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.
There were wooden spoons threatened 🥄
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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 system myself, I use it, it works. But I think it's more important that the people who work with me know I'm not perfect and never will be. Not as a disclaimer I say once and move past, but as an actual, ongoing, slightly uncomfortable truth I have to keep choosing to show rather than hide. So that's what I'm working on. The growth, not the perfection. And I'm not doing it alone, cos I've got help whether I want it or not. Brigid, obviously. But also both my Nanas, giving out to me for beating myself up - which, if you knew either of them, you'd know isn't a gentle nudge. It's a proper going over. There were wooden spoons threatened. (Something neither of them would ever have done in life, mind!) And it's exactly the kind of encouragement I need to actually learn and grow, however slowly I manage it. ​This week's post is about the checkpoint(s) I missed and the six months that followed. But the bit I actually want you to take from it, if you take anything, is that teaching the path and walking it perfectly are two completely different things. I only ever promised you the first one. BrÃd libh Órlagh Check out the links below: ​Brigid's Forge School​ ​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 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...