Read our posts about Soul

21Mar

Culture Tip: The Pale Fox at Chisenhale Gallery

Camilla Nicholls

creativity, culture

Soul

The Pale Fox, the first UK solo exhibition of the French, New York-based artist Camille Henrot, is currently on show at Chisenhale Gallery a publicly funded space that garners awards and frequently punches above it’s weight in terms of its programming and outreach work with local communities. On the day I saw the show there had already been a visit by members of the East End Women’s Institute and the gallery was filled with comprehensively tall-haired students from Wimbledon College of Arts. Henrot was awarded the Silver Lion for most promising artist at the Venice...
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14Mar

Culture Tip: The Book of Mormon

Claudine Levy

culture

Soul

The next morning my cheeks are aching. A solid two and a half hours of smiling is hard to beat, and that’s exactly what The Book of Mormon induced in me. From the makers of South Park, the musical charts the progress of Elder Cunningham and Elder Price, two Mormon missionaries sent to Uganda on a divine quest to baptise as many people as possible. It simply feels gloriously unacceptable.  This musical is camper than a Carry On film, and so self-aware it almost hurts. It would be easy to piously reject jokes about rape, racism and Aids, but once you embrace the...
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14Mar

Knitting Therapy

Rin Hamburgh

creativity, stress, therapy, wellbeing

Soul

Knitting therapy: relaxing, stress relieving, meditative, productive.
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11Mar

Self-Soothing: Coping with Stress

Gerrilyn Smith

anxiety, counselling, emotions, stress, therapy

Soul

How to use breath to help regulate your emotions, and soothe your self
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11Mar

My Mad Fat Diary: Journals as Therapy

Wendy Varley

creativity, family, therapy, TV

Soul

It doesn't matter in which decade you were an adolescent, My Mad Fat Diary will resonate. It's dark, funny, touching and painfully true. I was never fat (though I thought I was, agonising over my weight when it crept over – shock horror! – 9st) and never mad (though it's jarring to re-read my diaries and see the young me passing off casual mention of suicidal thoughts as "nervous tension"), but watching this programme is a sweet agony. It transports me right back to those teenage years of acute self-consciousness and vulnerability when binge-eating followed by...
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07Mar

Are Role Models Useful to Women?

Terri Apter

career, success, university, women

Soul

Do women need role models to help them achieve more?
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04Mar

Discovering Vedic Meditation

Nick Duerden

meditation

Soul

It's early on a Thursday evening, and I'm standing alongside a man I have just met, Will Williams, in his smart Shad Thames apartment. We are in front of a photograph of Guru Dev, one of the masters of the Vedic tradition, and Will has his eyes closed while singing something in Sanskrit and offering the gifts I was encouraged to bring - three pieces of fruit, a bunch of thornless flowers - to the guru. As he sings, I steel a glance at Will. His eyes are closed, and he looks utterly serene. Will himself does not resemble what we in the west think of as a "guru". He is...
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27Feb

Musical Meditation: Discovering LifeFlow

Nick Duerden

meditation, music

Soul

A few months ago now, I came across an audio meditation practice called LifeFlow, the conjoining of the two words presumably designed to illustrate the effortless link that should exist within all of us in the ideal world we all wish to inhabit. "You can allow this scientifically proven audio technology to bring your whole life into perfect harmony and feel peace of mind today!" read the aggressively motivational website blurb, employing, as these things invariably do, a proliferation of exclamation marks in pursuit of blanket persuasion. "YES!" it went on in...
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21Feb

Culture Tip: Her

Louise Chunn

films

Soul

A charming film, Her imagines a man falling in love with a computer operating system
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21Feb

The Top Five Regrets of the Dying

Susie Steiner

emotions, psychology

Soul

So there I was, on a miserable February morning, watching the rain dribble down the windows of the Guardian offices at Kings Place, searching for stories for the feature pages, when I came upon a website belonging to an Australian palliative nurse who had written a fascinating survey. Bronnie Ware had asked her dying patients about their greatest regrets in life and had condensed their wisdom down to produce The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. I read it hungrily, for perspective, for comfort, as anyone would. The features editors weren’t interested in it for...
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