Make Self Care, Soul Care
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A Chairde, Friends,
I decided to update this post as a welcome to The Celtic Creatives. Below you will find:
Welcome video from me, Jen
A free eBook, From Self Care to Soul Care: 7 Essential Steps
Fáilte, Welcome!
Your Invitation
This space is an invitation to make Celtic soul a part of your everyday life and in doing so, uncover pathways to what our ancestors called your ‘dán’, your creative destiny. Each month you’ll receive:
Imbas Dispatch newsletter with a Celtic symbol or oracle card reading. ‘Imbas’ means otherworldly knowledge or wisdom that illuminates in Old Irish.
For Paid Members:
Celtic Ritual: A creative tool or ritual to unlock the magic of your Celtic soul.
Full Moon Fairytale Céilí: A storytelling and mythic movement circle.
The Selkie Studio: Sharing space to explore this work, soul and archetypal themes in our lives in a safe and nourishing community.
Mythic Ancestor eBook: A rich compendium of Celtic goddesses, gods and archetypes with new additions each month (a rare find!)
For Founding Members:
Four soul-tending online Áes Dána Retreats (means ‘People of Arts’ in Old Irish) each year where we venture deep into mystical Ireland.
My Business:
If you feel stirred to work with me in another way through 1-1 mentoring and training programmes, live and self-guided courses, and in-person retreats, you can discover more here.
From Self Care to Soul Care: 7 Essential Steps
You can read this guide as an online magazine by clicking on the image below, download it as an eBook.
1. Self Care, Soul Care
‘In ancient Greek, the word for the highest degree of human happiness is eudaimonia, which basically means “well-daemoned”—that is, nicely taken care of by some external divine creative spirit guide.’
-Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
To draw upon
’s quote, the ancient Greeks believed that each of us is gifted a daemon/daimon, what in the Celtic tradition we might call an ‘Anam Chara’, a soul’s companion to help us remember who we are called to be in this life. When we remember, we can experience eudaimonia, the joy of knowing who we truly are.Our ancestors had a word for the soul’s calling, ‘dán’ (“dawn”). They saw our dán as many things: the poetry alive within us, our creative or artistic skill, our calling, destiny, or fate—our soul’s unique image. It was understood as both a purpose bestowed upon us by the divine and a gift that we offer back to the divine by living in to it.
Each one of us has the potential to live into the mystery of our dán, to make this an essential part of modern living. We don’t have to know what our dán is, but we can uncover pathways towards it by taking time for soul care.
Prioritising our soul care and the image of our dán, our soul’s purpose isn’t some fanciful or selfish act, it’s essential. Research shows how having a sense of ‘purpose’ in life is critical to our wellbeing. In one study, purpose was seen to reduce mortality by 46% and the risk of depression by 43%.1
The Celtic Creatives is a space for soul care. For me at this moment, my dán is about creating pathways for people to engage in soul care, and from this place to make Celtic Soul a living aesthetic.
‘This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, therefore the daimon is the carrier of your destiny.’
-James Hillman, The Soul’s Code
Tool to Help:
Guided Visualisation to Follow the Energy of Your Dán.
2. A Living Aesthetic
A ‘living aesthetic’ is a way of life that holds space for the innate beauty, creative expression and gratitude in how we choose to live our days. A ‘Celtic Soul Aesthetic’ specifically centres the Celtic Soul in our everyday experience. What if tending to your soul through this work was infused into your daily life?
In a world that seems to conspire against our dán, we can, like Goddess Brigid, the Morning Star in Ella Young’s Celtic Wonder Tales, ‘dream of beauty.’ We can wrap ourselves and our suffering world in Brigid’s healing mantle, finding creative ways to bring the wisdom of our ancestors to these times.
Our soul is the most authentic part of ourselves—that’s why authenticity is so magnetic. When we make soul-tending part of our day, we begin to shine as soul itself. We become what our ancestors called, ‘Shining Ones’.
Tool to Help:
Create Your Unique Soul Handprint
3. Tír na nÓg Time
One of the most well-known names for the Otherworld in Irish is Tír na nÓg, often translated as ‘Land of Eternal Youth’. This is not some anti-ageing mecca; the name emphasises the eternal, timeless nature of the Otherworld.
There are many tales of folks voyaging to the Otherworld and experiencing time collapse beyond logic and linear constraints. In what may seem like one rich day in Tír na nÓg or Emain Ablach (Avalon) or Mag Mell (Plain of Delights), one whole year will have passed in linear, Irish time. Similar to Kairos in the Greek tradition, otherworldly time is deep, generative time—like our night dreams where all timelines can co-exist in a single moment.
Time is charged with our socio-cultural conditioning, the demands of the overculture, habits, and limiting beliefs—most of us have a challenging relationship with time. Yet, we can have agency when it comes to time, discerning whether how we spend it depletes our energy (e.g., doom scrolling) or whether it gives us life. Tír na nÓg time is life-giving; it is the time you spend tending to your soul that gives back to you tenfold, more than linear time ever can.
What does your Tír na nÓg time look like? Perhaps it’s following the energy of your night dreams, meditating or journeying, asking your ancestors for guidance, bathing in nature, spending time in a sacred place, praying, invoking, moving your body, making art, creating, journalling, reading, daydreaming, resting... or simply being wholly present to life in a given moment.
Everything I create in The Celtic Creatives is done by entering otherworldly time. When you engage in this membership, you are in this field. Dedicate a sunrise or sunset or lunchtime, or whenever this week, to your soul time and observe what happens.
Life is a dance of time, the myths are clear that no mortal is meant to spend all of their time in Tír na nÓg or it will harm them, just like trying to micromanage every second of the day is harming us. It’s never about an either/or, it’s always an ebb and flow between us and the divine.
‘One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.’
-Clarissa Pinkola Estés, You Were Made For This
Tool to Help:
4. Ritualise
‘Ceremony is a primordial part of human nature, one that helps us connect, find meaning and discover who we are: we are the ritual species.’
-Dimitris Xygalatas, Ritual
Ritual is a conscious act or performance that transitions us from everyday life into a world of possibility, where the limitations of the everyday can be renegotiated and transformed. Ritual helps us enter Tír na nÓg time.
The Irish word for ritual is ‘deasgnáth’. ‘Deas’ means beautiful or gratifying, and ‘gnáth’ means normal or custom. Creating a ritual for your Celtic Creatives membership time is a way to make the ordinary sacred and in doing so, invite the limitless possibilities of the Otherworld into your space.
Ritual can be as simple as lighting a candle and setting an intention. Or you could go all out and make a ritual altar for your Celtic Creatives work, offering up items you hold dear (ancestral heirlooms or photos, crystals, oils, candles, sacred texts, divination tools etc.), your own art, gifts nature offers us from her landscape (seasonal flowers, shells, stones, the elements etc.). You could dedicate this to a specific mythic ancestor if you so desire.
Tool to Help:
5. Call in a Guide
‘What is so strange is that before we sought it, the Grail sought us. Also, before we sought it, the Silver Branch sought us. We are being sought. But, given the noisesphere of our own creation that we live in, we are making it almost infinitely difficult to be found.’
-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
I know how difficult it can be to source information on Irish or wider Celtic goddesses and gods. This requires extensive research into wide, varied, and confusing sources to curate, while also allowing the imbas, the illumination of each deity to shine through. It takes immense energy.
Over the past year in our membership, I have been building profiles of these deities for you so that you can sense into their energy and see who feels aligned for you. So far we have Brigid, Manannán Mac Lir, Ériu, Banba and Fódhla, Áine, Amergin, Medb, Óengus, The Cailleach, The Morrigan, Great Mother, Gobnait, Airmid, Danu. This is compiled into an eBook that is now 115 pages long and growing. I am proud of this work and feel a deep reverence for the teachings each one of these mythic ancestors has brought to my life. In ways, this is my altar to them.
Each deity holds an archetypal energy, universal patterns that form our collective instincts. Great Mother, Sage Old Man, Witch, Trickster, Warrior, are all examples of archetypes. Different cultures clothe archetypes in culturally-specific ways like Bóinn the ‘White Cow’ of the Irish canon parallels Hathor, the celestial white cow of Egyptian mythology. As John Moriarty suggests, these energies seek us out. When made conscious, they can become numinous allies.
What archetypal image are you drawn to? Give it form by working with a mythic ancestor who embodies this archetype. Answer the journal prompts in your Mythic Ancestors eBook, engage in active imagination, move with them in your body, work with them through creative expression and see what reveals itself, engage in prayer, meditation, or praise poetry, make offerings, or ask for a night dream to guide you. The Celtic Creatives archive is full of ways to work with your mythic ancestors.
‘If we accept, as Jung believed, that there are what he called “archetypes” in our unconscious, then we can read myths and fairy tales with an open mind. If we do not accept the existence of archetypes, then we have no way of explaining the superhuman surges of energy that magnetise us toward someone or something—or repel us.’
-Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames
Tool to Help:
Active Imagination with Your Mythic Ancestors
6. Nurture Awe
‘It should not surprise that people who feel even five minutes a day of everyday awe are more curious about art, music, poetry, new scientific discoveries, philosophy, and questions about life and death. They feel more comfortable with mysteries, with that which cannot be explained.’
-Dacher Keltner, Awe
The Celtic Creatives is a space for wonder, for awe, for feeling into the great mysteries of life through the eyes of our ancestors, and metabolising this through our psyches and bodies for our modern lives. Imagine a life without mystery? That is a life devoid of soul. The soul loves mystery because it is the great mystery. We feel alive in mystery.
Recent research suggests that we can find awe in eight everyday wonders; moral beauty, collective effervescence (belonging to a movement), nature, music, art, spirituality, life and death, and inner illuminations.2 All of which can be found in this soul work. Also, people who seek to experience awe have a higher tolerance for uncertainty and less need for self-regulation.3 Awe is a wonder drug for our wellbeing!
Tool to Help:
Óengus and Caer Full Moon Fairytale Céilí
7. Share in Tuath
Reciprocity is a core tenet of Irish mythology and the Celtic psyche, this everpresent cycle of receiving and giving, giving and receiving, much like the Star card in the tarot.
From our animistic roots, seeing ourselves reflected in the wind, the wave, the stag, the salmon in a pool, through our hospitality myths and folktales, all teaching us how to maintain right relationship with nature and the Otherworld. When we give from our personal soul, we receive from the collective soul.
This is an invitation to actively participate in our tuath, our safe and nourishing tribe, by joining our live gatherings if you can, or by sharing your reflections and wisdom in the comments. My perspective is just one, shaped by my inner-life and lived experience, and inherited from all of the marvellous souls who inspire me on this path, those still with us, and those now gone.
You have wisdom to offer this community that I never can, because I haven’t lived your life or walked your dán. Your perspective is unique, just as your soul is, and it is so welcome here.
Tool to Help:
I would so love to hear if this resonates so please do get in touch.
Croí isteach,
Jen x
So gorgeous - thank you for this rich sharing. It feels like a warmth surrounding me.
This is so beautiful. What a generous offering you have created. I just loved it all, Jennifer.