Mindfulness session helped Caelan Doris process club defeats 

SHOCK: Caelan Doris felt a sense of shock after the defeat to La Rochelle in the Champions Cup for a second year in a row and a mindfulness session with his Dad helped him process it. Pic: INPHO/Dan Sheridan

Everyone has their own thing. That pastime or place or person that they can turn to when regular life gets a bit too buzzy and there’s a need to escape from the static and the noise. Call it a refuge or a release, but it serves the same purpose.

Cian Healy has had his art and his knives, Peter O’Mahony his garden. Robbie Henshaw leans into his music and Tadhg Furlong savours the chance to go back to Wexford where he can feel a different type of grass under his feet and smell the country air.

More than a few of Ireland’s rugby players have found their escape in golf and Caelan Doris would have been one of them until he surrendered a couple of months ago to the frustrations that have haunted so many of us.

“I’m going through an horrendous patch at the moment and I’ve lost whatever small amount of will I ever once had,” he laughed.

If there is one crutch on which most lean at one time or other then it has to be family. That’s hardly a surprise but it’s a foundation that became far more prominent to Joe Public during the course of the pandemic and its fallout.

Players made debuts for their country in front of empty stadia then spoke of their pride and excitement in welcoming loved ones back into the stands as covid-19 loosened its grip and parents, partners and siblings got to share the big days more intimately.

The beauty of family is that it tends to be there for you on the bad days too. Sport is life stripped of its ambiguity in that you either win or you lose and Doris was part of a Leinster squad that suffered a punishing blow last May.

Defeat to La Rochelle was their second at the hands of the Top 14 outfit in a Heineken Champions Cup final in the space of 12 months and it was compounded by another loss at the penultimate stage of the URC.

Doris spent some of the time that followed by visiting his brother Rian, the CEO and co-founder of a company specializing in peak performance research and flow states, in LA. Rugby isn’t much of a thing in California and that suited just fine.

Stuart Lancaster put a package of the European final together for the squad before he cleared his desk and moved to Racing 92 but the Mayo-born back row hasn’t had the stomach to sit down and parse through the debris just yet.

Last year’s defeat certainly didn’t help them absorb the latest reversal. It probably made it worse, all the more so given Leinster’s scintillating start at the Aviva Stadium and the slow, grinding suffocation of La Rochelle’s second-half domination.

“It was almost just shock, given there was so much belief.” 

Is there a right way and a wrong way to deal with this brand of disappointment? Maybe, maybe not, and Doris concedes that it is a tricky situation. It’s not nice to sit and process these things but he knows that avoiding them isn’t the way either, “I ended up doing a mindfulness session with my dad,” he explained at the IRFU’s high-performance centre. 

“I hadn't fully felt it. This was on the Friday after. I felt that let things move through a little better for me. I found that quite helpful.” 

Chris Doris isn’t just dad. He is a psychotherapist who holds an MA in mindfulness-based psychotherapy and a practitioner of Sahaj Marg, an Indian system of practical training spirituality that advocates a simple path or natural way.

He was a decent rugby player in his own youth and, while Doris Snr has been an avid follower and supporter of his son’s professional career, their own interactions tend to steer clear of any game-specific stuff.

That’s okay because they’re hardly lost for conversation pieces.

Chris is a man of many talents, among them printmaker, draughtsman and painter, and his psychology practise and meditation background have fed into some of his work, not least his ’40 Days and 40 Nights’ project when he spent that long atop Croagh Patrick.

There is a picture of the two young Doris boys, Rian and Caelan, being carried down the mountain by their dad and mum Rachel when it was over and the Ireland No 8 is particularly taken by some of his recent ‘open paintings’.

“They’re kind of meditative in a way, and look very simple in some ways, but it is the layers of colour and how they make you feel that is the idea behind them. I was actually back in Mayo a couple of weeks ago and went to a local show he had there. It looked good.” 

It won’t be long now until the Rugby World Cup is the only show in town.

Andy Farrell has tailored the pre-season to suit his players’ minds and bodies up to now but the pace picks up this coming week with Italy arriving in Dublin for the first tournament warm-up this day next week.

The path ahead is a treacherous one with potential pitfalls in three of the four pool games and one of New Zealand or France awaiting in the last eight if things progress that far but, whatever happens in France, the prep won’t be faulted.

“It's first class, we're in an optimal environment to pack on a bit of size, get fitter and what's been great about this pre-season is there hasn't been too much mindless running. It's been very targeted around rugby, getting our fitness in through rugby and hopefully it sets us up well for the matches.”