Book review: Dermot Whelan brings his everyman appeal to meditation in Mind Full
Dermot Whelan writes about how he came to believe in the power of meditation
LIKE Niall ‘Bressie’ Breslin’s Me and My Mate Jeffrey, which sought to get people talking openly about living with depression and anxiety, if Mind Full helps those in need of a break from anxiety, career woes, or stress, then Dermot Whelan can consider it a success. Indeed it’s no surprise to see Bressie blurbing the cover: “Makes meditation accessible. Dermot is hilarious.” You’ll know Whelan from his titular Today FM show with Dave (no surname necessary). Here, he seeks to bring his everyman appeal to the practice of meditation, first telling his life story and how he came to believe in its power. That’s very much an and-then-this-happened part of the story, the “experimental” and “strange” breakfast show he bafflingly fell into suddenly becoming the biggest in Dublin. His rise on radio and in standup continues until he suffers a panic attack in an ambulance on the way to a comedy festival in 2007.
The second part of the book is a bit of a curiosity, Dermot offering up the various forms of meditation one can try, with the prompts literally spelled out. For a teaser or the full experience, you can listen to his guidance on his website. There’s a chapter on giving up alcohol for the year and then an FAQs section. It’s a jumble.
Like his radio show, it’s a bit difficult to work out who exactly this book is aimed at, a younger teen/early 20s fan of the radio show who wants to know more of Whelan’s life story? Whelan references Huey Lewis gigs and Total Wipeout, and titles chapters things like ‘Let’s Talk About Stress, Baby’ and ‘This Is How We Do It’, songs even someone in their mid-30s (ahem) will find dated. (There’s also one called ‘It’s All About That Bass’, but the sooner everyone forgets about that recent pop atrocity, the better.) So maybe it’s for someone older who feels weighed down by family and responsibility, or the person who just thinks they should be meditating because it seems like everybody else is? Consider Mind Full a beginner’s course in meditation.
Whelan says he wrote the book because “I wanted you to see that it takes very little to bring us to that sense of fulfilment” - such fulfilment is the rush of a corporation talk on stress and meditation Whelan gave to 30 people in an insurance company. It made him feel so much more alive than performing in front of a heaving 10,000 at the 3Arena. It’s all relative.
With home yoga being one of the proclivities of the last year-and-a-bit of Covid life, many people may have come across some form of meditation already. Whelan explains that it’s “focusing your mind on one thing - say, for instance, your breath - and when your mind wanders, which it will, we gently guide it back to the focus of our attention”. It’s self-care, not self-criticism, he adds, But it does require work: “Meditation isn’t a fair-weather pastime that we only reach for when we’re feeling chipper. It’s a boat we sit in every day, no matter what our internal sea is doing.”
And Whelan’s got the sceptics covered too: “It was one thing trying meditation, but to say it out loud seemed, to use that most effective of Irish words, ‘wanky’.” And despite some overwrought similes (“meditation is like Tinder for your thoughts”), it’s all told in an amusing manner, such as the live radio report outside a blustery Supreme Court, or confiding that meditating can be as simple as keeping your mouth shut while in conversation so as to “do less damage”.
Though Mind Full feels like a magazine feature stretched to nearly 300 pages, Whelan will likely have you questioning some things about your life, whether it’s facing up to anxiety or trying to figure out why you’re doing something that constantly stresses you out. It might bring things into perspective that you’d been brushing under the carpet. So if Mind Full prompts you or someone you know to make a positive life change, from just taking a deep breath when it’s most needed to giving up alcohol, then it can be considered a success.
- Mind Full by Dermot Whelan: Gill Books €16.99
