If you read last week’s post, you’ll know I’ve been thinking about the vacuum that opens up when you leave a high-control religion. The hollowness that certain weekends – Easter, Christmas, the hinge points of the year – can make suddenly visible.
This week I want to talk about what a lot of women do next. And why it often doesn’t work.
The obvious answer that isn’t really an answer
When you leave organised religion, the most common advice you’ll encounter – spoken or unspoken – is some version of: just be spiritual. Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t. Build your own thing.
On the surface, that sounds reasonable. Liberating, even. After years of being told exactly what to believe and what happened if you didn’t, following what feels right sounds like freedom.
The problem is that “follow what feels right” is not actually a framework. It’s an absence of one. For women who have spent years inside a highly structured belief system, that absence doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels like standing in a very large room with no furniture and no map.
The patchwork quilt problem
What tends to happen – and I say this from personal experience as much as from observation – is a kind of spiritual magpie phase. A crystal here. A tarot deck there. Some yoga philosophy, some sage smudging, a dash of Norse mythology, a moon ritual from a wellness influencer. Each piece picked up because it glittered, because it felt like something, because it seemed to offer an answer.
None of those things are wrong in themselves. But assembled without intention or grounding, without any real understanding of where they come from or what they mean within their own traditions, they become a patchwork quilt without a plan. It doesn’t keep you warm. It just gets heavier.
There’s also something worth naming honestly: much of what gets marketed as “spirituality” in the wellness space involves taking practices from living traditions – Indigenous, Hindu, African, East Asian – stripping them of their -context, and selling them to Western women as self-care. That isn’t spiritual freedom. Cultural appropriation dressed up in linen and good lighting is still cultural appropriation. Women who go down this road tend to feel, eventually, just as hollow as before – and now there’s a vague guilt attached to it too.
What actually helped me
When I stopped reaching outward and started looking closer to home, something shifted.
Not immediately. Not dramatically either. But what grounded me, what gave me something solid to stand on, was a combination of things that had nothing exotic about them at all.
Connecting with my ancestors. Not in a performative or mystical sense, but in the straightforward sense of asking: who were the people I come from? What did they value? How did they endure? What did they carry, and what did they pass on to me whether I wanted it or not?
Getting honest about my ethics and values. Not the ones I’d inherited, not the ones I’d been told I should have, but the ones actually operating in me – the things I couldn’t compromise on, the lines I wouldn’t cross, the things that made me feel most like myself.
Working from that grounded state outward was the final piece. Rather than assembling a spiritual life from whatever was available, I started from what I knew to be true about myself and built from there.
That process led me to Brigid. Not because someone told me she was what I needed. When I looked honestly at who I was and where I came from, she was already there – as saint, as goddess, as a figure woven into Irish culture across more than a thousand years. She didn’t require me to borrow from anyone else’s tradition. She was already mine to explore.
Structure isn’t the enemy
Here’s what took me longest to accept: the problem was never structure itself. The problem was being inside a structure someone else had built, one I had no hand in shaping and that never quite fit.
Building your own spiritual life doesn’t mean having no structure. It means building one that is genuinely yours: rooted in your own history, your own values, your own honest questions. That takes longer than picking up a crystal. It requires sitting with uncomfortable things. But it produces something that actually holds.
This is the work I do with the women I work with. It’s what the coming weeks of posts are going to be about.
Where this is going
Next week I want to introduce you properly to Brigid, not as a requirement, not as a new belief system to step into, but as a figure worth knowing. She has been part of Irish women’s lives for a very long time and might have something to offer you, depending on where you are and what you’re looking for.
If you don’t want to miss it, make sure you’re on the list.
And if last week’s post is still sitting with you – or if the patchwork quilt image landed somewhere uncomfortable – I’d genuinely love to hear about it. You can reply to any of my emails or drop a comment below.
