Starting a spiritual path rarely feels like starting. Most beginnings don’t announce themselves. They arrive quietly — dressed as curiosity, or restlessness, or a question you can’t quite put down.
Mine arrived when I was twenty-two, confused, and standing in an English Catholic church wondering why everything felt so different.
When I moved to England
I grew up Irish Catholic. And Irish Catholicism, if you didn’t grow up inside it, is its own specific thing — shaped by centuries of history that has no equivalent in the UK or the US. The relationship between the Irish and their faith is complicated in ways that are hard to explain briefly. It is threaded through with colonialism, with survival, with a particular fierce tenderness for certain figures and practices that don’t map neatly onto the universal Catholic church.
When I arrived in England at twenty-two, I walked into a Catholic church and didn’t quite recognise what I found. The texture was different. The cultural weight was different. The things that had meant something to me, growing up, didn’t carry the same charge here.
So I started asking questions. Not questions about my faith exactly — not yet. Questions about the Irish version. About where it had come from. About what was Catholic and what was older than Catholic and what was somewhere in between.
That was the beginning. I didn’t know it at the time.
What starting a spiritual path actually looks like
They rarely announce themselves. They rarely feel significant in the moment. Most often they feel like curiosity, or restlessness, or a mild dissatisfaction with the explanations available. They feel like a question that keeps returning even after you’ve set it aside.
My beginning was a young woman in an English city trying to understand why the religion she’d grown up with felt different here. That question led me to Irish mythology. Irish mythology led me to the older layers under the Catholic surface. The older layers led me to Brigid.
None of it was planned. All of it was necessary.
On starting something you can’t yet see the shape of
If you’re at the beginning of something — if you’re in that curious, restless, not-quite-satisfied place — I want to offer you something.
You don’t need to know where you’re going. You don’t need to have the whole path mapped before you take the first step. In fact, the most important beginnings I’ve witnessed, in myself and in the women I work with, tend to start from exactly the place you’re in: somewhere between what you’ve left and what hasn’t yet become clear.
Brigid is a threshold figure. She has been for a very long time. She meets people at the beginning of things — at Imbolc, the first stirring of spring, when the light is starting to change but winter isn’t quite done. I can assure you, she doesn’t ask you to arrive fully formed. She asks you to show up.
The Guided Path founding cohort has just begun. The self-paced programme is there for whenever you’re ready. And if you’re not ready for either yet — that’s fine too. Stay on the list. Ask your questions. The path will still be here.
Something landed here? Drop a comment below. I’d love to know what your beginning looked like — or what it’s looking like right now.
