As I have done each year since 2012, I spent the b’twixt and between days this festive holiday reflecting on what has been in 2025 and what is to come in 2026. I think its fair to say that over the past 15 years there has been a gradual shift in focus and energy from …
Some eight months after moving to Lewes, we have made it home. When people comment “you must have really settled now?”, it is an emphatic “YES!” And yet…within that settlement, there is a degree of something unsettling. As I deeply embed into the town, it is suggesting another aspect. I am leaning into this twofold …
Back from retreat, and spending my days settling back into “reality”. I haven’t found the transition as steep this time around. Maybe a testament to practice pervading more deeply into life and less “this” (normality) versus “that” (the container of retreat)? I certainly feel a little more practiced in the shift between worlds: a developing …
On the boat back home. My original intention was to use the ferry crossing France ahead of my retreat to draft a post. But such was the choppy sea, that plan soon drained away! However, there was also a lack of intrinsic motivation to write. At first, I watched my mind try to work out …
As I sit and start writing this first blog for a while, I connect with the memory of how I started my blogging career “like this” – a savoured moment sat in the corner of a cafe. Twenty years ago, I was writing about cycling and coaching. The coffee companion remains, this Helen still cycles, …
I can’t believe its Friday again. Time goes ever so fast these days anyway; but this week it has been stretching and contracting, and I don’t quite know where (and when) I am. I don’t really know HOW I am either… This time last week, I was receiving the news that my Dad, who was …
I am writing from the Dieppe – Newhaven ferry, returning from a week of solitary retreat in my beloved Normandy. My hope was to immerse myself in 10 to 12 hours of practice each day – the practice at hand being Guru Yoga, the fourth practice of the Vajrayana preliminaries, or Ngondro¹. Practicing for that …
A couple of weeks ago I shared that it had been a good summer: one that ticked all the boxes across body, mind, and spirit. I also mentioned that it was not without its challenges. One of the ‘good’ things about being an existential psychotherapist – a Buddhist one at that – is the reality …
I’m in that strange bardo state commonly known as ‘jet lag’ having arrived back from a visit to Canada; Nova Scotia to be more precise…or to be right on the dollar, Halifax Shambhala Centre. Shambhala is the organisation originally formed by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. And while Shambhala has a history peppered with …
I had the luxury of a day to myself yesterday; a chance to bathe in “sabbath” and commit the whole day to my practice. From just after 7am in the morning until 5pm, I alternated between periods of meditation and the fourth of the Ngondro practices: a visualisation and mantra practice called “guru yoga”. As …