I spent yesterday experiencing the great ceremonial landscape that is Avebury, Silbury Hill and West Kennet. Sitting with a friend and talking atop the West Kennet Long Barrow the enormity of that landscape was laid out before us. Even though we could not actually see the distant henge, avenues and […]
Mindful Musings (Blog)
56 posts
I originally wanted to call this blog “lost in translation" but in gestation it shifted to “the practice of misunderstanding”. It sort of wrote itself. Its roots are in my work with people in different capacities over the last 15 years. How often do the best intended messages somehow not […]
So how do animals make us human? There is a question. Someone once asked me what my thinking was on there being empathy in the relationship between animals and humans. Empathy is generally described as the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others. To understand their experience. "To […]
I came across an inspiring opening to a chapter recently in Erik Jampa Andersson's book "Unseen Beings" (Hay House, 2023) which I wanted to quote in full to kick off this reflection "Nature is not a place. We often speak of it as if it were a kind of stage […]
I have recently seen a post introducing the idea of Equine Assisted Services, particularly in the context the ground-based activities that are often engaged to facilitate learning and therapeutic interactions. The wording of that post has challenged me to consider the foundations of this work. When I first learned of […]
The Clever Hans phenomenon At the beginning of the 20th Century the world has consumed by the capabilities of a horse called Clever Hans. Clever Hans and his owner Wilhelm von Osten created a great stir in the popular entertainment of time. According to von Osten, Hans was a very […]
The stories we tell ourselves influence everything. Period. We make sense of the world in narrative. Whether that is in the way that we learn the journey from A to B. Remembering the last place that we left our car keys or recalling a memory of an interaction with another […]
How many times does this question come up when I have been training learners with Athena team or delivering Equine Assisted Services sessions? And how many different ways are there to answer it? Our understanding of horses has thankfully moved on from the view of them as mindless automaton, the […]
Yesterday morning my usually smooth and gentle Qi Gong routine was difficult, it was clunky and clumsy. At first, I wondered why. Why was my body behaving so insensitively? There was no sense, I knew this routine inside out, I was well practiced. What was going on? Then I realised […]
The literacy of feedback involves an understanding of the conscious and unconscious language within everyday exchanges. My work, wherever it s undertaken, consistently returns to one topic. The importance of developing a meaningful level of self awareness! Even if it is not the core agenda, it so often rears its […]