This is a special episode. Today, Patty is talking with author Judith Nilan. She and Patty had their very first conversation on the podcast and you can listen in to their discussion about Ireland and spirituality and of course, magic.
Judith takes people on spiritual tours of Ireland. How fun is that? That’s not what she ever thought would happen. She was working in the non-profit world and on her first trip to Ireland everything changed.
Her book, A Call To Crone: Weaving Wisdom With Threads Of Irish Heritage is how Patty first heard about Judith.
Make sure you hear the definition of crone as Judith explains it. It’s going to be much different than the references you may be accustomed to.
Wise women have been discounted for years. Judith explains how today we lack the rituals of the past, marking life transitions.
She now helps others create the ritual and connection they are being called to. Her story is fascinating, and you’ll find yourself wondering how you can connect with the wisdom of your ancestors.
Judith says, “it’s time”. You hold the divine light inside of you and it’s time to step into the fullness of who you are. Women’s voices and wisdom need to be shared with joy and love and light and peace.
Connect with Judith:
Email: judith@stonefires.com
Blog: www.stonefireblog.com
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TRANSCRIPT
0:00:04.3: Welcome to the space for magic podcast, where people who are led by their hearts come to learn the secrets to receiving all the gifts the Universe has for us. I’m your host, Patty Lennon. I’m an ex-type A corporate banker turned intuitive coach. Using a blend of common sense, brain science, and just a dash of magic, I’m here to help you create abundance in every area of your life and business. Welcome. Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of the space for Magic podcast. OMG, I am so excited to bring you our guest, she is someone who… I’m literally just talking to her for the first time in this interview, so you guys are going to hear my first experience of Judith one-on-one, which she has touched my heart and opened up something inside of me in such a wild and amazing way, through her book so Judith Nilan is our guest today, and her book is A Call To Crone: Weaving Wisdom With Threads Of Irish Heritage. And this book, just like we talk about, magic just finds us and when we make space for what we need will arrive… This book arrived in my life, probably a year before I started reading it, maybe less, but right at the beginning of covid, I was looking at my bookshelf, this book I was beaming to read me, and I pulled it off the shelf and I remember someone had sent her to me, but I couldn’t remember who it was.
0:01:38.5: And everything in it was what I needed to hear, and so I’m just gonna leave it there and we’ll talk more about who sent it to me and how I came to find it, but for now, Judith, welcome. I’m so excited to talk to you.
0:01:53.4: Thank you, Patty. I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you so much.
0:01:58.3: So I didn’t give people your professional background, or we haven’t even talked about what the book’s about and why it has so much meaning to me, why don’t you give the person that’s listening on the other side of this podcast a sense of who you are in the world beyond an author.
0:02:16.7: So my provisional background is really interesting, I work with non-profits, and then I was a consultant with non-profits, my husband and I owned a graphic design agency in Tacoma for about 25 years. And so that’s my professional background, working with people, facilitating groups, and more and more, I wandered into the area of just simply working with teams and people about how they could manifest their mission. So they asked the corporate piece, then I went to Ireland and my life changed, and while I was still operating the design agency, more and more and more, I started to do spiritual work, I started to work with women in Ireland and the wisdom that’s available there and so that’s in a nutshell how I got to be where I am now. I still do a lot of graphic design, but I’m… I don’t know, retired a horrible word, but I am now focused on leading tours to Ireland, spiritual tours, I have a house over there now, and I write books and lead circles.
0:03:23.5: So good. So you don’t know this, so I’ll just share why this book just had such meaning for me when it found me, and then I wanna get into the word Crone. For me, I’m gonna be 50 this year, and I have been really excited about that milestone, a lot of my friends haven’t been people that grew up with who are my exact age, and they’ve really resisted it, but for the last, I’d say four years, I have ate to move into Crone, that part of my journey as a woman, I probably was telling my friend Lynn something about that, and she is the one who ultimately sent me the book and how you’re here because she messaged me just a couple of weeks ago and said, Did you ever read this and you send me a picture of your book and I’m like, Oh my gosh, yes, I did, and I’ve been wanting to thank of the person that put it in front of me, I’m so glad I talked to you and then she was through a mutual colleague, able to make an introduction to you and literally every word I know that I’m just coaching my teenage daughter, Do not say literally all the time, but really Judith, literally every page, it felt like coming home to something inside myself, what you shared and this wisdom…
0:04:45.4: And I’m born in the States, but I am 100% Irish so Just the sense of the motherland calling me home has been really alive for me. So I know right at the beginning of the book, you say like, Let’s talk about this word Crone, or I know that this word doesn’t always conjure up what it truly means, but… What does the word Crone really mean? Well.
0:05:11.4: If you look at the entomology of it, Patty, and thank you so much because I think that part of what we’ll get into it, but I think part of why women are so resonating with this book… And especially if I can say this about you, my dear younger women, I’m gonna be 70 this month, I actually have a teacher who would tell me that I’m not really qualified to be a Crone until I’m 75, but I’m started on this journey earlier, and I think it’s because we don’t honor women, we don’t honor the wisdom that we have pretty much at any age, and so what I find is that there’s this incredible longing to really step into the fullness of the power and potential of who we are, and I think that a lot of women, we don’t have those times of transition where we do any kind of a meaningful ritual or any kind of an initiation, and so we kinda just wander through life without understanding these hallmarks and these benchmarks of when we step into a different kind of wisdom, and I know that for a lot of women looking at elder wisdom is something that really calls to them because that wisdom…
0:06:17.7: And you talked about this, you write about this on your site, Patty, that it’s in our DNA, we didn’t just sort of pop in here, blank slates, this stuff is embedded in our heritage in our bones, and so this goes back to the lack of honoring wisdom and we all know about the burning times in Europe, and since you’ve got Irish heritage, I’ll just mention that there were only about five actually witches that were burned in Ireland because the Irish have held and honoring for wisdom and for elders and for Wise Women. That just didn’t exist in other countries, and of course, the church wasn’t quite as prevalent then, but the word Crone goes back to before the language really started to be written down, Crone, if you look at the etymology means crown, and it really signifies this sort of glowing crown of wisdom, that emanation of that sort of wisdom, light that shines from true elders, and I think we also do see this in some of their religious iconography, you look at pictures, there’s a sort of halo glow around some of the heads, and I think that’s very much what Crown and crone is…
0:07:37.1: The other thing that’s interesting is the other word that women and other people don’t like a lot is HAG, and hag actually the etymology of it comes from Hagio, which means holy. So if you look at these ancient words that described wise women, crown of light wisdom, and being holy women, it really goes back to an earlier time when women in the wisdom that women held, especially elders, was much more honored and revered. Okay, that’s a long way to answer your question, I’m sorry.
0:08:12.0: But that was awesome, that was awesome. So now I’m gonna jump around ’cause now I’ve got, you’re here, my most recent favorite author with me and I get to ask you whatever I want, and so what I wanna know next is, So what happened on that first trip to Ireland.
0:08:30.0: Where it… With my dad, and so he wanted to try the old sod, as he used to say, and so I surprised him one year with a Christmas present for us to fly to Ireland together, I had no thought ever of going to Ireland and when we were putting our plans together, I had heard about these stone circle things, and I said to dad, I really like to go visit one while we’re there, ’cause I have no idea. So we ended up going in the Beara Peninsula, southwest of Ireland. I ended up standing next to a stone circle next to a standing stone, and for the first time in my life, I started seeing things, I started… Out of my peripheral vision, I saw ancestors and I had no idea where to put that. Fast forward, I started taking, like you said, before, Patty Ireland calls us home, she calls us home, and I kept going back with just friends, and one of the times that I was there, I encountered a fairy wind… They talk about it. It was a pretty extraordinary event. And when I came back from that trip, I found myself in a completely different place, I found myself…
0:09:39.6: My diet changed, my outlook was starting to shift, and by happenstance, as the universe gives us these gifts, I ended up having a session with a shaman who actually would later become my teacher for a bit, and in this session, I said, Oh, I don’t know if something happened in Ireland, and it was like this fairy wind and I started seeing ancestors, and she looked at me and she said, Did you bring somebody home with you? And I laughed ’cause I had no place to put any of this, my spiritual tradition was like zip and I laughed and she said, No, no, no, she said, You did. And this ancestor has a transmission for you, and you are so not ready to receive it, which was absolutely true. So she was doing a vision quest, I did the vision quest with her once and then twice, and that was the opening of it. And I started to understand that like many of us were called by our biological ancestors were called by the ancient wisdom Ireland to come home. And so that’s what started it for me. And then I just kept going back and now leading groups to go to the same sacred sites and do the meditations and have a connection with both the landscape and the ancient wisdom.
0:10:56.8: Now, do you believe that the places that you’re being called to… That you do you… Do you call them journeys? Correct. Or am I getting the wrong word?
0:11:07.5: No, you’re absolutely right. I don’t like the word tour, tour speaks too much like tourism, so they’re journeys and they are journeys, really not a tour of a, Let’s go see this and off the bus for five minutes and then back on the bus and go kiss the Blarney stone. They are journeys of both physical moving through Ireland in the landscapes and also very much journeys of soul.
0:11:31.8: Yeah, and so when you found the places that you feel native to or called to, or is there any connection with your ancestors to that particular location in Ireland, or is it that for whatever reason, your ancestors and your guides on the other side are using these particular sacred spaces in partnership with you.
0:11:57.3: Excellent question, and it turns out the answer was both, I’ve been having some conversations with my dad in the last couple of years, and my dad’s been… He’s on the other side now, and Dad has really been talking to be about the heritage of my biological line, Jen, Ireland, which apparently goes back to some Druid foundations, and he has been adamant on me about going to these different places in exploring where we were and in fact, where the cottage is, it turns out one of those places, so I was actually called to this particular village to a place where my biological ancestors were, and where they did some of their ancient spiritual work. In addition, when I first started going to Ireland, I started getting connected with the… To the two other down and people call them, but the two day the divine tribe, the spiritual indigenous ancestors of Ireland. So I first started working with them, and my first connections were a sacred place is like Knocknarea Maeve’s Cairn in Sligo, and then particularly Uisneach, which is the center of Ireland and has been the spiritual center forever. Of Ireland. So it’s a combination of both.
0:13:13.7: And so I get guided to particular landscapes were where they actually did ceremony, and at Uisneach I’ve been able to find that I actually was there 1800 years ago, doing the same kinds of ceremonies that I’m doing now, so that’s been pretty amazing to work with.
0:13:34.1: That’s crazy. That’s so cool. So I… Judith, obviously new to each other, and so I had a late in life, opening myself, so I walk through the world a type A until I was like 36 and then everything changed, so I totally understand the experience of just… Which pocket does this little fairy being… Go into in my mind. So for me, in relationship to your work, it’s been for a while, for years and years, I’ve known I need to go back to Ireland. I need to go back to Ireland, I studied in Ireland when I was in college and visited a couple of times, but what’s been calling me back is, is actually a past life that was one of my first past life that I remembered and I had to do with Bridget and the fire, Bridget. And I don’t know anything more than that. I need… That has some relationship to that. So from my own kind of Inquiry, there’s a part in your book where you talk, and I’m sure it’s one of the spaces you just talked about, that I will not even attempt to pronounce the cave where when people have gone in that they’ve seen things…
0:14:48.9: You know what I’m talking about, right? I hope it’s one got maybe…
0:14:53.4: Yeah, I know it’s the Irish, but it’s on a God, that’s a pretty… Part of that, I got it. And so let me just get back to your question, but let me just say when you go to Ireland, to my dear, and we will talk about this, ’cause you and I’ve talked about… I would love to help you figure out how you wanna get there. You need to go to Uisneach because the story of Uisneach, And it gets back to what you were talking about before, is Bridget’s story. And the creation story of Ireland is basically that Bridget came to earth, saw that there was a lot of darkness here went back, talked to the other divine beings that she was part of the her tribe, and said, We have to go save the earth. Basically, this is the Reader’s Digest condensed version. And so she was the one that brought the divine light to Ireland in the first place. And so Bridget beyond St. Bridget holds that creation story for Ireland, and it’s an amazing story and it happened addition of… So it’d be fun to talk to you about heading back there and getting that story personally on the.
0:15:57.2: Lay, so then that leads to my next question, which is really a question for all of us, and I think you did a beautiful job of gently offering wisdom around this, in your book, is that when we return to places that our soul is calling us to, our ancestry is calling us to, how do we do it in a way that’s respectful to the space and not just kind of tramping along into the cave because we hear it a cool place. Yeah.
0:16:28.2: Excellent question. Because there is an honoring, there’s a deep honoring. And I think one of the most amazing things about Ireland is at the sacred sites, the locations, the cairns, for the most part, have not been disturbed, so when we are at those locations, when we are in those stone circles, when we are in those cairns, we are in places that our ancestries did and ancestors did ceremonial and spiritual work, the potency of those locations is really profound, and then you do have places like the cave where yes, we went down into the earth and yes, it was a pretty dicey experience for some of my people, when a woman from Ireland, who was, I’m not real happy with us yanks coming over and doing ceremony, that she was going to freak us all out and went down into the cave and started channeling… Morean the great queen people and kinda know where his Morgan was. And that was an interesting confrontation because my people did not understand the whole concept of channeling at that point in time, Patty, and talk with them about it because I didn’t think it was really important. And when Laura opened that up for people who took him a day and a half to recover from it, but what they did get from it was how close…
0:17:49.7: How close those entities are and how thin the veils are. And part of the beauty of that is that I would suspect Patty that part of what you’re experiencing is that you probably know the myth that there were battles at motor and the TOA came and they defeated the dark forces, and they defeated the dark forces, and then finally, when the males INS came in, they all just decided, You know what, basically people are not ready to hold on to the divinity, so we’re gonna go into another dimension, some people say they went into the earth, and that was the story of the mounds, but they basically went into another dimension. And what they said is that When you are ready, we will come back to be with you and to work with you. And so they’re the ones that are calling us Patty, they are calling his home because they know this is a time, and this is a time it’s foretold and talked about in cultural traditions around the world, this is the time of awakening with you name at the Rainbow tribe, but this is the time when we are called to go back and awaken like you are doing now, through your work, Patty, to awaken that ancient knowing, and they’re ready to work with us, they’re coming up, they’re starting to connect with this…
0:19:07.4: I’m hearing more and more people who are having a connection, I have no doubt that if and when you are back in Ireland and you are there, particularly if you get to go to Uisneach, Bridget will find you, she will connect with you, and you will then begin to start having your own personal relationship…
0:19:27.2: I love that you just said that because you answered a question I didn’t even know I had, which was part of what really pushed me to make connection with you, I think where Lynn even reached out just coincidentally, right. When this feeling of like, I wanna bring this conversation up in the open and I’m not sure why or how… But three of us who are on similar journeys, meaning, we came from a very traditional corporate background, mostly our work has some type of spiritual basis, but we’ve always looked to maybe traditions that are more outside of the Irish heritage, so First Nations people or South American people from the Andes, that type of work is not something I’ve been trained in, but it’s sort of what I’ve been given awareness of, I guess I would say, and all of us have been told either by spirit teachers from the other side of the veil or literal spirit teachers here on the earth plane, you need to go back to your own people. You need to find the teachers that are indigenous to your ancestry, you can’t keep borrowing from other cultures, and not because it’s disrespectful, it can be, but more because…
0:20:51.9: It’s important for all of us to find our way back home, and I think what you’re describing is a little bit of what I feel. So many people I see or have happening for them. Yeah.
0:21:05.2: I’ll never forget. I had lunch, I had just finished my first book, the legacy book, and I was having lunch with a very close friend, and she’s black, and I talked to her about my book and she just sat back and laughed and she said… Well, it’s about time you found your own goddamn religion, your own tradition, and she’s right, because… Well, there’s two reasons, one, cultural appropriation is huge, it’s not appropriate, it’s really not appropriate to step into other traditions and then just take pieces of it. I do sweat lodges here, and I was really sitting patty with that whole notion of cultural appropriation with the lodges, and then I found out that in fact they did sweat lodges in Ireland, which I had not known, and I have now visited some of them their stones, a little bit different configuration. But now when I do a lot, it’s completely in tune with the Irish spiritual heritage, so that’s… The cultural misappropriation, I think, is a big deal, and it’s really something we need to honor and respect, but the real other reason is that because Patty if we have Irish biological heritage if we have Irish past life heritage, there is such potency and power for us because that is embedded in our DNA, that is something that’s in our biological and soul memory, and we don’t need to go find something else, we need to dig deeply into what we have known throughout lives and through past lives, because there’s more power and authentic power for us, in the Irish tradition, and it’s there, it’s just a matter of going back and spending time listening and really paying attention to both the Earth energies and the spiritual energies that come through a…
0:23:00.1: Man, I love it. Alright.
0:23:02.0: So on listening… Well, let me just say, if you’re listening and you felt some calling back to Ireland, whether it’s because of your own biology or a past life calling, and you wanna learn more about Judith’s work, Judith, where would you like them to first find you?
0:23:22.6: Emailing me and my website is probably the best way… I don’t sell my books on Amazon for a couple of reasons, and the most important reason, Patty, is that we can’t have… I wouldn’t have found you. Okay, when somebody buys a book from me, I actually am the fulfillment office around here, so I actually package up the book and I email people back and we into a conversation, and people are surprised that the author actually responded, but for me… Yeah. Okay, it’s about selling books. But that’s really not what this is about, Patty. This is about building and connecting the sisterhood, so when people can reach out to me through my blog or through my email, which is just fine, we can have a conversation, and I am thrilled to offer people, as you and I will discover… And when we get to do this together, I’m thrilled to offer people whatever I can to support them, coming back home to Ireland, coming back home to themselves in terms of places to connect with people to see, resources to look at. So yeah, my stone fire blog and my email are the best way to get ahold of me.
0:24:34.3: Okay, and I don’t have your… Let me see, what are you Judith@stonefire.com, right? There’s an S in there, so as judith@stonefires.com. Okay, great, and we’ll put those in the show notes as well, both the link to your blog site and your email, so are there any last words of wisdom or point that you would like someone who’s listening to hear right now in this time and space?
0:25:04.6: I think the most important thing for me, Patty, and I am so grateful and honored for this opportunity to talk to sisters is that Sisters, it’s time, it’s time for us to pick up the wisdom that we hold inside of us, and people ask me if I’m working with you, what do I need to believe? And that’s an excellent question because there’s only one answer to it, you need to believe that you are spiritual and that you hold the divine and divine light and divine wisdom inside of you. And everything I do is simply providing, whether it’s a book or a workshop, or a journey or a circle of simply providing the container in which you can step into the fullness of who you are, and it is time for our sisters, the world needs us in this time, we need to step forward with our voices, we need to step back into the wisdom that we hold and share it with joy and love, and light and peace, and we need to dance this because it is a joyful journey. Oh, so good, so good. Thank you so much, Judith, for being here. I have deeply honored and blessings to you, Patty, I know we’ll be in touch.
0:26:19.5: Blessings to all of those who are listening to this podcast. Thank you for your time, and thank you for your heart and your soul.
0:26:29.6: Hey, thanks for listening. If you know someone who needs to hear this message, please share this episode with them, and if you’re feeling really generous, I’d love for you to leave us a review at your favorite podcast app, it helps us with many more people, and it fills my heart with so much joy when I hear what you have to say about what I’ve shared. I’m cheering for your success, have an amazing day. And don’t forget, always create space for magic.
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