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.
Why there's no fasting in my rituals
|
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 disorder to have me look for help. And it just wasn't there - because I was, by the standards of the early 00's, fat. Looking back now, I think I really wasn't, I was pretty healthy, but that's life. So when I start thinking about food at all, I need to be careful, because it doesn't take too much to send me right back to the nightmare where I claimed to be eating 40g porridge - made with water of course - for breakfast and was actually eating more like 20g. Critically weighed every single morning… So when I read ideas for rituals that include fasting, I look for the reasons behind the fasting and see if the same end result can be gained by a different route. Most of the time, it can be. It takes more work usually - being lightheaded from hunger does help people have fantastic experiences and visions and gets them more susceptible to suggestions etc - but with discipline, practice and training, you can get yourself into a similar headspace without the fasting. This is one way I adapt modern practices to suit me, my limitations and my needs. Another is, I rarely need to sit or stand for extended periods of time for a ritual. I keep them short, practical and efficient… Far easier than longwinded… Now there's a major place for theatre in public rituals - I will never move away from that!! But mine are mostly private. And Brigid's as much an engineer as I am, so she understands where I'm coming from. 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.
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...
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...