Author Archives: Dani Thompson

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About Dani Thompson

Model/Actress/Presenter/Burlesque Dancer/Writer/Producer/Unicorn/Vegan and now lifestyle blogger!

The Heart Chakra: Healing, Balance & the Energy of Love

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The heart chakra, known as Anahata, sits at the centre of the chakra system and acts as a powerful bridge between the lower, physical chakras and the higher, spiritual ones. It governs our ability to love — not only others, but ourselves — and shapes how we experience compassion, connection, forgiveness and emotional balance.

When the heart chakra is open and balanced, we feel emotionally secure, connected and able to give and receive love freely. When it is blocked or imbalanced, we may struggle with relationships, boundaries, grief or self-worth.

Understanding the Heart Chakra

  • Location: Centre of the chest
  • Colour: Green (also pink)
  • Element: Air
  • Associated organs: Heart, lungs, thymus, circulatory system
  • Emotional themes: Love, compassion, trust, forgiveness, empathy, connection

Anahata translates to “unstruck” or “unhurt”, symbolising a place within us that remains whole and untouched by pain, even after life’s challenges. This chakra invites us to return to that space of openness and unconditional love.

Signs of a Balanced Heart Chakra

When the heart chakra is in harmony, you may experience:

  • Healthy, loving relationships
  • Emotional balance and inner peace
  • Compassion for yourself and others
  • Strong boundaries without guilt
  • A sense of belonging and connection

You are able to love openly while remaining grounded in self-respect and emotional safety.

Signs of a Blocked or Imbalanced Heart Chakra

An imbalanced heart chakra can show up in many ways, including:

  • Difficulty trusting or opening up
  • Fear of intimacy or vulnerability
  • Holding onto past grief, heartbreak, or resentment
  • People-pleasing or over-giving
  • Low self-worth or emotional numbness

Physically, it may manifest as tension in the chest, shallow breathing, or heart and lung-related discomfort.

Emotional Healing & the Heart Chakra

The heart chakra holds our emotional history — love, loss, joy, grief and everything in between. Healing this chakra often requires gentleness, patience and self-compassion.

Heart healing is not about erasing pain, but about allowing emotions to move through us rather than becoming stored in the body. Practices such as reiki, sound healing, breathwork, and meditation can be deeply supportive in releasing old emotional patterns and restoring energetic flow.

Crystals for the Heart Chakra

Crystals can help support heart chakra healing by gently influencing the emotional and energetic body. Some powerful heart chakra stones include:

  • Rose Quartz – Unconditional love and self-compassion
  • Rhodonite – Healing emotional wounds and forgiveness
  • Amazonite – Emotional balance and heart-led truth
  • Malachite – Deep emotional transformation
  • Green Aventurine – Emotional renewal and optimism

Working with crystals during meditation, energy healing sessions, or daily self-care rituals can help bring awareness and softness to the heart space.

Sound Healing & the Heart Chakra

The heart chakra resonates with the note F and responds beautifully to sound healing. Instruments such as crystal singing bowls, gongs, chimes, and the human voice can help dissolve energetic blocks and encourage emotional release.

Sound healing works by calming the nervous system and allowing stored emotions to surface and release naturally, supporting both emotional and physical heart health.

The Heart Chakra & Self-Love

Self-love is the foundation of heart chakra balance. It’s not about perfection or constant positivity — it’s about meeting yourself with kindness, honesty and acceptance.

Heart-centred self-love includes:

  • Setting healthy boundaries
  • Honouring your emotions
  • Releasing self-judgement
  • Allowing rest and nourishment

The more compassion you offer yourself, the more naturally love flows outward.

Opening the Heart Chakra Gently

Healing the heart is a journey, not a destination. The heart chakra opens gradually, layer by layer, as we learn to feel safe in love again — with ourselves and with others.

Gentle practices such as yoga, meditation, reiki, sound baths, journaling and working with heart chakra crystals can all support this process. Trust that your heart opens in its own time and wisdom.

The heart chakra reminds us that love is not something we need to earn — it is our natural state. When we reconnect with the energy of Anahata, we begin to live from a place of compassion, balance and emotional truth.

May you honour your heart, listen to its wisdom and allow love to flow freely — within and beyond you.

African Peanut Stew

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A rich, hearty, plant-based stew with warming spices and a creamy peanut base. Comfort food with soul.

African Peanut Stew is one of my all-time favourite comfort meals. Rich, creamy, and full of warming spices, it’s the perfect balance of hearty and nourishing. The combination of peanut butter, tomatoes, sweet potato and vegetables creates a beautifully velvety broth that’s both satisfying and packed with flavour.

What I love most about this recipe is how quick and simple it is to make with everyday ingredients, yet it tastes like it’s been simmering for hours. It’s naturally filling and easy to adapt with whatever vegetables you have on hand.

Ingredients

  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 1 tin chopped tomatoes
  • 1 tin butter beans (or any beans you like), drained and rinsed
  • ½ cup okra, sliced
  • 1 carrot, sliced
  • 1 aubergine, cubed
  • 1 sweet potato, cubed
  • 1 vegetable stock cube
  • 1 pint water
  • 1 tsp chilli powder
  • 1 tsp ground cumin
  • 1 tsp ground ginger
  • 2 tsp ground coriander
  • ¼ cup peanut butter
  • ¼ cup peanuts
  • 1 tbsp vegetable oil
  • Salt to taste

Method

  1. Heat vegetable oil a large pot over medium heat and gently fry the chopped onion until softened.
  2. Pour in the water and crumble in the vegetable stock cube.
  3. Add the chilli powder, cumin, ginger, and coriander. Stir well.
  4. Stir in the peanut butter and heat gently until it melts into the broth and becomes smooth.
  5. Add the chopped tomatoes, butter beans, okra, carrot, aubergine, sweet potato, and peanuts.
  6. Season with salt to taste and stir to combine.
  7. Bring the stew to a boil, then reduce the heat, cover with a lid, and simmer for about 40 minutes, until all the vegetables are tender and the stew is thick and rich.

Notes & Variations

  • Feel free to add other vegetables if you wish.
  • Jackfruit works beautifully in this stew for a heartier, meatier texture.
  • A handful of spinach stirred in near the end adds extra greens and freshness.

Lovely served with mashed potato or rice or on its own in a big bowl with some crusty bread for dipping.

Crystals for Self-Love

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Self-love isn’t about perfection or constant positivity — it’s about compassion, boundaries, forgiveness and learning to come home to yourself. Crystals can be beautiful allies on this journey, helping us soften, heal, and reconnect with our worth on an energetic level.

Below are some powerful heart-centred crystals that support self-love, emotional healing, and inner balance.

Rose Quartz – The Stone of Unconditional Love

Rose quartz is the ultimate stone of love and compassion. It gently encourages self-love and deepens our ability to both give and receive love. Working directly with the heart chakra, it opens the heart to unconditional love — for yourself, others and the world around you.

This nurturing crystal also helps to purify emotional wounds, restore trust, and bring harmony to the heart, making it a beautiful ally for emotional healing and self-acceptance.

It helps:

  • Release self-criticism and negative self-talk
  • Heal past emotional pain
  • Invite gentleness, compassion, and forgiveness

Use rose quartz during meditation, keep it by your bed, or place it over your heart to remind yourself that you are worthy of love exactly as you are.

Red Jasper – Grounded Self-Worth & Strength

Red jasper is deeply connected to the Root Chakra, supporting grounding, stability and a strong sense of safety within the body. It helps build self-love and self-confidence at a foundational level, encouraging you to feel secure, supported and empowered in who you are.

This earthy stone reminds us that true self-love begins with feeling rooted, balanced and at home within ourselves.

It helps:

  • Build inner strength and courage
  • Support healthy boundaries
  • Anchor self-love into everyday actions

Red jasper reminds you that loving yourself also means feeling safe, supported, and rooted in your body.

Moonstone – Emotional Balance & Self-Compassion

Moonstone is deeply connected to the energy of the Moon and the intuitive self. It gently soothes stress and emotional instability, helping to calm the mind and soften overwhelming emotions.

This nurturing stone offers deep emotional healing, encouraging balance, self-compassion and trust in your inner wisdom as you move through life’s natural cycles.

It helps:

  • Soothe emotional overwhelm
  • Support intuition and self-trust
  • Encourage patience and self-acceptance

Moonstone is perfect if your self-love journey includes healing emotional sensitivity or reconnecting with your inner feminine energy.

Rhodonite – Healing Old Wounds

Rhodonite encourages forgiveness — of others and most importantly, of yourself — while supporting emotional honesty and heart-centred truth. It gently heals past wounds and helps release old pain that may be blocking self-love.

This compassionate stone also assists in the discovery of your true passions, helping you reconnect with what lights you up from the inside out.

It helps:

  • Heal emotional scars
  • Release resentment and self-blame
  • Encourage forgiveness and compassion

Rhodonite gently supports the heart while helping you move forward without carrying old pain.

Amazonite – Speaking Your Truth with Love

Amazonite is connected to the Heart Chakra, supporting emotional balance and gentle healing of the heart. It helps to balance moods and dissolve sadness, bringing a sense of calm, hope and reassurance.

This soothing stone also assists in manifesting universal love, encouraging compassion, harmony and a deeper connection to love in all its forms.

It helps:

  • Release people-pleasing patterns
  • Encourage healthy communication
  • Support self-respect and authenticity

Amazonite reminds you that your voice matters and that honouring your truth is an act of self-love.

Malachite – Deep Transformation & Empowerment

Malachite is a deeply transformative stone known for absorbing negative energy and bringing hidden emotions to the surface. It helps eliminate destructive thought patterns and behaviours, supporting awareness, growth and emotional responsibility.

This potent crystal encourages empowered self-love — the kind that invites change, healing and conscious transformation.

It helps:

  • Expose self-sabotaging patterns
  • Encourage emotional responsibility
  • Empower deep personal growth

Malachite supports radical self-love — the kind that says “I choose growth, even when it’s uncomfortable.”

Working with Crystals for Self-Love ✨

You might choose one crystal that resonates with where you are right now, or create a small self-love crystal set.

Try:

  • Meditating with them
  • Holding them during journaling
  • Using them in self-care rituals

Most importantly, remember: crystals don’t create self-love — they support your intention to treat yourself with kindness, patience and respect.

Self-love is a practice, not a destination. Be gentle with yourself along the way.

Eden Perfumes

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Perfume, from the French Parfum, a mixture of fragrant essential oils or aroma compounds used to give the human body an appealing scent.

Expensive, opulent and luxurious be they floral, musky, woody, fruity or aquatic, men and women have been wearing perfumes for thousands of years.

But did you know that most of perfumes contain some really icky animal ingredients?

Ambergris – a wax-like  growth which is found in the stomach and intestines of about one in a hundred sperm whales. The finest ambergris has a lovely, sweet, musky odor. 

Musk – found in a small pouch, in front of the penis of a mature male musk deer. Apparently it possesses a sweet, generous, aromatic intensity bringing an elegance and a radiance to any perfume composition.

Civet – a buttery-yellow paste secreted by the perineal glands of both male and female civets which is said to have a radiant, velvety, floral scent . . .

Castoreum – Is used to produce a spicy ‘leather’ scent and is a thick paste found in the castor sacs between the pelvis and the base of the tail  of both the male and female beaver.

Hyraceum – also called ‘Africa stone’ is the petrified rock like excrement of the rock hyrax, it’s one animal scent that can be harvested without actually causing any harm to the animal but why oh why would anybody want perfume made from any animals excrement, no matter how ethically it might have been obtained?

Well, I definitely don’t want to be lathering my body in any of those, that’s for sure!

Luckily, I stumbled across an amazing vegan and cruelty free perfume brand last year whilst browsing the lanes of Brighton called Eden perfumes.

Eden Perfumes have hundreds of scents lines up in bottles on their walls that almost perfectly match that of many well known designer fragrances but without any of the cruelty, no animal ingredients, no animal testing and mostly organic, what’s not to love.

I have 3 myself, copies of Chanel No5, Dior’s Poison and Thierry Mugler’s Angel and you really would struggle to tell the difference between the Eden perfumes and the real designer scents.

Not only that but at only £18 for a 30ml bottle if you buy in store of £24 for the luxury lines, you’re saving a fortune!

Cruelty free cost’s less!

Shop online at www.edenperfumes.co.uk

Or head to:

Original Brighton Branch

26 Gardner Street Brighton BN11UP

New London Branch

203 Portobello Road London W111LU