First of all, the excesses of the modern hot cross bun and all it symbolises:

Exhibit 1: From Waitrose, the No. 1 Berry Blush Hot Cross Bun, “irresistibly fruity, bursting with sultanas, cranberries, blueberries and juicy strawberries, with a hint of creamy white chocolate. Their pretty pink crosses are applied by hand, and they're made with sourdough for extra flavour.” Good God. “Pretty pink” crosses! Do they have any idea what the cross on the bun represents, the bloody crucifixion as symbol of the bittersweet profundity of life’s suffering and sacrifice? Clearly not.

Exhibit 2: Perhaps even worse, from Tesco, “Neapolitan flavour hot cross buns with milk chocolate chips, strawberry flavoured jelly fruit pieces, dried cream and a chocolate flavoured cross.” Ditto re the cross, plus jelly pieces? Good Housekeeping (Feb 25th edition) was very excited about this one, and found it hard to choose between it and the Caramelised Biscuit Filled version. Egads, what fresh hell is this?

Traditionally, as many of you will know but some in this secular age may not, this week, the week leading up to Easter, brings us the end of Lent, the 40 day period from Ash Wednesday to Maundy Thursday. When I was a child in the 1960s, Lent was still important. Every year we pledged to “give something up” for Lent, which usually meant “sweets”. Then on Good Friday (the day after Maundy Thursday) you got to have a sweet treat in the form of a hot cross bun. They were baked just once a year and eaten on the same day. As far as I can remember, we only ever had one each, which we deeply savoured. The appearance of the hot cross bun was a rare and special thing directly linked backwards to the previous period of abstinence, and forwards to the coming excitement of Easter Sunday, with its happy church service of renewal and daffodils, its chocolate eggs, and roast lamb for lunch.

The abstinence of Lent mirrored the distant story (historically and geographically) of the 40 day fast of Jesus in the desert, the fast that preceded his spiritual awakening. But the suitability and timing of Lent in Northern Europe was directly related to an annual event much closer to home: the ‘hungry gap’, a period of several weeks every Spring when stored food from the previous year had run out, over-wintered vegetables in the ground had been eaten, and new crops were yet to be ready for consumption. This annual feature of Northern European agricultural food production still exists, but is masked by refrigeration, polytunnels, and the importation of food from the Southern Hemisphere.

So we don’t really need Lent any more….Or do we? What does the absence of the cyclical Lenten ritual of restraint do to us? What does it mean that in Western secular societies we’ve forgotten about doing without?

That the once universal practice of Lent (in Christian-dominant countries) is no longer practiced or even understood, brings thoughts of our collective over-consumption even more to the surface. Is it that we are just plain greedy, and/or is it that without external constraint we just can’t stop ourselves? The companion of over-consumption is our collective relationship to restraint. We’ve become really bad at it: we eat too much, spend too much, and own too much. (And probably complain too much and demand too much.)

The individual inability to self-limit is directly correlated with capitalism and the flood of things-to-buy. Where Christianity was the main religion, restrictive conventions such as no shopping on Sundays and no meat on Fridays were socially entrenched, widely adhered to and often encoded in law. But as capitalism has proceeded unfettered to barrage us with the insidious idea that a purchase will always solve a problem, so religion, which offers mystical solutions to life’s problems and puts up periodic barriers to consumption, has declined as an influence. Sometime in the mid to late 20th century (dependent on location), people stopped going to church and adhering to associated rules of commercial and behavioural restraint. Shops began opening on Sundays and bakers started offering hot cross buns several days before Good Friday. Now, in the 2020s, we can shop at any time of the day or night, and hot cross buns come in all sorts of excessive versions and are in the shops from mid-February.

Clearly, without such conventions, we’re not great at limiting ourselves. It’s been apparent for years that getting things-we-like outside of specific windows of time is a less than ideal method of life management. But hey, we say, everyone else is doing it! And it’s true that we are herd animals with limited capacity to control ourselves. Our animal brain will always go for the dopamine hit if one is offered. So how society is organised has a huge effect on our self-control. Now that we’ve made restraint into an individualised matter (with commercial fixes), have we set ourselves up for inevitable failure, or are we really, as Instagram would have us imagine, crafting a new kind of disciplined human with a home gym and a carefully curated diet?

Whatever your feelings about personal vs. social development and responsibility, we are in some kind of crisis of both social organisation and of personal dignity. In a subsistence, pre-industrial economy, having a rationale for enduring the hungry gap, a predictable cyclical period of deprivation for rich and poor alike, gave life dignity and we worked out solutions. Now that we live in worlds of magnified inequalities, the concept of dignity has become muddled and is often based on consumption. We buy our way out of trouble, rather than finding other means of coping with the inevitable vicissitudes of life.

One last thought: Capitalism originated in religious societies. For hundreds of years, the tension between the worldviews of mysticism and mammon coexisted with some mutual respect. That relationship has all but disappeared, as, albeit trivially, evinced by the mutation of the humble hot cross bun into a disgusting parody of itself. Capitalism appears to have won, and with it, the billionaire has become the new paragon. This trend has no limits. The super-wealthy prestige home buyers on The Agency (Netflix) are a case in point: they (especially the women) frequently complain that rooms (and dining tables) aren’t “big enough”, even when they’re vast. Just making the complaint of “it’s too small” is an act expressed with a weird strut, as if by saying it they cement their status with the absurd pride of the outrageously privileged. (I’d love to know where their money actually comes from.) They can buy a bigger one, so they will demand the biggest. Like Trump with his insane ballroom of banality.

Surely, surely, this bubble of excess will burst. I pray that we, along with the once-humble hot cross bun, will regain both the dignity of restraint and knowledge of the marvel of mystical symbolism in everyday life. No one who actually understands the deeper meaning of Jesus’s austere time in the desert and of his bloody crucifixion could ever eat a pretty pink cross on a bun without wincing at its crass absurdity.

Happy New Year! I like to make prayers at this time of year rather than resolutions. Maybe they are more like incantations than prayers, because they are not made to a deity, but spoken out into the void or whatever, and always in second person even though the meaning is personal for myself as well as universal. It’s like any kind of spontaneous creation: you open yourself up, and the words appear. Have a go!

This year, this first morning of 2026, these are the prayers that came:

May your path forward be peaceful and clear.

May your work be a source of joy and grounding.

May your home be full of love and warmth.

May you spend time in forests, meeting sturdiness,
and by the ocean, meeting flow.

And may a sweet and glowing energy of generosity and goodwill be readily available to all beings.

That last one might seem a long shot in today's rocky political climate, but when I feel cynical and down, I remember that blessings for the world are instinctive and universal in indigenous societies, and are central to Buddhist practice. In the indigenous and medieval aspect of my mind, it's easy to embrace the thought that such prayers help keep the world together. And I feel better for saying them.

Moving forward, from the New Moon in February (on the 17th), the symbolic imprint in the collective soul-mind becomes the Fire Horse, which speaks to inspirational change infused with love, goodness, and passion. Horses are amazing animals with a very particular vibe. I have twice lived in houses that had been converted from old stables, and they both had this specific kind of peaceful, sweet energy. Like dogs, horses can make us better humans for being around them. So I am dreaming into Fire Horse energy and thinking of the Virtues of honour, nobility, dedication, kindness, and courage, and of people who embody them.

Things to look forward to! xxx

Applications for Year One are now open.

We’ve already had four times the number of applications that had come in by this date in previous years. So if you know you want to take the course in 2026, don’t delay.

Please note the following deadlines:
1. The 20% discount for Early Birds who pay in full will end on January 1, 2026.
2. The option of paying in instalments ends on December 1, 2025.
3. Scholarship applications close on January 31 2026 (but these places are going fast so don’t hang about!).

Please get your application in a few days before these deadlines, if not earlier, so that we can look at them and get back to you in time.

Please note: CMS Year Two (for graduates from Year One only), was full this year and went really well, and will be offered again in 2027.

Click here to find out more about the courses.

It’s apparent from all the research now being done globally, and from all the countries represented by students taking my courses, that menstrual activism and the related desire for better healthcare, workplace understanding, and specific menstrual knowledge, are by now arising on every continent. Menstruation truly brings women together and is shared by women all over the world. I love that.

I do other one-off teaching sessions sometimes. The picture above is a screenshot of me speaking with a group of wonderful women in Costa Rica, who have a book club in which they discuss a chapter of Her Blood Is Gold each month. As you can see, they’re reading the recent Spanish edition, which was translated and published in 2024 by Elena Sofia Zambrano, a CMS graduate from the first year of the course in 2022.

A small bit of book news: Reorganizing Menstruation is currently on sale at Amazon for £33.49, down from £40. The link in the book cover image below will take you to the book at amazon.co.uk. Click here to read abstracts of all the chapters at Oxford University Press (and if you have a university affiliation as a student or academic, you can download individual chapters there for free).

That’s it for now. If you’re new to my work, the Find Out More link below will take you to my website.

See you again soon.

Warmest good wishes,

Lara

Find Out More

This essay was sparked by one of those comments. A reader wrote: "I know Lara doesn't like HRT, but I believe we can still be on HRT and continue to be advocates and continue to feel angry." I'm guessing she read my HRT/compliance sentence to mean that I think taking HRT is never useful and/or that it can override one's politics (or heard me speak about it before somewhere). I don't think that, but I do think that representations and commentary on HRT often reflect unconscious patriarchal thinking.

To clarify, (and I understand why the reader might have misread me), I am not against HRT in all cases, but I am against it being marketed as a cure-all for women's midlife experience, some of which is actually symptomatic of developing maturity in a most positive sense.

In addition, I was writing symbolically as much as literally about the narrative surrounding menopause and HRT: to the patriarchy, women have long been seen as becoming uppity and difficult at midlife, and HRT is seen from that viewpoint as a way of keeping them 'nice'. Even if this is a failed mission!

Many women don't take HRT because of that myth but because of genuine health concerns for which HRT can be the best solution conventional medicine currently has to offer. That doesn't mean it is in itself a great idea to replace something that one only needed for the fertile period of one's life (girls up to puberty do perfectly well without the high-intensity version of estrogen, and post menopause one can sense a return to the autonomous confidence of the eight year-old), or that it works for everyone, or is advisable for everyone.

HRT and sexual capital

The notion of the possibility of a return to an approximation of a pre-menopause high-estrogen state is the story that is often being sold, not only to women, but also to their male partners. From the perspective of the patriarch, women are secondary beings who gain status through their desirability to men, and through their fecundity. So female compliance includes willingness to have sex on demand, to be generally agreeable, to care for offspring, to be concerned with their appearance relative to the male gaze, and to be useful domestically. Under these terms, a woman must live with and be protected by a man, and a man will only accept a certain version of woman.

The narrative goes that some men will respond to women's physical and behavioural changes at midlife by staying married but getting a younger mistress, or by divorcing their first wife and marrying a younger woman. Indeed, we see enough of this in both real life and dramatised life to recognise it as a thing. The men who opt for a new version of their female companion in midlife will most often seek the estradiol-rich version of the female body, and with a drive that is not only biological, but very much to do with the status of the fertile female in a heteropatriarchy. Studies show that traditional men judge their own attractiveness and social status based on the looks of the woman on their arm, not their own. The quickest way for a midlife man to rejuvenate is to get a younger partner, because he's not looking at himself in the mirror and he's not judging his own looks. He judges his female partners as if their looks were something that belongs to him and reflects his true status.

Implicit within this narrative is the corollary that a man leaving for a ‘better’ version means a woman being abandoned and alone forever: a fate to fear when marriage is constructed as existential. And while we’ve collectively written and acted and lived other versions of this fate, and worked hard to create a narrative in which a single woman is happy and fulfilled other than by family and marriage, the basic format hasn’t gone away, and HRT plays into this. Of course women will want to look and appear younger and still sexy, and of course this is a source of potential wealth for those selling the myth of estrogen = marriageability.

HRT and future health

Menopause as a bodily transition has its own logic in the long term health of the body, allowing women to have a period of active and healthy life as an adult without the burden of managing fertility, bleeding every month, and coping with those demanding physiological activities at the same time as the body is ageing. During the menopause transition the body adapts away from the production of high-potency estrogen (estradiol) to increased production of low-potency estrogen (estrone). Adding high-potency estrogen back in via HRT may serve a purpose in soothing the symptoms of adaptation to the new hormonal reality, but it does so at the cost of not helping the body adjust for itself in a more sustainable way. As with other hormones such as steroids, if you take them from an external source, the body gives up making the hormone itself and/or finding new pathways for its production, and so stopping the medication can be problematic and needs to be done carefully. Bear this in mind as you read below about a new piece of research on bone health after stopping HRT.

Along with the rejuvenation narrative is a similarly exaggerated story – the notion that HRT protects future health. Some of this has some grounds, but too often this link is claimed on the basis of incomplete or thin data. HRT is aggressively marketed as a cure not only for symptoms of menopause and mid-life, but for future ailments of ageing, (particularly heart disease, dementia, and osteoporosis), as if these were all caused by what is positioned as a "lack" of estrogen. Some common ailments of ageing do affect women more than men, and not only because these are diseases of old age and women live longer (there are more old women than old men, ergo, the incidence of women with diseases of old age is higher). But pretty much across the board, such diseases in women are currently considered to be related to a combination of genetics, lowered estrogen levels, and lifestyle, largely because women who have early menopause, whether surgical or not, have slightly higher incidence of some of these diseases later on. But perhaps they had early menopause because their whole body was ageing faster than the mean. We do not all age at the same rate or in the same way. The statistical correlation between early menopause and susceptibility to common diseases of old age does not prove that menopause was the cause: correlation is not causation, but the female hormonal system with its relative complexity is an easy place to lay the blame.

Estrogen level is an important component of female health and bodies can make too much of it or too little of it. Women produce three types of estrogen: estradiol which is the motor of fertility; estriol which is the motor of pregnancy; and estrone, the background level that supports the endocrine system as a whole. Estradiol is secreted in the ovaries and makes conception possible. Estriol production goes up during pregnancy. Estrone is made in the ovaries, fat cells, and adrenal glands until menopause, when the body shifts to producing more estrone in fat cells (via the conversion of androstenedione in adipose tissue). But to assert that menopause itself is wrong is an assertion that perhaps only a desperate, late stage patriarchy would dare to make.

Even if we accept that lower estrogen levels may be a factor in the development of post-menopause heart disease, dementia and osteoporosis, the answer is not as simple as 'replacing' estrogen from an external source. Yet this correlation has become normalised. Menopause is being compared to diabetes as a syndrome that requires external replacement of a hormone the body is seen as unable to produce. And as if it were diabetes, to say that without this hormone being added in from the outside, the body will fail. In fact, the female body does continue to produce estrogen after menopause, just in a weaker form, estrone, that is not strong enough to stimulate ovulation but that does support fundamental bodily functions. From the "failure to ovulate —> estrogen deficiency —> ill health henceforth" logic, the HRT narrative takes a leap to it becoming a universal panacea, a fix-it-all drug that will save your future health.

HRT influencers and the misuse of data

Extreme and ill-founded narratives are not hard to develop in the current era of hysterical social media and people establishing themselves as experts when they are not actually educated in the topic. Opinion has become fact. Bias is normalised. And, accordingly, research data is being misused in pursuit of this concept of HRT as universal panacea for "women of a certain age". For example, recently there was a post on social media from an influential pro-HRT voice about a new study showing that women have a higher risk of fractures when they come off HRT (Vinogradova, Y. et al, 2025). This writer misinterpreted the data to assume it meant that going on and staying on HRT was supported by the study.

In fact, the study is a warning about a newly identified risk of taking HRT. The important finding is that coming off HRT has risks related to going on HRT in the first place, and makes fracture risk more likely than for never-users. This effect is in place for around ten years following discontinuation of HRT, after which risk becomes less that if you had never taken HRT (which may be small consolation if you broke bones in the meantime). The paper says "Fracture risk generally increases with age, but after discontinuation of menopausal hormone therapy, fracture risk increases steeply, usually to above the levels of comparable never-users". The study concludes that this data is important for "doctors and their patients to consider before commencing or stopping menopausal hormone therapy, especially regarding expected steep post-discontinuation rises in fracture risk and periods of enhanced fracture risk".

The big finding here is the steep risk following discontinuation, showing a disruption in bone health that is much more sudden and radical than if you had never taken HRT, and which continues to worsen your bone health relative to non-HRT users for a significant period of life. The comments under the social media post, especially worrying when from GPs, demonstrate how easily people are taken in by a misread of the research, and have gone away with quite the wrong information and confirming their bias. When I wrote to the author of the post to let her know she had misunderstood the data, she replied breezily to the effect of who cares, just take HRT for ever. This attitude is deeply disturbing.

This is a good example of another exhausting part of the patriarchy – the way data is misused to support the notion that women's bodies are somehow essentially just wrong. And it is too often women who are distributing this misinformation. If this issue is pertinent to your own work and/or healthcare decision-making at the moment, I recommend reading the whole paper (link below).

Thank you for reading this piece. Please do subscribe using the button below, whether for free content or a paid subscription if you would like to support my work.

Reference

Vinogradova, Y. et al (2025). Discontinuation of menopausal hormone therapy and risk of fracture: nested case–control studies using routinely collected primary care data. The Lancet.

As is usual with my work and life, I regularly speak with women of various ages living in various parts of the world and in very diverse circumstances. In the past week I have spoken directly to or otherwise connected one-to-one with women aged 27 to 89 and all decades in between, and almost everyone was saying the same thing. This year more than any others in recent memory, we feel exhausted, and in some cases close to broken. The only women who really seemed chipper were two who have cheery young children and, presumably, high levels of oxytocin and other feel-good hormones. In everyone else, there was a lot of coughing, allergies, sleeplessness, free-floating anxiety, and in some cases bronchitis and pneumonia. The extent of this mood, this state, has been so dominant in my extended field that it has really made me think. And this is what I have come to:

We need to give space to the understanding that symptoms of exhaustion, overwhelm, immune system weakness, and nameless grief are not necessarily due to individual burnout. You will know for sure it's not 'burnout' when it isn't cured (for more than a short while) by doing more yoga, a trip to a spa, or a beach holiday, or by 'cutting back', taking a sabbatical, or even retirement. And before you try all those things, consider that the difficulty you have in embracing your life with gusto may not be to do with anything you are or are not doing. What you have may well be a syndrome particularly common in women, and even more so since the end of 2024. The term I have coined (just today, and not very imaginatively) to sum up this syndrome is CPF: Chronic Patriarchy Fatigue – complete weariness at performative hyper-competitive masculinity strutting its stuff, whether it's on the world stage, on your social media, or (heaven help you) in your home.

I don't have an immediate cure for CPF and I don't think anyone else has either, but naming the problem is energy-releasing and can take the worst of the burnout mind-fog away. Naming this issue is something we need to periodically remind ourselves of, especially when the noise of WHAT MEN WANT is especially loud, whether it's Greenland or Gaza or control of your reproductive body or sex with you the way they want it. And again, heaven help you if that sex includes the currently widespread fetish of femicide brinkmanship through asphyxiation. Yes, there is a version of this world that gets a kick from throttling us.

But, refusing to be figuratively or literally silenced, feminists have been speaking up and naming the outer effects that patriarchy engenders in women's lives for a very long time now, especially liberal feminism with its emphasis on material equality. But such mainstream feminism has often failed to fully understand and publicly acknowledge the enormous strain that patriarchal structures and norms put onto our minds, bodies, and life force. And as the assigned menders and carers of the world, we still think that if we can just fix something in ourselves, we will arise, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, to meet the demands of heteronormative patriarchy with enthusiasm. Well, you can forget that. And once the estrogen levels go down, connivance and collusion with all the ways in which it is so much easier to be a man than a woman start to nosedive too. That's a significant part of what peri and post-menopause burnout is, and now you are being told that if you just go back to your former amenable estrogen-rich self it will all be okay again. It won't. It shouldn't. You need this rage, this passion, and the world needs it too. It's a form of energy and it can be directed for the good.

If this strikes a chord with you, think again about all your personal fix-it strategies, and consider that while yes, self-care is a basic duty of being a human and can bring momentary uplift and even longterm esteem, it pales as a remedy to war and destruction, to greed and domination. So don't internalise your rage and grief and imaginary powerlessness and don’t divert it into performative female beautification or inner flagellation (often the two go together). Get on with whatever it is you want to do and feel called to do. Continue to dismantle the models of patriarchal submissiveness and internal conflict you have inherited and continue to inhale through (most) popular culture and discourse and expectations. You have been and are being sacrificed on the spit of life, and sometimes women will be doing it to you too. (Note, before anyone @'s me, that men can also have CPF, and women can also be misogynistic.)

By putting causative emphasis on the patriarchal model, I don't mean to take away individual agency to self-heal. We can indeed do that work too, and we can and should support each other in the slow work of turning the ship around. The ship I'm using as a rather desperate metaphor here is the edifice that looms large in our minds, laden with all the thoughts and self-talk that stem from the concept that it is female duty to service all the manifestations of male superiority, which of course are often combined with extraordinary neediness.

I do my part of that work through liberating the act of menstruation from its historic role in upholding male superiority through making the female body abject. If that is work you also do or want to do, it may serve you to come study with me. My next offering is a three day training retreat on Trauma and the Menstrual Cycle, work I've been developing for the past two years.

Some of you will have attended the webinar I taught in October 2023 on new academic research on trauma and the menstrual cycle. Since then I've been working with trauma psychologist Dr Nancy Bancroft to better understand how current trauma psychology concepts and methods can dovetail with menstrual cycle awareness. Together we have combined recent research data with psychological methods to develop tools for getting out from under the exhaustion 'burnout' fog layer of hurt. These tools can help turn that internal ship around and free up our beings from the traumas many of us have suffered (often directly connected to our female sexual and reproductive lives,) and more broadly, how menstruation and the menstrual cycle can be both sources of trauma and keys to healing trauma.

Whether you menstruate or not, this work shows you how to use cycles to heal, to rebalance, to find your inner truth, and to resist the siren call of the patriarchy. (Paradoxical metaphor intended!) Do join us if you are able, on September 12 -15 inclusive, in Herefordshire for a training retreat that will give you deeper understanding of the ways trauma acts in all of us to obstruct clear thinking and acting, is indeed a part of burnout, and is not always personal (yes, second-hand trauma is real). In today's world, we need clear vision and knowledge to counteract fatigue and hopelessness, and in the process, to gain greater strength and wisdom. Click on the image to find out more, or go straight to https://laraowen.com/trauma-and-the-menstrual-cycle/. For logistical questions please contact Grace Hempshall at grace@laraowen.com.

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Symbolism and Meaning of Early February: Imbolc and Brigid’s Day

Early February has long been celebrated as a holiday, often associated with women. In ancient Ireland it was first celebrated as Imbolc and as Brigid’s Day. In the Christian tradition, first in the Mediterranean and later in all of Europe, it is celebrated as Candlemas and St. Bridget’s Day.

At this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, the land, refreshed from the resting period of winter and purified by frosts, is getting ready for cultivation, for the renewal of the agricultural year. This is a moment of quickening, as the spark of life reappears, coming up from its deep underground slumber.

In the USA, Feb 2 is Groundhog Day, a celebration of the lengthening days causing small furry creatures to poke their noses out of their hibernation holes and sniff the warming air.

The Chinese and Tibetan New Years occur in early Spring. These are calculated by slightly different combined lunisolar methods and usually fall somewhere in the late January, early February window, on the second New Moon after the Winter Solstice.

Associations and Significance

The Celts/ancient Northern Europeans celebrated the beginning of February with bonfires and feasts, to mark the return of solar warmth and light, and the fertility of beasts and land. They considered the moment when the Sun reached the halfway point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox as highly significant. This midpoint lies at 15 degrees of Aquarius in the astrological Zodiac. February 2 is when the Sun used to be at the midpoint. These days, it is now a day or two later, and in 2024 falls on February 4.

Like the other cross-quarter days (the festivals that fall midway between the solstices and equinoxes), Imbolc was a fire festival and a major holyday in the Celtic calendar. It was the festival of the lactation of the ewes: the word Imbolc is Gaelic for “in the belly” and referred to pregnant ewes and the time of lambing. Sheep were crucial providers of both food and clothing and the arrival of lambs was a time for celebration.

The specific areas of dedication at Imbolc, associated with Brigit/Brigid, the Irish virgin goddess, were virgins, healing, and poets. Imbolc is a virginal time in that everything is new, purified by winter and becoming ready for impregnation, the sowing of the seed. Brigid is associated with healing. It’s not clear how the association with poetry fits in here, but it may be because poetry is the purest of the creative forms and needs no tools other than the voice. (Extemporaneous poetry was the most highly esteemed of the Bardic arts, requiring purity of mind and clarity of intent in order to allow the voice of the divine to enter through the channel of the poet.)

Brigid/Brigit, also known as Brighid, Bride, Brighde, or Bridget, was a major goddess in the ancient Celtic pantheon. She was adopted by the early Christian Church as St Bridget and frequently associated with the Virgin Mary. She was sometimes a midwife to Mary and at other times conflated with her, as in medieval Ireland where she was known as Mary of the Gael and revered as a muse to poets. St Bridget is the patroness of Ireland and still a major saint. The Christians adopted the holiday of St. Brigit’s Day/Imbolc and called it Candlemas, integrating the old practice of lighting new candles on this day as symbolic of the new light, the new year, the new impetus for creativity. It is still the day of the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin, as February 2 is forty days since December 25, the (official) birthday of Jesus.

St. Brigid of Kildare in St Etheldreda Church. Image by Joseph Edward Nuttgens, via Deposit Photos

Memorials and mentions of Bridget as St Bride are found throughout the UK. I once lived in the Bride Valley in West Dorset, an unspoilt, broad and verdant valley through which the River Bride runs down to the English Channel. If you are ever in London, I recommend a visit to St. Bride’s Church in Fleet Street, one of the oldest churches in the city. There is an ancient crypt underground that one can visit and meditate in. Seven churches have been built on the site over the past two thousand years: this is an ancient place of worship, and has a palpable, deep, earth energy, very nourishing and feminine. Due to the proximity of the first printing press and the subsequent growth of the print trade, St Bride’s has long been associated with printing and journalism, and has a side-chapel with an altar dedicated to journalists imprisoned or killed in their line of work.

St Bride’s song

“I long for a great lake of ale

I long for the meats of belief and pure piety

I long for flails of penance at my house

I long for them to have barrels full of peace

I long to give away jars full of love

I long for them to have cellars full or mercy

I long for cheerfulness to be in their drinking

I long for Jesus too to be there among them.”

Celebrating Imbolc Today

Simple things to do to honor Imbolc include praying to St Brigid, lighting new candles throughout the house, wearing new clothes, and making lists of intentions for the coming season. If you want to have a feast, the dish of choice is roast lamb. But don’t forget that Imbolc is also a good time for a detox or fast, as the watchwords for this phase are purification and cleansing. And all of the Celtic fire festivals were traditionally times for gathering around a bonfire and celebrating the warmth of community.

The purity of the Imbolc symbolism is very much part of the newness of the year. Life is refreshed by cleansing, by letting go. This is a time to release attachment to past pain, to let go of whatever outdated stories about yourself and your life you are hanging onto, to allow the healing of forgiveness and acceptance to soothe old injuries of heart and soul.

It is an excellent time to review what has and has not already been achieved, and to assess which of your dreams you still want to pursue and which ones you might as well let go of.

It’s a potent time to clear away past disappointments, to let go of old ideas about yourself, and step fully into the present. And on the mundane and physical level, it’s a great time to clear out and give away all that stuff you no longer need.

The Bride Valley in West Dorset, with the English Channel two miles away.

About me and this Substack

I’m launching this Substack today as it’s a time for new beginnings. Imbolc has long held meaning for me and I find it a stronger marker of the New Year than January 1st. This year, I found myself revisiting some of my old writings on the ancient holydays as important cyclical markers in the year, and found much of this essay in a piece I wrote 20 years ago.

I set up my Substack account a while back, as a way to share my work on cyclical living and associated topics. But family needs and finishing a book and starting to teach a major course all meant I haven’t had the space to write for it until now. I intend to write regularly from now on — how often remains to be seen. For now it will be free. If you would like to learn more about my work please visit my website at https://laraowen.com.

Until the next time, Imbolc blessings to you all, and all love and luck to you for the coming fertile season.

Lara Owen, December 2023. Photo by Paul Carter (info@photodesign.co.uk)