Freelance Writer
Mountains beyond mountain. Photo by Yannic Läderach on Unsplash It started as a physical thing I’ve been doing yoga on and off, regularly and irregularly, for a few years now. Like a lot of lads, I started because I was interested in the physical side of it: the stretching, the flexing, the strength training that…
Photo by Nathalie Désirée Mottet on Unsplash That’s not me in the photo obviously, but you get the idea. Running during lockdown – running away from home, if you will – has made me realise just all the things other than training that I love about the sport: the non-competitive, non-performance-enhancement side. To me they’re just as important…
Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash There’s more value in the books you haven’t read than in the ones you have, or so Nassim Taleb tells us about Umberto Eco’s anti-library: despite having over thirty thousand books in his personal library, he is prouder of the ones he hasn’t read than the ones he has. This attitude should…
Being willing to look foolish is a key part of being happy. Me, in Ha Giang, Vietnam, April 2018. I realised in the writing of this post that all of the lessons I’ve reflected on here refer to results that have come not just from WRITING articles, but POSTING them in the public domain as…
An overview of some of the practical aspects of joining a silent meditation retreat run at one of the Dhamma Centres around the world
Image: Keegan Houser on Unsplash I spent weeks and even months after doing a silent meditation retreat trying to put the experience and anything I learned from it into words. The results were a load of half-finished drafts of Buzz Feed-style “Top 5 Things a Meditation Retreat Teaches You” articles, never published as I never…
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal “All right, brain. You don’t like me and I don’t like you, but let’s just do this and I can get back to killing you with beer.” Homer Simpson “It’s a DEAL!” Homer Simpson’s brain I’d just arrived…
I’ve learned a lot from writing. I write about travel and self-improvement. I’m currently doing a Masters degree in Psychology and Wellbeing. There’s a lot of reading and writing involved in that too. It often involves gathering information, fact-checking and a lot of research. But the learning isn’t about the research you do, or the…
Now that I’m a few weeks into my masters, I feel like I’m getting a bit of momentum going. My first assignments deadlines are approaching and I’m having to put in hours of work for them, which means working every day on something. I’ve my first due for submission this week, with many more…
Photo by Clique Images on Unsplash “When I’m trying to lift 400lbs, I’m mentally training for life. Through self-discipline and repetition of things I don’t want to do, I’m training for life.” – David Goggins Training for life David Goggins talks extensively about the dark depths of despair he’s been in throughout his life, and how he’s overcome…