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.
What they taught us about our bodies. And what it actually cost us
|
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 from the institution that taught it, wasn't nothing. It was a deeply ingrained sense that my body wasn't quite mine. That I wasn't quite worth taking care of. That I needed to earn my place in my own skin. Unlearning that took years. It was, in fact, where my inner work actually began - not with spirituality, not with Brigid, not with any of the things I now associate with this path, but with the slow and sometimes painful process of learning to value myself as I actually am. This week's post is about what inner work really means in practice. Not the Instagram version. The real one. If any of what I've described above sounds familiar - if you've carried something similar from your own religious upbringing - I want you to know that the post was written with you specifically in mind. You don't have to have it resolved to start. You just have to be willing to look. 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.
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...
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...
You're getting this email because you told me you were interested in The Guided Path. I want to make sure you see this. The doors are open. I published a post this week that I think will land for you, it's about the specific feeling that surfaces during weekends like Easter when you're no longer inside a religious community but haven't yet built something to replace it. That in-between space. The vacuum nobody warns you about. (I know I sent you the link on Tuesday as well, but I also know......