Blue Mountains Counselling & Hynotherapy. Lesley Loughnan

05/11/2026

31/10/2026

Grief isn't just something we feel emotionally – it can also be something we carry physically. 💔

Have you ever noticed how grief can show up as tension in your shoulders, a heaviness in your chest, exhaustion, or a feeling of being overwhelmed?

This Sunday, join Bernadette Arena for a compassionate and insightful Quest Connect conversation exploring "How Grief Sits in the Body".

🧘‍♀️ Together, we'll explore the connection between grief and our physical wellbeing, and how bringing gentle awareness and compassion to our experiences can support us as we navigate loss.

Grief is deeply personal, and there is no right or wrong way to experience it. Sometimes, simply understanding what we're feeling can help us meet ourselves with greater kindness.

📅 When: Sunday, 1 November
🕑 Time: 2:00 – 3:00pm AEST
📍 Where: Petrea King & Quest for Life Foundation page

We’d love you to join us and be part of this supportive community. 💜

30/10/2026

Vex King

30/10/2026

Loneliness is very much an expression of our ego consciousness. Because who is lonely? “I” am lonely! I mean, if you were in the state of Rigpa, then there would be no loneliness, because you recognise your interconnection with everything! So then, who is there to be lonely? Only our ego, which wants to be connected but is not connected, because it is so caught up in itself!

When we think with our ego, then we think that others are going to supply to me the happiness which I lack by myself! So, we feel sad to be alone, because we don’t recognise that the source of genuine happiness is already abundantly within us! Therefore, we give that ego mind lots of love. I mean, we cannot overcome our ego by beating it up or denying it. So we don’t resent it, but make friends with it: “Oh, you are feeling lonely, I am so sorry, what’s your problem?” Talk to it, be nice to it.

The Buddha said to give love to ourselves, give loving-kindness to ourselves: may I be well and happy, may I be free of suffering. Make friends with yourself, be your best friend! If you are best friends with yourself, you will never be lonely. That’s why the Buddha said to practise Metta, that is the start.

- Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

Photo: In the temple of Gatsal Ling Nunnery, 2026

28/10/2026

COURAGE

is a word that tempts us to think outwardly, to run bravely against opposing fire, to do something under besieging circumstance, and perhaps, above all, to be seen to do it in public, to show courage: to be celebrated in story, rewarded with medals, given the accolade. But a look at its linguistic origins is to look in a more interior direction, and toward its original template, the old Norman French coeur, or heart.

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything, except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on – and always has begged us on. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.

The French philosopher Camus used to tell himself quietly to live to the point of tears, not as a call for maudlin sentimentality, but as an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging, and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart at a fundamental level. It is a fundamental dynamic of human incarnation to be moved by what we feel, as if surprised by the actuality and privilege of love and affection and its possible loss. Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.

From the inside, it can feel like confusion; only slowly do we learn what we really care about, and allow our outer life to be realigned in that gravitational pull. With maturity, that robust vulnerability comes to feel like the only necessary way forward, the only real invitation, and the surest, safest ground from which to step. On the inside we come to know who and what and how we love and what we can do to deepen that love; only from the outside, and only by looking back, does it look like courage.

‘Courage’
in “CONSOLATIONS:
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.”
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2014