Yoga in One Syllable

Regular readers will note that things have been a little ghostly around here the past few weeks. Transcontinental travel, it turns out, doesn’t bring out the blogger in me; I’m quite happy absorbing a sunset, or watching the wind whip grains of sand across a dune, without feeling compelled to race back to the computer [...]

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Yoga is usually considered an individual practice that each of us can use to develop a better understanding of who we are: a vehicle for our inner journey of self-discovery. Sometimes, though, we can get so focused on ourselves that we forget that our relationships with others, as well as our environment, are often the [...]

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Almost four decades ago a book called “The Limits to Growth” was released. Funded by the Club of Rome it modeled the possible consequences of a rapidly growing population and the finite resources our environment can supply: it outlined limits. Yet the idea that growth may be limited is not generally popular policy: twenty years [...]

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Our mind is a great analytical machine, more sophisticated than any computer. But like the promises of “less stress” and “more free time” with which the computer age has lured us in, our mind, rather than streamlining our decisions, can often be caught making life a whole lot more complicated. Granted, our ability to analyse [...]

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I’ve been watching my patterns of work and life for quite some time and there’s an interesting cycle appearing. Every six weeks or so my ‘things to do list’ drops to basically nothing, leaving me with plenty of time to reflect on what I’ve managed to accomplish, how well I’ve managed to do it and [...]

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The repetition of the syllable “Om” or “Aum” has long been practised by people throughout India to help calm the mind and to maintain a relaxed state. The sound Aum is considered an audible symbol of the energy that sustains our lives, energy that has been there since time immemorial, continues today, and will be [...]

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Our mind is constantly bombarded by thoughts, impressions and messages. To help get us through the day our mind retrieves hundreds of memories and combines this with real-time data from our senses. In a previous article I questioned the truth of memory, but how often do we question what our senses tell us has happened [...]

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Watching a documentary last week about the brain and how it functions I was struck by how important perseverance and enthusiasm are to achieving our goals in life. Yet it seems these two psychological states are all too often the first things to go out the window when learning something new.

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Have you ever noticed that often when you arrive somewhere your mind is trailing 20 minutes behind? Either that, or it’s raced 20 minutes ahead. You may have got to work, sat down on your chair and turned your computer on, but you’re still thinking about the morning’s traffic jam. Or, as you eat your [...]

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A little while back my family and I sat down to a game of Monopoly. As the money was divided, the trinkets chosen and the dice rolled, everyone’s alter egos began to appear. Strategic thinkers and planners morphed into seat-of-the-pants speculators, spendthrifts threw caution to the wind and bet the lot on risky properties, and [...]

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