Inspirations

No, I’m not a psychologist. I’ve taken a different training path, and it’s been extensive. I experienced depression and anxiety in my 20s and 30s (they usually go together). It was debilitating and life felt difficult. Making my way in the world took a great deal of courage. I had to do a lot of talking to myself to get out the door some days. Spirituality was always important to me and it’s the reason [...]

Soul is one of those words that is difficult to define. The situation isn’t helped by the fact that people use the word in quite different ways, adding to the confusion. I thought I’d do a little investigation to see the breadth of its use and see whether that would help me clarify things for myself. Care of the soul For Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, the soul is not a thing [...]

Part of my iRest® training is learning to recognise uncaused joy. An aspect of our true nature that is always here, and that is unrelated to circumstance. I practice this in my daily meditation by feeling into the felt sense of aliveness in my body and mind. The felt sense of being alive. I find it to be a gentle buzz or hum and an openness, a readiness for what is to come. A readiness [...]

That is easier said than done, right? It’s simple, but it’s definitely not easy. Accepting things as they are, is well understood as the first step of mindfulness. Being with what is. Not suppressing or denying our experience, or getting caught up in ideas about the way things should be, rather than how they are. The closer we can come to doing this, the more peaceful and happier we are. I think we’re reluctant to [...]

I am privileged to be experiencing the second half of my life. (That is, of a lifespan that most of us reasonably expect to have.) And, it is a stage of life that I have felt totally unprepared for. Not supported by the culture I live in. Not talked about. Not really even acknowledged as a thing. We all know we have around ‘three score and ten’ years on this planet, notwithstanding accident, disaster, war. [...]

I really wanted to write a piece on guilt and blame. I’ve come to understand that whether directed outwardly or inwardly, guilt and blame are nothing other than by-passes that keep us stuck. Guilt and blame are unhelpful. I didn’t bargain on how hard that is to say. The belief in guilt, its expression as blame and the punishment that results, whether it be towards our self or others, is entrenched in our culture. We [...]

There is such joy in learning new things. Discovering the secrets of how things work, how things are done, understanding the clever systems and structures we’ve designed as a species to support our lives. The freshness of understanding something for the first time is a wonderful thing. So much of what we’ve already learnt may have been useful and fit for purpose when we first learned it, or made it up on the run, but [...]

No one wants to suffer. It’s totally natural that we don’t want to feel unpleasant emotions like loss, sadness or anger. And, they are messengers too, they inform our lives. There’s another thing that we do betwixt the attraction to pleasant things and the aversion to unpleasant things. We want things to be a particular way (which is of course related). We have ideas about the way life should turn out. Put simply, we overstate [...]

Most of my life has been spent sifting through what is ok and what is not ok; to do, to think, to say. As if some axe would fall if I got it wrong. Living in fear, in terror of straying from some imagined salvation, some way to keep me safe and protected. Truth is, I’m always safe and protected in this moment. My ‘unholy alliance’ against the present has seen me in a constant [...]

How I manage unwanted emotions and experiences has been a study for me over the last half decade or so. Until I was 50, I did as my family and culture had taught me; move away from them, suppress them, deny them, distract myself from them, or flat out run! Do anything but feel them! A change of pace For the last eight years the momentum has changed. I’m learning to feel, to heal. Turning [...]