REMEMBER THE WAYS: A Bealtaine Retreat to Honor Celtic Traditions

Remember the ways:

a Bealtaine Retreat to Honor Celtic Traditions

April 27th - May 3rd
with Lauren O'Neill & Laurie Calahan

Join us for a special experience of

REMEMBERANCE

Come gather in a witchy cottage in Southern Ireland for an intimate retreat experience to remember and honor the wisdom of Celtic roots and traditions. This gathering is for those looking to deepen their understanding of Celtic mythology and folklore, witchcraft and pagan rituals, and traditions of working with the land.

Both Lauren and Laurie are American-born and have been on a journey of coming home to their Irish and Celtic roots through powerful initiations. One intention of this container is to help other people who feel that same pull back to the lands and wisdoms of their ancestors access a deeper understanding of where their power comes from.

What to expect

We have spent a lot of time connecting with local creators and picking sacred local sites (there are SO many to choose from!!) and curating an itinerary to make this Celtic Roots experience one-of-a-kind and truly priceless. While we have curated a very exciting itinerary, we highly suggest you give yourself a few more days in the surrounding areas to visit the vast amount of sacred and traditional sites in southeastern Ireland.

We will begin by immersing into this sacred container, landing into the space after a day of travel and taking in the features of this special vortex before meeting for our Welcome Dinner. We will gather after for our initiation ceremony into our container and into the magic, using cacao (a heart-opening medicinal plant) and a co-create an altar to mark our intentions for our week together.

Each day, we will embark on a series of workshops and offerings that are designed to be the perfect balance between play and devotion. We want honoring the ancestors to be an activation for your younger parts, and we want to bring forth permission to experiment with magic…this is where play is essential. We must find joy to access these essential parts of ourselves for our deepest magic to appear. But it will be well balanced with learning and devotion. Everything from folklore and mythology to magical spells and herbal knowledge, we will embrace the traditions and wisdoms of these sacred lands and all those who traversed these planes before us and left behind opportunities for remembrance through ritual, ceremony, and sacred practice. Each day we will feature signature workshops for spellwork, dreamwork, protection, archetype exploration, and even bridge realms of psychotherapy and other ancient wisdom traditions.

We are excited to bring in some local Irish artists to celebrate the magic, including Lynne Berry of Ravens Flight Manor who will be joining us for a broom making workshop. She will teach us how to make a witch’s broom from plants from the land. (Make sure you leave space in your suitcase to bring your many new creations home!!)

Knockroe Passage Tomb (above) we will visit on Bealtaine and dates back to 3400-2900 BC

Other sites we’ll visit:

-The Ahenny High Crosses

-Kilkenny Castle

-The Slate Quarry Lake (Slate mined from here was used at The Palace of Westminster in London)

-Kilkieran High Crosses

-Kilmogue Dolmen

-Grange Stone Circle

BEALTAINE will be an epic day of celebration! We will begin our preparations all week, culminating on the eve of Bealtaine with a Candlelight Vigil Ceremony to open the portal. We will start the day building on our Celtic Mythology and Irish history, and build a land altar for our ancestors. The rest of the day will be filled with immersive offerings to get out of our cottage vortex and out into the lands around us! We will start with a ritual ceremony for Bealtaine at Knockroe Passage Tomb, followed by a day trip to Kilkenny. We will enjoy a tour at Kilkenny Castle, visit various local offerings put on by the community and the Roots Festival (we will dance to plenty of trad music!) and enjoy dinner at the historic, 14th century Kyteler’s Inn, founded by one of Ireland’s famous witches, Alice de Kyteler. We will close out our evening back at the cottages with elemental magic and a sacred fire.

And our final day will be another outing to more nearby sacred sites; a final day of immersion before we close out our container the next morning. Our lineup is stacked with activities, but there will be time for rest and you can opt-out of any of the activities offered in our container if you’d like to just rest and enjoy the cottage land.

We ask that you come with the intention of not just immersing into our vortex and retreat container, but also with the intention of connecting to these sacred lands and the ancestors who came before.

Meet your facilitators

Lauren O'Neill

Lauren works with shamanic witchcraft and wisdom traditions to help bring people back to the Magic and their own inherent superpowers. She believes is it our birthright to access the knowledge and powers of the anima Mundi—to activate the bridge between the earth and spirit realms and all the dimensions in between.

A devotee to Hecate and Artemis and an initiate of the Rose Lineage and Mary Magdalene, Lauren works with The Goddess to open portals for others. She will be bringing her depth of knowledge about Mythology, Jungian Archetypes, Alchemy, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Integration Practices (breathwork, meditation, yoga), Neuroscience and Internal Family Systems Therapy to go into the deepest dimensions of the inner world where parts of us remain dormant…to the places where the ancestors sing from…but we must learn to hear. She guides people back to their inherent birthright to hear. To hear the tones of the inner wisdom and tap back into our superpowers. To truly listen and stay curious about the cosmology of the inner world by bringing people back to the inner magical creatures and mystical archetypes that shape the very essence to what makes this human experience unfathomably MAGICAL.

Laurie Calahan

Laurie is a magic practitioner and celebrated artist weaving her life wisdoms into her offerings. She is rooted in Southern Ireland in a potent vortex space where she welcomes a small, selected cohort of guests to work with witchcraft and spellwork to elevate their magical practices. Laurie comes from a unique background of Pow Wows and Evangelical Christianity.

She has since left the church and come back to her inner knowing through ritualized practices from her childhood with a Native American grandmother, feeling free from the shackles of the Church that once kept her wild feminine restrained and restless. She is now on a journey to help other women find their sense of empowerment and agency. She uses her special cottage home on potent land adjacent to many portal locations to help bring others back to their power in a very intentional and selected cohort of practitioners.