Peace in a Pod

The 21st century human is, by nature, a lazy article. We have access to all the information that has ever existed at the touch of a button. We can order food, products and services straight to our door without ever leaving the house. It seems all we have to do these days is turn up, no effort needed. In an age where technology assists us so much in our day-to-day lives, it can be very easy and very tempting to take the foot off the pedal, to procrastinate, to become demotivated, to think ‘everything’s fine the way it is, and even if it’s not fine… meh’. Our parents and grandparents had none of that, no smartphones or computers, no central vacuum systems, no fancy kitchen appliances for spiralising or what have you; they just got shit done. And they didn’t complain about it either. Watching ‘Reeling in the Years’ and ‘The Way We Were’ with my parents these last few weeks has truly hammered it home for me how easy we have it nowadays in certain aspects of life and work. So why are we so ...

Making a conscious decision to work on yourself and to commit to personal growth is an epiphany. It feels like you’ve been born again. It feels like a veil has been lifted and you can finally see clearly. And, unfortunately, one of the first things you see is just how unevolved and ignorant other people are, and how poorly they are handling life, whether they are aware of it or not. I realise how snobby and callous that sounds, but I mean it purely in a humorous sense and not disparagingly. Those of us who have chosen to be more proactive in how we live are by no means experts, nor are we even necessarily happier. But it is annoying to be a reflective person amid those who live more passively, and at times it can actually be quite disheartening too. I heard an opinion somewhere along the line (can’t remember where) that people go to therapy to deal with people in their lives who won’t go to therapy. Now, whether therapy is part of your self-help journey or not, the principle still stan...

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 ...

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 ...

Since this is the first proper, deep-dive blog post on here, I figured it should be centred on a concept I will come to refer to time and time again, a basic principle that I want you to understand, so that if, for whatever reason, you choose not to continue this journey with me, you at least have this one building block that may hopefully serve you. So in the end, I decided to go with that exact idea: the building blocks of our mind - thoughts. If there is anything that baffles me about the human psyche, it is the notion of having thoughts, and the idea that, for vast quantities of our lives, we are totally inept at dealing with these thoughts. For me, identifying and grappling with my thoughts has brought me copious amounts of peace, even though it may not have seemed like it in the moment. “Damn, these jeans got me looking snatched today, only weak for myself so I am.” “Nope, she hates me, she ABSOLUTELY hates me, I’ve really put my foot in it now.” “Not a hope am I going in there ...