The Flowers on the Kitchen Table: On Hope, Shadow, and Finding Our Way Back to Ourselves

There are flowers on my kitchen table this week.

Simple ones. A little unruly. And somehow, in the middle of everything, the news cycle, the weight of the world, the hum of another difficult week — they are enough to remind me that beauty still exists in the ordinary.

I find myself returning to this often. The small acts of kindness. A cup of tea made for someone else. A moment of stillness before the day begins. A conversation where someone is truly listened to. These aren't escapes from reality they are portals back to ourselves.
And yet.

We live in complicated times. If you look at history, wars and periods of collective upheaval tend to move in roughly 20-year cycles as though the shadow we collectively refuse to look at finds a way to surface anyway. Carl Jung understood this. The psyche, whether personal or collective, has an extraordinary drive toward wholeness. What we push away doesn't disappear. It accumulates. And eventually, it finds expression in us, in our relationships, and in the wider world.

Owning the Shadow — and Finding the Gold Within It

Robert A. Johnson explored this with quiet brilliance in his book Owning Your Shadow (1991). Johnson, a Jungian analyst, invites us to consider that the shadow those parts of ourselves we have exiled, been shamed out of, or simply never been given permission to express is not something to be feared. It is something to be befriended.

Because here is the part that is so easy to miss: the shadow also contains gold.

The unlived life. The creativity we buried because it felt too risky. The boldness we packed away because someone told us we were too much. The tenderness we armoured over because the world didn't always feel safe enough to be soft in.

Johnson writes that we spend the first half of our lives building an identity a persona, Jung would say and the second half, if we are courageous enough, learning to integrate what we left behind. This is not comfortable work. But it is profoundly freeing.

Balance, then, is not the absence of darkness. It is the willingness to hold both.

What Our Nervous Systems Are Telling Us

I think about this a great deal in my clinical work. Because what I see in the therapy room  again and again is that the body knows. Long before we can articulate what is happening in our inner world or in the world around us, our nervous systems have already registered it.
Two frameworks that I return to constantly, both in my own practice and in the workshops I run for other therapists, help make sense of this.

The Window of Tolerance, developed by psychiatrist Dr Dan Siegel, describes the zone of nervous system activation within which we are able to function at our best. Inside this window, we can feel our emotions without being overwhelmed by them. We can think clearly, connect with others, and access our own creativity and resilience. This is where genuine healing happens.

But when life and especially accumulated stress, trauma, or collective fear pushes us outside that window, one of two things tends to occur. We tip upward into hyperarousal: anxiety, overwhelm, hypervigilance, the racing heart and the spiralling thoughts. Or we drop down into hypoarousal: the fog, the flatness, the going-through-the-motions numbness that so many people describe as simply feeling absent from their own lives.

Polyvagal Theory, developed by neuroscientist Dr Stephen Porges and brought into clinical practice by therapist Deb Dana, takes this understanding deeper. It reminds us that our nervous systems are not broken when they collapse or contract they are doing exactly what they learned to do. And crucially, the nervous system does not respond to instructions. It responds to felt safety.
This matters enormously in the current climate. When the world feels persistently threatening as it does for many people right now our windows narrow. We become more reactive, more contracted, less able to access the parts of ourselves that know how to be creative, connected, and kind.

And so the flowers on the kitchen table become an act of quiet resistance. A deliberate signal to the nervous system: something here is still beautiful. I am still here. I am safe enough, right now, in this moment.

The Landscape of Our Emotions: Colour, Art, and the Inner World

I have long been moved by the way art holds what words sometimes cannot.
Mark Rothko's vast fields of colour somehow hold grief and tenderness and awe all at once no narrative, no explanation, just a direct encounter between colour and the person standing before it. Something in us is recognised.

Josef Albers spent a lifetime exploring colour in his landmark work Interaction of Colour (1963), and what he showed us is this: colour is never fixed. The same hue looks entirely different depending on what surrounds it. Context transforms it. Relationship changes it.
We are like that too.
We are not static. We are not the sum of our worst moments, or our most contracted states, or the parts of ourselves we have pushed into shadow. We are shaped by context, by relationship, by what we choose to sit beside. Jung himself was deeply interested in the symbolic language of image and colour in the way the psyche speaks through the non-verbal as much as the verbal.

This is something I explore in my work with colour therapy alongside hypnotherapy the way colour can bypass the analytical mind and speak directly to the subconscious, to the parts of us that don't yet have words for what they are carrying.

Coming Back to the Simple Things

In the end, I keep returning to the simpler things. The flowers. The kindness offered to a stranger. The friend who really listens. The moment of beauty noticed in an ordinary Tuesday.
Hope is not the opposite of hardship. It is the thing that sits beside it quietly, stubbornly  like flowers on a kitchen table in a difficult week.

If any of this resonates with you, I would love to hear from you. More writing on the nervous system, emotional wellbeing, and the inner world can be found throughout this blog. And if you are ready to explore this work more deeply, I am here.