I have been struggling this week to write my blog. More often than not the words fall out of me and the blog writes itself. I have an alarm on my phone that sounds on Sunday at 9am and I drop the question in ‘What to write about this week?’ It goes off again at…
I am in the sky, on an aeroplane, on my way for a week’s holiday in Zante. My friend Claire is staying there for a month and asked me to join her for a week. The decision was easy! We flew from Liverpool. It is an early flight. So I drove down from Scotland the…
Mindfulness Meditation – Serendipity and Trust in my Values
When we think of mindfulness and compassion in action, we often jump straight to thinking about gestures of kindness, or caring interventions, or supportive acts, and usually aimed at someone other than ourselves. I sometimes feel there can be something a bit ‘Tom and Jerry’ about this – you know the thing – Tom chases…
Life is good. And yet, I seem to allow myself to suffer. The cause of my suffering? My mind of course! I notice I have been quite serious lately. A bit weighed down with my negative thought patterns. The resistance in this feels like sticky dark treacle clouding my mind – clinging to negative thoughts. …
As I was driving to the station this morning mulling on my blog, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody started to play on my playlist, with the starting lyrics: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide. No escape from reality”. This resonated with an experience I had this weekend. I was walking…
Mindfulness in nature
One of the results of our social media lifestyles is that we all end up in little bubbles communicating with those who agree with our point of view. This came home to me this week reading about the social media storm around Chris Packham and licences to kill birds. We live in a rural community…
One of the things I love about my home in Scotland is the birds. The little birds that come to feed on sunflower seeds and peanuts outside my kitchen window. The crows cawing in the tall trees as I practice in the morning. The starlings that roll across the sky in their flocks. The birds…