Yoga in One Syllable

In the spirit of thinking less, I’ve been doing more. I’m not randomly filling my time with busy-ness rather I’ve begun a campaign of consciously and mindfully doing and acting. Doing more may seem to run counter to many spiritual philosophies – doesn’t yoga advocate retreating to the Himalayas and meditating in a cave? Yes. [...]

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I think too much. I’ve been told this quite a few times lately. My doctor told me that my brain was working too hard. The Ayurvedic doctor I see in India flatly suggested I stop thinking. And then, the jnana yogi we visited in India confirmed that a person can definitely think too much (although [...]

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In my last article I talked about jnana yoga, the yoga of knowledge, and how practitioners of this form of yoga spend their life trying to understand the nature of the mind and how it works. All this sounds like an extreme sport version of intellectualisation. But we all know that humans don’t just think [...]

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Our Indian Yoga Tour for Summer 2011 is now well and truly over. We all had a lovely time and I hope to be able to share a little of the magic of India with you over the coming weeks. As I readjusted to life at home the other evening I took a walk through [...]

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When I was growing up, phrases like “watch your language”, “mind your P’s and Q’s” or the exclamation “language, please!” regularly flew round the classroom. Unsurprisingly, teachers were generally referring to the colourful profanities of excited teenagers. Now pipe down at the back – this article is not about swearing. Rather, it’s about how our [...]

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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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Yoga was ‘discovered’ by ancient sages in the Indus Valley. The knowledge they garnered was recorded in incredible detail and, interestingly enough, the more science investigates the claims of these philosophers the greater the correlation between their ancient wisdom and recent ‘scientific discoveries’. The sages postulated that everything that occurs in the world can teach [...]

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‘Being present’ is a constant theme in many Eastern philosophies, and with good reason. Have you ever noticed that unhappiness actually arises from your memory of past experiences, or from the imaginings about your as-yet-undetermined future?

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If you think you can, or if you think you can’t. Either way you’re right. Henry Ford We all tell ourselves stories about what we think we’re capable of achieving. But despite belief in the legitimacy of these tales, they could often be archived in a library’s fiction section.

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