Category: Me, myself and I

Here I talk about myself, my unverified personal gnosis (gnoses?), my thoughts, my actions, my learning, or even just some random things that are going through my head!

How to Celebrate Lúnasa Without Causing Harm – and What to Do Instead

Lúnasa is four days away. August 1st – or the Sunday nearest to it, as our ancestors would have observed it – is almost here. (Well, let’s be honest – it’s always more of a season than a given day in Irish lore!) Given this, there is a plethora of posts around how to celebrate Lúnasa, or Lughnasadh if you’re using pre-Caighdeán Irish. So here’s my approach!

Over the last few weeks we’ve covered a lot of ground. Brigid’s water aspect in summer. The lore behind her. The figures of the Lúnasa season – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, Crom Cruach – and what they tell us about what our ancestors understood about harvest, sacrifice, and the cost of prosperity. Now it’s time to talk about what you can actually do.

A word about fire first

Lúnasa is primarily a fire festival. That’s along with Imbolc, Bealtaine, Samhain. And some people want to celebrate Lúnasa with a flame or a bonfire.

This year – and increasingly every year – I want to ask you to think carefully before you do that outdoors.

We have had one of the driest summers in recent memory in parts of Ireland and the UK. Across southern Europe, Australia, North America, and elsewhere, wildfires have caused devastation that is increasingly connected to climate change. The same Brigid who tends the sacred flame also – as we talked about earlier in this series – has deep roots in water, in wells, in the healing and patient work of rivers and the sea.

If you’re in an area with dry conditions, a fire risk, or a hosepipe ban, please don’t light an outdoor fire to mark Lúnasa. Light a candle indoors instead. She’ll find you just as easily.

an image of a candle in a jar. OUr ancestors might have celebrated Lúnasa with bonfires, but we can adjust to help prevent wildfires!
A candle is just as good as a bonfire when you’re worried about wildfires!!

What Lúnasa actually asks of you

Putting the fire question aside, Lúnasa is fundamentally a festival of stocktaking. The harvest is beginning. What has come in? Has anything left? What did you plant in the spring – literally or metaphorically – and what has actually grown?

I use the four fire festival bank holidays in Ireland – Imbolc, Bealtaine, Lúnasa, and Samhain – as structured check-in points across the year. Lúnasa specifically is where I look at what I’m harvesting in relation to what I’ve sacrificed. Not in a punishing way. But honestly.

Am I sacrificing too much in some areas and ignoring others? What has grown that I didn’t expect? What did I plant with great intention that simply hasn’t come in – and do I need to let go of it, or keep tending it through the darker months ahead?

These are worth sitting with before the festival arrives, rather than on the day itself. Give yourself a few days to let the questions settle.

Practical ways to celebrate Lúnasa

You don’t need an elaborate ritual. You don’t need to be in Ireland, or on a hilltop, or in possession of any particular objects. Here are some things that are accessible, grounded, and genuinely connected to the tradition:

Go to the water. The seaside connection for Lúnasa is ancient and still very much alive – Irish people head to the coast on the August bank holiday without knowing quite why. Know why. Go deliberately. Wash your feet. Sit with the sea.

Put flowers in the house. Garland Sunday – the last Sunday of July – is part of the Lúnasa tradition. Flowers strewn, beauty acknowledged, the earth’s abundance honoured. A bunch of wildflowers or whatever is growing in your garden is enough.

Make or share food. The harvest festival was always communal. Cook something from scratch. Share a meal. Acknowledge that food comes from somewhere and from someone’s labour.

Do your stocktake. Sit down with your journal. Look honestly at the year so far. What has grown? Was something meant to grow but didn’t? What are you carrying into the second half of the year, and what needs to be set down?

Visit a well. If you’re in Ireland, there will be one near you. Most counties have multiple wells with Brigid associations. Visit one with intention.

Going deeper into the lore

If this series has sparked a genuine curiosity about the figures behind Lúnasa – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, and Crom Cruach – the courses at Brigid’s Forge School are the next step. Celebrate Lúnasa with learning!

You can take each course individually at €37 each. Or, for the next week, you can get all three together as the Lúnasa Bundle for €97 – saving €14 on the individual prices. The bundle covers Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, and Crom Cruach in depth, drawing on the primary sources and sitting honestly with what we can and can’t know about figures this old.

If you’ve been reading along for the last nine weeks and the Lúnasa season has started to feel like something worth understanding properly – now is a good time.

Beannachtaí Lúnasa oraibh. Lúnasa blessings to you all.

How are you planning to mark Lúnasa this year? I’d genuinely love to hear – drop it in the comments.

Six Months from Imbolc: What the Opposite Side of the Wheel Teaches Us

Imbolc and Lúnasa sit directly opposite each other on the wheel of the year. Six months apart, as far from each other as it is possible to be.

If Brigid is your primary deity – as she is mine – that means that right now, in late June and into July, you are at the furthest possible point from her festival. Imbolc is behind you. It won’t come around again until February. And Lúnasa, which belongs to a different set of figures entirely, is approaching fast.

This is not a problem. But it is worth paying attention to.

A picture of daffodils in my driveway
Yes I know, daffodils aren’t July flowers – it’s the only pic of flowers I have! lol

What the opposite point on the wheel actually means

The wheel of the year (as much as I dislike the term, it is commonly used…) is not just a calendar. It’s a map of energies, of what the land is doing, of what our ancestors understood about the rhythm of the year. And every festival has its opposite – a point of tension and balance, six months away, that helps define it.

Imbolc is about beginnings. The first light after the dark. The earliest stirring of spring. Brigid’s flame lit against the cold. It’s tender, hopeful, and small – a green shoot, not a full harvest.

Lúnasa is its opposite in almost every way. It’s the height of summer, the beginning of harvest, the moment of abundance before the slow turn toward darkness begins. Where Imbolc is about potential, Lúnasa is about what has actually grown. Where Imbolc is Brigid’s, Lúnasa belongs to Tailtiu, to the old gods, to something that predates even the Tuatha Dé Danann in the layers of Irish tradition.

Understanding that opposite point doesn’t diminish your relationship with Brigid. It deepens it. Because you can’t fully understand a festival without understanding what sits across from it on the wheel.

What sent me looking at this time of year

I started exploring the Lúnasa figures – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, Crom Cruach – because I wanted to know what my ancestors were actually doing at this point in the year. Not what the books said in general terms, but what people in Ireland were specifically doing, in specific places, in specific ways.

I found my way to Duchas.ie – the Irish Folklore Collection, which is one of the most extraordinary resources available to anyone interested in Irish folk tradition. And what I found there stopped me in my tracks.

Garland Sunday. Also known as Reek Sunday. The last Sunday of July, celebrated in two main ways across Ireland: the strewing of flowers, and the climbing of mountains. Both traditions appear in community after community across the folklore records, often with details that suggest something far older than Christianity underneath them. Far older, in some cases, than the Tuatha Dé Danann themselves.

The flower strewing connects to the idea of honouring the earth at its most abundant. The mountain climbing – most famously on Croagh Patrick in Mayo, but not exclusively – connects to a landscape-based devotion that predates any of the named deities we know. These are the traces of your ancestors’ practice. They’re worth following.

Brigid at this time of year

Brigid doesn’t have a specific role in Lúnasa – and I want to be honest about that rather than force a connection that isn’t there in the lore. She and Lúnasa belong to different layers of the tradition, and that’s fine. Not every deity needs to be present at every festival.

What she does offer at this time of year is continuity. The relationship you’ve built with her doesn’t go dormant because her festival has passed. She’s still there. The water aspect is still available to you. The forge still burns.

But Lúnasa invites you to expand your attention. To begin to know the other figures who belong to this season, to ask what your ancestors were doing in late July, and to let the wheel of the year be a genuine guide rather than something that only matters at Imbolc and Samhain.

What’s coming

Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing about the three figures most associated with Lúnasa in the Irish tradition – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, and Crom Cruach. Each of them has a course at Brigid’s Forge School for those who want to go deeper into the lore. And each of them has something genuinely interesting to say about what this time of year meant to the people who lived here before us.

If you want to mark Garland Sunday this year, you don’t need to climb a mountain. Put flowers in the house. Go outside if you can. Remember that the last Sunday of July has been considered significant in Ireland for longer than anyone can fully trace – and that your ancestors were part of that.

That’s enough. It’s more than enough.

Have you ever marked Garland Sunday or Reek Sunday? Or discovered something in the folklore records that surprised you? Drop it in the comments – I’d love to know what you’ve found.

Brigid and Water: Healing, Wells, and What the Sea Teaches Us

Brigid water healing is not the first thing most people think of when they come to her. The forge, the flame, the sacred fire at Kildare – these are the images that tend to dominate. And they’re real. They matter. But they’re only half the picture.

Water runs through Brigid’s tradition just as deeply as fire does. Her wells are scattered across Ireland in their hundreds. Her healing aspect is documented across centuries of both pagan and Christian practice. And for those of us who work with her actively, the water side of her tends to show up at the moments when fire would be too much – when what’s needed is not a dramatic transformation but a slow, patient, consistent one.

A picture of me, standing in the sea enjoying life!
The husband did not enter the sea on this particular day, but he was thinking about it!

The wells

Ireland is covered in wells associated with Brigid. St Brigid’s Well in Liscannor, Co. Clare is one of the most significant – a living pilgrimage site with an extraordinary atmosphere, visited by people who are neither particularly pagan nor particularly Catholic but who recognise something there worth attending to. It’s not the only one. Almost every county has its own, and the folklore attached to them is rich and specific and worth exploring.

Wells in Irish tradition are liminal places – thresholds between the surface world and what lies beneath. They are associated with healing, with wishes, with the resolution of difficult things. Water rises from the earth, cold and clear, carrying something of the deep places with it. Brigid tends these places. She has done for a very long time.

If you have access to a well – Brigid’s or otherwise – visiting it with intention is one of the simplest and most grounded ways to connect with her water aspect. You don’t need a ritual. You don’t need to know the correct prayers. Showing up and paying attention is enough.

The sea

The sea is something else again. Brigid’s relationship with the sea and healing is less often discussed than her wells, but it’s there in the tradition and it’s there in practice.

Whenever I have something troubling my mind – a problem to chew over, something that won’t settle, a weight I’ve been carrying longer than I should – I go to the sea. Even on the roughest days, even when the weather is doing something dramatic and the waves are throwing themselves at the rocks, I find something there to help me. The wildness of it on difficult days. The gentleness of it on calmer ones. The salt air that gets into everything and clears it out.

What I’ve come to understand is that this is Brigid’s water aspect working in a way that fire simply can’t. Fire transforms fast and completely. Water works on you gradually, patiently, wearing away at what needs to shift until you fit the shape that was waiting for you. It’s slower. It’s often gentler. And it tends to go deeper.

Healing that doesn’t announce itself

One of the things I’ve noticed about Brigid’s water aspect is that it rarely announces itself. The healing doesn’t arrive in a flash. It accumulates – visit by visit, tide by tide, glass of water by glass of water. You look back after a few weeks and realise something has shifted, and you can’t point to a single moment when it happened.

This is different from the fire model of healing, which tends to be more immediate and more visible. Both are valid. Both are Brigid. But the water model is particularly well suited to the kinds of healing that need time – the long-standing patterns, the deep griefs, the things that have been with you so long you’ve started to think of them as permanent.

They’re not permanent. Water is patient. So is she.

Brigid as a bridge in troubled times

This quality – the capacity to hold you steadily while change happens gradually around and through you – is part of what makes Brigid such a useful figure in difficult periods. She doesn’t demand that you be transformed immediately. In my experience, she doesn’t require you to have it together before you come to her. She meets you where you are and works with what’s actually there.

That’s what the wells were for. That’s what the sea offers. And it’s available to you whether you’re in Ireland or not – water is water, and she finds you wherever it is.

Going deeper

If you want to understand Brigid’s healing aspect more fully – where it comes from in the tradition, how it’s documented in the historical sources, what the old texts actually say about her – the St Brigid of Ireland course at Brigid’s Forge School (€37) is a good place to start. Next week I’ll be writing about the lore courses specifically – the primary texts that mention her, and what they reveal.

Do you have a relationship with Brigid’s water aspect? A well you visit, a stretch of coast that feels significant, a river that settles something in you? I’d genuinely love to hear about it in the comments.

Brigid Beyond Imbolc: How to Connect With Her in Summer

Brigid in summer can feel like a contradiction. She is so strongly associated with Imbolc – with February 1st, with the first stirring of spring, with candles lit against the dark – that when the long days arrive and Imbolc feels months away in either direction, it’s easy to find yourself coasting.

I know this because I do it every year. April hits and my spiritual practice goes a bit quiet. I’m not abandoning anything, I’m just… less active about it. Less intentional. And then, at some point in early summer, something shifts.

The pull of the sea

It starts with an urge I’ve learned to pay attention to. I need to get to the coast.

Brigid in summer leads us to the sea - well she leads me there a lot! But this image of Tramore on a sunny summer's day shows why - the crowds, the balmy water, the blue sky - and it's almost on my doorstep!
The Irish seaside on a summer’s day

Not for a holiday. Not for a swim, necessarily, although if the weather is right I’ll take that too. Just to be near the water. To walk to the edge of it and let the sea do what the sea does. Wash my feet. Splash my face. Stand in the cold shallows and feel something settle that had been restless.

This year, with Ireland hitting 30 degrees – yes, you read that correctly, 30 degrees in Ireland – the urge arrived with extra urgency. And it delivered, as it always does.

What I’ve come to understand is that this is Brigid. Not Brigid of the forge and the flame, but Brigid of the wells, the rivers, the healing waters. The side of her that works slowly, patiently, wearing away at whatever needs to shift until it fits the shape she’s looking for.

Why fire doesn’t always suit summer

Brigid’s association with fire and water is something I’ve written about before. Fire transforms fast – it’s urgent, total, immediate. Water transforms slowly. It supports, encourages, and gradually reshapes. Both are Brigid. Both are useful. But they suit different moments.

In summer, particularly for those of us with more natural energy in the warmer months, the fire aspect can tip into overwhelm. There’s already heat, already momentum, already a lot happening. Adding more fire to that can be too much.

Water, on the other hand, meets you in the heat. It cools. Soothes. It holds you while it works. And Brigid’s water aspect is, in my experience, just as transformative as her fire – it just takes longer, and it tends to be gentler about it.

A note for those in wildfire regions

If you’re reading this from Australia, California, southern Europe, or anywhere that summer brings the threat of wildfire rather than an invitation to swim – I’d suggest working primarily with Brigid’s water aspect this time of year rather than her fire. Light candles carefully and with awareness. But let the wells, the rivers, the rain, and the sea be your primary points of connection with her until the season turns.

Brigid and the sea have a long relationship, and it doesn’t require living in Ireland to access it. Water is water. She finds you wherever it is.

What summer practice with Brigid can look like

You don’t need to overhaul anything. Small, consistent contact with the water aspect is enough. Some possibilities:

Seek out natural water where you can – the sea, a river, a lake, a well. St Brigid’s Well in Liscannor is one of the most significant, but every county in Ireland has its own, and if you’re not in Ireland, look for what’s local to you.

Bring intention to water in your daily life. The shower you take in the morning. The glass of water before you begin work. These aren’t just practical acts – they can be devotional ones, if you choose to treat them that way.

Let the season inform your pace. Summer is a good time for healing work, for the slower processes, for allowing things to be gently worn into a better shape rather than burned through quickly.

And if you feel that pull toward the coast – go. Trust it. In my experience, it’s rarely just a desire for a nice afternoon out.

Going deeper with Brigid

If the summer feels like a good time to learn more about her – who she actually is in the old texts, how she appears across Irish mythology, what the sources tell us that devotional practice alone can’t – the courses at Brigid’s Forge School are a good place to start.

The St Brigid of Ireland course (€37) is the accessible entry point, covering her historical and hagiographical legacy. And over the next couple of weeks I’ll be writing more about the lore courses specifically – the texts that mention her, what they say, and why it matters.

Have you felt that seasonal shift in your practice? Drop a comment below – I’d love to know how summer sits with you and Brigid.

I Didn’t Know I Was Starting. On Beginnings and What They Actually Look Like.

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.

An image of a post staying "Start" in white writing on a red background, on a woodland path. But in real life, starting a spiritual path isn't always this clear!
Photo by Eilis Garvey on Unsplash

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.

[Find out more ]

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.

The Self-Guided Path: Why Walking It Alone Is Harder — and Sometimes the Only Option

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.

A sign saying "HELP YOUR SELF", with "self" kinda falling apart. A self-guided spiritual path isn't easy, but I admit, it was the way for me and I won't condemn it!
Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash

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.

[Find out more ]

Something landed here? Drop a comment or reply to my emails. I read everything.

How Knowing Your Spiritual Path Changes Everything — Including Where You Work

Spirituality in everyday life looks nothing like what most people imagine. It’s not a Sunday morning practice or a shelf with meaningful objects on it — or at least, it’s not only those things.

Once a spiritual path is genuinely yours, it stops being a compartment. It becomes the framework everything else runs on.

This image shows a wine glass with what I think is pomegranate juice and what I think is a pomegranate. Y'see spirituality in everyday life doesn't have to be complicated. In fact, I'd say it absolutely can't be complicated!
Photo by Birgith Roosipuu on Unsplash

The job I had to leave

A few years ago, I was working for a defence organisation. Good money. Interesting technical challenges. Perfectly reasonable colleagues.

And I couldn’t stay.

It wasn’t a dramatic realisation. It crept up on me — a low-level discomfort that I kept trying to reason away. This is just work. Everyone makes compromises. You’re not personally doing anything wrong.

But the discomfort didn’t go. Because once you’ve done the inner work — once you actually know what your values are and what you’re willing to stand on — it becomes very difficult to unknow it. My values are rooted in care, in healing, in the kind of work that adds something to the world rather than removing from it. Defence work, however well-intentioned, didn’t fit. I knew it. My path knew it.

So I left.

What spirituality in everyday life actually does

It doesn’t just give you something to do on feast days. It gives you a framework for the whole of your life — a way of making decisions that is genuinely yours rather than borrowed from an institution or a culture or someone else’s expectations.

For me, that shows up in obvious ways and in subtle ones. I choose employers carefully, with values alignment as a genuine criterion. My mornings begin with what I think of as a sacred shower — not because there’s anything mystical about hot water and soap, but because I’ve learned to use that time intentionally, to arrive in the day rather than just stumble into it. I touch the earth regularly — literally, feet on grass, hands in soil — because grounding is not a metaphor for me, it’s a practice. And yes, I ask Brigid for help with technical issues at work. She’s a goddess of the forge and of craft. She’s interested. She helps.

None of this looks like spirituality from the outside. That’s the point.

A real spiritual path is lived, not performed

The difference between a spiritual practice you perform and a spiritual path you live is exactly this — the lived path shapes the ordinary things. The work you take on. The boundaries you hold. The way you start your day. The people you allow close.

It took me years to build something like this. The Guided Path is designed to give you a structured, supported start — six months of live calls, workbooks, community, and Brigid as your guide — so you don’t have to find your way alone the way I did.

The founding cohort starts in two weeks. This is the last post before we begin.

If you’ve been considering it, now is the time.

[Find out more about The Guided Path]

Leaving Fundamentalist Christianity: Do This Before Anything Else

Many people leaving fundamentalist Christianity don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. They want to keep what mattered without walking back into something that controlled and restricted them. I’ve been in that conversation a lot lately — and I always come back to the same piece of advice..

Someone was sharing about leaving fundamentalist Christianity — the specific, particular grief of it. Wanting to keep what mattered. Not wanting to walk back into something that controlled and restricted you. The thread was full of people who recognised that exact tension, because it’s one of the most common experiences I encounter in this space.

I jumped in. Because I’ve walked this path. And because I think there’s one thing that matters more than anything else when you’re standing in that particular gap.

Yeah ok a railroad doesn't link to leavinga fundamentalist Christianity spiritual path, but this image of leaves on a railroad that splitting in two different directions speak to me. House in the background, various trees and shrubs around the railway... It's not too regularly used, but still important.
Photo by Nicole Moore on Unsplash

Leaving fundamentalist Christianity: what nobody tells you

When you leave a high-control religion, you don’t just leave a set of beliefs. You leave a community, a calendar, a language, a way of making sense of the world. The structure was suffocating — but it was still structure. And the absence of it can feel enormous.

A lot of people respond to that absence by reaching outward. They try things. They pick up practices, attend workshops, follow teachers. Some of it helps. A lot of it doesn’t, because they’re still operating from a template that belongs to someone else.

Here’s what I said in that Threads conversation, and I meant every word of it.

Get to know yourself first

Before you commit to anything — any tradition, any teacher, any practice — take the time to know yourself. Not the version of yourself that was acceptable to the institution you left. The actual you.

Start small if you need to. What’s your favourite colour? What music makes you feel like yourself? What time of day do you come alive? These aren’t trivial questions. They’re the beginning of a much more important conversation.

Then go deeper. What are your values — the ones that were actually operating in you, not the ones you were taught to perform? What do you believe about the world, about other people, about what makes a life well-lived? What are you willing to stand on, even when it’s uncomfortable?

This is the work that changes everything. Not because it gives you all the answers, but because it gives you a foundation to stand on when you start looking for them. For anyone leaving fundamentalist Christianity, this is especially true — the version of yourself that the institution knew may be very different from the one waiting underneath.

Why this matters for your spiritual path

A spiritual path that isn’t built on genuine self-knowledge tends to become another version of what you left. Different content, same dynamic — looking to something external to tell you who you are and what you should believe.

A spiritual path built on genuine self-knowledge is something else entirely. It grows with you. It holds you. It can absorb uncertainty without collapsing.

That’s what I’ve been building at Brigid’s Forge for years, and it’s what The Guided Path is designed to support — a structured, supported six months of doing exactly this work, with Brigid as a guide and a small group of women beside you.

The founding cohort starts in two weeks. There are still places available.

If any of this is resonating, I’d love to talk. You can find out more and get in touch at the link below — or just reply to any of my emails. I read everything.

Find out more about The Guided Path

Drop a comment below if something here landed for you. I read everything, and I don’t share what people tell me.

Is The Guided Path Right for You? An Honest Answer.

I thought being a pagan Catholic meant I was alone. I was wrong. The community just hadn’t been built yet. So I built it.

I know when people see a post like this, they expect a hard sell. I hope ye know better that this point here! The Guided Path is specific. It’s not for everyone. Here’s why. (And yes, we’ve been leading up to this over the last 1, 2, 3, 4 weeks)

When I was a teenager, I wore clothes that didn’t fit me.

Not metaphorically – literally. Tight, restrictive things I had squeezed myself into because that was what was expected. I beat myself up when nothing in the shops came in my size. I contorted myself to meet a standard that was never built with my body in mind, and I called the resulting discomfort my own fault.

My spiritual life looked exactly the same way.

Conforming to rules that chafed. Squeezing myself into other people’s expectations. Outsourcing every spiritual choice to thousands of years of patriarchy and then wondering why nothing felt like mine.

These days, I know which clothes suit me. I know which shops will have something in my size that feels good. I stick to them without guilt or apology. My spiritual path works the same way. I walk it on my own terms. Every choice is mine. I still work with Mother Mary, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, and Saint Brigid – figures who matter to me – but the institution that first introduced them to me? That part I left behind.

Me looking directly into the camera. I can do this now, from the work I've done on the Guided Path. I couldn't always!
Me, smiling directly at the camera

The Guided Path exists for women who are ready to do the same.

What it actually is

The Guided Path is a six-month group program. Twelve live calls, six workbooks, a small group of women on the same road, and email access to me throughout. It draws on the figure of Brigid – saint, goddess, keeper of the flame – as a guide and a grounding point, but it doesn’t ask you to adopt any particular label or belief system.

Each month focuses on one step: your core beliefs, reconciling your past, joy, the marks of a poet, the path forward, and finally your cauldron – what you’re carrying, what you’re transforming, what you’ll leave behind.

The work happens in the calls, in the workbooks, and in the space between sessions. It requires genuine engagement. It is not a course you consume passively and forget.

Who it’s for

It’s for you if you’ve left a high-control religion – Catholicism, evangelical Christianity, or any other tradition that told you exactly what to believe – and still feel something unresolved about your spiritual life.

It’s for you if you’re done with the patchwork quilt phase. Done reaching for whatever glitters. Ready to build something rooted in your own history, your own values, your own honest questions.

It’s for you if you want to do this alongside other women making the same journey, rather than entirely alone. The group is capped at fifteen. Large enough for real community, small enough that everyone is known.

It’s for you if you’re willing to look at yourself honestly – the way I described last week – and sit with what you find.

Who it isn’t for

It isn’t for you if you want someone to hand you a new set of beliefs to replace the old ones. That’s not what this is. I’m not founding a new religion here!

It isn’t for you if you’re not ready to engage between sessions. The calls are valuable, but the real work happens in your own time.

It isn’t for you if you’re looking for certainty. This program will not give you certainty. It will give you clarity, which is different and more durable.

It isn’t for you if individual coaching depth is what you need. The one-to-one program may be a better fit, and I’m happy to talk through which is right for you.

The honest bit about cost

The full programme is €2,497. The founding cohort rate is €1,997. A payment plan is available, cost should not be the thing that prevents the right woman from walking this path, so if the investment is a barrier, get in touch and we’ll work something out.

There are payment options available as always. The Guided Path is as accessible as I can make it.

What happens next

If any of the last five weeks of posts have felt like they were written for you — if the vacuum after leaving resonated, if the patchwork quilt landed somewhere familiar, if the Holyhead story made you smile, if the inner work post sat with you for longer than you expected – then the next step is simple.

Go to the link below. Read the full programme page. And if it feels like the right fit, fill in the form and I’ll be in touch within two working days.

No hard sell. No script. Just a conversation about whether this is the right path for you, right now.

Reserve your place — or get in touch to talk it through

And if you’re not quite ready yet – that’s fine too. Stay on the list. Keep reading. The path will still be here when you are.

What Does It Actually Mean to “Do the Inner Work”?

I used to roll my eyes at ‘do the inner work.’ Then I had no choice but to actually do it. New post.

I used to roll my eyes at the phrase “inner work.”

It sounded like something people said on Instagram when they wanted to seem deep without having to be specific. Do the work. Go inward. Heal yourself. What did any of that actually mean on a Tuesday morning when you had a job and a family and a pile of laundry and no idea where to start?

I didn’t believe in it. Not really. Not until I had no choice but to start doing it.

Where it actually began for me

The Dagda turning up in a Travel Lodge in Holyhead – which I wrote about last week – didn’t change my life overnight. I want to be honest about that. It was a significant moment, but significance and transformation are not the same thing. The transformation took years. And it started somewhere I didn’t expect.

It started with food.

I came of age in the late 90s/early 00s, when the cultural message to women about their bodies was as narrow and brutal as it has ever been. Thin was not just desirable, it was moral. It was discipline. It was worth. As an adult, I have never been smaller than a size 14. Getting to a size 14 took twelve months of a very low calorie diet. If you know, you know. Eating normally, I’m usually over a size 20.

For years, I spent enormous amounts of time and energy fighting that. Hating that. Treating my body as a problem to be solved rather than a home to be lived in.

The inner work, the real inner work, was learning to look at that honestly. Not to fix it, not to override it with willpower, but to understand what was actually driving it. What I was really hungry for. What I was trying to control when I controlled my eating, and what I was punishing myself for when I didn’t.

That required journalling. It required meditation. It required learning: about diet culture, about the history of how women’s bodies have been policed, about what I had absorbed without knowing I was absorbing it. Most of all, it required me to look at myself full on, no deviations, and see who was actually looking back.

Not the socially acceptable version of me. The real one.

A picture of my hands, one on top of the other. These hands did the inner work.
These hands did the work. (Yes, they’re my hands!)

What inner work actually is

It is not a quick process. It is not a weekend retreat or a course or a set of affirmations you say in the mirror. Those things can be useful starting points, but they are not the work itself.

Inner work is the sustained, honest practice of asking yourself hard questions and sitting with the answers even when they’re uncomfortable. It’s noticing the patterns – in your behaviour, your relationships, your relationship with your own body and mind – and being willing to trace them back to where they started. It’s recognising what is a conscious choice and what is an old wound operating on autopilot.

For me, it looked like this: I could be smaller than I am now. I know that. The inner work means I also know what it would cost me, what it would require me to go back to, and why I’m choosing not to. That is a conscious choice rather than a failure. The difference between those two things – conscious choice versus unconscious self-punishment – is enormous. Getting there took years of genuine inner work.

It also, eventually, led me back to spirituality. Because once you start asking honest questions about who you are and what you value, the spiritual questions follow. They’re not separate.

What it looks like in practice

Every woman’s version of this will be different. But in my experience it tends to involve some combination of the following.

Journalling: not as a diary, but as a tool for thinking. Writing without editing yourself, letting what’s actually there come to the surface.

Meditation: not as relaxation, but as a way of sitting with yourself long enough to notice what’s actually going on underneath the noise.

Learning: reading, listening, seeking out perspectives that challenge what you’ve always assumed to be true about yourself and the world.

Community: doing this work alongside other women who are doing the same thing, so that you’re not alone with what surfaces.

None of these are new. None of them are complicated. What makes them inner work rather than just activities is the intention behind them – the willingness to look honestly at what comes up rather than managing it or performing it.

What it has to do with Brigid’s Path

The reason I named this program Brigid’s Path is precisely this. Brigid – as poet, as healer, as keeper of the flame – is a figure associated with the kind of illumination that comes from sustained honest attention. The three marks of a poet in the old Irish tradition are not about writing verse. They are about knowing: knowing what illuminates, knowing how to discern, knowing how to speak from your own centre.

That is inner work. It has a long lineage. You are not starting from nothing.

Where this is going

Next week is the final post in this series, and it’s the most direct one. I want to talk specifically about The Guided Path – what it is, who it’s built for, and whether it might be the right next step for you.

If you don’t want to miss it, make sure you’re on the list.

Something from this post landing somewhere tender? You can drop a comment below or reply to any of my emails. I read everything, and I don’t share what people tell me.