Tag: spirituality

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 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.