Carmen Cook

“We must walk a spiritual path. Ego must wear itself out like an old shoe, journeying from suffering to liberation.” My Ego is not a worn-out shoe! To the contrary! - Chögyam Trungpa Well, I disagree! I’m not wearing my ego out! Because my view of ego is different from most people’s. Those of you who’ve been with me a while know that how I see ego is that, as human-beings-being-human, ego is the seat of all our emotions, while the rest of us is in the beingness of who we actually are. I...

A couple of months back an older relative had just read some ‘latest research’ that ‘proved’ she had a high chance of developing dementia, and she told me it made her scared. "Ageing isn't for the faint-hearted," she sighed, clearly worried. We discussed it and I’m not sure I was able to allay her fears that much. Hopefully I did a bit. As we age it’s easy to become caught up feeling that our minds and bodies are becoming more and more vulnerable. All our lives we have been fed this...

The other day I was working with a health therapist friend who was feeling so frustrated with herself that she approached me for some tapping. “But how does it work?” she asked. I explained what tapping was and how it used the meridian system (explained in the blog: “ Meridians – aren’t they woo-woo? ”) to send messages to the amygdala* in the brain, our main pathway involved in the fight, flight or freeze response. I say main pathway because I’m quite sure there are many others – our...