Do you, as a yoga student or teacher, ever wonder: how much of modern yoga, or the yoga I do, bear connection to the Yoga tradition or roots of the practice? There is I guess behind that, the question of whether it matters if what people are practising today and calling yoga bears connection to…
I write this to the sound of a fire, sitting a desk facing rolling hills in a corner of south west England, a picture-book setting out of a children’s magic story. Actually, night has fallen, so my view, truth being told, is Laura Ashley curtains, but you get the idea. I came to Devon, specifically…
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…
If there’s one question I really don’t like and never liked it’s: “Are you happy?” Podcasters and lifestyle experts have joined the legion of psychologists of our time to bring to the forefront of our attention the question, “am I happy?”. Combine this with the massive rise in talking about mental health, the question and…
“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…
We all want more positive, less negative, in our life and in our mind. We all have feelings and thoughts; we have ups and downs – and the share of each isn’t necessarily fairly distributed from person to person. How do we live a whole life that is capable of managing positive and negative, ups…