Even though there is a lot of talk and research about the benefits of daily meditation, I just could never get into it. I’ve tried over the years and never really got much benefit from it. I even experimented with different approaches, such as yoga, but it still wouldn’t click for me.
What I realised is that sometimes we struggle when trying to integrate practices that don’t quite fit our own cultural instincts. While Eastern practices work well for many people, they never felt natural or culturally intuitive to me. For me, it felt more meaningful to look toward the traditions rooted in my own landscape.
So what might that look like here on the western fringes of Europe?
The Celts weren’t inside temples practising inward stillness; they were outside, engaging in relational, nature-immersed, and ritual forms of contemplation. Some examples would be: hiking alone through wild landscapes, seasonal reflection (think St. Brigid’s Day or Imbolc), storytelling circles, pilgrimage walks, chanting or singing traditions and I love most of these things. I’m not sure about the chanting or singing though, but I do enjoy listening to ancient Celtic music (check out Fianna Bán music for a taste).
For me, practising mindfulness, not just in nature but in ordinary daily life, is where I’m at. I want to feel grounded in the traditions of my ancestors.
Recently, running has become my daily meditation. I’ll probably write a separate post about what meditative running feels like for me. I’ve also shifted my focus from training for road races to trail running, which feels like an entirely different experience.
On Friday evening I packed my running bag to head for Co. Offaly to take part in a 10k night trail run in the Slieve Bloom mountains. I was waiting for my partner to get home so I could take her car. It was a two-hour drive, and I couldn’t be bothered disconnecting her phone from the Bluetooth and pairing mine just for Google Maps. Instead, I looked up the directions to the event on my computer and wrote down three simple directions in my notebook:
Follow the N52 southwest to the ring road around Tullamore.
At the roundabout surrounded by trees, turn south onto the R421.
At the end of that road, turn right and the event will be about 10km somewhere on the left.
They were so simple I probably didn’t even need to write them down, you could easily memorise them. Have we forgotten how to do the simple things because of our smartphones?
Driving without navigation felt surprisingly good. I became more mindful of what I was doing and I paid more attention to where I actually was. It reminded me of travelling around Ireland years ago before smartphones existed, and I don’t remember ever getting lost back then. I didn’t get lost this time either. I arrived in perfect time.
It wouldn’t have been that difficult to connect my phone, but it seems to be a knee-jerk reaction these days, this sense that we need our phones for everything. I’ve noticed that the more connected I feel to nature, the less tolerant I am of technology. Interestingly, there’s research to support that: time in nature improves mental health which had a knock on effect of reduced smartphone use without people even trying to cut back on screentime.
After registering and warming up, I lined up at the start. Nobody really knew the course, apparently the organisers like to keep it secret. We were told simply to follow the flashing LED lights along the trail, while marshals guided us at the junctions.
And then we were off.
The first kilometre was a bottleneck. The trail was narrow, though it soon widened out. A runner behind me slipped and fell, taking two others with him. I stopped briefly to check they were okay. He was quickly back on his feet and was soon running beside me but he kept sliding around. I noticed he wasn’t wearing trail shoes, just road runners, so I slowed down to put some distance between us before he took me out too.
Then I realised I’d started too fast. My heart was pounding and my breathing was starting to go out of control on the climb. In the darkness and surrounded by forestry I had no sense of where the hills began or ended, so I walked for a bit and let my breathing settle.
I decided to let my breath guide me.
As I started to run again, I counted, four steps for the inhale and then four steps for the exhale. If I needed more breaths than this I’d stop running and walk a bit.
Instead of watching a pace on my watch, I let my body set the rhythm. That felt right. This was mindfulness in motion. Mindfulness in active movement could be defined as the practice of maintaining non-judgmental, present-moment awareness of the body, breath, and surroundings while in motion fostering a deep mind-body connection to enhance both mental clarity and physical performance.
After a while, someone behind me began matching my pace. When I ran, they ran, when I walked, they walked. Eventually they said, “Hope you don’t mind me using you as a pacer, you’re making good pace up this hill.”
“I’m just looking forward to the top, do you know where that is?” I replied.
“Five and a half kilometres in, then it’s all downhill,” was the reply.
Just after the 5km marker, the trail turned right and the downhill began. My companion sprinted off like a greyhound and I was suddenly playing catch-up.
The downhill was fast but rocky and slippery in places. I had a good headlight but every time I breathed out a heavy fog formed from the condensation of my breath, which combined with the beam from my headlight made me momentarily blind to the trail beneath me. My arms lifted out sideways for balance rather than pumping forward and back like a locomotive. I slipped and skidded here and there, and stumbled over the odd rock, but I never lost my nerve.
It felt like being a kid again.
This is what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called ‘Flow’. Flow is not mindfulness but rather a state where skill and challenge are evenly matched, attention narrows, self-consciousness fades, and you’re fully absorbed in what you’re doing.
You don’t need to be running to find flow. It can happen anytime you’re deeply engaged, for example: a digger driver becoming one with the machine, a chef preparing a meals in a busy restaurant, a dancer performing on stage, you get the idea. It comes from learning a skill and that skill becoming second nature to you, and it feels good.
I never caught up with my uphill companion but I still crossed the finished line in good time, and I later learned that out of the 240 entrants, I finished in 69th place, not bad for a forty something year old. The endorphin’s, or the runners high as they call it, soon kicked in. Even four days later as I write this, that high is still there, and that’s why we do this. My next trail run is in three weeks’ time, another 10km route which will be more local to me in the Cooley Peninsula, in the daylight this time though. I’m already looking forward to it.
Ultan
