When we're ruled by our fear, everyday life can feel a bit like walking a tightrope over a bottomless pit. It's a hell of a balancing act. And it's absolutely exhausting; it takes up so much energy, so much mental focus. But often the advice we get given is to push through our fear. [...]
What proportion of your life do you spend engaged in activities that are life-enhancing? You know the ones. The kind that, when you’ve finished, you’re fizzing with energy and joy, ready to laugh and love, walking on air. Is half your day spent doing things like that? The whole of your day, none of [...]
Successful people dream up a vision. From this, they can create a goal towards which they aspire. But, in order to turn the vision into reality, the dreaming - or fantasising - must stop. A more dynamic mindset is required. Fantasies of success tend to lead to inactivity, and so low performance. Positive expectation, on [...]
It was the belief of Carl Jung, that our neuroses were in direct proportion to our inability to face our emotional pain. It follows that, in order to heal and find peace, we need to open our hearts to the reality of our lives; to face our hurt with acceptance and compassion. And doing this [...]
If you woke up one morning recently and realised that there's not a lot in your life that makes your heart sing, or if a similar realisation has been dawning on you gradually over a period of time - then this tip could help to turn things around. Our souls are a little like gardens: [...]
I have been struck over the years how conflict in a relationship always comes down to the one thing: an unwillingness for each person to step into the other's shoes, to really feel what it may be like to live their life, to be in the relationship from their perspective. We become attached to our [...]
Getting a diagnosis of a serious illness can be a traumatic experience. And trauma has its own health risks. Unresolved, it can compromise the immune system because it can heighten the response of the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for producing stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones reduce the efficiency of [...]
We compartmentalise so much of our lives. We have our home life, and our work life, our social life, and our sex life. We get advice from an expert in this field, and then in that. And sometimes we forget to consider the whole, to notice the effect one area of our life has on [...]
So much of our lives can be spent re-living the past, or in the mists of the future that we don't really enjoy where we are. As children, we long to be more grown-up, and then we think things will be better once we've finished all that study and all those exams, when we have [...]
Even a forced smile encourages your body to produce more oxytocin, the “feel good” hormone. Here’s a short meditation visualisation to promote your sense of emotional wellbeing. If you’re not a visual person, you can simply sense or imagine in any way you can. […]
I heard this lovely story from Tara Brach: In the hall of a monastery, was a huge Buddha statue. It wan’t particularly attractive, as it was only made of clay, but the monks cared for it and did their best to show it off by painting it. However, about ten years ago, it was exceptionally [...]
Nelson Mandela said: “The greatest glory in living does not lie in having never fallen, but in rising every time you fall.” When things seem to go wrong time after time, some of us feel too weighed down by fear to keep trying. Fear is paralysing and exhausting, fueling in our minds loop feeds of [...]