Tag: mindfulness

Basic Sanity: Returning To What’s Already Here
When people come to meditation, it’s often because something in life feels unmanageable. We hope for relief, for a shift, for a special mindstate to lift us out of the struggle. And it’s quite natural that when experience feels intractable, we naturally look for something, anything, that feels different from what we have now.

You may be here feeling confused, exhausted, or quietly disappointed that nothing you’ve tried so far seems to make any real difference.

There are moments of pure panic and overwhelm where there genuinely feels like nothing to reach for. The fear is total, the circumstances feel unbearably heavy, and the combination of inner and outer pressure is so tough that no practice is accessible.

I want to name this clearly, because I have been here many times, and it matters to acknowledge this truth before speaking about meditation as anything larger or wider than that.

Sometimes it helps to name a concrete example, not to dwell in it, but to ground what might otherwise stay abstract.

I am taken back to an example of such a time when even going off to sleep meant bracing for the electric-shock pain in my lower back, which came each time I drifted off and continued through the nights. It was in those moments that the despair was so complete and nothing felt reachable.

It is precisely because of this reality, that meditation needs -so often- to be understood and seen differently to the way it is understood and seen. Meditation isn’t something to be deployed in those moments as a ‘way out’. It needs to be viewed as something cultivated in the wider field of our lives.

I’ve often heard people refer to the fact that they have ‘tried breathing, tried mindfulness… etc’…with the desire of something…”working”…in such moments.

And this reflects the common, wide (mis)understanding, that mindfulness is something to be taken like a pill, in difficult moments: take it and the difficulty will go away.

One of the things we first establish in mindfulness is that meditation doesn’t promise special moods or altered experiences. Its real gift is far quieter, far more ordinary, and ultimately far more reliable. This is because the practice begins to build our capacity for basic sanity, a groundedness that doesn’t actually depend on everything feeling good.

Nothing here is being offered as a promise, a solution, or something to convince you of, only as an invitation to notice what is already here and how easily and repeatedly it tends to be missed.

Basic sanity is the capacity to be less hooked by the powerful pulls that dominate both society and our own minds. Advertisements, endless stimulation, the pressure to perform, the pressure to improve, these forces tug at our attention constantly. They stimulate the senses but rarely nourish the heart.

And our minds echo these same forces back at us, sometimes even louder. We know this pull intimately in the habit of rumination: the way the mind insists that if we just think about a regretted situation one more time, we might finally think our way out of the pain it’s causing. Meditation isn’t about escaping all this; it’s about seeing it clearly enough that we’re not automatically seduced by it.

At the heart of practice is an impulse grounded in different values:
- compassion
- depth
- closeness to life
- the wish to feel things more fully and respond more freely
These values don’t usually arrive as strong convictions, but as something quieter and more tentative; they present a subtle pull toward living with a little more honesty and steadiness.

These values may start small, perhaps a faint sense that there must be a way to live with more honesty or more steadiness. But even that faint impulse is sane. It senses the possibility of being less swept up, less reactive, less lost.

As practice deepens, we begin to cultivate a steadiness that’s not easily thrown off its centre. We become less tangled in unnecessary drama, less convinced by the frantic “values” of the world, less pulled into craving or resistance. This doesn’t mean life stops being difficult. It means we’re less exhausted by the struggle against it.

Over time, the value of a steady and consistent practice is that our minds are able to adopt greater flexibility as a result of becoming stronger in our intentionality.

And in this way the quiet mind, the spacious mind, the clear mind…starts to feel less like an achievement and more like a home we return to.

As a consequence of an ongoing commitment to practising steadiness, when moments of overwhelm arise they are able to be met with less surprise and more of a sense of ground, rather than the feeling of being completely taken over.

Basic sanity is not some distant ideal. It’s the simple capacity to be here, with what’s real, without being pulled entirely out of shape by it. And with practice, this becomes less of a momentary experience and more of a way of living.

This perspective is what quietly frames my work.

This is also why I continue to love exploring the spheres of awareness with people in the course I run, as a shared inquiry into the steadiness and basic sanity that this practice makes possible.
23/01/2026
A few words about Wordlessness

I was thinking recently about a striking similarity between two of my main passions in life, music and mindfulness, this being that both go beyond words. Then I started reflecting on why this is, and what its significance is, to me.

And it’s not lost on me here that I’m using words to describe what they themselves cannot describe.

It seems obvious to say that many embodied experiences transcend what words are capable of. Take physical pain as one other example. And is it because these things reach us before the mind has time to interpret them? Then I began wondering: is it just beyond words, or is it, in some cases, beyond cognitive understanding altogether?

Music as a Way In

Music offers us a good way into exploring this: music theory training offers us a terrain to understand musical language in terms of note lengths, note values, articulation and so on.

These are essential for the traditional learning of instrumental playing, and yet however sophisticated a grasp of music theory we might have, it can never replicate the emotion we feel listening to JS Bach, and how doing this evokes something within us that perhaps remained dormant for a while.

This bypasses the conceptual mind.

Concept vs Experience in Mindfulness

Exactly the same thing can be said of the limitations of holding a cognitive understanding of mindfulness when compared to the experiential component. However great a grasp of neuroscience someone has, they aren’t going to know what is only possible through presence, sensation, tone and body… that which can only be sensed directly.

These experiences refuse to be captured by language, no matter how detailed our explanations or how high the level of understanding, because they’re understood by the body long before the intellect can describe them.

Music and mindfulness both perfectly illustrate this gap between concept and experience.

Why Write About This?

And why is there a need to draw attention to this?

It’s the degree to which the opposite is assumed so pervasively about mindfulness.

Working within secondary mental health care has, over the years, revealed to me how much assumption circulates about what mindfulness actually is. The assertions and references made about it are not because people have spent time with a teacher or developed a sustained practice, but rather because they’ve done a short daily exercise on an app for a while, regularly skim wellbeing articles, attended one or several workplace sessions, or heard/read enough about mindfulness to feel familiar with the concept.

These things somehow tick the box for it to be either commended or discredited based on such limited understanding.

Conceptual Assumptions vs Lived Reality

It feels remiss not to point out that the confidence of these assertions usually rests far more on conceptual understanding rather than the lived experience of mindfulness.

As valuable as conceptual familiarity is, it barely scratches the surface. For something so important, vast and fundamental to our existence as awakeness, awareness to our experience and to life, this feels somewhat of a tragedy, a wholesale ‘dumbing down’, inappropriate for something so sacred.

The healthcare system, and the culture we live in at large, leans heavily on information: we read, we analyse, we learn frameworks. But the qualities that mindfulness cultivates in terms of steadiness, clarity, spaciousness, discernment, don’t arise from knowing about them. They arise only from direct contact with the experience itself.

So just as studying music theory cannot replicate the moment a Bach phrase touches us, familiarising ourselves with the idea of mindfulness cannot produce the inner shift that comes from practising it.

My Own Path and Early Perceptions

There is a parallel I can draw, not in the sense of omitting the experiential component, but in terms of how my own perception has widened and developed over the years.

My first deep exposure to mindfulness was through MBSR, which although it contains long meditations as its core content, omits much of the context of the original teachings. MBSR is a serious course requiring full commitment to the practices. This was twelve years ago now, and I can clearly see what MBSR is and what it lacks.

Only as time and my understanding progressed did I come to realise how vast its roots are, and how far beyond technique or curriculum the real practice extends. And yet I would initially have assumed my preliminary exposure to represent mindfulness as a whole. So similarity lies in the fact that we often assume our experience is the whole truth. This is an instinctive thing to do and I don’t claim to be exempt from this human tendency.

Training, Depth, and What Cannot Be Studied

I remember that as part of our teacher training, it was somewhat disparaged that at Bangor University you could attain a ‘degree in mindfulness’. This wasn’t highly regarded by our teachers, who placed precedence on the number of hours a person had meditated before allowing them onto this particular teacher training course. Without a genuinely grounded level of understanding, an embodied ability to teach cannot emerge.

Language can only, at best, gesture towards feeling what happens when the attention steadies, when reactivity eases, when the mind softens enough for space to appear. It requires sensing ourselves in real time, without needing to name, judge or control the moment. This can’t be studied, only experienced.

The high level of meditative experience required is also what allows a teacher to break things down to make them translatable and relatable to beginners in this world. We need to take what’s complex and vast and make it clear and accessible.

What My Teaching Aims to Offer

My work is now shaped by this understanding, and after years of seeing how misunderstood mindfulness can be, my role as a teacher is to help people move from thinking about mindfulness into experiencing mindfulness. To help them enter this wordless depth and achieve experiential shift, and to sense the real potential for this when we make it a lived part of daily life.

Developed as a daily habit, we can deepen it, trust it, and return to it more often in the moments that lie outside of formal practice.

This is what my course is designed to offer. We acknowledge and explore the concepts, and then step beyond them into the experience where the potential for change actually lies.

Maybe this is why I’ve always found it hard to put mindfulness into words. I hope I’ve at least brushed against what words can never fully hold.

And so, if you have any curiosity at all, I invite you to come and experience mindfulness, not just understand it.

23/11/2025
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