You'll Never Walk Alone: Poems for life's ups and downs

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Rachel Kelly graduated from Oxford University, studying History. [1] She then worked as a journalist for The Times newspaper in the UK. [2] Since 2014 she has run wellbeing workshops for mental health charities MIND, as well as other organizations. [3] Kelly now works as a mental health campaigner. [4] She has written opinion columns for The Guardian [5] and has served as a commentator on the BBC. [6] [2] Books [ edit ] This idea is developed in the second verse, in which the writer longs to fly ‘closer to my home’. Repetition adds to the plaintive feel of this cry from the heart. The third verse suggests quite how tough the experience is of being motherless: it is ‘hard’; ‘such a hard time’; and ‘such a really hard time’. In the last verse, that word ‘Sometimes’ again suggests the possibility of hope.

Poetry lets us connect with other people who have experienced similar sentiments. We’re not alone in our despair or delight. This book will show you how to bring poetry into your everyday emotional reality, where it can be a new tool for wellbeing. And one that means you’ll never walk alone. My Review of You’ll Never Walk Alone As an advocate for the healing powers of poetry, her new book You’ll Never Walk Alone is an attempt to convey her enthusiasm and passion for the written word. It is a collection of “poems for life’s ups and downs” that will show you how to bring poetry into your everyday emotional reality, where it can be a new tool for wellbeing. Her hope is that poems can become part of everyone’s emotional life too, even if you don’t think poetry is ‘your thing’. Bestselling UK author and Mental Health Advocate Rachel Kelly believes in the power of writing for wellbeing. It has helped her to navigate challenging times in her life, especially when she suffered from depression. Rachel loves poetry. Poems help us to feel deeply and to connect. ’ I think of it like a handshake with the poet’, said Rachel . Her new book ‘ You’ll Never Walk Alone: Poems for Life’s Ups and Downs ’ is about how verse – both reading and writing it – could become an unexpected part of your mental health toolbox and help you manage and allow all types of feelings to come to the surface. Poetry can help you to honour those emotions and to possibly explore them further.As if in the middle of an intimate conversation between the poet and reader, the poem begins with what seems strange advice. Oliver urges us to unlearn one of the first lessons we are taught – to be good. In fact, we do not have to be good to be loved. Instead, all we need to do is reconnect with our essential loving, animal nature. All we must do is to ‘let’ this happen.

Writing is about connection. Therapy can be wonderful but at 3am it is unlikely to be available. Words can be our companion at any time of the day or night. Which is why I called the book ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone. If the thought of writing daunts you. Don’t think about it as being good or bad. Instead, write straight from the heart: writing for wellbeing is as much about how you feel as the words you choose and the images they suggest.Nothing compares with the experience of enslaved people. But all of us can feel motherless at times, even if we are blessed with the most loving of mothers. In my darkest hour, when I suffered severe depression, my mother could not comfort me – she who had hitherto been able to soothe any pain. There is, it turns out, a limit to a mother’s ability to succour her child. You’ll Never Walk Alone is a collection of the kind of inspirational texts – mainly poems – that can accompany us, whatever we are feeling, from sorrow to delight. The texts are not just about words which can console us or comfort us – though they often do this too. Rather these are poems that allow us to enjoy a full range of emotions. The poems are organised according to the season in which they ‘belong’: we all have seasons of our minds, be they wintery and dark, or more spring-like and hopeful. Comprising 52 poems, with analysis by Rachel, You’ll Never Walk Alone introduces a poem for each week of the year plus tips on bringing poetry into your life. Take the first, more universal approach to feeling better. Here the aim is for all of us to do a better job at supporting ourselves and feeling more connected to one another. To create a more sympathetic environment for anyone who is struggling, especially in the workplace, and to increase the amount of social prescribing. It was something my own mother recognised: it was she who gave me this poem. Now a mother myself, I too sometimes feel powerless in the face of the suffering of my own children, or indeed my own feelings of abandonment. This spiritual allows me to accept my own limitations, just as it may have helped my mother to accept hers. I didn’t think of others at all. Only when I began to get better did I want to share my experience and the reality of severe mental illness, how it could happen to anyone, and why charities like SANE are lifesavers to those who were desperate like me.