I have had a nagging question that I have had running through my mind these past weeks around culture and how do we define it? My first impulse is to think of places where there has been a long history of “being” that is consistent with that region, as in “Indian Culture, Jamaican Culture, Portuguese Culture”. This could include traditional ways of preparing food, the type of food consistent with that region, the religious practices, and daily cultural or traditional rituals.

Many of these practices evolved over thousands of years and were again, consistent with a geographical region and the people that inhabited that space. We understand that from a scientific point of view that this process of consistent environmental influence over time is a powerful driver on how our biology evolves, our immunity, our tolerance for certain types of environments, right down to the type of spiritual practices we adopted as we strove to make sense of our place in the universe by reading signs in the...

It was so interesting this morning as I woke up in a panic, the worry about money, about success and failure raced through my mind. I tried to go back to sleep but my mind was too committed to this negative track.

Frustrated and feeling a bit anxious I got out of bed to make a coffee, brushed the cat aside and stormed around for a few moments. After sitting down and reading for 10 minutes, a chapter on goal setting and taking action, I got up and decided to get to work.

The fear of failure is a big one for me as I had struggled to make the break into a new financial arena with my business ventures but just could not seem to ever make the leap to the next level of business success.

Isn’t it ironic that we have more solutions for depression, more books on financial planning, more leaders in the positive thinking movement, and more health solutions than ever before and yet, despite all that, our problems not only persist, they are expanding! I have spent half a lifetime trying to figure out the secret to happiness, looked to uncover the hidden solution that would transform my life into all I ever could have imagined it to be, but still seemed to come up short. I had health in many respects, but my quest for what I thought was healthy (image) only served to burn me out. I read endless books on personal development, psychology, and philosophy and had answers for the world, but none that seemed to unlock the key that would enrich my life the way I had hoped. I sought my happiness in the eyes of others and had not taken the time to ask of myself what happiness meant to me. So now standing at the precipice of my life I realize that I have been given a gift, and the gift...

I have the opportunity to work within our local prison system and was spending a bit of time thinking about some of the opening conversations I would have with these men. The reason for my involvement is to help create a powerful new paradigm for them so that long before the gates on the prison opened and they walked out, these men were already free.

What struck me powerfully is that as an inmate of a prison, your loss of freedom is tangible, but for us that have "freedom," our prison is not so obvious. As an inmate, you can see the guards, the gates and the barbed wire. You see the other inmates dressed like you, showing no vulnerability like you, using the same language as you, all following the rules of the prison society with little or no choice in things being any different. Every day you are reminded of your crimes, every day is filled with guilt, loss of freedom, loss of choice, and in order to function we push those feelings down so all we are left with is anger, resentment or...

I’ve been listening to a series of lectures over the past few months around culture, ideology and fairness or equality. As you can well imagine, there is no end to the opinions to the debate on what this all means, but what is more interesting is the foundational reason why we take our various views on the world.

One of the challenges that we have in social media, which has become a massive problem, is that social media only feeds what you are interested in, which is fine when we are talking about shoes and travel, but not so good when it comes to matters of politics and religion, and everything that may come underneath those headings.

What allows us to formulate an objective point of view is when we clearly understand our stance and the viewpoint of another, but we also understand the reason why they and we feel that way (assuming we and they have worked that part out before we and they professed our opinions). But social media doesn’t present both sides of the argument; it only sho...

In the past three to four years I have found myself looking into the dark recesses of my mind searching for the hidden drivers of my behavior that may help explain some of the challenges I face in my life. What I mean by hidden drivers are events in my life that I have experienced that made a lasting impact, for better or worse. In a program called “Landmark Forum” there was made mention that our lives are shaped by three “significant” events, events that give us our belief surrounding god, love, trust, and connection. There can be many offshoots the primary three, but when we dig I believe we will find there are some foundation events that set us on our path in life for better or worse. Trust for me is a big one as it has a direct relationship to love, connect and god.

If I cannot trust my environment, I cannot connect easily with those in that environment, and if there is no connection there can be no love, and if there is no love, there is no god. (only in the mind of the writer, y...

This quote has been around for sometime now and it has such a pleasant sound to it, an attitude of gratitude. A speaker I was listening to recently said something interesting that I wanted to share. What they said was that gratitude is not attained through simply having an attitude around it but rather it is an action, a decision we must make consciously on a daily basis to step into that place. The concept of having an “attitude of gratitude” would lead one to believe that it is possible to go through life minute by minute looking at life through a gratitude lens. The reality is that we drift in and out of consciousness, meaning that much of life is done on autopilot, and we are not truly present to most things we do repetitiously. This simply due to the fact that once we develop a pattern of doing anything the novelty of it wears off and we require less presence to attend to the same task that previously we had to focus on and give our full attention. This is when we appear to take t...