Part Three: Closing the Living Gap

The course begins with an enquiry into an understanding of our basic human needs, as opposed to the multitude of "wants" that tend to crowd out our needs, and that gradually open up a gap between us and our wellness.

What Dr Reilly calls The Living Gap.

At first, as we put our wants before our needs, our body and spirit sends us signs and signals such as tiredness or restlessness, or sadness, or hunger or thirst.

But in our busy lives we tend to ignore these messages that our body is sending us, and we begin to spiral down into a cycle of drain and strain. 

If we continue along this cycle our signs turn to symptoms and we may be heading towards physical breakdown - so we seek a fix in the form of a pill or a treatment that can keep us from going over the edge.

We may go through several of these cycles before realising that something has to change - from edging towards breakdown we begin to seek a breakthrough.

The turnaround or breakthrough cannot be achieved simply by trying  to change our behaviours.

We need instead to find the underlying 'maps' that are driving the behaviours.

Dr Reilly helps us to contemplate the type of maps or attitudes that will be required to spark our own self-care journey.

To embark upon this journey, the course guides us into an exploration of the small steps we can begin to take to lay down new maps.

Tapping again into the neuroscience of habit formation, we begin to see that we are able to choose simple self-care strategies that we can reinforce day by day until we have forged a new map of self-nurture.