Lisa Eddy

Tag: authenticity

  • I’m So Full of Shit (And So Are You): The Stories We Tell Ourselves

    I’m So Full of Shit (And So Are You): The Stories We Tell Ourselves

    Yesterday’s post, 29 June 2026: Crossroads Devotion, ended with a prayer.

    Not because I was trying to sound holy. Not because I wanted anyone to think I’d somehow transcended ordinary human frailty overnight. I wrote it because, in that moment, it genuinely reflected where my heart was.

    Then I read it again this morning.

    Oh, good grief…

    If I didn’t know myself better, I’d think I’d achieved enlightenment sometime between my first coffee and hitting the Publish button.

    It was all love, grace, and compassion on the Middle Path. Beautiful sentiments, all of them. Sincere sentiments too.

    The only problem was that I’d accidentally presented one facet of myself as though it were the whole person.

    Fast forward twenty-four hours and I’m sitting here rolling my eyes at my own sanctimony, quietly remembering that I’m also capable of being impatient, sarcastic, judgmental and occasionally spectacularly full of myself.

    That’s not a contradiction.

    That’s just being human.

    Wholehearted, Not Holy

    The older I get, the more suspicious I become of my own attempts to sound spiritually evolved.

    I think that’s one of the reasons the Christo-Hekatean path has felt so liberating. It isn’t because I’ve stopped caring about ethics. Quite the opposite. It’s because I’m increasingly allergic to hypocrisy, especially my own.

    For years, spirituality often felt like a performance review. Was I loving enough? Forgiving enough? Detached enough? Had I responded with sufficient grace? Was my ego showing?

    No wonder shame was never very far away.

    These days, I’m much more interested in wholeness than holiness. I don’t want to spend the second half of my life editing myself into someone who sounds enlightened. I’d rather become more honest about who I already am.

    That means making room for contradictions.

    I can genuinely want peace and still lose my temper.

    I can believe in compassion and still think someone is being an absolute prick.

    Neither cancels the other out.

    A Rabbit Hole Worth Falling Into

    This morning, I stumbled across a video about Dr John DeMartini’s method. I’d never come across his work before, but within a few minutes, I had the same feeling I remember having when I first discovered Byron Katie over twenty years ago.

    It wasn’t that either of them handed me answers.

    They handed me better questions.

    As I listened, I found myself becoming increasingly aware of the stories quietly running in the background of my own mind. We all have them. They help us make sense of the world, until one day we stop recognising them as stories and start treating them as objective reality.

    That made me wonder what narratives I’ve been carrying around for years without ever examining them properly.

    Relationship narratives immediately sprang to mind.

    Not any one relationship in particular. Just the collection of stories I’ve accumulated over a lifetime about love, romance, marriage, commitment, intimacy and what all those things are supposed to mean.

    I’ve no doubt some of those stories are complete bollocks.

    An Unexpected Answer

    One question refused to leave me alone: What do I actually want from love?

    It sounds ridiculously simple, but I realised I’d never asked it without all the background noise of expectation. I wasn’t interested in the answer offered by religion, romantic films or society’s collective script. I wanted to know what remained once all those voices had quietened down.

    The answer surprised me by arriving so quickly: freedom. Not freedom from love, but freedom within love. Freedom to remain curious, to keep growing, and to pursue truth without feeling as though I have to squeeze myself into a role that no longer fits.

    That thought was still rattling around my head when I reached for my astrology dice.

    Saturn in Capricorn in the Seventh House.

    (Sometimes symbolism has all the subtlety of a 2×4 upside the head.)

    There it was: duty, convention, inherited expectations and obligations.

    Then I picked a card from Stephen Fry’s Mythos Oracle.

    Artemis. I smiled.

    I’ve always thought of myself as a hopeless romantic.

    Perhaps I’ve been wrong.

    Perhaps what I’ve really been hunting all these years is truth. All my writing is about romancing the Truth. Yes, capital T.

    Turning the Cards Around

    The biggest gift I took away from DeMartini’s work was the possibility of a more honest divination practice.

    For years, I’ve encouraged Tarot clients to ask thoughtful questions when they come for readings. Sometimes I forget that advice applies to me as well.

    It’s remarkably easy to use Tarot and other divination tools as mirrors that reflect whatever narrative we’re already invested in believing. I’ve done it many times. I’m fairly sure everyone who engages in divinatory practices has done it.

    From now on, I’d like to focus more on questions like these:

    • What story am I telling myself that this card quietly refuses to support?
    • Which assumption have I promoted to the status of fact without ever really questioning it?
    • What part of the picture am I conveniently leaving out?
    • If the opposite were also true, what might I be failing to see?
    • What expectation is shaping the way I’m interpreting this card?
    • Am I asking this oracle to reveal the truth, or simply to confirm what I already believe?
    • If I let go of my preferred narrative for a moment, what else becomes possible?
    • What would change if I stopped trying to be right and became genuinely curious instead?

    I’m under no illusion that this will stop me projecting onto the cards at times when I read for myself. That’s probably impossible.

    What it might do is help me notice when I’m doing it.

    And that feels like a worthwhile practice.

    After all, the cards have never lied to me.

    More often than not, I’ve simply been a little too attached to my own BS.

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  • What 20 Years of Blogging Taught Me

    This year marks twenty years since I published my first blog post.

    When I started blogging in 2006, Facebook was still finding its feet, Twitter didn’t exist yet, and nobody was talking about algorithms, content strategies, personal brands, or AI.

    We simply wrote about our interests. Some of us spent an inordinate amount of time writing about our special interests because nobody else wanted to listen to us harp on about them. Looking back, perhaps that should have been my first clue.

    Then we wandered around the blogosphere reading what everyone else had written and leaving comments.

    The internet felt smaller then. More human.

    Twenty years later, I find myself launching yet another website and reflecting on what blogging has given me over the past two decades.

    These are some of the lessons that stand out.

    1. Blogging changed my life

    This sounds dramatic, but it’s true.

    If I hadn’t started blogging, I would never have built the business that followed. I wouldn’t have met many of the people who became friends. I wouldn’t have discovered so much about myself.

    A simple habit of writing online altered the course of my life.

    2. Authenticity is not a marketing strategy

    These days, authenticity is often discussed as though it were another branding technique.

    People can tell the difference.

    I have written thousands of posts. The posts that resonated most deeply were rarely the ones I carefully optimised. They were the ones where I was simply telling the truth or asking a question that others were curious about, too.

    3. You never run out of ideas if you stay curious

    All these years, people have repeatedly asked how I keep finding things to write about.

    The answer is that ideas are everywhere.

    Questions become posts.

    Books become posts.

    Conversations become posts.

    Tarot readings and spread ideas become posts.

    Life becomes blog posts.

    Curiosity is an inexhaustible source of material.

    Not worrying about whether other people will find it interesting helps, of course. It’s the writerly equivalent of dancing as if nobody is watching.

    That is honestly how I’ve been writing my whole life.

    Autistic much?

    4. A blog can become a spiritual practice

    Long before I recognised it as such, blogging became part of my spiritual path.

    Writing helps me clarify what I think, what I believe, and what I am willing to question.

    Many of my most important spiritual insights arrived while trying to explain something to someone else.

    Then there is the light trance that sometimes settles in while I’m typing. Time disappears. The words seem to arrive more quickly than conscious thought. It feels less like constructing an argument and more like receiving one.

    I’m curious whether other writers experience this too.

    Whether we call it flow state, inspiration, or channelling, some of my most meaningful writing has emerged from that space.

    5. The internet remembers everything

    This can be comforting and horrifying in equal measure.

    I’ve published things I’m proud of and things that make me cringe.

    Both remain part of the record.

    I’ve learned to make peace with that.

    When I happen across the cringey bits, I think, “Phew. At least I didn’t turn that into a book.”

    6. Starting over is not failure

    I’ve started over more than once.

    New websites.

    New directions.

    New beliefs.

    New identities.

    Every reinvention taught me something.

    The willingness to begin again may be one of the most valuable skills I’ve learned.

    7. Every successful blog is built one post at a time

    It’s easy to look at an established site and imagine it appeared fully formed.

    It didn’t.

    Every successful blog begins with a blank page and a single post.

    Then another.

    And another.

    Sometimes, the Tower strikes. Twice, I’ve had websites simply vanish overnight, without explanation (WordPress.com both times). Gone forever.

    Yet the foundations remained. The projects that were meant to last kept growing gradually.

    8. Community matters more than follower counts

    One thoughtful comment is worth more than a hundred anonymous likes.

    The relationships formed through blogging have often been more meaningful than any traffic statistic.

    These days, thoughtful comments are like gold dust, but they are still what keep me going.

    9. The comments section used to be the social network

    I miss this.

    Before social media took over, bloggers visited one another’s sites, left comments, and built genuine communities.

    The internet felt less like a marketplace and more like a village.

    Part of me would love to see that return.

    10. Burnout can disguise itself as ambition

    This is one I learned the hard way.

    At one point, one of my websites was attracting thousands of visitors per day and generating an excellent income.

    From the outside, it looked like success.

    From the inside, I was exhausted.

    At the time, I didn’t know I might be AuDHD. Looking back, what I called dedication may have contained a substantial amount of burnout.

    Achievement is not always evidence that something is sustainable.

    11. Making money from blogging is still possible

    People have been declaring blogging dead for at least fifteen years.

    Meanwhile, bloggers continue to build businesses.

    The landscape changes. The opportunities change. The methods change.

    But valuable content remains valuable.

    My prediction is that genuinely personal writing will become even more valuable in the age of AI. Facts and information are becoming increasingly accessible. What remains scarce is lived experience, individual perspective, and the courage to share both honestly.

    12. SEO is a tool, not a purpose

    SEO helps people find your work.

    It should never become the reason for creating it.

    Whenever I worried more about search engines than my readers, the writing suffered.

    13. Your blog grows as you grow

    Every website I’ve created is a snapshot of who I was at the time.

    Looking back through old posts is like opening a time capsule.

    The blogs changed because I changed.

    14. Writing helped me heal

    Blogging has accompanied me through spiritual transformation, religious trauma, grief, joy, reinvention, and countless periods of uncertainty.

    Sometimes the writing itself became part of the healing.

    15. Some of my biggest breakthroughs happened in public

    Not because I intended them to.

    Simply because I was documenting the journey as I went.

    There is something powerful about allowing people to witness growth rather than presenting a polished version after the fact.

    16. Plagiarism hurts

    There is no point pretending otherwise.

    Seeing your work copied without permission is frustrating.

    Over time, I’ve learned not to dwell on it.

    The original source of the work remains with the creator.

    17. Social media is rented land

    This may be the most important lesson of all.

    Platforms come and go.

    Algorithms change.

    Accounts disappear.

    A self-hosted blog is still one of the few places online that genuinely belongs to you.

    18. To AI or not to AI?

    As Dr Angela Puca writes in an excellent essay on Substack, the question is not if we use AI, but how.

    Used carelessly, AI can regurgitate information and platitudes.

    Used thoughtfully, it can help us brainstorm, organise ideas, edit drafts, and explore new perspectives.

    The challenge is remaining human while using increasingly powerful tools. I shared my own thoughts on how to use AI without losing my voice in this article.

    19. My blog became the foundation of a business

    When I published my first post, I had no business plan.

    Years later, blogging became the foundation of the work I do today.

    Not because I set out to build a business, but because I kept showing up and writing.

    20. Twenty years later, I still love blogging

    That may be the lesson that surprises me most.

    The platforms changed.

    The technology changed.

    The internet changed.

    I changed.

    Yet somehow the simple act of sitting down with an idea and turning it into words still feels like magic.

    Twenty years ago, I started a blog because I was curious.

    Twenty years later, despite all the changes in algorithms, social media platforms, SEO updates, AI tools, successes, failures, reinventions, and false starts, the reason hasn’t changed.

    I am still curious.

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