I was in a yellow taxi in the heart of Manhattan, stuck in a clogged artery on my way to a major interview for my new film. As we inched forward and squeezed ever tighter into the one-way street, my driver had the steering wheel in a death grip. A cacophony of horn blasts soon erupted and so did he. In the middle of the road, he got out of his cab, face red with rage, and began gesticulating wildly. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. The congestion cleared and I eventually arrived at my destination... Read full article »

I loaded up my app and listened to the experienced words of the meditation teacher who invited me to take a comfortable position and begin. She asked me to focus on my breath. In. Out. In. Out. And instructed that when I got distracted, to gently call my attention back to my breath.  It was Day 14 of “My Year of Living Mindfully.” The idea came about when I admitted that after the birth of my second baby, I’d completely dropped my daily meditation habit. After the return of my stress-induced nail biting habit, my insomnia, and some troubling early... Read full article »

Throughout my life I’ve suffered from a terrible affliction experts call onychophagy. The disorder can cause deleterious effects on my fingers, my mouth and even my stomach. More commonly, the affliction is known as nail biting. I’m a stress-induced nail biter and right now it’s not the menacing bacteria lurking under my nubby nails that I’m worried about. It’s the fact that my nail-nawing habit is a sign that all is not well in my mind and body. Indeed, the fact that I’m biting my nails again is just one sign that I’m not handling my stress very well. You... Read full article »

I recently found myself racing through university corridors, heels clacking on concrete floors, lost, and late for an interview. Having just battled Sydney’s peak hour traffic and struggled to find parking in our city’s gridlocked streets, I was disoriented in a maze of modern building design. Apparently the state-of-the-art business school, with its “9,100 square meters of flexible teaching and learning space” was designed to “inspire and enable generations of leaders.” All it inspired in me were sweaty palms, a tense jaw and a cortisol spike that would scare off even the most vicious of sabre tooth tigers. It was... Read full article »

I stuffed up this week. I was in my supermarket doing a last minute shop before my son’s first birthday. An endless list of urgent work matters and birthday party arrangements were stretching beyond a foggy and indistinct horizon in my mind. I had a persistent, gnawing, anxious feeling that I was forgetting something. Something important.  Then a text message appeared on my phone from a friend:Are you on your way?My friend was fresh out of hospital after a major surgery and was politely enquiring if I was about to arrive, as we’d agreed, to deliver her and her family... Read full article »

The brochure was amazing: “By safely exposing a patient to an allergen ... while simultaneously creating a positive stimulus, thousands of allergy sufferers have been able to be successfully treated.” Not only that, but it also pledged that “80% of cases require only one treatment.” Take my money, I thought. I’m in. It was 2007 and I’d been living with an autoimmune disease for three years. Essentially my immune system had gone rogue and was attacking my own healthy tissue, causing arthritis all through my body. Some days I walked with a limp because I felt so sore. Other days... Read full article »