The Light Returns: Brigid, Imbolc & the Season of Becoming

January asks us to reinvent ourselves overnight.
But our bodies, and the natural world, tell a different story.

In this episode, Eimear invites you into the quieter turning point that arrives in early February, when the light begins to return, and something inside us starts to stir again.

Through the Celtic festival of Imbolc and the story of Brigid — goddess, saint, healer, poet, and keeper of the flame — we explore how renewal actually happens: slowly, invisibly, and from the inside out.

This conversation is also a reminder that women’s stories, like our own power, are often softened, rewritten, or overlooked — and yet they endure. And maybe parts of you are ready to return too.

We also explore how cultures across the world mark this late-winter threshold, including Lunar New Year traditions, all pointing toward the same truth: life awakens quietly before it blooms.

If you’ve felt pressure to have everything figured out already this year, this episode is an invitation to soften, listen, and reconnect with what’s ready to grow now.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why January 1 rarely feels like a true beginning
• What the Celtic festival of Imbolc represents
• Who Brigid was before she became a saint
• Why women’s stories often disappear — and how they return
• The connection between seasonal rhythms and personal renewal
• A simple ritual to mark this turning point in your own life
• A poetic blessing for stepping into what’s next

Reflection for this week:
What part of you is ready to come back into the light?

Next episode: We begin a new season of conversations with extraordinary women who are shaping culture, business, creativity, and leadership in powerful ways — starting next week with our conversation with the founder of the travel app GreetHer, which is changing the way women travel and connect.

If this episode resonated, share it with a friend who might need the reminder: the light is returning — and so are we.

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Transcript

Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm thinking today about growing up in Ireland and this time of year. And around this time in school, we would make these little crosses out of rushes, and you might remember them if you were Irish or if you visited Ireland at this time of year, like thin green reeds, and you folded [00:01:00] into a kind of woven cross, and then you tie the ends together and then brought them home with you to hang in the kitchen or above a doorway.

If you've ever been to Ireland, you may well have seen one in somebody's home or in a pub. And we were always told this was for St. Bridget's Day. But if I'm honest, I never really understood who Bridget was, and there was never a particular day to celebrate her, and we didn't hear the story of her beyond the making of this cross.

It was all about St. Patrick's Day in March. And relatively recently, I find myself asking and wondering, yeah, who was this woman, and what exactly was the festival, this festival of Imbolc that I would hear about at this time of year? I'd heard the name but never really understood it, and I'd become more and more interested in my [00:02:00] Celtic heritage.

And particularly women in the Celtic tradition. As I've gotten older, and the more I started digging, the more I realized this is one of those stories that we inherit without ever really being invited into it. So today I want to invite you into this story. It's a story about a moment in the year, this time of year when the light begins to come back and about a woman whose flame.

People refuse to let die. First, let's talk about something that always feels slightly off. Always feels slightly off, and that is January 1st. At the beginning of the new year, we're told it's the beginning of the year and all that messaging, fix everything, change everything. Become something else. Set those goals, make it all different this time round, get involved, get energized more and more and more.

But it arrives [00:03:00] right after the Christmas season, the holiday season, in the darkest, coldest part of winter. When our bodies are tired, our nervous systems want rest. We're more likely to want to eat soup and thick, crusty bread with lots of butter - that's just me? be wearing sweaters and craving quiet and warmth and soothing and comfort.

Nothing about it really feels like a time for a big beginning and newness, and that's because January 1st isn't actually rooted in nature. It comes from ancient Rome. The Roman Empire moved the start of the year to January to honor Janus, a God who looked backward and forward. It made sense politically, and it made sense administratively.

But it doesn't make sense in our bones. It's always felt off [00:04:00] for me seasonally. The real feeling of beginning arrives later, doesn't it? And that's where this festival of IMBOLC, in the Celtic tradition, lives Imbolc, is I M B O L C, Imbolc. What is Imbolc? It's a festival that falls around the 1st of February.

It sits halfway. Between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. So it's this halfway point where winter is still here. The cold hasn't gone anywhere, but something subtle has shifted. The days are getting a little bit longer, light lingers a little bit more. In the afternoon, there's this sense that.

You know, underground things are stirring. The seeds are stirring in farming communities. Lambs begin to be born, milk flows again, and the name in bulk is [00:05:00] thought to mean something like in the belly; pregnant, gestating, potential for forming before anything is yet visible. It is not spring yet, but it's the sense of the promise of spring, the promise of new life and growth, and what's to come.

And that feels important, especially, I think, for women in midlife or really anyone who's in a transition phase, because there's a lot of pressure to go do it now. Everything. But nature, I think the rhythm of nature is really important to connect into, and listen to because it kind of says, first comes the quiet stir, and there's a lot of outside messaging that doesn't [00:06:00] let us be with that.

Enter Bridget. Let me tell you about Bridget. Before she was St. Bridget in Ireland. She was something much older in pre-Christian Ireland. Bridget was a goddess and she was associated with healing and poetry and fertility and protection and inspiration and fire. And she, she was connected to sacred wells and to the hearth, the hearth of the home.

She was connected with midwife energy, creative energy, life bringing energy. And when Christianity came and spread throughout Ireland, many local traditions were erased, but some were absorbed. The more important ones were absorbed. And Bridget became [00:07:00] Saint Bridget. The goddess became the saint. And people kept celebrating her at the same time of year because some stories are just too beloved to let go.

But when I was growing up in Ireland, I never knew that she wasn't a saint, a young Christian woman who had done something to some miracle to be called a saint. And this cross part had always fascinated me If Bridget. As I learned when I got older, she began as a pagan goddess. Why is her symbol this cross?

The Bridget's cross that we made in school when I was a child and children still make in schools in Ireland probably predates Christianity, and scholars believe it may have been an older protective or solar symbol. Woven from rushes and hung in [00:08:00] homes to guard against misfortune and fire again, the protective energy of Bridget.

And later it was reinterpreted through Christianity as a cross. So instead of the symbol changing, the meaning wrapped around it changed. And I like that. I guess I like that. Traditions can survive by adapting, and then we can learn about the history and the more ancient stories. It also makes me think about how often, just how often, women's stories are softened or rewritten for other purposes, but the real roots still survive beneath them.

And I think this story matters because of that. Because so many women's stories disappear, we really have to. Hunt for the answers often, or ask ourselves that question: where are the women? Where are the women's voices? Where are those stories? And we have to go [00:09:00] searching. Often their work has forgotten their powers, minimized their influence, minimized.

Their names are lost. But here's a woman from goddess to Saint whose presence people refused. To forget her flame kept burning and maybe that asked something of us. What parts of you have gone quiet? Maybe reflect on that. What parts maybe have you softened or played down to belong to fit in, to not rock the boat, and what parts refuse to disappear?

Maybe this season is asking them to come back. In Ireland. It happened a few years ago, and I was really pleased that there was a strong movement to reclaim St. Bridget and that there should be a national holiday to celebrate her. And that finally happened a few years ago. We all heard [00:10:00] of St. Patrick, but now St.

Bridget has her place, her rightful place in the Irish calendar, and all the kids get a day off school. Always important. I think I've become more curious and more interested in looking at the calendar, looking at turning points in the year, connecting more to the calendar of nature and less to the artificial calendars, and this turning point in the year of Imbolc, this midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

This turning point isn't just Celtic. Around this time of year, many cultures celebrate Lunar New Year, and we often call it Chinese New Year, but versions of it are celebrated across east and Southeast Asia, Vietnam, Mongolia, Korea, Tibet, and beyond. And their calendar follows [00:11:00] the moon to the date shifts each year.

I find this. It's really fascinating and I wish I'd learned about it when I was in school, but I'm always curious and always learning and, and the lunar New Year always lands in this late winter period, so different cultures, same wisdom. Life begins stirring again. Now hope returns quietly. Not fireworks of transformation, but just the first whisper of possibility.

So here's what I invite you to do. I'm really thinking about this in the run up to the Lunar New Year, between this time of Imbolc and the Lunar New Year. Thinking about what in me is waking up again at this time of year. What dreams, what dreams are there bubbling up that want to ignite? And what small flame [00:12:00] am I ready to tend to again?

Maybe tonight or sometime this week, you might like to mark this ritualistic time of year. This just the beginning of the newness of things, stirring of possibility. You could light a candle, sit quietly. Just journal a little. What do you wanna welcome back into your life? Maybe speak it aloud. Nothing elaborate.

It doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be grand. I think it's the simple moments of silence and quiet, self-created ritual that's often the most potent because there's no performance for anyone else in it. It's true and honest and authentic, and it's for you, and it just is you connecting into what [00:13:00] matters.

And this moment always reminds me of a poem that I may have shared with you before. I know I shared it in some of the live communities before, and it's by John O'Donohue, who's an Irish poet, sadly no longer with us. And it's about thresholds and courage and stepping into what is not fully visible yet, and having the courage to do that.

So I want to offer it to you to leave you now with his words. And the name of the poem is for a New beginning in Outta the Way places of the Heart where your thoughts never think to wander. This beginning has been quietly forming, waiting until you were ready to emerge for a long time. It has watched your desire, feeling the emptiness growing inside you.[00:14:00] 

Noticing how you willed yourself on still unable to leave what you had outgrown. You'd watched you play with the seduction of safety and the gray promises that sameness whispered heard the waves of turmoil, rise and relent. Wondered, would you always live like this? [ for the rest of this poem and more from the poet, purchase John O’Donohue’s book Benedictus]

Next week, we will begin a series of guest interviews, and I'm excited to introduce you to so many wonderful women who are smart, who are wise, who are doing amazing things in this world, and you're gonna love it. I'll see you next time. Take care of you.