I wake up ( that is if I got any sleep) and give thanks.
Play Love Dimension by Beautiful Chorus a few times
Water out/ water in
Back to bed for Insight Timer medication or course
Read in bed
Make coffee and then journal in bed
Get up.
Strength training with free weights
Move my body – yoga/ walk/run/ swim
Greet the world with a smile.
What led you to this morning routine?*
Well I started on this find tuning of a morning routine at the beginning of January 2025, more or less. I was hibernating and I wanted to start a ritual that would anchor me into my life. Into the present moment at the same time as showing to myself that I am loved. I’ve done everything in my current morning routine at some point or other before but the putting them all together in some kind of coherent order is a first this year.
Did any ancient practices inspire you?
I’m not sure if a particular ancient practice inspired me. But maybe practices from my ancestral ancients might have subconsciously. If I remember living with my mum, back when I was in my 20s, she had a morning routine which I really didn’t notice then but can now. She’d get up early everyday, even though she wasn’t going to work, and go to the bathroom. Then make a cup of tea, open the windows and have a smoke. Maybe read at the same time but she’d claim the sitting room and the quiet. When she’d finish she’d make herself available for others.
For you, what is the importance of following a morning routine?
I hate routines usually. The predictability of them and the monotony gets on my nerves and I have to break out of them. But I think , in the past, this is because the routines and rituals have not been my own but have been imposed on me by external forces. I’ve mentioned when I was teaching before but also when I think of when I was studying creative writing. We were told if we wanted to be successful we should stick to one genre of writing and practice it in this way, using these techniques and following these rules. I found it all so restrictive. But here with this morning routine containing sacred rituals to myself, even if not carved in stone and open to change, I do not fight against the routine because I created. I feel that it is coming from a place of love for myself. This is my way of practicing self-love because I am giving myself the time and space each day so commune with myself and get my shit together ( or not!).
My time of hibernation is coming to an end and there is a whole heap of resistance. It’s not as if I’ve got loads of work lined up. It’s the thought that my time will not be mine alone, to do with what I want come April and beyond.
I took a major risk taking/ making the time away to rest and dream. But for me there was no other choice. I think I was a bit burnt out around the edges and I needed to pull back and heal. And I have done that but there is no end point for healing. No rubber stamping a certificate.
I continue with my morning routine and hope to continue beyond the hibernation period. And this will be where the true test lies. To continue to love on myself daily before I have to meet the world will make the difference between continuing on the healing journey or coming to a full stop. As there can be no healing and growth and self-love if I don’t protect the time to {BE}.
I’ve been up today since about 8am. It’s just after 10am now and I’ve had this track, Love Dimension by Beautiful Chorus on Insight Timer on repeat. It’s only 2 minutes long so I’m not going to work out the math for how many times it’s been on repeat. But let’s just say a lot.
I’ve got it running on and on in the background as I go about my morning routine. I’m feeling the need to have this reminder coming at me on repeat entering my bones, my blood, my heart and soul subliminally.
Oooooooooooooooooooo
Welcome, welcome, to the love dimension. To the love dimension. Ooooooooo
Welcome, welcome, to the love dimension. To the love dimension.
It’s Monday y’all and that can only mean Level 3 Counselling Skills today. Yeah Love Dimension is on repeat. Like a mantra. Like an incantation. Like a protective shield of steel.
End / beginning of another week. Depending on if you see Sunday as the end of the week or the beginning of the next.
For me it’s and/both. Sundays are usually change over day at our house as Ella goes between my home and her dad’s. Sometimes we do things on a Sunday or sometimes we don’t.
We just take it easy.
But usually on a Sunday I reflect on the week gone and plan for the week ahead. It’s a ritual of getting my head in the game. Not the outside societal, capitalist game. No, my own game. The Sheree Mack Game, which runs counter to the White Supremacy Culture game of go go go produce produce produce and strive for perfection at the same time as avoiding conflict and being grateful for the crumbs from their table. Yeah counter to that game as I refuse to be part of this system, where my labour is being bought and sold to support the actors, that are white people.
I’ve been hibernating for months now and I’m still tired. Go figure. Maybe my exhaustion is more than a year in a dumb ass job but runs much deeper. A generational exhaustion that I just can’t shift which has to be recognised but will take a lifetime to ease.
Ease. Yes that would be welcome.
There are moments when I grasp these ease and feel it spread across my back, untightening bunched up muscles. Making my spine fluid rather than ridged. These times I can feel my heart and soul float and I’m relaxed into whatever I’m being. But these are just moments. The aim is to extend these moments into longer moments, into days and months.
I’m working on being so but it is a practice. So when I say Sundays are reflecting/ planning days. I don’t mean around a to-do-list of jobs that need to be completed in order to bring in the tainted coin. I mean, where did I experience ease this week and where can I factor in/ plan for more ease next week. Where did I experience joy and pleasure and how can that be replicated moving forward.
Yeah in the Sheree Mack Game, all the rules and tasks are different to the societal external game. At more ease and I know I’m winning x
This piece was originally published on Medium with Binderful back in 2020. I’m sharing this piece here because I was reminded that it existed over there when I made some crackers and jam this morning. It was good to revisit it. I share it with you now.
During these quarantined times with Covid-19, I’m trying to find way to support my well-being. I’m making sure I take the time and space to tune into my needs and wants, beside those of my family. I’m finding joy and memories in my day when I make solitude. This happens, usually in the morning, when I make my breakfast. It’s nothing fancy either. Its crackers and jam and black decaf coffee. The plain taste of the hard crackers against the sweet soft stickiness of raspberry jam (no seeds) is divine. This is a little sweet treat and takes me back to two moments in time.
The first is childhood. Crackers and jam was weekend breakfast when I was a kid. Dad would bring it to our bedroom, my sister and me, and we were allowed to eat them in bed. Crackers and jam is a poor man’s breakfast. But when I ate them as a child, I felt rich. I felt like a princess. I felt loved. Especially because my dad made it. A harsh Trinidadian man who ruled us with beats but who I idolised and always wanted to love me more. These Saturday mornings, tucked up in bed, I felt cosy and safe. As children most of our days were spent inside, with our imaginations and Enid Blyton. And this felt good. Now with my daughter, there isn’t any Enid Blyton more like David Walliams, but there‘s a generous amount of storytelling as we stay safe indoors. Learning from my childhood, when I received anger and beats for questioning why, our kids have been brought up wonder out loud and to receive a reason or answer rather than that feeling of saying or doing something wrong.
The second memory around crackers and jam takes me back to my first artist residency in Iceland. This would be my second time back to the island but the first time remaining in place, the remote Westfjords, for two weeks. Surrounded by white upon white. With the cold biting at all exposed flesh, I searched for any familiar signs, in the landscape, because I felt lost and adrift. I didn’t know why or what I was doing miles away from home, alone, in residence pretending to be an artist. I remember making crackers and jam and coffee one morning, knee deep in my unhinged being and remembering who I was. Memories came back about being a little girl craving love and safety and comfort. And how even though, I’d a harsh upbringing, in some respects, I know discipline and perseverance and self-preservation were forged then.
I suppose this mirrors how I feel and be now, in these uncertain times, and how making crackers and jam satisfies these urges and needs and fuels my desire to survive and thrive.
Growing up, and I still feel as if I’m growing up or at least progressing in this process of becoming, but yes growing up, I constantly rejected core parts of myself in order to fit in, in order to be accepted and loved. There was also an element of protection too. Growing up I knew or sensssd that being too wild and too unresostrcted and out there could bring trouble my way. Be looked up, be beaten up, be killed.
But I’m not prepared to repress, reject core parts of myself anymore. I don’t do it anymore because all it does it hurt me and stops me living my life on my own terms. Living y life to it’s fullest potential because I’m focused on the fear and rejection instead.
It has taken years and practice for me to take down the internal prejudices against myself. They might have been fortification constructed for protection and rejection but they did not serve me then and certainly don’t serve me now. Yeah I still protect myself from harm. I think I got complacent recently with the sea and also within the recent counselling skills session, but I’m practicing this from a place of love, self-love rather than self-hate and disgust. And the feelings are totally different.
Oak Moss Lichen, presence signifies the air quality of a place/ space/ session!
I’ve written before about this fucking counselling skills course I’m completing. So because it follows the school terms time dates, we have just returned on Monday after a week off. And my god was it difficult for me to return. We only have five sessions left and I was thinking of all kind of excuses to get out of these next five weeks, so I can just stay at home on a Monday evening and complete the mountains of task, assignments and reflective journals that need to be completed by the end of March to be in with a chance of passing this shit. So I didn’t want to return but return I did because I don’t want to fail. I’ve already put a lot of time and effort and pain into the course and I want to be able to walk away with my head held high. But it’s making it very difficult to stay the course. It really is as the space is not equipped for diversity, equity and inclusion and this is a fact. First off, a lot of time is taken up the week with the discussion of next steps. And some students are going to carry on with Level 4 and 5 with the current tutor’s private practice. Some are waiting a bit to get the finances together or looking into adult funding loans etc. But most of them are taking the next steps as they are needed to be able to practice counselling skills in society.
Lots of talk about finances, and time and access and how things are unfair and more money should be made available to do the next levels for free etc. One student, all up to date with assignments and very pleased with herself because of this, has her pathway all planned out and took great pleasure in letting everyone else know that she as the perfect student who had the time and space to just read about psychology and just add it into the pot for later etc. I recognised myself in her not so many years ago when I was always working to fulfil the perfect student role and make sure everyone else knew it too. How things have changed.
Me I know I’m not going any further than Level 3 for a number of reasons. The finances is one. This is barrier for anyone wanting to become a counsellor, the different courses and levels to complete and professional fees to be members of in order to practice, is all money money money. While training not only paying for the course, you also have to be under supervision of a therapist yourself, and be part of groups theory sessions, and then also be on placement, which is usually voluntary. The whole system is set up for those who have money already to be able to keep throwing it at the barriers and stipulations that are in place before you even qualified to counsel. So the finances are an issue, as well as not believing in the system I would be funnelling my money into in order to qualify. Not only is the education system steeped in colonialism, patriarchy and white supremacy culture but what kind of stupid duped yes massa oppressed fool would I be to actually pay to be further oppressed and brainwashed. Dead white men is the syllabus for counselling skills so why would I buy into more of that shit?
I just don’t believe in the whole system set up around becoming qualified and how it’s the privileged who continue to be in these caring helping positions when really they haven’t done the work on themselves to check their own unconscious bias, racism etc. So I’m not going any further after Level 3 so the majority of the conversation in class was very off putting and I switched off, thinking what is the point.
Once we got to the skills part, I had hardly got into my usual triad before one ‘friend’ said she didn’t want to work with me. No offence they said but you always make me laugh and I need to get my observation logs complete so I can’t work with you. How am I supposed to respond to this remark? Do what the fuck you want, but in the process make sure you reject me, by refusing to work with me and make it all my fault?
She said I make her laugh too much and she needs to focus. So okay work with the other individual in our triad and I’ll observe you as you practice being the listener and I’ll give you your feedback. And I’ll just add here, she still laughed during the skills practice, being put off by the tutor listening in on the session. I did nothing to make her laugh. So I just want to put it out there that maybe I’m not the problem or issue and that maybe they are. Just putting it out there as I’m not the problem but why not make the only Black woman in the group the problem, as then that’s easier than taking responsibility yourself for your own short comings.
It’s time to switch roles and I create a scenario to tell the other person in the triad so they can fulfil the listening counsellor role. I talk about a real current issue and I’m just being my expressive self etc. Fleshing things out to they can demonstrate all their counselling skills etc. At the end of the exercise, they takes a deep breath and turn to the other person in the triad who didn’t want to work with me and says, you’re right she is difficult to work with. That was hard, she made it hard.
Fuck why not gang up on me and make it all my fault instead of looking at yourself, or checking yourself to find out what might be lacking in your skills set and learning that you would think having a conversation with me about a real issue for me, what hard for you? Why blame the only Black woman in the room once again for your own shortcomings? Again I return to what I’ve said before white privileged people who will be in caring positions of authority who haven’t done the work on themselves, in order to know their own inner workings, before they start working with other peoples’.
But yes it’s my fault.
When it’s my turn to be the listener and practice my counselling skills, well didn’t the person come up with a scenario that was a dead end and she just sat there and didn’t really play ball. They didn’t elaborate, just dropped their problem and expected me to do all the work. I just had to laugh, and just think, but I’m the difficult one I’m the one who doesn’t take it seriously?
I’d just sat there and completed detailed feedback on each of their counselling skills, not making it personal. I didn’t critique them as individuals but in their role as the listener. But it was okay they thought for them to mess with my skills practice and after they had attacked me personally
Where is the fairness in that or the justice? Fuck and I wonder why I continue to put up with this shit week in and week fucking out?
Go back and take care of yourself. Your body needs you, your feelings need you, your perceptions need you. Your suffering needs you to acknowledge it. Go home and be there for all these things.
Sunday morning, I’m up at 6am to catch the sunrise in the sea.
The bay is quiet only a few people jumping waves and using the sauna tents.
I keep to my side of the bay where the waves are coming in smaller. I get in and feel good. The water is balmy compared to Loch Morlich last week.
I’m swimming just keep swimming. And before I know it I’m further out as well as further across into the centre left bay.
Before I release it, a big wave is coming in and I know it’s coming over my head. I stop swimming and try to make haste back to the shore knowing I’m wasting my energy.
The wave hits me hard, over my head, drenching my woollie bobbled hat and penetrates all breathing holes.
The main task is to keep standing and not to get pulled under. And to breathe of course.
I’m still trying to wade out of the sea and get to safety. But before I can make even a few more steps another wave slams me.
This time I’m down on my knees in the sea, gasping for breath. I pull off my hat, stand and I’m spluttering and stumbling to the shore.
Of course I have to turn back to the sea with a smile and say, okay you got me! I hear you. I feel you. I got a bit complacent there. Lesson learnt.
And this is a good reminder for me to always respect the sea and to not get too big for my boots. Taking it all leisurely basking in the temperature rise in comparison and forgetting where I am now.
Now in the present moment, I’m in the North Sea which is notorious for taking lives.
Don’t take you own life so lightly Sheree and pay attention.
Living Wild Studios 