#22 - Martha Wright - Coming home to yourself: ancient wisdom for modern life

Your mind might be brilliant, but it cannot do the whole job of living. When success on paper still feels like emptiness, numbness, or constant striving, it’s often a signal that something deeper is asking to be heard: the body, the heart, and the parts of us we’ve pushed into the shadows. I’m joined by Martha Wright, a shamanic medicine woman, certified breathwork teacher, Reiki Master and art historian who works at the crossroads of ancient wisdom and modern somatic healing. 

We start with Carl Jung and the shadow self, then get practical about what shadow work actually is: the stored wounds, shame, repressed grief, and even repressed pleasure that quietly steer our choices until we bring them into the light. Martha shares her own winding path into shamanic practice, what it means to serve as a bridge between ordinary reality and spirit, and how Celtic spirituality invites a different kind of faith, one rooted in land, seasons, story, and direct spiritual agency rather than rigid dogma. 

From there we go into the modern crisis of disconnection: consumerism, convenience culture, chronic distraction, and why nature stops feeling like a relationship and starts feeling like scenery. Martha explains “the body keeps the score” through a somatic lens, including why anxiety and physical symptoms can show up when life finally becomes safe enough to release old trauma. We close with tools you can use now, like coherence breathing for nervous system regulation, and a powerful look at keening, an ancient Celtic grief ritual that helps communities let sorrow move instead of calcify. 

If you want more embodiment, real emotional healing, and grounded spirituality that doesn’t bypass pain, you’ll find a lot here. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a review with the biggest takeaway you’re sitting with.

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Transcript

Welcome And The Call To Remember

Peter Kolakovic 0:01

Hello everyone and welcome back to My Best Life, the podcast where we explore the stories, struggles, and moments of awakening that help us live with greater purpose, authenticity, and connection. Today we're venturing into a conversation that invites us to look beyond what can be measured and understood with the intellect alone, and toward the deeper wisdom of the heart, the body, and the soul. Our guest today is Martha Wright, a shamanic medicine woman, psychologist, executive coach, and teacher whose life's work sits at the intersection of ancient wisdom and modern understanding. Drawing from Celtic spirituality, shamanic energy healing, somatic awareness and psychology, Martha helps people reconnect with themselves in ways that are both deeply practical and profoundly transformative. For many of us, life is lived almost entirely in our minds. We analyze, plan, strive, and achieve. We become experts at solving problems, yet often find ourselves disconnected from our own inner knowing. We may be successful on paper while quietly sensing that something essential has been left behind. Martha's work suggests that healing doesn't begin by accumulating more knowledge, it begins by remembering. Remembering that our bodies carry wisdom, that grief deserves expression rather than avoidance, that nature is more than scenery, it is teacher, companion, and mirror. And that sometimes the answers we've spent years searching for are waiting patiently beneath the noise of everyday life. In a culture that often asks us to move faster, produce more, and suppress our emotions, today's conversation offers a different invitation to slow down, to listen, and to become curious about the unseen forces that shape our lives. We'll explore what it means to walk a shamanic path in the modern world, the enduring wisdom of Celtic traditions, the practice of keening as a sacred expression of grief, and how ancient healing practices can help us navigate very contemporary challenges. Whether you're deeply immersed in spiritual practice or simply curious about a different way of understanding yourself and the world around you, I think you'll find something in this conversation that resonates. Martha,

Jung, The Shadow, And Inner Balance

Peter Kolakovic 2:28

I'd like to begin with a quote from Carl Jung that feels especially fitting for our conversation today. Jung wrote, Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. How does that resonate with you?

SPEAKER_01 2:47

Oh, so such a good quote. Yeah. What I love about that is it's really making in clear terms the shadow self. And the shadow self is something that we hear talked about in a lot of pop spirituality and social media, and it's unfortunately a lot of you know, maybe well-intentioned, but not always well-informed people, is there's this belief that the shadow self is bad. And it's not. The shadow lives within all of us just as much as the light. And, you know, if anyone has lived or visited, you know, more northern or more southern parts of this hemisphere, you know, you start to realize too much of one thing can start to make you feel a little baddie. So we shouldn't glorify the light and constantly just avoid our shadow. It's not balanced. And balance is so important. And so what I love about what Young has written is he's saying the unconscious, you can avoid it, you can deny it, you can ignore it. It's still going to drive your behavior. So the shadow, which is the parts of ourselves that have been wounded andor experienced and survived trauma, self-judgment, shame, repressed pleasure, it could be all sorts of different things. Essentially, these bits of us get pushed down deep down and ignored or avoided because we are culturally taught to not engage those deep emotions or process those pains. And that is what the shadow is. And so as long as we are living with the woundedness present in our body, we are going to be seeing the world with just half our abilities. One arm will always be tied behind your back. And so the more we, you know, on our own with breath work or through meditation or with a healer or in whatever medicine or methods uh one is called to do by investigating, not investigating, but inviting the shadow up to be witnessed, to breathe through it, to help alchemize that pain into presence and that woundedness into wellness. We begin to find a sense of balance where the thing that we have avoided for so long actually becomes a thing that strengthens us and helps us move forward with more self-awareness.

Martha’s Path To Shamanic Work

Peter Kolakovic 5:16

Okay. Well, we'll talk more about those methods, those medicines, as you call them. But before we get into that, let's learn a little bit more about you. If someone such as me met you today for the first time without knowing your story, how would you describe the path that brought you here?

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Oh, yes. So it's it's kind of a swirly-twirly path. But so I am a shamanic medicine woman. And for me, those titles, which are incredibly important and carry a rich history and rich tradition, I find that they balance me out. Shamanism is very much that kind of young masculine structure. And medicine woman is a bit more of that yin, intuitive flow of spirit. And so when I bring the two together, what I'm really saying is that I am an individual who is following a call from deep within my soul and from spirit, great spirit, to be of service to the greater community, to help people who want someone to walk alongside them in their own path through the shadow and into wellness or balance, to help teach people that which, you know, you said remembering earlier, to be a teacher, not saying that I have something you don't or I am wise and you are not. It's to be a teacher means to help people remember deep down in their bones, they already have this information. They just don't always have the human gnosis or the human words around it. And so that's essentially what I do. But it can look like so much more than that, or or so much more specifics, I should say, like energy healing, keening, things like you know, retreats, teaching. But how I came to this path is I the my first call from spirit to remember this path that I am living happened when I was seven. I was in, my father worked for the government and we moved around a lot. And I was walking into a Buddhist temple in Kathmandu, and I walked in and I went from seeing, you know, it's 1992, right? So I'm just seeing loads of tourists and all the big giant cameras, and this and and I blinked and I opened my eyes and it just happened so fast. And I saw the room was empty except for about 50 monks who were sitting in rows chanting. And there was a giant this giant gilded Buddha statue, which is still there today. And I said, I'm home. And then I blinked again and I felt such relief, like, oh, thank God I found it. You know, I'm back. And and then I blinked again and it all went away. And there I was surrounded by people again. And my mom said, What did you say? And I said, I'm home. She says, Okay, come on, let's go find your father. And so it's you know, scurries me on because I'm a seven-year-old. What do I know? And so that was we moved on. And then around mid teenage years, I dabbled in Wicca because I was desperate to find a spiritual connection that was rooted in the earth. I was seeking shamanism, but I didn't know. And uh the internet had a very paltry response rate. It was like, here are your three websites. And one of them was like, congratulations, you like the earth and spirituality. You're not a Christian, you must be a witch. And I was like, cool, cool, cool. So I read some books and I was like, this, no, this feels like I'm wearing the wrong outfit. So I walked away from that. And then in my core, my mid-20s, I had a quarter life crisis where my friend's mom did Reiki on me. And it was such a profound experience where my inner wild woman was this caged cave woman. I could, I have a very, you know, as my mom says, a wild imagination. But I remind people that our imagination can oftentimes be a tool for our intuition. And so what I was seeing in my mind's eye was actually my body communicating with me and showing me my inner wildness had been caged. And that through this Reiki session, I subconsciously agreed to stop and to let her out. And so she burst out of me. And that was when I realized I have to keep this, this I keep pursuing. So I became a Reiki master teacher and then was seeking more. And my friend introduced me to some new ageism groups that I tried on also didn't fit right. So I let those ones go as well. And then a handful of years later, in my early 30s, I was becoming chronically sick, where I just kept getting sick and kept getting sick. And I mean, it was like I would finish medicine on day 10. And day 11 would be back in the office, the doctor, full-fledged symptoms. And I mean, it was nuts. I even knew this was nuts. I was like, this is impossible. How is this happening? And the doctors didn't believe I was taking the medicine, but I was like, I assure you I am. And then they threw the word surgery out there, and I was like, oh, okay. No, no. Mm-mm. And so I sat at my desk and I said, What is going on? I just prayed. I was like, just God, tell me, like, what is going on? And I heard the words out loud, you have to become a shaman. And I turned around looking for my colleague, who surely was the person who said those words, but she wasn't there. I was alone. And so that's I Googled again, you know, many, many, many years later. And that's when I saw all this information. And it was everything my body has been seeking up for those three three decades. And that's when it began. And I just, man, I started drinking from a fire hose. I did, I think, nine apprenticeships in five years and became a breath work teacher and went through many rites of passages uh with spirit. And yeah, I just went, I got after it. And now, thankfully, it's all integrating and or integrated. And it's, I still, of course, everyone always has a bit more work to do. So I still have those moments. But that's that's loosely the path.

What Shamanic Healing Looks Like

Peter Kolakovic 11:28

So many people have heard the word shaman, but you know, I would say few truly understand it. So what does being a shamanic medicine woman actually mean to you?

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Sure. So shaman is a term that originated in Siberia and was used across many indigenous communities to refer to an individual who had gone through trials of spirit and study with humans, human teachers, learned about plant medicine spirits, animal medicine spirits, the land, the ancestors, the stars, and in doing so honed themselves to be a bridge, a bridge between ordinary reality where we humans live and are existing, and non-ordinary reality, where spirit is everywhere. And I mean spirit is everywhere, and spirit isn't everything, but I should say non-ordinary reality, reality where spirit is more tangibly perceptive. And so, as a bridge between these realms, the shaman is in service to the community to help with healing, doing soul retrieval for those who have experienced severe trauma or not, you know, and we think severe trauma always is like war or famine or disease and you know, abuse, offense. And it doesn't always have to look like that. You know, I think we tend to assume our pain is not big enough to be called trauma. It really is person-specific. And it, you know, so there can be a lot of reasons why the soul experiences soul tears or soul loss, but essentially that's one of the main types of healing. There's also ancestral healing, cord healing, you know, there's retrieval of one's power animal back into their life. And so these are just some examples of shamanic healing specifically. And so for me, being a shaman is being this energy healer who works with individuals and works with their subtle bodies and the other realms. And it's a word that's been used for, you know, it's it's important to understand that the word shaman comes from three, three avenues. One, we study, we study with our human teachers, then we go through our rites of passage and initiations with spirit. Then when we are of service and in service to our community, at the point that our community reflects back and says, you are shaman, you are, you're doing it, like you're living it, that's when we can say, I am shaman. So for me, I really took that to heart. And I would call myself a shamanic practitioner for many years. But then after I received, and I'm very grateful for it, that reflection from my community, and then went into the medicine woman work. That's when I started to weave the two together. And so a medicine woman, similar to a shaman, works with plant spirits, animal spirits, works with the land, works with the elements. But a medicine woman is keen to listen to the individual's body and let the body speak to the practitioner and say what is out of balance, what is necessary to regain balance. So you could see acupuncture as an example of being a medicine woman, an herbalist is a medicine woman, a midwife could be a medicine woman, right? So it's it's less so the structure and the discipline taught by the human and uh teachers, and it's more flowing into that intuitive connection of seeing the interwoven nature of life as bits and pieces of the great spirit that are actually connected. But we oftentimes live a life that's disconnected. So as a medicine woman, it's about bringing that balance and that stasis back in the body.

Peter Kolakovic 15:14

Were there moments when you resisted this calling? And if so, what finally convinced you to trust it?

SPEAKER_01 15:21

Oh that yeah. Sorry, I'm reflecting on when I stepped in. So, okay, two things. One, my very first shamanic apprenticeship. I remember sitting in the class, completely freaked out, completely freaked out. And I didn't know it at the time, but I come from a decent line of pastors and priests and devout Christians, and there was a tremendous fear of God and upsetting God that lived inside of me. And so in my first apprentice meeting, I was like, nope, nope, this is weird. What am I doing? But yet everything in my intuition and my longing was like, do it, keep going. And so I had to face that ancestral fear before I could really move forward, which looked like kind of like a gift-giving ceremony, honestly, where I walked away and I said, Look, Mar, you spent lots of money on this apprenticeship. You have to see it through. You can't give up. Just don't get the willies and let it stop you. I don't like to let fear stop me from things. Though I do, you know, I kick and scream a bit while doing it, but that's fine. That's on me. And so I sat in journey because we we learned how to just kind of drum into journey space and just to kind of be in it. We didn't learn too much about journeying the first day, but I just sat in the the kind of like the waiting room of my journeying. And I was like, I need to speak to whoever it is or whatever it is that's freaking me out. We got to have a chit-chat. And that's when all of these ancestors came. And it was this conversation of like, I don't know who you are or what your problem is, but take your fear back. And I was pulling it out of me, and I was doing this ancestral healing with absolutely no frame of reference in this life about what the heck I was doing or what. But I just followed my intuition, and that was exactly what needed to happen because then that made me feel open and at least more, I wouldn't say, I wouldn't say I was confident, but more willing to move forward. And then in time, the more healing I did, the more I grew in confidence, and also the more I grew in feeling safe with all of it. And then when I started my medicine woman work, it was the end of a year-long Imrava or Imrama. And Imrov is is a like a sea journey to the other world in the Celtic spirituality. And it was the end of a year, and the guided experience was like, okay, you're in this cairn with the kailiac, the the ancient mother, the crone goddess, and she is going to introduce you to the goddess who called you to your work, to this work, and to the work that pulls you forward after this Imrama is over. And I remember thinking, oh, I want it to be Bridget, you know, Bridget, maiden, spring, happy, beautiful, saint and goddess, right? Best of both worlds and safe is really what I think I was feeling. And then I remember sensing this woman's face when it was like all black around her forehead and eyes. And then I just saw a white chin and mouth, uh right and a red mouth, I should say. And I heard the word say Bive right in my ear. And I was like, wait a second, I know that goddess. Who is that goddess? Oh no, I think I remember who that is. And so I go and I look in the book, and Baive is one of the three sisters that make up the goddess the Morigan. The Morigan is the goddess of death, but Baive happens to be the old woman goddess or aspect of the Morigan, who is a goddess unto herself, and she's known and associated with the Banshee. She is known and associated as the Keening woman, the Keening Goddess, and so she washes the bloodied clothes of warriors in the Ford as they walk to battle. And she screams and she's terrifying. You know, her face is lined from tears, her mouth is bloody and cracked from crying incessantly. And she's old and she wails and she flies, and you know, not quite Bridget, is it? So I was just like, okay, what? So and then that was the call to become a keener, a Keenan woman. And you know, in the Keening tradition, you have these women wearing black veils and they're mourning and they're moving and chanting and seeing it's very shamanic. It's a ritual, it's a grief-tending ritual to help, and it's very performative to help evoke grief out of people so that they can move on after the loss of someone. So it you think about it, it's it's a very spooky, very kind of well, it's not comfortable. And that's so that was a huge resistance. But in time, I moved, you know, I just I stayed committed. And in time, I learned to not be afraid, though it is powerful and overwhelming and intimidating at times. I learned to trust the love that was inside Vive. Because when you move past that facade that the society doesn't like to talk about or see, you see you move into this incredible bosom of this elder ancient mother goddess who just loves people so much that when they die, she just wants them to have a really great death and be taken care of. And that is just about the sweetest thing that anyone could really ask for at the end of their life.

Celtic Spirituality And Living By Seasons

Peter Kolakovic 20:55

So, what first drew you toward Celtic spirituality and how is it different from organized religion, in particular from the dominant religion in the West, which is still Christianity?

SPEAKER_01 21:09

Yeah. So after a handful of I did um Egyptian mystery school and then core shamanism, and you know, a handful uh years of practice with that, I felt the calling for something more. Just, I mean, I I thought surely this is enough. And but something else just was like a hole needed to be filled. So I said, okay, fine, I'm listening, tell me where to go. And I and I realized that what I, you know, there are great living traditions, absolutely amazing. And they do call many modern practitioners, but I did not have the call to go to Peru or Guatemala or, you know, other other parts of the Americas. So instead, I was like, okay, well, the only other option that would be appropriate is my ancestry. What was that in Scottish and Irish? And so I Went with with Celtic and I did my first Celtic spiritual apprentice with apprenticeship with a woman named Dani Forrest, and it was a year-long journey. And then at that after that, I did the year-long Imrama. And then after that, I did nine months of the Keening apprenticeship. And so it was three years straight. And yeah, what you know, what I've learned is that Celtic spirituality, and it we wouldn't call it a religion because it wasn't. We don't have shamans in Celtic spirituality. That's not a title that was ever used. We have druids, we had bards, you know, but but not shamans. And so the Celtic spiritual practice is basically living in alignment, at least the way the Celtic practice is understood now, through what is left in remnants from the historical writings that were actually written down by early monks to Ireland, because so much was destroyed in the Protestant and the Catholic revolutions coming out of England. And so, as one does, you know, when immersing into a new culture and trying to convince them to convert, you adopt much of that culture and bring it in. So, you know, things like Halloween or All Saints Day is actually a direct response to Sawin, which is the Celtic ceremonial fire ceremony that celebrates the beginning of winter. So winter is actually known as Sawin. And then, you know, there's the Easter and Beltane, and anyway, so so it's it's living in the wheel of the year. And so it's Sawan in bulk, Beltana, or Beltane, and then Lunasa. Those are the four seasons. And so you live in tandem with how the sun is responding to the earth. And this is why we see in the stone circles, a lot of times there would be a keystone or some sort of receptive stone, or maybe you would see the cairn, which is like those stone mounds that were had kind of ceremonial space inside of it, will receive this a shaft of sunlight directly through the tomb entrance at a certain time of year. And that was very symbolic. That was, you know, the male with the light coming into the womb of the of the earth mother, of the divine feminine. And in doing so, we are now reminded: okay, the earth is going to keep turning and we will come back to a time of fertility. So it was all about living in tandem with the land, with the cycles. And it's different from kind of dogmatic or traditional structured religion because, you know, at least the way I have really embraced Celtic spirituality and shamanism together is that there's no person between me and spirit. There's no middleman and there's no edifice. There's no perfect way to meet God. God is everywhere and God is in my heart. And I feel that way about Jesus as well. He has, he and I have had a really beautiful rejoining after many years of confusion on my part. You know, he never left me, but I certainly was like, I don't think I'm supposed to like you. Because if I do the shamanic stuff, that means I can't be Christian. And he was like, oh, like, you know, face palm. And um, but then years later, I I he and I had this beautiful journey together. So anyway, there's there's no separation between you and God. God is in the tree, God is in the river, God is in the land, and so are your ancestors. Well, I mean, they're not in the tree, but like the ancestors are out here with you, and all of that can be accessed and connected to and worked with without the permission of someone in a robe. And I think, I mean, I'm sure you can find myriad differences, but I think that's the most important one is it gives us the agency, the spiritual agency to remember the divinity within us and the divinity all around us. And that we we do, we have to love this earth and we have to love the life on this earth as who we are, not just love our neighbor. We need to love nature too.

Peter Kolakovic 26:11

So, on

Why We Feel Cut Off From Nature

Peter Kolakovic 26:12

that subject, living in alignment with with nature, with the seasons, which you know, from what I understood seems to be a big part of of Celtic spirituality. Why do you think so many people today feel spiritually disconnected from nature?

SPEAKER_01 26:28

Oh, well, I think it's a great question. And I think a lot of it has to do with the lifestyle that we have been given. And I say given because so much of how consumerism and capitalism has been created came with it an entire marketing manipulative world that teaches us, oh, you don't want to be left behind. You want to have this too. Or if you don't have this, you can't have that. And so we begin with like, you know, you look back, and women and kids were working in factories through the 19 teens, right? And then we have the Great Depression, everyone, not everyone, many people lose their job. And then when we start to come out of that, what is also being marketed at the side at the same time in newspapers? The wife stays home. Look, she can use these grand, amazing vacuum cleaners and stoves to make your ham and jelly. Like, I don't know. But basically, we start to see these advertisements that the woman is supposed to be at home and you make your woman work. Or, oh my God, honey, I can't believe you are so poor that you also have to work. You know, we start to see these subtleties coming in through media, both, you know, advertising and of course other media too, magazines, et cetera. And then we start to see that change in the 50s and 60s. It's, you know, it's pervasive that the woman stays home, right? And then we start to see changes again going in the 70s and 80s after civil rights. We see this massive uproar and how the world is kind of being handled and now women are gonna work. And so at the same time, we're seeing a tremendous, especially in response to so you didn't think you were gonna get this history lesson. This is where, this is where my museum scholar, like educator background comes wind is like, but around civil rights, we see this massive thing called white flight, where white people were leaving cities and moving out to the suburbs. Well, how do you make a suburb? You clear the land, you throw down the trees, and you make space. And you know, and I'm speaking kind of facetiously about the time, right? You don't want to be in the city with all of these equal people of color. You want your own space. You deserve the house, you deserve the car, you deserve the blah blah blah, right? That's how you show your power and your empowerment. And the land, God gave you the land, you know? And so we see now, and so that's like the 60s, right? The 50s, 60s, and 70s, and we see this massive boom outward. And so I think as we start to feel more prominently the fear, the anger, the rage, and I think the fear and the anger and the rage has been in our bones for millennia. We are, as a species, we're an aggressive species. Apes are just aggressive species. But historically, I'm thinking specifically where I live in the state of Virginia, you know, there's a tremendous history around slave trade, and there's a lot of pain here. And so when you think about this pain, do we want to feel the pain? No, of course not. I want to feel better. Well, I'll tell you what's going to make you feel better. Why don't you come buy this great soda? Or why don't you go on by a boat and go to the water? And so we start to see like people are saying, hey, equality, equality, but it's not equal and it's not equal. Well, I'm not, I don't want to deal with that. So let me distract myself with stuff. And I think that's really how we got to where we are. And then you include internet, and then it's just like everyone's quote, connected, but we're behind screens and we're not touching each other. We're not hearing the voice, we're not feeling the energy. It's and so I think at a time that we've never been more connected, we've also never been more disconnected, not just from each other, but from ourselves. And I think it really begins to become connected again. It begins with going to the land and saying, Hey, I didn't think whatever our thing is, right? I didn't see you before. I didn't know it mattered before. I didn't know the energy that was pulsating underneath my feet and underneath my home. But I'm ready now. And that's we just have to be open like that. And nature is so incredible and will bring us right back in.

Peter Kolakovic 31:07

So, with all of these challenges in modern society that you've just described and pe people being so disconnected from each other, what can we learn from ancient Celtic traditions?

SPEAKER_01 31:20

Oh, I think the one thing that I and I've mentioned this a couple of times, balance. And I don't think there's a perfect balance point. It's about understanding the ebb and flow. The moon is not in one stable place all month. She moves, and the way she moves changes her from full light to full shadow and everything in between. So if we think of balance as just an equalizing of energy, whether it's just we've been in this really meditative place and we've been really relaxed and quiet and reading and nurturing ourselves, well, that's going to be balanced out through action. And we live in such a hyper-productive and hyper-reactive world that we aren't taking the time for quiet. So, what does that look like in Celtic spirituality? That looks like autumn and winter. Those are our seasons for quiet. Those also happen to be our busiest seasons for holidays. And sometimes our most toxic situations in life is spending time with family. And so at the time that our bodies are naturally and intuitively slowing down to rest, we're shoving it back out and giving it the booze or the food or the whatever to self-soothe to get through it. So, what I think people could really benefit from is look at how the moon shifts. Look at how the world responds to the change in the sun. Of course, it's different for people around the equator, but nonetheless, Celtic lands were very far north. So they didn't have that concept of the equator. But thinking about where have I been putting all my energy? Where have I been, what have I been doing or how have I been living? What is the balance of that? What would the opposite of that be? And, you know, if I invite that in even a little bit, doesn't mean we have to go from being meat eaters to completely vegan overnight. That's not what I'm saying. But maybe it's inviting in a couple vegetarian nights and seeing how does my body feel to that? Or if we've been working a ton, what does it look like to take two sick days in the week right off the weekend? So you have like four solid days of rest. What does that feel like? And what can come of that? So inviting balance, whether it's the yan and the yin, masculine, feminine, sun and moon, or looking at the wheel of the year itself and celebrating the things that deserve to be celebrated and nurturing and loving ourselves for the things that didn't come through. And that's a huge part of autumn, right? Is saying not everything I sowed as a dream to come true in the spring, not all of them grew. Not all of them bore fruit. And that's okay. Not everything has to be perfect all of the time. We can slow down, we can do less, we can rest.

Peter Kolakovic 34:06

So many people are are drawn to ancient historical sites like Stonehenge and and others. Why do you think that is? Why why do people go there on the summer solstice or the equinox to, you know, to celebrate? Well, what what is the purpose of that?

SPEAKER_01 34:24

Well, in in Celtic practice, these are really auspicious sacred nights. This is when there is some sort of astrological event that is unique to this one moment or this one evening in time. And so, you know, nights like in Sawin, so the night of Halloween, you know, the reason why Halloween is a is a Celtic celebration or ritual, right? Festival. And the reason why people would dress up is because, you know, or there would be performances with masks and fire and stuff, is because this is also the same night, one of many nights where the veil between the worlds is its thinnest. So when the ancestors, you could see this in uh Dia de los Muertos, right? The ancestors come forth and they eat from the offrenda. So the same thing with with Celtic spirituality. This is the night when the she, the gods, the goddesses, the I really they're called the Tua de Danu, the the people of Danu. And so the otherworldly race that we associate as gods and goddesses, this is when they can come out too. And, you know, but also here's come the trickster spirits and the fee and the fairies. And so you don't want to be stuck out all night, you know, kids. You wanna you want to stay inside. And if you're out, you want to wear a mask so you deceive them so they don't see you as a child. And so anyway, but why why people are attracted to these places is because these were the places where these celebrations happened. Or these are the places where there was, I'm I'm thinking of you know, La Cru and the Sleeve Nakali, uh, which is La Cru in Ireland. This is at the top of this big hill, and there's this beautiful white quartz rock cairn. And inside you can't enter it, but if you know, when back in the day when people could, you'd go in, and it just like with Newgrange and most cairns, there would be some like central spot with these little offshoot, you know, alcoves. And it was, it was, you know, you have your four for every season, every element. And so there was a lot of ritual and celebration and gathering to happen. And the land remembers just as much as the land remembers all the joy and excitement, the land can also remember the pain. So the land remembers everything. And so people come to these spaces because they feel the energy of this, these grand experiences or these powerful and intense experiences. And I think we we are attracted to them for two reasons. One, because it's it's ancient and it's not our modern. So it's something beyond what we are conditioned to see and live in every day. And two, it activates remembering. So it helps us in our bodies remember something stirring in our soul, like, oh, there's a connection here. Oh, I believe, you know, I've always wondered about this, but look, here it is in the in the information panel. Oh my gosh. You know, there's a remembering that happens.

Peter Kolakovic 37:31

If someone wanted to reconnect with that ancient wisdom, and particular in particular with ancient Celtic wisdom, where would you encourage them to begin?

SPEAKER_01 37:42

Well, there's okay, there are loads of great books. A classic author would be Tom Cohen. I'm also a fan of one of my mentors, which is Donna Forrest. There's an amazing woman named Jen Murphy with the Celtic Creatives, and she's also a woman I study with who's who has really awesome stuff in the Substack. These are all really great avenues. I would say if you can't, so of course, you know, of course, everyone's dream moment would be like just go there, just get on a plane. But like, not everyone can do that, and I totally resonate with that. So read books, listen to the stories. And so a huge part of Celtic culture and spirituality is storytelling. You know, for many months it would be brutally cold. And so people would be inside the home at the hearth, sharing stories, singing songs. And so, what are the stories of, you know, you could read the well, you could you can read many books, you can learn stories, you can, but I think one of the best things is just go outside, right? Go outside and to whatever aspect of nature is around your home and sit with it, whether it's desert, field, mountain, river, tree, bush, right, park, sit, breathe, breathe with those aspects of nature and just let yourself be held by the natural, be held by the land, and just breathe and see what comes up, whether it's a feeling, because it you whether or not people realize it, and again, like I said, our intuition uses our imagination as a way to communicate from our soul to our human brain. So even if you're quote, imagining something, oh, I must have made that up, and there's a chance you didn't. So if you felt a beautiful stirring in your heart while breathing with the tree, if you felt uh you oh or you heard a voice or you see a picture, believe it. Lean into it. And of course, I'm also here, so I'm always happy to help. I'm actually, I don't know when this will be out, but in the spring of 2027, I'll be debuting my my school of Celtic Spirituality and Shamanic Healing. And it's going to be a two-year program with an optional third for deep study in Keening. But yeah, and that's the first year is entirely around reliving again in a new way as the wheel of the year and learning some of these mythologies as medicine and then this in and the elements, and there's just a whole bunch packed in there, and I'm really excited about it. In year two, we begin to sit with the plant spirit as medicine. But that's that's year two is really for people who are looking to be a healer and be of service to community.

Peter Kolakovic 40:32

Wonderful. Well, this episode will come out well before spring 2027. So we'll make sure to put a link in the show notes to your offering so that listeners who are drawn to it can take advantage of that. That would be great.

Trauma In The Body And Unspoken Grief

Peter Kolakovic 40:47

I wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk about your work with somatic awareness and psychology. We often hear the phrase the body keeps the score. What has your own experience taught you about that idea?

SPEAKER_01 41:04

Oh, that's so true. And that's an amazing book. For anyone who's curious about how trauma is stored in the somatic body, the physical somas, which is the muscles, the bone, the tissue, the joints. It's a great book. It's kind of foundational, I believe. What I believe is that the body is a map. Just like the land is a history of what's happened, right? The mountains are showing the convergence of plates. The body is holding the story of your lived experience. And so when I tap into the energy of an individual and I'm doing a session with them, of course, I don't just tap into people's energy. I'll be clear about that. It's in a consensual session, whether it's a virtual or in person, sitting with the energy of the body, I begin to feel, you know, where the attention's being pulled. And then I feel in my body almost like a mirror, what's kind of the energetics coming up. And so what the body does is it starts to tell me a story. Maybe it's a specific isolated story, maybe it's a narrative about a larger time of life, but it tells me a story through sound, sight, and sensation in my own body about what's been stored here. And so the body keeps a score, is really speaking to the fact that, like I said earlier about the shadow, when we experience something, we're not always able to process it in the moment. And that's not a judgment. Some people physically cannot process trauma immediately because it's not safe. And so the body waits, it will wait and it's patient and it's hard, but it waits until life is easy. And you'll hear I'll hear this a lot with clients. Everything was fine. Finally, in my life, everything was fine. And then all of a sudden, it all went tits up or it all came crashing down. Why? What happened? What did I do? Nothing. Actually, something actually amazing. So something, yes. But what you did was you found peace. You finally found stability or safety to some degree, to the point where your body says, Oh, thank God. Okay, now I can relax, and now I can let all this stuff that's been sitting in here, I can start to let it up and out. And if we don't respond, if we try to pretend it's not there or just get back to status quo, that's where we start to see anxiety attacks. That's when we start to see depression and we start to have, you know, various ailments, physical ailments as well. And so the body is telling you, hey, Bub, we've been through it and we survived. We're now safe. Now let's deal with this because I don't want to keep carrying this heavy baggage any longer. The body has its own wisdom, just as the soul has its own wisdom. And when we Can let those divine wisdoms speak to us and tell us there's so much we can learn, not only about how amazing we all are in our own survival and endurance journeys, but how deserving we are to not have to carry that stuff any longer.

Peter Kolakovic 44:18

What emotions do people most commonly suppress and what happens when they remain unexpressed?

SPEAKER_01 44:26

Hmm. Grief is a big one. I think there's the acceptable grief of the loss of a loved one, but then there's this social perception or this belief people put on themselves that I need to get over this quickly. Grief doesn't get over, it is a cycle and it is a spiral journey in itself. And so we have to go through layers of it. So grief is one, and keep in mind, grief is more than just the loss of something. Grief can also be the dream that was never made real. Grief can be about the change in one's life. So growing up and becoming a teenager and then a young adult, and now I'm on my own. And there's a grief there. Every time we go through a, you know, I call it what I don't call in shamanism, it's called the death process. And so a death is just basically speaking to an ending of something. So every time we go through an ending and then we start a new beginning, if we're not grieving that which has ended, then we're carrying that grief with us until, you know, 30 years down the road, and next thing you know, we're just angry all the time because anger is a socially acceptable emotion. Anger is agency, anger is power. It's not it anger, like grief, is aligned with love. And so underneath these very common experiences of frustration and sadness is just this desire for love. It's it's really truly underneath so much pain, so much pain across the board. It doesn't matter how old, what race, what culture, underneath so much is just the dis this the desire to be seen and the desire to be told, I see you in your woundedness, whether I don't think you did enough or you this or that. I see you and I love you.

unknown 46:20

Yeah.

Peter Kolakovic 46:22

Why do you think so many people become disconnected from our own physical experience and carry this trauma sometimes for decades?

SPEAKER_01 46:32

Well, we don't talk about it. You know, we don't talk about the ways in which we can heal it, right? We have to, we have to work, we have to work. So we can't sit in our emotions. We should pray about it, right? But God oftentimes brings us messengers that we least expect. And if we're not willing to take the leap of faith of what's put in front of us, then we're not going to receive his love in that way. And also, I think that there we live in a society of convenience, especially in America. I can't speak for all countries and cultures, but you know, in America, there is this convenience culture. And so why should I feel like shit if I could just take a pill? Or if I could just drink, or if I could just spend this money, right? We we go to these very easy access points to hit our get our dopamine hits. But those dopamine hits can also come from breathing and regulating our nervous system. They can also come from pleasure, of the delight of a delicious brownie or cup of coffee, of walking outside and touching a tree and breathing with that tree, listening to the sound of a river. Like we can do these things. And yes, we have to feel to heal. Yes, we do have to feel these emotions, and it does stink. We don't love crying for two hours in a session, but those two hours of crying is clearing up years of repressed grief or repressed pleasure that now is being felt. And oh my gosh, I'm crying because I finally can feel something in my body that's lovely. And so when we release in these healing sessions, or in our own healing journey, I shouldn't say just with sessions, but when we release those emotions, we're doing tremendous work. So it's a not the same situation. So we don't need to be afraid of it because the same players are not there. You are older, wiser, and in a different context entirely, and ideally with a decent support system to help you process. So that in itself should make it more available and desirable to feel to heal. Two, you feel for a lot faster and it's not as intense. And when you're on the other side of it, you feel clarity. There's an openness inside because all that tension has now been released, and now there's clarity for intuition and love and presence that wasn't there before. So it's, you know, it's easy to pretend and avoid and distract, but it's so actually a lot harder to do that than it is to just begin to heal and be open to change. Because that work moves so beautifully, so intuitively, and it is it leads to a life of just feeling present and joyful and connected. It's worth it.

Peter Kolakovic 49:25

So

Breathwork, Keening, And Dying Well

Peter Kolakovic 49:26

you mentioned on several occasions, you know, feeling for healing and the importance of things like slowing down and breathing, conscious breathing, and touching trees. And I'm just wondering, are there other practices that can help people become more present and embodied in everyday life?

SPEAKER_01 49:47

Absolutely, yes. So breath work is amazing. Breath work is something that we see in the yogic tradition as pranayama. We also see it in Qigong and in Tai Chi. Breath work is it's well, literally, we all have to breathe to live. So it's the first thing we do when we're born, it's the last thing we do right as we're dying. And so when we can harness the breath, we can breathe in a way. My favorite is the coherence breath. We can breathe in a way that allows us to begin to regulate our nervous system, to calm ourselves down. So coherence breath is five seconds in and five seconds out, even slow and steady. Five seconds in, five seconds out, both through the nose or both through the mouth, but not interchanging. And just doing that breath for a minute can begin to like feel this massive rush of energy. And you're like, whoa. And it's like all that adrenaline that you were in is now kind of just being pushed up and washes off. Because by minute two, you start to feel calmer. And then minute three, you're back in your body and you're like, oh, yeah, that's good. You know, I feel recentered. So breath work, there's also activating breath works that you can do that will help to basically trigger the sympathetic nervous response into a slight trauma response. But because you're in a controlled, welcoming, calm environment and you know what this is, this is an activating breath. It the the body psychological, I mean, we can't truly name this in studies yet, but the body perceptively receives this information of I am safe. And so then it's like, oh, wow, all that stuff that was just triggered through this activating breath that's come up can now be let go because I'm safe and I'm in a safe environment. And so that's you know, breath work can take you the full gamut of deep healing as well as the really beautiful, calming, and relaxing. So breathwork is amazing, and there are plenty of free breath work resources. I'm a part of the teaching program of the Breathing Space School. So breathing space has free weekly breath works across the world every week. You don't have to pay a thing, you just sign up and you get to attend. So breath work is great. You know, like I said, qigong, acupuncture, yoga is phenomenal, um, somatic releases and stretching, right? Exercise can also be a really great way. And meditation, I mean, all of these things can start to bring us to where we as individuals need to be to begin to understand what is the modality that's best for us. You know, I of course believe strongly in somatic healing and energy work and soul work, but that's not everyone's bag, and that's okay too.

Peter Kolakovic 52:43

Wonderful. Thank you. So I wanted to shift gears one one last time, as we don't have a whole lot of time left, and I still wanted to touch upon some of your other work with grief and emotional healing, and this term keening, which is very uh unfamiliar to me on before this conversation, and I'm sure it's probably unfamiliar to many listeners. What is it exactly and why has this ancient practice endured for centuries?

SPEAKER_01 53:13

Well, so fascinating is that it was slowly eradicated, except that, okay, so keening is a grief-tending ritual in the Celtic lands of Ireland and Scotland, and there's presumably some presence of it in Wales and in Britain. But we don't have the information about that because of the history, where the Catholic Church and the Christian Protestant Church, you know, various ages, they basically said, like, this is unseemly, this is inappropriate to have these women dressed in black with black veils come to awake and cry over the body, sing songs and laments, mourning, you know, these really intense sounds. And what they would do is they were evoking the grief of the community so that everyone could really let it out. And then when they moved on, they moved on and they didn't stay in the past as well as try to forge into the future. And so it was said to be unseemly, inappropriate, archaic, devily. And so it was pushed out. And in the 1900s, the last known Keener died, I think in the 40s in Ireland. And then Mary McLachlan in the 70s and 80s started resurging by asking people, hey, what do you know about this? What is their information? So she started doing this amazing research. Madge Bray in Scotland has been, she has this um traditional futures page on YouTube, and she sings the traditional folk songs from Scotland. She does it as a keener and brings it act with the peabrock and the bagpipes. And so what it is is that it's for me, I do it much more shamanically. I'm not a formal singer, so I don't sing songs with actual words. But for me, when someone is beginning to go into keening energy in a session, or if it's at a retreat that I'm holding, or a session specifically for keening, basically I'm connecting with the goddess Bive, the one who called me to this work. I'm breathing with her and I'm letting her kind of tell me what notes to hit. And so I just oooh, you know, like sing. And I'm not a great singer, but it works because it's about the energy and the frequency. And so as those the song hits the body, it pulls up that grief. And again, the grief can come from so many different angles. So for me, I call myself a shamanic keener to kind of differentiate that I'm not a formal keener, but a keener nonetheless. So I say keening. And that's it. The practice has been resurging thanks to Mary and Madge. And there's another woman named who we oh gosh, I can't remember her name, but she's also in Ireland. If anyone's if someone's like, who is it? Then just email me on my website and we'll absolutely share that info. But there's so these three women have been teaching the new generation. And so there's, you know, like a dozen to a couple dozen of keeners around the world now, a few in North America, a handful in Europe. And it's just it's growing because the people, the collective needs to keen. We are so desperate to let go of that ancient grief from our own bodies and our own life, as well as the ancestral and as well as the land. We're all feeling this need to cleanse on the inside and let out the stuff that's been being been carried for too long. And that's what keening offers us.

Peter Kolakovic 56:37

So why do you think we've been carrying that grief for so long? Why, why does modern society struggle so much with grief and with death?

SPEAKER_01 56:47

Well, yeah, I mean, we're taught to fear it, we're taught to avoid it, right? Don't look older, look younger, right? It's it's it's so innocuous when you see it out in the world, this fear of death. And yet, why? It's one of the most natural things about life. We cannot have life without death. You know, if no one died, we would have been, I don't, I don't know what I'm trying to say, but we would basically have created towers upon towers for bodies to exist on top of the, you know what I mean? It wouldn't work. We have to have death. That's a part of life. And life exists because of it. And so I think we fear it because of the pain that we've seen in the past and that that our ancestors have experienced. And so death meant loss of power, loss of life, loss of presence. And so, you know, those sound very simple, but you start thinking about it, and it's like we have a whole country, a whole culture predicated on power, power over. And it's the person who has power over who decides if you live or die. Yeah, I don't want that. And so, you know, it starts, you start to bleed down. So I think there's a fear of death because one, we don't remember that it's part of the life, it's part of nature, it's part of the natural. And two, because we've had religions that tell us when you die, if you weren't absolutely perfect, you're going to hell. And it's like, well, shit, I don't want to know what that's like. You know, what if I wasn't perfect? I don't want to die. I don't want to find out. And, you know, so I think there's a lot of fear structure around death that's been created for us.

Peter Kolakovic 58:25

We

Becoming Who You Truly Are

Peter Kolakovic 58:26

started this conversation with a quote from Carl Jung. And as we come to the end of this conversation, I'm going to introduce another quote from Carl Jung. The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. What does it actually mean to become who we truly are, and what usually stands in our way?

SPEAKER_01 58:53

To become who we truly are, I believe, is to live an embodied self, uh to live embodied, to know that the soul and the human form are actually interwoven into this one presence. So you that die di as in two and vine, woven together, divine. We are divine. And so when I'm not saying we have to walk around all being like, I'm goddess so and so, or I'm Queen Cleopatra, reincarnated, and like no, okay, there's probably like a thousand queen Cleopatras reincarnated, it's fine. We're all part of energy, and that's energy is is abundant and and not siloed like that, nonetheless. But to be embodied, to live in our body, to be present, to enjoy pleasure, to experience the full dimension of emotions and in life, and to be good to each other, so that way we can feel joy and pleasure and not fear for pain. And to live embodied is to live with the soul and the body as one. And so I think to live as our truest self is to embody ourselves so that way on our heart, in our heart rather, in what we feel called to do, which is our purpose. And not everyone's purpose is this grandiose thing. For many people, it's quite simple: like be kind, make people laugh, you help people get through trouble times because you're really clever, like you're a good thinker. Our purpose is usually around something like that. It's not usually a deliverable that we achieve. And so to live embodied is to feel our intuition, to feel our soul, so that way we can then follow that intuition into action and making that wise action towards our purpose, our reason of being here. So that way when we do live, we live fully. We live with tenderness as well as joy, as well as uh abundance and all in all of its wonderful things, and also it's really difficult things because there's always gonna be challenge and opportunities to grow. But we live fully. And that way when we die, we die well, because we die unafraid and ready to go forward.

Peter Kolakovic 1:01:08

So

What Living Your Best Life Means

Peter Kolakovic 1:01:09

speaking of living with purpose and living fully, Martha, my last question for you what does it mean to you to live your best life?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:21

Well.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:39

Not like diagnosed, but overly distracted. But to listen with my heart and to listen to spirit and to go where they tell me and to show up as they as they guide me and invite me to do and to be of service. So for me, it's to be human and have this amazing human experience with my the family that I'm very blessed to have, but also to hear the divine, to hear God, to hear spirit as they say, Hey, we need you to go here now. And I'm like, Oh, what? Okay. And I do, and then they put me in front of someone who's been praying and asking for help, and just to listen, to be kind, to mirror back to them what the divine wants them to hear or what they are even saying to themselves, but don't even hear it themselves. You know, that's that's mine, that's mine to to live.

Peter Kolakovic 1:02:28

Martha Wright, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It's been a pleasure to speak with you.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:35

Thank you so much, Peter. Thank you all to listen who were listening. Thank you.