All posts by Barry Daniel

About Barry Daniel

I live in the Lake District in the UK where I run a guesthouse with my partner Kate and my cat Manuel. I enjoy painting, hillwalking, reading, visiting and entertaining friends, T’ai Chi and playing the guitar. I’m engaged to a certain degree in the local community, as a volunteer with Samaritans and I’m a fairly active member of the local Green party. I’ve had a relatively intuitive sense of the Middle Way most of my adult life but it found a greater articulation and a practical direction through joining the society. It’s also been interesting and great fun engaging with other people with a similar outlook. My main contribution to the society is conducting the podcast interviews, something that gives me a lot of satisfaction and that I’ve learnt a lot from.

The MWS Podcast 146: Katherine Weare on Happy Teachers Change the World

Education, Meditation, Podcast

Our guest today is Katherine Weare who is Emeritus Professor at the University of Exeter where she is working to develop and evaluate mindfulness in schools programs. Katherine is a dedicated mindfulness practitioner herself as well as a qualified mindfulness teacher. Her overall field is social and emotional learning and mental health and wellbeing in schools. She is known as an international expert on evidence-based practice and has conducted several definitive reviews and led programmes which have informed policy and practice in many countries. She is the author of several books including Promoting Mental, Emotional and Social Health: A Whole School Approach, Developing the Emotionally Literate School and most recently Happy Teachers Change the World: A Guide for Cultivating Mindfulness in Education which she co-wrote with Thich Nhat Hanh! and will be the topic of our discussion today

MWS Podcast 146: Katherine Weare as audio only:

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The MWS Podcast 145: George Monbiot on Rewilding

Activism, Books, Climate Change, Podcast, ,

Today’s guest is the British environmental writer and political activist George Monbiot. George writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000) and Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (2013). He will be discussing the topic of rewilding with the chair of the Middle Way Society, the philosopher Robert M Ellis.

MWS Podcast 145: George Monbiot as audio only:

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The MWS Podcast 144: Simon Bell on Tribalism and Prejudice

Books, Podcast,

Our guest today is Simon Bell. Simon is a retired mental health nurse who spent 37 years working in the National Health Service in the U.K. For 22 years he dealt solely with suspects, defendants and offenders from the time of their arrest until the point when criminal proceedings took place. He dealt with most types of offending behaviour and over the course of his career was involved in assessing and caring for several thousand offenders and victims of crime. His passion for history goes back to childhood; his passion for the Holocaust has its origins in being involved with the care of survivors of Nazi brutality whom he met during his early days in mental health car. He’s the author of ‘Auschwitz-Birkenau – From Hell to Hope’ and ‘Tribalism and Prejudice – The Far-Right and Lessons From History which will be the topic of our discussion today.

MWS Podcast 144: Simon Bell as audio only:

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The MWS Podcast 143: Maryanne Wolf on the reading brain in a digital world

Books, Literature, Podcast, The Arts,

My guest today is Maryanne Wolf. Maryanne is the John Dibiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service and Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research. She is an expert on the neurological underpinnings of reading, language, and dyslexia. She is also the author of numerous scientific publications as well as two books written for the general public: ‘Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain’, which has been translated into 10 languages, and her latest book ‘Reader Come Home: The reading brain in a digital world which will be the topic of our discussion today.

MWS Podcast 143: Maryanne Wolf as audio only:

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The MWS Podcast 142: Jeremy Sherman on the origin of striving

Books, Meaning, Science,

Our guest today is Jeremy Sherman. Jeremy is a decision theorist researching and writing about choice from the origin of life to everyday living. He teaches college courses across the social sciences and blogs for Psychology Today. He’s here to talk to us about his latest book Neither Ghost nor Machine in which he distils for a general audience the theory developed by renowned neuroscientist Terrence Deacon that extends the breakthrough constraint-based insight that inspired evolutionary, information, and self-organization theory. He argues that emergent dynamics theory provides a testable hypothesis for how mattering arose from matter, function from physics, and means-to-ends behavior from cause-and-effect dynamics. In effect that what this offers, is a physics of purpose and can make science safe for value, We’ll also talk about how this all might relate to the Middle Way



MWS Podcast 142: Jeremy Sherman as audio only:
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