Homecomings: 52 Ways Back to Ourselves is a poetic and practical guide inviting readers to pause, reflect, and reconnect with their inner selves through 52 thoughtful soliloquys and exercises. What was the inspiration for the idea behind this book?

I wanted to explore what it means to belong and how we can come home to ourselves as a foundational practice for our times. I feel that this has never been more important and necessary if we are to live in the midst of all that is happening within us and around us with joy, beauty, generosity, compassion, courage, kindness, wonder, reciprocity, wisdom and grace.

This book was originally intended for coaching supervisors and people practitioners, but my editor encouraged me to broaden its appeal as each Soliloquy speaks to our shared human condition and what it means to be human. This is why each of the Soliloquys begins with the letter ‘s’ following the ‘s’ in ‘coaching supervision’ which I developed from my regular journaling practice and love of poetic prose. It was fascinating how trusting my apparently arbitrary approach has led to this body of work. I wanted to explore the beauty and deeper meaning in everyday words that we might perhaps take for granted.

And I believe that finding our way back to ourselves can be as frustrating and elusive as it is enriching – as we try to catch the threads of wisdom that life is trying to show us. It is a continual process of feeling lost and found, of arrival and departure, of disconnecting and re-connecting and of forgetting and remembering. The destination is always moving and can never feel complete because we are already changed in our setting off. As we learn to hold these frontiers for ourselves, our understanding of life and living deepens with each encounter.

How do you hope readers will incorporate the “Songlines” exercises into their daily lives?

This is not a fast book but one to feast on. The 52 reflective soliloquys invite you to reclaim old ground, discover new horizons within yourself or get back on track. I invite readers to start where they are.

And please note that each Soliloquy is not intended to be comprehensive but is to be used as an invitational prompt for your own reflections. And each soliloquy is accompanied by a Songline – with both a creative and a reflective journaling practice ¬– which can be used to dive deeper and take your curiosity further if that feels right for you. In Australian aboriginal culture, the term ‘Songline’ is used to describe a song that is sung to help people find their way.

Readers may choose to work through the book in the order as set out in the Contents or may prefer to just dive in with whatever title grabs their attention (and I have designed a card deck to help readers to just pick a card at random with a prompt which will lead them to one of the Soliloquys). I hope that readers are inspired to explore a different Soliloquy each week – or to take longer if needed – using their supporting Songline to companion their own reflections. My hope is also that this book can be used in Meditation or Book Clubs to help people have conversations that really matter to them

How do you balance sharing personal insights while making them relatable to a broader audience?

I hope that I have got the balance right here!

I feel that I am exploring themes which are deeply personal which we can all recognise, and which can affect each of us at some time during the trajectory of our own lives. Whilst our own personal experiences of each of the ‘Soliloquys’ will be different because we are all unique and our own contexts will be different, I feel that we are nevertheless all connected because we are all human. And I believe that this shared humanity means that we all share the highs and lows – and everything in-between – of our shared human condition and what it means to be human in a world which sometimes wants us to forget the best of what our shared humanity can bring to our lives and to our communities.

Each Soliloquy is built up from personal experience – and what I have learnt from my work, from my research, from writers who have trod the path before us and also from ancient wisdom – which I hope makes the book relatable. I am offering gentle invitations into unexplored territory which can hopefully help us to enrich our lives.

I hope that this book will become Readers’ own companion self-care kit which feels relevant and contemporary each and every time that they open it.

If there’s one takeaway you want readers to carry with them after finishing the book, what would it be?

That remembering to come home to ourselves as a regular practice is an essential act of self-care, – as it resources us to be able to fully participate and engage in our own precious fragile life as it also connects us see the wonderous beauty and our shared interconnectedness in everything that makes a life well lived.

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