BOOKS – WORKSHOPS – PRESS – YOGA
Hi! Thanks for stopping by.
I am the author of Think Well and You’ll Be Right: Compassion, Mindfulness, and Other Refuges for Sustaining Hope in Today’s World.
I am currently writing another book about how our beliefs —and the behaviors that stem from them— shape our experience of time passing and how to age wisely, which has become my main concern these days. I live in Brussels with my partner and our two daughters.
As a journalist specializing in well-being and psychology, I have been a pioneer in bringing topics related to these fields to the front pages of Spanish-language media.
If I were to meet the genie in the lamp today, I’d wish for the end of the internet or, at least, the end of social media as we know it today. According to my calculations —completely unscientific but backed by the wisdom of intuition— the discomfort it causes outweighs the benefits. In the meantime, I invite you to visit my website, which offers information on the mindfulness and compassion workshops I teach in English.
BOOKS
THINK WELL AND YOU WILL BE RIGHT
Think Well and You’ll Be Right (Plataforma Editorial) is an intimate and inspiring story to sustain hope in the face of today’s challenges.
It may be that our most noble project is to alleviate our suffering and that of others. Or, at the very least, not to increase it. Compassion, understood as the courage to face difficulties with good temper and an open heart, could be the ideal strength to undertake this task. More and more scientific evidence points to it as a key element of a healthy mind.
Organizing the mind to work for us instead of against us involves, above all, understanding how it works, being able to identify what makes us happy, and not losing sight of the fact that the human brain, with strong biases toward the negative, has not evolved to face many of today’s challenges.
COMING SOON
Age is not what counts
What does age say about us? My next book, due out in 2026, is about mindful aging and relating more beneficially to growing older. Our beliefs, and the behaviors that stem from them, shape our experience of the passage of time.
READER TESTIMONIALS
Mertxe Eiguren
«Inspiring, very human, and practical. It has given me resources to manage my difficult emotions during times of uncertainty. A warm, intimate, and motivating experience to treat myself better and relate more healthily to others. Highly recommended!»
Irene Valverde
«This book will help you get to know yourself a little better, to love, respect, and accept yourself in a simple and conscious way. It’s an easy and enjoyable read. I would definitely recommend it as a reading book in schools, especially at the beginning of secondary school. A precious age full of questions about oneself and about life.»
Paula Andalo
«This is a text that is, above all, an excellent piece of journalistic investigation. It has one essential virtue in a book: it entertains. With its anecdotes, both historical and personal, with interesting, tragic, and humorous details, it makes it almost obligatory to turn the page until you reach the end. To look at ourselves and the world in a different way.»
WORKSHOPS
MENTAL HEALTH
MENTAL HEALTH FOR JOURNALISTS
I work with The Self-Investigation to offer mental health and wellness training for media professionals.
Learn to practice journalism sustainably, taking care of your mental health and enhancing emotional well-being.
Check the series of five guides around core topics for mental health in the newsroom:
COMPASSION CULTIVATION TRAINING
VITAMIN FOR THE MIND
The climate crisis, wars, social divisions, hate, loneliness, depression, the fragmentation of communities, burnout, and chronic stress can all be traced back to a lack of compassion on a large scale at the individual level. Yet, these issues also present opportunities to cultivate compassion.
Would you like to participate in a workshop to cultivate compassion?
MINDFULNESS
THE ART OF ATTENTION
Would you like to try a mindfulness workshop?
Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is a meditation-based therapy that can help reduce stress and manage anxiety and depression. It can also help people cope with chronic pain, illness, and other challenges.
“Meditation is an act of love for life and the mind.”
That’s what Jon Kabat-Zinn told me in this interview.
Can you count from 1 to 10 without your mind wandering? In this article, I explain what mindfulness is and why you should practice it.
You can read an interview with Alan Wallace here or this article about McMindfulness, or decaffeinated mindfulness.
MINDFULNESS
MINDFULNESS AND WRITING
Both writing and meditation are ways of expressing what we don’t yet know.
They help us develop presence, confidence, and the ability to find our own voice.
We view writing as an intimate refuge and a tool for internal dialogue, allowing us to discover, connect, and embrace what is present in our minds at this moment.
The change of perspective that writing offers (the ability to observe ourselves from the outside) also enhances creativity and the generation of ideas.
PRESS
ON THE MOVE
I was a San Francisco correspondent for the main Spanish news agency (Agencia EFE) for seven years. I’ve written for media outlets such as Univision Noticias, El País, Verne, and El Mundo.
Vuelta y vuelta on RTVE
The initial proposal was to write about the country I had left ten years earlier. I came to the same conclusion as many other returnees: if I were a foreigner, I would love Spain.
Later, I began writing about topics that interested me, such as meditation, yoga, and psychology. I did so until I came across China, which is where I've had the most fun writing ever. It's not every day that you get the chance to talk about mushrooms with eyes, men who dive into water at minus ten degrees, or what it really takes to learn Chinese.
‘Happiness Is Contagious’ is the article that introduced me to most people. I interviewed Phap Dung, a man who gave up his career as an architect to become a Zen Buddhist monk in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh.
The more job interviews I do, the less I like them. Stories about achievements, real or imagined, that one has to repeat over and over again. Overstatements and omissions. Questions about gaps in the curriculum, as if life could be contained in two pages. Sometimes I’m not sure where true life ends and interview life begins.
What if I told you that writing three pages a day, first thing in the morning, can work just as well as going to therapy?
YOGA
YOGA AS A REFUGE
Yoga is a natural antidote to anxiety and fear, as Ramiro Calle says in this interview. I have a 25-year love affair with yoga.
