Please look after your mental health. The promises of capitalism and over-working are completely empty. There’s no fulfillment at the end of working yourself into exhaustion and illness. And it’s not the gold standard of how well you’re doing in life. The corporate world doesn’t care about you, so don’t over-care about it.

Life will be over shortly. Finding out what truly matters now is important. Nobody is perfect, so let’s stop trying to be. Let’s just be ourselves. That’s enough. That’s freedom. Listen to yourself. Trust yourself. Don’t trust billboards or internet adverts that are trying to manipulate you into thinking that you’re not enough as you are.

We’re not here to be in constant competition with each other. If we truly recognised the shortness of life, we would drop all that shit, and all the baggage we carry. We would actually live. Forgiveness, patience and kindness...

For those who suffer from anxiety, like myself and many others, it seems that our in-built response to arising anxiety is to avoid it at all costs. This may be especially true for those of us who have faced traumatic anxiety or recurring panic. These deeply embedded response patterns can activate at any time, without warning, as if someone is flicking a switch without telling us. We might find ourselves asking, “Where is this switch flicker and why won’t they just get out of our house?”.

The switch flicker lies in our cellular, implicit memory, which is unconscious but can too often make itself extremely conscious and take over our brain, mind and body. From a neuroscientific perspective, the neurons or nerve cells that form the basis of the nervous system communicate with one another through neurotransmitters, eventually creating neural pathways. The neural pathways in our brain...

Nature is a powerful form of therapy and healing in and of itself, and it seems that we have forgotten the restorative power that it holds and always offers without asking for anything in return.

To align ourselves with nature and to become more true to what we are is a difficult task in modern life, which gives us every opportunity to ignore our inheritance of this most basic and wonderful resource. A resource that not only heals us but at the same time comes at absolutely no cost and comes with an incredible abundance.

Bringing ourselves in touch with nature gives us a freedom that is missing these days, as we over rely on technology and business for entertainment and finances for food, self-preservation and further distraction from a part of ourselves that cries out to be acknowledged – the latent but ever-present wild aspect of our being.

In a sense, we’ve divorced ourselves...

I’m writing this for those of us who have a tendency to block out, ignore or strongly resist intense and painful emotions when they arise. Personally, I have had lifelong habits of freezing, numbing and completely misunderstanding the more difficult aspects of my own feeling world. It’s only in recent times that I’ve learned the endless benefits of developing emotional intelligence and providing genuine space for what needs to pass through.

One recurring thing I’ve seen again and again in many people is the inability to fully allow painful feelings that are occurring for them. We all experience this in some way or another, and our society which promotes the ‘put on a smile no matter what’ attitude has largely cultivated this problem, leading people to feel shame where, with more understanding, they could be feeling self-compassion.

Regardless of how we got here, the reality is that...

After working very intimately and personally with trauma over the past couple of years, I felt inspired to write a few words about this complex and often misunderstood emotional issue.

Meditation was my entry point to recognise that I was unknowingly working with a wound that had been controlling my life and holding me back from moving in the directions I wished to go within myself. After a relationship breakup that certainly triggered something deep inside, a couple of months later I found myself living and working full-time in a Tibetan Buddhist meditation retreat centre, perfectly situated on the edge of the staggeringly beautiful Beara peninsula in West Cork. My search to overcome my suffering led me right into the genuine possibility of enlightenment within my heart and mind.

Soon after my initial honeymoon phase, I came face to face with an aspect of myself that had been so...

We all experience pain at times, some incredibly more significant than others depending on what’s going on in our lives. Pain is part of the human condition, and the first noble truth of the Buddha is: the truth of suffering. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? It’s true though but it seems that we may be in denial or possibly just looking from the wrong direction. We experience suffering everywhere we go, from the slight dissatisfaction of missing the bus, to the annoyance of not getting what we want, to the full on pain of losing that which we love deeply.

Obviously, life is full of incredibly rich moments too. Life is spectacular, a real wonder and a true gift. But by dismissing what we hold aversion to in ourselves and the world, and only validating that which brings us pleasure, we are actually cutting off a huge amount of energy that can potentially be used for awakening, almost like...

Thoughts seem to have such incredible power over us. We seem to believe what we think without question or any further investigation into if it’s true or not. The mind has this insanely powerful momentum that can sweep us away in an instant, and we don’t even notice it until we’re completely gone and missing everything around us.

I even think sometimes we prefer to be gone, lost in a fantasy world instead of being right here on the spot in life, as our mind made creations become a strange substitute for being here now. So we kind of just miss everything that’s happening, while we cheat ourselves out of the present moment constantly. And for what? Ridiculous dramas, stupid storylines about not being good enough, and revisiting old events while worrying about the future which has not yet arisen. Our thought patterns almost seem like a form of madness. At least mine do anyway.

But...

Comparison has some wonderful elements, such as recognising that someone has a lot less than us and being moved by compassion to help them. But there is a darker, more toxic side to comparison that has been nurtured and evolved in the modern world. I’m talking about the misguided view that because we perceive others to have a better life situation, that they must be happier and more fulfilled.

Often, we’re not even thinking about their supposed happiness, we are actually thinking about our own sense of lack. This can only lead us to feel ungrateful for everything we already have. Often, comparison just leaves us wanting and craving. In Buddhism, this is depicted as being a ‘hungry ghost’, with an image of a person with a big fat belly but with a mouth so tiny they can never be satisfied.

Without noticing, we all often unconsciously compare ourselves to others all the time, leaving us...

I don’t know how they got us to buy into this stupid notion of competing for better or worse jobs. Sure, some jobs pay a little more and Might be considered a bit more meaningful than others, but that doesn’t mean there are ‘lesser’ jobs.

We’ve been creating this habit since infancy on better or worse. But does that really do us any good? All it really leads to is being way too picky, having too many expectations and the worst of all, feeling we are either inferior or superior to others, which just means we create further separation. And we don’t even know this is happening, but we’ve been perfectly trained for it.

I totally get the whole “well if I’m going to work most of my life, it might as well be something I enjoy or that I get something out of”. I’m definitely on board with that too. But does it really have to define our identity so much? People look for their identity in jobs...