Tag: leadership

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.

The Inner Work of Women’s Spiritual Leadership

Yes, we are continuing on this series of women’s spiritual leadership. This week, looking at the inner work involved. Look, some of the things I was seeing online and elsewhere around Imbolc have inspired this. And even if you don’t feel called to leadership,. let these articles inform your choice of leader! (previous posts are here, here, and here)

Navigating Power, Vulnerability, and Growth

There’s a part of leadership that nobody prepares you for: the way the role rearranges your inner world. On the outside, the tasks are clear enough. Hholding ritual, making decisions, guiding conversations, offering perspective. But inside, women’s spiritual leadership opens complicated doors.

Old patterns wake up. Tender places ask for attention. You discover that holding space for others requires you to hold deeper space for yourself: the kind that can feel both tender and fierce at the same time. Remember, Brigid is a firm proponent of the slap to the back of the head technique when we’re not listening! And she is particularly adept at highlighting when I’m not attending to the inner work. Spiritual leadership requires it. Trust me.

I used to think leadership was something I would “grow into,” like a coat that would eventually fit. Now I think of it more like a landscape I walk through daily, one that changes with the weather of my life and the seasons of my soul. Some days are clear and bright; everything feels simple. Other days are fogged with self‑doubt or pricked by old memories. Nothing is wrong when that happens. It’s just the terrain reminding me that inner work is not a separate practice from leadership. It is the heart of it.

A green background allows various shades of green to reflect a hill, a path, some trees. A black female figure walks the land. This is the Inner Work of Women’s Spiritual Leadership

The Tension Between Humility and Self‑Erasure

Many women were raised to make ourselves small so that others could be comfortable. Then we step into leadership and try to reconcile confidence with care, visibility with gentleness, authority with humility. It can be easy to mistake self‑erasure for virtue. But humility is not the silence of your power; it is the clarity with which you use it. It’s standing in your centre without inflation or apology, refusing to dominate the room, but also refusing to abandon it. When we address the inner work of women’s spiritual leadership, we have to acknowledge this tension.

And ok – sometimes you need to dominate the room. And other times you need to abandon said room. But horses for courses, ok?

When that old impulse to shrink arrives, and for many of us, it does, I take it as a signal to slow down and check in:

Am I avoiding clarity because I fear I will be judged?

Am I softening my language so I won’t be called “too much”?

Leadership asks for honesty here. Sometimes the most ethical, generous thing you can do is to speak plainly and trust the strength of the space you’re holding.

For some of us, speaking plainly comes more easily than others, but it’s a skill worth cultivating.

Meeting the Old Stories with New Courage

Women’s spiritual leadership often collides with old narratives:

🔥the teacher who didn’t believe you,

🔥a priest who shamed your questions,

🔥the community that rewarded your helpfulness but punished your voice.

Those memories don’t always arrive as thoughts. Sometimes they show up as a squeezing in the chest, a need to over‑explain, a jitter under the skin that makes you rush when you could move slowly. The inner work of women’s spiritual leadership can escalate these feelings. It rarely reduces them.

When that happens, I don’t treat it as failure. I treat it as information. The body remembers what the mind tries to tidy away. I ask:

What age is this reaction?

Whose voice am I hearing?

What do I need now to meet this moment as the woman I am, not the girl I was?

Sometimes the answer is a breath and a glass of water. It can be cancelling a commitment and going to the land. Sometimes it is calling a trusted peer who will remind me of what is true. And occasionally, it’s arriving on a friend’s doorstep in floods of tears, begging for help.

Intuition and Discernment

Spiritual leadership invites intuition to sit at the table. But intuition is not infallible, and discernment is not the enemy of mystery. I often imagine these two as companions walking with me: intuition bringing the spark and the knowing, discernment asking the kind of questions that keep us honest. What else could be true? What do I know for sure? Is this mine or does it belong to the other person? Where is my edge here?

Women are often praised for intuition and not taught the discipline of discernment. The truth is we need both. Intuition opens doors we didn’t know existed. Discernment checks that we have the keys we need, the consent we require, and the capacity to walk through without doing harm.

Or, in the words of an ex-colleague of mine: just because it smells like shit, doesn’t mean it will promote growth.

Shadow Work as an Ethical Practice

Shadow is not a moral failing; it’s the part of us that prefers to be unseen. In leadership, shadow can look like subtle superiority (“I know best”), quiet resentment (“I give more than I receive”), or slippery avoidance (“If I’m kind enough, I won’t have to set the boundary”). The work isn’t to banish these impulses; it’s to notice them early and choose differently.

I think of shadow work as a daily hygiene: a quick scan for contractions in the body, a look for places where I’m seeking approval rather than truth, a willingness to say, “I was wrong,” while the moment is still fresh enough to repair. This is not self‑punishment. It’s devotion to clean leadership, the kind that leaves people more sovereign, not more dependent.

Of course, there is deeper shadow work I have done, am doing and will do in the future. That’s normal and human. But it’s also the daily check ins we so often forget. The inner work of women’s spiritual leadership very often forces more shadow work upon us, as we work through the old torments.

The Land, the Body, and the Gods

When the inner weather turns, I go outside if I can. I’m privileged to have a garden that allows this. The land has a way of re‑sizing my concerns and returning me to proportion. I walk until my breath finds me. Put my hand on a tree and listen. Make a drink and watch the steam. (Or I make a drink and appreciate the taste of the grapes in the wine…) Simple practices. Old practices. The body follows the land’s lead. The nervous system remembers what safety feels like when we move slowly and pay attention.

If you are a devotee of gods or saints, bring them into this, not as a task to perform, but as companionship. I don’t ask the divine to erase my humanity. I spent too long remembering that humanity! Instead, I ask for the courage to inhabit it with grace. Leadership doesn’t require us to be perfect. It asks us to be honest, to keep learning, and to return again and again to the practices that make us kind, clear, and steady.

The Inner Work of Women’s Spiritual Leadership: A Quiet Benediction

If you are a woman stepping into spiritual leadership, know this: the parts of you that tremble are not disqualifying. The tremble is evidence that you care. The path you’re walking is not about becoming untouchable; it’s about becoming trustworthy, which is a very different thing. Trustworthiness grows in the soil of felt reality, the days you tell the truth gently, repair quickly, and choose groundedness over performance.

Your inner landscape will keep changing as the seasons change. Let it. Let it teach you. Make you a leader who carries warmth without burning, clarity without cutting, and power without pretending you never doubted. That’s leadership people can breathe around. That’s leadership that heals.

Visibility in Spiritual Leadership

Last week, I wrote about spiritual leadership in the modern world: the responsibilities, the boundaries, the need to hold knowledge with care. But there’s another piece to this that deserves its own space: what happens when people begin to see you as a spiritual leader, whether you intended it or not. When you become visible.

Visibility is one of those things that arrives quietly. You don’t have to declare yourself anything. You don’t need a title or a platform. Sometimes visibility begins the first time someone asks you for guidance, or when people start coming to you with their questions, their fears, or their excitement about the path. With one conversation, one ritual, one piece of advice — suddenly you’re “someone who knows things.” And from that moment on, your path looks different.

And while visibility can be a blessing, it isn’t always comfortable.

An orange background with a black figure in the middle with a yellowish 5 pointed star in the middle with rays of yellow coming from behind. Written above the figure is "The Burdena nd Blessing of Being Seen: Visibility in Spiritual Leadership"

Being Seen Isn’t Simple

People often imagine visibility in a spiritual context as something warm and affirming. A sign that your work is valued. And sometimes it is. But it can also come with scrutiny you never asked for. People will make assumptions about who you are, what you believe, what you represent, and what you should be doing. You might find yourself carrying the weight of expectations you didn’t sign up for, simply because others have formed an idea of you that doesn’t match the full reality.

The strange thing about visibility is that people often see the version of you they need in that moment. Sometimes that’s comforting; sometimes it’s overwhelming. But rarely is it neutral.

When People Try to Claim You

Once you’re visible, even in a small way, people can begin to form attachment: some healthy, some less so. Someone might decide they’re your closest student despite you never agreeing to teach. Someone else may expect constant access to your time or energy because you answered a single question online. Others may subtly pressure you to take them under your wing, guide them personally, or carry emotional weight that isn’t yours to hold.

Most of the time, it isn’t malicious. It’s simply human longing. But longing can become entitlement, and entitlement can become a problem. Part of spiritual leadership is remembering that you belong to yourself first. Your practice, your time, your energy… These are not communal property just because you’ve been helpful or visible.

You Become a Mirror

Here’s the unexpected part: visibility means becoming a mirror for other people. Their reactions often have very little to do with you and far more to do with their own wounds, hopes, insecurities, or unresolved stories.

Some people will admire you instantly because you embody something they want for themselves. Others may feel defensive because you remind them of something they’re avoiding. And some will project every authority figure they have ever struggled with onto you, without realising they’re doing it.

This isn’t a sign that you’re doing anything wrong. It’s simply part of the terrain. And knowing that can make the road much gentler.

Why Grounding Matters More Than Ever

Visibility requires a certain steadiness. You need the ability not to inflate when someone praises you, and not to crumble when someone criticises or misunderstands you. Emotional grounding becomes the anchor that keeps you from drifting into ego or collapse. It’s what helps you sift through the feedback and recognise which parts are projections and which parts offer something genuinely useful.

Without grounding, visibility can swallow you whole. With grounding, it becomes something you can carry with dignity and clarity.

The Beautiful Better Side of Visibility

I just couldn’t with the “beautiful”. It’s not in me. Because this is work. But still…

It’s not all hard edges. Visibility also brings moments of great beauty. Someone might share how your words helped them through a difficult time. Someone else may feel less alone because you voiced something they’ve always felt but never had language for. You might find yourself connecting with people who share your values, your devotion, or your connection to the land and the divine.

Those moments make the weight worth it. They remind you that visibility isn’t just burden, it can also be a blessing, a thread connecting you to others in ways you might never have expected.

You Don’t Need to Be Perfect

One of the biggest myths about spiritual leadership is that you must be flawless: endlessly wise, endlessly calm, endlessly sure. But that’s not how humans work, and it’s certainly not how spiritual paths work.

You don’t need perfection. What you need is honesty. Honesty about your limits. Honesty about what you’re still learning. Honesty about your boundaries, your energy, and the fact that you’re as human as anyone else.

Invisibility hides our imperfections. Visibility simply makes them easier to see, and easier to accept, if we let it.

Staying Whole While Being Seen

If last week’s piece was about the responsibilities of spiritual leadership, this one is about what happens inside you when people begin to look to you for guidance. To lead sustainably, you need to stay whole. Staying whole means not letting projections reshape you. It means returning to your own practices, your own gods, your own grounding, again and again.

Being seen is part of the work. Sometimes the hardest part.

But staying yourself, even while being seen?

That’s the heart of spiritual leadership.