Often I hear self-care described in terms of what we can do. We can balance work with rest and play. We can care for ourselves through nutrition, exercise, socialising and getting support when things are difficult. Acting to manage life in this way is important, but I believe there are other aspects of self-care not … Read more
This is a video from the School of Life that points to some of the challenges modern life hands us. Whether you agree with what it says or not, it’s worth looking at to get you thinking about your lifestyle and what you believe.
An excellent article published by the Psychosynthesis Trust summarises the benefits of meditation. Read about those benefits here. The benefits are both mental and physical. Practice is deceptively easy but takes a lifetime to master. When you’re starting out it’s difficult to do it on your own. If you want to practice meditation near Hungerford … Read more
The Good Life is a phrase from Positive Psychology, although some of you may also recall the comedy series with Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal. In Positive Psychology your reach The Good Life as a result of effective effort, absorption in challenging meaningful activity and practicing mindfulness. That’s a gross simplification, but hopefully gives a … Read more
Evidence from research suggests that mindfulness style meditation helps you relate to your thoughts and feelings in a non-judgemental and non-reactive fashion. This can bring you to a place where you are more able to observe how you are in the present moment with compassion, hold emotion better, and be less harshly critical of yourself, … Read more
You can think about the human personality as a number of layers, each folded around early ones, rather like an onion. At the centre are the youngest parts of you, on the outside you older parts. While the skin we present to the world is adult, at our centre we still carry a part of … Read more
Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary … Read more
Maybe I’m getting to be a grumpy old man, but I get irritated by the modernist urging to be positive. Think positive, be positive, say “YES!” to life. Excuse me, but NO! Positivity and ‘yes’ have their place, but my experience is that often the difficulty for people is saying ‘no’. Without ‘no’ the world … Read more
It’s tempting to look at a new piece of technology, such as Facebook, and think of it as either a ‘good’ thing or a ‘bad’ thing. I’m certainly guilty of trying to decide on those terms, rather than thinking about if and how I want to engage with something new. I think everything has a … Read more
Today I reflected on how much I like to be home. I wonder what ties us to places, lets us feel comfortable there, soothes us and gives us our ground? I don’t think this is a parochial ‘mine is better than yours’ feeling, but rather one of familiarity, as if we vibrated at the same … Read more
