💥🧘‍♀️ Feeling Frazzled? Calm awaits...


As is becoming a distressing habit of mine, I was awake for half the night last night. And now, I'm not operating the best in work. But I'm here and keeping things on a (mostly) even keel. Some of the things that are worrying me?

  • I don't know if I'm doing a good job at my part time lecturing role
  • I'm worried about the content for tomorrow's class
  • I haven't finalised the material for the first week of the Brigid for Writers course, starting on Saturday
  • I can see things in work that will go wrong if someone doesn't do something, but I don't have the authority to fix
  • I have a medical procedure next week to determine if I have something silly and small wrong with me or something very serious wrong.
  • I have to organise a lot of replacement personnel in work for people who are moving on from my team - all for excellent reasons...

Yes, these are the things that keep me awake at 2am.

And I can't really guarantee calm awaits. But I can offer some things that help:

  1. Taking deep breaths, slower and longer on the out breath than the in breath
  2. Lying in bed with my knees bent, soles of my feet together
  3. Consciously tensing and relaxing all the muscles in my body in order
  4. Writing down every thought that comes into my head
  5. Counting sheep (it's a cliche for a reason!)

So, look, I know I'm basing my email on the things that are bothering me this week. But I hope some of the options listed above might help people.

And y'know - remember to breathe and no one ever said on their deathbed "I wish I'd spent more time at the office". (and yes, reminding myself as well!)

Bríd libh

Órlagh

P. S. Don't forget to sign up for Brigid for Writers before Saturday!!

Check out the links below:

Brigid's Forge School

Patreon

Facebook Group

Website

Hi, I'm Orlagh, of Brigid's Forge

I'm dedicated to helping women in particular develop their spiritual path in life. I'm focused heavily on Brigid in Ireland, although not all my followers are! I teach, speak, coach and mentor people to help them along their own individual path, based on what lore we have, but also allowing for each individual path to develop as it needs to.

Read more from Hi, I'm Orlagh, of Brigid's Forge

My official working hours are 8 to 4:30. My actual working hours, for much of this year, have been closer to 7:30 in the morning to 7:30 in the evening. Sometimes later. This is, as I discovered the hard way earlier this year, not sustainable. The anxiety I mentioned a few weeks ago didn't arrive from nowhere. It arrived because I had quietly allowed the boundaries between work and everything else to dissolve, one small compromise at a time, until I was operating on empty and calling it...

Trigger warning: this email contains a brief reference to miscarriage and pregnancy loss. If you need to step away from that today, please do - the blog post linked below doesn't contain this material and is safe to read. When I first read about Crom Cruach and the first-born sacrifice, I was doing what I usually do with mythology - approaching it academically, looking for the patterns, thinking about what it tells us about how our ancestors understood the world. And then it hit me...

My mother grew up in rural Clare in the 1960s. And one of her fondest memories from childhood is the trip to Lahinch for Garland Sunday - the last Sunday of July, which in her memory was simply a great day out. The men would walk the seafront. The women came too - which was notable, she says, because most of the fairs and gatherings of the time were horse fairs or cattle fairs, places where women didn't usually go. Garland Sunday was different. It was for everyone. Children ran and played and...