“Tara and Aoife are grounded in integrity and each possesses wisdom and authority far beyond their years. The effects of my time on retreat have felt nothing short of seismic. What’s awakened in me is a remembrance of a new way (which is actually an ancient way) of being in relationship with myself, others, and the land.

For generations, members of the Irish diaspora have wandered adrift in the US, disconnected from the land of our ancestors, many of whom left Ireland under pressure to assimilate and leave everything from the Old World behind. For countless others who boarded the ships for a better life, the sorrow of emigration was so great they simply couldn’t bring themselves to speak about their homeland.

My personal experience of this collective forgetting is that I struggled for decades, severed from my own lineage, shopping the rituals of other cultures, seeking healing through countless modalities, courting approval from exploitative systems, starving for something to fill the nameless emptiness inside.

I was not prepared for the deep-rooted sense of belonging and courage that emerged upon remembering that I am a daughter of Ériu.  The days I spent with Aoife and Tara filled that emptiness in a way that nothing else has ever quite been able to do. Our time together allowed me to feel into the rich, meaningful wisdom of my ancestors, and begin to glimpse my role in continuing their legacy. The lessons I learned and the inner knowings I accessed continue to unfold inside me—rippling out into discernible changes in the way I relate to others with more agency, clarity, and confidence.

If the world has dumped messages on you about what it means to be a woman, or what it means to be a person of Irish descent; if you’re increasingly aware that those messages feel neither fair nor true; if the roles you have been slotted into by society feel increasingly unbearable—may a retreat with Aoife and Tara offer you a portal through which you might begin to hear another way.”