Personal Statement

A Personal Statement from Michael Conneely

My wife, Maggie Pashley and I run a Healing Centre on the Atlantic Coast of Sligo, in the West of Ireland.

We offer a most extensive range of worldwide Healings and courses, as well as Sacred West of Ireland Vision Tours to make visionary contact with the Goddesses and Gods of the Ancient Irish and also Tours of the many utterly beautiful and exalted Sacred Sites of the ancient Irish – all within an hour of our Healing Centre. These include:  Carrowmore, Carrowkeel, Rathcroghan, Oweynagat Cave, Ben Bulben, Knocknarea, Loch Gill, Hazelwood, 
​Croagh Patrick, Killary Harbour, Loch Arrow, The Caves of Kesh and many, many more. 

I have written five visionary Earth Spirituality novels. These and the spiritual guide book The Backpackers Guide to the New Spirituality 2014 are all available on Amazon kindle and paperback. Having lived for years in utopian communities and spiritual centres, and also working as an astrologer and shamanic healer, my great inspiration is finding the divine through vision and connection to the Earth. Unusually for an Astrologer, I am a Western and Vedic Astrologer, as well as a Shamanic Healer.

I have written five visionary Earth Spirituality novels. These and the spiritual guide book The Backpackers Guide to the New Spirituality 2014 are all available on Amazon kindle and paperback. Having lived for years in utopian communities and spiritual centres, and also working as an astrologer and shamanic healer, my great inspiration is finding the divine through vision and connection to the Earth. Unusually for an Astrologer, I am a Western and Vedic Astrologer, as well as a Shamanic Healer.

And my Personal story lies behind

 
But there is a personal story behind this work. I come from an Irish family, though due to the circumstances of my birth I am a secret from them. But I have felt increasingly impelled to contact my ancient Irish spiritual roots. The calling came in waves to me over years: first to discover the whereabouts of my Irish family, then to follow Druid paths, then to learn and in due course teach the Ogham the ancient tree alphabet of the Irish Druids, next to write my novel: Druid – and now I feel the Goddesses and the Gods of Ancient Ireland are calling to me and I am writing a further novel: this time about them: It’s wonderful and its title is: ‘The Morrigan and The Dagda – Sacred Union’. I am also developing a worldwide visionary course to enable other people to find and contact these magnificent, beautiful and powerful; Gods and Goddesses of the ancient Irish. I feel I am well-equipped as a guide for the way because I naturally tend to vision work, and I have a long background in ritual. I am a very caring teacher of quite a number of worldwide spiritual courses. I hope to put these skills and background at your service.
This personal story is that my unmarried mother and I ended up in one of the now notorious Bon Seccours Convent Orphanages. My mother had to work twelve hour days unpaid. In due course she was blackmailed by her Parish Priest in the Tuam Arch-diocese and the Reverend Mother of the Bons Seccours Orphanage into giving me up for adoption. I have the documents to prove this. The consequences are that I am thus a secret from my Irish family and indeed my mother was given the penance by her Parish Priest for having bore me, of climbing Croagh Patrick Mountain barefoot: Ireland’s Holy Mountain near where her family live.

I feel this experience, this start in my life, was definitely destined; it was meant. It had huge effects and implications in my life. One of them was the effect of preparing me: preparing me to reclaim contact with, and share with others, the soul of Ireland’s heritage. Another was to deal with a destiny of being devalued and unheard, invisible and a secret.

My mother was actually blackmailed into giving me away. She had gone to her Parish Priest saying she had signed the papers under duress. I have the evidence. I have a letter from the Reverend Mother of my Bon Secours Convent Orphanage telling my mother’s parish priest what to do, and the next letter on the file is a letter back to her from the parish priest confirming that he had told my mother that if she made any attempt to reclaim me he would be ‘reluctantly compelled to inform her mother of her lapse from virtue’ and she would therefore be expelled and shunned and made homeless and left without any support by her family.

In fact It was in the Bon Secours Convent Orphanage at nearby Tuam, Co Galway, the same Order of nuns that ran my own convent orphanage, that the skeletons of 798 dead orphans – babies and little children – have been recently discovered. They were buried between 1925 and 1961, at exactly the same time as my mother and I were in another of the Bon Seccours nuns’ orphanages. Indeed the Tuam orphanage is in the same Arch-diocese as my family home.
The mothers there had to work for many hours a day for no pay and they were allowed to see their baby for one hour a day ‘if they were good’.
The orphans at Tuam were buried in a mass grave in a septic tank, dead through malnutrition and disease. This is the legacy of Saint Patrick. This is the legacy of the Catholic Church.

So Ireland’s Holy Mountain, Croagh Patrick, does now deserve to have the Goddess of the Land there restored. The manuscripts record how when Saint Patrick embarked on his mission to convert Irealnd to the Catholic Church of Rome in 432 AD, he started out by doing a forty day retreat on top of Ireland’s Holy Mountain, now called Croagh Patrick. And the manuscript records how he faught with Corra the spirit of the land, and that although at one point she ‘engulfed him in her jaws’, Saint Patrick bested her, and he consigned her to the Loch below the Mountain – Lough na Corra – ‘for eternity.

Saint Patrick’s message of the Universal Church appealed to the Irish Kings. It butteressed their position. But since Saint Patrick’s conversion of Ireladn, things have not gone well for the Irish:
They have lost their magnificent Gods and Goddesses.
They have lost their land.
They have lost their language.
They have been conquered by the Anglo-Normans and then the English.
They have been a subject people
In many cases, they have lost their children, even.

But now is the time for the damage of Saint Patrick’s conversion to be reversed. This is the theme of my novel Druid. And also we are now blessed to be able to contact the Goddesses and Gods of the ancient Irish in vision, and draw on the high energies of the Irish Sacred Sites – the theme of the novel and the course I am now writing.

This orphanage, and indeed my birth family are quite close to Croagh Patrick, Ireland’s Holy Mountain, now sacred to Saint Patrick. And I have long explored this place as a centre for Ireland’s spiritual vision.
My mother knew it as Ireland’s Holy Mountain on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean in the far west of Ireland, a place of Catholic penitential pilgrimage, where she was given the penance of climbing the Mountain barefoot for the sin of having born me when she was unmarried.
​But it was decades later I discovered the true story of Croagh Patrick. It is a spiritual centre for a much more ancient power than Saint Patrick created. A sacred power that was understood differently in different epochs. There is manuscript statement that at one time Ireland’s Holy Mountain, Croagh Patrick, was formerly revered as sacred to the Goddess of the Land there, the spirit of place: Corra. Corra is the local Goddess of the land. She is the Goddess of the Earth, whom Saint Patrick claimed he vanquished.
And there also the evidence of the ‘Rolling Sun’ phenomenon, evidence that points to the fact that Croagh Patrick was also at some time also sacred to the ancient Irish God, Llugh. Llugh is the God of the Harvest the Sun brings, and God of the thunder and of the harvest of our talents. And it is on this sacred landscape that my Novel Druid took place. I have witnessed this Rolling Sun phenomenon where the Sun sets by rolling down the slope of the Mountain to make union with the Earth. I have seen it from the ancient and highly carved Bohea Stone. This phenomenon can only be seen on two days of each year: April 18th and August 24th, and only on those two days, and it can only seen from that standing stone: the three-miles-distant Druid Bohea Stone with its 250 highly carved petroglyphs.

But it is not only my Irish Heritage I bring to my writing and my work. There are also my academic, reasearch and teaching skills which I put at the serive of those following my courses. I would like to present myself to you as a most dedicated, caring and supportive teacher. I am not only the author of six visionary books. I have an Oxford University MA, a total of five university degrees, and as I said, I have completed a five-year ethnographic Field Study: a university-based social-anthropological field study of ‘spiritual forms new to the modern west’. This background means that I bring to my courses and events, my
own experience of the Oxford University tutorial system that I myself experienced as a young man in the nineteen sixties.

My method of teaching is a completely individual, skilled and caring and personal to your needs. It is based on the one-to-one Oxford University tutorial system that I myself experienced as a young man in the nineteen sixties. In the Oxford tutorial system the student receives direct feedback on his/her work of the highest caliber, as deep and profound critique and analysis as the student wishes offering profound, eclectic and totally personal learning and assessment. My teaching is skilled, respectful and very learned.

My field study:

 

​To undergo this field study was a great blessing where I learned so much that I can now pass on. This was no detached intellectualised academic study but a deeply personal spiritual journey because the method of study was Ethnography, where the anthropologist has to live in the institutions under study, personally experience them, and give the people in the study their own voice.

My field study was mainly based at Glastonbury in England. The field study was in the areas of Hinduism, Buddhism, paganism, shamanism and Utopian Community. So I lived on and off over the five-year study period in a Hindu Ashram (Skanda Vale, the UK Centre for the Tamil Sri Lankan community displaced by civil war); a couple
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of Tibetan Buddhist Gompas, More ‘western’ Buddhist communities such as Sharpham College, Gaia House and the Goenka
Vipassana centre, a Wiccan coven, a Druid Grove, a shamanic journeying group and Bender Sites (Benders are frameworks of
withies with a tarpaulin stretched over them and a wood-burning stove. They are communities of people dedicated to ‘tread lightly
on the Earth’: people who want as little to do as possible with western modernity and materialism: Eco warrior families.

Since 1994 I have devoted my time to empowering people through worldwide distance astrology and earth-spirituality sessions
and courses as well as readings. I offer a wide range of expert, caring and supportive Certificated Distance Learning Courses.

My method of teaching:

 

My method of teaching is a completely individual, skilled and caring quest personal to your needs. It is based on the one-to-one
Oxford University tutorial system that I myself experienced as a young man in the nineteen sixties. In the Oxford tutorial system
the student receives direct feedback on his/her work of the highest caliber, as deep and profound a critique and analysis as the
student wishes, offering profound, eclectic and totally personal learning and assessment. My teaching is skilled, respectful and
very learned.

The guiding light of my work:

 

​The guiding light of my work is to provide the ideal space for the genuine spiritual seeker who wants to find their own beauty, power, spark, inspiration and connection, who wants to always walk and be supported in their own vision, authenticity and genuine power. I seek to create a sacred space where bridges are built between the different spiritual pathways. My work is completely free from the damage and barriers of ‘ego’ and ‘control- scripts’ or ‘cults of personality’ and legalism/dogmatism, rituals with meaningless scripted speeches, or even ‘power stealing’ that so often mar modern spiritual groups, centres, orders and courses, and the many straight-jacketing hierarchical organisations.

My inspiration:

 

My Inspiration:
Since 1994, I have come to realise that my spiritual path is one that essentially unites both the stars and the earth. It does reverence for the Web of Life. It offers you connection to the energy from the Divine: perception, healing and kindness within the strands of the Web, bringing higher awareness and enlightened perception to all we study and experience.

Vision Path:

 

Much of my teaching is on the use of vision. Quite substantially it is a Vision Path. I learned Visionary development in the Highest Yoga Tantras of Tibetan Buddhism, in work with Goddess and God in a Wiccan Coven, through contacting the meanings of the Runes and the Ogham, through travelling the shamanic pathways, through walking the Celtic Otherworlds and being called by the deities of the ancient Irish: The Tuatha de Danaan. Above all, ritual, journeying and being spiritually fed by the beauties of nature and the sacred sites. I have experienced clairvision and clairaudience, and my first novel was largely a chanelling from these sources. I am pleased to offer the fruits of all this study and practical experience.

My clients and course students come from all across the world and from all walks of life.

 

​I look forward to hearing from you and to working with you.