Shivam talks with Eoghan Connaughton and Aron Hegarty, the Founder and Directors of the Gaelic Woodland Project.

Their mission is to conserve Ireland’s natural and cultural heritage and to create an ecologically rich and diverse patchwork of native habitats across Ireland.

In 2024, they acquired 12 acres of land in County Mayo, to be rewilded with native Irish trees, following best practices to support biodiversity and ecosystem restoration.

For more information, go to their website at https://gaelicwoodlandproject.com/

Jimmy Wightman is a meditation and mindfulness teacher based in Brighton, UK. He’s been featured on the BBC, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Yahoo News and other similar publications.

Jimmy’s interest in meditation started after many years of partying and DJing on the London clubbing scene left him feeling broken, depressed and suffering from insomnia.

In a desperate attempt to gain back control of his life, Jimmy found a teacher from the ancient Vedic tradition (from India) and discovered a profound level of inner peace and stillness that was previously unthinkable. Despite being an atheist at the time, that was the beginning of his spiritual journey.

Jimmy went onto explore many styles of practice such as Transcendental Meditation, Vipassana and Zen before training as a meditation teacher himself.

He now teaches deep mantra meditation inspired by Himalayan Yogis (Advaita Vedanta tradition) as well as mindfulness inspired by his teacher Shinzen Young (author of The Science of Enlightenment).

Jimmy is a regular attendee at Enlightenment Intensive retreats at various locations in the UK but he especially cherishes his time attending retreats at Spirit Horse.

You can find out more about Jimmy at his website: DelveDeep.com and on Instagram where he’s known as That Meditation Guy.

Spirit Horse Radio EP17: Adam Duncan, Life-Stage Project

Shivam catches up with an old friend and discusses old times, old age and the often uncomfortable topic of death and our mortality.

Listen on our website via www.spirithorse.co.uk/podcast or search for 'Spirit Horse Radio' on your favourite podcast/music listening platform.

Adam trained in Drama and Education at Goldsmiths before writing scripts for the BBC and many other organisations. He ran a media company for twenty years and designed training programmes for large organisations such as Amnesty International.

For the last ten years, Adam put a lot of energy into working with a charity called A Band of Brothers (ABOB), doing rites-of-passage weekends for young men involved in the Criminal Justice System in order to help them move on from adolescent behaviour to healthy masculinity.

But at the age of 70 came a new question, what did growing old mean to him?

As luck would have it, he was offered a place on a brilliant course in supporting people at the end of their lives. Through being alongside people who worked with the dying, Adam started to come to terms with mortality, being able to let go of some of the old attachments and this gave him a new lease of life and a surge of creative energy that he hadn’t felt for decades.

In 2018, Adam wrote and rehearsed a show called The Seven Ages of the Dance of Life and Death with a community of actors, dancers and musicians. The show attracted an appreciative audience.

In isolation, he was able to publish The Power of Ageing. It sold around a hundred copies, but more importantly, it brought together a small group of like-minded people who felt passionately about the subject matter. Starting a monthly discussion forum from which the Life-Stage Project was formed.

You can find links to Adams work and projects in the episode description.

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