Imagination Archives - Jane Kennedy Counselling

The State of Your Heart

This line, attributed to Persian Sufi poetry, gave me pause. How would you answer it? I love the impermanence of it, in this breath. It’s mindful and present. It suggests we don’t have to know the whole answer, just the thought for this moment.There is so much noise in the world right now. So much urgency and fear. The state of our heart seems like a trite or indulgent thing to attend to when there are “real” problems to be anxious about. For those who have been shaped by faith spaces that centred end times, Armageddon, or apocalyptic pressure, and I see so many in the counselling room, this can feel especially overwhelming.

26 June 2025

On Magical Thinking

Once upon a time in a warehouse-turned-church-auditorium not that far away, I was a teenage girl who believed in magic. The magic of a God who loved me, who was always there to give me victory over emotions or head colds and reveal his perfect will for my life. The

29 January 2025

Come With Me

Perhaps it’s the oxytocin making me gushy after so many hours Havening with clients recently, but I balled like a baby at the Wicked movie this week! Have you been? It was so lovely to see it with my daughter, we had the theatre to ourselves as we gasped and sobbed. This

4 December 2024

We need more people.

It’s funny isn’t it that when we start to think about, or focus on a particular thing, it seems to pop up everywhere. There’s science to this phenomenon that I’ll leave for another day, but it’s happened to me this last few weeks. I’ve been spending a of time on Substack recently.

26 September 2024

The God of My Imagination

I wrote on my Substack this week about the God of my imagination. I’d been reflecting on how I created God in my imagination. Which is, of course, what we all do as we learn about faith, as it becomes our framework, identity, worldview, a relationship with the divine. It’s

26 September 2024

A Slower Urgency

I remember sitting up in bed and taking a deep breath the first time I read the writing of Bayo Akomolafe some years ago. He started with “The times are urgent, let us slow down” quoting an African proverb. You can see the blog I was reading here. It’s a thought provoking delight alongside a warm drink and

14 August 2024

The Rhythms of Grief

My humanity pulls me toward grief, I am heartbroken at the suffering I see and am forcing myself to witness. I tend to my own trauma stewardship so I can enlarge my capacity to feel it and bear it with the global community.

18 February 2024

Regret and Shame

The documentaries keep coming. On cults, megachurch demise and people we may have once looked up to and admired, falling from grace. Or rather, tripping over themselves while clinging to tired old scripts and defending the indefensible. And of course, we know why this is, to admit there was wrongdoing

20 June 2023

You are here.

Memoir is my favourite genre of story. I love to delve into good storytelling, to see where people have come from, what has shaped them, what they’ve overcome, what resonates for me in the same way. There’s an element of curiosity in it for me but also it makes me

12 April 2023

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