There is an irony at this time of year. Everyone talks about the “season of goodwill” but other than making a few (forced) false platitudes, sending Christmas cards and gifts (often because they think they should, or because of some selfish reason to be seen to be being generous) most people become (much more) self [...] Read more »
One Minute Meditation
Even if you have have a regular meditation practice (and if you don’t, I highly recommend that you cultivate one), you will find at times, in the hustle and bustle of life, yourself being swept away, distracted, harassed and flustered. At times like this I have developed a “one minute meditation” (although, in reality it [...] Read more »
Simple Ways to Slow Down Daily
Slowing down shouldn’t be a chore, it should be simple, easy, fun and rewarding. If it is a hassle, you are doing it wrong. If it is a hassle, you won’t stick to it. So here are a few simple ways that you can slow down in a day. You don’t need to do all [...] Read more »
Compassion: The Second Keystone of a Tortoise Mind
Compassion is not very fashionable nowadays. Our hare-brained society rewards and favours (and even deifies on some occasions) the rude, the aggressive and the self centred. Hare-brained people hide behind terms like “assertiveness” or “honesty” or “just telling it how it is”, when they are simply being rude, judgemental and self centred. They mock people [...] Read more »
How to Develop Slow Speech
Here are just a few ways you can practice slow speech, become less critical and more positive in what you say. This will have an affect that more people will like you and want to hang out with you. Which is nice… Be grateful – the happier you are with your life the less likely [...] Read more »
The Deck Chair Diaries Part 5
A day in the life… A lot of people ask me what I get up to on a day to day basis, so I thought I would give you a timetable of my “ideal idle day”. I admit, things don’t always work out this well, but I try and use for this template. You may [...] Read more »
The Story So Far
(For an audio version of this blog click here, or here to listen via iTunes) This blog is just over two years old, so I thought for my first post of 2011 I would write a brief(ish) “story so far”, hopefully this will act as a catch up for new readers and review for older [...] Read more »
Be Gentle
I have been working away a lot recently (the reason for few posts, tweets, etc) and whilst I was away I fell spectacularly off the Slow path and found myself thrashing around the undergrowth. A few things went horribly wrong, I got stressed out, I found myself becoming flustered, tense, short-tempered, lethargic and easily distracted. [...] Read more »
Smiling: An Experiment
For the last week or so I have been experimenting with making myself smile at all times and exploring the results on my state of mind and wellbeing (it is not really what you could describe as scientific…). The idea being, that when we are happy, we tend to smile, however, the feedback loop seems [...] Read more »
Meditation Makes You Cool
We often say “I am thinking”, but really it is the other way round; “thinking is doing you”, what I mean by this is that our sense of “self” is a product of our thought processes. There is no fixed self or personality, we recreate our “selves” from moment to moment. So, if your personality [...] Read more »