Peace in a Pod

Right now in Ireland we are going through a national heatwave (highs of 28-29°C , y'all!!) and there is room in people’s minds for little else. All we can think about is nabbing the perfect spot at the beach, devouring our ice-creams before they melt, and being sure to lather on enough factor 50 to protect our delicate skin. We’re stressed out from it all, but at the same time, we love it. Therefore, it felt right to dedicate this week’s blog post to the sunshine and the impact it can have on our mood. Let me be the first to say that I low-key can’t cope with the fact that I am writing about the weather. This is literally the stuff of small-talk parody, and no-one is more aware of that than me. Having said that, I for one have always felt a deep emotional connection to balmy weather as it brings back the best memories: family days out at the beach as a child making sandcastle villages (yes, villages - the Trenchs were extra), holidays in France biking around the countryside and can...

Let me acknowledge from the outset that not being able to travel nationally or internationally is by no means the greatest fallout of COVID-19. I think that much is obvious but I feel the need to say it nonetheless. Having said that, pre-pandemic when life got rough or it was all a bit too much, we always had the excitement of a holiday to look forward to, whether that was a weekend break away here in Ireland or a longer stint somewhere further afield.  Despite making use of the lockdown to read, meditate, spend time more productively and, of course, make banana bread, I long for the high-energy adrenaline rush that comes with air travel. There’s the paranoia of going through airport security: grappling for the <100ml liquids to squish into the plastic bag, or entertaining the irrational thoughts that, despite having never taken Class A drugs in my life, the X-ray machine may somehow find traces of cocaine in my luggage. Not forgetting the thrill of eating a dinner on an airborn...

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...