Deepening the Senses
Personal Development Workshops & Programs
Introduction
Deepening the Senses is an immersive, transformative experience, a space of exploration where we build connections and reconnect with our inner world and soul self.
It is a facilitated space of guided ritual, deep reflection, and learning. Deepening the senses is cultivated with care and honed over many years to create an intentional space where we cross into the inner realms, responding to the call of the soul, and drop down into the ‘subtle body,’ which speaks to us in the language of metaphor, symbol, and images.
The Deepening the Senses experience shares knowledge, skills, and resources from depth psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, literature, and art with you in an accessible, practical, and creative way. It weaves a visceral tapestry of experience, incorporating embodiment practices, rich visual meditations on images, music, poetry, stories, Irish mythology, and songs, and memorable sweeping images and footage of the beautiful Irish landscape. Deepening the senses is intended as a voyage of soul and discovery, where we explore what Patrick Kavanagh, the Irish poet, called “the true Gods of sound and stone”.
Here, we can catalyse the change and transformation we need in our lives, expanding our understanding and experience of our inner world and soul selves.
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The inner world is the realm of the unconscious, or what Carl Jung called the Shadow. This is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories outside of conscious awareness. Jung believed that there is a personal unconscious as well as a collective unconscious.
The unconscious plays a vital role in shaping personality. Although this inner world is quite remote from our present awareness, it plays out within us and produces patterns of behaviour that can hold us back and keep us stuck, though we may not recognise it.
The shadow can teach us where we need to develop and mature. It also stores our unlived potential, the gold of our wild soul selves, our untapped vitality and power often concealed and exiled in our effort to ‘fit in’.
The collective unconscious is also in the inner world. According to Jung, this contains inherited ancestral memories and archetypal patterns common to all of humankind. The unconscious communicates through images and symbols, such as what we see at night in our dreams. The personal and collective unconscious images differ in content in that the personal unconscious has more of an individual quality to them. In contrast, the images in the collective unconscious have a mythic and primordial, ‘archetypal’ quality. Jung said these primordial images "are the deepest, the most ancient and the most universal thoughts of humanity.”
Deepening the Senses aims to cultivate an experience in which we can attend to the inner spaces of the soul, stand in curious awe and wonder, and glimpse the glint of gold that has been hidden, living within us all.
What is Deepening the Senses?
Deepening the Senses is the overarching approach I have developed for my work, where we look at support the journey in individuation through the lens of Depth psychology, and the ancient Gaelic world. This approach is translated into International one-to-one Depth Work with clients, as well as International Personal Development courses, programs, workshops, and retreats. It is informed by my background in Psychotherapy, Jungian Depth Psychology, Irish Mythology, and Folklore.
Often due to difficult childhood experiences and depending on the culture, society and set of circumstances we are born into, there are aspects of ourselves that we unconsciously hide and suppress to "fit in". This leads us to feel more estranged from a fuller sense of self.
Carl Jung, the analyst, coined the term ‘individuation’, which refers to the psychological developmental journey we take to become more whole. The journey of Individuation involves reclaiming and integrating those unknown, suppressed parts, bringing them into conscious awareness, thereby achieving greater self-realisation, enlarged consciousness, and authentic self-hood.
The Ancient Gaelic World
Deepening the Senses is an approach that is grounded and embodied, rooted in sensory experience. It supports the journey of individuation by drawing on the wisdom and richness of the ancient Irish Gaelic world, opening a channel of memory that we traverse into the inner realm and the symbolic life.
This is facilitated by ritual as well as a rich visual meditation informed by insights from the field of depth psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, poetics, literature, and art. It interweaves Irish culture, history, mythology, folklore, music, language, and landscape into an experience of the soul.
When we listen to mythology, we step into a timeless, dreaming time, out of the rational concrete into symbolic life. This is the world of metaphor, symbol, and imagination. It softens our ability to be more receptive to our inner environment, the energies of life, and the archetypal patterns living through us.
Through this Deepening the Senses work, we build a relationship with our inner landscape, a re-enchantment with our inner lives, and an intentional engagement with what needs quickening, change and transformation to support us to return to a greater sense of self. In this way, we can arrive at some new understanding of ourselves, or what Irish poet Seamus Heaney called “a new purchase on yourself”.
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I grew up in South Connemara, near Cárna, a wild and rugged landscape on Ireland's Atlantic coast steeped in myth, story, song and history. Oscar Wilde famously said of the region, “Connemara is a savage beauty”. I grew up in a small, rural Irish-speaking community where Gaeilge is still spoken today by people living there. Gaeilge is my first language. This area was a major centre for the work of the Irish Folklore Commission, recording endangered folklore, mythology, sean-nós (old-style) songs, and oral literature. Many of my relatives contributed to those archives in their sean-nós songs and stories.
Artists, writers, poets and philosophers have visited Connemara over the years, and some moved there to live, learn and be inspired and close to that world and tradition. I have been fortunate to grow up there, immersed in that landscape, those ancient songs, stories, customs, myths, legends, and music. It has greatly influenced me, not only in that wild landscape but also in the sense of connection and belonging it evokes in me - of place, tribe, and ancestors. It connects me with a core anchor within, no matter where I find myself standing in the world.
Deepening the Senses is my desire to share that culture and spirit and, as a Psychotherapist, to support how that connection can nourish and guide you on your personal development journey of individuation to return to your sense of ‘home’ within.
The Exile Within
When we are disconnected from our authentic selves, we often experience feelings of yearning and longing. We can feel a sense of exile deep within. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said, “I believe that there is a longing in my soul that searches the whole world”. We hunger for connection, to be reunited with our exiled parts, to return to a call to ‘home’ within.
Piecing together the stories of our lives is part of this journey of individuation. This can awaken a wish to know who our people are, our ancestors, and where we come from. We can feel exiled from that rooted ground of belonging, our past, our history, the very landscape itself.
The past is alive, flowing through us in countless ways. In Deepening the Senses, we explore how to reconnect to a felt sense of belonging and how that supports us in being more fully in the ground of our own being.
In the ancient stories and mythologies, there are often tales of embarking on a journey, an odyssey, and returning home, back to where one started out from, transformed and somehow changed, no longer who they were when they ventured out, and now, a sense of them being more fully in themselves.
New! Online Course Series
A Journey Inward
A Journey Inward is a series of online courses that explore the Self-Abandonment Wound and how to support yourself in healing the wound of unworthiness and embracing life—mind, body, and spirit.
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Embodiment, Soul and the Celtic Spirit
Healing the Wounds of the Abandoning Self
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The Cailleach's Descent to the Underworld
Crossing the Dark Seas of Loss into Strange Country
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Resting Under Brigid’s Mantle
Cultivating Sanctuary and Self Compassion in Daily Life
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Awakening Bealtaine
Embracing Our Authentic Power
A Celebration of Granuaile -
Celebrating the Harvest at Lúnasa
Taking Your Seat at the Banquet of Life
NEW! Seasonal Program
Walking Between Worlds
Coming Early 2025
Are you yearning for a sense of meaning and belonging in your life? Do you wonder about the inner mysteries? Do you yearn for a deeper connection to your embodied self and the world around you? Do you desire to realize your wholeness, to know contentment in your body, so that you can open to life’s wonder and beauty? Are you drawn to learning more about ancient Gaelic Celtic culture, its folklore, ancestors, language, stories, and mythology, and experience how it can help you unearth your depths, personally and in the collective psyche, and awaken your inner wisdom?
These seasonal programs are developed to cultivate a sense of wonder and beauty. A deepening into the inner sanctum of the symbolic.
“As we look we feel the presence of a lost world. We are out of touch. We have no bridge on which to step across so many centuries.”
What Past Participants have said...