Peace in a Pod

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...

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...