There’s a strange paradox that took place in the years following the birth of my two sons. Although I discovered a new and delightful maternal love, along with a profound sense of clear-minded meaning and purpose, my mental wellbeing took a dive. All the caring, cleaning, cooking, washing, planning, and putting-on-a-brave-facing combined with chronic sleep deprivation and finding only rare moments of “me” time, took its toll.I wasn’t experiencing a full-blown depressive episode, but twelve months after my youngest son was born, I rated myself just below average on the Mental Health Continuum, which is a scale developed by Professor... Read full article »

It was a story of a young man who has dropped out of university because he can’t cope with the pressure of studying during a pandemic, it was hearing that two girls I know couldn’t see their dad on Father’s Day because he’s having another breakdown, it was the news that a mother of three kids who lived around the corner from me had taken her own life… Today is the day I have to say, enough is enough. We need to talk about mental health. But we need to talk about it differently because clearly, our current strategy isn’t... Read full article »

“I think it would be really helpful if you could share practical tips for people on how they can just turn their minds off,” said Andrea, who works in the HR department at a multi-national software company.* Andrea was calling because she was providing copies of my latest film, My Year of Living Mindfully to her colleagues and she wanted me to deliver a “behind the scenes and journalistic insights” presentation to everyone via cyberspace.People in Andrea’s company are spread all over the world, from London to Melbourne and Jakarta in between. But although they’re in different countries, in different jobs,... Read full article »

I couldn’t stop myself from marvelling at the bright-eyed woman across from me who I knew was experiencing what most people would consider intolerable pain, but was somehow nevertheless radiant, light-hearted and completely present as we sat eating a meal together. The lunch date was both professional and personal. I was profiling Vidyamala Burch in my documentary My Year of Living Mindfully as a case study in coping with chronic pain. She’s the founder of Breathworks, an organisation with a global reach that, among other things, aims to teach people living with chronic pain and illness how to reclaim their... Read full article »

Introduction One of the most frequently asked questions after people have seen my feature documentary My Year of Living Mindfully is: How do I get started on my own mindful experiment? Before you continue reading this guide though, the first thing I’d like to ask you in return is: Do you actually want to start meditating regularly? If your answer is no, then stop reading now and plan to spend your precious time on something that you would like to do for your health and wellbeing. If your answer is yes, read on. The reason I ask this important question is... Read full article »

I’m often asked why I went to so much trouble to make my new documentary My Year of Living Mindfully. The project took me and my co-producer (and husband, Jules Harvey) almost three years from start to finish. It involved a 30,000 kilometres journey around the world from the bright lights of Manhattan to the dusty refugee camps of the Middle East, included interviewing 18 world-leading mindfulness scientists, and required spending $30,000 towards the lab time needed by a team of six Australian scientists who studied me as I meditated throughout the year.Although the whole endavour was elaborate, the motivation... Read full article »