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Mind health

Healing

‘Spiritual bypass’ is perhaps the biggest risk as we explore what is true about ourselves and about the world.

It is a term coined by John Welwood, a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist and refers to the ‘tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks’.

And it raises the question,

How do we understand the two aspects of what we are: the pure intelligence, presence and beingness of life …

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The joy of stress

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 and is l…

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Put you in a trance...

“I just want some ice on my wrist so I look better when I dance

Have you lookin' at it, put you in a trance

I just want a Rollie Rollie Rollie…’

We seem to be listening to this song a lot, Finn and I, in the car on the way to school. (For those of you who, like me, didn’t know… ‘ice’, the urban dictionary says, ‘is flashy jewellery often containing many diamonds').

‘Have you lookin’ at it, put you in a trance..’. Ayo and Teo know that the ‘you’ in the song will be hypnotised by the jewels, made half…

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It is slavery to live in the mind, unless it has become part of the body



"It's a Slavery to live in the mind unless it has become part of the body."  - Khalil Gibran

I came across this great quote the other day, and I wanted to share it with you.

In just 17 words,  it shows the imprisonment the mind creates and the freedom available when that is seen for what it is.

For those of us who suffer greatly from the thoughts and beliefs of the mind and the corresponding emotional experiences of anxiety, depression, isolation, withdrawal, conflict, it might be really obvious th…

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Defence and Capacity

A friend sent me a recent article by Sir Anthony Hopkins. Its essence was that we deserve the best and so when people treat us badly we should move away from them, have only those who cherish us in our life.

Many thousands of people thanked him for the article. It was a beautiful piece of writing.

And what more powerfully healthy message can there be than that we all deserve kindness, compassion, love, cherishing?

Let’s not ever forget that message. It is vital.

But it is missing a crucial element…

A…

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“This time, it’s personal”



It was the tag line from Jaws, The Revenge, famously one of the worst films ever made.

The shark is back and follows the Brody family from Amity Island to the Bahamas, strategically targeting them to extract its revenge.

The images and score of the original Jaws still haunt many of us every time we step into the ocean, such was the power of that film.

But Jaws 4… not so much…

The idea that a shark can be motivated not by hunger or survival but by revenge just didn’t hold water. It was ‘personal’ for…

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What does it mean to be well?

‘Make the suffering stop. It is overwhelming. Take away the anguish. Make me feel better. I’ve tried everything. This is my last hope.’

Maybe we all know that desperation. It might not be suffering in relation to health. It might be about our partner or money or family or career or colleagues or house. 

But the plea is the same ‘make the suffering stop’. And we try everything to get rid of it. All the time trying to get rid of the sensation of dis-ease, discomfort, insecurity, desperation through …

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What do you believe?

"Beyond our own galaxy lies a vast expanse of galaxies. The deeper we see into space, the more galaxies we discover. There are billions of galaxies, the most distant of which are so far away that the light arriving from them on Earth today set out from the galaxies billions of years ago. So we see them not as they are today, but as they looked long before there was any life on Earth.” www.nasa.gov

Are we experiments in a cosmic Truman Show? A version of the matrix? A creation by an omnipotent God…

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What do we want?

I read an article yesterday about ‘Wantologists’ in America who help people identify exactly what it is they want in their life (link below for anyone wanting to read it). Wantology originated as a process to help businesses make purchasing decisions and is now offered by consultants for individuals.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/opinion/sunday/the-outsourced-life.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

It is easy to scoff at the idea of course and at the ways we are increasingly relying on buying in help fr…

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Stillness or change?

I was teaching yoga to a group of beginners in Amsterdam and about four weeks into the course I introduced a 10 minute meditation session. For all of them, it was the first time they had ever done any meditation. At the end of the lesson we discussed what it had been like. A couple of people said that is was the first time they could remember not having constant mental chatter going on in their minds. This silence only lasted a minute or so of the ten minute session but it was a revelation that …

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