Innate well-being

For ten long years the Greeks had been attempting to seize the City of Troy and win the war. In exasperation, Odysseus comes up with one last desperate measure. He instructs his soldiers to build a magnificent wooden horse and to position it outside the city gates. Under cover of darkness, he and his best men climb inside.

The next morning, while the citizens of Troy are waking up the remainder of the Greek army sets sail.

‘They have surrendered!’ the shout goes up across the walled city.

‘An…

In his book, ‘The Body Says No’, Gabor Maté writes in great detail of the indisputable link between stress and a wide variety of diseases.

He demonstrates how stresses, often imposed on the developing psyche in childhood, continue to play out in patterns of behaviour in our adult life that create physically debilitating and even fatal illness.

This field of medicine is psycho-neuro-endocrine-immunology. It investigates the link between stress within the system and the emergence of disease an…

A question that often comes up is ‘How do I have better access to my wisdom?’ or ‘How do I make the right decision?’

We could begin by looking at the factors involved…

There is the body – ‘a universe of 37.2 trillion cells operating in more or less perfect concert’ as Bill Bryson so eloquently describes it. And an estimated 37 billion billion (37 x 21 zeros) reactions taking place every second. And there are other bodies… other humans, plants, animals, insects, microbes with their own structur…

[Excerpt from SANE]

Without an understanding of what the mind really is, mind management is just a playing out of confusion.

The self exists as a thought or belief or as a state of mind. It arises in that moment in whatever appearance it takes on. It doesn’t exist outside of that. The idea of who we are is whatever the mind is doing in that moment.

For the self to try to manage the mind creates a false separation and unfulfillable effort. Because self and mind are the same thing. A belief try…

[Excerpt from SANE, Getting real with reality]

In insanity, pleasure is a release from the prison cell. It is temporary relief.

The greyhound is allowed to catch the rabbit before the chase is back on again.

The hamster wheel stops momentarily.

But it is a temporary fix and it is a fix that ultimately can make the prison harder to bear. Because we have experienced the relief of the end of the search.

The yoga class, the pills, the alcohol, the shopping hit, the love affair. All brilliant. T…

I frequently practice Bikram yoga (try it if you haven’t already – quite something!) and one of the phrases that my teacher often says is ‘Breathe. Align. Deepen.’

Breathe – focus on the breath, this brings everything into this moment, a deep immersion in the body, in the pose, allowing the intelligence of life that we are to respond to this what is, right now. Without that attention and presence, no yoga.

Align – align the body within the pose, get the basics of the pose right, come back to b…

In their book, Stealing Fire, Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal calculated that the industry of ‘shutting off the self’ is worth $4 trillion a year. It’s not surprising because the mind, lost in its own creations can be torture, it creates conflict, stress, disease and misery.

Of course, we would be driven to find ways to turn off that suffering. But without an understanding of what the mind really is, mind management is just a playing out of confusion.

The self exists as a thought or belief or as…

[Excerpt from EASE, getting real with work]

To have the job of our wildest dreams, to do the work we are to do, to live from the freedom we really are, we have to be willing to get a bit clearer about reality.

Ready?

Ok, in the previous chapter we started with what we see around us. And the fact that nothing can be observed other than via perception. And everything that is brought to life in perception will change as perception changes and as understanding of the nature of perception changes.…

[Excerpt from 'It's not you... and it's not me']

In the midst of our suffering, we have a skewed view of what is really needed. And the greater the suffering, the more skewed the need and the more desperate we are to get it.

It looked like I needed the man to make me feel valid and worthy.  The only way he could do that would have been by convincing me how much he cared about me, how special I was…

Because then I would feel OK. My self-esteem would be intact. My view of the weekend I had ju…

[excerpt from SANE, getting real with reality]

In ancient Rome and Greece ‘aimless wandering’ was considered a form of madness. The ‘treatment’ was stoning and beating.

In mid 1800s America, the label ‘Dysaesthesia Aethiopica’ indicated that black men and women were incapable of living in freedom. The ‘treatment’ was slavery.

In the 1850s and 60s when train travel was becoming possible, it was believed that the shaking motion injured the brain, sending travellers mad. The ‘treatment’ was to s…