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 [...]

Lao Tzu

I giggled all the way to and from Paris today. We were delayed for two hours on the Eurostar and I even missed one of my first meetings. But I was so engrossed in The Man Who Drove With His Eyes Closed that I hardly noticed and when I did, I was actually grateful for the delay. The biographical encounters with Stephen Russell’s teachers taught me a lot more than I expected and not all of it came directly from the often hilariously written stories about Stephen’s personal growth journey. Some lessons, like a realisation that I need a little more self discipline in my life, permeated beyond the words written by Stephen directly through to my own needs.  While I had heard of The Barefoot Doctor, it was only a few months ago that I realised that Stephen Russell was his real name. A martial arts practitioner, acupuncturist and author, Stephen’s life philosophy comes from living the Tao; a way that I have yet to familiarise myself with beyond the succinct ideas of Lau- Tzu and the Tao Te-Ching. As Stephen is friends with someone I admire, I took it as a sign he [...]

To me feathers are the Symbol of writing. I see a feather and I think of a quill and the creative writers in the times of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Even in these days of my iPad notepad, I still love to write with a fountain pen. So when feathers started to appear in my life about a year ago, I started to wonder if there was any other more commonly known symbolism for feathers. I have always been fascinated by the meanings in signs and symbols but one of the key thing one needs do is ask themselves “What does it mean to me?” before racing to the bookshelf to get another person’s interpretation. As I was now curious to find out if a feather might mean more than just my Anchor for writing, I turned to my trusty books on symbols to find none of them had anything significant on the meaning of feathers and so the subject fell from my consciousness. That was until I turned up without a feather to The Path with Heart, Davina MacKail’s workshop introducing Shamanism and I realised that to the Native American Indians and shamans feathers are not only symbolic, but essential in [...]

 “A delicate face looks up from a fiery mane of Pre-Raphaelite hair and beams enthusiastically at each and every student assembled in the circle of seats. The smell of burning white sage surrounded Anne Aylor the first time I walked into her class.” The scent: a hall mark of her creative ritual and the eye catching cow—one of her infrequently used teaching aides—were assembled along with Ganesh, Buddha and a few Crystals on a small table. Anne Aylor believes that to teach you have to channel other energies, such as compassion and wisdom and these small icons remind her of this. I first met Anne in the middle of October 2009 when I attended on impulse her two-day Release the Writer in You workshop. It changed the way I looked at my life. As I think back to that chilly October Saturday when I first met Anne, I still remember her cow. “Asking a student to stop reading when they have been reading for too long is difficult when they are in mid sentence, but if they do this or if they apologise for what they are about to read, it is a cow offence [...]

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. [...]

Last weekend was probably as close to hell on Earth as I have been to in my life. While Londonwas deep in riots, I was immersed in life with The Prisoners of Padua, who seem to be getting further and further from the edge of reality.  I woke up back in London on Tuesday morning, blissfully unaware of the riots and yet strangely calm and serene despite the tragedy I found in Italy. And not to mention the chaos  in Croydon that I subconsciously avoided with a “wrong” turn onto the M25 on my drive back from Gatwick Airport. Someone somewhere was keeping an eye on me. This same someone, however, threw The Raven in my path yesterday, an encounter that threw me more off balance than the mania in Italy. Although it was only today on my way to lunch, when I reverted back to my shopaholic tendencies that I realised something had thrown me off kilter. I had bought not one but two turquoise rings without even thinking about it. These two rings are gorgeous and original, and I would argue that one cannot have too many rings. That said, anyone who knows me knows [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

An archetype is an original model, or prototype, of a person, used as a symbol upon which others are emulated, essentially a universally recognised blueprint.