Today I enter my personal Year 6: a year that represents the start of a change. Without even knowing this as a fact, I feel it intuitively. Last weekend I started a year-long Yoga teacher training course. With all the yoga, the Meditation and philosophy I will be learning over the 200 plus hours, a mind, body, spirit transformation is inevitable. If the last 18 months of ISHTA yoga practise are anything to go by, the next year is not going to be just any ordinary journey. ISHTA is both an acronym for Integrated Science of Hatha, Tantra and Ayurveda, but also the Sanskrit for individualised or personalised. In the last few months, I have felt that I am finally entering my own mind and body, the latter of which ironically is thinking quite seriously about a change of its own, but that is another story. As I spent the summer watching the Olympics and painting my flat, I reflected on this very strange sensation; that of contentment. It has been 11 years since I moved into my flat; 11 years of stories: drama, death, heatbreak, love, lots and lots of lovely godchildren, a niece, the longest [...]

I am trying to be more selective on the courses I now go to, largely because right now my most precious resource is time. But an email with the title A Return to Love caught my eye. I have heard of Marianne Williamson, a respected spiritual teacher and author whose aim is to help people reconnect to their spirituality and find inner peace, but I have not read any of her books or heard her speak. I first came across her name at the last Deepak Chopra event I went to as she has co-authored a book called The Shadow Effect with him. The title caught my eye as our shadow side is something I am fascinated with at the moment. Author of the Powerful Beyond Measure prose often attributed to Nelson Mandela, Marianne has written 11 books, including A Return to Love and Everyday Grace and The Age of Miracles: Embracing the New Midlife. The words love, grace and miracles were encouragement enough to consider forgoing a much needed lie in to attend this day-long workshop for an in-depth inquiry into love and romantic relationships as a personal force for transformation and healing. Love and romantic relationships is definitely [...]

I spent the day with Hermann Hesse. I had always intended to re-read Siddhartha, but as with all things these days I am letting life guide me in terms of timing. So when a friend mentioned en passant last night that he has just finished reading Siddhartha, I knew what I was going to do this morning. I first read Siddhartha in 1993. I was 24 and running away from my family. I took four books on my six month trip to India among them my mother’s copy of Siddhartha. I cannot recall the details of the book but I can remember knowing that there was something about this novel. Reading again today with the knowledge I now have, it was like reading a totally different book. The first time I read Siddhartha it was just a story. Donald McCrory, who has written Hermann’s biography this new edition, says that the message of Siddhartha will vary from reader to reader. Because of this, I would recommend that all first timers just read the story first to see if resonates and if it does read the full introduction, biography and interpretation. It changes the flavour of the book completely. [...]

I have dipped in and out of many spiritual concepts over the years and have found that the basic principles are few and wonderfully straight forward. So why do so many of the books and teachers trying to describe how to live a life based on these principles want to make things more complicated than they need to be? So imagine my surprise when someone I then hardly knew suggested I read The Four Agreements and found that it was a book with four simple beliefs that were common sense and resonated with me. I cannot pretend to understand much about the Toltec traditions that underpin the Four Agreements, but I have since devoured nearly all the books written by don Miguel Angel Ruiz in a bid to see how his take on awareness, transformation, and living from a place of love not fear compared to other teachers. Miguel, the youngest of 13 children born into a family of healers and raised in rural Mexico by a healer mother and shaman grandfather, learned from an early age that everything is possible, if we really want it. However, like many of us he wanted to make his own mark in [...]

‘I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek Happiness.” This is the opening line of The Art of Happiness that sets the agenda with clear simplicity. When I think back to a year ago at the time I spent three whole days in the presence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama—albeit as part of a conference—I am instantly happy by this memory. So it was always going to be a pleasure reading The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living by the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler. Add to the cocktail four solid days of sunshine with nothing planned but to read, relax and recuperate and the effect was like a massive Meditation on the meaning of life. I first came across many of the Buddhist principals—such as the nature of suffering—that underlie The Art of Happiness in Matthieu Ricard’s book Happiness. Matthieu’s book—which led me to the Mind & Life Conference in Zurich in the first place—was a transformational manual that I savoured over a month. The Art of Happiness I have devoured faster than chocolate Easter eggs. The concepts are now a growing part of my psyche, and the way the [...]

Purple and I have always been friends: the smell of lovely lavender, amazing amethysts jewels, and fields of lavender or woods of bluebells that infuse me with a sense of tranquillity. In the garden, purple irises were always my favourite flower and bunches of purple freesias are a luxury I indulge in if I get up early enough to head to Covent Garden flower market or on a Sunday Columbia Road. Ten years ago, I adopted a newsletter with a purple masthead and prior to that had worked on the university paper called Palatinate; the name of a colour derived from the shade of purple used in County of Durham.  After a recent Feng Shui weekend workshop, a few amethysts, my lavender scented candles and a purple glass bottle found themselves re-housed in my bathroom. The North East corner of my flat is the area of wisdom and personal development and it needed to have the colour purple as well as images reflecting the nature of spiritual development. It was after this particular weekend that the colour purple, whose name is derived from the Latin purpura or porphyra in Greek, came to have a meaning to me that stretched beyond [...]

I really must stop goading the universe. The other day I was feeling happy and serene, tapping away at the article on The Four Principles of Spirituality feeling that everything was in balance and exactly where it should be when a triple whammy hit in one week. I don’t know what I was thinking when I said to a friend as a joke, “If I carry on like this I will run out of challenges to write about in The Life Detective.” How arrogant can I be? No-one ever stops learning; actively or passively, the lessons keep on coming. One of the key’s to my Happiness is staying physically, emotionally, and spiritually fit, so that my recovery rate these days is so much faster than in the past. It all started with my nascent Yoga journey: a whole 28 yoga classes since October in fact. I was feeling rather happy with my new routine of yoga twice, sometimes three times, a week. I discovered that I had let go of the past as evidenced when Synchronicity kindly re-introduced two old friends, now since married to each other, to a local Friday yoga class I had discovered. [...]

Until today, I had always thought Groundhog Day was just a karmic comedy film from the early 1990s that takes places in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. I was talking to my Chicago-based colleague about our industry heading towards yet another Groundhog Day moment, when she asked if I knew that Groundhog Day is a real event taking place in the US today.  According to American folklore, if it is cloudy when the groundhog, also known as a marmot, emerges from its burrow on 2 February then winter weather will end. If, however, the sun is shining and the groundhog sees its shadow, the story goes that the animal scoots back into its burrow and winter will continue for another six weeks. The premise of the film, actually filmed in Woodstock, Illinois, is based on the main character, Phil Connors, an egocentric Pittsburgh TV weatherman played by Bill Murray, being forced to relive the 2 February celebrations in Punxsutawney over and over again until he can learn to give up his selfishness and become a better person. The firm itself really winds me up—which is likely to mean that it hits a nerve somewhere—but the karmic concept behind it has become [...]

The Unicorn sent me this power point presentation today of The Four Principles of Spirituality. I am not normally a fan of forwarded email, but this one really struck a cord with me. The words below are powerful enough, but the photography is alive and the music peaceful and haunting at the same time.   It says that India teaches us about The Four Principles of Spirituality. But what I like about it is that what ever one’s belief system these four principles transcend religion. Their essence is simply about living in the now and accepting everything that is happening at this moment in time is exactly as it should be, whether or not this moment is powered by an external or internal divine being. What ever its origins, India or elsewhere, these four principles certainly take the steam out of any drama.  I know that I will turn to this if ever life every throws me a challenging curve ball. The First Principle states:   “Whomsoever you encounter is the right one.” This means that no one comes into our life by chance. Everyone who is around us, anyone with whom we interact, represents something, whether [...]

The crown chakra is the seventh chakra, which is called the Sahasrara chakra, and for some is associated with the colour violet but for many white.