General musings

In sound engineering there’s a concept called signal to noise ratio. It refers to the level of desired sound – the ‘signal’, such as an instrument – relative to the ‘noise floor’, which is the amount of hiss, or hum, or underlying undesirable sound. Part of the art of good audio mixing is managing equipment […]

We get wrong-footed because we rely on the unreliable. What is truly, unerringly reliable? Not much. And you can choose to see that either as cause for despair, or a kind of liberation. All sorts of outrageous-seeming things have happened and will happen to me during my life. ‘Why me?’, I can rage. ‘Why not

If you base your own behaviour on what other people are doing, you will never fulfil your potential. So there I was, getting annoyed with the person next door in my hotel banging and crashing about. I’d tried to be really considerate of the adjoining door in this room by using in-ears to watch Netflix,

Would you have a better time if you stopped taking things so personally? Would you have a better time if you admitted that life will never be exactly how you want it, and so you might as well enjoy it anyway, in amongst the mess? Would you have a better time if you stopped labelling

I love tigers – but I have no desire to have one in my life. I’m fascinated by documentaries about extreme mountain climbing – but have zero urge to strap on some crampons.  And although I have five godchildren and a stepdaugher, all of whom I adore, I have never ever wanted kids of my

If we could understand what each others’ hearts are saying, would we still be able to harden our own, or would we lose the capacity to hate? It’s much harder to hate someone up close and personal. We can demonise entire races, or exploit entire species for our own gain, if we don’t connect with

According to the yoga tradition, we have four types of desire called the purusharthas. They are dharma, artha, kama, and moksha. Dharma is our soul’s purpose, our reason for being in the world, to bring forth the unique nugget hidden within us, the unique expression of the Universe that we are. Artha is the desire

I feel incredibly fortunate to have three teachers with whom I study every week. A former Buddhist monk and psychotherapist who I’ve known for almost a decade; a renowned Tantrik scholar and author; and a yoga teacher with forty-five years of teaching experience, whose own teacher was Desikachar (son of Krishnamacharya, the ‘godfather’ of modern

The first time anything about our current situation really felt different for me was the day when they closed the gyms and yoga studios. Up until that point nothing much had changed in my day to day life – I was at home in between tours, and although I love going out in nature for

Maintaining a healthy immune system is incredibly important right now for obvious reasons. Whilst it’s hard to target a single system of the body (because everything is interconnected), there are certain things which have been proven to improve immune system functioning, some of which you’d probably expect, and others which may surprise you. As a