Peace in a Pod

This week we welcome a new month (perfectly rectangular, in case you hadn’t seen the memes) and a new season too, one usually linked with birth and beginning, and a shaking off of the winter cobwebs. If I could convince you to start any new habit this Spring, it is that of meditation. I have spoken about it on this platform before, from what it actually entails to some of the many benefits it reaps. My own mindfulness practice really came to fruition when I decided to download Headspace 14 months ago. I don’t exactly remember how I had come to hear about it - maybe I saw ads for it on social media - but I am so glad I took the plunge and got it because I truly feel that having a structured meditation practice via the Headspace app has helped me weather the stress of everything over the last year. So stick with me for the next few minutes for a little review of the app (which has a 2-week free trial btw - you’ve been told from the outset). Headspace was founded back in 2010 by two guy...

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...

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...