Tegan Cannell

17/08/2026

09/07/2026

A lifelong school friend took this black and white photo of me for her photography course. I was about 25. Super happy. I'd hardly cried a day in my life. The one holding it is me today, 16 years on — and the strange thing is, I relate to those tears now more than I ever did back when they were just part of a photograph.

But it's more than the tears. The girl in that photo was ignorantly happy — mostly propped up by a whole heap of external 'benchmarks' being sufficiently met... that is... until they weren't. Unable to 'get my life back', I ended up becoming quite depressed. These days? I know how it's possible to be happy regardless of those external benchmarks.

So what changed?

I stopped trying to 'be her again'. One day it finally dawned on me. Why would I want to 'be her again', when being her is exactly what couldn't meet the reality I was facing? Why wouldn't I want so much more for myself? After that penny dropped, I stopped looking backward.

I used to think peace was on the far side of getting my old life back — changing the external circumstances I found myself in. What I discovered however, is that freedom became possible when I stopped asking life to be different, and started asking something of myself instead.

The shift between these two ways of being happy is the heart of what I share with people in my work today.

06/07/2026

Guilt, for most of us, is like an internal self-punishment telling us we should have done something differently. For all the weight it carries, this way of relating to guilt rarely helps us do better next time. If anything, it just adds another layer to a load that was already too heavy.

Here's what I've come to notice about that kind of guilt.

Not feeling guilty can feel like you have let yourself off the hook too easily, and holding onto the guilt feels like you're taking responsibility but, holding onto it often keeps your eyes fixed on the moment you snapped, the thing you said, the behaviour you regret. It rarely takes you any deeper than that. And deeper is where the answer is. What's actually needed in those moments isn't more guilt or self-criticism. It's understanding.

➡ Feeling bad about the moment keeps you busy with the symptom.
➡ Understanding what led you there is what reaches the cause.

None of this means the moment didn't matter, or that you shouldn't care. The guilt is there because you care, more than the way that was expressed in that moment. And so it pays to reframe how we hold guilt. Rather than being left in the murk of the punishing kind, there's another way to see it. Guilt can be acknowledged as the part of you that knows you could have met the moment with more kindness, with more love. And that part is worth listening to.

In this reframe, accountability becomes less about blaming yourself for one moment, and more about wanting to understand what got in the way of expressing yourself in more loving ways. And more often than not, what got in the way usually isn't the thing that triggered us. It was simply the mirror illuminating everything you were already carrying, long before the moment even started.

04/07/2026

Cold air. Warm sunlight. Blue sky. Fog. Clouds. Rain.

All of it happened in the same day.

I spend many hours walking on the Brisbane Valley Rail Trail. Each walk brings something different, and I often find myself reflecting on what nature has to teach. The day I took this particular photo, I was reminded that nature never asks itself to be one thing. It doesn't demand endless sunshine or permanent blue skies. It allows the full spectrum.

Yet as humans, we often expect life to be different. We want happiness without sadness, certainty without doubt, and ease without challenge. We spend so much energy trying to hold onto one side of the experience and push away the other.

But perhaps life was never designed that way.

What I am becoming clearer on, slowly but surely, is that part of being human is experiencing the full spectrum. Much of our suffering comes from resisting the parts of life we wish weren't there, while freedom seems to emerge when we stop demanding that life be different and learn to find beauty in all of it.

That's not to say we should tolerate things that need changing. Rather, it is learning to meet what is here before deciding what comes next. Because it is much easier to respond wisely to reality when we are no longer fighting the fact that it exists.

02/07/2026

💎 To be clear: This does not mean you stop taking action toward things that matter. It means you stop allowing those outcomes to be the judge and jury of your happiness.

01/07/2026

We each develop a set of beliefs, assumptions, and interpretations that shape the way we perceive and relate to the world around us. At the core of this filter is our understanding of who we are, other people, and our place in the world. Much of this begins forming in early childhood as we try to make sense of fundamental questions such as: Who am I? How freely can I express myself? Am I safe? Do I belong? Do I matter?

While these questions are universal, the answers we arrive at are deeply personal. They are influenced by our experiences, relationships, environment, and the meaning we make of them. Much of this foundation is established in the early years of life, shaped by the people around us—who are themselves responding to the world through the lens of their own beliefs, experiences, and understanding.

The challenge is that once these interpretations become subconscious, we stop seeing them as interpretations and start experiencing them as reality. Becoming aware of the filter is the beginning of freedom, because lasting, intentional change is much easier when we become conscious of what is driving our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours.

01/07/2026

Many of the thoughts you think are not fresh observations of reality. They are familiar interpretations of it.

Most of what we call thinking is actually the mind drawing from old experiences, beliefs, assumptions, memories, and conclusions. We think we're responding to what is happening now, but often we're responding to what has happened before.

So much of what we call thinking is, in many ways, remembering.

The challenge is that we tend to merge the experience and our interpretation of the experience into one. We don't just think the thought, we assume the thought is true. We don't just have a perspective, we assume it is reality.

But here's the thing: you don't have to believe every thought you think. When we become willing to question our interpretations, we often discover other ways of understanding what happened. The event may be the same, but the meaning we give it can change.

And when the meaning changes, our experience of the event often changes with it.

We can't change the past, but there is freedom in recognising that the way we have remembered it may not be the only way to understand it.

29/06/2026

Have you ever been with a small child in the middle of a big emotion? Often, what helps them settle isn't having the feeling talked away or dismissed, but having a caring adult meet them, soothe them, and help them feel safe. Not because the feeling disappears, but because the child feels seen, heard, and understood.

For many of us, that wasn't how big emotions were handled growing up. We were told to be quiet, calm down, stop crying, toughen up, or sent away until we could "pull ourselves together." Some may even remember hearing, "Keep going and I'll give you something to cry about." 😳

So it's no surprise that, as adults, we often do the same thing to ourselves. We push feelings aside, minimise them, or try to think our way out of them as quickly as possible.

These days, many parents are learning a different way. We are learning to acknowledge our children's feelings while also being the steady adult who can hold the moment, and when the time is right, help them to meet those challenging moments in new ways. In a way, our generation gets the gloriously challenging job of doing both—being that presence for our children while learning how to be it for ourselves.

What I have learned over the past eight years of trying to be that change in my children's lives is this: our inner world as adults is not so different from that of a small child. Often, what we really want is to know that someone is listening, that our struggle or discomfort has been acknowledged, and that if something needs to be done about it, someone has our back.

One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is learning how to offer that same acknowledgement to ourselves. Sometimes we learn it from a parent, a partner, a friend, a mentor, or a therapist. Sometimes we learn it through experience. But over time, we can develop the capacity to become that steady presence within ourselves. A simple moment of, "I see you. I hear you. I've got you," can be incredibly powerful.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't lean on others. It simply means that self-love includes becoming someone who can offer that same acknowledgement to ourselves. And when we start listening to our internal world without judging it, suppressing it, or giving it more meaning than "this is what I am feeling right now," something interesting happens. Much like a child who, once they feel safe and understood, becomes more capable of thinking clearly, problem-solving, and considering other possibilities, we often discover that what felt overwhelming a moment ago can be met in a very different way.

29/06/2026

Most of us move through life so closely identified with our thoughts, beliefs, meanings, and judgements that we don't see them for what they are: one perception of reality.

The moment we become aware that our initial interpretation of what is happening may not be the only way to see or relate to it, we create a powerful space. A space where curiosity becomes possible. A space where we can begin to wonder, "What else might be true?"

We start recognising that a belief is not necessarily a fact, a judgement is not necessarily the truth, and a feeling is not necessarily a command that must be followed. The circumstance may not have changed, but our relationship to it can. And from that place, we become more capable of consciously choosing how we respond.

You can't change what you can't see. Awareness is about seeing more clearly, and it begins when we are willing to shine a light on ourselves and the role we play in the way we experience reality.

26/06/2026

From the moment you were born, your brain was absorbing and encoding information at an incredible rate. During infancy and early childhood, your brain was making approximately one million new neural connections every second — establishing the neural networks that would become your filter.

Through repeated experiences, certain patterns of thinking, feeling, and responding got reinforced and wired in. Those neural pathways formed a blueprint — a unique constellation of networks that became the foundation of how you relate to yourself, other people, and the world around you.

This is your filter. In other words: the current state of consciousness you function from.

And here's what matters: You don't just have a filter—you live through it, often without realising it's there. It sits between what happens and how you perceive what happens. Because it feels so familiar, it can seem like reality itself. But it isn't. It's a learned way of seeing. Your experience of life is one interpretation of reality, filtered through your belief system and limited by what your filter allows you to see.