Tag: mindfulness

Preserving Ideas

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Last weekend I spent a few hours wandering through the Small Publishers Fair in London, where tables of hand-bound chapbooks, risograph zines, and small press essays lined Conway Hall like devotional offerings to the printed word. There was something really wonderful about it: a room buzzing not with algorithmic chatter, but with paper, ink, and the human hand.

Lately, this question of preserving ideas has been preoccupying me. As I’ve been working on my forthcoming projects—both scholarly and personal—I’ve found myself turning again to the physicality of books, not just as containers of knowledge but as archives of consciousness. The handmade box-making I’ve been experimenting with at home (a small project that began as a way to store my growing stack of old notebooks) has become a kind of meditative practice: measuring, cutting, folding, gluing, all in careful rhythm. It’s taught me something about form and memory—about how enclosure can protect, but also invite reverence.

Walter Benjamin once wrote that every book has a double life: one as a vessel of ideas, and another as an artefact that carries the traces of its readers. Marginalia, stains, folded corners all become evidence of encounter. When I teach or write about modernism, I’m always struck by how that movement both exalted and feared this materiality. Woolf, Joyce, and their contemporaries wanted language to transcend its own physical limits, yet they depended utterly on print.

My own shelves are full of books that now hold more of me than of their authors, filling with underlinings, exclamation marks, and the occasional coffee ring or grease smear. They are records not only of what I’ve read, but of who I was when I read it. In a sense, they preserve moments of thought—snapshots of consciousness mid-formation. To lose those, or to surrender entirely to digital ephemerality, would be to lose something essential about how we think in time.

There’s a similar intimacy in the act of making. When I’m gluing the corners of a handmade box or rolling out pastry dough, I notice how my thinking slows, finds rhythm in repetition. Craft requires patience, but it also invites reflection—it’s an embodied philosophy. David Pye, in The Nature and Art of Workmanship, distinguishes between the “workmanship of risk” (where every action could alter the outcome) and the “workmanship of certainty” (where machines guarantee precision). The handmade book, like the handwritten note, belongs to the first category: it lives in the space of risk, imperfection, and care.

In an era of constant digital revision, the printed page still says: this is what I thought, then. It invites us into a conversation with our past selves. Even my old notebooks, boxed and labelled, feel like small dialogues across time—some pages embarrassedly naive, others startlingly prescient.

There’s a line from Italo Calvino that I often come back to: “The classics are those books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to go away and when they hide in the folds of memory.” I think the same could be said of our own notes, letters, recipes, and marginalia. They refuse to go away; they wait patiently for us to rediscover them.

At the Small Publishers Fair, I was reminded how vibrant this world of small-scale making still is. Stalls dedicated to poetry, philosophy, and experimental art books, each one a testament to the persistence of the tactile imagination. Many of the presses represented there are acts of devotion, sustained by people who believe that ideas deserve bodies. To hold one of their books is to participate in a lineage of care: the slow publishing ethos that values depth over reach.

In the evenings lately, with autumn deepening and the smell of spiced raisins still in the kitchen, I’ve found myself reflecting on what it means to live archivally, or, to put it another way, to be a steward of one’s own thought. It’s a gentle calling, really: to keep what matters, let go of what doesn’t, and tend the rest with attention.

So whether you’re keeping a commonplace book, baking from a family recipe, or printing a limited-run essay for a small press, you are participating in this broader human act of preservation. You’re ensuring that thought continues to have texture—that it lives in the world not just as code or content, but as something we can touch, smell, and remember.

And maybe that’s what the physical book still teaches us, in its quiet way: that ideas, like relationships, need form to flourish. They ask for bodies, boxes, bindings, and for the gentle friction of being held.

UPCOMING EVENTS

If this resonates, you might enjoy joining one of my upcoming gatherings:

Taming Aversion: How to Work With the Mind When It Pushes Back

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

There’s a moment, familiar to anyone who has tried to live deliberately, when the mind simply says no. One minute, we’re aligned with our highest intentions, the next, we’re scrolling, tidying, grazing. That small, invisible shift — from presence to avoidance — is the terrain I’ve been exploring lately. Not because I’ve mastered it, but because I’ve been caught in it more times than I can count.

Aversion is easy to mistake for laziness, distraction, or even moral weakness. But what if it isn’t? What if the mind’s pushback isn’t defiance, but a form of care — a protective reflex triggered whenever growth begins to feel unsafe? The older I get, the more I suspect that the moments I’m most tempted to flee are the moments that matter most.

Every meaningful change seems to summon a guardian. The Buddhists call it mara; Freud might have called it resistance; psychosynthesis would describe it as a subpersonality defending its role in the inner system. Whatever name we choose, the pattern is the same: when the psyche senses transformation, it activates its most familiar defences.

Sometimes I’ll wake up with a vague heaviness, an urge to delay, to simplify the day, to shrink the horizon of possibility. The rational mind can explain it away (fatigue, overwork, weather), but underneath there’s often something more intimate: a small, frightened part that’s unsure what will happen if I really allow change to occur.

The task isn’t to override that part but to listen to it. Roberto Assagioli urges us to treat each subpersonality as purposeful, never pathological. In the same spirit, Internal Family Systems founder Richard Schwartz suggests asking these inner protectors what they’re afraid would happen if they didn’t intervene. Often the answer is touching: You might get hurt again.

There’s a strange irony in inner work: aversion tends to appear at precisely the moment when we’re closest to contact. The body stiffens not because we’re far from the truth, but because we’ve brushed against it.

This, I think, is why so many contemplative traditions treat aversion as a doorway rather than a wall. Pema Chödrön describes it as “the moment we touch our edge.” In those moments, the goal is not endurance but intimacy — learning to stay with what trembles.

When I sit in meditation and feel the urge to move, I’ve started to see it as a kind of emotional sonar. The resistance tells me something important is near. Rather than pushing through, I name it: aversion is here. I feel where it lives — perhaps in the throat, the chest, the solar plexus — and I breathe around it, widening the frame. Sometimes that’s enough. Sometimes it’s not. Either way, the willingness to stay changes the quality of the moment.

Unexamined aversion tends to generate drama. The mind, avoiding stillness, manufactures movement — endless narratives, self-critique, external blame. I sometimes think of this as the “noise of protection.” Beneath the content, the function is the same: distraction from direct contact with feeling.

In my own life, this often appears as overthinking. If I’m avoiding grief, I become analytical. If I’m avoiding fear, I become productive. The activity disguises itself as virtue — busyness, preparation, clarity — but underneath is the same motive: anything but this.

This dynamic is at the heart of the next workshop I’ll be leading — Stopping the Drama Cycle: A Workshop on Love & Our Limiting Patterns (3 November, 7.00–8.30pm UK time). We’ll be exploring how the mind uses drama — both internal and relational — to regulate discomfort. It’s not about pathologising the habit, but learning to see it clearly, tenderly, and to notice the quiet peace that emerges when we stop feeding it.

The paradox is that aversion softens not through conquest, but through companionship. The moment we stop trying to get rid of it, it begins to loosen its grip.

One practice that helps is gentle inquiry:

  • Ask, what am I unwilling to feel right now?
  • Ask, what am I protecting myself from?
  • And then, what would it feel like to allow just one degree more of openness?

This incremental approach — widening the window of tolerance rather than forcing it — honours the nervous system’s intelligence. As Bessel van der Kolk reminds us in The Body Keeps the Score, safety is the foundation of transformation.

Psychologically speaking, aversion is a sign that the psyche is reorganising itself. Spiritually speaking, it’s the ego’s last resistance before surrender. Either way, tenderness is the most effective solvent.

So much of contemporary self-help is built on the rhetoric of mastery: “hacking”, “rewiring” the brain. But perhaps what’s needed is not mastery but maturity: the willingness to work with the mind, not onit. Lately, I’ve been experimenting with what I call “soft discipline.” Instead of pushing through aversion, I create conditions for the opposite of fear: trust. I light a candle, clear my desk, breathe slowly, and remind myself that resistance is just another form of aliveness. It’s the psyche’s way of stretching before the leap.

In contemplative traditions from Buddhism to A Course in Miracles, resistance is reinterpreted as an invitation — an opportunity to practice forgiveness, not in the moral sense but in the cognitive one: the gentle release of judgement against ourselves for finding the work difficult.

This theme continues in Practical Miracles: Practicing the Course Beyond the Book (8 November, 2.00–5.00pm UK time) — a longer session on translating spiritual study into lived practice. We’ll explore how resistance can become revelation when approached through the lens of practice, not theory.

The longer I’ve worked with clients and students — and with my own mind — the more I see that aversion is not an obstacle to healing but one of its instruments. It appears wherever the psyche is trying to protect what it loves. To work with aversion, then, is to enter a relationship with love in its most disguised form.

The next time your mind pushes back, you might imagine thanking it. “Thank you for trying to protect me.” This simple act of recognition can dissolve years of struggle. Aversion doesn’t vanish, but it begins to trust you enough to soften. Growth, after all, isn’t the elimination of resistance but the deepening of relationship with it. What begins as pushback may, in time, become partnership — the psyche’s way of saying, I trust you to take me further than I could go alone.

Upcoming Workshops

Stopping the Drama Cycle: A Workshop on Love & Our Limiting Patterns
🗓 3 November, 7.00–8.30pm (UK time)
In this workshop we will explore how resistance and reactivity keep us circling the same emotional loops, and learn how to step out of them with compassion and clarity.

Practical Miracles: Practicing the Course Beyond the Book
🗓 8 November, 2.00–5.00pm (UK time)
This half-day workshop is deeper immersion into A Course in Miracles as a lived practice, where we will translate insight into relationship, creativity, and peace.

Metaconsciousness: Becoming Aware of the Ways We’re Driven

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Lately I’ve been thinking about how much of life unfolds beneath the surface of our awareness, not just in the mysterious depths of the unconscious, but also in the quieter, more practical rhythms of habit, mood, and reaction. What if our real work is to notice not just what we’re conscious of, but how consciousness itself is being directed?

That’s what is meant by metaconsciousness, the capacity to recognise when we are being driven by hormones, hunger, fear of rejection, deadlines, the steady dopamine drip of our phones, or the deep psychic grooves of childhood conditioning. In my own experience—especially during the past few months of moving between projects, planning new teaching, and reshaping routines—this awareness has felt like an internal turning point. The challenge isn’t simply to ‘be mindful’, but to discern the layers of agency beneath the surface: Who, exactly, is choosing what I’m doing right now?

When I start to ask that question seriously, it becomes uncomfortable. I notice how much of my day is already spoken for by subtle compulsions masquerading as preferences. Even something as benign as checking email can carry the faint pulse of anxiety, a microdose of control. We like to believe that modern life rewards autonomy and discernment, but in practice it trains us in reactivity, which is, by definition, the opposite of freedom.

From Consciousness to Metaconsciousness

Consciousness, in this view, is not a steady state but a constantly fluctuating field of attention. It’s automatic, embodied, and largely determined by biological imperatives. You feel hunger, so you eat. You feel threatened, so you defend. You feel bored, so you reach for your phone. These are not moral failings; they’re simply how the nervous system evolved to keep us alive.

Metaconsciousness, though, introduces a different quality. It’s what happens when we see that we’re acting automatically and hold that recognition with curiosity rather than judgment. There’s a subtle but profound difference between saying ‘I’m angry’ and ‘I notice that anger is arising’. The first statement identifies with the emotion; the second observes it. And in that observation lies the seed of freedom.

This is why contemplative practice remains, for me, one of the few truly radical technologies of our time. Sitting quietly, noticing the mind’s movements without needing to edit or manage them, slowly reveals how much of what we call “self” is just a cascade of impulses, stories, and inherited scripts. Over time, a new perspective opens—one that isn’t outside the body but is no longer confined by it.

If you’re drawn to exploring this dimension in your own creative or professional life, I’ll be leading an online session called Mindfulness for Creatives: Cultivating Focus, Flow, and Inspiration on 23 October (7.30–9.00pm, UK time). We’ll look at practical tools for noticing when attention narrows or scatters—and how that awareness can restore genuine inspiration.

The Drama of the Driven Life

Of course, once we begin to see how we’re driven, another pattern emerges: the drama of selfhood. Many of us unconsciously replay emotional scripts that were formed long before adulthood, such as seeking validation, fearing abandonment, or rescuing others to avoid our own discomfort. These patterns aren’t evidence of failure but they are evidence that we are living out of old perspectives and potentially trying to replicate old relationships from the past, especially the damaging or traumatic ones.

But they can also be exhausting. In coaching and in my own reflective practice, I’ve seen how deeply these dynamics colour our work, our love, and even our whole sense of purpose. The shift toward metaconsciousness invites us to watch these patterns with compassion and detachment, and to move, in psychological terms, from within the drama to observing it.

This theme forms the heart of my upcoming workshop Stopping the Drama Cycle: A Workshop on Love & Our Limiting Patterns on 3 November (7.00–8.30pm, UK time). It’s an evening devoted to understanding how we get pulled into emotional triangulations—the victim, rescuer, and persecutor roles that Karpman identified—and how to step into a more mature and loving mode of engagement. If you’ve ever felt trapped in repetition, whether in relationships or creative work, this session offers a clear, compassionate way through.

Beyond Insight: Practicing the Miraculous

Metaconsciousness doesn’t stop at awareness; it calls for us to do something with it and act from a deeper centre. For me, this is where A Course in Miracles becomes a training in radical perception. Its central insight, that we can learn to see differently, aligns perfectly with the idea of metaconsciousness: we are not our automatic thoughts, but the awareness capable of choosing love instead of fear.

In Practical Miracles: Practicing the Course Beyond the Book on 8 November (2–5pm, UK time), we’ll explore this integration more experientially. How do we move from intellectual understanding to lived transformation? How do we reframe life’s small irritations as opportunities to practice gentler perception? This isn’t about metaphysical abstraction but about everyday miracle-mindedness: the courage to meet the driven mind with tenderness.

A Season of Turning Inward

As autumn settles in, I find myself slowing down a bit. The academic year begins; projects find their rhythm; the light changes. Each season asks for its own form of consciousness, and autumn, for me, always invites metaconsciousness. It’s the season of noticing how we’re driven: by deadlines, by expectations, by the desire to finish before winter.

But it’s also the season of release. Of choosing what’s worth carrying forward and what can gently fall away. In this way, the movement from consciousness to metaconsciousness mirrors the movement from doing to being—from the leaf’s impulse to hold the branch to its graceful surrender to air.

If you’ve been following some of my recent writing on what our books say about us or how to develop positive morning rituals, you’ll recognise the same undercurrent: how to live well within limits. To become aware not only of what drives us, but of the stillness beneath those drives.

And that, I suspect, is the quiet art of metaconsciousness. Not transcending the body or renouncing the world, but inhabiting both more fully—knowing that our thoughts and feelings will continue to move like weather, while something deeper watches with patience.

If you’d like to explore that space with others this autumn, I hope you’ll join one—or several—of these gatherings.

Upcoming Workshops

Sourdough as Slow Philosophy

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

Bread is one of the oldest human technologies, and once or twice a week when I feed my starter, I get to feel the quiet intimacy of participating in something ancient. The jar on the counter, alive with invisible life, asks nothing more than regular attention. A little flour, a little water, a little faith. The process become philosophical, a daily practice in patience and presence, and sourdough, for me, is not simply food; it is a mode of inquiry. It asks how transformation occurs, and at what pace we should approach that transformation.

Every sourdough baker learns early on that control is an illusion. The starter has moods, the dough responds differently each day, and the line between perfect proof and an epic collapse is razor-thin. In this small domestic theatre, the dough resists command, growing best when treated with care, not coercion. Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society warns of the violence of acceleration, how the modern subject, obsessed with optimisation, loses the capacity for duration. But sourdough refuses this logic. It can’t be rushed, not by willpower, not by technology. The microbes moved at their own pace, and perhaps I have begun to as well.

Fermentation, after all, is transformation through decay. It is the art of letting things break down in order that something new may emerge. There is philosophy in this: a recognition that change requires dissolution. The sour tang of the starter, the slow bubbling, and the mingling of bacteria and yeast are all material lessons in collaboration and renewal. Our ecological lives, too, depend on unseen networks, on the fermentation of shared experience.

In a world addicted to instant results, fermentation becomes an act of quiet resistance. We live amid the tyranny of instant coffee, instant messages, instant gratification. Sourdough asks us to wait. It requires a slowness that verges on contemplation. Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement began as a protest against fast food, but its real gift was philosophical: a reclamation of pleasure, locality, and rhythm. Baking, like slow thought, teaches that nourishment and wisdom arise through attention. To bake for oneself, or better, to bake for another, is to rejoin an economy of care rather than consumption. When I share a loaf, still warm from the oven, I’m reminded that slowness is also a form of generosity.

The sourdough jar reveals how we attend to it. Some days, the starter is buoyant, light, eager; on others, sluggish and heavy. It reflects not just temperature but temperament. My own perfectionism has often met its match in the unpredictable nature of fermentation. The failed loaves — dense, burnt, deflated — have taught me more than the flawless ones, and sourdough offers its own alchemical education. The process cannot be hurried; it thrives on warmth, patience, and rhythm.

When I take a loaf from the oven, I feel a satisfaction that the intellectual world rarely grants: here is a thing complete, made by hand, known through touch. The world slows, if only for a moment, and becomes sufficient.

Sourdough, then, becomes a teacher of right timing, a philosophy that ferments rather than forces. Its lessons are certainly not confined to the kitchen. I’ve begun to notice similar rhythms in my creative work, where projects now follow seasons rather than sprints. After years of academic urgency, I’m learning the value of waiting and of letting ideas ‘prove’. What emerges, when it finally does, carries more depth, less strain. Slow philosophy isn’t simply slow thinking but slow being: a willingness to inhabit processes rather than rush through them. Education itself could learn from this pedagogy of fermentation, where growth happens unseen, between the visible milestones.

To bake bread is to remember that life itself is leavened by care. The simplest rituals, when done attentively, become meditations on being alive. Whether it’s bread, gardening, sewing, or journaling, each act can be a form of everyday metaphysics where philosophy meets fingertips. The smell of bread cooling on the counter, the sound of the crust cracking as it releases its final breath, is a small hymn to time.

UPCOMING EVENTS

If this resonates, you might enjoy joining one of my upcoming gatherings:

More to Explore

Book Buying as a Practice of Becoming

Posted on by Allan Johnson in Observations

As I usually do, I bought a used copy of this month’s selection for my neighbourhood book club: Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner’s marvellous 1984 Booker Prize-winning novel about making sense of people and the shame we inhabit. The copy I received was a marvellous 1980s edition, its cover gently worn, the paper slightly yellowed with age. Inside was an inscription in assertive biro: ‘To Rita with love, Pete xxx. April 86.‘

I love finding ephemera like that in used books (once, I found a four-leaf clover that a child had pressed between pages and forgotten in 1972). That simple handwritten note in Hotel du Lac became a fragment of someone else’s life, a small piece of history folded into my own. It reminded me that buying a book is rarely just about acquiring a text — it is, at its best and fullest expression, a gesture of self-formation. Choosing a book can be a conscious act of orienting yourself toward a new way of thinking, a new rhythm of attention, a new life project. In that way, book buying is a practice of becoming.

Every book purchase marks a threshold, a crossing into a new state of thought, feeling, or attention. When I choose a book, I am often choosing not only the ideas it contains but also the possibility of becoming someone who holds those ideas. That threshold might be a commitment to learn something new, to deepen a habit, or to allow oneself to enter an unfamiliar world.

For me, Hotel du Lac became not just a novel but a threshold to conversation — in our book club meeting tonight we will speak about solitude, desire, love, and the quiet transformations of everyday life, I’m sure. The purchase itself became the first step into that dialogue.

Choosing which books to buy is also an ethical act — a choice about the economy of your attention and the kind of knowledge you wish to cultivate. In our age of algorithm-driven recommendations and one-click convenience, the act of selecting a book has become even more deliberate. It is an assertion: of attention, of values, of resistance to the noise of the digital marketplace.

I try to keep this in mind. When I choose a book, I am choosing the kind of life I wish to live. That is why I prefer second-hand bookshops, curated lists, and the serendipity of browsing. The gift of finding a well-loved copy of Hotel du Lac was not just about economy but about entering into a relationship with the book that carries the traces of other readers and a past moment in time.

My first job as a teenager was as a bookseller at Borders Books, and I’ll never forget the linger last hour before closing when the shop was almost empty and I wandered to and fro reshelving books that had been cast aside and getting lost myself in the shelves. There is something profound in the act of browsing: the way attention moves differently among stacks of books, the accidental discoveries, the impulse that turns browsing into a purchase. This ritual carries a rhythm: the searching, the selection, the return home, the opening of the book for the first time. It is a small act of pilgrimage.

This ritual has shifted for me over recent years. I buy more online and second-hand now, but I also savour the moments when I am in a physical shop, taking time to feel the books, the paper, the weight of them in my hands. Buying a book in that way is an act of attention — a slow, deliberate counterpoint to the speed of modern life.

The books we choose to live with often become companions in our ongoing process of becoming. That inscription in Hotel du Lac reminded me of this. A book is not simply an object; it is a living presence. It carries the imprint of its past readers and acquires a new life each time it meets another. In choosing it, we invite it into our own narrative.

Some books grow with us. They take on new meaning as we return to them at different stages of life. They become landmarks in our own inner journeys. It’s for that reason that buying books can be a form of investment in the future self we aspire to become.

When I buy a book, I am buying a possibility: a possibility of becoming a reader who thinks differently, who sees differently, who lives differently. Each purchase is a small apprenticeship in self-making.

Here are some ways to make book buying a mindful practice:

  • Keep a wishlist and revisit it periodically.
  • Choose one book that challenges your usual thinking every month.
  • Seek out books outside your comfort zone.
  • Return to books that have shaped you before.

If we approach book buying as a practice of becoming, every purchase becomes a small act of self-cultivation. This month, my purchase of Hotel du Lac was not just for a book club — it became a quiet practice of curiosity, of connecting with a history, of choosing to open myself to a particular conversation. In this way, every book bought with attention becomes a threshold, an ethical choice, a ritual, a companion, and an investment in becoming.

If you choose to see book buying this way, your library becomes not simply a collection of texts but a landscape of your own growth. What will your next purchase become for you?

Upcoming Events

If this resonates, you might enjoy joining one of my upcoming gatherings:

More to Explore