The Mindful Quote Top Ten!
Mindful Quote Top 10 “Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.”― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life “It’s a funny thing about life, once you begin to take note of the things you are grateful for, you begin to lose sight of the things that […]
What is Real Right Now?
The other day I was feeling particularly overwhelmed by things – my feelings, my chattering mind and my perception of the world around me. It’s at these times that my general wellbeing can be balanced on a knife edge; either I will fall deeper into the chatter of my mind and get horribly lost or my […]
Top Tip #9 – Stop Fighting… you’ve already won!
It’s not always easy to maintain your attention in the present moment, there’s a certain momentum to your egoic thinking and it will not go quietly. It will wriggle and struggle, threaten and seduce you; it will reinvent itself and claim ownership of your practice. Sometimes it will claim small victories and you’ll believe the […]
Top Tip #8 – Be a Non Believer
Be a non-believer. Don’t believe me. Don’t believe anyone, and most importantly of all, never ever believe yourself. Beliefs are for fools you see. They are constructions of the ego and simply a product of your conditioning. Most of them aren’t even your own beliefs, they were programmed by your culture your background, your parents, the […]
Top Tip #7 – Practice Doing Nothing
Here’s a challenge for you. Can you sit and do nothing? It’s more of a challenge than you may think, go on try it. Maybe start with 10 minutes and build up, my record is 4 hours, but that has taken years of dedicated training in doing nothing! Instead of doing, try being instead for […]
Top Tip #6 – Mindful Walking
When you are walking, be on the step you are on. Forget the idea that you are going anywhere at all. You may be on your way to somewhere, but that somewhere is still just a future thought. There is nowhere to go really, in truth you have already arrived! You’ll never get to the […]
Disobedience and the Cultivation of Compassion
If you only got into Mindfulness because you had tried everything else and were desperate to find relief from your mental suffering, to escape some neurosis, or you simply wanted to quieten your mind so that you could get the edge in a competitive world, then you need to understand one thing now. Before you […]
Top Tip #5 – Give up being Master of the Universe
Mindfulness is paying full attention to “what is” in this present moment and learning to embrace whatever arises and offering no resistance to the truth of this moment. That is not so say you can’t take action to change “what is”, if your hand is on fire, put it out, don’t waste energy resisting the […]
Top Tip #4 – Delight in the Mundane
The whole essence of mindfulness is to be fully where you are, and to be here comfortably in the present moment without any desire to be anywhere else. Once we realise that nothing other than now exists, it makes perfect sense to be here, fully engaged in reality rather than away in our heads, lost […]
Resentment and the Power of Forgiveness
A few years ago, whilst attending my first retreat, I sat listening to one of Adrian’s talks and I remember him asking us all “Is anyone here holding onto resentments?” Quite a few people raised their hand (I’ll come back to whether I did or not in a moment). With hands raised and resentments being […]
