Mindfulness Reflections

After a long period of heads down, focused concentration on the craft of teaching adults, two milestones will be taking place for me this year - all things being equal - and I'm very excited to share them with you here today. 1) Mindful ELT online workshops Late last year I ran a Mindful ELT online practice workshop pilot called "Introduction to Mindful Teaching" for teachers wanting to incorporate mindfulness practices into their classrooms, private lessons and day to day lives to enhance the quality of their teaching and overall experience. I received full support for this undertaking from British Council Mexico, especially my line manager, as I explained the vision of offering a series of online workshops to English teachers worldwide. She then put me into contact with a Norwegian web designer with whom I'll be working from end of February. The pilot was attended by volunteer teachers in Mexico and the UK and the feedback I received throughout and aft...

Now that Marie Kondo is all the rave worldwide, let me share the aspiration I had, some 10 years ago, to become a home stager. Home Staging (a term coined by Barb Schwarz in Seattle, USA) is the preparation of homes for sale. My idea was to become the first Home Stager in Mexico and I travelled to the US to receive training from Barb herself. Prior to that, during the time I lived in the UK, my favourite TV programmes were all about property construction and transformation. From House Doctor to Grand Designs, I found everything related to property absolutely fascinating (still do), from the process of building, refurbishing or renovating to the areas of conservation and restoration, it was all gripping to me. So like I said, once I was back in Mexico and travelled to the US to receive training, I came back, translated all the materials, opened a company I called Escenogar (escenografía = staging and hogar = home in Spanish), went to see all the estate agents in my area, arr...

Facebook reminds me of this post from a year ago today: "The "id" (called "unconscious" in Spanish) is not a structure, but a mental state". Thich Nhat Hanh (affectionately referred to as Thay -  meaning "Teacher" in Vietnamese - by his monastic disciples as well as his lay followers, such as myself) used to love poking a bit of fun at Shakespeare during his teachings ( Dharma talks ). He'd sit quietly for a few minutes until you could hear a pin drop in the meditation hall filled with nearly 1,000 people (give or take a crying baby or two), and then say, in his characteristically soft-spoken style: "To be... or not to be... is NOT the question". I remember laughing out loud when I heard this. You know who else might also have been wrong? Sigmund Freud, who developed the psychoanalytic theory of personality development, which argues that personality is formed through conflicts among three fundamental structures of the mind: ...