A self-guided spiritual path is harder than anyone tells you. There’s no map, no one ahead of you on the same road, and no way of knowing whether what you’re doing is working until it does — or doesn’t.
I know this because I walked one for years. And there’s a particular kind of stubbornness that made me do it that way.
Nobody was showing the way
When I started this work in earnest, there wasn’t the infrastructure there is now. No programmes built for women like me. No communities I could find that made space for the particular in-between I inhabited — neither fully pagan nor fully Catholic, neither leaving everything behind nor returning to what I’d left.
So I did what stubborn people do. I went looking for what I needed and put it together myself. Research, a lot of it. Books, many of them. Meditation practices I found and lost and found again. Journalling that went nowhere for months before it started going somewhere. Connections with Brigid that built slowly, inconsistently, and often in ways I didn’t recognise until later.
It worked, eventually. It took much longer than it needed to. And there were long stretches where I had no idea if I was going in the right direction, because there was no one to ask.
The advantage of the self-guided spiritual path
Here’s the thing about walking it alone: you build something that is completely yours. There’s no teacher’s framework subtly shaping your conclusions. No community’s consensus pulling you toward what’s acceptable. Every piece of it was found, tested, and chosen by you, because it was the only option.
That has genuine value. It produces a kind of confidence that’s hard to acquire any other way — not certainty, but the ability to trust your own discernment, because you’ve been exercising it without a safety net.
I don’t regret the path I walked. But I do know it was harder than it needed to be.
What I’d have wanted
I’d have wanted something structured. Not structured in the sense of telling me what to believe — but structured in the sense of giving me a map of the territory, a set of tools to work with, and the knowledge that other women were working with the same questions even if their answers were different.
That’s what the self-paced option of First Steps on Brigid’s Path is. All six sessions, the workbooks, the guided meditations — without the live calls or the group. You move at your own pace, in your own time, following a path that has been laid out clearly.
It’s the thing I wished existed when I was doing this the hard way.
If the group programme isn’t right for you — if you need the flexibility of doing this in your own time, on your own terms — the self-paced option is there.
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