MUSIC

Music is my first love….

I am blessed to work across cultural sectors be it TV, theatre, performance, film or 'CreaTech'.

But I always feel that music is at the heart of everything I do…

Everything...

Sound, rays or light is all vibration... is all music...

To make work that works you need harmony in you, your team and what you think, do or say. When one part is not in tune the work always suffers. 

It is sometimes hard to admit when a work or a player is discordant but we all know deep down when we are out of tune, out of step be it with our work or life and we are all looking for our music.

So today as I head off to WOMEX in Lisbon I feel blessed to be part of a community that also puts music at the heart of their life.

As music is my first love and it will be my last

#beinghuman #music #womex

BFF

Awareness is our best friend forever.

Trustworthy, honest, reliable, always there for us, awareness isn’t judgmental and like any good friend, awareness listens.

Awareness knows a lot about a lot, vivid and present awareness is a great friend to have when we feel down, depressed or confused.

Our senses can call on awareness, we can click our fingers, smell a flower, or look to the sky and the sky is always there, somewhere, even when the clouds of memory, thought, perceptions, and panic gather and create a storm.

It’s impossible to stop a storm but you can watch a storm pass in the company of your BFF.

It's difficult to make friends with your negative emotions but awareness can make friends with everyone and everything.

Problems become solutions and obstacles become opportunities with your BFF at your side.

#beinghuman #mindfulness #media

SHOW

Everything is the same and yet nothing is the same if we simply show up and commit to being right here, right now.

Whether we call it awareness, silence, or stillness… when we rest in it, we see what we already have, what is always there for us

When we are present, tending to the moment, we are timeless in a profound way.  When we train our minds to relax, when we practice relaxing we create space to learn, see and be... 

We heal, that is we come to terms with things as they are, we befriend our problems, our pain, we embrace our path... 

When we let go of grasping, striving and we relax we actually do more of what matters, are present wherever we are and get more meaning from life. We do, go and get more when we have nothing to do, nowhere to be, nothing to get ….

We become whole, holy as meditation is medicine.

Everything is the same and yet nothing is the same if we simply show up...

#beinghuman #mindfulness #femalefounders

LOVE

Love is a decision, a verb and it takes work.

Love is an action, an intention, and a job but in a feeling-based society, we are not encouraged to take responsibility for how we love and are loved.

Romantic love., creates lust, attraction, and attachment and turns on the dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitters stimulating good feelings or obsession whereas pure love is our innate birthright an experience of well-being that is built on awareness.

To experience love, we need to feel well in our bodies, in our minds and in our perceptions. Without the experience of love, there cannot be the action of love.

When we become aware of our body, our feelings and our mental processes, we can find harmony between our body, our energy, our consciousness, and our feelings. We are then calm, our minds still and a natural feeling of well-being can arise, this is the essence of unconditional love. Once we have found this love, we have to nurture it, sustain it and extend it. There is no use finding love and keeping it for ourselves. We need to share the love.

Genuine, unconditional love forms the basis for experiencing and developing immeasurable compassion, joy, and equanimity.

If we develop metacognition, awareness and understanding of our thoughts and processes we can decide to love and find a state of basic unconditional love which is beyond thoughts, moods and emotions.

Love is a process, a path.

#beinghuman #love #job

HEART

Our hearts are clever, brainy, wise…

Our hearts don’t just pump blood, there is a complex nerve system in our hearts that communicates directly to our brains.

Research shows our brains need this information from the heart to function. Our hearts influence our emotions, intuition and health as the signals the heart sends to the brain impact our perception, cognition, and emotional processing. When we cultivate, intentionally or unintentionally, gratitude, love, and compassion instead of anxiety, anger, or fear, the oscillations of our heart rhythm are more consistent and coherent.

When heart and mind align, we feel personal, interpersonal and global coherence. We feel connected, in flow and our heart’s intelligence, our intuition can guide us.

Our hearts can also entrain the hearts of other people around us and our hearts respond and are connected to the oscillations of the earth's frequencies. So tuning into our heart’s wisdom creates a profound shift as we learn to live with more compassion, clarity and confidence.

So be brave today and dare to trust the intelligence of your heart.

#beinghuman #gratitude #intelligence #flow

HAPPY

The more we wish to be happier the unhappier we get but the more we work to be happier, the happier we get.

But what is the work and does the work, work?

To be happy research shows people need enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose. But in a “me before we” society we often misunderstand "purpose". The paradox is to have purpose we first need unhappiness; we need to suffer and we need to understand others’ suffering. If our energy goes into avoiding unhappiness, we may never really understand suffering and hence never find true happiness.

Being happy and stopping being unhappy are not the same thing…

Take the example of money. If we have none and get some it stops us from feeling unhappy. But if we do not understand the difference between happy and unhappy, we may carry on chasing money all our lives, believing money makes us happy then wonder why we are rich and miserable. But, if we make money helping others and helping them to help us all, we get rich and get happy.

Our pain and the pain of others can drive our purpose, to help others and let others help us. The greatest gift we can give is to also let our fellow humans stop their pain by helping us stop ours.

Happiness requires work, not just wishes and the work is to cocreate a “we before me” society.

#beinghuman #happiness #work

BELIEVE

Religion is a gift from our ancestors but spirituality is hardwired into humans.

Science tells us what many of us know… all of us, are innately hardwired to be loved, guided and never alone. We are also hardwired to share that love, guidance and togetherness.

In the way we have physical fitness for our physical core, we need spiritual fitness for our spiritual core. Those who are spiritually fit have more robust and resilient brains. They are less likely to get depressed, find it easier to grieve, recover from trauma and die. The spiritually fit are 80% less likely to be addicted and 60% less likely to commit suicide... every mystic needs statistics.

Neuroscience tells us the best way to build spiritual fitness is to love and serve your neighbour. When we feel a deep connection to all life, we are more aware of our impact and make personal, community, political and business decisions that impact people and the planet in a more sustainable and sustaining way.

Spirituality is our muse, spirituality awakens us… Humanity is designed to be an open system, so religious or not stay open, we all share a birthright to see into the deeper nature of life...

We are all on a spiritual quest. We are all transcendent. We are all believers.

#beinghuman #sustainable #neuroscience

BODY

My body is my best friend. Intelligent, loving, present and kind, my body always wants what is best for me.

My body is always there for me, my body's wisdom and teachings available anytime, anyplace, anywhere for the whole of my life.

My body is layered, complex not merely flesh and blood, my subtle body has senses, experiences and emotions and consciousness lives in my body of awareness.

When I get out of my head and listen to my body, I can explore the wisdom of my body in the here and now.

By turning my attention to the physical, energetic and somatic dimensions of my human experience, I can connect with my body’s innate, natural wisdom.

My body is a path to awakening and so is yours...

#immersiveexperience #womenempowerment #beinghuman

BAFTA

I have always loved telling stories...

Since, my first job in TV was Channel 4’s, ‘The Tube’ a legendary music, art and culture show, I have worked across the Creative Industries for over 30 years... Making TV and Createch... films, pop promos, documentaries and short dramas, I have performed at Glastonbury, written music for film, and created immersive, interactive art but I have never made a feature film...

I have been blessed by an eclectic career but during lockdown I felt the urge to pivot to drama, to story, to be led by a narrative. My first foray into solo theatre, ‘Everyone’s Mother’ won a John Thaw Award in 2019. But only when I graduated with my MA in Text and Performance at RADA in 2021 I finally realised the medium is not the message...

So I am really proud to have been selected for BAFTA Connect and to be recognised as a future creative leader in the film, game and TV industries….

But my first feature film scripts are here, sitting on my laptop, waiting for their moment.... but if they end up simply being read on a phone... that's good too...

TV, film, theatre, projection, laptop or phone, I will always love playing with sound, rays and light...

I will always love telling stories...

#beinghuman #BAFTA #femalefounders

COINCIDENCE

Tibetans have a phrase, Tashi Tendrel, meaning ‘auspicious coincidence’.

For an ‘auspicious coincidence’ to materialise, our mind, our body and our speech need to be aligned so nature can also align and agree with us.

When our thoughts are in one place, our body in another and our speech a third. When we believe the multi-tasking myth, we are never really present and we fumble through reality, fumble through life and our fumbling destroys the conditions needed for coincidence.

We can’t look for coincidence, we need to be patient, learn to relax and allow our mind, body and speech to synchronise. Like electricity, coincidence is always available if you find away to plug in and not get overload or shock.

We all can learn, practice and become adepts at riding life on the waves of coincidence.

Coincidence is our birthright.

#beinghuman #femaleempowerment #buddhism

EXPOSED

We are all constantly exposed…

This level of exposure has never before been experienced by humanity…

Our digital selves, lives, beliefs, loves, hates and likes are open to scrutiny, examination and evaluation, 24/7.

Collectively, we have forgotten the power of privacy.

Like all addicts, we delude ourselves, kid ourselves we are in control, believe we are immune to the pervasive, screen time and social media epidemic. But humans are social creatures, our brains evolved to form communities, communicate, collaborate and work together. We construct our identity through how we are seen by others. We are designed to care about what our tribe think about us. It is part of our tribal DNA and we need our tribe to survive.

But when our identity is formed online in the company of strangers, we are very exposed. When we create a vulnerable, digital identity that only exists in cyberspace and our heads, we can develop a hyper vigilant flight or fight response that remains long after we log off, if we log off. The feelings of shame and self-loathing that are already endemic in the modern world are exaggerated online.

So, turn off your notifications, try to reduce time online but remember this is actually a collective problem, not an individual one. We have collective rules and social norms for alcohol, gambling, smoking and drugs that can harm humans and we need to develop them for digital.

Collective problems need collective solutions…

#beinghuman #socialmedia #digital

LUCK

People who believe that luck or chance determines what happens to them tend to be more depressed, less educated, have fewer teeth and even worse gums than those who don’t.

Our belief in luck is correlated to our locus of control. Locus of control is the extent to which we believe that life events are due to our own actions (internal locus of control) or to factors over which we have little influence (external locus of control).

Internal locus humans attribute their success or failures to their own efforts and abilities. External locus humans attribute success or failure to external factors, things outside of their control, such as other people, luck or fate.

The words we use are signs of where we sit on the locus of control spectrum. Those with an internal locus of control tend to use a first-person narrative and take responsibility. Those with an external locus of control tend to not to take responsibility and blame other people, circumstances or luck.

What we believe, feel and say is important.

As long as we make sure our locus of control doesn’t turn us into locus control freaks we are happier, healthier, wealthier and wiser…

#beinghuman #womenfounders #brandidentity

PRO

Human beings have become an “anti” species.

Driven by an existential fear that we are separate, alone, we have backed ourselves into our defensive corners with anti-biotic, anti-depressant, anti-viral, anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, anti-climax, anti-everything and everyone beliefs and behaviours. In this fear paradigm the ego gets stronger and stronger.

When 7.9 billion people feel like this, when we invest in separation, in scarcity, we feel a need to compete. We humans act like a tumour, like a cancer, so disconnected from our own energy sources that we suck energy out of the planet believing we are separate from nature and that it is against us.

Indigenous people did not believe in ownership, we did not always believe in ownership. We believed we were a cooperative part of a vast ecosystem, deeply interconnected, flowing with life itself.

This belief in me and mine, in ownership make us weaker, disconnected from the whole and from all that is available and possible. Being anti makes it hard to thrive and ultimately survive.

So, we indigenous humans and our indigenous human egos need an anti-dote…

We need to become a ‘pro’ species, to face the propaganda, stop procrastinating and proactively promise to protect and progress.

#beinghuman #femaleempowerment #brandstrategy

HELP

Google “self-help industry” and you find a plethora of statistics…

It is a multi-billion-dollar industry, worth $13 billion in the U.S and $41 billion globally. Most motivational speakers are men but the average customer is a middle-aged woman between 40 and 50. Women make

up three quarters of self-help book readers, in fact, 70% of all industry customers are women. The self-help industry is tailored towards millennials, with 75 million millennial users globally. The mostly male motivational speakers earn over $1.6 billion every year, the top 17 most popular motivational speakers generate around $296 million with 12 of the 17 most prominent speakers 60 or older. Deepak Chopra has a net worth of $150 million, Tony Robbins $600 million….

When I google ‘help others industry’ statistics are harder to find, it's as if the 'help others industry' doesn’t exist. Yet 2014 figures show that total unpaid work in the UK had a value of £1.01 trillion, equivalent to approximately 56% of GDP. Globally, there is unequal gender distribution of caring responsibilities, with women spending up to ten times more time on unpaid care work than men.

So, despite the lack of a ‘help other’ section in the book store we clearly have a massive, global ‘help others industry’. For millennia many spiritual paths and thus humanity have placed helping others, compassion, kindness at their core. The success of Oprah Winfrey is based on a profound understanding of this spiritual, deeply interwoven connection between helping self and others. Oprah is worth $2.5 billion.

Helping others feels good, it creates a sense of belonging, gives a sense of purpose, helps keep things in perspective and is contagious. Helping others helps you live longer, boosts your self-esteem, creates stronger friendships as performing acts of kindness lifts your mood and ultimately makes you more optimistic and positive. Helping others reduces loneliness and isolation and creates connection with our community… The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives.

Helping others is the best self-help in the world.

#community #gender #beinghuman

DISEASE

We are in a chronic disease epidemic.

For centuries scientists believed we humans were the highest and best genetic code on earth. We created a way of living that isolated us from the genetic environment around us, radicalised the virome and ignored the devastation we were creating in the microbiome of the soil, the rain and the air we breathe.

But to be human, to be alive is a story of a complex eco system, a system that lives physically in us. Self is actually a diverse, beautiful, curious connection to nature, the nature within us all. We are malleable, plastic, curious possibilities rather than a distinct identity even at our gene level and this massive life in us makes us much greater than our mere single self or our species.

Our bodies are made up of trillions of cells and inside these cells are mitochondria. They convert the food we eat and the air we breathe into a special type of fuel that generates the energy our cells need to keep us healthy and alive. Literally. The microbiome of our gut relies on bacteria to help the mitochondria generate the energy needed to repair and regenerate. For our bodies to be performing at their best, we need our mitochondria to be performing at their best too. When the rate of repair goes below the rate of injury, we develop chronic disease.

We need deep, diverse, communication and conversations with nature as we swap information at this genetic and mitochondria level. But it Is estimated 50% of the complexity and diversity of life on earth has been lost in the last 40 years under the pressure of human behaviour. In our isolation, in our lack of deeper communication we have created chronic disease we could never have dreamed of.

To be healthy we need to stop isolating ourselves, stop demonising disease and listen to what disease is telling us: We need to stop the war on biodiversity, rebel against the extinction of the microbiome and understand to be a creative, curious human being is to be an expression of nature itself.

#biodiversity #creative #beinghuman

LABELS

We humans love labels.

I don’t mean the brand variety but the habit our minds have of putting a label on everything and everyone. These labels rarely have much to do with reality but are part of our eternal search for a perfect world, a world only filled with the labels we like, be they black or white, gay or straight, left or right, good or bad...

But what use do all these labels actually serve?

Labels and our endless habit of labelling everything really gets human beings into trouble. Be it by creating suffering for ourselves or creating suffering for others, labels are behind segregation, discrimination, conflict and even war. But how can we navigate a modern world of seemingly endless choices unless we know what to like or not like?

We need to learn when and where labels are useful, where they serve and help humanity and where they don't. Where our labels help us get closer to truth and where our labels take us away from the truth. Labels are both our problem and our solution.

When we learn to watch our labels and not let them run a mock, we see an unbiased, fairer, kinder world that we can enjoy more and more each day. We give ourselves and others parole from label prison and free to live a life on the outside.

#brandstrategy #brand #beinghuman

BABY

I was on the bus yesterday looking at a small baby. The baby was simply being a baby, looking, observing, listening, feeling wonder, feeling life… Her fascinated baby senses open to our kind, gentle, tender world, in awe and amazement of the unique, innate, fascinating beauty of… everything…

As I sat there, communing, meditating with the baby I was thinking about the fact that I was once as open as that baby and wondering exactly when I started to close?

But for a moment, on the bus, with the baby’s help, I relaxed and opened to the tenderness of the world as the baby reminded me the world is actually an extremely tender place.

I realised that tenderness and an ability to receive the tenderness of the world is the baby’s super power, and could be mine again too. My baby guru taught me that if I don’t allow the kind, gentle, tender world to help me, to support me it is actually exhausting and I don’t want to feel exhausted.

So, as the baby and I went our separate ways, I realised I need to get back in touch with a long-lost friend, my own inner baby. I need to make sure she feels happy, safe and secure. I need to give her the love, nourishment, encouragement, joy and playtime she needs so she can remind me of the mystery and magic of every moment.

#femaleempowerment #love #beinghuman

SERVE

In the digital age, we are always ‘on’.

Our mobiles know us intimately. They sleep with us, go to work with us, on holiday with us, even to the loo with us, watching us as we pray, love, work, play and eat. We are becoming at worse, addicted or at best way too dependent on our tech. Research shows technology is changing our physical brain structure and function causing distraction, sleep disruption, F.O.M.O., social comparison and negatively impacting our work / life balance as like digital children, we get stressed and anxious when we are separated from our digital parents.

But we are not computer servers we are human beings.

We can make a conscious choice to be our narrative self or to be our aware self? Research shows just eight weeks of daily meditation or mindfulness practice create positive change in our telomeres, cerebellum, hippocampus and our posterior cingulate cortex as our brain activity shifts from right to our left pre frontal cortex.

Basically, we get happy.

So, to reduce the stress we all feel in the digital age, do not take things personally when they are not personal. Learn to detach from your story and trust your deeper intuition, innate intelligence and beauty.

Never forget you are a homo sapien, a wise human.

#technology #mindfulness #intelligence

R & D

Every summer I take time out.... a lot of time out....

Mothering, swimming, walking, surfing, playing, reading, thinking, talking, loving, creating, writing, musing, enjoying, building, travelling, drawing, designing, nurturing, cuddling, meditating, stretching, laughing, crying, thinking, connecting, visioning, praying, practicing, being ....

Every year as summer ends I take time to come back... a lot of time...

But now I am back...

#beinghuman #create #life

BIASED

Human beings are naturally biased. Bias is built into our DNA, fuelled by our experiences, beliefs, emotions and ideologies. No matter how hard we try, we can never be truly unbiased. Bias has a natural, normal role and can help us survive and thrive but if we let bias overwhelm us, possibility becomes… well…impossible.

We all like to think we're rational but in reality, our biases make us think and act irrationally. We all have a bias blind spot, meaning we are less likely to detect bias in ourselves than others.

So, as we cocreate our lives and our futures, bias can stop us from seeing the endless possibilities available to us in every moment. If we ignore bias, bias can sacrifice our truth on the altar of conformity, commerce and compliance.

But if we acknowledge our bias, we can open up, commit and work to transform our own, unique possibility into our own, unique reality.

#engineer #work #bias