Dyana’s Blog
Dyana’s writings about life, her teaching and learnings
Words, Death and Staying Alive
Sailing is like writing. It allows me to pause. Facing into the wind is like facing the page on the screen. Extraneous story lines, which would twist me this way and that, often criss-crossing in contradictory ways, become irrelevant. I empty myself to welcome in...
Why We Need Angels
We all create hypotheses and theories about life which we then test. If a hypothesis proves useful and make good sense of our experience, well then we adopt it as real. A hypothesis that leads to poor life outcomes and predictions is discarded. This is the way of...
Mindfulness and the Prefrontal Cortex
A lot of us have heard about mindfulness and its possible benefits. Recently I have learned a few interesting things about the brain that have made the benefits of mindfulness meditation even clearer to me. Meditation produces a thickening of the prefrontal cortex –...
Introducing Kum Nye – Moving Meditation
An introduction to Kum Nye – the essence of moving meditation.
The Four Noble Truths and Modern Life
The relevance of Buddha’s four noble truths in our modern lives The fundamental and most important teachings of the Buddha are disarmingly simple. There is suffering There is a cause of suffering There is an end of suffering There is a way to the end of suffering. It...
Mindfulness and Buddhist Psychology
Have we reduced Buddhist psychology to mindfulness training? What might have been lost in the translation? The core teaching of the Buddha has always about how to reduce human suffering. The freedom or liberation his teachings refer to is freedom from suffering. It...
The Body as an Intelligent, Sensitive, Living Organism
Somatics and somatic movement classes grew out of Feldenkrais, and developed alongside new research into neuromuscular reprogramming. Somatics is based on the principle of neuroplasticity – the understanding that the brain is continually remodelling itself in response...
The Symphonic Body
Reflections arising from a Somatics Practice Part 3 – The Symphonic Body The skeletal structure of the body is an intriguing confusion of so many curves and angles and knobbly bits. In particular I find the pelvic bone almost impossible to visualise internally – it...
How much of my body is my friend?
Reflections arising from a Somatics Practice Part 2 – How much of my body is my friend? When I started somatics I was stunned to realise that I couldn’t directly sense much of my physical body. I didn’t have any direct feeling for it at all. This was after a lifetime...
