelihoods, this seem ignorant, in its literal sense, but unnecessary and lazy too, so is somehow even more heartbreaking, as well as common all over the world. Even in the UK when we don’t have much wildlife that “invades our space”!

Wild Heart Foundation: KwaZuluNatal 

Please see our website: wildheartfoundation.com