This blog accompanies the Whole Health programme 30 Days of Meditation - click here for more details and to sign up 

The audio at the top of this blog is the 15 minute meditation from Day 1 of that programme: What is Mindful Attention? This question enquiring into mindful attention is to notice the quality and nuance of our experience in any given moment, without judgement. This is a the essence of any aspect of yoga and other meditative arts. The meditation that accompanies this blog can help foster presence in a still practice, but also feed into awareness in movement, action and relationship with others.

Below we explore ways of meditating (not just sitting!) - also explored in the blog Meditation Positions - but first some let's look at how we can weave still and moving practices into our lives for awareness of the whole human spectrum of experience.

Meditation and yoga postures

Meditation is part of the eight-limbed path of yoga described in Patanjali's Yoga Sutra's withi...

This blog accompanies the Whole Health programme 30 Days of Meditation - see here for more details and to sign up

Meditation is not just about sitting

Images of meditation are widespread, often giving the impression that simply sitting serenely is what it's all about.. but meditation is steady, focused, mindful attention - as explored in Whole Heath - and this can be explored in many positions; it is finding ease, comfort and a place where awareness can be cultivated that is the guide for where you need to be at any time. 

Although most meditation images are seated, if you don’t often sit cross-legged, this can initially create more tension in the neck, shoulders, chest, back or hips and dominate the experience. It is better to be fully supported in a way that allows the whole body to rest and the chest to open easily or you can feel like you are swimming upstream rather than flowing with the river. There are enough undercurrents to meet without adding more! This prepar...

Reducing too much reliance on grains in our diets can help us turn to alternatives that provide less potential for agitating inflammation and more brain soothing healthy fats, like coconut flour and almond butter. These muffins are a great snack or breakfast-on-the go option, where the protein and dense nutrition in the eggs and nuts works alongside the cinnamon for blood-sugar balancing.

As a sweet treat, they satisfy without setting off future cravings. There is no sugar added and if they don’t taste as sweet as you’re used to (or want!), bear with it – our taste buds change their expectations within a few days and this can also help us turn to less sweet foods as self-medication.

Serves 12

Prep time: 5-10 minutes

COOKING TIME 20-25 minutes

INGREDIENTS

4 medium bananas (adjust amount depending on size of bananas)
4 eggs
2 tbsp coconut oil
½ cup/125g almond butter
½ cup/65g coconut flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp baking powder
½ - 1 tsp cinnamon
Pinch of salt
12 pecan nuts
1 tbsp ca...

The podcast above supports the information below, and you can scroll down for the Kind Resilience meditation. 

To best get an idea of resilience means, consider the following question; when something challenging happens, how well do you recover?

 Resilience is the how well we bounce back after adversity. Life will always present us with joys and sorrows and we need to feel one to be able to experience the other in a fully-rounded emotional spectrum. Resilient people have the ability to meet change and difficulty as opportunities for self-reflection, learning and understanding how the circumstances or events may be part of their growth and self-development.  

Resilience is not something we are simply born with or not, but a skill that can be learnt and cultivated. Our brains have an innate capacity for rewiring according to habit (neuroplasticity) and resilience is part of a learning new attitudes from perceiving challenge as failure or catastrophic, to being able to step back, adapt...

Coriander is known for its ability to eliminate toxic metals such as mercury and the garlic and onions contain detoxifying sulphur, a mineral that we need in great amounts to eliminate toxins and wastes from the liver, as well as all cells individually. Citrus and olive oil also have plenty of liver-supporting components and this salsa can be used to pep up salads to eat plenty of greens and soluble fibre for moving out toxins.

Serves 6-8

Prep time 10-20 minutes (plus a couple of hours to let the flavours marry)

INGREDIENTS

4 large tomatoes (or if available a mix of large tomatoes and cherry or plum tomatoes in a variety of colours) 

25g/1oz. bunch coriander leaf (cilantro)
1 small red onion
1-2 green chillies
½-1 small garlic clove
Zest of ½ lime
Juice of 1 lime
1 tsp salt
1-2 tbsp. olive oil 

METHOD

1. Finely dice onion, chillies (deseeded) and garlic (mince/finely grate this if possible) and add to a bowl with the lime and salt. This will ‘cook’ the ingredients slightly and take away
...

Many of us know when we’re started to feel the effects of stress – we can ‘feel it in our gut’. Like many cop shows where the lead detective gets her or his ‘hunch’ from these gut feelings, we are continually responding to the continual ebb and flow of input from deep in our belly. Exploring how we tune in to these messages is the basis for the mind-body connection at the heart of yoga and how we can navigate the noise of the modern world without ‘losing our heads’.

Gut feelings are always there for us to access and if connected, listen and respond to, but it is an endemic part of our modern ‘thinking over feeling’ culture to often push down, ignore or dismiss those voices from below. This is where we respond from our conditioning, from what the primal branches of our nervous has deemed safe or unsafe from the ages before around seven years old, when all experience is processed literally and unconsciously. Before we learn to form inner discussions around what we’re presented with, our...

Beetroot (beets if you are Stateside!) are a stalwart of liver support, as they contain the highest amount of a substance TMG (tri-methyl glycine) that is crucial for detoxification and other conversion processes that take place in the liver. The kick of horseradish belies the substances that it contains that help the liver heal and regenerate. It contains significant amounts of cancer-fighting compounds called glucosinolates, which increase the liver's ability to detoxify carcinogens; substances that prompt our production of cancer cells.

Having this dip to hand a few times a week can support all liver processes, including metabolism and blood sugar balance.

Cooking time: 1 hour (although you can opt to buy pre-cooked beetroot if you would like to make a quick dip)
Prep time: 10-15 minutes
(serves 4-6)

INGREDIENTS
4 beetroots (approx. 250g/8oz.)
10-15g/ ½ oz. fresh rosemary
50ml balsamic vinegar
1-2 tbsp. olive oil
½ tsp salt
2-3 tsp fresh grated horseradish (if unavailable you could use a...

Mindful and Embodied Exercise for Soothing Anxiety

The modern world has us stuck up in our heads, with the result of losing the body awareness that we need to register a sense of presence and safety. Learning how to release self-protective holding patterns in the body can help unravel both the physical and mental tension that can create anxiety.

Many therapies that address the mind and mental health are now recognising the need to bring embodied awareness or embodiment into practices; recognising that we can only fully come to relaxation states when we have a sense of where our body is in the here and now. A recent study into CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) – the most widely accepted treatment for anxiety, panic attacks, depression, eating disorders and other mental health issues – put forward that “integrated embodiment approach with CBT enhances outcomes across a wide range of emotional disorders”, recognising the limitations of a process that only addresses thought patterns (...

We explore how we’re hard-wired for craving – from sugar to screens – but can develop practical tools to consciously override this primal stress-induced reactivity and find other ways of self-soothing.

Desire and aversion

From the moment we are born, we seek what gives us pleasure - it is deep within our primal make-up to desire and to use this as motivation to seek and obtain what we need. As babies, reaching to suckle provides the impetus to self-coordinate and move to find nourishment – and our first reward for such behaviour, the sweetness of milk, sets up associations that we take through life.

As we grow, quick-fix foods are often wired into our neural networks as this comfort or reward, so deeply sown into the wiring and internal drives of what soothes us. These might replicate this first sweet taste, or we can shift towards other substances (or behaviours) that complete such loops – bringing us back down to relief when we feel agitated, overwhelmed or in the face of di...

Recognising and accepting sugar addiction

Until recently, although we could see and feel the ‘pull’ of sugar, it was not actually proven that this was a real addiction. However, a recent study showed that sugar binges and subsequent removal of the sugar, showed classic withdrawal symptoms, including "the shakes", teeth chattering, anxiety and changes in brain chemistry. The addictive qualities of sugar have been shown to be similar to those of drugs of abuse.

We know that sugar increases the dopamine (feel-good reward neurotransmitter or brain chemical) and opioid levels in the brain that can create a sugar addiction. Low levels of the sleep and mood neurotransmitter serotonin also create a self-medicating craving for sugar as when our levels are low, our bodies survival mechanism uses insulin – the hormone produced to move sugar out of the bloodstream into cells – to get serotonin quickly into the brain. Balanced blood sugar helps regulate all of these brain mechanisms, balancing ou...

In my consultancy, I have the opportunity to discuss the intricacies of the working day with many clients. As I specialise in burnout, fatigue, anxiety and other stress-related conditions, this is often with those with high demand jobs who struggle to balance their available energy and simply getting through their workload intact and sane.

So often these people are aware of that they are pushing their resources to the limits, but we all know that when we need to simply get the job done, we have to keep going in the moment. It might not be that the job is simply overwhelming either, but that many of us actually really enjoy what we do and rise to that excitement for challenge and the achievement that is part of productivity. So it's quite easy for us to use to keep going when we're on a roll and not want to step back and intercept that excitatory type of energy that can be so good for mental acuity, quick responses and determination.

The new screen and sedentary issues

So because we ...

Originally written for Movement for Modern Life

We have looked at the effects of stress on the gut. This showed how our digestive system is bound up in our relationship with the world around us. It makes sense that our postural issues affect our digestion. As our physical being (annamaya kosha or physical layer in yoga) is how we meet and relate to the world, our postural habits affect our digestive function and, as we will also explore in the next episode, out into movement patterns themselves.

Postural issues and digestion

A key detail in our human digestive tract design is that our physical design is stacked up vertically from the ground. Our digestion has to follow this organisation. The human oesophagus (where the food goes down) and rectum (where the waste comes out!) are vertical to the ground, unlike other animals. Our digestive processes rely on these and many other related aspects of posture to optimally function.

The emotional psoas and the diaphragm

This brings ...