well-being technology — Philosophy for Life | Blog | Philosophy | Wisdom | Spirituality

We dream we are separate, lonely individuals. It's time to wake up.

In Oregon, there is a honey fungus that is four miles wide and possibly 8000 years old. It appears in our reality as small white mushrooms.

Altered states, Buddhism, Contemplation, Dreams, EnlightenmentJules EvansSeptember 14, 2019Comment

Ten defusion techniques for unhooking your mind

We’re constantly getting hooked by our thoughts, beliefs and feelings, getting lost in the drama. But luckily, there’s a host of defusion techniques we can use to defuse, from ACT, CBT, Stoicism, Buddhism and many other therapeutic traditions. Here are 10 of my favourite.

Buddhism, CBT, Contemplation, meditation, Psychology, self-help, StoicismJules EvansMay 3, 2019 Comments

The making and breaking of the counter culture

Last week I came across a small book called The Making of a Counter Culture, written in 1969 by an American historian called Theodore Roszak. I loved it. Roszak was the first to coin the phrase ‘the counterculture’.

Spiritual technologies

Our psyches are deeply connected to the material and symbolic worlds we weave around us. The habitat of our daily lives re-inforces our habits, for good and ill. All our stuff – our apartments, our clothes, our books, our TV, our online activity, our food, our relationships – helps make us who we are, in a powerful feedback loop.

Art, Spirituality, Transhumanism, well-being technologyJules EvansNovember 2, 2018 Comments

The Quakers on how to balance inner and outer work

Last week I visited Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat centre outside Philadelphia, nestled between the gorgeous Quaker liberal arts colleges of Haverford and Swarthmore. I made a sort of mini-pilgrimage there as part of my research into the ‘mystical expats’ – Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Alan Watts, four English writers who moved to California in the 1930s and helped invent the ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ demographic (which is now 25% of the US population).

To philosophize is to learn how to die

Last weekend I went to a seminar on dying at the Garrison Institute. That might seem a rather Gothic weekend, but I don’t think it’s that weird. Socrates said: 'To philosophize is to learn how to die.'

Buddhism, Contemplation, DeathJules EvansAugust 12, 2018 Comments

Joe's story

This is an article by Joe, a young artist who I met at a London Buddhist Centre retreat last month, and whose story I drew on for my latest blog-post, Re-finding Your Joy. He told me his story on the retreat and I asked if I could interview him.

Contemplation, Masculinity, UncategorizedJules EvansJuly 13, 2018 Comment

Should I go on a retreat, and how do I choose one?

A friend emailed me asking about retreats, whether they're useful, and how one goes about picking one.

On mysticism and metaphor

Last weekend I went to Wilderness festival and gave a couple of talks. It was a magical festival - the musical acts weren’t that stunning, but there was lots of marvelous, weird, dreamy stuff happening that I wandered into, like a Mardi Gras parade and a mock fertility ritual with a man dressed as a penis and a woman dressed as a vagina. It was all very Dionysian.

Contemplation, meditation, mysticismJules EvansAugust 12, 2015Comment

Review: The Wellness Syndrome

How are you feeling? How well are you? Is your weight where you want it to be? Smoking too much? How happy are you on a scale of one to ten? Are you optimising your personal brand? How fast was your last five kilometre run? Would you like to share that via social media? Would you like a life-coach to help you overcome these challenges on a way to a better, happier, more awesome you?

Review: The Happiness Industry by William Davies

Watch out folks. There is a murky world lurking behind the scenes, a sinister cabal of policy-makers, psychologists, CEOs, advertizers and life-coaches, watching you, measuring you, nudging you, monitoring your every smile, all to try and make you happy. We must resist. This, broadly, is the message of sociologist William Davies’ book, The Happiness Industry: How Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being.

Anthony Seldon on venturing beyond happiness

Sir Anthony Seldon is the former headmaster of Wellington College, one of the first schools to introduce well-being classes into its curriculum. He's also a co-founder of Action for Happiness. In his new book, Beyond Happiness, he suggests we need to look beyond 'workaday happiness' to find something more non-rational and spiritual, which he calls joy or bliss. I interviewed him about this, as well as his thoughts on the 'politics of well-being' and his plans to create the first 'positive university'.

What can we learn from Benedictine monks about sticking to New Year's resolutions

It’s that time of year again, when people all over Britain go off for the traditional New Year's Vipassana retreat. But not me - this year, I decided to keep it old school. I went on a Benedictine retreat.

What can we recover from medieval contemplative culture?

Earlier this week, my girlfriend and I toured around Yorkshire and Northumberland, once the stronghold of English medieval monasticism. We visited the beautiful ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, which once boasted the biggest church in England. As we wandered around the ruins, I wondered what we lost, when Henry VIII dissolved more than 1000 monasteries in five years.