Yes, I liked the whole thing of being in meditation groups, but didn't like the fact that in order to enjoy that I had to put up with people saying things that to me just seemed to be ridiculous. There was one particular group I went to for a while, where the leader himself was often saying things that seemed daft to me. Like one time, we were meditating under a tree, and he started talking about the spirit of the tree spreading outwards and enveloping us. I used to think, why can't he just lead a nice meditation session without pushing his spiritual ideas onto us?

Once, we went to a stone circle, and when we were touching a big stone, some people started going "Ommmmm", and the leader, he was going "OMMMMMM" really loudly and in wildly varying pitches. I almost burst out laughing! I thought to myself, "You sound like you're going insane!"

This is why, when I started my outdoor mindfulness group, I tried to approach it by not pushing my ideas onto people. I would try to just lead them through a nice mindfulness session in a lovely outdoor setting, but not tell them what to believe.

In fact, I'm very keen for meditation to able to be separated from spiritual things. I don't even really like the word "spiritual". It makes me think of people having a spirit or a soul, which I don't think we have. I really like the idea that meditation, and related practices, can be extremely beneficial to people for their own sake, without the need to believe anything spiritual.

Yes, please publish that druid ceremony article to Medium. I'd like to read that.

Thank you for writing about me. Is that yet to be published?