By Brendan Myers The body is the first gate, not the mind, the vision, theory, or the doctrine. The body. This is where most people fail before they even begin, they want revelation while the jaw is clenched, reclamation while the breath is shallow, they even practice prayer while the heart is still closed. They want expanded awareness while the nervous system is still defending itself from yesterday, childhood trauma, debts, arguments, shame, grief, or other experience

By Coach Bill Malhi | Foundry Publishing You did the sensible thing. You went to your GP. You asked for blood tests because you knew something wasn't right, the energy, the fog, the flatness that wouldn't shift and you wanted answers rather than assumptions. The results came back. Your doctor said everything was within normal range. Maybe they mentioned that results like yours were fairly common for someone your age. Maybe they suggested you try to sleep better, reduce stre

By Coach Bill Malhi | Foundry Publishing Picture this. The alarm goes at six. You lie there for a moment, and before you've even sat up, you're already behind. Not groggy in the way a shower fixes, but genuinely tired, like something that should have recharged overnight just didn't. You make the coffee. You remind yourself to focus. You get on with it, because you always get on with it. This is not a client story. It's a pattern I see constantly, and it might be yours. If you

By Brendan Myers Most people have had a version of this experience. You sit down to meditate. You close your eyes. You settle your body, and almost immediately, a part of you starts taking notes. Am I doing this right? Is this what relaxation is supposed to feel like? How long has it been? Was that thought mine? Should I be feeling something by now? Is this even working? You are not meditating. You are conducting an assessment of your meditation. The monitoring function

In 1983, a U.S. Army intelligence analyst sat down to write an assessment of something unusual. Not a weapons system or a foreign surveillance programme, not a conventional threat. A training programme that claimed to move the human mind into altered states of consciousness - and wanted to discover whether those states had any practical value. The analyst was Wayne M. McDonnell. The document was Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process, prepared for the U.S. Army Intelligen

The question is straightforward : can prayer change your mental and physiological state even if you are not religious? The answer is yes. Understanding why, requires separating prayer from what it has become in many people's experience -wishful thinking, obligation, performance, inherited guilt, or institutional property. Before it was any of those things, prayer was something simpler. It was directed contact with something larger than the individual ego and survival self

The mind does not operate independently of the body it inhabits. This is not a philosophical position. It is a biological one. The dominant story inherited from Descartes - the mind as a thinking thing, the body as a vehicle carrying it around - has organised Western medicine, psychology, and most approaches to behaviour change for centuries. It produced a model of the human being in which thoughts, decisions, and conduct are primarily cognitive events, and the body is largel