Mad in Ireland: Fields of Healing

This Podcast will be inluenced and brought to Mad in Ireland by a number of people from Mad in Ireland, in association with Dublin North, North East Recovery College. For this introductory episode Martha Griffin. Triona Byrne and Líam Mac Gabhann chat about their aspirations and plans for Fileds of Healing. Needless to say as the Mad in Ireland collective come to bear on the podcast, we will have even broader fruitful aspirations. A Rumi poem comes to mind just now, Roughly speaking it goes like this. Somewhere out there beyond right doing and wrong doing there is a field, we will meet you there.

What is Family Constellations?

Although we attempt to answer this question in the podcast, to tweak your interest, a version or summary describing Family Constellations introduces us to the podcast and interviewees below.

Family Constellations is a therapeutic modality founded by Bert Hellinger, who spent many years as a catholic priest and teacher in a Zulu school in South Africa. In Family Constellations we explore dynamics and patterns that run through families. The focus is primarily on trans-generational trauma: how the events that affected our ancestors continue to have an effect on us. Our ancestors often had to deal with massive traumas: war, hunger, early deaths, extreme poverty, and the attitudes and strategies they developed to deal with those events can show up in our lives, where they are no longer helpful.

Welcome once again to Mad in Irelands podcast series ‘Fields of Healing’. This time around we visit the world of music and rhythm as a field or landscape of and for healing. Music is something that many people appreciate in its various guises and it has many forms. If we were to reflect on the impact of music on our lives, we might at the very least notice how different music evokes a range of emotional states; we might even feel that energetic drawback in time to a place when we liked a certain genre or listened to particular songs that remain with us today. We may not have considered the nature of music and rhythm generally as a healing field, yet since time memorial it has played a part in healing rituals. And within the broader eclectic paradigm of healing and how people can and do engage with music as part of their own healing journey, we visit that field. It is vast and at best we can give an Irish sample, in this case from two people who work within mental health services and outside of it, bringing their own version of music and rhythmic healing to the mental health field. We are speaking with Rory Adams, music therapist and Deirdre Howard, Community drum facilitator and hope your interest is peeked by our latest podcast.

We are delighted to be presenting this third episode of Fields of Healing where we discuss a healing field that is becoming more and more visible and popular within Irish healing circles. Shamanism is what many people might think of as something pagan and definitely something from ‘over there’, maybe South America or Siberia or Mongolia, not something Irish. Yes, it is something from ‘over there’ for sure, though more accurately something associated with indigenous healing practices in any part of the world. In Ireland, much of our traditional indigenous healing practices and even words have been disappeared. By various colonial usurpers, latterly by the catholic church and probably significantly influenced by the so called age of reason and science.

Of course, healing practices, medicine men and women, remained in folklore and to a large extent perhaps could only survive within this dimension until recent decades, where we have seen a huge increase in interest and practices grounded in our very own indigenous healing. Celtic shamanism has re-emerged within this development and even still, lost words and descriptions are slowly beginning to emerge that give meaning to these practices. For now, shamanism can and does offer a way of being that encompasses this old and contemporary spiritual holistic healing modality.

We are delighted to present this first ‘Fields of Healing Podcast’, literally from a field, with the potential to bring healing to many who otherwise may not have the opportunity. This episode is longer than a normal episode. It unfolds as a story that can be paused when the listener chooses and can easily, like a good book, be picked up again when you are ready.

The background, purpose and public face of Kyrie Farm can be found on their website above. Here in this Podcast, we interviewed three people pivotal to how Kyrie Farm will evolve. John McKeon the founder of this initiative brings the vision and rationale for why Kyrie Farm will be relevant in mental health care into the future. Dr Eoin Galavan is the Services Director for Kyrie Farm and outlines the aspirations for creating a therapeutic farm and what at this stage of collaboration the service will be like. Ciara Glynn brings the voice of experience to all aspects of the services development, as Peer Advisor at Kyrie Farm.