Morrígan At The Pier
I visited my friend Dom in Greystones, Co. Wicklow, a seaside paradise 15 miles south of Dublin en route to a Holotropic Breathwork Residential. For those not familiar, Holotropic Breathwork is a psychotherapeutic method that induces a non-ordinary state of consciousness by lowering carbon dioxide levels through accelerated breathing, which shifts brain activity, stimulates the limbic system, and can trigger the release of repressed emotions and memories. Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina developed Holotropic Breathwork in the 1970s as a non-drug method to access the deep healing states that Stan had previously observed in patients during LSD-assisted psychotherapy.
As Dom and I sat on the pier eating burritos, I noticed a crow staring at me with its beak fixed wide open. She could have been giving me an aggressive hint that she wanted a bit of chicken out of my burrito, or she could have been panting from the heat, but the newfound mystic in me was like: “that’s the Morrígan.” The Morrígan is a shape-shifting Irish goddess of battle, prophecy, and sovereignty, who embodies death and transformation. She loves a liminal space like a pier, marking the threshold between land and sea.
The Morrígan often appears before great battles or life-changing moments to announce the passage the hero is about to enter. Enter dragon, aka me… she’s totally here on the pier at the edge of land and sea, announcing the transition I’m about to make from conscious to unconscious.
The Morrígan served the most in the Second Battle of Moytura, when the Tuatha Dé Danann, god-like beings of the Otherworld who embodied Ireland’s natural and spiritual forces, faced the Fomorians, a chaotic race of basically sea monsters who oppressed and drained the land.
The night before the battle, the Dagda, chieftain of the Tuatha Dé Danann, met up with the Morrígan by the River Unius. She let him lie with her, a symbolic union of his masculine power of plenty with her fierce sovereignty. This act sealed victory for the Tuatha, as it was a ritual mating of life-force and death-force. You see, the Dagda was this daddy-energy, full-bellied, live-laugh-love kind of guy whose club could kill with one end and restore life with the other. The Morrígan was the crow of battle, who announces death before it comes.
The union sealed the Tuatha Dé Danann’s victory because life-force without death-force leads to stagnation, greed, and overgrowth, and death-force without life-force leads to destruction without renewal, so pure void. Together they form wholeness: the endless cycle where destruction clears space and abundance fills it again, ensuring renewal after destruction. In the heat of battle, the Morrígan spread fear, confusion, and frenzy among the sea-monster guys, the Fomorians, tipping the scales toward victory for the Tuatha Dé Danann.
And the best bit was when the Fomorians fell she stood and gave prophecy. She spoke of a world drowned in blood, of skies darkened, and of bones broken. But she didn’t end with doom. She declared that the land would flourish, rivers would run full again, and prosperity would return.
So, after a beautiful cliff edge walk and a dip in the sea, Dom dropped me off at the battleground, I mean the retreat centre, and I carried that feeling of the Morrígan’s presence with me, staying open to the idea of death-force and life-force for wholeness.
And the experience unfolded in a way that really did feel like battle, shoulder to shoulder with warriors. I was moved by my own inner experience and battled with myself on the mat each day, but I was also rocked by the experience of sitting for my breathwork partner, witnessing her process, and the process of everyone else in the room, who I became very fond of and concerned for. Most of the population would do anything to avoid what everyone in this room paid to do, to go to war with their own Fomorians, inner sea monsters.
I joked with the group over dinner that I’m on a “healing bender” this year because last year Moon Omens on Instagram told me I need to go home and heal generational wounds and restore the matriarchy in my homeland. I thought, grand so: goodbye London, hello Kerry. And my experience so far this year has been that healing is just dying. I keep wondering, am I dead enough yet? By which I mean ego-death. It has also been a time of peak, joyful, abundant living despite the darker introspective times, so I feel so grateful for the luxury of both.
And I am deeply grateful to be grand. I love all of this introspective stuff because I want to be great, great for myself, as great as I can be for everyone I support as a coach, great for the people I love, and great enough to write songs and stories that really say something because I’m living a life examined. But I also foresee the error in sitting around every day giving myself stage direction notes and not doing enough of the just getting on with the show!
So here’s to accepting, embracing and exploring it all, we might as well expand ourselves while we’re here sure, and here’s to finding wholeness in the co-existence of the dark and the light, death and life.
