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.
My 9-5 is actually a 7:30 to 7:30. Lúnasa is where I fix that.
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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 dedication. Lúnasa is where I fix this. Not because there's anything in the ancient tradition specifically connecting the harvest festival to diary management - there isn't. But because I use the four fire festival bank holidays as structured check-in points across the year, and Lúnasa is the one where I look hardest at what I'm sacrificing and whether it's worth it. Here's what that actually looks like in practice. I confirm the days off I'm taking between now and Samhain and put them in the diary before anything else can claim them. I look at my meeting load and block out working time - actual protected time to do the work - so that my 9-5 doesn't get entirely consumed by meetings that could have been emails, leaving the real work to happen after hours. I put my self-care commitments in the diary as meetings: exercise classes, massages, the walks and the sea visits and the things that keep me functional. Sacred in the diary means nobody - including myself - can quietly move them. None of this is revolutionary. Most of it is basic. But it requires a deliberate moment to do it, and Lúnasa gives me that moment every year. What am I harvesting? What am I sacrificing to get it? Is the trade-off one I'm making consciously, or one that has just crept up on me? The God of the Day Job is a demanding deity. He doesn't always give back what he takes. Lúnasa is a good time to renegotiate the terms. This week's post is about how to mark Lúnasa practically - without lighting fires in drought conditions, and with a genuine look at what the festival is actually asking of you. [Read it here ] And if you've been following the whole series and want to go deeper into the Lúnasa figures - the Lúnasa Bundle is €97 for all three courses, saving you €14 on the individual prices. Beannachtaí Lúnasa oraibh. 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.
I beat myself up for straying from my path. Every single time. Which is a genuinely stupid thing for me to be doing, given what I actually teach for a living. But there it is - I skip a checkpoint, I go six months off track, and the first thing that shows up isn't "right, let's fix this," it's "you're supposed to be good at this, you teach this stuff." I think there's a version of me that believes if I'm teaching this, I should be good at it. And in some ways, I am. I built the whole cauldron...
You'll have received another email from me today with a link that jsut doesn't work. My apologies and I'll send out a new one tomorrow with the proper link. I've redone a few blog posts and it causes some issues with links. But... the bit about my patience being gone? That's real. It might not be covered in this week's blog post, but I will come back to it and I'd be delighted to hear from you if you're in a similar place!! Bríd libh Órlagh Check out the links below: Brigid's Forge School...
My patience for bullshit has disappeared. Completely. Gone. That's not really a complaint - it's the actual topic of this week's post, and the thing I want to talk to you about properly here. Perimenopause has had a deep impact on how I think about life, and not the way anyone warned me about. Nobody mentioned the bit where your tolerance for sitting through meeting after meeting just... evaporates. Or that your ability to hide your expressions goes with it, so now whatever I'm thinking is...