Julia Godden Therapies

06/08/2026

15/07/2026

The Pigeon Outside My Door

A pigeon has chosen the tree outside my front door as the place to build her nest.

The first thing I wondered was, Isn’t she frightened of me?

Every day I pass beneath her. The door opens and closes. I leave carrying bags, return carrying the weight of the day, sometimes pausing to look up and speak a few gentle words. From her tiny branch I must appear impossibly large.

And yet, she stays.

Perhaps trust is not the absence of fear. Perhaps it is something much quieter.

Perhaps it grows through repeated encounters where nothing bad happens.

In therapy we often speak about attachment as though it belongs only to childhood or intimate relationships. But attachment is a wider language than that. It lives wherever nervous systems meet. It asks, Can I settle here? Can I soften? Is this place predictable enough for life to continue?

I wonder whether this pigeon has slowly gathered evidence.

The giant comes and goes.

The giant looks up.

The giant speaks softly.

The giant leaves me to my work.

There is no need for friendship. No need for ownership. No need to erase the distance between us. Only enough safety for her body to remain where it is.

That feels surprisingly profound.

Today I watched another pigeon arrive. Assumed to be daddy. For a few moments they sat together before one quietly took over the nest while the other flew away. No fuss. No performance. Just an ordinary exchange of care.

It reminded me that love is often invisible.

It looks like taking your turn.

Like carrying warmth while another rests.

Like returning because something precious depends on it.

There is a rhythm to this that feels older than language.

I find myself slowing as I pass beneath the tree. My footsteps soften. My movements become less abrupt. She watches me. I watch her. Without intention, we begin to shape one another.

Perhaps this is a kind of mutual regulation.

Not because we are consciously soothing each other, but because two living beings sharing the same place inevitably begin to adjust. My body responds to her fragility with tenderness. Her body, over time, seems to recognise that my movements carry no threat.

Neither of us becomes less ourselves.

Instead, we become neighbours.

It makes me wonder how often this is happening all around us.

The blackbird who continues to sing while we hang out the washing.

The fox who learns which gardens are safe to cross.

The ancient oak that quietly alters our breathing the moment we step beneath its canopy.

The dog who rests because our own nervous system has finally settled.

The robin who appears each morning as though reminding us that we are expected.

Perhaps coexistence is a form of conversation.

Not spoken in words, but in pace.

In repetition.

In restraint.

In the willingness to leave enough room for another life to unfold.

The natural world does not ask us to become separate from it. It asks us to remember that we have never been separate.

Our bodies evolved in relationship with birdsong, changing light, wind moving through leaves, and the countless creatures who have been watching us just as long as we have been watching them. We are constantly influencing one another, often below the level of awareness. The boundary between human and more-than-human is more porous than our modern lives allow us to notice.

Perhaps that is why this small pigeon has affected me more than I expected.

She has become a quiet teacher.

Not because she has stopped being wary.

Not because she trusts without discernment.

But because she demonstrates that life continues where there is enough safety.

Enough consistency.

Enough space.

Every morning I glance up before leaving home.

Sometimes she is looking back.

We acknowledge one another for a brief moment before each returning to the ancient work of being alive.

And for reasons I cannot fully explain, that feels like hope.

11/07/2026

You don't have to hit rock bottom before therapy is worth it.

In fact, more people are choosing therapy than ever before.

Our latest research shows nearly three-quarters of people who've had therapy found it helpful and most would recommend it to someone else.

That's a positive shift! Asking for support shouldn't be a last resort. It should be a normal part of looking after ourselves.

Read more of our latest results to why more people are choosing therapy 👉 https://orlo.uk/117KI

10/07/2026

In Iceland, people commemorated its first glacier formally declared lost to climate change. Western culture needs more of these rituals

06/07/2026

Trans inclusive!!! Anti colonial frameworks. Very simple.

01/07/2026

When we move in the world of the senses, yet keep our senses in harmony, free from attachment to attraction or aversion, we rest in the wisdom heart of our Essential Nature, the true Equanimity of Being, in which all sorrow and suffering cease.
— Bhagavad Gita 2:61-66
Richard Miller translation

01/07/2026

Truth.

30/06/2026

Space is too wild, undomesticated, and vast to be "held."

The image of “holding” is an evocative one that has given rise to the idea of “holding space” for another, where we’re attuned to what they’re feeling and how they’re making sense of their experience.

Through empathic resonance, they feel felt and understood.

While I’m sympathetic to this view, it’s not completely accurate for me in lived experience.

When with another who is spiraling outside their window of tolerance, it’s not me who is “doing” the holding. There is “holding” occurring, but in no way is it “mine.”

I can recognize and participate in this holding and practice devotion toward it, but it doesn’t originate in me. It originates in the stars and in the soil.

My role is to move into reverie, to set aside any fantasy that I know what healing is, and to listen. To move into awe. To wonder. To pray.

Even the agenda to "hold space" can interfere with that unfolding, contaminating the vessel.

Space cannot be held…
… but entered into and loved.

29/06/2026

The unlived life does not always ask to be recovered. Sometimes it asks to be mourned.

There are ways we imagined our lives might unfold that never came to pass. Dreams that remained unopened. Forms of tenderness that were never welcomed. Capacities that stayed hidden because the conditions for their flowering were never there. Ways of speaking, creating, trusting, resting, loving, or belonging that could not fully emerge in the world we were given.

We often imagine healing as a return—as the recovery of what was lost, the reclaiming of what had to go underground. And sometimes it is. Sometimes something long exiled does begin to find its way home.

But not always.

Sometimes healing begins not with retrieval, but with grief. With allowing ourselves to feel the sorrow of what could not happen, what was interrupted, what had to be left behind in order to survive, remain connected, or make it through.

This grief is not a failure of healing. It is not resignation, and it is not collapse. It is a form of love. Because what is mourned is no longer abandoned. What is grieved is no longer left wandering at the edge of the psyche, carrying its loneliness in silence. It is brought into the heart and given a place among the things that mattered.

Perhaps this is one of grief’s quiet mercies: not that it restores the unlived life, but that it refuses to exile it any longer. It allows us to turn toward what mattered, even if it can no longer unfold in the way we once hoped. And in that turning, something sacred happens. The lost life is no longer asked to disappear without witness. It is met, blessed, and carried differently.

Perhaps grief is one of the ways love keeps faith with what could not be lived.