Tag: mindfulness

Foraging for mindfulness

Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)Leave a comment


Hi friends, long time no type.

This is always what happens around this time of year. As much as I say that summer is my least favorite season, as soon as the sun comes out and the weather warms up, I want to spend all of my time outside and none of it writing blog posts. I think it helps that it doesn’t get as ungodly hot and humid in Ireland as it does other places I’ve lived (and the sun and warmth aren’t givens either, so I always want to make the most of it).

Then autumn rolls around, and I start feeling like, well, I suppose a bit like hibernating animals feel as they get ready for the cold, dark days of winter. I get productive and motivated, preparing things and getting things done. Although I obviously don’t need to eat my weight in salmon or lay in a supply of acorns, I do get that “end of year” feeling around September where I start to wrap up some summer projects, start winter ones, and look ahead to my little New Year routines like setting up my bullet journal. 

I know that I fall victim to SAD, particularly with Ireland’s extremely short, usually rainy days, so having routines and hobbies and things to look forward to helps. But I love this transitional time, when the air gets crisp and the days are shorter but not too short, and when I can take my summer activities into autumn. 

I’ve gotten into foraging in the past couple of years, the fullness of the hedgerows and the lack of poison ivy in Ireland combining to create a good environment for it. I began with picking blackberries on all of my walks, sometimes coming back with a kilogram in only the half hour or hour I’d spend outside at lunch. 

I’ve since branched (ha) out to hawthorns, sloes, elderberries, yarrow, meadowsweet. Basically anything that is easily recognizable and not potentially lethal. Like, I’d love to start foraging mushrooms, but I’d definitely want to get some expert training first; I’m not about to start just eating fungi out of the ground (cue “dumb ways to die” jingle). 

I took my last foraging walk over the weekend, just before they cut the hedgerows back along the rows, in order to grab one last haul of sloes. Then, outdoor adventures completed, I turned to my indoor activity of processing my harvest. Some of the things I’ve made so far: 

  • Blackberry wine
  • Blackberry jam
  • Blackberry and apple crumble
  • Blackberry muffins
  • Blackberry cheesecake bars
  • Blackberry Bakewell 
  • Blackberry syrup
  • Elderberry syrup
  • Elderberry tincture
  • Elderberry powder
  • Yarrow powder
  • Yarrow tea
  • Yarrow oil
  • Meadowsweet tea
  • Sloe gin 
  • Hawthorn jam

And I’m still planning to try some oxymels and ketchups and a few other recipes with what I’ve got left. 

One thing I really enjoy about the process is how it almost feels like a ritual. I’ve been trying to get back into a yoga routine lately, and it feels similar, the journey of slowing down and making deliberate movements. 

There are a dozen hacks online for the easiest and quickest way to remove tiny elderberries from their bushy stems, but why do we always need the easiest and quickest options? Why would I freeze the branches for faster removable or scrape the berries away with a fork to take them off in clusters rather than individually when I could sit cross-legged on the floor, listening to music and separating the berries from their stems one by one. It’s meditative.  

Anyway, my goal for this year was to write at least 20 blog posts and this is number 19, so you’ll be hearing from me at least once more in the next few months. But as the temperatures drop and the days get shorter and I’m spending more time inside, I hope to spend more time writing as well, so I’d like to think there’ll be more than one more blog post coming along. 

I have been reading an ungodly amount of books, so there’ll at least be a few book reviews on the horizon. The kind of thing you could read over blackberry jam on toast and a cup of mint tea. 

Beginning and rebeginning

Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)Leave a comment

I’ve always thought of the new year as coming in two parts. There’s the first of January, obviously, and then because my birthday is also in January I think of it as the second part. The world’s new year, and my personal new year. 

Since moving to Ireland, I’ve also come to embrace Imbolc at the start of February (especially now that designating St Brigid’s day a bank holiday has given us an extra long weekend to break up the long, cold stretch between New Year’s and Paddy’s Day). Though as far as I know Imbolc was not the traditional start of the new year, it is considered the start of spring in the Irish calendar, and that in itself is a new beginning. 

I know not everyone likes new year resolutions, and I understand the argument against. If you want to make a change in your life, you don’t have to tie it to an arbitrary spot on the calendar. But for me, I love to set intentions across the period between New Year’s Day and my birthday, and now Imbolc — basically over the course of January, rather than deciding them on day one, I give myself time to turn them over in my mind, and let them develop. 

There’s a bit of ritual to the whole process, sure. I always light a candle, pull a few tarot cards, start a list in my bullet journal, and so on, but mostly it’s the thinking that’s the important part. 

At work, we talk about goals in terms of the SMART acronym: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound. And some of my resolutions fall into these categories. I did parkrun 17 times last year; this year I’m trying for 20. It’s fun and satisfying to have things to check off the list (two parkruns down, 18 to go). 

But some of my resolutions don’t fit a single one of the SMART factors. There’s nothing specific about nourishing my creative soul or time-bound about deepening my relationship to nature. And achievable? How would I even know? 

On a similar note, most of my resolutions are the same year after year. Sometimes it’s because I’ve let them slip as the months go by — like the eager January gym-goers whose numbers thin out by April, sometimes life gets in the way. I mostly dropped out of my yoga practice last year, and I’ve updated my blog more times in the three weeks of this year than I did in all of 2024. Sometimes getting started again is as lovely and important as getting started the first time.

Likewise, the intentions that cannot be measured — cultivating creative energy, exploring spiritual growth (or “going full witch” as my best friend called it), striving for a better world — these are resolutions for every year, forever. These are lifelong journeys, not goals that can be completed.

And does it matter? Not a bit. Come next year, I’ll set the same intentions again. And in the time between, these things will begin and they’ll begin and they’ll grow and they’ll end and they’ll begin again, and we’ll see what happens. I look forward to it.

The morning I thought would never come (the one where I enjoyed waking up early)

Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)2 Comments

Processed with VSCO with hb2 preset

 

If you had walked into my bedroom at dawn a decade ago, you probably would’ve found me wide awake, book in hand. Not because I had gotten up early to read, but because I hadn’t ever gone to bed the night before. My “ideal” sleep schedule, in between bouts of insomnia and the forced early mornings of school, was around 6am to 2pm up through college.

Obviously, this is not sustainable in adulthood for people who don’t work the graveyard shift. It wasn’t really sustainable in school either, to be honest, but I got by. At the time, I was more than happy to be as nocturnal as possible, and I would never have thought I’d ever be anything but a night owl.

I look back at that sleeping schedule in horror now, much as I imagine my teenage self would look at the idea of waking before 8am on a Saturday. Where once I relied desperately on my blackout curtains to keep out the sun as it rose high in the sky, now I regularly beat it to arise–on purpose! Without even having to!

Becoming a morning person wasn’t an overnight process, though. Here are the steps I took to give my mornings an energising boost:

Continue reading “The morning I thought would never come (the one where I enjoyed waking up early)” →

Ten Minutes of Mindfulness

Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)2 Comments

Mindfulness is a lifelong practice, and for most of us, it requires conscious effort. We wake up in the mornings bleary-eyed and in need of caffeine rather than serene and at peace with ourselves and the world. It’s easy for us to go about our days telling ourselves that we don’t have time to meditate or do yoga, no spare minutes to practice gratitude in between commuting and working and hitting the gym and cooking dinner and taking care of kids and doing homework and buying groceries and doing every other one of those essential things that seem to eat up every moment of the day.

The truth is, we do have time, and we choose to fill that time with reading and Netflix and sports and bar-hopping and every other one of those non-essential things, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. This isn’t a “social media is the devil” post, because that subject is beyond played out and anyway that’s not how I feel (perhaps a topic for another post). What this is, is proof that even with the few spare moments you have in your life, you can practice mindfulness. Even if you only have 10 minutes, here are 10 ways to bring more awareness into your everyday.

Continue reading “Ten Minutes of Mindfulness” →

Mindfulness in the Face of Life’s Little Annoyances

Lauren (thebestpossibletime.com)Leave a comment

You know how some people just rub you the wrong way, even if they’ve done nothing to warrant it? Maybe it’s the guy who works at the coffee shop you frequent every morning, the one who always says hello but looks as though he’s just smelled something bad. Maybe it’s your coworker whose friendly attempts at small talk grate before you’ve had a chance to drink the coffee you just bought from the dour barista. They haven’t done anything to offend you; there’s just something about them.

There’s a girl in my yoga class who, until recently, was like that for me. She’s never said a word to me, nor I to her, but I was just not a fan. Most of the reason is that she commits one of my biggest pet peeves–getting up and leaving during savasana (or sometimes she does other, more energetic poses in place of this all-important final resting pose)–but the fact that she always seems determined to try to stretch herself into the fullest extent of the pose, form be damned, didn’t help either. Take your cues from your body, not from Instagram, girl.

So I’m in class, in savasana, while she’s doing pigeon pose or whatever, and suddenly I realise: if she’s beng a “bad yogi” by ignoring the niyama of isvara pranidhana, surrender, then I’m being a bad yogi by letting her actions dictate my feelings in opposition to the niyama of santosha, contentment. Whatever she is doing is not half as detrimental to my own well-being as what my own thoughts and prejudices are doing to me.

Continue reading “Mindfulness in the Face of Life’s Little Annoyances” →