June 2024
This feed provides some excerpts of my creative work for my community in June 2024.
Story & the Body
A Chairde, Friends,
Years ago, while I was studying creativity and innovation at the UCD Innovation Academy in Dublin, I participated in a storytelling course, not the kind that may spring to mind, around the fire with a storyteller in full-bodied regale of a folk or fairytale, it was about the science behind storytelling. This experience showed me how modern science has only caught up thousands of years later with what our ancestors, the Áes Dána, the ‘People of the Arts’, knew—that we, you and I—are wired for stories. Research shows us that:
Stories stimulate parts of our brains that amplify our intuition, helping us intuit other people’s thoughts and emotions, stimulating empathy
When we resonate with a character in a story, our brain produces the neuropeptide oxytocin, the ‘love hormone’ that fosters human bonding and togetherness
Storytelling lights up neurological pathways in the brain that incite us to take action in our lives
The emotive feeling of a story in our bodies releases dopamine to help us remember the experience (and its teaching)
Art by Kay Nielson
2. Moving What You Are Feeling
A Chairde, Friends,
Cén chaoi a bhfuil sibh? How are you doing?
For this month’s Celtic Creatives Toolkit, I share a simple yet alchemical movement practice called Moving What You Are Feeling.
As it says on the tin, this practice encourages you to move with what’s alive in your body in real-time. This can be done in the time it takes to move to one song so it’s easy to incorporate into your day. It’s not a big ask space-wise and yet will cultivate more spaciousness in your life - your body will love you for it.
3. Goddess & Fairy Queen Áine, Bringer of Destiny
As we have just passed through the portal of Grianstad an tSamhraidh (‘Sun Stop of Summer’), the Summer Solstice, a time when Goddess and Fairy Queen Áine (“Awn-yah”) radiates forth, let’s invite her in as our Creative Ancestor to profile this month.
The name Áine means brightness, lustre, glow, radiance, splendour, brilliance, wit, glory… in Old Irish. You also see Áine as an epithet (an adjective that speaks to characteristics of a person e.g., “X the Bright”) for male figures in the mythology.
Today, we’ll explore her as a bringer of life, a bringer of sustenance, a bringer of summer, a bringer of destiny and a bringer of cosmic magic.
