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Alistair Appleton
Dec 24, 20246 min read
10 Festive Dos and Don'ts
I just wanted to run through some of these do's and don'ts. So these are things I've collated over the years in my work as a therapist,
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Alistair Appleton
Dec 17, 20244 min read
Surviving Family Christmas – the mindful way (2024)
You're not going to look like these guys, but you might be able to feel like them! This is an old post from 2 years ago but I always like...
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Alistair Appleton
Sep 10, 20241 min read
We Two Boys together Clinging /Walt Whitman
I promised myself to read more Walt Whitman this month. I always had a slight allergy to his loose-limbed lines but inspired by my visit...
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Alistair Appleton
Sep 4, 20242 min read
From Justine / Lawrence Durrell
Again, like my selection from Gravity’s Rainbow this ‘poem’ is actually prose. A little chipping from the strange crystal that is the...
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Alistair Appleton
Sep 2, 20243 min read
Beingfulness vs. Abhidharma - Slicing Up the Meaty, Messy Pie of Our Experience
I was doing this practice with Mingyur Rinpoche, and he was teaching what's known as the Abhidharma, which is a very old form of Buddhism.
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Alistair Appleton
May 28, 20242 min read
Kindness / Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye is an American-Palestinian poet who lives in San Antonio. Her poetry is much garlanded and she has been Young People’s ...
393 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
Mar 27, 20242 min read
Allerseelen / Paul Celan
Where to start with Celan? A Holocaust survivor whose pulverising poetry stretched the oppressor's language into transcendental shapes,...
308 views4 comments
Alistair Appleton
Mar 26, 20243 min read
6 Tips for Accessing the Emotions on the Cushion
This is an excerpt from the session on emotions on Monday (25th March 2024) where I give some tips about accessing the second field, the...
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Alistair Appleton
Mar 19, 20242 min read
Fricatives / Eric Yip
This poem is shortlisted by the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem in 2024. And it's got it all: sexuality, race, power, language,...
240 views2 comments
Alistair Appleton
Mar 12, 20241 min read
from XIVLINERS / Tom Raworth
I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the English (post?) modernist poet, Tom Rawoth back in 1990 when he was midway writing his great...
177 views2 comments
Alistair Appleton
Mar 5, 20241 min read
Symbiosis / Em Gray
Em Gray is a neurodivergent poet from Brighton and this haptic, ticklish poem was commended in the Forward Prize this year. Simple as it...
581 views6 comments
Alistair Appleton
Feb 27, 20241 min read
Eliza / Liz Berry
This beautiful Queen-Mab-like poem is from Liz Berry's collection Home Child describing the life of a 12-year-old orphan, Eliza Showell...
426 views0 comments
Alistair Appleton
Feb 20, 20242 min read
from Gravity's Rainbow / Thomas Pynchon
GR is, of course, not a poem. It's a 900-page novel. Fifty years old this year. But I was so bruised, amused, amazed by it that I wanted...
287 views9 comments
Alistair Appleton
Feb 13, 20242 min read
Oh Do You Know the Flower Man / Kizziah Burton
Kizziah Burton lives and works in Hollywood. And this poem - shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2024 - is awash with florescence. And...
313 views1 comment
Alistair Appleton
Jan 31, 20245 min read
What does Buddhism have to say about sexuality and gender?
New member Fran, coming from a progressive Islamic mosque in Canada, was interested in Buddhism’s stance on gender and sexuality and so I...
1,073 views14 comments
Alistair Appleton
Jan 25, 20244 min read
Worrying is NOT caring
This is an edited transcript of a lovely discussion we had this Tuesday in our anxiety/stress class on Zoom. We were discussing the...
1,004 views3 comments
Alistair Appleton
Dec 6, 20233 min read
Discipline 2: The Fragrance of Shila
This transcript is from our 2nd exploration of the paramita of discipline or in Sankrit, shila. From the outside, these disciplines, -...
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Alistair Appleton
Dec 6, 20234 min read
Discipline 1 - The Paramita of Shila
In our ongoing exploration of the six paramitas, we have come to the second which is discipline (shila). We can think of shila as a...
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Alistair Appleton
Dec 1, 20232 min read
London London
So I was in London last night at the Barbican. My brother, niece and myself had booked tickets to Kyrill Gerstein play Rachmaninoff's...
335 views4 comments
Alistair Appleton
Nov 30, 20231 min read
Music for Well-Being
I got this interesting link from Reasons to be Cheerful (David Byrne's excellent website). How do concert spaces make themselves more...
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