Welcome to the unknown. This week I find myself thinking about a phrase often used when discussing Resilience or Presence, “being able to access the best and most resourceful version of ourselves in times of challenge.” It has always sounded a beautiful and important concept, but now it is reality. […]
Mindful Musings (Blog)
30 posts
As a number of you know I often deliver workshops which involve drumming with horses. Over the years I have delivered them all over England, and abroad, to a number of different audiences. The audience that I suspect most will find surprising is to a business school. This was part […]
Maslow started with the basics – first the physiological, simply keeping ourselves alive, then safety. It is a foundation. Without safety our functioning is compromised. Performance stilted by the low-level stress reactions of insecurity. Our cognition often fogged. Our creativity dulled. Sadly our brains are very good at perceiving failings […]
The actor Christopher Reeve famously said: pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice. Amazingly, it was when Superman hung up his cape that he become a real super hero. His tolerance of condition after a life-changing riding accident was an inspiration. There is a metaphor in Mindfulness based on the […]
How is it that we are so connected yet so alone? Somewhere on route to the 21st century we ceased to be genuinely connected. Friends are but a click away, yet there is no relationship. From our earliest education through to the height of our careers it always seems to […]
So how do horses make us human? There is a question. I was recently asked to do a talk on empathy. More specifically about empathy in the relationship between horses and humans. And that was where the question arose for me. Empathy is generally described as the ability to put […]
The literacy of feedback involves an understanding of the conscious and unconscious language within exchange. The workshops I have been running over the last year or so, whether in board rooms or stables, consistently return to one topic. That is, developing a meaningful level of self awareness. Even if not […]
Emotions as motion - really? Well, somebody asked me recently “how horses react to human emotion?” My flippant response was, “well they move". Notwithstanding my initial understatement, it got me thinking..... (As an aside, recent research by Léa Lansade in France certainly supports the direct effect of human emotions on […]
The Cycle of Somatic Presence is all about being. A constantly shifting and redefining of being, but essentially still being. As we enter the third decade of this century I see an age that could well be defined as the age of persistent distraction. A time of increasing and ever […]
A few years ago somebody asked me to explain the embodied and somatic training and coaching that I do - with and without horses. And so I wrote this piece, originally as a LinkedIn article. I have revisited it and expanded here some of the ideas. So let me introduce you […]