Returning to the Well | Healing the Mother Wound
The Great Mother
The Guardian of the Well
Nurturing a Relationship with the Great Mother Archetype - Embodying your Sensing, Intuitive, Soul Self.
Honouring the feminine in our lives is to return to the wellspring of the body. Often, with the mother wound, we are disconnected from our sensing, feeling, instinctual, knowing selves. This disconnection is frequently passed down from generation to generation until someone is ready to meet and heal it. We will explore the archetype of the Great Mother through the goddesses of Irish mythology and how we can begin to cultivate the Great Mother within. Here, we can return to the language of the body and re-member ourselves as our instinctual, knowing embodied selves.
Nurturing a loving inner mother helps us cultivate presence, instinct, intuition, and a deep, embodied knowing. This is the sacred act of reparenting—tending to the parts of ourselves that never felt fully seen or safe to be.
In this course, we journey alongside the great mother goddesses of the Irish landscape—sovereign figures rooted in earth and myth. They will guide us as we come home to our own ground of being, reclaiming agency, embodiment, authenticity, and the right to our own voice and separate self.
A core expression of the Mother Wound is enmeshment, where the child’s sense of self is blurred with the parent’s, often through unconscious patterns of over-attunement or emotional vigilance. Rather than growing into a separate self, the child becomes an extension of the mother’s emotional world. In this space, saying “no” can feel like betrayal, and boundaries feel shameful or dangerous.
In healthy development, differentiation allows the child to become their own person. But when enmeshment takes root, autonomy is laced with guilt, and love feels conditional on staying merged. This deep pattern can block our full expression in the world. Together, I invite you to soften these bindings and begin to step into your true, separate self.
This course is an immersive, visceral odyssey of the soul and spirit, a journey to the metaphorical well of wisdom that flows through Irish myth and memory. You will see sweeping images of the Irish landscape, and experience the music, poetry, insights from Depth psychology and Psychotherapy, and ancient stories that are interwoven to support you to connect to The Great Mother archetype, and her protective presence, thereby healing the Mother Wound in your life.
Join Eileen Ní Shuilleabháin in your very own return to the well. Together, we will explore, through the work of Psychotherapy, Depth Psychology and Irish Mythology, how we can begin to reclaim our sense of agency, authenticity and find the Great Mother within.
What is included?
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We will begin by Crossing the Threshold—the Opening Ritual that guides all of my Deepening the Senses Programs, Courses, and Workshops. In this space, we create a container for our work together and set our individual and collective intentions.
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We begin by introducing the themes of the course in a 30-minute immersive video presentation to explore ideas, images, and reflections from the world of Depth psychology, philosophy, literature, Irish folklore, and poetry. We will explore the emotions that are stirring within the theme and how this learning can be a rich source of knowledge to support us in developing a relationship with our inner world and soul self.
After the seminar, there will be a time for reflection, a space for you to note your experience through awareness, journal invitations, and personal reflection.
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In this section, we will deepen into story and mythology with a visual meditation of sweeping footage of the Irish landscape. You will hear stories from mythology or Irish folklore to deepen into myth, ancient customs and practices of the ancient Gaelic world, drawing on somatic practices throughout to support you in your body, to enhance this visual experience. For our ancestors, the world of storytelling, poetry, songs, and folktales shared around the hearth at night provided an escape from a harsh existence—an escape that brought them into the unseen world of imagination, psyche, and spirit. We will become curious about what images are stirring our own imagination from these ancient stories and images, and deepen our relationship to our soul selves.
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This second seminar draws on the features of all the Deepening the Senses workshops and includes ritual, mythology/folklore, music, and poetry. It is a space of reflection and exploration, a space for sharing and mutual learning. This seminar aims to create and deepen into the theme on the path of discovery and self-development.
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Here, we sit at the symbolic hearth to create a pause and space for reflection. I share insights with you on the key themes, from my work with clients and those who attended live Gatherings over the years. This is designed to support you in your own integration of the learning thus far.
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This is the final video module, where we capture the essence of the course's learning, sharing rich reflections, images, and lessons from the collective experience. We explore how you will apply this learning to your daily life.
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We will cross back over the threshold again, returning to our initial starting place of ritual, the container of our work together, where we will close this work again in ritual. From here, we return to our everyday lives, inspired and curious about what new perspectives, new understandings, and awareness we can bring with us, from the Deepening the Senses experience.
This course is for you if…
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You long to feel safe within yourself and are ready to cultivate an inner mother who offers comfort, presence, and protection to the parts of you that feel unseen or emotionally abandoned and not in your own seperate solid sense of self.
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You struggle with boundaries, guilt, or people-pleasing, and suspect these patterns may stem from emotional enmeshment, over-attunement, or a childhood where saying “no” felt unsafe.
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You are seeking a deeper connection to your intuition, body, and soul, and feel called to reawaken your instinctual wisdom through myth, ritual, somatic practices, and the ancient Irish and Celtic spiritual landscape.
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You feel the Mother Wound in your life— a sense of disconnection from your authentic self, chronic self-doubt, or the belief that your worth depends on keeping others happy or emotionally regulated.
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You are drawn to Jungian Psychology and feel a deep pull toward Irish mythology, ancestral wisdom, and the Irish language, and want to explore how folklore and the Gaelic Irish culture and the living landscape of Ireland can guide personal and collective healing.
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This offering is particularly relevant for you if you are engaged in psychotherapy, or if you are interested in your own personal development and you are curious to learn more of Irish heritage, ancestors, language, folklore, and myth as a lens into your inner world and soul self.
Purchase the Course
✓ Over 120+ Minutes of Immersive Video Lessons
✓ 30+ Page Companion E-Workbook
✓ CPD Certificate for Irish Professionals
✓ Instant & Unlimited lifetime access
✓ A Depth Psychology Experience Rooted in the Irish Landscape
Listen to a short excerpt…
You will learn how to…
Through guided practices, depth inquiry, and gentle embodiment work, this course will support you to:
Gain insight into your relationship with the mother archetype and deepen your understanding of the mother wound and its impact on your life.
Explore the dynamics of enmeshment and begin the vital process of differentiation by cultivating healthy boundaries and stepping into your own ground of being.
Identify and begin to release intergenerational patterns of emotional fusion and inherited enmeshment.
Reconnect with your body and develop a felt sense of safety and presence through somatic practices that attune you to your sensing, feeling self.
Cultivate a relationship with your instinctual, embodied knowing, strengthening your capacity for differentiation without losing connection through somatic awareness and inner attunement.
Engage with the mother figures of Irish mythology, folklore, and poetry in an embodied way, deepening your intuitive connection and enriching your relationship to creativity, inner guidance, and self-trust.
Develop emotional boundaries, learning to discern what is truly yours from what belongs to your mother—or to the ancestral lineage.
Grow in appreciation for the Irish language, stories, and ancestral wisdom as part of a rich, soulful experience of personal and cultural reclamation.
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Depth psychotherapy research, theories and practices, somatic psychotherapy, psychology and neuroscience, Celtic mythology, ancient Gaelic wisdom in folklore and stories, the medium of poetry, art images, symbol and metaphor.
What A Journey Inward Participants have said...
About
Eileen Ní Shuilleabháin
BSocSc, MSW, MA Psychotherapy, Dip Supervision, Dip Jungian Psychology, Certified Coach (WCI)
I am a Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Coach with over 20 years of experience. I am dual-located in the US and Ireland (In Northern Nevada and on the West Coast of Ireland, in Galway).
I grew up in Connemara, a wild and rugged landscape on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. Oscar Wilde famously said of the region, “Connemara is a savage beauty”. I grew up in a small, rural Gaelic (Irish) speaking community where Gaelic is still spoken today in people's homes. 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. I have been greatly influenced by the wild physical landscape and immersed in those ancient songs, stories, customs, myths, legends, and music since childhood.
I desire to share with you a sense of that culture and spirit and, as a Psychotherapist, to support how that connection can nourish and guide you on your personal development journey.
Returning to the Well Online Course Series
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The Great Mother
The Guardian of the Well
Nurturing a Relationship with the Great Mother Archetype - Embodying your Sensing, Intuitive, Soul Self. -
The Dark Mother
Entering the Sacred Grove
Encountering the Shadow in the Mother Wound -
Blessing the Waters
The Inner Child
Embracing the Inner Child - Cultivating the Great Mother Within -
Kindling the Fire
Reclaiming the Ancestral Story
Embodying Sovereignty & Agency - Honoring the Ancestral Lineage