Lucy Weir, PhD
I’m a philosopher, a writer, and a yogi. I have worked with many challenges, including having a hypersensitive brain which means I’m prone to addiction. My teaching and learning involves reintegrating connections using the revelations that Yoga brings. My practice, research, and writing, has allowed me to develop both creatively and philosophically. I seek to facilitate others to achieve their own insights and to practice in a way that enriches action, connects human and more-than-human communities, and deepens inner and outer understanding now. (I’ll be moving writing, practices, and pictures from my other two blogs, http://www.yogazazen.wordpress.com and http://www.gamanrad.wordpress.com, so if you’re interested while I’m in transition, you can look there).
From a magical childhood in the Highlands of Scotland, early trauma created a lifetime struggle with addiction. Attempting to create connection between what I understood and the contradictions of my culture, I spent my early adulthood battling to live a worthwhile life by volunteering in the global South, studying forced migration, and working in a therapeutic community. Mid adulthood took me to the harsh beauty of Erris in the west of Ireland, to love and motherhood, but also to the realities of loneliness, (relative) poverty and (absolute) depression.
I survived by learning. In 2014, I completed my PhD and in 2015, our family changed shape, spread out, split and shifted our relationships. No upheaval of that kind occurs without pain and, however much awareness helped, without suffering.
In 2019, I published my first book, Love is Green: Compassion as Responsibility in the Ecological Emergency https://vernonpress.com/book/442. I launched the book with the help of some wonderful friends, and with Eamon Ryan as the keynote speaker. Among the ruins of 2020 plans, I managed to secure a contract with Palgrave Macmillan to edit a second book, Urgent Matters: Philosophy as a Practice in the Ecological Emergency which is what I’m working hard to complete at the moment. I’ll include some short previews here.
This site is going to be an amalgamation of work I’ve done in philosophy, yoga, and creative writing. I hope you can sit back with a cup of tea and a notebook, get up and stretch to the practices (or your own inventions), as well as find inspiration to create connections in your own life through what you read here. I hope, above all, to contribute to a shift in how we see ourselves and our relationship with the more-than-human world, so we can begin to recognise that our own need for love reflects a need to act compassionately to all else that we find ourselves with. These more-than-human systems are what created and sustain us. We need to use all our considerable ingenuity and skill to show some reciprocity now, to alleviate, or at least mitigate, suffering, and to allow ourselves to appreciate fully the space and intelligence of our enmeshed existence.
Let love do it
I trained as a yoga teacher between 2000 and 2002. I completed my PhD in 2014. I published my first book in 2019 and am working on my second in 2021.
The ecological emergency includes biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change, and all the other impacts of the Anthropocene. Knowing what to do in response can be overwhelming: doom or denial are the most common reactions. My work is to teach a middle way, to transmit that, if we let it, love does what needs to be done. I have learned about free will, realisation, awareness, connection, and compassionate attunement. Letting compassion act, realising there is no ‘them’ and ‘us’, and surrendering to your deepest desire: these are keys to transformation of all our relationships.
Yoga teacher trainer, teacher, philosopher, and writer.
I’m in the process of uploading material from my other sites, https://yogazazen.wordpress.com/, https://gamanrad.wordpress.com/ and looseyoga. I’ll gradually get a better picture of what I can offer up here.
Be well. Raise awareness. Be kind.
Know Yoga Ireland 