Samhain - Stories, Spells & Soundbath
As the Celtic Wheel of the Year arrives at Samhain, we gather at Belfast Castle to enter the darkening half of the year with story, movement, ritual and sound.
Where we live and breathe and have our being is widely associated with the origins of Halloween, and the ancient festival of Samhain carries much lore around liminality, thresholds, ancestors, otherworlds, endings and beginnings.
The Yoga Fellowship of Northern Ireland is excited to launch their 50th anniversary year with a gathering where we’ll explore old myths and stories through a yogic lens:
- what might the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Cailleach and the wild figures of Irish folklore have to say about how we meet change, honour endings, listen more deeply and find our way through the dark?
- how can November help us in our relationship with death and dying?
- what symbolism might a winter’s tale or ritual from long ago hold for us living life now?
Through embodied practice, imagination, twists and turns and grounding movement, you are invited into a story of mantra and intention, drumming and a deepening sound journey, where we’ll explore ritual as both reclamation and renewal, a way of marking transition and reconnecting with place, season, body and the more-than-human world. A little folklore, a little enchantment, some soul work — and space to listen for what the turning of the year might be asking of us. We can’t promise you won’t slip out of time but we promise to have you back in time for tea.
Facilitators:
Mary O’Rawe
Mary, like all of us, is a shapeshifter. She weaves her particular threads of experience and learning as a wife and mother, Yoga and Qigong teacher, therapeutic sound practitioner, Reiki guide, human rights lawyer, baby massage therapist and Death Doula (Éascaitheoir Báis) into all the different aspects of her life and practice.
She believes the sacred isn’t somewhere else. It’s in the attention we bring to what is already here.
Much of her work is concerned with thresholds: the places where one thing becomes another, the spaces in between, and the invitation and energy they hold. Her invitation is to pause, listen and be present, with what we can, of what is emerging in each moment.
Mary finds herself, on many levels, a keeper and teller of stories. She believes stories are how we make meaning in the world. They can hurt. They can free us. They can keep us caught in old patterns. They can be spells. They can be prayers. And, approached gently, often from the side, they can make space for new encounters, new possibilities, and new ways of knowing – They can remind us of our recurring, archetypal and mythical belongings: to ourselves, to one another, to the land, to the water, and to the mysteries that lie beneath, above and beyond.
Mary is drawn to the symbolic encodings carried in stories, myth and poetry, and to what happens when we listen with our whole bodies, minds and breath – for what lives in the words, beyond the words, and beneath the surface of things. Sometimes we catch glimpses of old wisdom still finding its way into the present.
This can happen especially in thin places and as the seasons turn. There is something about thresholds – birth and death, beginnings and endings, leaving and returning – that invites us to slow down and listen differently. The wisdom of our lineage as storytellers is perhaps best honoured not by fixing stories in place, but by leaning into their rituals, rhythms, hidings and retellings, and noticing what they might open in us now.
Mary invites us to keep company with old stories and to lean into different ways of knowing, allowing them to breathe, marinate, alchemise and change within us, until we find where they still speak to the present. She values working with the energy carried in a place, the stories passed between generations, and the mysteries that can reveal themselves when we become quiet enough to listen.
What she offers is, ultimately, an invitation: to slow down, to listen beneath the noise, to become more intimate with the seasons and the places we inhabit, and to remember that life may be far more mysterious than we have been taught to believe.
Mary creates workshops, talks and experiences where movement, myth, ritual, sound and storytelling meet – inviting us to enter more fully into the relationship, mystery and complexity of living simultaneously in human and more-than-human worlds.
Aideen Carmichael
Aideen is a yoga teacher, Sound Bath facilitator, wellbeing educator and certified Irish Shamanic Practitioner. She creates nurturing spaces for deep rest, reflection, connection and renewal, weaving sound, vibration, energy and mindful awareness into her work.
As part of this Samhain retreat, Aideen will guide you through a deeply restorative sound bath — a space to pause and turn inward, honouring Samhain as a time of transition, reflection and connection with the wisdom of those who have gone before us, as we welcome the quieter, darker season ahead.
Registration is open from 12.30pm.