Second Arrow
Mindful therapy

My first silent retreat was challenging, and yet I have gone back for more again and again. Try your first silent retreat, and perhaps you w

When I qualified as a Clinical Psychologist, I had one overriding ambition: to be a mindful therapist, bringing mindfulness and...

Before I became a parent, I was pretty mindful. I meditated each morning for as long as I wanted, and I maintained my practice throughout...

I very much enjoyed this podcast - https://fitmind.com/podcast-collection/ruben-laukkonen-neuroplasticity-meditation - in which Ruben...

A striking fact about meditating on kindness is how little people do it. Even experienced meditators seem to avoid the practice

I was practising in a very goal-focussed way for a while, aiming for kensho, which is the breakthrough experience of Zen, in which the...

Meditation is a microcosm of life, in that you get to see how your mind works, do your best to manage it, and along the way find out what...

In my last post, I suggested that in meditation and in life you should hew to the cliché about putting one foot in front of the other. In...

Most people who are interested in mindfulness know that it comes from Buddhism. Fewer know, however, how far the modern, popular...

It is possible to really hold yourself back by not wanting to admit your failings, in both meditation and life. My father has a good...

Since my Zen retreat the other week, I've been thinking about the relationship between catharsis and Awakening. I've experienced a fair...

Lately I've been running into a dilemma that is familiar to many modern meditators: should I do exactly as the teacher tells me? What if...

I very much enjoyed this podcast - https://fitmind.com/podcast-collection/ruben-laukkonen-neuroplasticity-meditation - in which Ruben...

There is a story from one or another spiritual tradition in which a great yogi dwells upon a mountaintop, meditating ceaselessly. One...

The single most useful thing that I have learned from meditation is to feel my body, and to feel my emotions in my body. This is an...

Enjoyment in meditation is a somewhat vexed question. People often assume that it's the point of the exercise. Aren't you meant to...

A lot of the time, meditation is no fun at all: you're tense, uncomfortable, distracted, and bored. You can't stay focussed on the...

I did one of these retreats a couple of weeks ago - https://zenways.org/event/breakthrough-zen-retreat-online/- and it felt quite powerful.

In my last-but-one post, I offered three general principles to apply when cultivating kindness in meditation. In this one, I'll be more...

Before you dive into the blog, I’d like to issue a few caveats and disclaimers about how I come to be writing it, and how you should...

In my last post, I made a rather speculative case for body awareness as a natural state, to which we should all wish to return. In this...

I've already written about how "bad" meditation is in fact invaluable because it teaches you how to relate to unpleasant things. But...

Cmichel67 (Christopher Michel), CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons First, let me say...

If you've read my last post, then hopefully you've started to work on building up some awareness of your emotions in the area of the...