Earth Salutations are grounding, meditative and calming. The perfect sequence at the end of a busy day when you want to reconnect to self and enjoy a quieter practice. I...
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Why does outdoor yoga support wellbeing? There are four major reasons to take your yoga practice outdoors: Bringing playfulness and lightness into your yoga practice Broadening your perspective and improving...
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When I was 50, my last child of three set off for university and I wrapped up my 12-year business life in Beijing. I too set off. I downsized my...
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This article originally appeared on Maddyness UK Fact #1 - Reversing poor breathing habits can ease body pain If you suffer from shoulder, neck pain or headaches, there is...
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I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘practice’ these past few months. Perhaps the new year period put me in a reflective mood as I looked ahead to what I want...
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Originally published on Maddyness UK Do! Do! Do! What have you been doing? In our business culture, we are feted for our doings. Proclaiming them makes us feel validated But constant doing comes at a price. We become enslaved by our doings. They rule our business and home lives as if we have stepped onto a doing travelator with…
One of the recurring themes I hear from guests on my Finding Space retreat is that they don’t have time to make changes in their everyday lives! And that’s the challenge facing most...
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Do you have a place of contemplation you visit regularly? Unlike brainstorming which is an active practice, with a specific goal and often the sharing of brains, contemplation is a solitary practice...
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So, tell me, do you sometimes wish you could step off the treadmill of your thinking mind? Do you ever wish you could switch off the inner chatter? I do....
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This is a story about stones. One gratitude stone starts the tale. I gathered it from a Norfolk beach the day I ran away from London in March 2020. London locked down and I fled in a van. Although I drove the van forwards, I could see no way of moving forward in my life. I was driving away from…
“Focussed, sharp, clear thinking, creative.” What am I describing? A successful entrepreneur? Correct – also the benefits of a well oxygenated brain. Your most complex organ, the powerhouse of your nervous system, the brain consumes 20% of the body’s oxygen supply. Limit that supply and life quickly becomes unfocussed and foggy. Does that describe how you have been feeling during…
Originally published on Maddyness UK Have you ever driven or walked somewhere only to realise you can’t remember a single part of the journey? Or driven or cycled to the wrong destination and wondered what you’re doing there? When life is stressful, when you are juggling too much, when ‘busy-ness’ is your catchword, autopilot becomes your default setting. It’s…
“What do you do?” people ask. “Put simply, I teach people to breathe better and stress less,” comes my reply. “Oh!” go the sceptics confidently, “Surely we all know how to breathe!” My challenge when I deliver a breathing workshop is that the room is mostly full of sceptics. This is sometimes verbally shared with me as attendees enter the…
Exercise for the desk-bound on National Fitness Day National Fitness Day today in the UK. People are joining in fitness activities all over the country. And you are? ………. Sitting at your desk! Want to take part in the day and contribute to your fitness? I’ve got your desk-bound body covered. Lungs. You can exercise your lungs. Here are three…
A Salute to the Sun The Sun Salutation is a sequence of yoga poses, generally practised in rounds of twelve, that is just what it says it is –...
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Silencing your inner critic How polished and wily are our inner critics? They are the public speakers we all wish we could be. Confident, charismatic, convincing. Their audience sits there in stunned silence – not a heckler in hearing. There’s no Q&A. There’s no discussion. They are never booed off the stage. Even though we’ve heard their opinion before, we…
An innovation to mindfulness programs is to introduce the ‘body door’ when the ‘mind door’ has been shut. This is a more comprehensive approach to health and wellbeing and much more effective.
Mindfulness is one of those words that, even after you’ve looked it up in the dictionary, you still require further research to fully grasp its meaning.
Article originally published on the Huffington Post in January 2018
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Soon after becoming CEO, Bertolini began Aetna’s mindfulness-based wellness programs with a study. He says, “We measured heart rate variability to establish stress levels for approximately 250 employees.
The recent debacle of United Airlines dragging a passenger off their plane is a dramatic demonstration of a company without an integrated corporate wellness program.
Two minutes of wisdom from Jon Kabat-Zin, who explains how mindfulness can help us reduce our “Me, me, me” narrative and the concept known as selfing.
