Are friends as important as family?

Family are given to you but friends you get the opportunity to choose.

Family often love you unconditionally and stay with you throughout your life.

Friends often stay for a period in your life and then drift away. However I have noticed really close friends stay for the duration.

Some friendships are as close and as strong as a blood tie. They can be based on a common interest or less obvious things like the same sense of humour, life values or the joy of giving and receiving.

The picture of the three flowers represent me and my two closet friends. read more

Send love to someone you cannot meet

I am learning from giving virtual reiki sessions over WhatsApp in lockdown London, that distance is absolutely no problem for energy. My friends and customers are amazed that it feels the same as when I am in the same room as them.

Love is intelligent energy and has no bounds.

So with this post of the Kyoto Garden in Holland Park, London I am sending my love to my friend Hitomi in Tokyo. Normally she visits us every other year but she has not been able to come due to the virus. Hitomi, we are missing you and hope we can meet again sometime soon. read more

How to Handle a Toxic Manager

Toxic managers can be challenging and also detrimental to your calmness and well-being. I know this from first hand experience. I was a senior executive successfully delivering a business change programme but I had the meanest manager I had ever experienced. He was a short New Yorker who loved to shout and belittle people. He did not respect that I lived in a different time zone from him and would call me late into my evening. Normally a confident person, my self-esteem and confidence hit rock bottom. It was a very unhappy period in my life. read more

Families who eat together stay together

Its is Spring Bank Holiday in the UK so it seemed right to talk about families and how we can improve the time we spend together. My observation is there are many benefits from families who eat together.

In our busy 21st century lives, there is a trend towards families eating their meals from trays watching TV rather than sitting to a table and facing each other.  Likewise teenagers, if allowed, will take their food and eat in their bedrooms.

Eating a meal at a table together as a family strengthens the family bond.  Over the meal conversation will flow backwards and forwards between parents, between parents and children.  By sharing their day’s news, family members are more involved with each others lives.  This gives opportunities to support one another and for parents to guide a child. read more

Bloggers: can your posts be written by a robot?

Hello fellow bloggers,

I came across this article, Artifical Intelligence Can Now Write Amazing Content – What does it Mean For Humans? by Bernard Marr who is a Big Data and AI guru. It is a well written article. Have a read and see what you think.

As an independent blogger, I feel it gives me the opportunity to share my thoughts and approach to life in the hope it will make other people’s life easier. I am sure you may be the same or looking to entertain and make life more fun.

Have a read of this article and let me know if you think a robot can replace the human emotions we experience which often inspires an author’s writing. Can they learn to demonstrate empathy? They seem to be learning to mimic many human behaviours. read more

Soul Maps: what are they?

Personal development is about improving your skills and strengthening your relationships at home and at work.

But how do you go about doing this?

21st Century people lead busy lives, there is little space to contemplate and just ‘be’. Meditation helps to calm the noisy chatter of the mind to create the space to just ‘be’ and connect with your ‘Inner You’.  

But when I have found my calm space, what do I do with it?

Soul Maps go beyond the meditative state and in that calm space you can ask a question, such as; read more

Feeling life has too many challenges? Here is why you should engage with them

Challenges arrive in your life to provide you with opportunities to learn and grow.  Through them you can learn important life lessons such as improving your communication, overcoming jealous love or learning to receive as well as to give.  However when faced with a new challenge you may feel daunted.  Know the feeling?

Sometimes the same challenge keeps appearing in your life.  Do you find that frustrating?  This will keep happening until you learn your life lesson and manage it better. read more