Tag: body image

What My Body Actually Needs Before I Can Do Ritual

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

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

The Toenail That Wouldn’t Quit

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

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

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

Food, and the Other Injury Nobody Sees

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

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

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

Shedding the Earthly Bounds

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

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

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

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.