Tag: mental health

  • Hold your seat

    Hold your seat

    There’s a phrase that we use when teaching mindfulness for times when we feel challenged during a teaching session  or unsure of how a situation will unfold: hold your seat. For the most part it simply means just that. Stay put. When the going gets tough, don’t run away. Instead, stay embodied, present, compassionate and…

  • September’s bloom

    September’s bloom

    Ooh it‘s September… I can‘t tell you how many ‘new‘ beginnings there have been this past week: the return of the Tuesday morning with Jane sessions (alongside the rest of the Sanctuary‘s wonderful drop in meditations), the Being Present course began AND I started back at university. I had been in the midst of an…

  • What’s your prescription?

    What’s your prescription?

    Recently, I have been delivering a programme on Rest and one the practices that we do is setting our personal prescriptions. What does this mean?  To begin with, it’s an exercise taken from Claudia Hammond who is a BBC radio presenter and delivers the podcast ‘All in the Mind’. It’s the practice of what she…

  • The cure for apathy

    The cure for apathy

    Watching the news this past week should have come with a trigger warning. Just as I was settling down to a Friday night of relaxing TV, live news coverage rolled in. Rather than feeling an ease into the weekend, the politics of our day  activated a sense of shock, disgust, anger and ultimately a sadness…

  • Misery loves company

    Misery loves company

    To say that 2024 was a tough year would be minimising what was probably one of the most anguish filled years of my life- if not THE most. After a road of tortuous ups and downs and months of hospital stays, I lost my beloved husband Graeme to cancer. The devastation felt crippling and one…

  • The practice of looking up

    The practice of looking up

    Last week, things were feeling tight. Part of my discomfort was that I had a computer heavy week with very little output. This is perhaps funny as one of the projects that I was working on was the Art of Rest, which is starting in the Sanctuary this coming weekend. Despite the research that I…