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!

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.

Why “Just Be Spiritual” Doesn’t Cut It After a Religious Upbringing

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.

A magpie with a thought bubble saying "Mmmm... Must have shiny things..." Still being spiritual but not religious after leaving a church can lead to magpie like tendencies...

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.

Spiritual Burnout: What to Do When You’ve Given Too Much to Everyone Else


I’m off work right now. (And yes, I’ve written about spiritual burnout before, but bear with me, ok? I’m trying to focus on spiritual burnout recovery this time…)

Not on holiday. Not at a conference. Off work because I pushed too hard for too long and my body eventually made the decision my brain kept refusing to make. As an engineer, I’m trained to solve problems, keep things moving, be the person who figures it out. Turns out that’s a fantastic skill set right up until the point it isn’t.

And sitting here, with more quiet than I’m used to, I’ve been doing what I always do when something cracks open, I’ve been noticing the pattern. Where else does this show up? Where else am I the one holding the flame for everyone else while quietly letting my own go dark?

Here’s the thing. Right now, in my spiritual life, I don’t think I’m at crisis point. But I recognise the early signs. Spiritual burnout doesn’t always arrive as a dramatic collapse, sometimes it’s a slow, quiet drain that you only notice when you’re already running on empty. I know what this road looks like. And I’d rather write about it now, from the relatively sane vantage point of almost, than from the wreckage of having ignored it too long.

So this one is for anyone who recognises themselves in what I’m about to describe.

A tired woman rests her hands against her face in a moment of stillness — capturing the emotional weight that makes spiritual burnout recovery necessary.
A woman looking distressed, is she in spiritual burnout?

Signs of spiritual burnout

Over-giving in a spiritual community rarely announces itself. It creeps in through small, generous decisions that compound over time. Here are some signs worth sitting with honestly:

Your own altar has been neglected for weeks, but you’ve shown up for everyone else’s questions and crises.

You’ve started dreading notifications from people in your community. After conversations where you gave a lot, you feel vaguely resentful… and then guilty about the resentment.

Your own doubts and questions feel like something you can’t share with anyone, because you’re supposed to be the one who has it together.

You’ve stopped asking Brigid for anything. Prayer has become entirely outward-facing.

I know these signs because I know their cousins from work. The dread of the inbox. The resentment after a meeting where you gave everything and nobody asked how you were. The way your own needs quietly stop feeling legitimate because everyone else’s are so clearly urgent.

And then there’s the really subtle one, the one that makes this so hard to shift: your identity has quietly fused with being useful to others. Pulling back doesn’t feel like protecting yourself. It feels like losing yourself.

In work, for me, it looked like staying late to fix things that weren’t mine to fix. Answering messages at 10pm. Saying yes to one more thing because I was the one who knew how to handle it. Sound familiar in a different context?

That’s why the practical advice often doesn’t stick. People know what to do. Doing it feels like a threat to who they are. But it’s essential if you’re going to recover from this spiritual burnout! (Talking to myself? Me? Never!(

So what can we actually do about spiritual burnout?

I have a list of practical steps for spiritual burnout recovery. Because of course I have.

Stop before you fix.

Before changing anything, spend a week just noticing where your spiritual energy goes. Not to judge it, not to overhaul it, just to see it clearly. Most people are genuinely shocked when they look. I was, when I finally sat down and looked at where my working hours were actually going. You can’t manage what you haven’t named yet.

Reclaim something that’s entirely yours.

One practice, however small, that you don’t share, don’t post, don’t discuss and don’t offer to anyone else. Not because it’s a secret, but because it’s sovereign. A single candle lit for yourself. Five minutes with Brigid that belong only to you. This sounds simple. For people whose entire practice has become communal, it’s one of the hardest things I’ll suggest.

One of the things I’ve done while off work is to stop performing recovery. No updates. No checking in with people. Just actually resting, which turns out to be completely different from talking about resting. Your spiritual practice deserves the same protection.

Learn the difference between witnessing and carrying.

You can be fully present for someone without taking their struggle into your own body. This is actually a skill, and it doesn’t come naturally — particularly for empathic people, which most of us in spiritual community are. Practically: after a conversation that cost you something, do a short physical reset. A walk, cold water on your face, stepping outside for a few minutes. It signals to your nervous system that what you held for them stays with them. It doesn’t follow you home.

I’ve had to learn this at work too — the difference between caring about a problem and owning a problem that isn’t mine. Spiritual over-giving works exactly the same way.

Let people sit with their own questions.

Over-givers tend to rush — to answer, to soothe, to solve. Next time someone brings you a spiritual question, try responding with “what does your gut tell you?” It honours their own wisdom. And it protects yours.

Renegotiate quietly, not dramatically.

You don’t need to make an announcement. Definitely, don’t owe anyone a declaration. You can simply respond a little slower. Be slightly less available. Say “I don’t have the energy for that today” without explanation or apology. People who genuinely care about you will adjust without drama. People who push back or don’t even notice? That’s information worth having.

I didn’t send a big email to work saying I was stepping back. My body made that decision for me in the end. I’d rather you make it for yourself, consciously, before it comes to that.

Ask Brigid for something.

Spiritual burnout recovery doesn’t have to be dramatic. Sometimes it starts with the smallest possible thing — bringing your own need to the flame instead of everyone else’s.

When did you last do that?

I know, it’s obvious…

Brigid is associated with generosity, with service, with the perpetual fire that never goes out. It’s easy, especially for those of us with a Catholic background, to absorb that as meaning we should be the same. Always available. Always giving. Never asking.

But Brigid isn’t just a resource you dispense to others. She’s in relationship with you. The forge isn’t only where you make things for other people. It’s where you go to be renewed yourself.

I’m sitting with that right now, in this quieter stretch of time I didn’t exactly choose but probably needed. Bringing my own tiredness to her rather than showing up with a list of things I want to do for everyone else. It feels strange. It also feels like exactly the right thing. And I know, reaching out to Brigid (or your deity of choice) to help with recovery from burnout of a spiritual nature seems a bit, well, strange. I get it. But just trust me on this.

If your prayer life has become entirely outward-facing, this is your invitation to change that. Bring something to her. Not something polished or spiritual-sounding. Something real. The exhaustion, the resentment, the quiet grief of having lost the thread of your own practice while tending everyone else’s.

She can work with that.

The smith has to tend their own fire first.

Now, I googled a lot before I wrote this, because I don’t want to send you down a bad path.

When the World Gets Loud: What a Grounded Practice Actually Does

I wrote last week about St. Patrick’s Day and my online experience. But it led me to think about women’s spiritual leadership and how being grounded actual leads me to being a better person and a better leader.

There’s a version of spiritual practice that looks beautiful on the outside. Candles, rituals, carefully arranged altars, the right words said at the right time. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that. But it’s not what I want to talk about today.

I want to talk about what practice looks like when you’re tired. Really tired. When you’re off work with exhaustion and you’ve still somehow spent the last 36 hours in heated online conversations about Irish identity, St. Patrick, and the gap between the Ireland that exists in diaspora memory and the one I actually live in.

Because that’s where practice gets tested. Not in the quiet moments. In the loud ones.

Women's Spiritual Leadership can often feel limited to flowers and candles, But that's not the case. Groundedness is far more important than pretty pictures.
Women’s Spiritual Leadership isn’t always flowers and candles

The Thing Nobody Tells You About Spiritual Work

When people come to Brigid — or to any serious spiritual path — they often come looking for peace. And peace is part of it. But what a genuinely grounded practice builds, over time, is something more useful than peace. It builds capacity.

Capacity to stay present when things are difficult. To know your own mind clearly enough that you don’t lose it in someone else’s argument. Capacity to feel the full weight of something – the frustration, the grief, the sheer weariness of trying to hold truth up against a wall of comfortable myth – and still find your way back to yourself afterwards.

That’s not magic. It’s the slow accumulation of showing up, over years, to something real.

What Brigid Actually Offers

Brigid is a deity of the threshold. Of the place between states: between winter and spring, between darkness and light, between what was and what is becoming. She holds contradiction without resolving it too quickly. Saint and goddess. Flame and well. The fire that transforms and the water that soothes.

Working with her, over time, teaches you to do the same. To hold complexity without collapsing it. Stay in difficult conversations without losing your centre. Know the difference between a boundary that needs holding and a battle that isn’t yours.

This week, I needed all of that. Knowing the real history of this island – not the postcard version, but the layered, complicated, sometimes painful truth of it – meant I could speak from solid ground rather than from reaction. The years spent learning, researching, sitting with the stories, walking this path – they weren’t just personally meaningful. They were practically useful. They meant I had something real to stand on.

Grounded People Lead Differently

I work with women who are navigating leadership — in their professions, in their communities, in their spiritual lives. And the ones who struggle most aren’t usually the ones who lack skill or intelligence or vision. They’re the ones who haven’t yet built the interior infrastructure to hold the weight of what they’re carrying.

They’re reactive when they want to be considered. Depleted when they need to be present. Performing certainty when what they actually need is genuine rootedness.

A Brigid-centred practice addresses that at the source. Not by making you invulnerable — that’s not the goal, and honestly it’s not possible. But by giving you somewhere real to return to. A flame that doesn’t go out just because the room gets difficult.

What This Looks Like in Practice

It’s not always ceremonial. Sometimes, it’s a candle lit in the morning before the day gets away from you. Occasionally, it’s returning to a piece of history or mythology that reminds you of who you actually are. Sometimes it’s the simple act of naming, quietly and clearly, what you know to be true, even when the noise around you is saying something different.

Over time, these small acts of return build something. A kind of interior steadiness that shows up not just in ritual space, but in meetings, in difficult conversations, in the moments when you’re running on empty and still need to show up well.

That’s what I came back to this week, when the online world got loud and my body was already waving flags about rest. Not a complicated practice. Just the accumulated weight of years of genuine work, holding me up when I needed it most.

An Invitation

If you’re a woman in leadership – formal or informal, professional or spiritual – and you’re feeling the gap between who you’re being asked to be and who you actually are, I’d invite you to consider what it might mean to build that kind of interior foundation.

Not because Brigid is the only path. But because this island’s tradition offers something ancient, layered, and genuinely powerful for women who are ready to do real work. And because the difference between leading from exhaustion and leading from groundedness isn’t a matter of working harder. It’s a matter of going deeper.

If that resonates, you’re in the right place. Have a look around. And if you’d like to explore what this kind of work might look like for you personally, you can find me here.

When the Internet Wants You to Be a Different Kind of Irish

I’ve spent the last few days doing something I probably shouldn’t have, given that I’m currently off work with exhaustion. I’ve been online, trying to have conversations with Irish Americans about St. Patrick, about what Ireland actually is today, about the gap between the island their ancestors left and the one I live on now.

It’s been a rough 36 hours. (If you search for me over on Threads, you can probably retrace the whole thing!)

I don’t regret it. But I won’t pretend it didn’t cost me something.

(And yes, being off work is why this is here on Wednesday evening and not Monday morning like usual)

So Let’s Talk About Aul Paddy

I don’t write about him every year, cos I have better things to be doing, but here’s a post from 2022 talking about him as well.

There’s a particular kind of tiredness that comes not from the argument itself, but from the invisible labour underneath it: the constant recalibrating, the search for the right words, the hope that this time the point will land.

So here are a few things worth knowing about St. Patrick, since we’ve just been through another year of the myths doing the rounds.

A snippet from the RTE coverage of the St Patrick's Day in Dublin, which is all about being Irish in our many shapes and colours!
Screenshot from the RTE news coverage of the Dublin Paddy’s Day Parade, you can see it all here: https://www.rte.ie/player/series/rt%C3%A9-news-six-one/SI0000001474?epguid=IH10016318-26-0076

Patrick didn’t kill pagans. He himself considered his mission to Ireland a failure. The snakes weren’t pagans either, that’s a later invention. What Patrick did have, however, were excellent propagandists a few centuries after his death. If you want a genuinely gripping political read, look into the row between Armagh and Kildare in the 7th or 8th century about who would claim the supremacy of Ireland. Spoiler: Armagh and Patrick won that particular battle. Though it’s worth noting that Brigid did considerably more work in the succeeding centuries… but that’s a story for another day, and honestly, a subject close to my heart.

Paddy also wasn’t Irish…

What “Irish” Actually Means

This is where the conversations got harder.

“Irish” means born here, or living here for a considerable period of time, knowing the culture, the politics, the modern history. It means existing inside this place, not just carrying it in your blood memory.

Being Irish American means that somewhere along the line, you had an Irish ancestor. Chances are they were a poor peasant, heading to lands far away for survival. Good on them, the fact that you’re here and exist means it worked. It’s a remarkable story. But it doesn’t make you Irish.

And the Ireland many Irish Americans are so fiercely proud of? It’s a photograph of someone who used to live here. Beautiful. Sincere. Real in its own way. But not quite us anymore.

Here’s some of what modern Ireland actually looks like:

There are Black and brown Irish people. Here, living on this island, playing hurling, playing Gaelic, playing soccer, singing, dancing, serving as politicians, just being people. They’re as Irish as I am. One of them was Taoiseach a few years ago. There is no pure Irish bloodline: we’re a nation of mongrels, and always have been.

If you’re telling me you can trace your lineage to before Christianity arrived on these shores, I’d gently suggest you’ve been extremely misled. For many reasons, we are lucky on this island to trace lineage back to the Great Hunger. Prior to the 17th century, most of us don’t even have church records. But sure – you’re definitely a descendant of Niall of the Nine Hostages.

The Ireland We Actually Live In

Ireland sides with oppressed peoples. Saoirse don Phailistín. We recognise the behaviour: the British practiced it on us first, and we haven’t forgotten what that looks like.

The Irish language isn’t dead. It’s going through a revival, and thankfully so.

Our Head of State is our President, ár Uachtarán, currently Catherine Connolly (our third female president). Our Head of Government is the Taoiseach, Micheál Martín, the man you may have seen at the White House recently. ( You may have heard him being referred to as a Prime Minister, that’s a bad translation of an Irish word)

We voted in Marriage Equality. We repealed the 8th. We are not the Catholic island of your great-grandmother’s stories. We’ve changed, sometimes painfully, often beautifully.

Why This Is Personal

I found myself asking, somewhere in the middle of all this: why does it land so hard? Why does correcting a myth about a 5th century saint feel so exhausting?

I think it’s because identity isn’t abstract for me. It’s something I’ve spent years rooting myself in. Not the postcard version, but the real, complicated, sometimes painful story of this island. I’ve walked a spiritual path with Brigid long enough to understand that she herself holds that complexity. She is saint and goddess, fire and water, patron of poetry and of smithcraft, Of making things and of tending the flame. She doesn’t flatten into a simple story. Neither does Ireland.

That’s part of what learning about her has given me. Not just devotion, but groundedness. A sense of actually knowing where I come from – which makes it harder to stay silent when that story gets simplified, and harder still not to feel the weight of trying to hold the real version up against the wind.

Coming Back to Myself

I’m not writing this to criticise anyone. The love is real – I know that. But I’m also genuinely, medically tired. Which made the last few days both harder and, strangely, more clarifying.

Because when you don’t have the energy to perform patience, you fall back on what’s real. And what’s real for me is this path, this practice, this sense of being held by something older and steadier than any comment section. Brigid has been walked with through harder things than this. She’ll survive it too.

I came back to myself eventually, as I always do, by stepping away from the screen and back into something quieter. A candle. A few slow breaths. The ordinary, unglamorous work of remembering who I actually am, where I actually stand, what I actually know.

That’s the gift of a grounded practice. Not that it makes you invincible. Not that it stops the world from being exhausting. But that it gives you somewhere to return to when it is.

So if you’re Irish, or Irish-adjacent, or just someone who found themselves in an argument this week that cost more than it should have: I see you. Rest. Come back to yourself. The flame will keep.

Women’s Spiritual Leadership Ethics

How to Guide Others with Integrity and Care

If the last two pieces explored responsibility and visibility, this one turns inward, toward conscience. I appreciate that women’s spiritual leadership ethics is a mouthful. And not really that sexy. Not the lofty, abstract kind of post, but the everyday conscience that sits beside you when someone asks, “What should I do?”

Anyone who guides others, whether they’re a priest, celebrant, coach, elder, or simply the woman people turn to when everything is falling apart, eventually confronts the ethical weight of that question. Women’s spiritual leadership ethics live right at the heart of that moment.

I’ve never believed that ethics are a dusty set of rules. They’re a way of walking. They’re the shape integrity takes when things get complicated. So rather than a manual or a code, what follows is really a conversation. With yourself, with the people you support, and with the role you inhabit, intentionally or otherwise.

A green background, with the shape of a woman with her hair in a bun in black with a yellow tulip shaped flower in her torso and rays of green surrounding the flower. Women's spiritual leadership ethics come from within us!

This surprises no-one, right?

Ethical guidance always begins with consent, and not the soft, implied kind that arises because someone keeps talking and you’re the nearest steady presence. Consent in spiritual work means clarity: what are you actually doing together? Are you sharing a perspective, or offering direction? Are you teaching, or simply witnessing? Without this clarity, guidance can slip quietly into control, even when your tone is gentle and your intentions are good. Consent also includes the right to stop, to pause, and to protect your own boundaries. This is a crucial part of women’s spiritual leadership ethics, which refuses the old pattern of women giving endlessly until they are emptied.

Knowing Your Limits

Again, I preach this over and over. Don’t teach what you don’t know. One of the most ethical things a guide can do is recognise when something is outside their lane. There are moments when what a person truly needs belongs to a therapist, a doctor, a solicitor, or a crisis service, not to you. There are times when a question falls outside your tradition or your experience. Staying in your lane isn’t a lack of courage. It’s integrity. It keeps people safer than any impulse to be the one who knows everything ever could.

If someone comes to me looking for Brigid as a link to Maman Brigitte? I’m steering clear of that. There may be a link, but I haven’t experienced it and my experience with voudoun is zero. So I’m not going there.

Power, Transparency, and the Quiet Responsibilities of Leadership

Even when you don’t intend to hold power, people may place it in your hands simply because you listen well or speak clearly. That’s part of the nature of spiritual leadership. One of the gentlest antidotes to unconscious power is transparency. When you make your process visible, and by that I mean: how you make decisions, what informs your perspective, what your boundaries are around time, availability, confidentiality, and money. Once you make your process visible, you invite trust instead of projection. Transparency keeps the ground steady under both of you, and it’s a core principle within ethical women’s spiritual leadership, where clarity replaces authority for authority’s sake.

I try to present myself online as I do in real life. It’s not always possible. I mean, very few people have seen me mid-tummy bug for example. But I try to keep it real. And I also try to let people know what they’re getting into when they start working with me. Because I know I’m not for everyone. No one is.

Keeping Stories Sacred

If someone offers you their truth – the raw, vulnerable, complicated version – it is not material for content or conversation elsewhere. Honouring privacy is one of the deepest spiritual acts in any leadership role. If you’re unsure whether you can share a story, then you can’t. When people know their story will not be used to polish your persona or fuel your next online post, they can soften, breathe, and do the work they came to do.

And even when I do share stories, they’re anonymised. I try to keep it at the level of “I’m talking to many women who…” rather than “here’s a story that happened to a follower of mine”. I hope the difference there is obvious.

Navigating Money Without Shame or Manipulation

Money and spirituality tend to make people twitchy, but ethics demand we address them honestly. And this is an area I struggle with.

Some things belong in the realm of gift: the quick blessing, the small kindness, the simple moment of support. But they are also voluntary. Not required. People might demand all they like, but no matter what leadership position you are in, you owe nobody anything!

Other work requires actual labour, skill, and emotional energy, and that work deserves to be paid for. There is nothing unethical about charging fairly for the work you have trained for. What matters is clarity and the refusal to use fear, urgency, or spiritual scarcity as sales tactics. In women’s spiritual leadership ethics, coercion has no home. And that goes both ways, from leader and practitioner or client.

Supporting Sovereignty, Not Dependency

If someone cannot make a decision without you, something is off. Ethical guidance strengthens a person’s own discernment rather than replacing it with yours. You may offer insight, name what you see, or open doors they hadn’t considered. But ultimately, the work is to help them hear their own wisdom. And, most importantly, to step back far enough that they can trust it. A guide who celebrates when someone no longer needs them is a guide who understands the heart of the work.

You don’t control other people’s lives and sometimes – it’s time to cut the chord. Gently, sometimes, but firmly.

Repairing Harm With Humility

Even with the best intentions, harm sometimes happens. A poorly timed question, a misunderstood suggestion, a ritual that opens more than someone can integrate… It’s part of the territory. Ethics doesn’t promise perfection; it promises repair. Repair means listening without defensiveness, apologising with clarity, and taking responsibility for your part. If we expect those we guide to grow, then we must model what real accountability looks like.

We can all cause harm. We all do, just by living. When you know better, do better, remember? Women’s spiritual leadership ethics demand more than the traditional male model. It’s important to consider this. We’re not looking to recreate, we’re looking to do better.

And sometimes there’s harm you can’t heal. Learn from it. Be humble. Do better next time.

Tending Your Own Practice

This comes down the list, but it’s probably one of the most important topics to consider. Fill your own cup before you pour from empty.

One of the quiet dangers of guiding others is neglecting your own spiritual life. It is far too easy to become the mentor who never returns to their own well. But exhaustion, isolation, and disconnection erode ethics faster than anything else. A spiritual leader who doesn’t nurture their own practice becomes brittle. Make space to study, to pray, to reflect, to be a beginner again. Ethics rests on honesty, and honesty is impossible without a living, breathing spiritual life beneath it.

Self-care is community care.

The Need for Community

And following on from that…

No one leads ethically in isolation. Community challenges us, steadies us, and keeps us from drifting into our own unchecked authority. Whether your work is rooted in a lineage or built from your lived experience, you need peers who are not impressed by you. Community keeps the edges of our ethics sharp and reminds us that leadership is not about perfection.

It is about service.

The Quiet Test

In the end, it all comes back to something simple: after an interaction, can you sit quietly with yourself? Can you meet your own eyes without the small wince that says you crossed a line? If the answer is yes, good. If there’s a stone in your stomach, look again.

Ethics is not a declaration. It is the daily choice to be clean with your power, generous with your care, and honest about your limits. Guiding others is beautiful work, and it is serious work. May we carry it with humility. May we leave people more sovereign than we found them. And may our footprints mark a path that feels safe for those who follow.

Women’s Spiritual Leadership Ethics

I said earlier that we’re not looking to re-form the traditional male model of spiritual leadership. I meant it. We’re not holding ourselves to those standards.

We’re doing better. That means community first. It means clarity, transparency, accountability. Being able to look at ourselves in the mirror. Being aware when the Overton window is shifting – and correcting it when necessary.

This is about being the leaders we needed earlier in our lives, and developing into the leaders we’re going to need going forward. Doing the work, bit by bit.