Sarah Ashley Neal trained in holistic therapies and dabbled in business before launching Emotional Sandwiches®. When she isn’t engaging with her entrepreneurial mindset, she is reconciled with a yoga mat to quiet it down. Sarah has spent the last decade working on projects in both the public and private sector. In an exclusive piece, Sarah reveals the inspiration behind Emotional Sandwiches, a unique self-help book that reintroduces readers to their emotional friends and foes.
Sarah Ashley Neal
Paper Dreams and Flights of Fancy…
That’s when it hit me! I’d been sitting on a rock in Almeria, Spain, after trailing my emotional baggage around with me when a dozen or so words appeared in front of me. It was as though a collection of smoke circles had been blown from afar, and they’d finally caught up with my vivid imagination. I frantically wrote the words down, seeing this as a sign to start writing again, encouraged by the fact that I had even begun to talk to them . . .
“How am I going to write a book about you lot, then?”, I asked. They didn’t reply. Or I wasn’t listening properly.
Several years later, when I hid in the Andalucian mountains to write a different book, I sat overlooking breathtaking views when the same words piped up. If I didn’t know better, I’d have accepted the idea that they’d caught the bus along the Costa del Sol to reunite with me after hearing of my return. But they’d never really left. This time, the words had surfaced from within and were beginning to make sense as I humbly listened to what they had to tell me!
So down went the other book and a new one began. Little did I know that the one I disengaged with is the next book in this series. But you don’t need to know about that one, yet! What you’d probably like to know is how the title came about?
Inspired to play around with twenty ‘everyday’ words, I tasked them to feedback on areas of my life requiring attention. Some situations appeared less threatening once the layers of perceived complication were stripped back and put into perspective. If words could speak, what would they like to tell us? That’s what I wanted to know. I wondered if anyone else shared my enthusiasm. So, I set about sandwiching some of their feedback together, about life in general, and hey presto – Emotional Sandwiches was born.
I’ve found that solutions are usually unafraid to surface when we stop suffocating the situation, under scrutiny, with excuses. What we choose to do next may challenge us further, all because we had the gumption to ask ourselves for honest feedback. If the answers coming through are going to be of value to us, then we’ll most likely have to make a few adjustments, somewhere, and this may appear to complicate ‘things’ – again!
Sometimes the steps we need to take can be disruptive, emotional and impact on other people and so, we find ourselves going back to the drawing board to consult the oracle within, hoping for alternative answers to surface which may require less effort. The trick is to recognise what holds us back from acting upon the answers coming through.
We can all identify with the Emotional Sandwiches, even if there’s never been any inclination to stop to analyse them, before. I felt inspired to work with these artistic communicators that have helped to remedy all manner of things in my own life and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know them better.
