Irene Sullivan, The Heart of a Healer

In this episode of the Awakening Doctor podcast, we meet the extraordinary Irene F. Sullivan, a trauma nurse practitioner with a multifaceted career spanning art, medicine, theology, philosophy, and cultural anthropology.

Her story takes us from the hustle of an inner-city hospital in the United States to the vast expanses of remote Alaska, and from the rural landscapes of Boulder, Colorado, to an artist’s studio in Marnay-sur-Seine, France. We learn about her evolution from the confines of patriarchal religion to a personal spirituality rooted in goddess theology, and her transition from fervent social rights activism to measured climate justice advocacy and eco-keening.

Along the way, Irene engages with indigenous communities, learns from shamanic healers, takes on the priesthood, falls in love with a Roman Catholic priest, reclaims her Irish heritage, and even meets with an Episcopal bishop in a red-light district. Her passionate protests against ecocide and climate devastation finally land her in an ICU with a broken heart.

Today, as a Bean Chaointe or Keening Woman artist whose work is dedicated to creating spaces for eco-memory, eco-grief, and eco-care, Irene has transformed the duty of care that is at the heart of the nursing profession into a palliative medicine for the planet.

Join us for a powerful conversation with a trailblazing health professional whose journey is an embodied reminder of our collective duty to care – for each other and for the environment.

Learn more about Irene F. Sullivan here: https://www.irenefsullivan.com.   

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 12:51 Medical Industry Failures and Personal Trauma
• 17:25 Nurse Practitioner, Trauma, Environmental Activism
• 26:11 Environmental Work and Personal Transformation
• 40:15 Art, Healing, and Shamanic Journey
• 47:41 Women Shamanism, Keening, and Healing
• 59:02 Relinquishing Religious Orders
• 1:12:19 Healing, Art, and Environmental Awareness
• 1:19:55 Awakening Doctor Podcast With Dr. Christodoulou

Transcript

Maria Christodoulou Host00:00

Something you wrote to me in my initial intake questionnaire.

Irene Sullivan Guest

Oh, dear!

Maria Christodoulou Host

It was something about who you are and you said, my commitment to my artwork is entwined with my soul work, which I'm coming to realise is woven throughout my body. I am a warrior goddess of compassion action for eco-system justice and I need a strong art to do this. I want to add, it's your strong heart that is an embodiment of this. You are the art, Irene.

Irene Sullivan Guest

Thank you.

00:41

Welcome. I'm Dr Maria Christodoulou and this is the Awakening Doctor podcast, a space where we discover the personal stories of those who work in the medical and health professions. 

00:52

Join me as I explore the hopes, the fears, the aspirations and the real-life challenges of those who carry the title, responsibility and privilege of being a doctor.

Joining us from her home in Coal Creek Canyon, Colorado (USA), is Irene Sullivan. Irene is a poet, a writer, a photographer, an independent scholar and an academic. A nurse practitioner and a Bean Chaointe (or Keening Woman) artist whose work is deeply committed to climate justice. She holds advanced degrees in religious studies, theology and trauma nursing, and has spent time living, working and learning from indigenous healers and studying the diverse stories of Greenlandic woman shamans and their healing practices. She is also co-author of a Dictionary of Native American Mythology and founder of the Grieving Planet Project.

In essence, Irene has spent a lifetime weaving together the threads of her experience as a trauma nurse with her interests in shamanic healing, philosophy, cultural anthropology, theology, climate science and a spirituality of resistance into the body of work that is both her art and unique presence in the world today. Thank you for joining us today, Irene. I feel very privileged to have you in the room with us. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 02:06

Thank you, Maria, because I feel very privileged to be part of this.

Maria Christodoulou Host 02:10

Thank you. In the room with us today is Amy Kaye, writer and narrative coach, who is also producer and editor of the Awakening Doctor podcast. So, hi, Amy.

Amy Kaye Other

Hi.

Maria Christodoulou Host

Where do we begin to tell the story of Irene Sullivan? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 02:25

My goodness, let's see. Good question. I guess we began to tell the story of Irene Sullivan, going back a few generations to my Irish great-grandmother, great-grandfather, who came to this country to escape British rule and the type of colonisation that was going on, and planted their roots and brought with them that trauma which, of course, influenced how I was raised and brought up. And from the very beginning it was a household dominated by ‘the church’, so to speak, Roman Catholicism and all of its patriarchy, and I was the eldest of six and so from the very beginning I have memories of being resistant. But this can't possibly be correct. What are you talking about? And where I was raised, initially, I spent my early years in the countryside and have a very, very fond memory of helping bring milk cows in from the pastures with my grandfather, and so I spent a lot of time outside in the forests, listening to birds, and of course none of that was honoured, because I was thought of as the odd child. Being the eldest of six, you really never have a childhood. You raise your siblings. So that's where it started and I realised that I didn't want that type of life. I was born in 1950. 

03:53

So, there weren't a whole lot of choices for women. It was either a school teacher or a nurse, but I did know that education was the route out and that's the route I took. So that's the beginning of my love of knowledge and books. I was very lucky, my mother read and had books in the house all the time, so I was very fortunate that that became both my escape, mentally and physically, but also spiritual. Just to go, you know, no, I'm not going to take a path that was, I would say looking back at it now, pretty much filled with intergenerational trauma because of what people had to do and put up with. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 04:33

Right. You chose nursing and not teaching, although you did end up teaching later. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 04:39

I covered the bases. I wanted to immediately go to university and my father wouldn't stand for it, so I had to find a way to liberate myself with some kind of independent means of supporting myself. So back then, nursing schools were connected with hospitals and you had free room and board for a nursing education. Except that senior nurses were taking care of wards at night, so we certainly earned our keep. You know the model. And that was okay. I did that. I did well. My empathetic side, being a highly intuitive, sensitive type, it was very rough on me but I was very good at it. Classic eldest child of six children. Take care of everybody, take care of the entire ward. I did that. I graduated, but within a year or two I thought, oh man, this is not where I want to be. So at that time, the nurse practitioner programs were just starting in this country because it was the end of the Vietnam War and I thought, oh, this I can do. There's a lot of independence, you're thinking, you're making critical decisions, and you're also going into fields where nobody else wanted to go but people needed to have – I don’t even call it healthcare anymore in this country. 

05:55

The medical industry was just beginning at that point. So I became one of the first certified nurse practitioners in the country. Initially, it was wonderful because I had a lot of autonomy. I learned a great deal. I was able to travel. I worked for public health service in the Arctic, on different Indian reservations, so the work was meaningful. I felt like I was contributing something to make the world a better place. Until the major medical insurance corporations stepped in, started taking over. It was a process of marketing and capitalism at its worst. You suddenly realised you were no longer working for or serving the patient. You were working for the insurance company. The story, I think, is pretty much universal. I said no, I can't do this. So then I decided well, I'll just go back to graduate school and get another degree and got a degree, because I love to teach. So I took an academic path and that worked for a while. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 06:56

Tell me about your time as a nurse practitioner in the Arctic because you have some fascinating stories about your time there and the things you learned. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 07:04

I went to Alaska feeling like I had a good sense of how to handle what could arise. I did trauma nursing on the south side of Chicago, which is a pretty rough area, and I got to Alaska and I was out on the Bering Sea coast, a small village called Hooper Bay. And my very first day there, within the first 24 hours, this was just post pipeline, so there was still a great deal of non… Western, so to speak, interference. And someone came rushing in to get me - we had little health stations - and tried to explain to me that a man who had harnessed his sled dogs, because sled dogs were still used a great deal, something spooked the dogs and the dogs ran and caught his thumb and pulled his thumb out. That's not something you deal with in inner-city hospitals. I think the Goddess, even then, had me under her wings. Let's stop the bleeding and explained to people that they need to go out and find the thumb and just gather it up. 

08:13

Packing things in ice was no problem up there. We were still communicating by radio. We did have air transport to Anchorage and then onto Seattle, which is where the big major medical traumas went. So it all worked out. I got him a flight, they found the thumb and returned back to the village like within a month with his thumb back in place, which, when you're living in a subsistence economy, is an incredibly important oppositional thing to have. That's my fondest memory. There were others and I did realise, yes, my education was fine in inner-city Chicago, where I had a support team. You simply call a trauma surgeon or the OB-GYN or whoever's on call. Well, there's nobody. I was it. I had two health aides, which were wonderful, but I was responsible for supervising and educating and showing them how to do things. 

09:05

It certainly contributed, I think, to my resilience. In that, okay, if you can handle this, you can handle anything. Those are the tapes that have played as life unfolded for me and I had to deal with different scenarios. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 09:21

You've also spoken to me in the past about the burnout that happened for you when you were working as a trauma nurse. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 09:28

Oh yeah, and listening to some of your other podcasts and the things you've talked about, it just resonates so deeply because in some ways I think personally, internally, you're set up for… You go into it because you're the eldest of six children, you're the adult child of an alcoholic situation. So, you learn all these amazing skills which gets rewarded in trauma. You can multitask, you can read situations before they unfold. And I did burn out and it affected my health and I didn't realize how much until much later in life. 12-hour shifts, you're it. There was no taking into account that those of us who were doing that work are human beings. It was the, boy, you better show up for work, never mind if you have 104 temperature. Push through it. 

It was a culture of, in many ways, abuse and then, once the bottom line entered into it, it became even more so and that, for me, was pretty much… I was well into what I was doing and I was working in a big inner city, in Denver, university hospital, as a nurse practitioner, and I remember the moment I was summoned into the emergency director's office, summoned being the operative ward, and he leaned across the desk and he said you, you personally, are costing this department - it was some large figure - with your admissions. Because the senior nurse practitioners had the right to admit. And I just sat there and I said, well, he's showing me these stats. And they were all pretty much direct admits to the ICU and I said, wait a minute. We're not talking about people whose blood sugar may be off. We're talking about somebody in ketoacidosis. We're not talking about somebody who has a cold. We're talking about someone who has pneumonia. And, of course, most of these people were uninsured. And so it became quite an interesting conversation. I wished back then I would have had an advocate with me recording all this, because you would not believe well, you would believe. Things like, this has got to stop. You have to send them across town to the public hospital. I said, people's lives are at stake. And he just looked at me. 

11:53

I walked out of the office and you know how you have that great internal moment, the satori moment that they talk about in Zen? I went back to the ED and I said I'm going to take an early lunch. I walked across the street to human resources and I said, how much money do I have in my retirement account and what is the penalty for pulling it out early? And so they gave me the paperwork and I remember coming home and sitting down with my husband at dinner and looking at him and I said, I've had it, it's over. He thought I was talking about our relationship. He couldn't connect the dots. I said no, I've had it and I signed the paperwork and I went back in and I turned it in and I was also an adjunct faculty at the school of nursing to precept new nurse practitioners and I left. I did not even give two weeks notice, I left. 

12:51

So it was very dramatic and of course there was a lot of fallout. Oh my God, what are you doing? The school of nursing was tremendously upset and for years afterwards said, would you just consider coming back to precept students? And I said no, even though I needed the money desperately. I said no because I do not have the attitude that you want these students to be exposed to and I can remember some of the older nurse practitioners in the faculty going. Oh, in fact you do. We want to have some workshops around the attitude because they felt like they were literally throwing sheep to wolves. That was my trauma and I suffered health wise because of it. Later. That stuff builds up. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 13:30

Which is kind of one of the turning points that caused you and I to meet, right? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 13:34

Yes, I mean years later. My God, you know I'd gone through these diagnoses that didn't make any sense and then one day, June 1st 2022, I had a heart attack, A significant heart attack, and two weeks later, through clots that almost took my life, and after interfacing with the medical industry and all that… First of all, I had to find myself and get myself back. And you know, because I told you at the time, you just manifested through the group we were in with Chameli and I said, an awakening doctor? Oh, I really have to check this out, because I need someone who gets it, who knows the culture and the language of the culture and who knows what's happening these days with statins and stents and… Thank God, Maria. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 14:28

Say more about that. Thank God. Why? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 14:31

Well, because I was overwhelmed. I was vulnerable. I've never been so vulnerable in my life and even though I do know that it's a mess and I was very, very lucky. I had a physician friend and we decided about 10 years ago we would make a pact with each other because she lives in the area, that if either one of us or our loved ones had to interface with the medical industry, we would be there for each other, because when you're having a heart attack or when you've been given a diagnosis of cancer or any of the myriad of things that can happen to you, you're vulnerable. I called her and I just said, I think I'm having a heart attack. Please meet me in the ER. And she was wonderful and advocated and actually intervened in a way that if she hadn't, I probably wouldn't be here. 

15:23

That's how sloppy and ineffectual the care was. Starting with my husband going into the ED saying, we're having a cardiac event, and someone coming out with a wheelchair, and instead of treating me as someone having a cardiac event, I was taken to the station where they check your insurance to make sure you have the right insurance, and then this ineffective triage nurse sat there with her little computer screen asking me things which included, which to this day can't believe, was I up to date on my COVID vaccinations? Mind you, this is June of 2022. Then they asked me if I was up to date in my flu shot and it's not even flu season, and never made eye contact. Meanwhile, I'm sitting there doing this very powerful Buddhist practice, watching the clock, visualising what my coronary arteries are doing, and I sat there for well over 10 minutes until I was taken back to a room that wasn't even the cardiac room. By then my friend had come in. Somebody did pop two aspirin in my mouth and start an IV and she said Irene, your ST segments are jumping off the screen. I go yeah, this is the real thing. 

16:44

Finally, the physician came in and said, you're having a heart attack. And I said, yes. Me being me, I said, and here's how we're going to play this. You’re going to let me know every single moment what you're doing. And only at that point did they bring a cardioversion into the room and someone decided it might be a good idea if we transferred her into the acute room. And of course, the famous question is, have you been under any stress yet lately? And of course my friend Laurie is going. Oh Jesus. I said, have you been living under a rock? They just reversed Roe versus Wade. Yes, I'm under stress. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 17:25

What's it like being a nurse practitioner… I mean, you worked in that field for what, 25 years? And then you're in this place where you're vulnerable, your health is at stake, and you have to turn to the very system that you walked away from to assist you. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 17:38

I immediately accessed a Buddhist practice. I used to do many long sitting retreats and different meditation techniques and there's one prayer you can say, okay, I'm not going to directly allow myself to engage with this, I'm going to watch this, I'm going to practice a form of detachment. The only problem with that is if you know how to read an EKG strip, you're going and, oh, these numbers don't look good. And what are you hanging now? And so it's very difficult. 

18:12

We've all seen patients who have a whole continuum of a way of dealing with things and we meet them where they're at. They want to know every single thing, or they don't want to know anything, or maybe they're completely in denial, or maybe they think they're going to die on the spot. Over the years you learn how am I going to meet this person to try and get them through this? For me it was very difficult and actually I'm very, very grateful that I had the meditation practice to call upon, because you hold onto visuals. I will never forget the clock in the room, watching it as I'm wondering what's happening to my coronary arteries. It's difficult. We need special people to handle us. People like yourself who are devoted to, okay, we can map this out. We can find our way out of this. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 19:08

You were diagnosed with Broken Heart Syndrome. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 19:11

Yes, Takotsubo syndrome. There's a certain kind of meditation you do when you're in the ICU. My heart was broken. In this culture, we're death denying, we're grief denying. We have a lot of denial going on. In that profession, how many times were we allowed to grieve what happened? And some of the traumas were horrific. But after 25, 30 years and learning how to compartmentalise, you suddenly realise that you have not grieved, you're grieving a system. 

19:45

I went into the field originally because I really thought I could make a difference and help people, but more than that, it's personal griefs. I lost friends through some real tragedies. My youngest brother committed suicide. The entire family chose to be in denial. I rode dressage horses for years. That's how I kept my body limber and I lost my big, important, wonderful horse of 20 years while I was actually in Europe. And looking back, that's when I realise my immune system just went to hell and it was downhill from there. 

20:19

Even though I grieved that, when I got home from the hospital I had this little conversation with my heart saying, how could you do this to me? I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't eat meat, god, I exercise. Okay. I eat too much butter and ice cream, all right, fine, okay. And my heart came back to me and said because you didn't listen to me, you didn't pay attention. And a few months before, the whole reason I got involved in the group that we got involved with Chameli was… The question I brought to myself and to the Goddesses: 

20:58

There is an ecocide event happening 10 miles from my house. I'm dealing with some of the worst players there are. It's not the oil industry, but it's the water industry and out here in the west, that's pretty crucial. And I'm not in my 20s and 30s anymore. I can't chain myself to trees. I can't do some of the behaviours I engaged in when I was younger. How am I going to handle this? And my specific question is, how am I going to handle this without losing my mind and my soul? So I entered into that world, which opened into another world then, which has, I believe, saved my life in many ways. 

21:36

But it took a heart attack for me to say, all right, there are ways to deal with what is an environmental catastrophe. What are you going to do? Really? I confronted people. I learnt a lot of the skills from trauma. You don't have any hesitation in walking up to the president of something or another and saying you're wrong. What you're doing is wrong. 

22:00

I've been to county commissioner meetings, claim they care about the environment and I said, this is an ecocide event. And they look at me, this is Boulder, Colorado, which prides itself on being so enlightened, and they go, we’re not familiar with that term. It was a heart event. I mean, my heart was breaking because I embodied so much. It was interesting to get into and start doing embodiment work and find out how crucial that is into keeping myself balanced. Broken Heart Syndrome is very real and I wouldn't be surprised if… we all know people, neurosurgeons, cardiac surgeons who have their heart attacks even though they're bicycling 30 miles a day, wouldn't touch a piece of red meat if their life depended on it and they still end up having triple and quadruple bypass surgery. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 22:56

Yeah, so what do you think it was that your heart was trying to tell you? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 23:05

First of all, listen to her and secondly, and it did unfold this way, there is another way to be present to all this without compromising what I took on. Social activism can be a double-edged sword. I did Jungian analysis for almost three decades but if you don't stay in conversation with what your shadow is and what your complexes are, before you know it they gotcha. There you are in an ICU bed, because I've always believed, from the very start, and I taught this and I talked about this with my patients, we are embodied spirits. So tell me what's going on in your life? You know, somebody comes in and says you're the fifth person they've seen for some obscure complaint that nobody, the lab tests don't show anything. So what else is going on in your life? 

24:03

There was a small juncture in medical education that really had good conversations going on with medical anthropologists and part of that was learning narrative. What is the narrative? And of course, those are the days when you could take an hour with a patient and book a follow-up for the narrative. And one of the things I learned in traditional societies, in Inuit, Yupik societies, is the power of storytelling. This is a shamanic thing and storytelling would release.. Good Lord, try that. I wrote my dissertation on the power of storytelling. And the other thing was to go find my roots. A lot of work's being done now in intergenerational trauma, intergenerational healing, and I thought I had a fairly good handle on that from my academic work. But it's not until I went back into my roots in Ireland that I realised the effect of that. The loss of language, the loss of voice, the loss of self-esteem. Really it was very, very powerful. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 25:11

I think the thing that I find interesting about intergenerational healing work is that so often the emphasis is on the loss, on the things that have been lost and forgotten, and actually some of the story you've shared with me has also been about what you've been able to reclaim as a result of that work. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 25:30

Yes, I worked with this amazing woman. Her name is Jen Murphy of Celtic Embodiment. She developed this not only out of her native roots, but for almost two decades, maybe longer, she worked in the largest NGO setting up educational school systems in African countries. Places that the rest of the world, for the most part, has forgotten. Here’s somebody after my own heart. They're in one field and they somehow managed to pull the threads into another. Because she had that vast knowledge, she was able to open doors about what really is the heritage of Ireland, which is matriarchal. The goddesses were incredibly powerful and the poets and the druids were the carriers of law, Brehon law, which is all about how we take care of the land and how you interact with it. We're talking centuries, and most of this is written down in old Irish and people devote their lives to translating it. This is how I will find my way in doing environmental work, in witnessing to this. These goddesses are alive and well and incredibly powerful. 

26:49

The first one I met was the Cailleach, who’s this ageless old hag who, when Christianity came to Ireland, they would approach her and say well, how old are you? And she said, oh, I don't know, but I eat a bullock every year and the bones are up in my attic. So go up there and count the bones and you can figure out how old I am. Well, they gave up because they were overwhelmed by the bones. She is the first one I identified with. She's walking the land gathering injured animals and in Ireland there's no traditional creation story. There's no one being that did it. The Cailleach created the land by dropping stones from her apron. I thought, I’ve found my tribe, literally and figuratively. 

27:42

The contemporary women in Ireland these days are just amazing. Keep in mind, this is a country that was run by the Roman Catholic Church and in the 90s, when they had Mary Robinson, the first female president, they had abortion rights, women's rights, gay rights. I have really reclaimed. Told you earlier about the Land Art Project I did that was completed on July 3rd on the supermoon. It's the Cailleach’s daughters guarding dried riverbeds, shrouded trees, Irish invocations written into stone on how voice is power. My voice is my power and my voice is my ancestors. I remember once, in one of our sessions, I asked you about relevancy. I said, being relevant is really bothering me. I'm not relevant anymore. Was I ever relevant? This all feeds into my heart going, what are you doing? And that question got answered, finally, when I said these are my roots. I can remember stories of my grandmothers in this country, keening, and it's an inherited speech act of women. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 28:56

Tell us more about the piece of land art because, if I remember correctly, it started as a grief ritual. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 29:02

Yes, the land art is in my former riding arena and for five years I could spend no time there. It was too much for me. You know, I live at 9,000 feet in the mountains and on the back of a horse I can see the entire Rocky Mountain back range covered with snow, and there's fox and deer and now moose, and everybody kind of hangs out. I have mother moose, who at the very end of it, for the past three or four years, have calved at the far … and of course then they take over the entire property because they're highly protective and nobody can go back there. They've done things like charge my husband. 

29:42

I've always wanted to do a piece of land art, but it usually requires some pretty strong studio assistants. You're moving earth and dirt and stumps and you're working with the land and I thought, oh, I'll just start. The first thing I had to do was remove all these very old, rotting stumps that my husband had put there to use for firewood and he hadn't gotten around to it yet. So I started in May and I thought, well, how am I going to do this? So I got a wheelbarrow and I put the stumps in the wheelbarrow and then wheeled them to where we split wood. All you hear up here, it’s very still with a lot of birdsong, especially in the spring, and I realized, the memories came back of my riding days and how important that was to me, and I said this is like the ngondro of grief, because you're picking up these stumps and you're wheeling them. It was the second or third day I was doing this, and my husband came home and he said, what on earth are you doing? You're wheeling these. You had a heart attack! 

30:41

I said, you know what? My heart is fine and this is the test of cure. I couldn't have done this prior to my heart attack. I wouldn't even think of doing it. Then I had to move rocks and at one point I just broke down and cried because I thought, you know, this is the embodiment of I'm okay, because after you have an event like a heart attack, you think, huh, is there something I might do that might trigger this again, separate from keeping my cholesterol where it needs to be? 

31:12

And, of course, your whole medical mind kicks in. I said well, you know, there was no arrhythmia, there was no this, there was no that, and so I would sit out there and just listen to the land. It was you who said when I was sharing this early on about the whole embodiment of the land and I realized this is a ritual space for keening the land because we're in big trouble. I've been doing a lot of work lately figuring out that the whole environmental melancholia, why people deeply care and yet there seems to be apathy, and realizing that that is only a symptom of how overwhelmed and how much people care. It's serving no purpose to blame people for their lack of action. So it's been a real interesting journey in terms of the research around that. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 32:03

You also said earlier that your heart was pointing you to the fact that there might be another way to respond to the climate crisis, to ecocide. What's changed for you, having had the heart attack? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 32:18

This is going to sound incredibly simplistic, but I sit and listen to my heart every day. There's a triple sovereignty goddesses of Ireland from the other world, and in Ireland you can talk about the other world and nobody even lifts an eyebrow. Well, yeah, well, of course. Which is…. In this country, it could get you a psych consult. You know, they’re going, do they answer you? I go, well, yes, they guide me. It’s heart work. It involves - which I'm still learning because it's an old, old defence mechanism habit - also knowing how to guard one's heart. In August of the year I had my heart attack last year, there was a big community meeting and I had been very involved in the community in terms of taking on this dam project and people were saying, are you going to be there? You know, you're the one who speaks out, and I’m going, yeah, well, you know, I’m not the only person with a voice in this community. I had to make a very difficult decision. I said no, I'm not coming. I've recently, I'm recovering from a heart attack and honestly, Maria, I did not think my heart could take it, especially because there was a Takotsubo syndrome, and so I said to my husband, I cannot go, I absolutely cannot do this, because I was on all these anticoagulants. So he went, and he spoke to these people and he used the term ecocide and the room - not the commissioners, but the rest of the people – applauded. And he came home and he told me what happened and I said thank you, because it was the first confrontation of, there has to be a different way. And then on Earth Day, on April 22nd, and this is all coming from sitting with my heart and listening to the goddesses, The Morrígan, and Brigid and the Cailleach. I said, you know what? They continue with the lying, they continue with the normalizing the language. I said no, I'm going to change the playing field. So what I did is, my husband and I and a very close friend who's a hospice social worker and another friend who's a music therapist, hosted an Earth Day event in the community hall acknowledging eco-memory, eco-grief and eco-care. 

34:34

I created what I call a keening womb with my artwork. I contemporized the traditional keen. I collect globes. I go to thrift stores and collect all these globes and I take them out of their stands and I had 20 globes sitting and each person got to pick up a globe and talk to the planet, to the earth. Where do I hurt? Well, I hurt everywhere. There's no place left on earth that doesn't affect me. 

35:04

You know how, when you run a project, you have a project and you want to do a test to see am I heading in the right direction here or should I bring in a different analytic? The response was, I mean, it was heart rendering. People were so grateful and the music that Emily… she had people playing drums and singing. And years ago when I founded the Grieving Planet Project, the planet needs hospice care. My husband is a hospice chaplain and he comes home and he tells me about all these different things that are happening and I go, the planet needs hospice care. 

35:35

Nobody wanted to hear it because we have a dialogue and a narrative going on that says oh no, no, we can fix this. Yeah, right, that's a whole another podcast. That's when I realized, yes, this is your work and this is the direction and this is the other way. And I have to give some credit to the Celtic embodiment work, because that was a six-month immersion course, an incubator course, in approaching whatever your creative work was, whether it was counseling or… I was the only artist in the group, but the people looking at what is that rooted in and what are different ways of doing things? 

Maria Christodoulou Host 36:16

You've coined the phrase or the word wit(h)nessing. 

Irene SullivanGuest36:20

That's not my word, I have to give it credit. That comes from a Bracha Ettinger who is Israeli-French. She lives in France now, philosopher and analyst. Her work is incredibly difficult to read, but she has a beautiful subtext under it of, when we witness, we are wit(h)nessing, and I have always loved that term. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 36:44

But it feels like such a beautiful way of describing even hospice care or what's being asked of us now in terms of what's going on with our planet. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 36:54

When people say to me, what is this? In a room, I will say how many of you have had someone who's dying? A fair number of people raise their hands and I said what was the most important thing that you could do for them? Well, I don't want them to be in pain, I don't want them to be alone, I want them to realize that I'm with them. And I said, that's what we're doing with the planet. This is my approach. I'm not out there chaining myself to a tree. I still write letters to people in power, and everybody has to have a route, a path that they follow to this, and this is mine. You're welcome to join me, but I still cry, I still get depressed, I still fly into rages. All the meditation in the world is not going to deny that… that chthonic goddess rage. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 37:49

Yeah, I think if meditation allowed you to bypass that, then it wouldn't really be an embodied practice, would it? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 37:57

No, it wouldn't, and I have a friend right now who's escaped totally into the intellectual meditation realm and it's actually quite sad to see. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 38:08

I read somewhere, I think it was on your website ,that in a previous conversation you've said there were only two times in your life when you were willing to lay your life down. One of them was this issue of climate crisis and the other was a civil rights event. Can you tell us a bit more about that? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 38:28

In this country, in the 60s… This country is built on violence and racism and I was very involved in getting the vote out and going in the South to do it, which was… when I look back at it now, you know, the things you do in your 20s and 30s, you would really think twice about it. And it became violent and people backed off. It was shortly after we had three young men from the North who were involved in voter registration who were brutally murdered by white Southern police and their bodies were hidden and eventually it all came out. But white male police seemed, at the time, to be targeting white Northern women and of course they could tell by the way we spoke. 

39:29

Keep in mind, parallel to this, Vietnam was going on, and interwoven with the whole birth control issue, it was like this giant convergence of rights and if you don't have rights, I don't really have rights. I can delude myself into thinking it. So I was willing to do that because I witnessed brutality and that's just been who I've been all my life. It's no surprise that my heart finally said it had had enough the week Roe versus Wade was reversed. To be honest, I don't know if I will continue to reside in the United States. I consider myself a citizen of the world who resides in the United States, but it really depends. We'll see. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 40:15

You also have a home in France, if I remember correctly. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 40:18

I have a studio in France, in Marnay sur Seine. It's a little village of 250 people and it's a village of tremendous care and warmth. I was involved in creating an archive for an artist who resided there and it was a wonderful experience working with this family, who was overwhelmed by hundreds of pieces of artwork and, in the back, was the artist's atelier, which overlooks the Seine. So their way of showing their appreciation, that is now my atelier. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 40:51

You did an impressive… I was impressed by it and I'm sure many others were too. The work about the Seine, the exhibition about the alchemy. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 41:00

That was actually the beginning of realizing that what people want and need from the artwork… at least, this is what I experienced in France and started the entire thing. It was done in this 16th century desacralized church, so it was a magnificent space. You know, artists are always saying, oh my God, what a magnificent space, the light is perfect. So the exhibit was in there and it involved a year-long video I created of the bees that were found in an old tree by the Seine, and in France if you harm the bees in any way, if you bother them, they will call the gendarme on you. You're going to get in trouble. I projected the bee video in a confessional that was no longer used. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 41:45

I saw the image of that. I thought that was quite profound.

Irene Sullivan Guest 41:47

On either side where the penitents would kneel, was a poem written by Jane Hirschfield, who's an American poet, and she wrote this poem when horrible Donald came into power and was eradicating everything. And the title of the poem is, “On the Fifth Day”, and the poem is about the first people to ignore his order, who were the wildlife service people in the middle of the Dakotas, which in this country is, without hurting their feelings, practically in the middle of nowhere. They started this whole revolution as environmentally caring. So I had the poem translated into French by my wonderful French teacher and I hung it on either side, one in English and one in French. 

42:34

One of the few priests in France actually wanted to see what I was doing there, even though the church had been desacralized, and I thought, oh God, here we go. And he said where did you get this idea from? I said it's theology. It's the theology of penitence. We should be on our knees asking forgiveness. Last I saw of him. But the interesting thing that happened, that broke every heart who witnessed it and tears flowing. A man came in with his young son and he read the poem to his son in French and the little boy then says, but Papa, what happened to the bees? So you have… all these traditional beekeepers were there, because this is wine champagne country and there's a lot of vineyards and the bees. This is very crucial to all of this. And then one of the pieces was this very, very long artist book that I had laid out and I came in one morning and keep in mind, the church was open because it was summertime and there's feathers laying on it and rocks and dead bees and I thought, did those pigeons get in here again? What I realized is people were coming back to the exhibit and leaving offerings of feathers and rocks and dead bees. I go back to my room and cry for two days. This was a month-long exhibit and people came... Typical, which I love about being in Europe is people are vacationing from Italy, people from Germany, people coming up and saying thank you. 

44:14

That, for me, was the major shift. Prior to that, I had been into the whole conventional, oh you’ve got to get into a gallery. You got to sell so much work. That was the start of the shift and I thought, no, this is not why I'm an artist. And the whole question of why are you an artist? There's artists out there creating so-called environmental work out of Styrofoam. I'm going, no, it’s like a radioactive material, it never goes anywhere. That was Alchemy on the Seine, and I will be returning in October for the first time now in three years because of the pandemic. And then I couldn't travel with the heart attack and I'm working on a project that involves Neolithic dolmens. I have a wonderful friend there, a Scotsman who lives in France, who is very involved with the dolmens. He's been studying them for years and I go. Since my work in Ireland I realized these dolmens have a lot of history in them, so we'll see how that turns out. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 45:20

Am I right in saying they are also often places for grieving? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 45:25

Yes, burial, big time burial places, at least in Ireland, and they think there's probably a Celtic connection because this is northern France and they're not far from Marnay. They also believe they were places where the druids delivered Brehon law when there was something happening. Brehon law is ancient and it's about how you punish people who might be hurting the trees, what to do if your neighbour's bees come on to your place and fertilize that, how you divvy that out. I thought okay! 

Maria Christodoulou Host 46:07

So part of my purpose for creating this podcast is to tell the stories of healers and doctors and, in a sense, to shift perceptions not only of the profession but also of what it is to be a healer. 

46:22

And one of the reasons I wanted you to be a guest on this podcast was when I look at the little bit that I know of your life journey and the sort of transition from trauma nurse practitioner into religion and would like us to talk a little bit more about your journey with religion and the Roman Catholic Church. But then your Fulbright scholarship that led you to do the research on the shaman traditions and the time you spent in the Arctic with indigenous peoples, learning about traditional healing methods and practices and incorporating, eventually, your time as a trauma nurse, your knowledge of physical health, but also your calling as a priest, if I can call it that, to now doing art that is about a healing of the land, a healing of the planet that's in crisis. It feels for me like your own journey has been quite a shamanic journey and I wondered what you would think of me saying that like. How does that sit for you, when you think about everything you’ve done and everything you’ve been through in your life? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 47:22

Thank you for articulating that. You are not the first person who has said that to me. My very, very wise Jungian analyst said that to me and when he first said it to me I thought, oh no, we're not going down that path. 

47:41

When I did my research about the Greenlandic women shamans, there was a woman shaman, Teemiartissaq, whose stories were recorded in the late 19th, early 20th century, by one of the first anthropologists quote unquote to go into Greenland and in those days it was by ship, a long journey from Denmark, and the photography was all on glass plate negatives. He recorded a story from her which led to my work there and in the story she is called to be a shaman and she's hesitant to do it but she does. And the way this happens is you're called out into the tundra and you're all alone, and usually either a big bear comes and eats you alive and then spits out your arms and legs and head all over the tundra. Your power as a healer comes in, literally re-membering yourself, and if the bear doesn't get you, big walruses get you, and they toss you back and forth between them like a beach ball. And when her helping spirit is telling her, I'll go with you out there, and the helping spirit says, I have much to teach you. What the helping spirit says to her is, you will cease to be powerless. 

49:10

I remember at one point in analysis we were talking about the hero's journey. You know, everybody's into the hero's journey and then I said no, no, no, no, no, no. I have an antidote to that, I have the feminine version. And my analyst was like, what? And I told him the story and he said, oh my God. We as women go out alone. We are summoned. We are called. We do not follow that narrative, even though as healers we are in a male dominated, patriarchal defined narrative. It's like that wonderful woman surgeon you had on who said they’d told her, “fine, give it a try, but you have to do it as good as a man”. Shooters. We don't always have the support. Rarely. We have to create it, we have to find it. Teemiartissaq comes back into the village. She is a powerful healer. She's able to fly to the moon and fly to the bottom of the sea to retrieve souls. Soul loss is the cause of all illness and you have more than one soul in that cosmology. 

50:17

When you think of these metaphors in terms of so-called modern-day medicine and immune system. They always say, well, it's immune- mediated. Well, we don't know what's going on, we're not sure, it’s a developing field. And it is, I respect that. So you take all that with you and then someone like yourself or someone like my analyst says, this is how you operate, this is where you're going, and you think, well, maybe, maybe not. And then you realize that yeah, it is. 

50:48

The most powerful healers I know, are the most humble people I know, and they never present with their own agenda. They will sit in silence and let you speak, know how to ask the right question and know when to ask that question. And, let's face it, that model. There's no space in the current medical industrial model for that any longer. And we have people… 

51:13

Every time someone tells me or calls me up and says, what do you think about taking an antipsychotic? I don't discount that, but I also know it's there, but there's no container for it. There's no story. It’s the same with what’s going on in the planet. We're going to green this and green that and we're going to do this and do that, and you know. Then I look at a country like Iceland that's figured out how to do carbon capture. Or the Irish in the middle of the boglands saying, no, this absorbs carbon like a sponge. And what are we doing here? Not listening. So, I guess I had never thought of healing the land in the same embodiment way until you mentioned it, which you did in an email a while back, and I've been thinking about that. So, yes, and that's where I see the work of the contemporising, the Bean Chaointe. Contemporary Irish women used that as a powerful speech act. Just imagine when women are demanding their rights from the so-called Irish Congress and a thousand of them are in the streets of Dublin keening and the men are inside basically going, oh for God’s sakes, we can’t stand this. Give them what they want. I mean, it was not that simplistic, but when you hear the stories and you hear the keening, you’re damn right it's a contemporary speech act for injustice. That's kind of the thread that I've woven through this. 

52:50

I did a keening when these earth movers were digging up the side of the mountain. I stood there and I keened. I made sure I wasn't on their property because they have speed dial for the sheriff, and it was a powerful experience. It was an overcoming experience. I now understand what the traditional keeners were talking about. And this man drove up behind me in a big truck and I thought, uh oh, here we go. And he said, what are you doing? I said, I'm keening the land, and I recorded it on my phone and this man, he looked at me and he said, Bless you. And he drove away. He was not the kind of individual whom you would think something like that would come out of. You know, I was like all prepared to say this is my constitutional right… Not that anybody's paying attention to that in this country. 

53:45

But anyway, as far as the church goes, I was like every eldest child. Let's see, I've been a nurse, I've been a teacher. Well, let's try the priesthood. And I must say, I was educated by the great nuns of the Sacred Heart. They were incredible women educators at an all-girls school. They could think on their feet and they taught us to think on our feet. And I did graduate work with the Jesuits, who have their own particular way of developing thinking skills, I am very grateful for that. However, it came packaged in an agenda that I now realize is just overwhelming in its own toxicity. So I really believed... 

54:28

I was accepted into the Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago to study theology. They really believed women were going to be ordained and I believed I was called to that. Within a year of my being accepted there Rome closed the school because there were ‘too many’ women. There were four of us, all right. And, you know, I had a choice. I could go to another Jesuit school or I could go to Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, and I chose to stay in Chicago. So I went through the whole thing and then I realized I mean, I demonstrated, I was on the blacklist of several influential Roman Catholic clergy. 

55:06

Along the way, to complicate matters, I fell in love with my husband, who was a high-profile Roman Catholic priest, and of course everybody had a fit and, you know, referred to me as the fallen away divorced woman Catholic and I'm still very proud of this moment. I made an appointment with the individual who referred to me as that, walked into his office and said, let's get one thing straight: I fell away from nothing. I walked away and closed the door behind me. So I moved over into the Episcopal Church because they were ordaining women and I followed suit. I have a degree and training in both Roman Catholic canon law and Anglican canon law. It's always good to know what they're thinking on the inside of the castle, you know, if you're a feminist, goddess descendant… I'm thinking, what? Oh, you can't be serious. That’s a whole nother book and story. But anyway, I did that and I was ordained. 

56:00

My husband left the Roman Catholic Church amongst tremendous… Really, the witch burnings aren't far off and, I will share this with you. He was very high profile, and we fell in love and it's wonderful, and it has been wonderful for 40 years. But the funny part about it is, once he left and we were living together, and I was fine with living together. I thought, I'm not doing this marriage thing again. It just doesn't work for me, because I had been married before, to an anaesthesiologist. Now, how is this for a marriage proposal? How is this for the most romance you can possibly imagine? He says to me, you know, I think we need to get married. And I said, why? Why? No. He was becoming an Episcopal priest. He said, well, how am I going to explain this to the bishop? So I said, all right, fine, but I'm keeping my own name. Took me a lot of money and trouble to get my name back. 

56:57

And then, of course, he occasionally, you know, when I was active as an Episcopal priest, I was also speaking out and different clergy would come to him and say, my God, your wife said this, this and this, and… but her last name is different than yours. He said well, we're not really married, we just live together. I mean, he loved to taunt these, you know, uptight clergy. I was processing all of this in a very deep, dark place. I realized that just because they lay hands on your head doesn't mean anything has changed, and I was very outspoken, but I also knew canon law better than most of them. So I had a distinct advantage and I used it. 

57:38

But the last straw, so to speak, for me is, I was the pastor at a small mountain church. A rector, and I was physically assaulted while I was vested by one of the members of the congregation. Hugging and inappropriate kissing, and I thought… You know, now when I look at it, I can say boy, you know, you start messing with the fierce goddesses and she wants you in a place… It’ll happen, because she'll use everything. I spoke to the women in the congregation, none of whom would support me or believe me, except for a couple in the congregation, both of whom were attorneys. She was an attorney and her husband was a federal judge for the state, and they were beyond horrified. And the bishop sent a deacon on a day when I wasn't there to talk to the congregation and (he) opened his remarks to the congregation with, we men have to be so careful these days. If we look at a woman the wrong way, there's going to be trouble. 

59:02

Yeah. I was hesitant to sue the diocese and sue the bishop. My husband was beyond furious. I was tethering him at home, putting a muzzle on his mouth. I desperately needed to process where this was taking me. The congregants who were lawyer and judge… the judge called me at home and said, this is what happened. They were in church when this deacon said that. He said Irene, sue them and make sure he appears before my bench with his cheque book in hand. Now, you got to remember, this is a very conservative judge. And I said, oh boy. I said, well, I don't know, Fred. He says well, I do. So, I sued, I filed papers, and my husband went to talk to the bishop and the first words out of the bishop's mouth were, have you got any idea how much lawsuits involve these days? Do you know how much money is at stake here? 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:00:03

I'm sorry, Irene. Really.

Irene Sullivan Guest

My husband is a very peaceful and quiet… Well, they got their lawyers involved. The whole thing was a nightmare. But the bishop said, I want to meet with you in person. It took a lawsuit just to get him to meet with me. So I said, well, fine, but it won't be at the chancery, it'll be at a restaurant. 

01:00:28

And I picked a restaurant in the red-light district, and I went in early in the morning and… It was gay restaurant. And the guy says to me, you want some breakfast? I said, I’m meeting someone here. He says, oh, who are you meeting? The restaurant was totally empty. And I said, oh, he’ll be real easy to spot. Purple shirt, big cross. Okay, now, keep in mind, this was before we had legitimate gay consciousness and gay rights and everything else. 

01:01:01

So the bishop appeared and, basically, I said to him, so it takes a lawsuit? His words were, you have to realize how hard this is for me. I'm a centrist. I said, oh, that's an interesting theology, being a centrist. I said, you know, my theological background, Jesus was anything but a centrist. He was not a centrist. And so he said, I'm sorry. He said, will you reconsider? I said no, I'm surrendering my orders. I said, I was one of the first women to be ordained and now I'll be one of the first women to surrender her orders. And I was able to do that because I spent the summer… 

01:01:44

Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book Women who Run With the Wolves had just been released. Nobody would talk to me. I had women clergy calling me, saying, what are you doing? Don't you realize the rest of us have to work in this diocese? I mean, it was non-stop and I was really very severely depressed, but I just… I sat every day and I read this book and I wrote, and I thought, I am being called out of this and it doesn't matter. Prior to that, in fairness and in honesty, I was having an increasingly difficult time standing before a congregation and saying, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, because I didn't. This was the manifestation of okay, here's your out. You don't have enough courage to be honest and authentic enough. We'll create a situation where your authenticity will be challenged and you will do the right thing. So for me, it was the right thing. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:02:39

You've used the word calling a couple of times and you've hinted at your current interest in Goddess theology. Do you want to say more about what you do believe if you no longer believed in God the Father? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:02:54

Every morning I step outside, on my front porch if it's summer, and my back porch if it's winter, because it does make a difference, and I raise my arms in gratitude. And then I do this thing we learned in one of the embodiment things. Washing myself in gratitude and then raising my arms again, asking for guidance. And keep in mind I live in a pretty spectacular place even in the winter. And then I raise my arms and ask for guarding of my heart. And that's what I believe in. It's not theistic. It's not out there anywhere. It is around me in everything. When I have bears who decide they're just going to sit in my backyard. I don't know what they're doing, but they're sitting there. That is a manifestation for me of holiness. When we say namaste, when we bow to someone, that there is that essential goodness in all of us. It doesn't matter who, what, where, when you come from. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:04:05

What would you say to a young person who has a big heart, wants to make a difference in the world, is aware of the suffering, both planetary and human, and wants guidance from someone like yourself who spent many years navigating the complexity of being human? What advice would you have for somebody who's 19 or 20 and looking at the world and saying what's my role, what's my purpose? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:04:37

Usually I want to cry first, because you see this dedication and this heart and this devotion. At least I say, oh God, I was like that once. But then I feel a real responsibility to honour that, cherish that, in a way that it wasn't cherished for me. In a way that I think the dominant paradigm at the time was not cherishing that. We were told, what, are you freaking crazy? Do you know how much money I've spent on your tuition in this private school and you're off… The whole thing. I think I would want to talk with them. I would want to hear more about their story. Why? And based on that say, that's so wonderful that you can listen to your heart. I have had younger people come to me. The pressure at university and academia is, oy. I did this even when I was teaching at university. They'd come in and they'd, oh my God, this is what I want to do and I’d go, well, who wants to do this? You want to do this? 

01:05:41

I have a younger friend right now who is, I swear, she is, IQ-wise, she is brilliant. She's one of those people who can figure out how to put things together and create alternatives. She's just so gifted. And she's also very, very gifted artistically, musically. Can play multiple instruments. She told me the story of how her parents paid for a very good education, but she majored in music and they're so disappointed because she has the IQ to do math and business, and she feels badly about that. She's a beautiful musical therapist. I said no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You follow your heart . And it’s hard. Hard to watch her. It depends on the situation, but I would say, first and foremost, don't sell out your creative spirit or your imagination. That's what I would say. And I don't know what I'd say to you if you came to me and said I'm going to medical school. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:06:42

I know what I would say to you. I would say your heart's in the right place, but it's not a good place for your heart. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:06:50

Very wise. And where does that leave us? Did you happen to see the article in the New York Times a few weeks ago about the burnout rate in physicians, the high incidence of suicide amongst physicians? I'm not surprised. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:07:06

Absolutely. At this point. Maybe I should ask Amy if there's anything she wants to ask. 

Amy Kaye Other 01:07:14

Not so much ask. It's always amazing about these conversations is Maria doesn't really tell me who the guest is going to be, and I quite like it that way, because I like it to be a bit of a blank slate and I don't come with any preconceptions of who she’s going to be talking to. But the timing is always amazing and the people on the podcast are always amazing. What's amazing is that you're talking about your Irish heritage and Ireland, and I actually studied and worked in Ireland for a bit. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:07:43

Oh where? 

Amy Kaye Other 01:07:45

Dublin. It was an incredibly difficult time in my life. I was in a toxic abusive relationship at the time, but I still think back on Ireland as one of the most magical times in my life. It's such a beautiful country to live in and it's magical. So all the time you're talking about Celtic life and these women and Ireland and all that, all these memories are coming back to me. And you're talking about the stones and I was remembering those cobbled streets in Dublin that you walk down and it's incredible. 

01:08:14

And then something that came up again with… when you were mentioning the bees, talking about the bears and talking about all the animals, and I have this thing where, without sounding too woo-woo, but I don't think I would sound too woo-woo in this context.

Irene Sullivan Guest

Oh no, no, the other world is right here.

Amy Kaye Other

I get messages from animals. Animals will come to me and then I have to kind of try and figure out what that's about. A few days ago there was a bee that was on my windscreen of my car. I only noticed it as I started driving and it stayed with me for a 25-minute drive on the highway. I don't know how that bee stayed on that windscreen. We came home and I'm thinking what is this bee here for? What is this bee trying to tell me? And I think the bee was just letting me know that I was going to meet you. It's so wonderful that the bee came along for the journey. It was letting me know about you.

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:08:57

Do you know why this, your sharing this with me is so special? Because all summer… I have a lavender patch. The bees have not come back. This is the first summer. We have lost them and I have been devastated. I even went out and brought fully blooming lavender and planted them, hoping that the pollination would start. There's no bees to be found. 50% of the colonies collapsed over the winter worldwide, and so I have been grieving this. 

I have a friend in Ireland who went to the Gobnait Shrine. Saint Gobnait, who is the patroness of bees. She's a sovereignty goddess and she took care of the bees. And so for you to say that, not knowing any of this, sitting thousands and thousands of miles away, you know is just oh, thank you. 

Amy Kaye Other 01:10:01

Thank you! For me, what came up with this entire conversation was, I have to talk about Ireland. I have to talk about the bee. And what's interesting is, when these things come to me, I'm always going, how is this going to fit into this conversation and how am I going to bring this in? And like, it's not even a question, but there's this voice going, tell her about the bee, tell her about Ireland. Will you get the message? The person always gets the message. It's absolutely bizarre. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:10:23

Wonderful. It must be the runoff from that time in Ireland. Once that happens, you just… It’s in you. It filters into the DNA somehow. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:10:36

Anything from your side, Irene, that we haven't spoken about, that you'd like to share? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:10:41

Only that I think what you're doing is wonderful and that when I meet women like yourselves, I'm renewed, because it's a long, lonely path. It really is, and I just… thank you. Thank you for the work you're doing. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:10:59

Thank you. On that note, then, in terms of some of my listeners who may not fully understand what an awakening doctor could offer or what coaching might be, would you be willing to share a little bit about what our short coaching journey together was like for you? What it meant for you? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:11:16

I will give you a visual. I come to you and I'm just dripping with muck, mire, seaweed… All of which would be healthy things, but it’s the medical industry of terror. Being terrorised. 

01:11:33

You're story not being honoured. Your thinking, your mind, your intellect not being honoured. Keep in mind, Chief of Cardiology prefaces his dissertation on the benefits of statins with, gals like you rarely see 12 months, and you're like three or four months into this. You really came in many ways like The Morrígan. The Morrígan is a fierce Irish goddess, but she shape shifts. She can be a crow, she can be very gentle, but underneath the gentleness she carries a sword. She's not afraid to cut through the bullshit to use it. 

01:12:19

And so, while I'm covered in this muck trying to find my way out, terrified, convincing myself I'm never going to be able to travel again. I'm on these damn anti-coagulants. I can't get on a horse, I can't get on a bike. Hell, I can't take a walk and trip or bad things will happen. I am grateful that there were drugs out there to prevent me from blowing a clot in my brain or my lungs. 

01:12:44

However, I was not healed, I was not cured. I was basically fixed. What was fixed was the part of my heart that was occluded, so that when you look at an echocardiogram you can egotistically say well, if I didn't know it,… This is another quote... Looking at this echocardiogram, you never even had a heart attack. That's because we got you in under the 90-minute rule. Meanwhile, I'm devastated. So what you did is, you helped heal me by accessing, just as any good Innuit shaman would do, the powers within you to take charge of your life again, which is what you had all along.

When I came to you after the whole treadmill thing and I said they’ve got me on this whole cardiac rehab program, and you said, you don't have to do it. I said, oh, that's right, I can go buy a treadmill and put it in my guest room and do my cardio. It was this voice saying oh, okay. Because that's the other thing we get into from our medical training. We do tend to follow the rules. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:13:58

What was supposed to be a cardiac rehabilitation program was causing your blood pressure to elevate and your heart rate to accelerate in ways that were dangerous for you. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:14:07

I think the way you go about it, Maria, it is shamanic. It's the healer's route. It's the listening, it's the holding the space, it’s the story, it’s knowing when to say what and when and how. I mean, you know from years of practice, delivery is half of… 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:14:26

Yeah. I think it's also about distinguishing between curing someone and healing someone. I mean, you've already alluded to that, and for me, you can be cured of your illness but not healed by it, and/or you can be healed from it but not cured, and it depends what we're trying to accomplish here. And for me certainly, health and healing is about becoming more whole, and so knowing the story and helping someone reclaim their truth is part of the healing process. Illness or an event like a heart attack gives you that opportunity to go a little bit deeper inward and discover, what is it that your body is trying to say? What is it that in your life needs some attention? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:15:08

Yes, and I truly believe, the more you compartmentalise or ignore or repress, the angrier… It may not be your heart. Maybe another chakra, maybe another organ, could be your liver, until you pay attention. This has been absolutely wonderful. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:15:35

It has. But I also want to say, for the purposes of the recordings, a little taste of Irene's art, Please visit her website, www.irenefsullivan, with two L's, .com. She has the most exquisite photographs of herself there. The opening page of the site for me is really like... 

01:15:55

I look at your expression on that opening page and it really is, you're speaking to me directly and asking me if I'm willing to pay attention. There's a whole lot of different things about your various art projects over the years and lots of beautiful images of your art. So I really think if people who are listening want to take the time to go and have a look at that, it's worth a visit. I'm just so grateful that you were willing to share some of your story with us today. I was deeply touched by your sharing and by your vulnerability and by the incredible story of your life. It's just really... You have done so many different things. I was saying to Amy before we started that I'd gone through some of the information on your website and I'd read some of the articles and the summaries of your art projects and I was like, we can never squeeze this into a one or two hour conversation. It's just impossible. There's just so much richness here. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:16:47

Your questions are a gift, and feel free to ask more and we'll do another one. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:16:53

I want to finish by reading to you something you wrote to me in my initial intake questionnaire.

Irene Sullivan Guest

Oh dear.

Maria Christodoulou Host

It was something about who you are, and you said, my commitment to my artwork is entwined with my soul work, which I'm coming to realise is woven throughout my body. I am a warrior goddess of compassion action for ecosystem justice, and I need a strong art to do this. I want to add, it's your strong heart that is an embodiment of this. You are the art, Irene. 

Irene Sullivan Guest

 Thank you. 

Amy Kaye Other 01:17:36

I don't know whether to scream or cry or laugh. It's profound. It’s so wonderful that we can do this virtually. That you can be in the States and we can be in South Africa and that we can do this in real time. It's phenomenal. And I hate the fact that we're alive in this technological age, but then moments like this, I think, thank God we're in the age, because otherwise this would never been possible. I just want to say, thank you so much. Thank you for the bee. Thank you for reminding me of Ireland, and just thank you. I'm incredibly honoured to have been part of this conversation. This has given me hope. These conversations always give me hope. I didn't know you before this and now I feel like I know you a little bit more. And, it's only the beginning of I don't even know what, but thank you Maria and thank you Irene. This is amazing. This is such a great way to start my weekend. I'm so appreciative. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:18:25

Oh well, thank you. It is the global village and we are, what’s that great phrase? Women hold up half the world, so when I can share with women like yourselves, it just… This will be nourishment for me for months, until I get to Ireland in November with my other sisters. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:18:47

So what's next for you? 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:18:49

I am trying to think about and integrate the work that… and some of the research that these environmental psychoanalysts are doing. They've been kind of left out of the loop of how to hold space for what's happening to us. Denial manifests in many, many, many ways. There's a woman, Renee Lertzman. She's from the UK. She wrote this book on environmental melancholia using many of the traditional psychoanalytic sources. The message of the whole thing… You can no longer say because people aren't acting, they don't care. That's off the table. People care very deeply, they're overwhelmed. 

01:19:33

And then how our capitalist systems play into that. So what I'm trying to do with that, having read the book, is how can my art invite and hold the space for people to engage with eco-memory, with eco-grief and with eco-care? And I really feel that I'm being guided. This is my work for the rest of my time here. I just listen because I get overwhelmed too. That old, complex, shadowy demon that goes, the earth is burning up and you're out there creating sculptures out of dead tree roots. The Goddess stepping in and saying yes, exactly that's what you're doing. And then having that space to invite people in. That's why I revamped the website. And contemporising the Bean Chaointe. These women, they allowed people to grieve so they could become whole again. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:20:29

I look forward to witnessing how your journey unfolds. 

Irene Sullivan Guest 01:20:33

And I yours. 

Maria Christodoulou Host 01:20:36

I'm Dr Maria Christodoulou and you've been listening to the Awakening Doctor podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please share it with your friends. follow Awakening Doctor on Instagram, Facebook and Spotify, and go to Apple podcasts to subscribe, rate and give us a good review. Thank you so much for listening.