To Dare, Together. Truth Seeking for Healing, Transformation, & Collective Liberation!
Hello friend! I’m so grateful you’re here. I created this space for you and I to spend some time together. To Dare, Together. To seek the truth in the depths. To Dare to tune into the wisdom and pleasure of our bodies. To honor the places that hold pain and renewal. To Dare to descend and arise, transformed in the never ending cycle of death and regeneration. To reenchant the world around us from a more embodied and integrated place. To Dare to join in honest connection where liberation, love, equity, beauty, joy, gratitude, sensuality, dignity, and reverence for all life on earth is at the heart of our sacred space.
I am your host, Erin O'Brien, licensed psychotherapist in practice for over 20 years, intuitive healer, relationship counselor, and dare I say, witch, and if you are willing, your friend. Together we will descend into the mystery, into the exquisite darkness because true liberation starts with healing from the inside out. And it happens when we dare to go there, together.
Where are we going, you may ask? Well, we are delving into all the realms of our experience. We will move through our body, heart, mind, soul, spirit, original and chosen family, relationships, communities, cultures, dominant systems in society, intergenerational patterning, ancestral wounds and wisdom, and the great expanse of our collective. Because when we are together, we will seek to know what is true. We will alchemize and transform, knowing that our fates are inevitably intertwined with one another. So let’s will it together.
My offering here will be a combination of solo explorations together, and deep dives with other like-hearted therapists, healers, intuitives, activists, magickal practitioners, artists, abolitionists, astrologers, visionaries, witches, and more. This is a place that will weave together the relational, social, and sacred sciences, because oh yes, they are all connected. I want to support our journey of transformation by sharing practices that we can facilitate because ultimately we are our own wisest guide, healer, and teacher. Our body holds so much intelligence if we just slow down enough to listen. When we know how to keep silent and just be, just breathe, just listen, we know how to summon our greatest powers of transformation.
We will explore practices that focus on increasing our somatic awareness, trauma integration, and nervous system regulation. We will work with our shadow to illuminate what needs to be alchemized or released. We will dismantle our internalized systems of dominance and extraction so we resonate with the reciprocity and abundance of life. We will deepen our understanding of intersectionality and how our social location in the world shifts our experiences of power and disembodiment. We will strive to relate with others in ways that are embodied and promote connection, celebrate differentiation, and respectfully move through rupture or conflict so that all beings preserve their dignity. We will conjure the wisdom of our ancestors to strengthen our communal spaces. We will create rituals to attune with the cycles of nature, lunar rhythms, astrology, and the wheel of the year. We will do pathworkings and divination to deepen our relationship to our Higher Self, Spirit Team, Intuition, Magick, Soul’s purpose, and so much more.
We are all here on Earth right now. It’s time To Dare to take a stand for healing, transformation, and collective liberation. And the first step starts from within. Let’s take it together.
“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.” – unknown
To Dare, Together. Truth Seeking for Healing, Transformation, & Collective Liberation!
Blood Moon (Lunar Eclipse) Opens Path for Ancestral Truth and Change
Today’s episode was recorded at the peak of a powerful Total Lunar Eclipse in Pisces. This is a sacred time where truth is revealed and significant transformation is supported by the cosmos. This eclipse signals a time to let go of old patterns and behaviors, bringing closure to repeating cycles of intergenerational wounds and wounding that we all internalize from the dominant systems around us. We explore how reconnecting with our ancestral truth offers a pathway toward both personal sovereignty and collective change. We look at the pattern of cultural suppression that serves white supremacy by severing connections to ancestral wisdom.
During this transformative Blood Moon, ask yourself: Where do you need to rise up in your truth? Are you in right-relationship with what matters most? What service do you bring to the work that needs to be done right now?
The path forward requires going backward and slowing way down - honoring our nature, speaking our truth, and reclaiming what has always been ours. We all have a role to play in what happens next, what's yours?
Hello and get ready to dare together truth-seeking in the depths for healing, transformation and collective liberation. I'm your host, erin O'Brien, licensed psychotherapist in practice for over 20 years, intuitive healer, relationship counselor and, dare I say, witch. So I am recording today's episode on Sunday, september 7th, at approximately 1 40 PM Eastern standard time. I'm located on Turtle Island, which is also the United States, in the mid-Atlantic region, and right now is the peak of the lunar eclipse that is happening today and it started at around 1128 am earlier today 1128 AM earlier today and the highlight, which is about 82 minutes, according to what I'm, what I've done, my research on totaling um pretty much one 30 right now, up until 2 52 PM, and then it will conclude at about 4 55pm. So I am recording these words right now at the peak of this astrological event considered the blood moon, and in honor of the blood moon, I'm going to be talking about blood, of my blood, which is my ancestors and their land and their spirituality, their gods, their deities, their goddesses. So that's a part of my mission for today, during this full moon, lunar eclipse at the blood moon and a full moon. So there's a lot of science and really cool, wonderful things about this.
Speaker 1:What I will say, to get to the heart of the matter, is this is a time of letting go. Full moons are powerful times and in particular, a full moon, lunar eclipse is a time for really slowing down and letting go and asking yourself some transformational questions about the places that you have been avoiding or hiding or suppressing. Or hiding or suppressing and we do that best when we get really quiet, when we slow our bodies down, when we tune into what the sensations, what the wisdom, what the energy is telling us from up inside that quiet space. We witches refer to that as keeping silent, which is a really important part of walking the path, and larger pagan practices, of course, honor that as well says of course, uh, honor that as well. So I want to also say that this full moon and lunar eclipse is happening in pisces, which is a water sign and is very dreamy, very much about all of the intuitive capacities and psychic abilities that can come through there.
Speaker 1:We're also still in Virgo season and Pisces and Virgo are on the same axis, so they're sort of opposites of each other, and so Pisces holds the expansion, the endless possibility, all of those pieces, and Virgo holds the details. Virgo wants to categorize, wants to get down to the kind of granular understanding of a situation, of what's going on. So these are beautiful polarities of each other, or opposites or parts of the same whole. So what does all this mean? What can we be with in this moment? And Virgo is also, uh, energy, an archetype of looking at what is missing, or sort of the critique or the places that need to be developed or grown that we're experiencing right now, because we can ask ourselves those hard questions, those deeper places of awareness what do I need to develop in myself to grow in myself or acknowledge? This is where I say 17 synonyms for the same concept.
Speaker 1:Anyway, what I also want to bring in is I realize that my intention in setting out, in creating this space for voice and truth and reflection and connection and change, for ourselves personally and also in service for the greater work, capital W work for all of us, for the collective, for the people, the land, the other world, all the beings seen and unseen. And so I have not been able to create as much as I initially set out to do, which has to do with lots of personal transformations and reckonings that I've been sharing a bit along the way and having to do with ways that I am transforming personally in my own reckoning with my nature and my body and my brain and the way that I move through this world that very much feels like it is not always dancing with me in the ways that all of our bodies, quite frankly, really require to be moved with right. We actually require quite a bit of rest and peace and stillness to do basic body functions like digest our food and be able to sleep in restorative ways so that our body can function, so our brains can do what they need to do. And so I'm tuned into how the way that the world and dominant systems and, you know, capitalism and all the ways of dominating and extracting and hoarding all the things that happen in our world right now and have been happening forever, right, colonization is ongoing and continues, and genocide, and the way that we extract and destroy our earth, our home, and the ways that we do that to our bodies by negating our nature. And so where am I going with this of is some deeper awareness that I've been confronted with, which is so right, which is so the path.
Speaker 1:When you set out to do something that is about truth for the collective, you are very quickly confronted with all of the truths that you have not taken the time to slow down and reckon with for yourself. So I am sitting here today during this full moon, lunar eclipse, and I am aware that part of why I've not been able to create more content and truth and all the things I set out to do back, I don't know May, end of May, when I put out my first like little, I don't know little snapshot of what I was trying to do here. I'm doing my best, certainly, and I want to do more, and so I'm going to do more, and part of that is honoring what's required for me and my nature to do what I feel really called and passionate to do here, which is speak the truth and the power and the magic that is in the spoken word. And I want to share a bit about what I've been busy doing, which has been really going back into my deeper ancestry and the roots that are a part of me, and the roots that are a part of me and that includes, you know, my lineage, my genetic inheritances, and also really going back into my family lines that connect with Ireland, the great island of my people, where my ancestors came from and in particular my great grandmother, margaret Gallagher, came at 16 years old uh, because her older sister she was one of 14, and her older sister, who was 18, was supposed to get on the boat for America and was scared and chose not to go. And so her younger sister, my great grandmother Maggie, said I will go. And she did, said I will go, and she did. And she did that so that she could come here and she could earn a higher wage and send that back to her family in Ireland. And what was going on in Ireland was colonization and occupation and the great famine and all of these things that were created by humans, right by colonizers from Britain, and taking all of the fertility that happened from the lands in Ireland and taking it and taking it out of the land and selling it for profit capitalism. And meanwhile all of the native Irish folks who were working the land were not. They were starving and they were dying, like Canada and the United States. And a lot of my ancestors and great grandparents came from situations like that, mostly from Ireland.
Speaker 1:So for me what that has meant is doing a deeper dive into honoring the source of my native culture and what's been coming through pretty strongly is this download or, you know, maybe collective sense right now that one of the paths to collective liberation, to dismantling white supremacy and dominant systems of power, is to go back. We have to go back in order to go forward, and for me, what that has meant is going back into my ancestors' culture and connecting with the traditions and the spiritual practices and the teachers from Ireland, and one in particular I want to talk about, because they're amazing and their name is Reverend Laura O'Brien, who happens to have the same last name as me, although no relation, at least that I know of, although no relation, at least that I know of and this is a human being that is so dedicated to Irish tradition and the lore and the mythology and the spirituality, and I've been just learning and listening and diving deep into all the workshops and online resources, so much of which is free, through the Irish Pagan School or through the Morrigan Academy or through the OM Academy there's, like, I think, three different academies that Reverend Laura O'Brien and their partner, john Sullivan put out. So for me, what moving forward in truth and healing and change has meant is reconnecting to my ancestors and my roots and what my family and their family and their family were doing. What did they do? What did they know? That was stolen and silenced and quite literally, the native language was suppressed and criminalized, outlawed. Families were not allowed to speak it, it was discouraged, and that happens a lot in native cultures that are colonized.
Speaker 1:I was speaking with my mom a couple days ago about my great-grandmother and just listening to the stories there, and she was sharing with me that my great-grandmother would, you know, quietly whisper Gaelic Irish with her cousin who had also immigrated to the Philadelphia area and kind of whisper it in the kitchen and the children would sort of gather around and the you know the nieces and nephews, in awe, kind of trying to listen and trying to understand and what are they talking about and all of that. So I know that my family story is not unique. It is the story of what happens when families immigrate to the United States and what white supremacy dictates and requires, which my family has so much privilege around and the protection of being in a white body, and what that has meant is a disowning and a deadening of native traditional tongues and practices and languages and spiritualities. So there's a lot there that I've been doing a deep dive around and trying to feel okay with not maybe being able to convey it here perfectly, because I'm still very much so deep in my student path of learning about Irish paganism and, in particular, one of the deities that is, the great queen, the sovereignty goddess of Ireland, of my people, who is all about right relationship and I know I've spoken a bit about that here who goes unsaid and gets locked in our throat and then we swallow it hard and it rots in our belly. And that is something that I've been really in a practice around and what that has meant for me is trying to slow down, trying to be in spaces of silence and contemplation and meditation so that I can listen, so that I can know Laura O'Brien speaks about a lot in. You know they are a priest of the Morrigan for 20 plus years and 30 years in the Irish pagan path, and so you know, certainly honoring source and honoring the lore and honoring that this deity is of the land of Irish culture and tradition, land of Irish culture and tradition, and so how we need to honor the truth of where deities come from, right and not be appropri, listen and honor my path and my nature and what I've come to learn in deepening my relationship with Irish deities is they're. They're very direct and not subtle and really want sovereignty for all, and the Morrigan in particular wants sovereignty for this moment, because so much of the leadership and the folks in power are not in right relationship. And I'm going to just direct you to the resources and the source of, if you're interested to learn more about this, because I will not do it justice. I am not Irish, I'm Irish American, not Irish, I'm Irish American. But if you're really interested in it, go back to the Morrigan Academy or Irish Pagan School. Also, there's a really cool book that just came out called the Morrigan, ireland's Goddess by Reverend Laura O'Brien Sovereign Secrets from an Irish View. So where am I going with all this you? So where am I going with all this?
Speaker 1:For me, I am committed to knowing my own truth first, because that is the sovereign's path and that is, you know, we are sovereign over our body, the land. Our body is the land and our personal land, and so it has to start there, our personal land, and so it has to start there. What are you avoiding? That is your nature. How do you dishonor your nature? By not being in truth and not being in right relationship with who you are, what your body needs, what your heart needs, what your soul and spirit are calling and asking you to do. Because one thing that I've learned is, you know, in the questions that arise of, like you know, is this real, is this all just in my you know, how am I mapping on my own ego, or maybe things getting lost in translation, right Like, am I all that? All that stuff that comes up when you're on a spiritual path and you're connecting to energies and and channeling information, and the prophecy certainly, which in the Irish tradition, was a form of speaking truth to power, and that's very, very magical, very important kind of spell craft. And again, I'm going to redirect you back to source because I am not the expert on this.
Speaker 1:So what we are being called to do right now, I believe, is honor yourself first. What is your body calling for or screaming for? What happens in your gut when a truth comes in and you push it away? Because the If we really want to be on a path of healing and transformation and dismantling all these systems that certainly live inside us, we really have to be able to do it for ourselves first. We have to do that.
Speaker 1:I know I say this a lot. I feel like this is like maybe my I don't know like my, my I don't know anthem or something, I don't even know if that's appropriate way to put that, but I, um, I think what I want to put out here in service to all of our healing and transformation and change and movement forward is, and change and movement forward is where do you need to slow down and stop and listen so that you can hear and know what is true, so that you can speak it, so that you can be visible, so you can be courageous, so that you can be on your highest path and purpose, so that you can be on your highest path and purpose, so that you can play the role that you are here to do in the coming collective battle for healing, for change, for love, for connection right, for care, for care communities. We have each other. And what is your role?
Speaker 1:I know I feel like I've said that a couple times what is your unique divine role right now? What is in your nature that you have been denying out of fear? Where do you need to rise up in your truth right now? What do you need to see the full moon is here, to illuminate what's in the shadow and to plant seeds of inspiration, and certainly about healing and all of that and to let go right, it's a moment of completion and so what needs to be released, what do you need to let your body express? So I feel like I maybe said the same thing in 37 different ways, which is very on brand. So I'm working on that.
Speaker 1:How to be more concise? You know, here's the thing about being someone with divergent brain patterns I just go up and out, and up and out and up and out. You know, getting down more linear and that convergent kind of settling into, like one way to say something. It's just not my flow, it's not my. Anyway, I wish you lots of love and sovereignty and truth and courage and alignment with your nature and your body and your spirit and your soul.
Speaker 1:And how can you honor yourself? Which honors your body, which honors that which is your land? Your body is your land, it is earth, right, and the land around you. What do you need to do to honor the land around you? It can be simple with giving the land some water and a blessing or a song, or you speak your truth, or you offer something you're going to commit to. That can be small, like picking up trash. I have a trash bag that I will gather trash when I'm out and I will see it. And now my kids will be like Mama, someone littered on the earth here, let's get it. And sometimes I'm like very good, and sometimes I'm like don't touch that, let me get it.
Speaker 1:Anyway, what do you need to do to honor your community, the people around you that you love or that you don't even know yet, because we're all connected? What do you need to do to honor, whatever your spiritual path is, the other world, the other dimensions, divine source, the liminal spaces, however you conceptualize that for yourself, whatever speaks truth to you, how are you honoring that, whether that's your ancestors, your angels, your God, your deities, the divine source, the all you know, all the ways we can think about that, my ancestors and the deities that they were most deeply connected to. I understand that for me to dismantle my own internalized systems of dominance and oppression and supremacy, I have to connect to where I belong and reclaim the things that were invisibilized and disappeared for my people to participate in the whiteness. And that stops with me, and I understand that that plays a role in their, their healing and being in right relationship with their path. So what time is it? It's 2.08 and I told my family I would be home at 2.
Speaker 1:So I am committing to doing the thing that I set out to do, which is offer more of these for connection, for truth, for change, because it starts with us, and for me, I need to change, by creating more space to do this and slowing down so I can do it in a way that is honorable and in right relationship with what I feel is important right now. So, and also, I am going to figure out the technology, the damn technology to be able to start to bring on other people's voices, which is what I really set out to do, and I'm going to be doing that to bring in other voices of truth here. So thank you for your patience around that. All right, my dears and my friends, I'm your host, erin O'Brien, licensed psychotherapist in practice for a long time, intuitive healer, truth seeker and speaker, relationship counselor and, dare I say, witch. As above, so below, within, so without, as the universe. So the soul. Blessed full moon and lunar eclipse blessed blood moon. Bye for now, thank you.
