What riches lie beneath the gloom?
When the gloom descends there is an invitation to be humble in the face of powerful forces sweeping through us. An invitation to open wide just as we yearn to close down. To hold up the light and look for undiscovered treasure. To dance on the cusp of awareness of the...
How goodwill refreshes the parts other states cannot reach
During the festive season, ordinary streets and buildings are lit up by hundreds of tiny fairy lights. One or two strings of lights would have little impact but as hundreds and thousands of lights go on, for a few short weeks, we create a magical world. In the same...
Trying to settle down versus allowing yourself to settle down
When you shake up a bottle of water with sand inside, the sand swirls around frantically until you set the bottle down. Then the sand slowly sinks to the bottom and the water gradually clears. It takes a little time. There is nothing you can do to that bottle of sand...
A few words on the holiday season
Photo: © Juliet Fay November 2017 Because we are human with human connections, the holiday season seems to heighten things: love and loss; fear and delight; hope and expectation. Just knowing it's a time when Life seems to go crazy with the saturation filter can help...
Leave go
For there, just out of sight, is a space where we don’t need to hold things so tightly. Where there is nowhere to fall but into grace. Where stories of self and others flutter like Autumn leaves, falling, falling to gently decompose as winter turns to Spring and...
Circus acts, the ring master and the Big Top
I always wanted to go to the circus, like the ones in black and white movies. There was a romance at the idea of a community of exotic performers and wild animals showing up in their wagons and townsfolk coming together to witness the weird and the wonderful under the...
Why your best self is an illusion
Any time now, the travel companies will entice us with images of relaxed, happy people enjoying fun in the sun to try and sell us holidays for the year ahead. Anyone who has taken holidays will know the reality doesn’t always match up to the sales pitch. Sure we might...
An antidote to seriousness: raising consciousness and being in service
Those early diving suits. Wow. Just imagine the weight. And now imagine how our institutions like our political systems, our judiciary, our media, our education, health and infrastructure systems all assume a great weight of complexity is needed to keep our societies...
Stories about family (and other things we make up)
Walking on the estuary the other day I bumped into someone I know a little. We stopped to chat. He was curious about the sea birds. On the waters edge, they hung out in one big gang but he’d noticed, on a nearby part of the coast they separated into distinct groups. I...
How appreciation grows (NB this is not a gratitude practice)
I live on a beautiful estuary on the western fringe of the UK and recently got curious about my experience of this place. I love walking and go out across the sands at low tide several times a week if I can. My eyes are drawn to the sky and I am rarely disappointed. A...
Keep calm and “think cool”?!?
Coming through the aircraft door onto the steps, the heat hit me like a wall. I was 21, arriving in a country 650 miles from the equator, where the humidity averaged 80% and the temperature hovered around 30 degrees C (88 degrees Fahrenheit) pretty much every day. I...
Doing yoga to feel better and other innocent mistakes
I do a bit of yoga now and then. At the first sense of tightness in a muscle, my whole system used to click into ‘this isn’t how it should be’ mode and at once the tightness in my body increased slightly and a corresponding tightness in my mind emerged. But one time I...
“Everything matters; nothing matters very much”
Many years ago, a retired Royal Air Force pilot lived across the road from me. He was widowed so we used to have tea now and then. I loved listening to his stories, told with a wry grin between puffs on his ever present cigarette. Wanting to help, I'd offered to alter...
How insecure thoughts are not the problem
A lively conversation in my early twenties returns to me now with fresh meaning. We were discussing people's capacity for change. I held that people can change; for me life was about growth and evolution. In contrast, my boyfriend at the time, believed you have to...
A change of heart is one thought away
A change of heart is available at any time
Why reaching out to others is a natural instinct
I am blessed to get to share an understanding of how the mind works with folk at a local mental health Welcome Centre in a town near my home. Each time I show up I see something new. In one session, the first of a four week run, I was moved to hear people who’d been...
How realising where the life vest is, helps us weather mental storms
My thoughts are with all those affected by Hurricane Irma. When, out in the world a huge physical storm has/is affecting millions, it can feel crass to talk about internal mental storms and yet when you're trapped in one, it can feel overwhelming. Lost. We panic and...
Poem: Life’s Invitation
Life support,
It’s built in.
Part of the
Operating system
If wisdom lies within, why are we having 3 Principles conversations?
"Techniques will not help you to find the knowledge or the happiness you seek. I would call techniques the lost man's way to enlightenment" p.53 The Enlightened Gardener Revisited by Sydney Banks This morning running through my mind was the question, 'What I can bring...
CHARLOTTESVILLE
Like many, I have wondered whether to say anything about the events in Charlottesville and its aftermath and if so, what to say, fearing I may be speaking without fully understanding what I am seeing.... And I realised we always speak and act from the understanding we...