Compassionate Contemplation

Our Labyrinth Gardens carry an intent 
to be used for calm and connection.

Calm can mean space that seems to be a break away from anxiety and stress, or if you are a calm and happy person, a place to carry your questions and discover what is revealed for you.

Connection can mean a pause from our self creation, which we may call ego, into space of uncondition where we can flow without challenge and be part of our surroundings rather than complete with it.

Compassionate contemplation is sharing our calm, our prayer, our meditation, with all around us. Using the Labyrinth Gardens, we may attract or conceive a vision, a clarity, and maybe form a story of how our craft, that calling that we process through our minds, hands and voice, can be used compassionately towards bridging and connection. 

This is not limited to our compassion with other people, 
but with all life and our landscapes

Compassionate connection with anything here opens a wonderful personal opportunity of experiencing a potent prophecy of our present in an exciting glass half full kind of way rather than glass half empty. Hopefully it is an experiences of what seekers search for, 'Truth'.

You may feel that you come here to use the Labyrinth Gardens to see if you can get answers to questions, or at least pick up some ideas. After a Labyrinth Garden session here may well find that you discover how to live with and enjoy your questions and the unexpected mysteries they unravel. And the ideas you pick up are not new but have been with you a long time but not entered into. Now they may suddenly seem valid and have purpose.

Hopefully you will leave here, Carrowcrory Labyrinth Gardens with a new story, a new storyboard, a revived exciting clarity, to add to your craft, your calling, or to seemingly enter a new calling, that you share to connect with others and your surroundings.

Hopefully you will also be back to 
visit for a recharge from time to time.

These Sunday Afternoon Sessions at Carrowcrory Labyrinth Gardens are now going to be the core of what I personally work with as a gardener and keeper as well as guide for visitors.

Media such as books, videos, blog, and audio tracks will be a sideline, something to work at through winter between Samhain and Imbolc, and during days indoors sheltering from harsh weather.

Sunday Session adventures I am offering at present are extensions of my books and writings in my 'Bathing' series

Bathing In The Fae's Breath
Bathing With The Sheela
Bathing Our Roots
Bathing Among The Aislings

The current sessions offered ...

Discovering The Sidhe
Some ideas of how to apply folklore stories of the sidhe, sí, fae, to our imagination and guidance of how to calm, be fulfilled, and apply to our crafts and calling.  How the Sidhe may well be that lovely mentoring invisible friend from childhood, who never really goes away.

Re-Wilding Our Mind And Spirit
A session offering a break from our life's routine and institution of living according to how we are being 'told what to do' by employees, educators, family, friends, church, politicians, and subtle corporate advertising that hypnotises us into trends and new habits. Space to realise who we are again and re-discover truth.

Discovering Tree Wisdom
Our connection to trees, the folklore and folk medicine that has come from this, and how we can apply these to what we do through our lives now

Introduction To Ogham
References to tales within my Ogma's Tale Of The Trees, the transition of tree understanding into a language of trees and the symbolic language of Ogham. A little Ogham divination included.

Inspirational Journaling.
Journaling usually refers to keeping a journal, or diary, of our personal lives, but through this session we focus on personal inspiration, vision, and inner prophecy and translating the best we can through words and sketches, that may be the foundation content to future blogs, recordings, books, video productions, or future crafting, which is how the creation of the Tree Labyrinth here started.

Create Poetry
A lovely first step from journaling, though your journaling may well be your poetry, and journaling from your poetry. This session is encouragement to let your feeling flow through words as if they are on an an ebb and flow change like the sea, winds, and dance of climate movement.

Discover Aislings & The Green Men

Through fairly recent folklore, an Aisling is the word for a vision of a woman and Green Man as vision of a man often also described as a Geancanach  and can both be our visions of longing and fulfilment, so using this folklore through this session we explore how longings could instantly morph into unrequited love found. Using folklore to understand how our longings are actually fulfilled. 

Dances For May
Dancing is a wonderful expression from re-wilded inspiration, and inspiration through May, for us Northern Hemisphere people, may well be connected to the blossom pollination, fruit formation, birdsong, and conceptions of this time, especially conceptions of our own new ideas and partnerships with others to bridge and share ideas.

Dances For Midsummer
More dancing expression from our re-wilded spirit, this time connected to gratitude to the maturing towards a new harvest, so joy for the warmest weather, and the bounty to come to protect us from winter.

Sounds Bathing
This session is more of a treat as there is sound bathing from natural sounds during any visit here, but for extra sensory pleasure we will have the presence of singing bowls, chimes, and any other vibrationary instruments that anyone brings along. A drumming session after is also very welcome.

Sensing Herbs
Most of us approach herbs like prescribed medicine. We look into books and web sites to identify plants and decide what is a cure or a tonic for this and that. Through this session we let our Re-Wilded animal spirit be like the animals and let our senses discover the connections and benefits of herbs to our lives. This is a herbalist approach not many people seem to guide, but I think you will love this.

Apple Wisdom
This is personally self indulgent for me as I love apples and their folklore, so this is an invitation to join me to include fun adventures such as what is behind wassailing, folklore of Avalon, and the blessings and protection that the enchantment of apples can bring us.

Introduction To Harps
Harp folklore touches me almost as much as the apple folklore, event though I am, mysteriously, not a harp player. Shared by Claire Roche, she demonstrates how a harp can be a perfect enchantment instrument for the inspiration and sharing of feelings and words. This session has absolutely nothing to do with techniques and formal harp playing craft, but all part of a suggestion of how a harp may help to transport what you are trying to say and share. I start this session with a bit of local harp, cruitre, clarsach, folklore too. 

Click here for the current Labyrinth Gardens Sunday Sessions