Peace in a Pod

Don’t give me that look. I know the one. When you hear the word ‘meditation’ and straight away images of dreadlocked, baggy-pantsed, incense-burning hippies singing ‘Kumbaya’ come to mind. While the idea of meditation or mindfulness seems very new and trendy (especially to the Irish), it has been around for thousands of years, playing a huge part in Eastern religions. Having said that, you don’t need to be a Buddhist monk on a mountaintop to be able to meditate; cultivating your own mindfulness practice is actually easier and more accessible now than ever before. I would like to preface this post by informing the reader that this here is merely an introduction to meditation ( my understanding of it anyway), and will not address its every facet. I felt I needed to do a series of blog posts around the concept of meditation and mindfulness because to try to condense it all into one would be like trying to put the ocean in a glass. The Cambridge dictionary definition of meditation forms a...

For me, peace is everything. It is the overarching principle after which this whole blog of mine is named, after all. So much so, that I use peace as a yardstick for measuring how my day went: did I have peace in abundance? Or was I missing it? Peace is out there for us all, it is comforting, and it is needed, if we are to make our way successfully on this earth. Before we venture any further down this road, we must agree on a definition of peace. I do not mean it to describe the interim between war, the down-time where all seems calm, on the surface, tension bubbling like stew underneath. My understanding of peace is one of a deep-rooted sense of contentment - a feeling of safety, like an impenetrable bubble. Not bliss per se: bliss is fleeting, and the idea of it, in my mind, is one that does not coexist with life’s troughs, only its peaks, and even the most naive of us knows that that is not how life goes. Where light is shone, shadows are cast. And that’s just simple physics. Peace...

Generally, in life, a simple problem requires a more or less simple solution. Nothing in the fridge for dinner? Go food-shopping or order takeaway. Device about to die but you're not done using it? Plug it in to charge. The time and energy put into solving small problems are usually in small quantities themselves. Similarly, to solve an immense problem, we feel, requires an immense amount of resources. Manpower, money, and a monopoly on time - nothing less. We throw all including the kitchen sink at whatever tantamount issue faces us, because we have learned subconsciously that if we are presented with a big problem, our response needs to match in size and weight. But what if I told you that one of life’s biggest and scariest threats - the threat being that of a meaningless life - could not be solved, but, at least, eked away at, with the simplest of solutions? I remember hearing it years ago, probably in my teens, and scoffing, if even. I was not the most self-aware adolescent to ...

My post last week addressed thoughts, the building blocks of our day-to-day lives. We have thoughts relating to our work, we think about goings-on in our personal lives, we mull over whatever is happening to the characters in the Netflix series we are currently binging… and as I stated in that same post, no thought is bland; each comes with a flavour. For the most part, thoughts are either positively or negatively spiked. The residue they leave upon us has us feeling a certain way in the immediate aftermath, sometimes for the rest of the day, or the week. Insofar as it is possible, we each need to make it our business to ensure that our positively seasoned thoughts leave a stronger imprint on us and our psyche than their negative counterparts. For the purpose of this post, we will have to dwell a little bit on the concept of negativity in order to better understand it. A definition of negativity provided by Psychology Today denotes it as “a pessimistic attitude that always expects the ...