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.
I was a spiritual magpie. Here's what that actually looked like.
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I want to tell you something I'm not entirely proud of. For a good few years after I left the church, I was what I now think of as a spiritual magpie. I attended courses, oh gods... so many courses. I picked up crystals. I bought posters with Sanskrit on them. I had a set of cheap "chakra" towels that I genuinely thought meant something. I collected bits and pieces from traditions I knew nothing about, stripped of all their cultural context, and arranged them around my house like they added up to a spiritual life. They didn't. It was a complete mess. And looking back, I was being an appropriative white woman without even realising it - taking from living traditions because they were available and they glittered, not because I had any real understanding of or relationship with them. (When you know better, do better, right?) The shift came when I stopped reaching outward and started looking closer to home. At my own ancestors. At my own values. At what I actually believed, underneath all the borrowed aesthetics. That's what this week's post is about. If any of that lands, if you recognise the magpie phase in yourself, or if you're in the middle of it right now, the post is worth a read. There's no judgement in it. I lived it too. And if you want to make sure you don't miss what comes next, there's a form at the bottom of the post. Bríd libh Órlagh Check out the links below: 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.
For a long time, I thought being a pagan Catholic meant I existed in a category of one. I worked with Brigid. I lit candles for Mary. I had a complicated, deeply personal relationship with Saint Thérèse. And I also worked with the old Irish gods, followed the wheel of the year, and did things that would have raised eyebrows in the parish and in the coven alike. I thought that meant I had to hide. That there was no community for someone like me - someone who hadn't made a clean break, who...
The religion I grew up in had a lot to say about women's bodies. Keep yourself pure. Guard your worth. The messaging was relentless and specific, and it came with vivid illustrations - a used piece of chewing gum, a heart passed from hand to hand until it was battered beyond recognition. The point was clear: your value as a woman was bound up in your body, and that value could be lost. Damaged. Given away. I absorbed all of that. Most of us did. And what it left behind, once I'd walked away...
This week's post starts with me, alone in a Travel Lodge in Holyhead at two in the morning, crying my eyes out and asking for guidance. What turned up was the Dagda: father of the Tuatha Dé Danann, one of the old Irish gods. His first suggestion was to drink some water. By the end of the night, he'd told me to go look into his daughter. His daughter is Brigid. And that's what this week's post is about. Read it here But before you go, I want to offer you a friendly warning. Once one of the...