Do you sometimes overthink things? I know I do. As a spiritually minded person, I have spent hours meditating just to become more aware of my emotions as they pass through me. My temptation is to start questioning these emotions, to try and work out why I'm feeling sad or angry or downright miserable.

There has been a lot of downright miserable of late. And after all that meditation and questioning, I know that that misery is an old pattern that was laid down in my childhood, and that has very little to do with the person I am now. Still, sometimes I get caught in the old emotion and my brain starts spinning stories about being unloved and unseen. Which sets my mood into a nosedive.

To compound the whole sorry business, I then get my analysing mind to work on it and try to dissect the misery, find its present-day cause. And of course all I can find are wires connecting me to a past long dead, to a pattern long worn out.

There probably is a present-day cause that set me off. I am after all trying to do some of the most stressful things known to man: moving half way across the country, renovate a house, and start a new business. No wonder my child-self gets insecure. But my reaction to it, the depth of my feelings of isolation, are and old groove that I fall into. It isn't easy to to get out of. And I can't think myself out of it.

Truth is, moods are like weather. Storms are caused by the flutter of a butterfly's wing setting off a series of movements in the air. Any flutter of circumstance can set off a dark mood. And then all I can do is sit it out. There is as little point in trying to find its cause as to wonder why it is raining. It just is. No effort on my part is going to make it go away - in fact, the strain of trying will make it worse.

So I sit, and I watch. Inevitably, the clouds will part and the sun will shine again.