Peace in a Pod

Meditation sounds like a fluffy word. It sounds like it doesn’t mean anything. It seems too simple to have any real power. The idea that listening to your breath, and training the mind to focus on just that, is meant to be beneficial to us in a number of ways sounds crazy. It’s just too vague, too hippy-dippy, too… straightforward? Okay, so maybe you aren’t totally allergic to the idea of meditation. You’re open to it, but finding the time to do it is just proving difficult. My hope is that, having read through this blog post and my having shared with you both my personal experience with meditation as well as what the science says, you will be willing to invest the time in yourself and in your quality of life. The first major thing I noticed in my life when I started to meditate was how much it reduced my stress , which is a known benefit of mindfulness (Goyal et al., 2014). Speaking as someone whose thoughts can spiral to towering infernos, this benefit alone is life-changing. I parti...

(This blog post is a bit different to what has come before. It is intended as a light-hearted, conversational piece that I only thought of putting together in the moment. I am not trying to persuade or dissuade here, merely just reacting to a novel experience I had at the weekend that I wanted to share. Hope you enjoy.) About midway through October, it came to my attention that a full moon would fall on Halloween night, for the first time in something like 76 years. Not only that, my sister Méabh told me, but it would also be a blue moon - the second time in a calendar month that a full moon would occur. A few months back, I remembered Méabh talking about things like cosmic orderings and how she and her friends had done one, and she felt forces in her life work for the better in the aftermath. Now I for one am not about mysticism or astrology or any of that - there is certainly a bit of fun in it, for sure, but I would be skeptical about the validity of its claims. However, I do think ...