Bringing the scientific and the spiritual worldview together, Diarmuid Lyng

What is your own background briefly?

My name is Diarmuid Lyng. I’m of Wexford, but I’m currently living on the Dingle Peninsula, in the homeland of Antarctic Voyager Tom Creane, in Anascaul, just behind Inch beach. I was a primary school teacher but I now divide my time between retreats, media work, workshops and public speaking engagements. I live with my partner, performance poet and fellow Wild Irish Retreater Siobhán de Paor and our two year old boy Uisne.

We met doing our TEDx’s in 2016, how did that help on your journey to where you are now?

The TED talk I did with you was a real eye opener into the type of life I was pursuing, but have since, hopefully, left behind. It was a huge honour, and returning to Wexford after some years away was the final stage of the Hero’s Journey that had been enacting itself within me. To return home with the boon of wisdom is a crucial stage in order to move into the next adventure.

I was on stage to talk about the hurl, and I had just been given a delightful welcome onstage where my C.V. was presented to the audience in a way that makes it seem like a good thing to have this person speaking, but halfway through the opening story I looked down to my own empty hands to realise that I had forgotten to bring the hurl out.

Immediately my mind raced to a cover up, how could I make it seem like it was part of the plan, how could I deceive the crowd into thinking that the person who’s C.V. they had just heard wasn’t silly enough to forget the one thing he needed for the talk.  But I had been on a journey of self-acceptance and so I came face to face with my stupidity and said it aloud.

‘There I am now, the T.V. Presenter, the Hurling Captain, the media analyst, and I couldn’t even remember the one thing I needed to bring out on stage! Can someone get me my hurl please?’

It brought me into the room, to presence, to courage. It was itself a culmination, a bold move where I may have hidden before. Other speakers even suggested I did it on purpose, such was the effectiveness in terms of engagement with the crowd. They loved the humility. They loved the realness. And the words I spoke afterwards faded into insignificance. I had told my story in that moment.

But when the video was released that whole section was cut. It helped me see the gloss that things like TED talks put on live, the perfect sheen of delivering lines at crucial times. I respected the whole movement less for it. Life, glorious life, is alive in those moments of uncertainty and fragility.

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now? How does playing sport to a high level help to inspire you and drive you to achieve the new goals you are looking to complete?

My experience in sport has left me very wary about the stories I tell myself about success. I found after driving myself into the ground playing at the top level that it was more important to learn to listen to my body and to listen to those around me than it was for me to pursue my ambitions blindly.

How was the last 12 months?

The last 12 months have been a movement from inwardness to exploration. Those early days for our boy were crucial to us both, to have the ability to live very frugally in order to invest in that time to be with our boy. Wild Irish Retreat grew with us with some very successful retreats while voiceover work, presenting work and my continued involvement with the GAA has kept the show on the road.

We now plan to extend Wild Irish Retreats out into other areas which can satisfy a hungry population for meaningful connection around significant life events. I ran a stag (Wild Irish Stags anyone?) recently in Kerry where I dressed twenty men up in women’s clothes and played a hurling match with them.

We gathered around a lakeside fire afterwards and marked the significance of the day for the stag, accepting things would now change for him, but that we wished him the best on the journey forward, and that we were honoured to have been with him up to now. The hunger of the participants for this type of acknowledgment and the gratitude they showed was remarkable.

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

I am planning an Easter retreat in West Kerry, rewilding as Gaeilge but though we will spend the weekend engaging our wild spirit, for now that is all about online promotion.

I am involved with the GAA on their Sustainability Toolkit for GAA clubs and I am working on a plan to plant Ash trees as part of a theatre festival this year, while also trying to develop a show to take on the road that focuses on the work of Irish mystic John Moriarty. If you’re curious check him out here with Tommy Tiernan.

Tell us more about the GAA plan to build sustainability toolkits? What will this involve?

The sustainability toolkit is in its infancy and there are people far more qualified than me that are going to shape it. I am involved to hopefully plant some alternative ideas in there in the hope that we don’t reduce our efforts to heal our relationship with the planet to lessening our carbon output. While this is a necessary step it pales in significance compared to our efforts to meaningfully reconnect with the natural world, to reconnect by listening, to reconnect by spending time out in it.

Much of the focus now is on what humans will do, what leaps forward we can make technologically to fix the problem, but as I see it our biggest input should be in trying to create the conditions in which nature can fix itself, to restore marshes, to restore hedgerows, to allow rivers be rivers that support life instead of channels of pollution. We need forests, not plantations of cash crops, but forests where plants and animals can flourish amongst the native trees that know the soils of Ireland.

We need to stop poisining our soil. We need to stop poisoning our food. We need to stop poisoning our animals. We need to stop poisoning ourselves. These changes are more valuable than reducing the problem down to the war on carbon, and I am involved in this programme in order to put these ideas forward in the hope that the truth of them will gain traction.

In relation to the Ash Dieback, how could the GAA make a big impact on this issue?

I suspect that the lack of biodiversity is playing a central role in the threat of dieback. In Europe when dieback took hold there was a firesale on Ash. Uproot it and burn it. And though they lost nearly all of their trees anyway, one of the effects of that policy was that there was much less chance of finding more resistant strains.

I believe, and with the backing of experts in the field, that if we can get GAA clubs or club members to set aside a couple of acres for planting a biodiverse landscape with the Ash most prominent, we can engage an army of planter hurlers and footballers. Through government funding as a carrot for the GAA clubs. I believe the GAA can re-root itself in a time where it needs a re-rooting. By taking up the case of the Ash tree, the tree that has so generously provided for us through the centuries of hurling.

By having it’s young players plant trees that they will grow with, to instill an appreciation in how valuable that piece of wood is in their hands, and in increasing the numbers of Ash trees, hopefully, more resistant strains will be identified and the more chance the great noble of the wood will survive here.

What do your wild retreats involve & what do you hope to inspire people to go away and do differently?

Our retreats are about connecting with nature and with the language. Indeed, since we have started we have realised that the language experienced out in wild nature does everything for us, we just have to stand back and allow the language and the nature to communicate through the attendees and then we receive feedback at the end about how great a job we do. But we do very little other than organisation and a little inspiration.

Wild nature does the rest for us. Both wild nature outside and the wild nature of the attendees, that burning little question inside of them that wonders if mortgages and cars and Saturday nights out is the extent of this magical opportunity they have here, now. We play hurling. We forage seaweed and healing plants, we introduce phrases and hidden gems of the language. We experiment with poetry. We do yoga and meditation to attend to the physical body. We do a sweatlodge by the sea, and usually everyone jumps in afterwards!

How can people find out more about you personally & your work?

Our work is currently at wildirishretreat.com. Personally, my website is under construction, but I will field comments, feedback, requests etc at diarmuidlyng@gmail.com

Who and where do you get inspiration from?

I am inspired by those that the language speaks through.
I am inspired by those that spirit speaks through.
I am inspired by those that get up on cold winter mornings to do everything in their power to provide for their family.
I am inspired by people courageous enough to ask questions with their actions and not with their intellect.

I am inspired by my young self, who gave in and surrendered to the joy and love of hurling, who reached heights he only dreamed possible as a young boy, but dreamed him he did. And that young boy is the source of my dreaming now, he tells me to keep dreaming for reconnection to ourselves, to nature, and to our language in the hope that once again, those dreams may be realised.

Anything else you’d like to add / we should have asked?

I hope the scientific worldview and the spiritual worldview can continue to come together, that they can lead us away from the current paradigm of right and wrong, where we can hold, as science and spirit do, that the nature of reality is still all to play for, that we have made great strides, but that we still have much to learn about how and where we are.
I think about my contradictions and I am assisted by the scientific knowledge that two opposing truths can both be accurate and so I don’t have to suffer my contradictions so much.

As we loosen our certainty about how things are, I believe we move closer together in the knowledge that we really only have each other, and we share that reality with blades of grass and flies and mountains and waterfalls and if we reasoned to find what we have in common, even celebrated what we have in common, we would do better than to constantly look for what is different, what is worse, what is better.

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 30,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview, or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles. Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully we can share your story too and reach our global audience.

Irish Tech News

---

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking