I was 15 when the Gulf War broke (the first one, to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi control). I was already ‘into news’ and it was this war that led me to my first experience of being in a ‘newsroom’: having written a letter (remember those?) to Katie Adie (then the chief foreign news correspondent at…
I got back to London last night, after 10 days’ away. A few of those days were road tripping through Dorset, in the South West of England – I enjoyed that very much. I think the place I’m most at home in is: in the driver’s seat of a car while on an open road.…
While wars rage, waters pollute, civil unrest abounds, people row about gender and corruption and scandals ever roll on… a lot of important things affecting people’s basic everyday wellbeing get overlooked. One of those things is: men’s health. It might seem strange for a female yoga teacher to bring this up and even have the…
This is not a panic. This is beyond an emergency. It’s bigger than climate change. It’s bigger than anything we have faced before on planet earth… AI is moving faster than most people realise and within a few months will become more intelligent … than humans. …
I have just returned from a four-day residential Buddhist retreat. While having been on various retreats over the past 24 years, this was my first ‘Buddhist’ themed meditation retreat and it focused on ‘the nature of mind’. There were many highlights (including the crisp Egyptian cotton bed linen and the marvellous vegan fig cake in…
“My Dad worked for 30 years for an insurance company, going in, day in and day out, giving his time and energy to someone else just to support us – his family. I don’t want to make that mistake” – so shared James Smith, the world’s fastest growing online personal trainer, last week in a…
It took a whole morning. Well, with the build up to it included. When I awoke I knew it was time, to start the process of clearing. By mid-day I had cleared the drawers. No biggie you may think in the grand scheme of things, but deciding what to keep and what to let go…
When I was at Uni, studying English literature, the only ones to graduate with a First were the only two males in our year group. Coincidence? I never thought it was. While the personalities of the two guys on our course were completely different from each other: one introverted and quiet, the other extroverted and…
For anyone feeling an inner calling to… “something” Be it change, growth, review, adaptation, or letting go, this year has triggered or accelerated one or more of these things in each of us. For this final blog post of 2020, I want to leave to one side the specific external events of the year, and…
Oh My. Oh. My. I’m writing this on the last day of October 2020: surrounded by headlines, commentary and increasingly pressing advice to our nation, the UK, to prepare for another full lockdown. Really? Maybe it was always inevitable. Maybe we’ll get lucky at the last hour. What graphs to believe? What experts to follow?…
Would you like the key to finding peace in daily life? Ok. Here it is: To experience peace in our daily lives, we need to have more agency over our mind and mental energy, and, to regularly practise both of these things. Sorry if that wasn’t as sexy, punchy or attention grabbing as you might have…
One minute we are going about our day. Then fragments of news’ arrives, of a virus spreading in a far away land. This expands, over a few weeks, into eerie scenes depicted on European shores and a stream begins to build of regular commentary on media platforms. Random gossip turns to concern, questions become predictions.…