By Eva Selhub and Alan Logan This is an important and exciting book in my view, as it gives extensive research validation for the natural happiness approach, and the aims of Hazel Hill Wood as a natural learning centre. This will be a longer blog than most, because I’d like to highlight the main insights […]
Archive by Author
To raise your wellbeing, learn from extremes
Insights from a Woodland Resilience Immersion for GP’s This is embarrassing for me to admit as a resilience expert, but I have been struggling to sustain my own wellbeing and morale in recent months. The combination of huge, apparently insoluble problems on the climate change and political fronts has really ground me down. However, I came back […]
Front-line extreme: natural resilience for junior hospital doctors
Of all the front-line services we depend on, hospitals are among the most crucial, and a large hospital will have several hundred junior doctors. These are young men and women, from mid-twenties into thirties. They start right out of university, and the first two years are the Foundation phase. An amazing 30% of junior doctors […]
Why our front-line services need re-visioning
All of us depend on front line services: they include health, local authorities, education, care, and a myriad of voluntary sector organisations such as charities, help networks, and community groups. They are a safety net, and as stresses grow for most people, we need the support of front line services more than ever. But most […]
Five Sufi practices for joy, wellbeing and renewal
Back in 1992 I met the first person I’d ever met who called themselves a Sufi: he was the Reverend Lesley Foot, an Anglican priest who explained he had his Bishop’s permission to be a Sufi too. This demolished most of my preconceptions about Sufis. A year later, at a Sufi workshop, someone asked the […]
Creativity and Spirituality
How inspiration can help our daily life and work There have been some interesting features in the media about the ways social media is shaping our lives. Let’s face it, their basic aim is to make us spend more: so the effect of all our screen time is to make us more self-centred, more anxious, […]
The Seven Planks of Spiritual Practice
The Seven Planks of Spiritual Practice. Having a spiritual practice may be helpful to us in many ways, but what does this actually mean, and how would we start? When I am asked about getting started, I suggest that people explore a couple of established, named spiritual paths which appeal to them: for example, Buddhism, […]
Sufi Wisdom: an introduction
Listen to this story:When the soul left the body,it was stopped by Godat heaven’s gates:“You have returned just as you left!Life is a blessing of opportunity: Where are the bumps and scratchesleft by the journey?” Poem by Rumi, translation Neil Douglas-Klotz A few people are seeking a spiritual thread to help them find meaning and […]
A Sufi View of Climate Change
I’ve been exploring Sufi spiritual teachings for over twenty years, and felt it might be useful to explain how these help me to live with and respond to the climate crisis. My sense is that a spiritual path and practices can help a lot in this process. So what do I mean by Sufi? It’s […]
Book blog: Journey of Souls by Michael Newton
Ever wonder about a life beyond this one? Perhaps Covid-19 has made many of us reflect about our mortality, and wonder if this increasingly strange world is a preparation for something else. I have long believed that our soul exists before and after a human lifetime, and this book offers evidence I find persuasive. Michael […]