Giving Voice to Sorrow. The healing of Ancestral Grief. Ancestral grief is sorrow carried across generations, often unnamed yet deeply felt within families and cultures. It lives not only in personal memory but in collective memory, where historical trauma continues to shape identity long after the original events have passed. The Irish story offers a powerful example of this inherited grief.

The Bean Chaointe, the keening woman of Irish tradition—a guardian of liminal wisdom and grief and a mediator between the visible and invisible worlds…

Few writers have rendered the texture of rural Irish life with the clarity and restraint of John McGahern…

Intergenerational trauma refers to the transmission of emotional wounds, behavioural patterns, and unresolved psychological conflicts from one generation to the next…

Depth psychology explores the unconscious layers of the psyche — the hidden, symbolic forces that shape our behaviour, imagination, and sense of meaning…

In all of my Deepening the Senses courses, I speak about cultivating a space of sanctuary in your life and home — a space of ritual, a physical place that is wholly yours…

Connemara becomes a site of reflection on mortality, memory, and disappearance….

The Irish word for candle is coinneal. It was a common tradition to light the candle at Christmas and place it in the window…

The Bean Feasa, the wise woman or healer of Irish tradition—a guardian of liminal wisdom and a mediator between the visible and invisible worlds…

Samhain is a door: an invitation to cross into the mystery of the dark…

Every threshold moment—the death of an old self, the shedding of an identity, the loss of what we once clung to—carries its own mourning…

As we approach the darker months and the time of the Cailleach, I am thinking more about the ancient archetypal idea of “pilgrimage”…

This word literally means “God's secret” or a “secret-sacred” or “hidden-divine”.  Another related word is “rún”, meaning “secret”, “mystery”, or even “beloved.”

Symbolically, fog marks a threshold space, concealing and revealing, signalling the presence of the Otherworld…

Numinous experiences are profoundly healing—often because they work hand-in-hand with archetypes, those deep, universal patterns of human experience.

No matter how tangled or imperfect our path or our story has been, we start to glimpse the wholeness of who we are—and see how, even our mistakes, are threads in the greater tapestry of our life’s unfolding, the story that carried us forward…

The cousins from England were home, the fields hummed with life, and one year in the 1980s, something stirred in me—a longing I couldn’t quite name. I wanted everyone there…

Our very first relationship in this world was with our mother. The mother wound is a term that describes the emotional and psychological pain that arises from…

The Otherworld was considered to be very much a living worldly place that existed parallel to this one and was ‘sensuously colourful, musical and carefree’…

We make sense of who we are through our stories. When we piece together the story of who we are, it helps us find an anchor for ourselves in the world…