I am an Inishowen woman. That carries a particular relationship with land, weather, and the long memory of a place loved and grieved over for thousands of years. The Irish language is part of that ground too, not performance, but homecoming.

I am also a retired primary teacher, a breathworker, researcher and gatherer of stories, practices and questions.

For more than thirty years I stood in classrooms in Donegal. Teaching taught me something I still carry into everything I do: growth cannot be forced. We can create conditions, offer support, pay attention, but we cannot hurry another person's unfolding.

These days much of my curiosity turns towards older Irish ways of knowing: plants and their uses, folklore, language, story, custom, season, place and the knowledge carried by ordinary people through ordinary lives.

I keep returning in particular to the bean feasa, the woman of knowledge. But rather than adopting the term as a tidy title, I am researching what it actually meant: what these women may have known, how that knowledge was learned and carried, and how the historical woman differs from the figure we sometimes meet in contemporary Celtic spirituality.

I am quite comfortable not having all the answers.

Alongside that research sits the contemporary and more measurable world of my work: breath physiology, functional breathing, the nervous system and modern breathwork practice.

I don't need the scientific and the mysterious to prove one another.

The scientific and the mysterious.

The old and the contemporary.

Breath and story.

Body and land.

Evidence and wonder.

It is the conversation between them that keeps drawing me back, and I suspect it always will.