For some, mindfulness is a life-saving psychological tool that pulled them out of the depths of depression, for others it’s a way to disentangle from the grip of addiction. Some use mindfulness to face chronic pain or stressful emotions, while others use it to achieve peak performance at work.Some believe that mindfulness is an innate human capability of such great import that it should be taught in schools and used in parliaments, while others see it as a marketing device, with which to sell mayonnaise and colouring books. No matter what you think mindfulness is or what it does, there’s... Read full article »

It was 5pm and I’d gotten nowhere. I felt as if all the information that had been uploaded into my brain over the last few days had fragmented across my mind and my brain’s neural pathways were jammed. I had writers block; the mental equivalent of the SWOD (Spinning Wheel of Death) that accompanies a computer operating system in need of an upgrade. I was hurtling towards a grant deadline and every word I’d composed felt trite, vacuous and a long way off encapsulating the depth of the film that I was hoping the grant would allow me to release.... Read full article »

This time last week I found myself weeping in hotel room in the Middle East.I had just spent my day filming in a dusty refugee camp on the border of Syria and Jordan where I had interviewed a single mother of six children who’s answer to my question, “If you could wish for anything in the world right now, what would it be?” was “Anything? If I could have anything, it would be a tarpaulin for the roof because it leaks in the rain and winter is coming.”I was in Jordan; a country on the front line of a global... Read full article »

Around this time last year I found myself in the midst of a professional crisis of conscience. The credibility of my work as a health journalist was being put to the test after I read an academic paper in which a group of 15 well-respected neuroscientists, mindfulness researchers, and meditation teachers warned that mindfulness is being over-sold and over-hyped and that some people are being misled, cheated, disappointed and even harmed. The paper inspired a series of alarming headlines such as Mindfulness Is a Meaningless Word With Shoddy Science Behind It and Is Mindfulness Meditation BS? I say alarming, because... Read full article »

It’s taken me an inordinate amount of time to string these words together. I’m unfocussed, inarticulate and foggy. In fact, in the course of writing this sentence I’ve also refreshed my inbox (twice), checked multiple news websites (again) and made (another) cup of tea. I’m in an unusually bad mood and looking for a distraction from the difficulty of having to think. This all boils down to one primary cause – sleep. (Or lack there of.)As regular readers will know, from time to time I suffer from insomnia, usually induced by one of three things:A. CaffeineB. RuminationC. Small children Last... Read full article »

I looked at the older, bald, robed man across from me and thought, whatever he’s on, I want some. I was interviewing Matthieu Ricard, the renowned Buddhist monk who normally lives in a monastery in Nepal but was in Australia as a keynote speaker at the Happiness and Its Causes Conference. It was eight in the evening and the 71-year-old was on his fourth and final day of a whirlwind tour. Starting in 2004, neuroscientists performed a series of seminal brain scans on Ricard and the popular media started calling him the happiest man on earth. As we prepared for... Read full article »