Anxiety

I’ve spent the whole of my life looking like the child in this evocative photograph from Jordan Whitt—feeling unprotected. Until recently, I never knew why. In The mother wound – “The dreadful has already happened” I describe the crisis of nurturing that enveloped humanity after long-term drought, desertification and famine from around 4000 BC onwards […]

We live in a world of growing crises, growing trauma, and growing anxiety. We’re desperately in need of solutions, a way of turning back the rising tide of emotional distress. It turns out that—surprise, surprise—nature has a win-win solution for this. It’s called the ‘orgasm reflex’. The “shambles” Studying schizophrenia in the 1960s, psychologist R.D. […]

Align with your day. It’s a neat little catchphrase, but what does it mean? Aligning with your day is a tool for congruent living. It’s a method for engaging with life as it is, rather than life as we might wish it to be. We live in a highly uncertain world. Coronavirus. Climate change. Political […]

As I write this, coronavirus is sweeping the globe, public trust in the UK government has collapsed and the streets of America are full of rage. So is my social media feed: “It’s only 8.15am and I’m seething,” a friend posted recently—and it wasn’t even in response to any of these headline issues. Another friend […]

On Sunday 8th March, as the first wave of fear over the coronavirus swept the globe and induced panic shopping, two women fought over diminishing supplies of toilet paper at a Sydney supermarket. Two women, aged 23 and 60, were later charged with affray. Fighting over toilet paper New South Wales police acting inspector Andrew […]

On 19 February 2020 buses carrying 72 coronavirus evacuees were pelted with rocks in the village of Novi Sanzhary, Ukraine. Villagers clashed with riot police for several hours before the evacuees—none of whom had tested positive—reached the sanatorium where they are now quarantined. In Britain, several Chinese people have reported being targeted with racist abuse […]

I have written extensively on this site about unconscious shame in general and sexual shame in particular. In my Are YOU ashamed? toolkit I’ve listed some of the common effects of shame—such as a fear of public speaking—which are so widespread they are simply considered to be normal human behaviour. Yet if shame is both […]

We tend to think of sex as a component of our love lives, and that’s it. When we have a romantic partner, we have sex with them. Period. We don’t always realise that beyond sex lies the broader spectrum of sexuality, or sexual energy—and that it encompasses a quadrant of related energies. Quadrant We tend […]

Sometimes, we all need to hear this: there is a you-shaped space in the jigsaw puzzle of the world. Your uniqueness is valued. You are enough. Jigsaw I write this because yesterday I was the person who needed to hear this. I was doing some research for a book I’m writing, and was reading a […]

On Friday 8 June 2018 the foodie world reeled to the news that celebrity food author and TV presenter Anthony Bourdain, 61, had committed suicide. I never met Bourdain. I never even read his acclaimed book, Kitchen Confidential, though I meant to. But his TV shows like No Reservations and Parts Unknown were go-to choices […]