This post comes to you as part confession. I am a whining, moaning, angry bitch. Everything that comes out of my mouth is either a moan, a complaint, a rant or a criticism. OK I may be exaggerating slightly for effect, but I have becoming frighteningly aware recently that I have become more critical and [...] Read more »
The Deck Chair Diaries Part 4
I have been working away recently (as I often do) and before then I had an attack of the lethargies, where I just sat around and did very little. It reminds me of what the Barefoot Doctor says about comparing procrastination with idling: “When you are idling you’re following the natural progression from a phase [...] Read more »
The Deck Chair Diaries Part 3
I really am an Idler at heart, the one thing that has kept me going doing what I am doing is the dread that if I fail I will have to go back and get a “proper job” in some soulless office, with strip lights and recycled air (is it me or is the average [...] Read more »
Zen and the Art of Zen
I first got into Buddhism when I was 19. I remember it very clearly, surprisingly so since I was drunk at the time. I was rambling to a friend of a friend I had just been introduced to in a bar in Cheltenham, I was expounding my current thoughts about life the universe and everything [...] Read more »
The Buddha As the First Psychotherapist?
As John Naish so eloquently put in his excellent book “Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More”. Human beings are designed to want, to crave to covet. For good or ill, it is what has got us to where we are today. It has worked very well as a survival strategy and without it, [...] Read more »
Mindfulness Part 1
One of the key tenants of the Slow Philosophy and one of the most important abilities to cultivate is mindfulness. Mindfulness comes from Buddhist philosophy but has been picked up in the last few years by modern western psychology, mainly by someone called Jon Kabat-Zinn. Mindfulness is attracting increasing interest among western clinical psychologists and [...] Read more »