Peace in a Pod

Straight out of the gates, I will hold my hands up and acknowledge that the phrase ‘main character energy’ sounds kind of ridiculous and feels very Gen Z, trendy, and abstract - saying something but nothing at the same time. But the wider concept of feeling like the ‘main character’ in your life - in other words, valuing yourself and honouring your power and worth - is something that really resonates with me, and has helped me gain perspective on issues that have cropped up and caused me pain. My learnings on this particular topic stem from a situation that happened in the last year which had me feeling really down, anxious, and insecure in myself. It dogged my thoughts for months - sometimes it was all I could do not to ruminate on it all day. It was the first thing I thought of every morning, like a thick, grey cloud that settled over my head for the day and never left; the sun might peep through here and there in flashes but that was it. Overall, life was gloomy and I didn’t allow ...

Judging by the title of this blog post, you may be forgiven for thinking that I have lost all concept of time in this lockdown and that a Halloween-related essay is about to unfold before your eyes. But sadly, readers, the reality is that ghosting is an all-year-round occurrence, and is something that has particularly piqued my interest as I meander down the road of self-discovery. As spooky and unexplainable a phenomenon as the Loch Ness Monster and UFOs? Or just an escape tactic we grasp for when we feel like our backs are to the wall? Let’s explore. A definition of ghosting is as follows: “abruptly cutting off contact with someone without giving that person any warning or explanation for doing so” (Gould, 2020). While the term is associated nowadays with the cessation of online or over-the-phone communication, the actuality of up and disappearing out of a relationship like a fart in the wind has always happened - I refer you to cinematic and real-life stories of husbands or wives wh...

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...

I would like to start off this blog post by redefining the meaning of the phrase ‘self-help books’. Before I began ambling down this path of enlightenment, I would hear the above and think (ignorantly) “Self-help? That’s only for people with a mental problem” or “Only someone desperate and helpless would buy a self-help book”. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in having such flawed assumptions. In Ireland especially, we have quite a poor and twisted view of mental health and ill-health - a ‘shut-up-and-put-up’ culture has pervaded this country and especially the generations who grew up in an acutely Catholic society. Fast forward to 2020 where, in the last 5 years, the country has passed a marriage equality referendum as well as another concerning reproductive rights, and things look slightly better. So call them what you want - whether it’s self-help books, or personal development literature, or whatever - turning up for yourself and your mind is no longer considered a silly, fruity idea. Infac...

I think one of the most simultaneously hilarious and stupid things we have done as a society is create a taboo around mental health. We do this bizarre thing where we all struggle in private and pretend to everyone else, who is also struggling in private to further or lesser degrees, that we are managing perfectly fine. We have the audacity to think that our problems are unique and that it is utterly pointless to talk to anyone about them, and that is assuming we even realise we are having problems at all. The prevalence of social media platforms like Instagram that only show the highlight reel have definitely ramped this up too. ‘I am the only person who is stressed, who feels sad, who feels lonely, who feels less than.’ Before I became turned on to the idea of self-help at the end of last year, it seems crazy to think that I just ambled through life completely unaware of the fact that I have thoughts and feelings and values and anxieties that can all be actively reflected upon and qu...

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...

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...

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 ...