CC Podcast S01E01: What Was Handed To You
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The Inherited Weight
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Lora O'Brien: So there's a particular kind of guilt I want to talk about today, and it's the one that turns up with no event or reason really attached to it at all. You're driving home from something completely ordinary, or you're standing at the sink with your hands in the water, and this weight just arrives. Now, because you're a sensible woman with a life and responsibilities, you go looking for what you did wrong, and there's nothing there to find because nothing happened, and nobody said a word to you So what do most of us do with that?
We maybe decide that the fault has to be in us somewhere because there's nowhere else for it to be, and that decision is where an awful lot of very expensive searching often starts. I've watched capable women spend years and serious money on it, and I've done my own version of it too. I'm Lora O'Brien.
I'm a native Irish [00:01:00] educator and cultural steward, and I hold a master's degree in Irish history. Everything that I teach comes out of our living Irish tradition and the history behind it, and nothing in it is borrowed from somewhere else and given a Celtic paint job. And that decides what you'll get from me here and what you won't on this podcast.
The Cailleach of Beara
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Lora O'Brien: So let me bring you a woman out of the Irish record because the historical record hands an inheritance over in names and places, and we've very nearly stopped doing that, and I really don't think it's something that we'd want to let go of . A scholar called Kuno Meyer published her poem in 1899, and sitting right in front of that poem, there's a short prose introduction that some scribe put there. But here it is in Meyer's own translation word for word.
It says, "The old woman of Beara, Dicti was her name. Of Corco [00:02:00] Ruini she was." So he names her people there as well, and then he ~keeps going. "Of them also was Brigid, the daughter of Iustán and Léithán, and the daughter of Iustán and Léithán, the wife of Cercher and Olach, the daughter of Muiniguin." the wife of Cerber and~
~Beal~
~And then he just ~keeps going. "Of them also was Brigid, the daughter of Éostúin, and Liadán, the wife of Cermait, and Uallach, the daughter of Muinign. Fionn," who would've been a wise man, "had left a prophecy for them that they should never be without a famous, illustrious woman of their race." Now, listen to what that has already done, and she hasn't even opened her mouth yet, the actual Cailleach of Beara.
She has her own name, and the name is Digdi. Not the old woman, not somebody's mother. She has people. She has a place. Three other women of her line are named right beside her, and every one of them gets a name of her own before she gets the man that she's attached to, which, for 1899 translation even, that was quite rare.
But the poem is actually [00:03:00] much older. Then there's a prophecy running through the whole family which says that this line, this lineage, will never be short of a woman worth talking about. And, isn't that something that we'd all like to think about our own lineage?
But her inheritance, it's names, it's places, it's stated relationships, and that's the whole difference between a lineage that you can work with and one that just sits around gathering dust, right? So now compare that with how yours arrived. Nobody sat you down for the most part, if you're like most of us.
Nobody said, "Here's what your grandmother believed about money, and here's what it's gonna cost you to keep believing it. And here's the thing that your mother couldn't say out loud in that house, and here's where it went instead." You got it the way we all [00:04:00] get it, off the walls, in the atmosphere, in whatever didn't get said at the dinner table you absorbed it before you were old enough to name one single bit of it, and that's exactly why you can't put it down now The word that everybody reaches for is baggage, and baggage is a very soft word for something that's actually quite precisely shaped.
What you're carrying has edges to it. It has a date on it, and most of the time it has somebody's name on it as well. A thing with a date and a name can be picked up and turned over and set down somewhere specific, where an atmosphere can't be picked up at all
The Bean Feasa's Method
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Now, the second thing I want to give you is a method rather than a story, and it comes from the Bean Feasa, the wise woman of Irish tradition. Another scholar, Gearóid Ó Crualaoiich, published a study of the Bean Feasa in the journal [00:05:00] Folklore in 2005. It did become a whole book. But he opened that article with a legend a collector wrote down in Cape Clear in County Cork in December of 1933 from a woman of 70 called Eileen Uà Choideagáin.
So it went like a girl on Sherkin Island loses her speech. She goes to bed grand and wakes up unable to talk, and they bring her east to a woman who used to be giving out knowledge. And that woman can do nothing for her the first day and tells her to come back in a fortnight. She comes back, and this is what she gets in Ă“ Crualaoiich's translation.
"Weren't you," she said, "driving a horse down the hillside when you met an angry red-haired woman of the Harnedys, and she had a woolen cloak around her, and she struck you a blow on each side of you and the third blow down on top of your head? [00:06:00] There was poison in that." Now, just take a minute there to watch which way that diagnosis travels because it goes outward to a hillside and a woman on the road and somebody else's temper.
And at no point in it does it land on the girl. Nobody in that story asks her what she did to bring it on herself
~So there's a couple of more things that I'm not gonna leave out in that story because there's~
She did cure the girl, this Bean Feasa, and the loss of speech kept coming back on her at the same time regularly until the day she died
That ending is a little bit hard to sit with sometimes, but I kind of love it because it doesn't promise you that naming a thing finishes it. It says that the thing had an origin, and that the origin was outside of her, and that it came back on her anyway because, life does sometimes. And it lets all three of those things sit there together
Without tidying up any of them. So what she's actually doing is asking where you were, what you were at, and who you [00:07:00] met, and she starts from the position that whatever's wrong came from outside until something proves otherwise. Now, I'm not here to be handing you a license to blame every person that ever annoyed you
Although if somebody did smack you on one side of the head, on the other side of the head, and on the top of the head, then maybe be looking at them, but I don't want you hearing it that way, right? 'Cause there's no shade and no shame in any of this.
Blame isn't what we're after here. But what she refused to do was start from the assumption that the woman in front of her was defective. And that refusal is the part I want you to take because that's the rare bit for so many of us, especially when we were girls Everything was our fault. But here in the Irish tradition, that's not what the wise women are telling us
So put that now besides how you've been handling the thing that came to you when you were standing at the sink, [00:08:00] right? That inexplicable thing, that feeling. And you've been treating it as evidence about your own character, where that story should send you looking outside of yourself for where it actually started.
So try it. Where were you when the feeling started? What age were you when you got the guilt, where you felt like you were doing something wrong? Whose house were you in? What were you asked? What were you actually doing for the family at the time? Who did you meet? Whose fear or whose shame or whose silence were you standing nearest to?
The women that I've asked have those answers ready before I finish the question most times. Again, we just blame ourselves first without actually looking for what the actual cause is. And what was missing was somebody asking in that order and a way of hearing the answers back that didn't turn them straight into an [00:09:00] excuse Now, some of what you're carrying is yours, mind, and you'll know it because you can point to the day that you picked it up, and you're taking responsibility for it.
But the rest of it came down the line to you from people who are dead, and the first move with any of it is the same. You name it. You can't set a thing down that you haven't named, and you can't argue with a mood or a feeling or a vague sense of guilt or shame. But it costs you to leave it unsorted and unnamed, and I don't mean that in a vague way.
Unnamed inherited weight goes into your body first, and then into the specialists, and then into the long, expensive wander through practices and retreats and methods that never quite fit because not one of them was ever aimed at the actual problem or understood it, really. And it wasn't for want of insight either, because most of those women could talk about their families with considerable precision.
It [00:10:00] was just that nothing had been named specifically enough to be put down.
The Practice
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So the practice for this one takes a single sitting, and it happens while you're right there in your own house. Just pick one place in your house where you can be for two minutes without having to explain yourself to anyone, and that might be the back step, might be a window facing away from the road, might be a corner of a room that nobody really uses.
Just go there when the house is quiet and either stand or sit, whichever you can hold for two minutes. Then name one thing out loud that you were handed rather than chose, something you never expected to or asked to take responsibility for
Say what it is, say who handed it to you, and use their name if you have their name, but say what it's costing you now. Really think about it. But three sentences at the very most, said once at whatever volume [00:11:00] the house allows for. You don't have to shout it, you don't have to give a big scream. You can whisper it, but I would say it out loud.
And then stop. Don't argue with it, don't soften it, don't say it a second time, don't make excuses for it or the people who gave it to you. Then just walk away from that spot and stay away from it for the rest of the day
Now, if you can't say it out loud because of the house or the people in it or just the sort of day that you're having, say it under your breath with your lips moving, because the saying is the working, the volume isn't. And the first time you do it, it'll likely go one of two ways. Either a great deal more arrives than you were expecting, and you'll want to keep going, in which case, stop anyway and do the rest another day.
Come back to that same spot the next day. Or absolutely nothing arrives, and you'll feel like an eejit standing there in your own kitchen or your spare room hanging out, talking to yourself. Now, if it's the second [00:12:00] one, take a beat, right? Do it again another day. This is work that you may have never done before, and naming what an ancestor handed you isn't the same as calling on that ancestor.
Nothing in this practice calls on anybody. Working directly with the dead is a separate undertaking with its own protocols and its own obligations, and it isn't a thing to start by accident on a back step on a Tuesday. So just be aware of that, because sometimes that can put a little blockage in. You don't want your great-grandmother actually showing up in your spare bedroom, right?
But what you're doing here is sorting, and it goes just one item at a time. Some of what you're carrying is yours to keep, some of it was handed to you by people who are long dead, and telling those two apart is most of the difficulty that most of us have. Now, that's difficulty, mind, not damage. Nothing about what you're carrying means that something went wrong with you.[00:13:00]
It means you came out of a line in a country with a particular history, and that line handed you its unfinished business the way every line does. Every lineage hands down that baggage
Closing
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Now, there's just one last thing I want to say before I let you go. All of this work came out of my own journals first. This is the first episode of a new podcast, and I'm not exempt from one single bit of it. So if you want something to steady yourself with while you do it, the grounding audio and the PDF that goes with all this work are free at cailleach.community/past.
And it's what I give women who come to me with the waking anxiety and the inherited heaviness. So it's free and it's yours, and I will see you in the next episode. Slán.
