Your undercarriage, your nether regions, your squidgy bits – the human pelvic floor is a bit of a minefield. Here’s a user’s guide. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve bought the Love Your Back programme, you’ll know that one crucial part of building a daily ritual of positive self-care practice is to really focus on the benefits that you get.

Yes it’s inconvenient to have to do your lying down.

Yes you’re too busy / tired / stressed.

Yes it’s noisy and chilly and you’ll have to move the table to find space.

Do it anyway.

Because once you get there, you know how great you feel.

You feel rested.  You’re calmer.  Your back is easier.  Your shoulders have unfolded. You can breathe.

That’s the part to focus on.  Really soak up and luxuriate in the positive benefits.

Why?  Well, we are hard-wired to love pleasure and avoid pain, BUT as neuroscientist Rick Hanson points out, our brains act like teflon with good experiences, and like velcro for bad ones.  Those bad parts are the parts we remember.  The good stuff slips away like fried eggs out of the frying pan. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of things I love about the Alexander Technique, but at the very top of my list is the lying down practice.

It’s simple but profound.

It’s easy but rich.

And it only takes 20 minutes per day. Read the rest of this entry »

Posture.  Sounds terrible doesn’t it?

Shoulders back.  Tummy pulled in.  Walk about with a book on your head.

Stiff, formal, old-fashioned and uncomfortable.

Who wants to be bothered with that?

In fact, there’s a big secret that most people don’t know about posture.  A secret pay-off.  I think you might like to know about it. Read the rest of this entry »

We are all blessed with some very clever bits of design in the spine: the intervertebral discs.  So we’re all disc jockeys, riding the discs in our spine all day as we move about.  Here’s the full scoop on your secret shock absorbers – what and where they are, how they work and how to keep ‘em happy. Read the rest of this entry »

The turning of the year is always a time to think about what we want for the next 12 months.  There’s usually a flurry of goal-setting and we struggle through a booze- and fat-free January to off-set the Christmas onslaught.  We start off full of resolution but all too often end up disappointed.

We make all these plans, of course, because we want something in our lives to change.

But our lives will change all by themselves.

I began 2012 brimming over with plans.  Almost none of them happened.  Instead, I spent most of the year dealing with crisis after crisis in my family: emotional, physical, financial.   Even my cats got sick.  It was tough and relentless and not much fun.

One day, in high summer, I was walking through Lincoln’s Inn Fields with a fancy take-out coffee, trying not to cry.  I felt like I was losing so much.  Too much.  Things were changing too fast, and for the worse.

Then it hit me. Read the rest of this entry »

Being English, I am of course pre-occupied by the weather.  Having lived in relative climactic stability for several years in Spain, I now understand why.

In Britain, we have a lot of weather.

In Spain, the sun comes out in early Spring and stays out pretty consistently until October.

Here, you can get sun in the morning, rain in the afternoon, snow in the evening and who knows what the next day.  So you have to keep up.

In Ireland it’s even more exciting. I spent two weeks in Kerry and we had different weather every 15 minutes.

But underlying these weather shifts, there are deeper forces at work.  The cycle of the seasons stays constant, maybe with some alterations of degree year on year, but basically the same. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a quick trick to make that time at the sink a little easier. Read the rest of this entry »

Laptops are great.  Portable, useful, practical.

But because the keyboard is right next to the screen, laptops pose a big old challenge.  If you have your hands at a good level and your arms parallel to the floor, then you have to look down to see the screen. When we look down, we tend to drop the head forward from the base of the neck and compress the chest, literally shoving our heads and faces closer to the screen down below.  We might add in a shoulder raise for good measure, collapse the rib cage and go into a full slump.  Bring on neck and shoulder pain, headaches, lethargy, loss of focus and even RSI.  Maybe laptops aren’t so great after all.

It doesn’t have to be this way.  Here are my top tips for beating the laptop slump. Read the rest of this entry »