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.
The rituals I actually hang my life on ☕
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I did the maths on this earlier in the week and it stopped me in my tracks a bit: I build "new starts" into my mental calendar roughly six times a year. September. Samhain. January. Imbolc. Easter. The start of school holidays. Being the child of two teachers, and married to a third, the school year is baked into my DNA at this stage - it doesn't matter that I haven't sat an exam in decades, my whole nervous system still thinks September is when things properly begin. I've been sitting with that this week, cos it made me look sideways at all the smaller ones too. My first cup of coffee in the morning. My husband tucking me into bed most nights (yes, even now, yes, it's as lovely as it sounds). Our weekly takeaway with our friend we've basically adopted at this point - known affectionately around here as the "pet gay" - who we act as surrogate parents to, right down to trying to feed him every single time he sets foot in the house 🍽️. My twice-yearly trips to Monart. My monthly massage. All of it is ritual. Every bit. The hooks I hang my actual life on. And here's the bit I keep going back and forth on: some of that list is enormous privilege, plainly. Not everyone gets a twice-yearly spa trip or a monthly massage, and I know that, and I'm not going to pretend I don't. But sitting with the discomfort of naming that hasn't made me want to strip the list back to only the "acceptable" rituals - the free ones, the humble ones. It's made me think the opposite, actually: that the size or the cost of a ritual was never really the point. Some of what's on my list is spiritual. Some is just relationship, showing up for people I love in a repeated way. Some of it is just... a coffee. But it's all doing the same job. Worth asking yourself the same thing this week, I reckon. What are you actually hanging your days on? Bríd libh Órlagh P.S. If any of this has you thinking about where ritual actually starts, I went further into it on the blog this week - the actual moment I worked out what a ritual even was, and it was a lot less impressive than a spa trip. 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.
Content warning: this one goes into disordered eating and food restriction in some detail. Skip if you need to. I mentioned in last week's newsletter about fainting on the steelworks floor - never a good idea. But over the course of about 4 years, I started fainting more and more often. My heart rate dropped and my blood pressure was lower than recommended. I was also a size 18 (UK sizes - adjust for whatever system you use!!). But it took a doctor telling me I most likely had an eating...
Have you any idea of the panic you can cause a bunch of hardened steelworkers by fainting on the factory floor? Especially when you're a woman. Half of them are afraid to even touch you, convinced something seriously wrong has happened - when actually it was just me being careless with my own energy. Honestly, the conversations I had after that one. When I finally came to, the estimates from my colleagues at the time ranged from hours to days. I'd guess it was seconds at most in reality (for...
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...