My Blog
Always take the weather with you
These are lyrics from a hit song by Crowded House, a New Zealand-Australian rock band, released in 1991. I recently relocated with my family from South Africa to Great Britain, arriving on 1 June 2024 to an exceptionally cold and wet summer. We kept reminding...
The Serenity Prayer
When my best friend was going through a divorce I bought him two books, one of which was more of a booklet, titled The Serenity Prayer. He later told me how much it had helped him navigate a very difficult time in his life. Now I must add that Chris is not a religious...
Living by faith
Faith is believing or placing confidence in something, whether within us or beyond us. It involves trusting in the inherent goodness or efficacy of something. As humans, we all live by faith. Faith is largely determined by culture, in other words, the experience of...
Who are you?
One of my favorite quotes by Carl Jung is, "The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you." Sadly, most people do not know who they are, as their lives have been determined by what the world has told them. The outcome is not the...
Lemons or Lemonade
Lemons are inevitable in the journey of life. There are just too many moving parts within and around us for things not to go wrong, or at least not go the way we want them to. The challenge is to make lemonade whenever this happens– a process of personal autonomy,...
Dancing between Duty and Desire
Siegmun Freud, the Austrian Neurologist (1856 -1939), defined the human psyche in terms of the Id, the Ego, and the Super-Ego. The Id is our natural yearning, the Super-Ego is social norms and values, and the Ego is our conscious ability to satisfy the desires of the...
Life in the Matrix
“The Matrix trilogy suggests that everyone has the individual responsibility to make the choice between the real world and an artificial world. Though Neo is the exemplar of free will, fate plays a large role in his adventure. Neo relies on the Oracle, and everything...
The internal battle between love and hate
The biggest challenge humans face is our mind’s self-limiting constructs, developed in the first third of life. Science has revealed the human brain only fully integrates at the age of 25, making us passive sponges of the prevailing cultural norms and values. Whether...
Living and Loving
John Powell, in his book ‘The Secret of Staying in Love’, suggests that the average human realizes only 10% of their potential. What a tragedy that so much living and loving is missing from our lives. Fortunately, we are at a point in history where this can and should...
Why we need a four-day working week?
To get the work-life balance right, a four-day working week is necessary. Currently we are stressed, immune compromised, and survival driven. Phrases like “Life’s a bitch, and then we die” describe how most people live. Another one comes to mind from The Shawshank...
Slave Mind, Mastermind
I used to love playing a code-breaking game called 'Mastermind'. I later studied psychology with the hope of cracking my own code, to better understand myself and live my best life. What I have come to realize is that most of us are slaves, slaves to our beliefs and...
When Culture Kills Us All
What the tragic conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Israel expose, is how easily manipulated, misinformed, and seemingly powerless we have become as a species. Unfortunately, our limited thinking patterns, borne of deeply conditioned cultural norms and values, predispose...