So I am here at the start of week three of being home alone and it is going pretty well. This weekend I had an online meeting with my mum and my sister Helen and a long FaceTime chat with my daughter. Helen’s husband did a live DJ set on FaceTime on Saturday afternoon…
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may…
I was looking through some notes on intention and motivation this morning and I came across some notes from doing a Charlie Morley golden shadow exercise from his book ‘Dreaming Through Darkness’. The golden shadow is made up of our good qualities and best aspirations, which often we are not able to admit to ourselves.…
Where do I even begin. Last night I joined in the evening sit – it was the first time I had managed because usually I am cooking dinner then. I’ve decided that we will eat earlier and make sure I connect with this most precious offering from the amazing tutors at the Mindfulness Association.…
There is a practice in the Mindfulness Association Level 3 Insight training called – Resting in the Midst. It is my most valuable practice. I have used it before, when travel plans have gone awry, when I have found myself stuck in situations that seem impossible to get out of, when I am overfull with…
As I practice mindfulness, compassion and insight meditation more and more I recognise more and more how I create my own reality. If I wake up with the expectation that the day should be one way and it turns out a different way, I can easily create a reality that is unpleasant for me and…
Hello everybody and welcome to this week’s blog. It’s my first blog post for the Mindfulness Association and as I type I can feel the tension between the head and the heart about where to start, and also a vibrant emergent energy that needs channelling if I am to make any sense at all! I…
to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when…
I found myself in a cabin in the woods in the middle of storm. Yes, the one we all felt the effects of last weekend. Storm Ciara. The cabin is somewhere I retreat to on a regular basis. It is in the middle of woodland surrounded by chalk streams and near a lake. It has…