Welcome, Failte!
Welcome, Failte!
Born in Northern Ireland, raised beside the slave castles in Ghana and working all her adult life in the diversity of Toronto Canada, Eimear O'Neill cares about collective healing from the traumatic effects of the structures of dominance wrecking our habitat, our Earth. These include colonisation, white bodied supremacy, extractive capitalism and global hoarding of resources by an elite few. She integrates indigenous ways of knowing, and artful research, with trauma-informed ways of seeing and healing historical wounds at personal and collective levels.
Since 2004, Eimear has been creative director of the Spirit Matters gatherings and co-director of the Transformative Learning Centre. Teaching integral transformative learning, community healing and peace building along with her therapy practice, Eimear uses a community and collective healing lens in all her work. Hosting gatherings connecting indigenous peoples and re-rooting people in their own ancestral past, is core to that healing. Such gatherings virtual or in person, help to transform participants’ consciousness around climate change, racism and other historic and traumatic wounds. Working with other experienced facilitators, she uses and researches systemic constellations, Hedge Schools and other transformative practices in collective healing.
On February 13th 2022, Ed O’ Sullivan, my beloved partner in life, love and transformative learning, passed peacefully back into the flow of life. After I brought his ashes back to his ancestral homeland in West Cork, I have been moving between grief and surges of creative writing and art making.. it is the gift of softening with grief to feel deeply...
I will continue to work on healing our collective traumatic wounds. I will begin with gathering together what Ed and I did in that work in ourselves, in our relationship, in our spiraling circles of family and community.
For those in the work of bringing together that which has been seperated, in depth information on healing collective trauma and dealing with the collective traumas of climate change, colonisation, land loss, racism, extractive and disaster capitalism, and pandemics, can be found on You Tube https://youtu.be/zuib20xnQVQ
Site Map
Information on the Updates page includes DNA evidence that the original Irish were dark skinned and blue eyed. Selected articles and chapters are available on the Publications page. The progress of current book and research project, Close to the Tree; Healing Ireland’s Ancestral Wounds can be found on the Research page. On the Transformative Learning Centre page can be found the foundations of the Integral Embodied Transformative Learning involved in collective healing. Currently the Spirit Matters Community page connects to FaceBook for gatherings and events that foster community.
The triple spiral shown here is carved with flint into the stone entrance passage of the main excavated megalithic mound in the Valley of the Boyne near Dublin. Older than the pyramids or Stonehenge(3500BC), this carving is still lit by the winter solstice sun each year. The rising sun’s light moves gently down the passageway leading to the central area, lights the full womb-like chamber and slowly withdraws. Five thousand years ago the indigenous people of Ireland held their communal knowledge and sense of what is sacred. seasonal and flowing with life, in their carvings and their structures oriented to engage with the sun like lovers..The triple spiral symbol is a deep form, holding the pattern of dynamics of our spiral galaxy, and of our human DNA. Currently it is used by Eimear as a heuristic for humanity’s evolving consciousness. (image by Jeremy Bennison )