Peace in a Pod

(I am crawling out of the void to come at you with a piece that dawned on me today while I was working out - cue me pausing mid-glute-bridge to type furiously in my Notes app. The main idea I want to put across here is how empowering exercising feels, and why meaningful movement of any and every kind needs to be a priority for all of us.) ‘Meaningful movement’ is how I’ve recently begun rebranding ‘exercise’. While all of us come to fitness with different experiences, feelings, and self-perceptions, as long as you schedule different types of meaningful movement throughout the week, job’s a good’un. Think of it like making an appointment for future you. Movement for me varies between traditional weight-bearing gym workouts, 20-minute HIIT sessions in the comfort of my apartment, yoga, a stroll outdoors, an incline walk or run on a treadmill, or a cycle. Living in the desert means that outdoor exercise, for me anyway, occurs between October and May, as anything outside of that is just u...

I am taking inspiration for this week’s blog from the 140km of cycling I somehow managed to put up this week (yes, yes, I know, hold the applause, please). This included the Limerick Greenway, from Barna to Rathkeale, and the entirety of the Waterford Greenway - both of which I would highly recommend for your summer staycations as they are flat for the most part and have many scenic stops along the way as well as an abundance of amenities. The weather was dry for all 3 of my days out, bordering on hot at times, but overall the cycling was enjoyable and manageable. There were moments, however, where the going got tough - mainly, dealing with that chronic ache that slowly develops in your behind from sitting on an uncomfortable piece of rubber for 6 hours on end, as well as battling the heat of the last few days, something to which we Irish are sadly not acclimatised.  Coping with these physical discomforts was made a lot easier, mind you, by employing some of the mindfulness and gra...

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...

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 ...

2020 isn’t over yet so I feel dissuaded from saying anything definite and final about it. The universe still has 4 weeks to Punk us before calling it a day. But if there is anything at all I can say about this year, it is that, so far, it has been a teacher, and a harsh mistress at that. Among the many lessons in which it schooled me, probably the biggest and most important one was in regards to control: having control, not having control, the anxiety linked to things being outside my control, and basically how to manage it all before I am eaten alive. From a young age, I relished the feeling being in control gave me. I am the eldest of four, so usually for my brother and sisters it was my way or the proverbial highway. I was in charge, I picked the games we played, I determined how long we would engage in each activity before I decided I was bored and we were all going to do something different instead, I wrote the Santa letters because my younger siblings’ spelling and grammar were n...

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...