In his books, Carlos Casteneda writes of his lessons from the Shaman/Sorcerer don Juan. Don Juan talks about the accumulation of inner silence. To me, this could be likened with stillness, “no mind,” “meditation” or anything you’d like to call the true absence of thought. Many people ask me “how much should I meditate?” “How...
One of my friends Vik, who I’ve mentioned here before, has a great by-line for his business, which hopefully I got right here: “Exercise is optional, movement is essential” Succinct, yet powerful. I thought that was worth sharing. If your training is long, arduous, a chore and leaves you with a frown, then perhaps it’s...
On the recent retreat we ran, a guest, presenter, friend and mentor Cole Clayton took us through some work with the breath. In one of the early sessions, he invited us to observe the breath over a period, we were going to be lying down. Thoughts would inevitably come, he said, but when they did,...
Many focus on the output, the work. I focus on the opposite. Let’s look at exercise. Yep, the programming is important. Yep, the effort you put in is a big component. Of course, you need to show up. You need to practice. However, despite this, my message is still to prioritise the opposite, even in...
While the fitness industry has popularised a “lean” look as the epitome of health, we know that this could be achieved while sacrificing other areas of health that we know to be important. Despite being “ripped,” if your immunity, resilience, mobility or libido are low, then your overall health may not be up to scratch....
Meditation is a popular form of stress management. Many people choose it to down-regulate stress and numerous studies have backed this up. However, many of the individual studies in this field commonly fail to include an active control group. Pascoe et. al* then did a meta analysis of 45 of these different studies and included randomised...
The one-arm handstand, or doing a handstand on one arm, is a difficult movement. It’s something I’ve been playing with in recent months on and off. The thing is, it’s far more than twice as hard as a regular handstand. According to circus artist and handbalancer Mikael Kristiansen, the one arm handstand is 10-20 times...
Sound and some music has can have a powerful effect on healing. Conversely, we all know that some sounds or music can have a negative effect. I know this to be true experientially, for many reasons, including the odd fact that whenever I get into a small twin engined plane the low-frequency, slightly mis-matched hum...
