Tag: brigid’s path

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

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

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

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

What the cauldron actually is

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

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

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

Why this is the hardest step of the whole lot

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

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

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

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

What actually happened to me this year

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

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

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

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

The bit that’s genuinely hard to admit

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

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

What the cauldron actually allows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a path, anyway?

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

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

Why do I keep revisiting this bit?

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

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

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

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

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

Guides, torchbearers, and pathfinders

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

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

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

What is right for you?

Well. That’s for you to decide.

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

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

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

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

So where does my path forward actually go?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imbas forosnai – knowledge that illumines

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

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

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

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

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

Teinm laeda – chewing of the marrow

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

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

Dichetal do chennaib – improvisation, straight from the head

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bounce Around Like an Eejit: Joy as Discipline

Why joy isn’t something that just happens to you — the research behind planning for it, ten minutes a day on a trampoline, and Joy’s place as step three on Brigid’s Path.

After the depressing events of the last two weeks, this week I want to talk about Joy. Yes – ye are following me through this iteration of walking Brigid’s Path. I’d say sorry, but I’m really not. Sometimes you get the bad and the ugly before the good comes along.

Me at the beach, in the wind, experiencing some joy. Also my hair all over my face! Sometimes joy as a daily practice takes effort!

I love trampolining. And ok, it requires some hefty underwear – an F cup could blacken my own eye if I’m not careful – but that’s beside the point. Once the damn thing was up (again, so sorry about that day, neighbours), it was a lot easier to go and play on it. But easier isn’t the same as easy.

I bet ye can all guess how my mind was working once I got that trampoline up. What a waste of money. Grown woman playing on a trampoline. What will people think. It’s not like it’s doing any good. And on, and on, and on. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

But joy isn’t always about the immediate effects. And sometimes the shadow work isn’t about digging through what’s gone wrong – sometimes it’s about being disciplined enough to actually let joy into your life, instead of quietly ignoring it.

I have a firm belief that no matter what put us on this earth, or why we’re here, we don’t have to be bloody miserable all the time. There’s real research behind that too – Barbara Fredrickson’s “broaden-and-build” theory in psychology argues that positive emotions aren’t just pleasant, they actually build real psychological resources over time: resilience, creativity, the ability to problem-solve. Joy isn’t just a nice feeling. It’s functional. And one well-known long-running study of a group of nuns found that those who expressed more positive emotion in early adulthood went on to live measurably longer than their less expressive peers.

But somehow, along the way, we all got the notion that joy is childish, or immature, or just not part of daily life as an adult. And there are times I wonder who or what benefits from that. (No, no – not me buying into conspiracy theories about capitalism, particularly late-stage capitalism… of course not. Dopamine produced by spending money is just as good as any other kind.)

It’s a hard nut to crack for most of us. Even those deep into sport aren’t immune – the Mayo football team just won the All-Ireland after 75 years, a story big enough to make the New York Times (albeit behind a paywall, but seriously – loads of free stuff on the net about it), but that was 75 years of loss for the fans first. A curse, they called it. That’s all over now. So no, nothing – or hardly anything – is guaranteed to give us joy. But from reading the literature, I’ve found that building habits that lead to joy can.

This all ended in me actually being disciplined about joy. Sounds antithetical, right? But looking at the research – and trust me, I’ve looked at the research – there’s nothing that says joy is spontaneous. In fact, a lot of what’s suggested – a daily walk, noticing nature, watching comedy – kind of needs to be planned for most of us. So I had to plan this too.

I committed to ten minutes a day. Hail, rain, or shine – and honestly, even getting onto the damn thing in the rain is fun enough. Certainly it was for someone watching me. But I decided: ten minutes, usually in the morning, for joy. And ok, it wasn’t the trampoline every day – sometimes the rain really was too much, so I danced for ten minutes instead. (Yes. We’re back to Shakira again.)

I get it – joy and discipline don’t really mix in our modern world. But there’s joy in mastering a new skill, and mastery takes practice. Not to mention repetition. Going back to something I’ve mentioned before about food – there’s joy in producing my own food too. By which I mean buying it and cooking it, not growing it. Taking the time to put love into what goes into my belly. A homemade fajita isn’t the same as an authentic Mexican dish, and it’s not trying to be. But it means I’m valuing myself enough to actually feed myself properly.

We overlook joy far too often. And it’s so important, it’s step three on Brigid’s Path. It’s not about being constantly happy – it’s about getting regular injections of joy into our lives. And sometimes that means heading out on a cold morning to bounce around like an eejit for a few minutes, before putting on your serious face and heading into the world to adult.

One Thing a Day: What the Reset Actually Looked Like

The list, the new notebook, and the daily practice behind the reset — what actually changed after the twentieth night, one small thing at a time.

Last week I told ye about the twentieth night, and the moment I finally sat down and admitted things weren’t working. So, here’s what I actually did about it.

I made a list. All the little things that had been bothering me – the trampoline sitting in the front hall, the few bits of clothing that needed mending, the clutter that had built up in various corners and really only needed five or ten minutes each to tackle. You get the idea. I love a good list. I even got a new notebook, to make sure I KNEW I was serious. Cos, y’know, a new notebook solves everything. A special trip to Eason’s in town and all.

So I had a plan. And since Al was away, there was no one in the house to stop me doing things and leaving them the way I needed to leave them to pick back up easily. (Yeah. It’s not my first rodeo… unfortunately.)

Now, I knew this wasn’t all getting done before I went back to work. That wasn’t the point. The point was to make the list and commit to doing one thing on it each day. Putting the trampoline together took a few hours – and possibly the neighbours learnt some new words that day – while sewing on a button took a few minutes. But the important thing was, they were crossed off the list.

And yes, sometimes that meant at 9pm, begrudgingly, putting on a load of clothes, and even more begrudgingly hanging them out the next morning. But I’d promised myself. And those promises are the easiest, and the most dangerous, to break.

Y’see, breaking a promise to yourself is the easiest thing in the world – no one is going to hold you accountable. But it also means you stop trusting yourself. Because you don’t keep your word. And whether it’s psychologically right or wrong, I found that treating myself the way I’d treat a friend was the best way to go about it.

So the day I ended up coming home three hours late from work because of a car accident – not mine, but it held up traffic – I changed the plan from “fold the dry clothes” to “shelve the pile of five books by the living room door.” Practicality came into it.

And I slowly worked my way through the house, and my list. Bit by bit. Some things got added, and some got taken away – I decided to outsource and pay for the weeding, because dear gods, those weeds had a mind of their own. And yes, that is a structural thistle we have out the front. It might die of old age before I get to it. That’s ok.

A picture of a 4 foot tall thistle in full, if a bit dry, bloom. It got removed from my list and onto the outsourced list from my daily reset practice. Cos that thing has DEEP roots!
My structural thistle. Yes, it is almost 4 foot high. And apparently roots almost as deep!

Throughout all of it, I could feel the other part of my brain coming out. “How could you let things get this bad?” “You know better than this.” “Oh my gods, what a failure you are.” Not the most supportive.

So I had to take myself by the hand and use my journal. (Yes – spoiler alert, this is the “Reconcile” part of Brigid’s Path.) Sitting down and journaling through a conversation in my head might seem a bit odd, but it works for me. It also forces my brain to slow down and actually think about what I’m saying to myself. A genuinely useful strategy, to be honest – one I use regularly, when I remember it.

I’m still working through the list, if I’m honest – and the more I do, the more I add to it. The chimney cleaning I’m trying to book. The clothes that just need to go to the charity bin in town. Working through the list adds to it, because clearing the house clears my head, and clearing my head shows me the next thing that needs clearing.

It’s not just about reconciling ourselves to what others have done to us. It’s the internal work too – the shadow work, the recognition that this is an ongoing process, not a one-and-done. I’ve always said my spirituality has to be practical, has to fit in with my actual life. And sometimes what I’m doing looks more like good psychology than spirituality. But I also know a cluttered home means a cluttered mind means a cluttered life. For me. Your mileage may vary.

But it’s worth sitting down. Lighting a candle. Taking a deep breath. And starting to write. See what comes out.

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.

Brigid: The Irish Saint and Goddess Who Makes Sense After You’ve Left the Church

Why did I end up working with Brigid, Irish saint, goddess, on my spiritual path? Well you might ask.

It was a Travel Lodge in Holyhead. Two in the morning. I was waiting for the night ferry back to Ireland after a women’s empowerment weekend, sitting on the edge of a bed that had seen better days, crying my eyes out and asking for guidance from anything that might be listening.

What arrived was not what I expected.

The Dagda 0 father figure of the Tuatha Dé Danann, one of the old Irish gods – turned up. Not dramatically. Not with thunder or visions. His first suggestion, after I’d poured out everything I was carrying, was to drink some water. By the time the night was over, he had one more piece of advice: go and look into his daughter.

His daughter is Brigid.

Brigid is probably not who you think she is

If you grew up Catholic in Ireland, you know Saint Brigid. February 1st. The cross made of rushes. The secondary patron saint, the one who wasn’t Patrick. Maybe a school named after her, or a church, or a prayer you learned and forgot. (Indeed, and a GAA club either!)

What most of us weren’t taught is that Saint Brigid possibly/ probably absorbed an older figure: a goddess of the same name, part of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the pre-Christian Irish pantheon. A goddess of poetry, smithcraft, and healing. Protector of the vulnerable. Keeper of the sacred flame at Kildare, which burned for centuries and was tended by women.

Listen, a spiritual path away from organised religion doesn't have to start with Brigid Irish saint & goddess. But like this candle in the picture - it doens't hurt either...
I know, I often use a candle to start people off with Brigid. But there’s reasons!!

The two figures of Brigid, saint and goddess, are so deeply entwined on the spiritual paths they walk that scholars still debate where one ends and the other begins. For our purposes, that ambiguity is not a problem. It’s actually the point.

Why she works for women like us (saint or goddess)

Women like us – ex-Catholic, ex-evangelical, ex-whatever-it-was, still spiritual, not sure where to go next – tend to have a complicated relationship with religious figures. We’ve spent years being told what to believe about them. The last thing most of us want is another authority telling us who to pray to and why.

Brigid doesn’t work like that. She never really did.

Brigid sits at a threshold: between Christianity and what came before it, between the institutional and the personal, between the historical record and lived experience. Most certainly, she doesn’t require you to become pagan to approach her. She doesn’t require you to abandon whatever remnants of your Catholic upbringing still feel meaningful. She has been navigating that in-between space for over a thousand years.

Unusually, she is also a figure who has belonged specifically to women for most of her history. The flame at Kildare was tended by women. The traditions around her in Irish folk culture were carried by women. Her feast day, Imbolc, marks the first stirring of spring: a threshold moment, a beginning, which is exactly where a lot of us find ourselves.

What she’s not

She is not a replacement religion. Approaching Brigid doesn’t mean you’re signing up for paganism, or Irish polytheism, or any other label you’re not ready to take on. Brigid, Irish saint and goddess know better than to try to force anyone on a spiritual path that’s not right for them.

She is not going to fix everything. No single figure, practice, or tradition does that.

She is not exclusively Irish either – though her roots are deep in this land, and if you have Irish ancestry, that connection is worth exploring. She has travelled all over the world with Irish emigrants, and as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a chance she might have originated with our neighbours to the East.

What she is, in my experience, is a reliable point of entry. A figure grounded enough in history to withstand scrutiny, flexible enough in tradition to meet you where you actually are, and specific enough to give you something real to work with rather than a vague spiritual fog.

How to start with Brigid, saint or goddess, on a spiritual path

You don’t need to do anything dramatic. You don’t need to build an altar or declare a belief or join anything.

Start with curiosity. Read about her: both the saint and the goddess, and the places where they overlap. Notice what resonates and what doesn’t. Light a candle on February 1st if it appeals to you. Look into the history of Kildare. Find out which stories about her have been told in your own family’s county, because there will be some. (And if your family doesn’t come from Ireland, check out the other posts in the blog to get you started!)

Most of all, stay honest with yourself about what you’re actually drawn to versus what you think you should be drawn to. Brigid has been around long enough not to need your performance. She just needs your attention.

Your spiritual path may align with or veer away from Brigid, either the saint of the goddess. That’s ok. She won’t mind at all.

Where this is going

Next week I want to talk about what the actual inner work looks like – not the aesthetic of spirituality, but the practice of it. What it means to sit with uncomfortable questions, and why that is worth doing.

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

Have a question about Brigid, or something from this post that’s sitting with you? Drop it in the comments or reply to any of my emails. I read everything.

You Left. But You Didn’t Leave Everything.

This Easter weekend, my social media feeds were full of it.

Families at Mass. Easter Sunday tables. The smell of candles and lilies practically coming through the screen. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I kept seeing the other posts too – the quieter ones. The women noting, without quite saying it, that they didn’t know what to do with themselves. That something felt off. That the day had a shape they no longer inhabited, and nothing had grown in its place yet.

For me personally, Easter these days is a lovely three-day weekend. Some time to slow down, to reconnect with myself, to remember what I actually think and feel when I’m not just moving through the week. And honestly, there’s never a bad time for a free day off work. But I’m aware that I have structures in place – practices, rhythms, ways of checking in with my inner life – that give me the kind of grounding that Easter provides for practising Christians. I’m not adrift during that weekend because I’ve built something to stand on. A lot of women haven’t had the chance to do that yet. And Easter, with all its weight and visibility, can make that absence feel very loud.

If that was you this weekend, this post is for you.

Leaving religion hasn't created so much of a spiritual vacuum that I can't appreciate my daffodils in the garden! (Which is what's in this picture!)

The vacuum nobody tells you about

Leaving a high-control religion (Catholicism, evangelical Christianity, any tradition that told you exactly what to believe and what happened if you didn’t) is often framed as a liberation. And in many ways, it is. You step away from the guilt, the authority, the rules that never quite fit. That part is real. (Also, rarely a bad time for REM!)

What doesn’t get talked about as much is what comes after.

The liturgical calendar that still lives in your body, even when you’re no longer observing it. The way Christmas and Easter arrive with a weight that has nothing to do with chocolate eggs or family dinners. The strange grief of sitting outside something that was, for a long time, the whole shape of the year.

Easter is a particularly pointed example. It’s not a minor feast. It’s the pivot of the entire Christian year: the death, the waiting, the rising. If you grew up inside that, it’s in you in a way that’s hard to articulate. And when you’re no longer inside it, the weekend can feel oddly hollow, even if you know, intellectually, that you left for good reasons.

And it’s not just Christianity. Nearly every religious tradition I’ve encountered has its equivalent: a moment in the year that carries the full weight of the community’s belief, that marks time in a way that’s impossible to ignore. Passover. Eid. Diwali. Vesak. These are not decorative occasions. They are the hinge points of the year for the people inside them, the moments when the community gathers, when something larger than the individual is acknowledged. When you’re no longer inside that community, those hinge points don’t disappear. They just become visible from the outside, which is a different and sometimes lonelier experience.

That hollowness is not a sign you made the wrong choice. It’s a sign that spirituality was never nothing to you, even inside a framework that may have done you harm.

You left the institution. You didn’t leave the hunger.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of working with women navigating this particular terrain: the thing that draws people into religion in the first place is rarely the doctrine. It’s the ritual, the community, the sense of being held inside something larger than yourself. The marking of time. The acknowledgement that life is not just a series of tasks to be completed.

When you leave, you take the doctrine off. But you often don’t take the hunger off. The desire to mark the turning of the year. To tend to something. To have a practice that feels like it means something.

And that’s where a lot of women get stuck. Because what’s on offer, in the broad spiritual marketplace, on social media, in the wellness space, doesn’t quite fit either. It can feel too vague, too performative, too much like swapping one unexamined set of beliefs for another. Or it asks you to stop taking spiritual life seriously altogether, which also isn’t right.

Neither of those is the only option.

The neither/nor of it

I’m not here to sell you a replacement religion. I’m not here to tell you that Brigid, or paganism, or Irish mythology, or any other tradition is what you’ve been missing and you just didn’t know it yet. That’s not how this works, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being straight with you.

What I am here to say is that the vacuum you felt this weekend, if you felt it, is worth paying attention to. Not because it means you should go back. But because it tells you something real about yourself: that your inner life matters to you, that you’re not quite ready to let it wither, and that you’re looking for something that takes you seriously.

That is a reasonable thing to be looking for. It exists. And it doesn’t require you to step into any ready-made container that someone else has built for you.

Where this goes

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be writing about exactly this: what it looks like to build a spiritual life after religion, how you work out what you actually believe (as opposed to what you were told to believe), and what figures like Brigid – who has survived and adapted across more than a thousand years of Irish history – might have to offer women who are doing this work.

If any of that is landing for you, the best thing to do is make sure you don’t miss what comes next.

And if you want to share this with someone who had a quiet Easter weekend and couldn’t quite explain why, please do. Sometimes the most useful thing is knowing someone else has noticed the same thing.

Or drop me a line or comment on the post!

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.