I’ve been very lucky in my life to have had first-hand experience of a number of prominent spiritual teachers – amongst others, the Dalai Lama, Jack Kornfield, Sogyal Rinpoche, Ram Dass and Adyashanti. But, the retreat that I went on with Eckhart Tolle in 2014 in many ways remains the most profound. Why was that? Well, it's hard to say because, in many ways, the time with him was quite ordinary. There were no particular highs. He sat and talked – for fourteen hours over ten

I met with a friend and colleague – a well-known clinical psychologist and hypnotherapist in Cape Town – and one of the topics we discussed was meditation. His conclusion was that learning meditation was “the single best investment” he “ever, ever made” and I must say that I agree with him. Meditation has literally transformed both of our lives. For me, the really exciting thing is that the general public, the scientific community, the medical profession and many others besid

Our busy modern minds bombard us from morning to night with thoughts, the vast majority of which are profoundly unhelpful. The 'noise' of the mind tends to make us tense and it obscures our body-based intuition and innate wisdom. So, if we want to live more wisely, we need to settle the mind - at least to some degree and there are many ways of doing this. In my experience most people that I have worked with, find that the optimal way for them is through meditation. Now, there

Each of us, in their own way, wants to be happy but we tend to search for that happiness in many unhelpful ways. We are taught, for example, by our culture that happiness resides in achievement. So, we get a new job and, after a year or so, it becomes just ‘my job.’ So, we get a new car but, after few months, the car just becomes my car. So, we get a new relationship and we find that the intensity that we enjoyed early on in the relationship dims over time. So, we decide to g

On the way to school one morning, I asked my son how he really felt about the world's future and his reply was: "uncertain." His answer was more of an opinion than a feeling but it certainly echoed the sense almost all of us have. We know that our financial institutions are unstable. We watch helplessly as economic power shifts rapidly towards the East even as China's growth falters. We are deeply aware that racial and religious intolerance are on the rise and we are know tha

There are so many ways to settle your mind - from meditation and mindfulness to rock-climbing and yoga. Here's a quick and surprisingly effective way to quieten the mind that I learned – not from a meditation teacher – but from a photographer. ‘What has photography got to do with settling the mind?’ you may ask. And, it's a fair question but the reality is that, for a photographer, a settled mind makes a considerable difference. A settled mind makes the difference between tak