Tag: inner work

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 ]

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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.

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.