Nick's Blog

Many of us work in offices, where a large part of every day involves sitting at a desk. Something we practiced for years at school as well. Musculoskeletal disorders have emerged to reflect this, with a proliferation of different forms of strain and injury caused (apparently) by all of this desk work.  And in recent years there has been even more alarming news for desk workers, with claims that too much sitting can even be lethal, this sort of thing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/national/the-health-hazards-of-sitting/750/ Is sitting really so terrible? It seems the most innocuous and gentle of human activities. Arguments will be made that it's the amount  of sitting that we now do which is the problem, that we're more sedentary than our ancestors. That sedentary idea is important here, much of the danger of sitting relates to it (again, apparently) being a static, unmoving thing, unlike walking or running for example. That's a framework which needs a...

Presence traditions, particularly mindfulness, are popular and making inroads into both personal and professional life, including into medicine.  The basic approach is as simple a thing as you could imagine. Just let go, let things be as they are, discover the power of letting yourself automatically respond to things rather than always reacting to them. To not try to make things right or any particular way, but to let them them just be as they actually are. Whether that be in your body, in your activities, or whatever.  Common training in achieving this sort of presence includes people being encouraged to learn again how to pay attention to things, to focus on their senses; on what they see, hear, smell, touch, and so on. It's this attentional workout that can lead people astray, however, or at least get them stuck in years of repetitive, fairly meaningless sensing. A sort of trap, where people continue to be as reactive as they always were, while simply chang...