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.
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.