The problem with writing a block or trying to be active on the myriad of social networking sites out there is you tend to “blogify” (or “twitterify” or “facebookify”, or “socialnetworkofthemomentify”) your life. You are constantly looking for ways to spin experiences into a pithy, fun or informative posts, comments or tweets. You start to [...] 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 »
Zen Therapy: A New Approach to Coaching
Although I have been blogging (with varying degrees of success) since 2005, I don’t, primarily consider myself a blogger (those of you who are regular readers will have noticed some of the grammatical and spelling clangers I have made over the years!). I consider myself, primarily a coach, trainer and therapist (which is how I [...] 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 »
Getting Rid of Want 3: Mindfulness
“Poverty is not the absence of goods but rather the overabundance of desire” – Plato Mindfulness is best described by John Kabat-Zinn as “…paying attention in a particular way; On purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” Being mindful of the present moment can reduce habituation and therefore craving. In one study of habituation, 3 [...] Read more »