Tag: HMB Post

The Ecology of Presence: Why Re-Embodiment is a Radical Act.
🌀 Reclaiming the Small Body: Why Re-Embodiment Matters More Than Ever

We live in a culture that has become profoundly disembodied.

The average person has between 15,000 and 90,000 thoughts per day — a staggering mental churn that keeps us suspended in the realm of cognition. We’re encouraged to live in our heads, to value speed, productivity, and intellect above all else. Rarely are we invited to pause, feel, or listen to the quieter rhythms of the body.

I have been reflecting on this cultural disconnection. We’ve lost touch with what I call the small body: our physical, tactile, energetic self. Because, far from just flesh and bone, the body is a sensing instrument, a portal to presence. It’s also a bridge to something much larger: the large body of the earth, the ecosystem, and wider field of life.

🧠 The Worship of Intellect and What It Costs Us

One striking signal of our cultural imbalance is how we allocate resources. In the United States, the largest financial endowment ever made was to Harvard University , an institution that epitomizes the worship of intellect. Harvard’s endowment now exceeds $53 billion, funding research, innovation, and academic excellence. The leading universities in the UK, Cambridge and Oxford, are renowned for having some of the largest financial endowments, often competing closely with each other. This underscores just how much value is placed on intellect, on both sides of the pond.

It isn’t inherently wrong to value intellect. Indisputably, intellectual pursuits are fundamental in terms of how they fuel advancements, foster growth and shape society. But let’s consider some of the vital things which get lost when intellect becomes the dominant or only perceived form of valued intelligence:

We lose somatic intelligence — the wisdom of the body.
We lose emotional intelligence — the capacity to feel and relate.
We lose intuitive intelligence — the knowing that arises without logic.
We lose relational intelligence — the ability to attune, connect, and co-regulate.

To elevate one form of knowing while dismissing the others is imbalanced, dangerous even. It leads to fragmentation, alienation, and a loss of meaning.

And it’s no coincidence that so many people today feel anxious, numb, or disconnected.

🌍 The Small Body and the Large Body

The small body – our personal, felt experience – was never meant to exist in isolation. It is in constant dialogue with the large body: the earth, the seasons, the cycles of life. Indigenous traditions, ancient philosophies, and somatic lineages have long understood this relationship.

The way we treat our bodies mirrors the way we treat the earth.

When we neglect the small body, we also neglect the large body.
When we override our own signals, we override the signals of the planet.
When we numb ourselves, we numb our empathy for the world around us.

🌱 A Path Back: Embodiment in Practice

The good news is that can return.

We can learn to listen again, through breath, movement, sensation, and presence. There are teachings and practices that support this re-embodiment, and they’re more relevant now than ever. Through these teachings and practices we can heal the split between mind and body, self and world; we can reclaim presence in a world that profits from our distraction.

Re-embodiment doesn’t mean abandoning intellect. It means integrating it. It means listening to the body’s signals, honouring its rhythms, and allowing it to guide us, in movement, in decision-making, relationships, and creativity.

This is a key component within my seven-week course, rooted in the foundations of embodiment. It’s designed to guide you gently back to the wisdom of your own body and the deeper connection it holds.

We’ll explore:
- Somatic awareness and nervous system regulation
- Philosophical inquiry into body-mind integration
- Tools for daily embodiment in a disembodied world
If you’re curious, I invite you to explore. Not just the course, but the possibility of living from a place of felt presence, grounded awareness, and embodied truth.

Let’s remember what it means to be fully alive.
27/08/2025
Frustration Unleashed: a Candid Rant…

I’m always on the lookout for podcasts that align with my values around embodiment, and different journeys of healing approached with depth and care. Last night, I listened to an ‘expert’ claim that mindfulness should be avoided in trauma work: encouraging people to stay present teaches the nervous system that the present isn’t safe, he claimed.

This once again frames mindfulness as just another option, in some wellness toolkit, showing limited understanding of its true nature and potential.

If you’ve ever been told that learning mindfulness doesn’t apply to your situation, especially because of the trauma you’ve lived through, I want to say this plainly:

That’s not true.

Mindfulness isn’t a neat little practice reserved for quiet minds or calm mornings. It’s for this: for grief, fear, exhaustion, and the kind of pain that doesn’t always have language.

Personal Story: Mindfulness in the Midst of Trauma

Five years ago, my parents both died within two weeks.
The lead-up to their deaths was a relentless combination of palliative care for my Dad alongside the upheaval of hospital and intensive care visits for my mum. It was a punishing regime marked by exhaustion, sadness, and a fear beyond words. My whole system didn’t settle during those years; it never had the chance. I was already carrying the weight of secret miscarriage, the disenfranchised grief of childlessness, relationship rejection due to my own physical condition, and early life trauma that had yet to surface in my awareness. (I have since learnt that old pain can only be released from the body proportionate to the amount of safety you feel internally.)

How could I have navigated this level of uncertainty and suffering without anything to hold onto?
The small seeds of understanding I had begun to cultivate in the years prior were all I had. Mindfulness wasn’t a practice I ‘chose’ in calm circumstances, it was the only thing truly available to me. The only thing big enough, wise enough, intelligent enough, loving enough to hold all that I came to it with, trauma included.

The idea that mindfulness forces us to ‘stay in the present’ at all costs is a misnomer of Titanic proportions, and it needs calling out.

Because an equal part of navigating presence is knowing when it’s too much to stay with, too much to bear.

Distraction as a Vital Component of Presence:

In contrast to the narrow view that mindfulness demands constant presence, we need to clarify what it really teaches: how to stay when it serves us, and how to step away when it doesn’t.

Because distraction, when done with full intentionality and awareness, is an entirely different thing. Instead of shutting out pain blindly, we recognise what is tolerable in a given moment and make a conscious choice to shift focus if necessary.

Not only that, but the kind of discernment which knows when presence serves and when it overwhelms, doesn’t come by accident. It requires training in presence itself, so we can recognise our limits not as failures, but as signals. When tuned into with full awareness these signals deepen our self-understanding, not just emotionally, but somatically, cognitively, and relationally.

Notwithstanding all the misconceptions, it was the training in presence itself which led me to a potential of peace I hadn’t known was possible. Through learning this practice intentionally, we tolerate more with greater ease: we actually can be with more than we could before.

In other words, being present doesn’t imply pain for the sake of pain.

Expanding Understanding of Mindfulness

You see, in trauma, reality is often fragmented, overwhelming, and deeply alive. Mindfulness, when taught with integrity, doesn’t ask us to bypass that. It meets us inside it, with choice, with nuance, with care.

To dismiss mindfulness outright in the face of trauma is to miss its depth and versatility as a practice that evolves with the person and the situation. It isn’t rigid: it’s fluid, adaptive, and built to meet the full complexity of life.

When mindfulness is stripped of its roots, reduced to a quick fix or productivity hack, we lose what it was always meant to be: a compassionate, discerning way of meeting reality as it is, not as we wish it to be. This is a sad consequence of the fact that so much of the original depth and nuance of these teachings has been shaved down to the extent that what we’re left with is a hollowed-out version, presented as lifestyle advice rather than a path of liberation.

So rather than rejecting mindfulness in the context of trauma, we need to reclaim it. Not as a tool of control, but as a practice of relationship, one that invites us to turn toward what’s here, and just as importantly, to turn away when presence would be too much.

That’s not avoidance. That’s wisdom.

And it’s time we made more room for this wholeness. The kind that doesn’t fracture under pressure, but softens around it, steadily, intelligently, and in service of healing.

To make whole, sweeping claims implying the appropriacy of mindfulness, we need a wholer understanding of what mindfulness is. Not a lifestyle edit. The whole practice: complex, compassionate, deeply relational.

19/06/2025
Loneliness Reframed

How Society Frames Connection

Is loneliness necessarily the absence of company, or the result of how ‘connection’ is framed in society?

Similar to the majority of people, most of what I do is in pursuit of connection. As a social person who seeks and thrives from connection I value relationships with people and with the world around me. And at the same time circumstances have urged me to feel an increasing pull towards the richness of relationships beyond traditional frameworks or definitions.

The way society defines connection, tying it to roles rather than experience, often diminishes the ways in which true belonging actually unfolds. Furthermore if these traditional structures elude you for whatever reason, the sense of belonging and of inclusion can be elusive to non-existent at times.

I believe connection can extend to presence itself; a way of being fully engaged with moments as they unfold.

Navigating Exclusion and Assumption

Childlessness was one of the hardest realities I navigated through my thirties, filled with uncertainty and exclusion. Not knowing why it couldn’t ‘happen for me’ or whether I’d ever ‘join that club’ made those years feel isolating and highly fear-driven. I was also not lacking other circumstantial challenges during this time.

Then, after losing both my parents at 45yrs, I realised I had no immediate family in the traditional sense.

What struck me as much as my own grief, however, was the way it was sometimes assumed that these realities made my life… lesser, and how unhelpful this was.

The Structural Exclusion of Connection

When institutions cater to predefined groups, the exclusion isn’t just incidental; it’s structural. It’s striking how often this divide is reinforced, in church services centred around families, social events that assume certain relational dynamics, even casual conversations that frame family as the ultimate marker of fulfilment.

These structures don’t just overlook those who exist outside of them; they implicitly cast them as “missing something.”

Over several years, this conditions the nervous system to crave something broader in pursuit of meaningful survival and belonging.

Mindfulness and the Depth of Connection

The ancient, universal teachings of Buddhism, discovered on my part via mindfulness training, offer a depth of wisdom so reassuring as to be genuinely restorative. The relevance is such that they often illuminate what I’m experiencing in this very moment as though they were speaking directly to me.

One of my favourite of the contemplations of the body is in terms of the four natural elements; from this perspective we connect these elemental forces around us and within us and they offer us their gifts. This frames the body as the doorway to love, because the body is the doorway to every experience.

This kind of love is expansive, boundless and free of assumption. It doesn’t measure belonging by lineage or biological markers but simply recognises existence itself as a form of inclusion. Our experience of this is deepened through meditation which, over time, increasingly permeates our waking moments.

I had never previously come across such intelligence and care that truly considers every nuance in terms of every breath, every sensation, and every interaction without the labels and categorisations that can unintentionally exclude.

Connection Beyond the Human Experience

Within this, connection itself reaches beyond the human experience, woven into the fabric of being, unbounded by species or expectation. This brings to mind the unrivalled love that exists with my cat, the bond untethered from assumption or hierarchy, rooted purely in presence, trust and the profound understanding that needs no words.

For some, this same depth of connection is found in nature, in the quiet communion with the land, the trees, the movement of water and air with little separation of that inside and outside of the body. This relationship exists from participation and reciprocity where one becomes part of something infinite, held by the rhythms of the world itself.

A New Way to See Love and Belonging

This reframing is not only profound but deeply helpful because of the acknowledgement of experience as the foundation of connection, rather than predefined relationships. It moves away from social constructs and towards the immediacy of being, the way we engage with life at its most elemental level.

Society often assumes that loneliness is inevitable, as if connection can only be validated through specific roles. Mindfulness can show us that the absence of traditional family ties doesn’t mean a life devoid of richness. True connection isn’t determined by a family tree as much as it’s found in the world around us, in every moment we inhabit fully.

Mindfulness allows us to engage with love and connection beyond external validation and rooted instead in the immediacy of experience.

That is worth more than any predefined role or expectation.

To learn more about the HMB course please visit: HMB Course

06/06/2025
The Paradox of Productivity

There are days when the to-do list seems endless. It’s so overwhelming that I don’t even know where to begin.

Every task feels important and starting one thing feels like neglecting another. The thought of the things I haven’t done, and the mental energy spent thinking about not having done them often feels more exhausting than actually doing them.

But there’s still no clear starting point. It feels like time is being wasted, even though you’re constantly busy. It’s the familiar pattern of never taking a break, yet never catching up either. It’s a cycle that’s all too easy to fall into.

The pattern was a constant companion during my years as a primary school teacher. The pressure, the demands, the never-ending list of tasks, each one seeming to hold equal importance. With the eclectic life I have nowadays I often find that similar feeling creeping in: the more I try to keep up, the more overwhelmed I become.

The Counterproductive Solution

In these moments, what feels completely counterproductive is the idea of pausing. To do “nothing”. To breathe. To focus on the body and notice the sensations of breathing.

On the surface, taking a break like this feels like the last thing I should be doing. I should be working, ticking off items from the list. It seems almost impossible to justify stepping away for a few moments when the pressure to “get things done” is so intense.

But after just a few minutes of doing this, of being intentionally still, quiet, breathing…something shifts. When I return to the situation I was in, it feels different. Lighter. Quieter. The weight of the tasks that were looming over me doesn’t feel as heavy. I can see them more clearly, without the cloud of stress surrounding them.

Presence Over Perfection

I still don’t know exactly where to start, but I start somewhere with something. There’s a sense of presence now in whatever I’m doing. The background noise of tasks still exists, but it no longer controls my every thought and action. I can acknowledge the tasks that are piling up, and then let them go somehow without letting them define my entire day.

This shift in perspective has been one of the most important lessons I’ve learned over time. And the biggest insight I take from it is this:

It’s in the moment when I feel I have the least time to meditate that I need it the most.

We often believe that we’re too busy to take breaks, but it’s precisely in these moments when a pause can make all the difference. The act of sitting still, of taking a moment for mindfulness, is not a luxury or an indulgence. It’s an essential part of managing stress and maintaining clarity.

More Than the Moment You Sit Down

Meditation isn’t actually for the minutes we spend sitting in stillness as much as it’s for all the moment that follow. It’s the quiet intention that permeates everything else. Grounding ourselves creates a foundation of calm that we can carry with us throughout the day.

Pausing, being still, turning our attention inward…these are not escapes, but returns to ourselves, to the present moment, and to the clarity we need to navigate everything else. Stillness doesn’t solve the chaos of life but it softens our relationship to it. It allows us to approach our tasks, challenges and relationships with more patience, presence and perspective.

From that place, I don’t need to have everything figured out before I start. I can just begin, one step at a time. The overwhelming weight of everything doesn’t feel as heavy and I move through the day more steadily.

The Power of Pausing

The irony is that stillness often feels like the least productive thing to do, especially in times of pressure. Yet in reality it’s often the most effective thing we can do. It’s the foundation for greater productivity, clarity and well-being. It helps us manage stress and become more mindful of how we respond to the demands of the day.

So, the next time you feel the weight of a never-ending list and a constant pull to keep pushing, remember: sometimes the most productive thing you can do is to pause. Then, from a place of stillness, move forward, one thing at a time.

Final Thoughts

Life will always be busy, and the to-do lists will never truly be “done”. But by integrating small moments of stillness and mindfulness we can change how we approach those lists. We can navigate the busyness with more calm, more presence and more grace.

When we feel we have the least time to pause, it’s often when we need it the most.

Learn how to build a meditation practice into your life in the HMB Course.

21/05/2025
Abundance from simplicity

Can a greater sense of fullness be found not in what’s added but in what’s already here?

It’s such an easy question to dismiss or overlook. Yet when taken seriously and applied throughout life it becomes a valuable practice which is rich, grounding and even transformative.

We’re so conditioned to evaluate our lives through constant assessment;” Am I comfortable enough? Stimulated enough? Happy enough? What could make this experience better? “

But what if we turned this perspective on its head and asked, “what is there an absence of in this moment?”

Imagine pausing and noticing that, in this very moment there’s no headache, or no abject fear, for example.

An adaptation of this idea came to me during a session I ran with a boy in the secondary mental health setting where I work. I asked him to state the absence of something negative in the moment. This isn’t to ignore any challenges he was facing but to intentionally focus on things that were not present, such as “there’s no toothache in this moment”, or “there’s no backache in this moment”, (not something I take for granted speaking as someone who has experienced plenty of both). We took turns in stating five things that were absent in this moment.

I challenged him to repeat the exercise every day, coming up with five examples each time for one week. I committed to the same and we shared our reflections in the next meeting. It turned out to be a surprisingly powerful practice.

And yes, things which aren’t habitual require intention, time and repetition. They can however be implemented in a kind and gentle way.

Noticing and experiencing the value in what’s ordinary or easily dismissed mirrors a deeper capacity and ability to recognise potential which is otherwise missed. It suggests a kind of attentiveness that reaches beyond the obvious, into the overlooked or unspoken spaces where meaning still lives.

It reminds me of another version of this exercise whilst on a silent five day retreat in 2019. Amidst the howling wind and unrelenting rain – challenging conditions with almost all external stimulation removed as is the intention of silent retreats – an instruction which was gently repeated throughout was “what is enjoyable in this moment”.

Adopting this practice as a regular part of life opens up space for recognising when there is clarity, stillness or peace available to us in any given moment no matter what else is going on.

This can become the art of deliberately focusing attention on small, subtle sources of goodness – those easily missed moments that hold genuine value. It recognises what is okay, even in a situation that feels messy or imperfect. This practice of “taking in the good” has strong roots within Buddhism.

In a world that constantly tells us to strive for more, achieve, do and become more, I would argue that this practice has never been needed more.

02/05/2025
More than a modality

I’ve heard it a hundred times: ‘Mindfulness is for relaxation’. It’s ‘breathing techniques’. It’s a worksheet about noticing your five senses, or, ‘mindfulness is for concentration’.

How did such a profound practice get reduced to this?

Happy by-products don’t do justice to its scope yet are described again and again as its sole purpose.

It’s true that once something gains scientific backing, it becomes palatable, then popular, and more and more spheres jump on the bandwagon. But in doing so, much of the original depth and meaning is diluted. Even the word mindfulness itself turns out to be a somewhat inadequate translation, its cognitive overtones often leaving out the essential role of the body. As was coined by the Buddha, all the teachings are within the body.

Throughout my time in the NHS, I’ve seen mindfulness embedded as the foundation beneath every so-called “third wave” approach—from CBT to DBT to ACT. Take CBT’s emphasis on challenging thoughts: it aligns directly with vedanā, the second foundation of mindfulness, which reminds us that our experience of something isn’t inherent in the thing itself, but shaped by our internal responses. Countless other examples of this can be found in modern replicas of the original messages.

So is it okay, or even remotely acceptable, that these teachings are so widely misunderstood and misrepresented?

There will always be things we can’t change, but we can still do our part.

I want to contribute to efforts made in restoring some of the integrity and depth to these vast and timeless teachings — not just in theory, but in how they’re lived and shared.

The HMB course restores fullness in terms of embodied inquiry into how we meet our thoughts, feelings and sensations with presence and compassion.

21/04/2025
Embodied presence in performance

Time is never available in the quantity I’d like when getting ready for a musical performance – this always been more the case with so many competing weekly commitments. In the rare moments that I steal to reconnect with practice and familiarisation with the music, it strikes me that the deeper goal is to become increasingly at one with the instrument. What is it to apply mindful attention to instrumental practice?

I return to embodiment, a key teaching of mindfulness.

With the cello this means cultivating a growing fluidity between the fingers of the left hand and the motion of the right, bowing arm, so that both act in harmony, with ease and intention. This physical alignment directly shapes sound rather than being purely technical. My intention of sound quality is in terms of depth of expression and clarity.

With the piano it’s about channelling the weight of the entire hand behind each finger, so that every movement is made with only the tension that’s truly needed. Each finger is supported by the hand, each hand by the arm, and the arms by the whole body – creating a chain of support that enables freedom, control and a resonance in the sound.

With recorder, too, it’s about economy of motion, lifting each finger only as much as needed above the holes. Mastery comes from isolating fast, awkward combinations and working through them rhythmically, shifting emphasis across different notes to expose weaknesses and build precision.

These embodied principles are at the heart of how I teach instrumental technique, moving beyond mechanical repetition into a space where technique enables expression and movement becomes music.

17/04/2025
A different take on distraction…

One of my first experiences of formal meditation was as part of a group advertised on ‘meet-up’, a short walk away from where I live, back in April 2012. The opening instruction of that first and only (for me) group meeting remains firmly imprinted in my mind as “shut down all thoughts !”

Well cue instant feelings of failure…This command wasn’t relatable or possible to my own mind, exacerbated by the sense that it somehow was for others. This reinforced my long-held notion that some people can meditate and others who can’t, holding myself in the latter. I had probably believed this for years which had put me off trying any kind of meditation properly. This wasn’t a mindfulness meditation group.

Since then I found the approach in which thinking, as one area of human mental activity for, is normalised from the start. The mind is viewed as another sense doorway. We would no sooner expect our mind to stop having thoughts as we would the ears to stop hearing or the eyes to stop seeing. Further to that it can be described as a ‘magical moment’ when we realise that the mind has been ‘lost’ in thought because of the equal number of times to being lost it is found.

Infinitely more approachable as a method?

Even with this generally accepted understanding of things I still hear questionable interpretations of the ‘training of the mind (body /heart)’ which takes place in this practice. Interpretations can take the form of suggesting that we’re seeking increasingly fine levels of concentration as though being ‘rightly mindful’ equals being concentrated, and that we ought to strive for increasingly prolonged periods of this. What’s the trajectory of this? Less and less distraction..? Ultimately never being distracted ?!

These interpretations feel very tight.

Is distraction always wrong? Maybe it’s right that it happens. Maybe when the mind wanders and when we come back, if we’re not so bothered we might actually feel quite balanced or refreshed, with a bit more energy and the attention sharper.

Why is this ?

Likely to be for millions of reasons. But what we mostly need to understand it that it was right, at that moment for us to be distracted.

There is often an intuitive brilliance to allowing minds to wander, because they do create. And so there can be a beauty to this mind wandering.

We also need to acknowledge the wisdom in distraction when we’re not sufficiently resourced to feel what we are faced with. So wisely bringing the attention to somewhere else can take the pressure off, ie, when feeling pain in the body, an area I have personally practiced with a lot. Distraction can be the wise response. So much of this practice can be discerning the difference between a wise and an unwise response.

With this, I suggest that distraction isn’t only inevitable but necessary, in meditation as in life.

07/04/2025
New Blog Coming…

I’m excited to announce that my new blog is coming soon – watch this space!

14/02/2025