Author: galros2

I've been working with Brigid for many years now and looking to share my experience and knowledge with those who wish to learn. Check out my links here: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brigidsforge Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MyBrigidsForge School: https://brigid-s-forge.teachable.com/ Blog: https://mybrigidsforge.com/

So Here’s What I’ve Actually Built

Six weeks of ritual, body, emotion, structure, and ancestors – here’s where it all leads: Kindling Brigid’s Flame, and what my own Samhain will look like.

Six weeks ago I wrote about not knowing what a ritual even was. Since then we’ve covered opening and closing properly, what my body actually needs before ritual work, learning to feel things at all, where my own ritual structure genuinely comes from, and talking to the dead without people getting worried about you. That’s the whole arc, more or less. Land, sea, sky, and everything underneath it. So now I want to tell you plainly what I’ve built out of all of it.

What My Own Samhain Ritual Actually Looks Like

Before I get into the course itself, here’s what this year’s Samhain ritual will actually be, cos I think it’s more useful than a description.

My husband will be totally confused about the goings-on, as usual. Even after 19yrs together, he’s not fully au fait with what I do, and that’s grand – it’s my road, he’s just joining me occasionally. We’ll light some candles, open the ritual properly. Have a chat about what’s working for us and what’s not, yeah, in a ritual space, cos it gives us better focus, and the help we get from Brigid, the Dagda, and our ancestors genuinely helps us at this time of year.

We’ll probably do some cards. I use oracle rather than tarot, unless we’re talking about the Buffy tarot deck, which is the only tarot deck that has ever made sense to me. Usually one card for the year ahead, then one for each month, sometimes two or three decks laid alongside each other to see how the story lines up. Depends on energy and time on the night. We’ll record our first thoughts, close the circle properly. And then, honestly, collapse on the couch and watch some telly.

This is the Buffy Tarot deck box. It's all purple and magenta colours, with a cartoon, stylised Buffy in the top and all the cards have characters on them. And yes, it appears in the Kindling Brigid's Flame Course!
Yes, there is a Buffy tarot deck…

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. No robes, no crowd – my well-known hatred of crowds means I don’t organise public events, never mind attend them – just structure, intention, and my very confused husband.

Why I Built Kindling Brigid’s Flame

I’ve run courses like this before, and I’m always trying to make the next one more accessible than the last. This time round I’ve cut the videos right down – no more hour-long sit-and-absorb sessions, everything’s split into small chunks you can actually get through in a spare ten minutes.

Mostly, though, I’m writing the course I could have done with years ago. I was genuinely confused about this whole ritual thing, the way I wrote about a few weeks back. I wish someone had taught me a structure I could actually use – one flexible enough to bend around whatever season of life you’re in, rather than a script you either follow exactly or fail at.

What’s Actually In It

Kindling Brigid’s Flame takes you through the physical, emotional, and spiritual groundwork. And then into building your own ritual structure for Imbolc, the way I’ve built mine.

Self-taught: €197 as a one-off payment, or €67 x 3 (€201 total).

With coaching: three 1-2-1 sessions with me, to be used within 6 months of the course starting. That costs €497 one-off, or €177 x 3 (€531 total). My usual coaching rate is €250 an hour, so that’s a really good deal if you want the extra support.

Modules go live after Samhain, from 1 November. And it’s built to run roughly three months, through to Imbolc. (Though nothing’s stopping you moving faster if that suits you better.)

If you want the self-taught version: self-taught, one-off payment or self-taught, 3 payments.

Or, if you’d prefer it with coaching: with coaching, one-off payment or with coaching, 3 payments.

If any of the last six weeks has felt like it was speaking to you directly, this is where it leads.

Talking to the Dead Is Grand, Apparently, Depending Which Dead

Why is talking to the Tuatha Dé Danann fine but talking to your dead Nana worrying? A real look at ancestor work, family stories, and what to do without any.

I mentioned a few weeks back that my two Nanas have been helping Brigid get me through some difficulties with guilt. What I didn’t say at the time is how odd people’s reactions to that tend to be, once you actually sit with them. I mean ancestor work in Irish spirituality is inherent, but people still get a bit freaked out by it.

Here’s the thing that gets me. People are entirely grand with me talking about the Tuatha Dé Danann popping in to say hello. Nobody blinks. But mention a conversation with your dead grandmother and suddenly people get concerned, genuinely concerned, like I’ve said something worrying rather than something ordinary. My Nanas, my Grandads, my dead aunts, uncles, other relations – most of them, the ones who knew me anyway – loved me. That doesn’t stop being true because they’re dead. I don’t know why one kind of ancestral contact reads as folklore and the other reads as a cry for help, but it does, and it shouldn’t.

The Stories We Actually Tell

In Ireland we tell stories about the people who’ve gone on ahead of us. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes with that particular look in the teller’s eye that says “yeah, dodgy one, but honestly, great craic all the same.”

One of my Nanas accidentally scared the bejaysus out of the neighbours wearing a white coat in a graveyard in November – purely by existing in the wrong outfit in the wrong place at the wrong time. The other had a story about a friend wearing red shoes that her father couldn’t find out about, cos they weren’t respectable. I never did figure out if the “friend” was actually Nana or not. She won’t tell me now, either.

The smell of Sweet Afton cigarettes, or an ash burn on a shirt, brings one Grandad to mind straight away. The smell of pipe smoke brings the other. Not confusing at all, that second one, given my darling husband went through his own pipe-smoking phase at one point…

What I Actually Have Left of Them

Beyond the stories, I have objects too. My great-grandmother on my dad’s side gave him a small statue of St Thérèse of Lisieux when he went away to school. He gave it to me when I went away to school in turn. It’s a small thing, cheap tin or some other metal, and it’s carried three generations of leaving home in it.

And this is before we get into the mass cards, the photos, the buildings…

A photo of my St Therese of Lisieux statue, that came from my greatgrandmother through my Dad. Ancestor work in Irish spirituality doesn't have to be complicated!
There she sits, on the kitchen windowsill, in between 2 mini candles.

When Your Family Doesn’t Tell the Stories

For anyone interested in Brigid or Irish spirituality, I’d strongly recommend working with your ancestors. But I know not everyone has a Nana with a graveyard story or a Grandad linked to a particular smell. Plenty of people’s families just don’t talk, or the stories got lost somewhere, or there’s nobody left who remembers.

So what do you do? Well, do your best. There are loads of ways to find out births and deaths online these days. Learn actual history of the times your ancestors lived in – you might be surprised what you find. Learn the actual history of the countries your ancestors lived in, not the populist views, the facts. Try to learn from natives, rather than colonisers, as difficult as that might be in some places (side eye to the British Empire).

Ancestor work doesn’t require a family full of characters and heirlooms to be real. It requires you showing up and doing the digging, even when nobody handed you the stories to begin with.

Where This Fits Into Kindling Brigid’s Flame

This is one of the areas Kindling Brigid’s Flame actually spends real time on – ancestor work and building your own sacred space, as part of the physical preparation for your Imbolc ritual. It’s built for people who want a proper framework for this rather than guessing, whether or not they’ve got a Nana with a good graveyard story to start from.

Where My Ritual Structure Actually Comes From

I’ve mentioned before that I open and close rituals deliberately, and that I do it with a five-part structure moving through the provinces of Ireland. What I haven’t said yet is where that structure comes from. I mean, it’s not something I made up out of nowhere.

The Settling of the Manor of Tara

So, here’s an old text – the Settling of the Manor of Tara – where a figure called Trefuilngid Tre-eochair asks Fintan mac Bóchra how Ireland has been divided up. Fintan answers in five parts: “knowledge in the west, battle in the north, prosperity in the east, music in the south, kingship in the centre.” Each province then gets its own long list of exactly what belongs to it. Connacht gets learning, foundation, teaching, judgement, counsel, eloquence. Ulster gets battles, contentions, hardihood, strife, pride, wars. Leinster gets prosperity, supplies, feats of arms, splendour, wealth. Munster gets waterfalls, fairs, knowledge, musicianship, melody, poetical art. And Midhe, the centre, gets kingship, stewardship, primacy, the overlordship of all Ireland.

And honestly, the story is about a lot more than this. It’s mainly about Fintan himself – a man who survived the Flood, lived a thousand years alone in an empty Ireland, and was there for every wave of invasion the mythology tells us about: Cessair, Partholón, Nemed, the Fir Bolg, the Tuatha Dé Danann, the sons of Míl, all of it. The whole text is really him proving he’s old enough and remembers enough to be trusted with settling how Tara itself should be chronicled. The five provinces bit is one passage near the end, not the point of the story. Worth knowing, cos it’s easy to lift the neat five-part structure out and forget the actual text is this enormous, strange piece of mythic history with a thousand-year-old man at the centre of it.

Cúige, and the One That’s Missing

Here’s a thing that confused me badly as a kid. The Irish word for province is cúige – and cúig is the Irish word for five. Five provinces, cúige, straight etymology, no mystery there once you know it. Except Ireland has four provinces now. Ulster, Munster, Leinster, Connacht. Four. I was very confused in primary school to be honest. Nobody explained why the word for “province” was built on the word for “five” when I could count them on one hand and still have a finger left over.

The missing one is Midhe – Meath, more or less, though not identical to the modern county. It’s the centre, and out of all five, it might have been the most dangerous one to hold. Tara and Uisneach were both there, and between them they represented the core power of the country, political and spiritual both. Whoever controlled the centre wasn’t just holding one region among five – they were holding the seat that the other four answered to, in a way. That’s a different kind of exposed than holding Ulster’s edge or Munster’s coast.

I feel a particular way about this one, cos Meath is my own home county. We call it the Royal County (I know, I know – the ego on us!! But you should see our neighbours…)

Why I Use It to Open and Close

The five-part structure I use isn’t lifted wholesale from the text – Fintan’s answer to Trefuilngid is describing the character of the provinces, not handing down a ritual script. But it’s what I built my own opening and closing prayers from. When I open a ritual now, I move through the provinces in turn – Ulster for strife and war, Leinster for prosperity, Munster for the arts, Connacht for learning, Midhe for sovereignty at the centre. This old text genuinely roots those five qualities, even if the ritual use of them is mine.

It gives me a structure that’s bigger than just what I personally want out of the ritual that day. It’s not a wish list. It’s five real, long-attested associations, and I’m asking something of each one in turn – built on the lore, not copied from it.

Magic done as part of ritual works better with structure like this behind it, cos structure is what stops a ritual sprawling into whatever feels vaguely spiritual in the moment. One goal, not several. A beginning, a middle, an end. Something you’re actually asking for, not just a general vibe you’re hoping shows up.

This is exactly the kind of thing I go into properly in Kindling Brigid’s Flame. (the course I’ve been building to help people prepare for their own Imbolc ritual) Working through the physical, emotional, and spiritual groundwork, and then building a ritual structure of your own, the way I’ve built mine. More on that as we get closer to Imbolc.

Source: “The Settling of the Manor of Tara”, https://maryjones.us/ctexts/tara.html

What Took Me This Long to Learn About Love

I spent years hiding my emotions, diagnosed as “hysterical” for showing any. It took a crisis to teach me what love – and feeling anything – actually means.

I’ve written before about anger. Today I want to talk about love. I know – engineering and academic citations to love, in the space of one blog post. Well, ye should be used to me by now.

But Love, Orlagh?

Love was a word that didn’t really mean much to me for a long time. I mean, sure – my parents loved me. My brother probably did too. I loved them back. But it was a word I said the way you’d say “grand” when someone asks how you are. Automatic. Not really felt.

An image of a candle flame lighting - always linked to emotions and particularly love for me. I mean, I used candles to learn to feel my emotions, believe it or not!
The candle is always linked with love for me… Brigid, husband, ancestors looking after me…

Emotions in general were difficult for me long before that, mind. As a woman in engineering, any emotion I showed in my early career got diagnosed as hysteria by the people around me. Plenty of managers 24yrs ago were very happy banging the table, raising their voices, all that carry-on, but let me release the slightest hint of emotion and suddenly I was a hysterical woman with no technical ability whatsoever. Yeah. Double standards.

There’s research on this, actually – Henzler (2017) found that the more an organisation claims to be based 100% on meritocracy, the more likely there is bias in its actual decision-making processes. And trust me, engineers are vocal about only caring who’s good at the job, not what gender they are. That’s not accurate at all.

Where It Actually Started

All that led to me hiding my emotions, and eventually hiding from them entirely. Though honestly, it probably started well before engineering. I mean how many Irish kids grew up hearing “c’mere and I’ll give you something to cry about” the second they got upset? Add in the complete lack of healthy emotional expression anywhere in Ireland in the 80s and 90s… Possibly before that too, and you end up with a lot of us who genuinely don’t know what we’re feeling half the time.

So yeah. Emotions are tough for me. Love especially, cos it asks you to actually feel something and say so out loud.

What Actually Changed It

It took a crisis with my husband’s mental health, and potentially facing life without him, to get me to properly pay attention to it. And it changed how I spoke to people. I started telling those I love that I actually love them – out loud, not just assumed. I started recognising my own emotions more readily too, which is really just the tuning in exercise applied to feelings rather than physical sensation – you have to be able to identify what you’re feeling before you can say anything true about it.

It changed how people spoke to me back, as well.

Here’s the thing underneath all of it: you need to know the difference between you feeling something and someone trying to impose a feeling on you from the outside. And you need to know how to deal with what comes up as it arises, because trust me when I tell you, emotion really bloody rises in deep ritual work. That part I’m working on properly at the moment, as part of what I’m building for Imbolc this year – more on that soon.

Henzler, Eliora (2017). Measuring Meritocracy: A framework for investigation.

What My Body Actually Needs Before I Can Do Ritual

Ritual prep isn’t just candles. Physio, food history, and old injuries all shape how I actually prepare my body for ritual work.

People picture ritual prep as candles and incense. Mine starts with a lot more physiotherapy than that.

The Toenail That Wouldn’t Quit

I’ve talked before about my 5yrs with an overachieving toenail – which turned out, when it was finally sorted, to actually be three toenails growing on the one nail. Genuinely. Three. It’s a great story at a dinner party. It was a lot less funny living through it.

Here’s the bit that surprises people: if you’d told me beforehand that my glute muscles had a significant role to play in walking, I’d have been surprised. Shocked might be the better word, actually. But there you go – five years of favouring that foot, hobbling really everywhere, and my glutes just stopped doing their job. My back and legs took the brunt of it instead. I had to relearn how to walk. Properly relearn it, the way you’d teach a child, cos my body had built a whole alternative system around not using the muscles it was supposed to use.

Almost 10yrs on from the first toenail removal, I still attend physio regularly, especially in times of stress. So when I say physical preparation matters to me before ritual, I don’t mean lighting a nice candle and having a cup of tea first. I mean I genuinely cannot stand for hours. I can’t kneel for hours either, or sit for hours, for that matter – any of it causes real pain. Whatever ritual I’m building has to work within that, not pretend it doesn’t exist.

Food, and the Other Injury Nobody Sees

Food is an integral part of my preparation for ritual and you wouldn't believe how long it took me to accept that. So this plate of crisps, ham toastie and sliced up apple is a major part of it for me!
This might not look like much, but to me it’s a feast!

The other physical piece is a history of disordered eating. When I say history, I mean I’ve done a lot of work on it, so most of the time I’m genuinely fine. But there are still things that trigger me, and they trigger me mightily, not mildly.

Food plays an important part of most ritual traditions – offerings, feasting, fasting, all of it. So if there’s something specific I want to do around food for a ritual, that’s a physical preparation question for me as much as a spiritual one. And fasting, which comes up a lot in ritual practice generally, rarely enters mine at all. There’s nothing wrong with fasting as a practice – it just doesn’t work with my history and my reality, and I’ve stopped pretending it should. If I’m doing something intense, what I actually need is plenty of water, not less food.

Shedding the Earthly Bounds

Most of the time, going into ritual for me means physically shedding things first. Jewellery off, yes, even my wedding ring. Bra off. No tight clothes. Everything loose, easy, comfortable…

With Samhain coming up, the physical preparation this time is bigger than just what I wear. I mentioned a few months back that I’d started decluttering – that’s continuing now, so that myself and my husband actually have a clean, clear physical space to hold our own ritual in, rather than trying to do meaningful work in the middle of everyday clutter. That matters more than people expect it to.

None of this is the version of “physical preparation” you’ll find in most ritual guides. But it’s mine, built around a body that has actual, permanent limits – and I’d rather work with those limits honestly than perform a version of ritual that ignores them and hope my body doesn’t notice.

How to Open and Close a Ritual (So It Doesn’t Follow You Home)

I’ve written before about how long it took me to work out what a ritual even was – turns out I’d been doing them my whole life without the label, from Mass to my hair appointment to a candle lit for an intention. That part I got to eventually. What took me a lot longer, and cost me a lot more, was working out that a ritual needs a proper ending. As in – how do you actually open and close a ritual???

The Candle Was Easy

With a candle, this bit’s fairly straightforward. The ritual ends when the candle burns out, or you blow it out yourself. No grand ceremony required – the flame going out is the close, built right into the object. I didn’t have to think about it. It thought about it for me.

A picture of a tall, thick, green electric candle. Yes, I use electric candles. And when the batteries die, that's how the ritual is closed, if I forget to do so...
Even an electric candle will burn out eventually…

Then I Started Doing Something More Complicated

Not that anything ever happened to me. Nor did I ever faint in the middle of a factory floor, causing panic and mayhem among a bunch of hardbitten steelworkers, an extensive investigation into potential excessive CO2 levels, and some very embarrassing conversations with my manager about blood loss during periods. Nope, never happened…

But it did teach me to firmly open and close rituals.

Here’s roughly what actually went on, if it had happened, which it didn’t. Deep spiritual work, done properly, without a clear ending point – the kind of thing you sit with, that stirs something up, that you don’t just switch off and walk away from. And then straight back into ordinary life. Straight onto a factory floor, in this instance. No line drawn between “I am doing this work” and “I am now doing something else entirely.” The work doesn’t know the ritual’s meant to be over cos you never told it, formally, that it was over. It just keeps going. Quietly. Underneath everything else you’re doing. Until eventually your body makes the decision for you, in the least convenient location it can find, in front of the least convenient audience.

Why the Close Matters as Much as the Open

So here’s the thing I didn’t understand at the start, and genuinely wish someone had told me plainly: opening a ritual is the easy part. You light the candle, you say the words, you know you’ve started something. Closing it is where people get lazy, cos it feels like the interesting bit is already over and you’re just tidying up. It isn’t tidying up. It’s the bit that tells your body, your mind, whatever you want to call the part of you doing the work, that it’s allowed to stop now.

A firm close doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to be clear. Blow out the candle and say so, out loud if you can manage it, even just to yourself – “this is ended.” Close a book if you opened one. Stand up if you were sitting. Change your physical position, cos the body remembers position as much as it remembers anything. The specifics matter less than the fact that there’s a specific, deliberate, unmissable moment where the ritual stops and ordinary life starts again.

I don’t always get this right, even now. But I’ve never had another CO2 investigation over it, so I’ll take that as progress.

Learn from my mistakes!!!

What Actually Makes a Ritual a Ritual

Ritual doesn’t mean candles and robes. It means repetition with meaning – and you’ve been doing it since you started brushing your teeth.

When I started out in spiritual work, I really struggled with this one. Ritual. What even is it. I had this picture in my head – candles, robes, a circle of people who all somehow knew what they were doing – and none of it matched anything in my actual life, so I figured ritual just wasn’t for me yet. Totally wasn’t ready for that level of commitment. I needed to learn more first, get more serious, earn my way into it somehow.

Well, it took me a long time to work out that I already knew what ritual was. I’d been doing it my whole life.

What is a ritual? Well lighting candles is an age old Irish tradition. And here I've lit three on my Brigid altar, 2 for Brigid and 1 for the Dagda. He likes to keep an eye on things...
Why light one candle when you can light three? And some incense….

So What Was I Missing, Orlagh?

I grew up Catholic. Still am, in my own way – pagan Catholic, I call myself, which tells you something about the in-between space I live in. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to connect the dots that the sacraments I’d been raised on – weekly Mass, confession, baptism, communion, confirmation, marriage – are rituals. Not “ritual-adjacent.” Not “a bit like ritual if you squint.” Rituals. Full stop. Never mind the “special” Masses that show up around specific points in the year, Easter, Christmas, all of that – that’s ritual wearing a different coat, tied to the turning of the year the same way Imbolc is.

What Else Counts, Then?

So then I went further. If Mass is a ritual, what else is?

Turns out: loads. Brushing your teeth every morning. Your (semi) regular – if you’re me – hair appointment. The weekly takeaway. Your daily coffee, made the same way, at the same time, in the same cup. None of these look like ritual cos none of them come with candles or robes or anyone chanting anything. But they’re regularly repeated actions that carry meaning beyond the action itself, and that’s the actual definition. That’s it. That’s the whole bar.

Ritual doesn’t mean massive. It doesn’t mean huge, elaborate, performed for an audience, done “properly” according to some rulebook you haven’t found yet. It can be that, sure, if that’s what you want and what you can sustain. But it doesn’t have to be. The Mass you sat through as a child and the coffee you make every morning without thinking about it are doing the same basic job – marking something as significant through repetition – even though one has incense and the other has instant coffee granules.

My First Ritual

Once I understood that, my first actual, deliberate, this-is-a-ritual ritual was almost insultingly simple. I lit a candle.

Surprising no one, if you know anything about Irish people and our relationship with candles. We’ve been lighting them for intentions for generations – a candle for a safe journey, a candle for an exam, a candle for someone who’s sick, a candle just because you needed to do something with your hands while you hoped for something you couldn’t control… I was following a very long tradition without even fully realising it at the time. No need for a script. I needed a match and something I wanted to hold in my mind while it burned.

That’s genuinely where I’d tell anyone to start, if they’re standing where I was standing – convinced ritual is a locked door they haven’t found the key for yet. It isn’t locked. You’ve been doing it for years, just without the label. Light the candle. See what happens.

Not Looking at Myself Here. Nope. (On Missing Your Own Checkpoints)

What happens when you skip your own spiritual check-in – six months off track, and why building a way back matters more than never going off track at all.

I know, people associate the cauldron with the Dagda far more than with Brigid. But honestly, the Cauldron step is so important on Brigid’s Path. And it’s the one people are most likely to skip…

Well, here we are. Last stop on this walk through Brigid’s Path – Know Yourself, Reconcile the Past, Joy, Three Marks of a Poet, The Path Forward, and now the Cauldron. Six posts. Took me longer to walk it than to write about it, if I’m honest.

What the cauldron actually is

This shows a picture of my Dagda statue inbetween my little brass cauldron and my incense holder cauldron, both of which as about twice the size of the Dagda here! People associate cauldrons far more closely with the Dagda than Brigid...
My Dagda statue and his totally size appropriate cauldrons!

The cauldron is the checkpoint. A fixed point in the year where you stop and ask yourself if you’re still on the path you think you’re on, or any path at all.

I use Imbolc, Bealtaine, Lúnasa, and Samhain for mine. (Have to be honest hear, I stole the idea of 4 checkins a year from the 12 Week Year…) Others use the first of the month. Some people use their birthday, or New Year, or nothing fixed at all, just a feeling that it’s time. Doesn’t matter which one you pick. What matters is that you actually stop and look.

Why this is the hardest step of the whole lot

Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud, myself included until recently: the cauldron only exists because we go off track. Not might. Will. Every single one of us, at some point, drifts from whatever path we thought we were walking. The cauldron isn’t a nice-to-have for the odd bad week. It’s built for the assumption that things will go wrong.

And planning for things to go wrong feels antithetical to most of us, cos it feels like admitting defeat before you’ve even started. Like you’re supposed to walk a spiritual path with total confidence, straight line, no wobbles, and if you need a checkpoint system for when it falls apart, doesn’t that mean you’re already failing at it?

I don’t think that’s true. But I understand exactly why it feels that way, because I felt it too, and I built this whole system myself.

We don’t like admitting we’ll need a way back before we’ve even left. It feels presumptuous, almost. Or pessimistic. Or like you’re jinxing it. So we skip building the checkpoint in the first place, or we build it and then quietly don’t use it when the year gets busy (ahem, not looking at myself at all here. Nope.), because using it means admitting there might be something to check.

What actually happened to me this year

Earlier this year, I knew things had to change. I wasn’t getting the time to do everything I needed to do – that was obvious to me by January, if not before. And then Imbolc came around and just… floated by me. I didn’t do my usual check-in. I had no time alone. Definitelydidn’t get the cobweb clearing done inside my own head that Imbolc is supposed to be for (if you saw my Instagram post a few weeks ago, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about here!).

So I went off track. In all sorts of ways.

And now, six-plus months later, I’m pulling myself back together. Slowly. One step at a time. But getting there.

I want to be honest about the order of events there, cos it matters: I didn’t skip Imbolc because I decided the cauldron wasn’t for me this year. I skipped it because life got in the way, and skipping the checkpoint is exactly how “life got in the way” turns into “six months off track.” The checkpoint doesn’t stop life from getting in the way. It stops you from paying attention or acknowledging it for half a year.

The bit that’s genuinely hard to admit

This has happened to me over and over and over again throughout the years. Sometimes massively, catastrophically. Sometimes barely a wobble. Either my path changes, or I change, or my circumstances change – and every single time, the cauldron is what brings me back to check.

That’s not a failure I’m confessing once and moving past. It’s a pattern. A recurring one. And admitting that a pattern is a pattern, rather than a one-off you’re finally past this time, is a much harder thing to sit with than admitting a single mistake. A single mistake, you fix and move on from. A pattern means building your whole approach around the fact that you’ll be back here again, and being at peace with that, instead of treating each return to the cauldron as evidence you’ve failed at this all over again.

What the cauldron actually allows

Not a guarantee that you’ll never go off track. A way back when you do.

The cauldron doesn’t judge how far you’ve drifted. It doesn’t care whether this is your first time back or your fiftieth. It just sits there, ready, whenever you’re ready to come back to it. The whole point is that it works regardless of how badly things have gone, which is precisely why it’s uncomfortable to plan for – you’re building something for a future version of yourself who’s failed, and building it well means genuinely believing that version of you deserves a way back too.

Missing one checkpoint is what let this particular drift go on as long as it did. I’m not going to pretend that’s a coincidence.

So, six posts later – where does that leave the whole walk?

I went into this round of Brigid’s Path because I needed to. Know Yourself, because I’d stopped. Reconcile the Past, because there was plenty to reconcile. Joy, because I’d let it go entirely. The three marks of a poet, because I’m still working out how much I trust what I know without proof. The path forward, because twenty years in, the path looks nothing like it did when I started, and that’s not a problem, that’s just what happens.

And now the cauldron, because none of the above holds if you don’t keep coming back to check.

I’ll be back at this again. Not because I failed at it this time, but because that’s what the path actually is – not a straight line you walk once, but something you keep returning to, checkpoint after checkpoint, for as long as you’re doing this work at all.

When’s your next checkpoint? Not someday – an actual date. Mine’s Samhain. What’s yours?

What the Fuck? I’m Only Paid for 40 (Or, Choosing Time Over Money at Forty-Something)

Twenty years on, the same core values look completely different in practice – a reflection on career pivots, nieces I don’t see enough, and why 70-hour weeks stopped being worth it.

Fifth stop on Brigid’s Path this round, and this one’s less about a single moment. The Path Forward is hugely important on Brigid’s Path. And I keep. On. Coming. Back. To it. (Step one, two, three, and four linked!) Not once, not twice – constantly. Life changes, so the path changes, so here we are again.

A representation of my working week in a spreadsheet, with colour coded meetings showing in a chart but all the info stripped out. I have a path forward that hopefully has fewer meetings in it!
Yes I’m sad enough to have an outline of my week…. and yes the colours do mean things. Anyone working in a manufacturing envorinoment will recognise the signs of a tier system at play here! If you don’t – don’t worry. You’re not missing out.

What is a path, anyway?

A connection between two places or states. A search. A story. A call. A feeling.

And also – hard work. Bloody hard work. I say that because it’s true, and because it’s the bit that gets left out of most spiritual writing. Nobody puts “hard work” on the inspirational quote graphic, but there it is, plain as anything, sitting underneath every other definition. And we’re looking towards the path forward on Brigid’s Path, it nearly always contains hard work!

Why do I keep revisiting this bit?

Because I’m not the same person I was 20 years ago, and my path is looking different because of it.

A few years ago I couldn’t have thought about the thing I’m actually thinking about now – a pivot in my engineering career, away from day-to-day manufacturing support and towards more of a consultancy role, or something global. That wasn’t even a shape my ambition could take back then. But as I get older, I want different things from life.

Oh how myphysical body has changed! My emotional body has changed. My spiritual body has changed. The core values are the same – they haven’t moved – but how I express them definitely has.

I have two nieces I want to spend more time with. I have friends and family I don’t see enough of. Seventy-hour weeks are no longer appealing. Like, what the fuck? I’m only paid for 40. Why am I giving away an extra 75% for free?

Time is far more important now than money, fundamentally. And that’s reflected in the path I’m choosing for myself.

Guides, torchbearers, and pathfinders

These are job descriptions, not descriptions of a person or entity. They might be friends, teachers, authors, voices from the past, deities, saints, things beyond definition. Almost certainly, they will offer suggestions. They can show you the path they walked and how it might help you. They might shed light on a particular aspect of your spiritual path, or they might be extremely specific, or extremely general.

And, honestly, they might not always be what you need. That’s allowed too.

I know Mary, St Therese of Lisieux, Mary Magdalene and all the rest are there for me. But those relationships ebb and flow. There will be times when this work is the most important work you can be doing. And others when it’s really far down the list, because other things are more important. Most of us don’t have the need, want, or wherewithal to devote our entire lives to our spirituality. We find the spiritual in the mundane. And that’s ok as well. It’s always ok.

What is right for you?

Well. That’s for you to decide.

Some questions worth sitting with, if you want a starting point: What values and beliefs are most important to me now? What positive aspects of my previous experience do I want to carry forward? Am I afraid of changing direction, and how do I address that? What practices actually align with what I believe, rather than what I think I should believe?

You’ll notice some overlap with questions I’ve asked in earlier posts on this path. That’s fine. This is about revisiting them now that you’ve done more of the work.

How to keep yourself safe while you’re figuring this out

Set your boundaries. Pay attention to your internal and external feelings, not just one or the other. Know your own lore – the story you’ve already lived, not just the one you’re being sold. Ask questions, and actually assess the answers instead of accepting the first one that sounds nice. And ask the same question again and again until you’re actually happy with the answer, not just tired of asking it.

So where does my path forward actually go?

I don’t fully know yet, if I’m honest. But I know it’s away from where I’ve been standing for the last while, and towards more time, not more money. Away from the version of me that thought 70-hour weeks were just what committed people did, and towards a version that gets to see her nieces more.

That’s the path forward, as far as I can see it right now. It’ll probably look different again in another 20 years. Good.

The Alarm I Set So I’d Actually Listen (Or, What the Old Poets Knew About Knowledge)

The three marks of a poet in old Irish tradition – imbas forosnai, teinm laeda, dichetal do chennaib – and what happens when you ignore the first one for two months.

Well, here we go. Back on Brigid’s Path, (after know myself, reconciling the past and joy) and this time it’s the Poet aspect I’m meant to be sitting with. I say “meant to” because I’ve been half-avoiding this one, cos poetry has never felt like mine to claim – I’m no poet, or so I’ve told myself for years.

But Brigid doesn’t just mean poet the way we mean it now, all verse and rhyme. In the old triads, the ones that list out threes of everything Gaelic culture thought was worth naming, there’s one that goes: three things that constitute a poet – knowledge that illumines, chewing of the marrow, and improvisation. In Irish: imbas forosnai, teinm laeda, dichetal do chennaib.

Three marks. Not three techniques you learn in a workshop – three ways of knowing.

Imbas forosnai – knowledge that illumines

For-osna. Lights up. Brings to light. Makes manifest.

This is the kind of knowing that arrives already lit, if that makes any sense at all. Not information you went looking for, but something that illuminates the second it lands – and you can’t unknow it afterwards.

I had a deep knowing from January this year that something was wrong. It took til March to take the drastic step of taking time off work. And even then I was hesitating about the amount of time I took. It took a few months after that before I could even hold a decent conversation at home.

We all have this deep knowing inside of us. We’ve just very often trained ourselves to ignore it. It’s not scientific, like? So how do it work? Well, I believe it’s our bodies and souls speaking to us. It’s the signs and indications our bodies and souls give us that we can’t put into a so called normal box, so we learn to ignore them. We can call it intuition, self-knowledge, all we want – but we all know things deep down that sometimes it suits us to ignore.

The old sources call imbas forosnai a gift of clairvoyance. I don’t think you need to believe in fortune-telling to recognise the shape of it. Are you telling the future, or creating it? I still don’t have an answer to that one. (Ask me again once I’ve chewed on it properly.) I just know that January me knew something March me eventually had to act on, and the gap between knowing and acting nearly cost me more than the knowing itself.

Teinm laeda – chewing of the marrow

This is the one I actually understand in my bones, cos it’s just rumination. Chewing the pith. I think of a cow working the same mouthful over and over, getting everything out of it slowly, no rush. Teinm laeda is knowledge you don’t get in a flash – you get it by staying with something long after everyone else has moved on. Turning it over. Turning it over again.

Really, this is most of what I do. Most of what any of us do, if we’re honest, when we’re actually working something out rather than performing having worked it out.

Dichetal do chennaib – improvisation, straight from the head

Now, this is the one that stops me in my tracks every time. Dichetal do chennaib literally means from the head – and it’s the mark of knowledge that arrives whole, spoken, in the moment, with no chewing at all. No illumination beforehand. Just composed, extemporaneously, because the moment demanded it.

The example I keep coming back to is Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, standing over her husband’s body, and the caoineadh – the keen – coming out of her already formed. Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire wasn’t drafted. It wasn’t chewed over for weeks. It came out of her, whole, because grief needed a shape and she gave it one on the spot.

That’s dichetal do chennaib. Not composure. The opposite of composure, actually – it’s what comes when there’s no time left to compose anything.

So where does that leave me, walking this bit of the path?

I’ve had my imbas forosnai moments this year – the deep knowing I sat on for far too long before I acted. I’ve definitely been chewing the marrow on some of it for months, cos that’s just how I process things, slowly, going back over the same ground until it gives something up.

What I haven’t done much of is the third one. Dichetal do chennaib asks you to trust that something whole can come out of you without being prepared first. I’m not sure I trust that yet.

But I am doing something about the imbas forosnai bit. I’ve gone back to my old practice of tuning into my body daily, actually asking it what it needs instead of overriding it and hoping it’ll sort itself out. I’ve even put a phone alarm on to remind me – which tells you everything about how easily I still talk myself out of it without one.

A screenshot of my alarm screen from last Friday at 11:13 to remind me to tune in - every day... Acting on our knowing, on our imbas forosnai is as important as knowing it!
Yes, this is my alarm screen from last Friday so I remember to tune in!

That’s the practice underneath everything I teach in one of the courses I’m building for the school right now. More on that when it’s ready. For now, it’s just me, an alarm, and the discipline of actually listening.

So that’s the homework, really. Not to force an improvised moment, but to notice when one’s asking to happen and not talk myself out of it – and to keep checking in daily with the knowing that’s already there, so it doesn’t take til March next time. What’s the knowing you’ve been sitting on? I’d really love to hear it, if you feel like sharing.