Who am I when I say, "I am"? It’s a question that has haunted philosophy, psychology, and mysticism for centuries. In both Eastern and Western traditions, from Descartes' cogito to the Buddhist doctrine of anatta, the self is an elusive, shifting thing—something we claim to know intimately and yet cannot quite pin down. It is both embodied and relational, constructed yet felt, solid in our experience but conceptually slippery.

This is a manifesto of sorts. You’ll probably disagree with much of it, maybe even get angry. I ask you to read it with an open mind if possible and name your objections with thought and evidence.

I know you’re familiar with yoga but what you may not know is that all that stretching and twisting and bendy people doing impossible things is just one kind and not even one of the major ones in the history of the whole thing. The posture form of yoga that’s familiar to you is no more than 150 years old — far from the ancient magic that some people try to claim it is. Yoga itself, as an art form, does go back centuries though. I’m going to tell you about some of the other forms and clear up some misunderstandings. First I want to tell you about Karma Yoga. The first thing you need to know about Karma Yoga is what the word means. You’ve probably heard people talk about good and bad karma, like it’s some magic tally that tracks how good or bad you are and gives out punishment and rewards. It isn’t that. How could it be? How could the bad things that billionaires do lead to private jets and caviar when all the times you looked after your granny and said please and thank you, led to not being able to afford eggs or electric? Money isn’t everything but if you don’t believe in eternal rewards and punishments like heaven and hell, how could karma work? Karma doesn’t really mean any of that. Karma is a Sanskrit word, Sanskrit is the ancient language of India, and it simply means ACTION. Karma Yoga is the yoga of what you do.

The one thing that I hear more than anything else about yoga is “I’m not stretchy enough to do Yoga”. It’s a little like cancelling your first driving lesson because you’ve never operated a car. It’s sort of the point. Likewise, you might hear people say they won’t meditate because they can’t concentrate. Some people don’t cook dinner because they are too hungry and then starve.

It’s almost unbelievable that yoga has reached every shore of every continent (I’m guessing that someone has done something vaguely yogic on Antarctica). At its core it has such a specific point of view, such a cultural base that puts it at odds with every other way of making sense of reality, that it should be rejected along with forest gods, trepanning, and human sacrifice. Yet in studios, homes, beaches, ashrams, health centres, doctor’s surgeries, schools and prisons, people are pulling out the mat, taking a breath, and attempting to bend their legs into pretzels.

Do you ever stop to wonder why you started your journey to a ‘better’ you? In the end, it doesn’t really matter - you’re doing what you’re driven to do - but sometimes some reflection can help you reach your goals, focus your attention and - absolutely the most importantly - pursue things for the right reasons.

Mindfulness is one of the most abused terms in the English language at the moment and the massive gap between its study, the media and the claims of some of its practitioners is yawning ever more widely.

All the way back at the dawn of time, the gods came together to review their latest creation. And they weren’t all happy; not in the least.

‘Now’ is important for a number of reasons in the science of understanding yourself as its the only thing we ever have some access to. We interpret the data from our immediate environment through our senses in almost real time and fill in the gaps as we need to, creating a fairly representative picture of what’s going on around us. That really is the absolute limit of our environmental ‘knowledge’ and even that can be unreliable or interpreted incorrectly. It’s true that one of the major reasons for collecting all this ‘now’ data is to predict the future, so that if you see a ball flying towards your head, it’s probably a good idea to duck as the prediction is that it could bloody hurt if it makes connection with your cranium.

Here’s a little story about the dangers of believing too strongly in your own myth.

The Buddha once asked that very question and the answer he came with is very interesting to those who want to raise their consciousness or understand their own mind. Mindfulness, whether you believe it’s a quick-cash-cow or a serious spiritual business (a contradiction in terms!) is, on the whole, pretty effective. It’s also widely misunderstood as a proxy for meditation. Sometimes meditation is the opposite – it is the very mindLESSness of it that has the impact. Of course these are all metaphors anyway, and the reality is a lot more complex than that. If you really want me to write a post about transient hypofrontality theory then please do ask….

The world is full of the well-meaning and increasingly, people are so militant about what’s helpful that they end up as discriminatory, as aggressive, as pernicious as the thing they swore to destroy. Sometimes its hilariously obvious, such as when people present ideas like everyone is equal and deserves love care and support, EXCEPT YOU, YOU FASCIST/LEFTIE. Other times its a little more subtle like in the very words we use. Here are three that I think are particularly wrong-minded but no doubt you’ll know many more. My purpose here is not to mock the intentions of people that want to support others but to get us all to think about the day to day language we use and what lies beneath it.

Some people seem to thrive on conflict, seeking it in the tiniest of causes, heaping on catalysts like vodka on a bonfire. Others make a big thing of despising it, preferring to spread it out over time passively and with sniffy comments. Any extreme is always questionable in managing relationships so some sort of sliding scale between the two can have an enormous impact on your social skills and personal outcomes. Those that thrive on conflict tend to make things worse, those that despise it, ultimately do the same thing. The same reaction every time can equally land poor results so a context specific approach to managing difficult moments in your personal relationships is the order of the day. Here are 6 questions to ask yourself that will help you manage conflict on the fly and get the right result without dragging it out.

There’s an important question that both capitalism and socialism have tried to answer, and that is the question of what to do the great bodies of people who, for whatever reason, have less than others. Answers have ranged between make that demographic disappear by equalling out the wealth to fuck ’em, it’s their fault for not working hard enough. The trouble with the latter answer, even if you’re a stone-cold Victorian mill owner or a fancy French la-di-dah lord, and leaving aside the clear fact that poverty is inherited in exactly the same way as wealth, is that the poor don’t much care for being poor and the turning wheel of revolution just a-keeps on spinning.

Happiness: it’s a multi-billion pound industry and it’s held up as everything from the cure for cancer to the reason for being alive. We go on courses, read books, strive and fight and compete and struggle and no matter what we possess, whatever we win, no matter how far we come in life, if we don’t possess it, we see ourselves as failures. Happiness itself dominates the news, not because we all have it but because it’s seen as the opposite of what the media shoves down our gagging throats on a daily basis: we are all anxious, depressed, repressed victims and we need to do something about it for ourselves, so the news, social media and society tells us.

Making educated guesses about people so that we can predict their behaviour is one of the most important things we do as social animals. Even something as tiny as having visible pupils on white backgrounds in our eyes give humans an advantage over other creatures. If I’m sizing you up for fighting or fun for example I want to know if, and perhaps more importantly how, you’re looking at me. If it were all that simple though, we’d all be Derren Brown with our ability to 100% understand each other. Imagine that world!

Stop. Flip apps and set an alarm. It should go off the next time you’re in a social situation and remind you that you should take 30 short seconds to pause, breath and take a look around you. You’ll see the faces and postures of the social group, you’ll see conversation, you’ll see gestures and you’ll see people who seem secure and confident dominating those who seem nervous and meek. What if there was a way that you could simply and easily make sense of all this data? With practice there is, and playing cards can help you.

In every situation we have our own unique view. We make an interpretation of every event, every human, every interaction based on the angle with which we view it. Not in a literal sense of course. If we don’t like what someone’s saying, it doesn’t do much good to slip round the side and try it from there. They don’t like it when you do that. Your brain has an angle, a viewpoint, a level, and it’s that performance we watch, not anyone else’s – and here’s the thing – your angle might differ radically from the directors.

Keep writing. Keep going. Keep doing what you set out to do, despite the little voice, the tinge of fear, despite the agony of putting yourself on the line. Write faster than your fears can follow because it’s the only way to finish.