Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Christina Lattimer
Waiting For Hello
Margaret had been at number ten for 31 years, and in her view the young lady who moved into number twelve in March had absolutely no manners. She’d be off at seven every morning and back after dark. Never a wave. Never once did she say good morning. Margaret would just watch her from behind the front room curtain, the woman hurrying down the path with her head down and her keys in her hand. ‘Would it kill her to say hello?’ Margaret asked her sister on the phone.
Why, Grandad?
Rob had an answer for everything, and most of his answers were the same. That’s life. It is what it is. Always has been. He was seventy-one, and he said them to the news, the weather and the price of a loaf. He said them on Sunday mornings at the allotment, where his granddaughter Isla helped him mainly by asking questions. She was seven, and she asked about everything.
Seeing The Light
Every evening at ten past six, Nadia crossed the same junction. She moved through the routine without thinking. The path was so familiar she barely noticed it anymore. With her phone in one hand and her bag on her shoulder, she weaved through the crowd. When she paused, she answered emails as the crowd moved her along. She was good at her job. She got promoted in the spring, went running on Sundays, and always had a podcast playing during any free moment.
The Other Notebook
Ray kept a notebook in the glovebox of his van. He had kept one since he was sixteen, when his first boss made him write down every mistake he made. Stripped thread. Wrong oil. Forgot the sump plug. “So you never forget,” the old man said. Ray never did forget. Thirty-two years later, he had his own garage, four staff, and a wall of certificates from every course he could find. Diagnostics. Electric vehicles. Customer care. A leadership weekend in Harrogate.
Forgiveness And Living From Your Higher Self
A colleague of mine was agonising over her marriage breakdown. When she spoke about her frustration and contempt for her ex-husband, it was still very raw, despite their having been apart for a few years. We briefly discussed how she could cope. I gently suggested, “Perhaps for your own peace of mind, you might want to consider forgiving him.” She glared at me as if I were suggesting she let the devil off the hook, and emphatically told me that would never be possible.
The Benefits and Drawbacks of Anger
When I was a child, my Dad always used to tell me that anger was wrong. He warned that anger got you nowhere and that it was destructive. Of course, as a child, I thought that meant I ought not to feel anger, and so for many years, when my life was going wrong, I suppressed my anger, feeling guilty when it inevitably came up. It wasn’t until I felt so bad about things and I sought help that a very wise therapist helped me to shout my anger at an empty chair.
How To Manifest The Life You Want From Your Higher Self
We are all creative beings. We tend to think of creativity as belonging to artists, musicians and writers, but each of us uses imagination to shape our experience of life. Think about how often you picture what might happen tomorrow, review what happened yesterday, or worry about what lies ahead. Each of these is an act of imagination, and the thoughts, beliefs and feelings attached to them colour how we see the world.
How To Stop Self-Sabotage – Living From Your Higher Self
My biggest lesson in self-sabotage came when my house was repossessed. I had wanted the house badly because it had lots of character. However, because of decisions I made that reflected avoidance and denial, my finances spiralled out of control. Looking back, I realise I could have fairly easily avoided losing my house, but my mindset didn’t see that at the time.
Finding Real Confidence: Living From Your Higher Self
For years, I thought confidence came from success and from other people thinking well of me. The problem is that there’s always someone else who looks more capable or more successful. And when our sense of self-worth depends on what other people think of us, we’re at the mercy of their opinions. Living From Your Higher Self takes a different approach. It starts by separating our abilities, which vary from one situation to the next, from who we really are.
Humility And Your Higher Self
When I was younger, I had strong opinions on most things. I was also keen to help people be at their best, and didn’t realise how arrogant that combination could sound. When I was training to teach adults (the irony isn’t lost on me), a fellow student gave a presentation with some obvious mistakes. I thought I was helping by pointing them out, until another student whispered, “You don’t need a sledgehammer to crack a nut.” That whisper woke me up.
How To Change Your Perception and See Life Differently
Have you ever looked back on something that happened years ago and found you see it quite differently now? A job you were devastated to lose turned out to be the push you needed. Someone you once looked up to no longer seems so impressive. The event or the person hasn’t changed. What has changed is how you see them. For most of my life, I assumed I saw the world as it was. It took me a long time to realise I was only ever seeing my own version of it.
How To Stop People-Pleasing
I remember talking about how guilty I felt when someone asked me to do something I wanted to say no to. My friend felt the same. We laughed at ourselves and decided we were just too kind, and that people would take advantage of our kind nature. We needed to toughen up. That conversation happened when I had no clue what was driving me, or that the guilt was only the tip of the iceberg. I thought I simply needed firmer boundaries. I didn’t realise I was a people-pleaser. Most of us want to be liked.
Are Your Expectations Keeping You Stuck?
As you become more self-aware, you might begin to notice what you expect to happen. Most of the time, we are expecting something, whether we realise it or not. We notice it more when something out of the ordinary is coming up. Think about the build-up to a holiday, when we are already picturing lovely sandy beaches and blue skies. One of my favourites is Christmas: all that goodwill, Christmas tunes, lovely food and family getting together. Are You Living Groundhog Day?
Overcoming A Negative Pattern When Living From Your Higher Self
I started smoking when I was barely a teenager. I can still remember inhaling my first cigarette and feeling quite sick. But I persisted. At the time, I had no idea why. When I finally stopped smoking, I’d just turned 40, and I felt triumphant. I’d hated the habit for years, and giving it up had taken real effort. What I hadn’t expected was that, within a few months, I’d find myself standing at the fridge, eating even when I wasn’t hungry.
Can You Really Rewire Your Brain At Any Age?
Can you rewire your brain at any age? Or can you teach an old dog new tricks? In my experience, yes, you can. In fact, many of the major changes I made in my life came when I woke up and realised I had been living on autopilot. I was in my late 30s/early 40s when that penny finally dropped. I left school at sixteen with a handful of GCEs and very limited ambition. What I wanted to do was to be a typist. This was despite my teachers telling me I was wasting my talent.
What Unconditional Love Looks Like in Everyday Life
Thirty years ago, I managed a young woman who had just had twins. She was twenty. Not long afterwards, her partner left, and childcare for two babies came to more than she could possibly earn. She came to see me distraught, having already worked out that she would have to give up her job. Another leader and I put our heads together and found a way for her to work from home at night while the babies were asleep.
Why Love Feels Like Something You Have to Earn
Think of the last time you did something generous for somebody and felt slightly unappreciated afterwards. Perhaps you had expected a thank you, some recognition, or simply for them to notice what you had done. You might not even have realised you expected anything until you didn’t get it. That small flatness is worth paying attention to. It is one of the few moments when a condition we have quietly attached to our love becomes visible to us.
Experiencing Relationship From The Perspective Of Separation
We tend to think of relationships as the connections we have with other people, but we are in relationships with almost everything in our lives. We have relationships with our partner, children, family, friends and colleagues, but also with work, money, our body, ageing, food, our home and the world around us. We have a relationship with our past, our future and, most importantly, ourselves. To relate means, at its simplest, to make or recognise a connection.
What Our Relationships Can Teach Us About Ourselves
In How We Experience Relationships From The Perspective of Separation, I looked at what we tend to go to our relationships for, and what happens when they cannot supply it. Here I want to look at the same relationships differently. Instead of asking what someone else is doing wrong, what they need to change or whether the relationship is meeting our needs, we can ask: What can this relationship teach me about myself?
How to Use Your Emotional Guidance System
Finding the thought behind a feeling is only the beginning. What we do next depends on what the feeling is showing us. Sometimes we need to question a belief. Sometimes something needs to change. At other times, we need relief, time to feel what we feel, or help to work through it. Using our emotional guidance system well means recognising what the feeling is asking for, rather than trying to do all of those things at once.
How to Find the Thought Behind the Feeling
Our feelings about a situation are the result of the thoughts, ideas and beliefs through which we interpret it. We are taught that we need to regulate our feelings, but it is often our thoughts, ideas and beliefs that need our attention. This matters because if we focus only on the feeling, we can miss the information it is giving us. The feeling is the signal, and the thought behind it is where the learning begins. A Feeling Rarely Begins with the Feeling Something happens, and we react.
Characteristics of Higher Self Thinking
When I was a child and life felt overwhelming, I would sometimes experience what I can only describe as a loving presence. At other times, when I was questioning life, answers seemed to come that were loving, reassuring and wiser than my usual thinking. I didn’t know what it was. For a while I thought it was God; later, I came to see it as a loving and wiser part of myself.
The Thought System That Has Been Running Your Life
A client of mine took on a substantial amount of extra work. He had asked for the opportunity, did it well, but when his review came around, there was no increase in pay and little explanation. He was furious. He stopped putting himself out, did only what was required and started looking elsewhere. His reaction was understandable. He had been treated poorly. But the event itself wasn’t creating everything he felt. A thought had arrived with it. They don’t value me.
Not Everything Happens for a Reason
When something terrible happens, we naturally want to know why. We can blame ourselves, somebody else, God, fate or life itself, because an explanation can feel easier to live with than having none at all. But sometimes the most truthful answer is simply we don’t know. I don’t have a problem with the saying everything happens for a reason when it helps us make peace with life’s disappointments or unexpected turns. The job we didn’t get leads somewhere else.
What Is Life Trying to Tell Me?
For most of my early life, learning meant acquiring something I didn’t already know. I learned new skills, gathered knowledge and worked out how to do things better. Learning was something that helped me in my career or made life work more successfully. It never occurred to me that life itself might be teaching me something about me. That changed after a serious back problem left me unable to work and eventually contributed to me losing my house.
What Happens When Nobody Needs to Win
Most of us have probably been part of a group where something just worked. The ideas were better, people built on each other’s thinking, and what emerged was better than anything one person might have created alone. We have probably experienced the opposite too. A room full of bright, capable people does not necessarily produce anything remarkable. I used to think the difference was simply getting the right people together. However, I no longer think that is enough.
Why Trying to Inspire Never Works
A few years ago, I was working with a coaching client who was explaining why she had moved on from a group of people, and she was feeling guilty about it. I listened, asked a few questions and then reassured her that she had nothing to feel guilty about. She went quiet. Then she changed the subject, and we spent the rest of the session somewhere else entirely. It took me a while to work out what had gone wrong, because nothing I had said was untrue or unkind.
Characteristics of Inspirational People
I have always paid attention to the people who inspire me. Some of them are well known and have reached thousands or millions of people. Someone who can change the way a great many people think about themselves, their lives or the world has done something genuinely valuable. Others on my list are people almost nobody has heard of. They may have inspired one person, a handful of people or a team of twelve.
What You Are Really Chasing Is a Feeling
What I wanted, from quite early on, was to work with people and help them develop. I had almost fallen into managing people, and Human Resources seemed the obvious route. So I did the qualifications, and there were years of them, applied for the next job, then the next one, and gradually worked my way up. I do not want to dismiss any of that. I learned a huge amount, achieved things I was proud of, and much of what I know now came from those years.
The Difference Between Motivation and Inspiration
Many years ago, when I was a new and inexperienced manager, one of my team came back from a very long lunch and swore at me in front of everybody. He was popular, he was influential with his peers, and every leader I spoke to had already decided he was trouble. I had been putting off dealing with him for weeks, which is a lesson of its own and not the one I want to draw here. Once the formal warning was out of the way, I did something I had not planned.
If Everyone Is Connected, Why Is the World Like This?
“Be the change you wish to see in the world” is one of those phrases we have heard so often that it risks losing its meaning. It sounds inspiring, but it can also feel disconnected from reality. When there is war, poverty or injustice around us, changing ourselves can seem like a very small response to a very large problem. It is a fair question. If we really are connected, why does the world look the way it does?
Why Boundaries Get Easier When You Stop Blaming
One of the first questions people ask when they begin to understand Unity Consciousness is, “Does this mean I have to accept whatever other people do?” The answer is no. Seeing the best in someone does not mean overlooking harmful behaviour, avoiding difficult conversations or staying in situations that are unhealthy. In fact, I have found the opposite. The more I stopped confusing people with their behaviour, the easier it became to deal with that behaviour calmly and directly.
Living From Unity Consciousness: What Changes When You See People Differently
What We See in Others Matters The Pygmalion effect shows how much our view of another person can affect them. In the late 1960s, researchers told teachers that a randomly selected group of pupils had exceptional academic potential, and by the end of the school year many of those children had made greater gains than their classmates. What had changed was not the children but the way their teachers saw them, and that view influenced the attention, encouragement and opportunities they were given.
The World of Separation
Thirty years ago, I led a project at work that saved my department well over a million pounds, a considerable sum at the time. Once it was approved, an older male colleague was assigned to work with me, and over the next six months we delivered it together. The programme won an award. At the end of the year, our manager assessed us both for promotion. My colleague was recommended. I was not. My first reaction was immediate. I felt hurt, angry and overlooked.
How Unity Consciousness Changes Our View of Connection
Most of us, when a relationship is not what we would like it to be, look first at the other person. It is a perfectly reasonable place to look, and sometimes it is exactly right. People do let us down, and they do withhold things, and when that is what is happening, the remedy is a practical one. We say what we need, we ask for something different, or we accept that this is as much as the relationship is going to offer.
From Observing to Choosing
I Decided I Could Be a Member Some years ago I found the belief that had been running my money for most of my adult life. I was one of the poor people who watched the others. The people with good lives, with money to do the things they wanted, were a club, and I wasn’t a member and never had been. Finding it was a relief rather than a blow. But finding it isn’t what changed anything. What changed things came a few days later, and it was a decision about what I believed.
Turning From Experience To Observation
You Can’t See Everything Straight Away Willingness is what opens the door. Once you’re prepared to look honestly at yourself, the next question is a practical one. Where do you actually look? Many people make the same mistake. They sit quietly and ask themselves, “What do I believe about myself?” The answer that comes back is usually the one they’ve always told themselves. It feels reasonable because it is already part of their conscious story.
The Only Thing You Have to Do Is Be Willing
The Question I Was Asking For years I asked one question about my life, and I asked it constantly. Why is this happening to me? It’s a fair question, and I’d defend anyone’s right to ask it. It is also the wrong one, because of what it quietly assumes. It assumes the answer is somewhere outside me. Something is happening, I am on the receiving end of it, and my job is to work out who or what is doing it.
How Beliefs Shape Your Experience
Describe Yourself in Three Words Most people manage it in about four seconds. Loyal. Organised. Ambitious. A worrier. The reliable one. Someone who has never been much good at confrontation. Whatever came to you, notice how little effort it took. And notice that the three words probably aren’t all complaints. Some of them you’d stand behind quite happily, and you’d be right to. You are good with people, or you are reliable, or you do work harder than most.
Why You React the Way You Do
I had been waiting twenty minutes when the waiter came over, apologetic, to tell me the dish I’d ordered was no longer available and would I choose again. I should have been told at the time of ordering. We were hungry. And instead of simply picking something else, I took the opportunity to tell him it wasn’t good enough and that I expected better. He couldn’t have been more apologetic. Eventually, with a shake of my head, I chose again and off he went.
Living a Guided Life
Learning to trust your Higher Self every day In the last article, we looked at how to quiet the mind enough to hear your Higher Self. This one asks what happens next when you start following what you hear. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, ch. 64 After my son was born, I took part-time work so I could be with him. When his school start date finally came round, he couldn’t wait. I decided to restart my career.
How To Quiet Your Mind So Your Higher Self Can Be Heard
In the last article, we looked at how to recognise the voice of your Higher Self. This one is about the harder problem: hearing it at all, in a life of noise, notifications and never-ending to-do lists. “Like the wind, our Wise Self speaks ever so softly. The whispers are sweet, and one must quiet to hear them.” Jan Lundy I was afraid of my own Higher Self. That sounds strange, given how overjoyed I was to have found it.
When Intuition Speaks: How to Recognise Your Higher Self
In the last article, we met the observer, the you behind the thoughts. That raised the question this article answers: of the thousands of thoughts that pass through your mind each day, how do you recognise the ones that carry the voice of your Higher Self? “What would You have me do? Where would You have me go? What would You have me say, and to whom?”- A Course In Miracles Almost everyone has experienced a moment when an answer arrived without effort.
You Are More Than Your Busy Mind
In Connecting To Your Higher Self, I introduced the wiser, calmer perspective that lives in each of us. In the last article, we met the quiet voice we kept talking over. This one asks a more practical question than it first appears: who is doing the listening? “There is nothing more important to true growth than realising that you are not the voice of the mind, you are the one who hears it.”- Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul. It’s two o’clock in the morning.
The Quiet Voice You Keep Talking Over
In Connecting To Your Higher Self, I introduced the wiser, calmer perspective that lives in each of us, the one that responds with love rather than fear. This article is about the moments you’ve already heard it… and talked over it anyway. “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.”- Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement address, 2005 Have you ever looked back on a situation and thought, I knew that wasn’t right?
What’s Waiting on the Other Side? Discovering the Peace You Already Carry
When I was in my twenties, I remember reading about inner peace and thinking it sounded terribly dull. Surely life was meant to be exciting, full of ambition, emotion and adventure. Why would anyone want to feel peaceful all the time? Looking back, I realise I had misunderstood what inner peace really meant. I thought peace was the absence of life. I have since discovered it is the foundation for living life more fully.
The Road Ahead: What to Expect When You Begin
Beginning the journey towards your higher self can feel exciting. It can also feel unsettling. It can feel confusing and, at times, deeply uncomfortable. Sometimes you may feel all these things in the same week. Most of us begin because something inside us whispers that there must be a better way to live. Perhaps life has become exhausting. Perhaps success hasn’t brought the fulfilment it promised. Or perhaps we simply sense there is more to who we are than the roles we play.
Your Teachers Are Closer Than You Think
When people begin a journey of personal growth, one of the first questions they ask is, “Where do I start?” There is no shortage of answers. Some people recommend meditation, others suggest therapy, coaching, psychology, philosophy or spirituality. There are countless books, podcasts, courses and teachers, all offering different perspectives on living a happier and more fulfilling life. It can feel overwhelming. The good news is that there isn’t one correct path.
The Question That Changed My Life
Part One of the Living From Your Higher Self series introduced the journey, the map from a life weighed down by fear and sadness to one of peace and purpose. This is where the map came from: two questions, asked nearly thirty years apart. I must have been about eight years old the first time I truly became aware of myself questioning suffering.
Why Personal Growth Isn’t Enough
In The Question That Changed My Life, I described the question that set this whole journey in motion. This article is about the wrong turn most of us take next, the one I took too, and the story that showed me why it never works. Years ago, I found my eight-year-old son, Dan, sobbing on the armchair, a depth of distress I had never seen in him, and one he couldn’t explain. Dan had always loved school. He used to count the days until the holidays ended.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Christina
Contact Christina, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack