Morrigan Academy Podcast S03E02 - Pick Your Battles
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to The Morrigan Academy podcast, where we explore the myths, magic, and mythology of Ireland's great battle goddess. I am Lora O'Brien, Irish draoi, priest of The Morrigan for over two decades, and your host here at the podcast and at The Morrigan Academy. So it's been a few months since the last episode, apologies for that, because the teaching year just grew legs, basically.
And I'm gonna be back with a weekly footing from here on in, with a new episode landing every Wednesday in the AM here in Ireland. Now, the question I get asked more often than pretty much anything else is some version of this one. How do I know what she actually wants from me when everything feels like too much already?
Now look, we know the world is on fire. But for those of us who've been following along, anybody who's read my book, you will know The Morrigan has been preparing us for [00:01:00] this. But this question usually comes from people who are doing far more than they were ever asked to, and feeling like it still isn't enough, and I get it, believe me.
But today, I want to look at the difference between the work she is asking of you and the weight that you picked up somewhere along the way. I've been in dedicated relationship with The Morrigan since 2004, officially, and I spent 10 years managing Cruachan, or Rathcroghan, in County Roscommon, which holds The Morrigan's cave.
I've been working directly with students that are seeking her for over a decade now. So most of what follows comes out of watching the same pattern arrive over and over and over again in the same shape. I'm not just basing it on what I think or what I know or what I've experienced. I am looking at the big picture.
So let's go to the [00:02:00] mythology.
Cath Maige Tuired, the Second Battle of Moytura. And as usual, I'm working from Morgan Daimler's translation here because that one carries the Rosc poetry that most of the versions that you'll find online don't, and the Morrigan is a poet. Picture it. The Dagda has a house at Glen Etin in the north, and the text tells us that he was to meet a woman there on the same day every year around Samhain.
This particular meeting falls a week before the battle. He finds her at the Unshin of Corann, washing herself in the river with one foot to the south at Ailech and the other to the north at Luscanduf. And the nine plaits of her hair are undone. She usually wears her hair in nine plaits, and these have been undone as she washes herself
In the river. The Dagda speaks to her, and they [00:03:00] make a union. And the place is called The Lying Down of the Married Couple from that day. And the text then names her outright as The Morrigan. She was just The Woman up until that point. Then she tells him what to do, and she tells him what she'll do herself.
His portion is to strip his own land, Mac Scétne, against the Fomorians, the enemy that they're going to fight the battle with, and to call together the Aos Dana of Ireland, so the noble people of Ireland, to meet at the Ford of Unshin. Her portion, her work, is to go to Scétne and injure the Fomorian king with magic.
The text names him Indech mac Dé Domnan. And she takes from him the blood of his heart and the kidneys of his battle ardor or the kidneys of his valor. She then gives that blood with her two palms to the hosts waiting at the ford, and [00:04:00] afterwards the place is called the Ford of Utter Destruction because of what she did to the king there.
Morrigan has no problem getting her hands dirty or bloody in this case. The line that comes next is direct quote, it says, "Afterwards the Aes Dana did that, and they recited incantations against the host of the Fomorians." So each side did their own portion, and neither did the others.
Before a blade even came out the work had been divided out loud, and then it was carried out exactly as divided Now, that division is what I'd have you take from the scene. I do love that scene, and I come back to it regularly. It's one of the classics, right? But the division of labor is what I wanted to focus on today because most of the people who come to me exhausted are carrying portions that were never assigned to them.[00:05:00]
You've done that. I know you have. And when everything feels like too much, the instinct is to read it as evidence of failing at devotion or as proof that you're not strong enough or committed enough for a goddess like this one. I'd read that same signal completely differently because overwhelm usually means that you're holding somebody else's half alongside your own.
You're carrying more than you were ever meant to carry There's no version of being a person paying attention to the world in 2026 as I record this that doesn't involve absorbing far more than any one body can hold. And obviously, there are people who are going about their business blithely in complete ignorance.
I'm talking to the people who are listening to this podcast, who are [00:06:00] followers of The Morrigan, who are curious, at least, if not in a working relationship with this goddess. So, you are absorbing far more than any one body can hold, and The Morrigan doesn't expect you to carry everything, though, because she never asked you to.
Now, notice too that her own portion in the mythology is precise and finite. It's a big job, fair enough. She names one king, one place, one act, and one delivery of the blood to the hosts. And the reading that I take from that is that the rest of the battle was never hers to fight So hear me now, right?
Yours is meant to be precise and finite as well. If you can't say what your portion is in a single sentence, that's usually the [00:07:00] first sign that you've picked up work belonging to someone else Now, again, if you've read my book, you'll know my kind of origin story with The Morrigan. The first piece of work that she gave me, and honestly, the only thing that she ever expects from me, is to get real information out there.
Now, that's pretty open-ended. Of course it is, right? It's a big piece of work that she's given me. But over the decades that I've been doing that work It's really, really shown me the different applications, but also where it starts and where it ends. I can't take responsibility for what people do with that information.
As much as it frustrates me sometimes But just think about this because the two kinds of weight, the work belonging to somebody else and your own portion, [00:08:00] those two kinds of weight feel different in your body once you actually start paying attention to it.
The Morrigan's work tends to settle in your chest or your belly and really stays put when you try to put it down or ignore it. People get very frustrated about like, "Oh, she never tells me exactly what I need to do." But you can feel it.
You can feel the draw in your physical form to the work that you're supposed to be doing. We're very cut off from our bodies and from our physical forms in a lot of ways. And like some of that is the neurodivergence that so many of us are dealing with, right? That's a whole thing. Yes, I get that too.
But you can practice this, and you can actually feel that weight. If you give her regular time, doesn't have to be a lot of time, but if you give her regular time, you can feel where the weight of her work settles in your physical form
And you can try and [00:09:00] set it down, and you can try and step away from it, and you can try and ignore it. You can try and distract yourself. You can try and do all these things, but it'll still be waiting for you in the morning. While when there's things that you've absorbed and you start to do something that gets you in flow or even that distracts you or, something that you're using to try and distract yourself, the stuff that you've absorbed it lifts off you the moment you call it, the moment you name it out loud, the moment you say, "Well, actually is that mine?"
You can set it down. You can walk away from it. It doesn't actually settle into you. It can be lifted off you. And look, I know that this is not a precise instruction, right? That's not my job. I'm trying to describe Almost 30 years of spiritual and magical practice. And not just with The Morrigan, but [00:10:00] with my entire native Irish spirituality and my folk magic
and my witchcraft. And it's not always clear-cut instructions, unfortunately. I'd love to be able to just tell you to do XYZ, and boom, you're done, that's not how it works, unfortunately. But it will give you a little practice, , it's about five minutes, and you can do it last thing at night
so it's not gonna cost you anything other than five minutes less on your phone before you go to sleep, or, five minutes less looking at the ceiling if you're not on your phone, right? You can do it lying down if that's where you are. You can do it on the bus home if you want to do it instead, or in a car park, or wherever your five minutes happen to fall.
But I would suggest as close to sleep time as possible, so get still wherever you are. Put a hand on your chest or your belly. It can fall differently for different people. Whichever one feels more settled tonight, take three breaths. You don't have to perform them. You don't have to [00:11:00] breathe a certain way.
You just notice that you're breathing at all. So breath in, breath out three times. And then you ask yourself three questions. And I want you to really let each answer just arrive on its own instead of chasing after it. So keep breathing and ask yourself the first question, which is, what did I pick up today that nobody actually asked me to carry?
Now, whatever comes to surface, just let it come. Don't argue with it when it does, just observe Keep breathing. Second question is, what's actually mine right now? And that's the real work. That's the portion that she is actually signaling to you. That's the thing that would still be there in the morning if you set it down tonight.
It's the one that won't go away. That's the work
Keep breathing. Just let it come. Let it observe. Keep breathing. Just observe what's happening. And then the third [00:12:00] question is, what can I put down for tonight between now and when I wake up? Just let it flow away from you.
Let a river come in, the river Unshin, think of it, let it flow. She's washing. You can just put what you want to put down into the river and let it flow away. If it's for you, if it's work that she wants you to do, she will make sure that it lands right back on you, 'cause she's good like that. We love that, don't we?
Right Then I want you to say it out loud, and this is the part that really beds it in, okay? Especially just before you go to sleep. Say something like, for example, "I'm setting down my brother's situation for tonight."
If your sibling happens to be, I don't know, a neo-Nazi and you have had to deal with that, right? They're in that red pill pipeline and you don't know [00:13:00] what to do about it, and it's stressing you and it's stressing your family and all the rest of it, you can just say, for example, just a random example like, "I'm setting down my brother's situation for tonight," and that does the job.
You put it in the river, let it flow away, I want you to do this for seven nights. Again, we're gonna do this weekly podcast. Try and do this most nights out of the next seven and see what shifts in you. And if you want to, you can do a little journal in the morning when you wake up, see how you're feeling, right?
Just do a little check-in. The third question kind of brings the hard stuff up with it, and it can be grief that you've been deferring or a decision that you've been dodging, and that's the practice working rather than you failing, and you can set it down until the morning. You can come back to it when you have more capacity if you need to. But whatever you're carrying, whether it's yours or [00:14:00] stuff that you need to just let go completely, the Morrigan isn't gonna punish you for needing sleep before you face a hard thing
She's a hard goddess, definitely, and she does expect a lot from those who follow her But she knows you're human, and she's not just gonna punish you arbitrarily for needing to do human things, right? So if you do want to do a little bit more of active journaling, there's a prompt for the week for whenever you get quiet 10 minutes with a notebook.
What did I agree to carry this week that nobody asked me for, and what did saying yes to it cost me? So think about that, In the second Battle of Moytura, the Morrigan divided the work out loud before the battle. She named her portion and she named the Dagda's portion. And that same division is available to you every night of the week.
What's actually mine to carry? But also, what can I put down so that I can just sleep and rest? [00:15:00] And if it's still there in the morning, if it washes back up, settles back in, grand. That's yours. If it goes away, it's not. So before you go, the book, The Morrigan Ireland's Goddess is out with Llewellyn, and thank you for all your reviews that are helping to make it one of the top-selling books on The Morrigan, but here we are.
In it is 12 chapters that take you from primary sources through to your own practice, just like we're doing here in the podcast. And every one of them closes with exercises and journaling prompts so that you're doing something with what you read rather than just reading it, right? I want to be giving you the practice as well.
As I mentioned, I was given one instruction in her cave at Cruachan years ago, to get real information out there, and that book is the fullest version of it that I've managed yet, and I'm actually quite proud of it.
If you [00:16:00] have read it already, please leave a review, even just two or three lines, because that's how the next person that's sifting through the nonsense and the crap and all the AI-produced bollocks can find something solid to stand on and can get the help, the support, the spiritual community that they need.
You can get it online. You can get it in your local bookshop. It's available everywhere that you would get your books. And until next time, please honor the Lore, respect The Morrigan, and Slán go fóill.
