Mindful Resolutions – The Daily Savour
Savouring is a lovely short practice to integrate into your day if you feel you are lacking pleasant emotions like joy, pleasure, happiness etc. It takes the attentional skills of #mindfulness and turns it towards pleasant and enjoyable daily experiences and the feelings in your body.
Mindful Resolutions – Dropping Anchor
The first short practice is one of my favourite daily life practices from Russ Harris. Each stage is more than it appears on first glance. It can help us to ‘open up, be present and do what matters’ in our lives. I won’t say too much about the details here as I want to focus […]
Mindful Resolutions – Introduction
Introduction to short practices for January the Mindful Resolutions
It’s like Riding a Bike – the Practice of Happiness
Happiness is a lot like riding a bicycle, if you think and concentrate too hard on each process, you are likely to start to wobble and ultimately fall.
Daily Compassion (Guest Blog)
This was a guest blog that I wrote for the brilliant 365 Days of Compassion Blog It’s early February and you can’t quite fathom that you are breaking all your New Year’s resolutions. You are a month in and you are already overeating, missing the gym, drinking a glass of wine, the house is a […]
Bullet Ants, Vision Quests and Mental Health Recovery as an Endurance Event
The Sateré-Mawé tribe of the northern region of the Amazonas in South America have a sacred ritual for young warriors that is quite unique. They have to prove their worth to the tribe by remaining in a calm state whilst suffering agonising pain. The tribe sow sedated bullet ants (named as their sting is said […]
Lost in Oblivion – An Exploration of Adverse Meditation Experiences
(Please note this is a long blog post in order for me to do this subject justice. It’s likely to be of most interest if you have experienced adverse meditative affects) Meditation is not all spa music, oxytocin, sandalwood and light! There can be stages that are like arduous rights of passage. A shamanic vision […]
Getting Your Five a Day of TLC
I am a big fan of the short mindfulness practices that you can integrate into your day. Exercises like the STOP practice, the 3 minute breathing space and the self-compassion break. I often say to participants in our 8-week courses to try to get your ‘five a day’ of these short mini-mindfulness practices. A lot […]
Behavioural Activation Part 5 – Lets Get Physical – Activate Through Activity
If you look at many high functioning people who have experienced depression, you often find exercise is part of their recovery. The likes of Tim Ferris, Stephen Fry and world class endurance athlete Christopher Bergland all have credited exercise to helping them maintain and improve their mental health (if you do a little more research […]
Behavioural Activation Part 3 – The Internal Saboteur
Its official – there are parts of us that are not in our own corner. In the clasp of depression this can show up as an internal voice or feeling that sabotages our efforts to make positive changes. It might be that heavy thick feeling of pain or it might be the voice telling you that […]