Author, Psychologist
Browsing Tag
As Australians tentatively prod the early weeks of 2021 to see if the year’s open to reinstating past freedoms, the shadowy shocks of 2020 grumble threateningly just below the surface of our days. Is COVID-19 going to surge forward with renewed energy after a quick kip? Can we capture new mutations in their infancy, weed …
It lost me at Father. I could not feel the spirituality of my forbears. As a kid I tried to believe God was listening and watching over us. I couldn’t feel him. Christianity was the ideology and tradition of my ancestors. Believing in it made you a ‘good person’ according to my Grandma, but my brain wouldn’t …
Let me fall if I must. The one I become will catch me. Baal Shev Tom From my twenties, I recall this image. I was standing on the edge of a crevasse, not just a cliff, a dark, vast jagged wound in the ground, an abyss where I couldn’t see the bottom. Around it was …
So Pete left, and there I was – another failed relationship, another week without an acting job, my bank account dwindling almost as fast as my frail self-esteem. As weeks dragged by, I felt increasingly out of control and I was fast sinking into depression. I was strangely overcome with grief about losing Pete although …
“Avoid the temptation to squeeze your mind into submission (in meditation), to confine it and restrict it – that will just make it wilder! Use light concentration, gently correct it when it wanders, and patiently give it time and space”. Ian Gawler and Paul Bedson This guidance comes from two very experienced teachers of meditation and …
Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally, to things as they are. Jon Kabat-Zinn Mindfulness develops your emotional intelligence, which helps you to take charge of your life and deal directly with your thinking, emotions and actions. Mindfulness is not something you have to get …
Guilty secret? It’s possible you won’t like me after this because it seems to be a surprisingly polarising topic. I love a gloomy day. In fact, when someone says it’s a lovely day because the sun is shining I get really uncomfortable. I don’t want to lie and agree with them but I know from …
A real friend is one of the great loves that make life worth living. I realised far too recently how important it is to be reflective about what a friend means to me. It doesn’t work to assume that people are automatically ‘friends’ just because you hang out with them. I wasn’t taught that as …
Strangely, I still felt loved as I focused on surviving grief. My former partner stopped breathing, holding my hand; just as intimate as in life. For the previous two years we’d faced everything together. Still I could feel his presence long after he died and it frustrated me, gutted me and buoyed me in equal measure. I felt the love but I …
It was a big day when mindfulness hit me as a super power – an innate power I could channel to improve my life. I’d been studying yoga and meditation for some time and I had the THEORY totally down, but apparently it hadn’t really sunk into my heart and gut. Because there I was on an …