Karen Neil (PhD) is a freelance pharmacist and health coach, researcher, creative writer, mindfulness teacher and musician.
She applies a holistic approach to health and wellbeing, teaching mindfulness-based skills for health and advocating for positive health promotion, diversity and inclusion, children and young people, the creative arts, community, and planet.
Karen’s website: www.mindfulmedicine.co.uk
X: @Mindfulpharmacy
Arts and Health Position statement: IHPE-Position-Statement-Arts-and-Health-2024.pdf
Featuring: the gift of sensitivity, dog walks as prime moments to idea-conjure, well-being as skillset, rhyme or no rhyme, fish n’ chips, the transformational wisdom of young people, how reading poems aloud can feel like one thousand butterflies, the beauty of a teacher reminding students to watch the sunset, humour as survival tool, the life-altering experience of mentoring her daughter, loneliness, stage-dives onto bean bag piles, and how to stay human through it all.
Guest House
By Rumi
This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the sham, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
With forever gratitude to my brother, Tom Hall, for providing the opening/closing soundtrack.
This is a totally new venture for me: heaps to learn re: editing/audio.
Everything on that front I hope to improve, episode by episode.
Excited for the ride.
What did this episode bring up for you?
However small, brief, or transformational.
Share, comment, react.
Thank you for listening!
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