You're Not Here to Be a Celtic Paganism Teacher

We Teach You From Irish Tradition, Not to Become Irish Tradition Teachers

Let me be crystal clear about something.

When you come to the Irish Pagan School, when you sit in community at An Tuath Nua, when you join a course or intensive or show up for live teaching, you are here to deepen your own spiritual life.

Not to turn around and start teaching Irish tradition to others for money, for social media clout, or for spiritual influencer status.

This is not a teacher training programme. This is not a spiritual entrepreneurship course. This is not your ticket to becoming the next Celtic priestess with a 'passive income stream'.

You are here to learn from our athentic living Irish tradition, with cultural respect and ethical clarity, so you can build your own grounded practice rooted in real lore, real relationships, and real daily accountability to the Gods, ancestors, and land of Ireland.

Why This Boundary Matters

Here in Ireland, we have watched for decades, and actually for centuries, as our culture has been stolen, watered down, repackaged, and sold back to us and to the world by people who have no connection to this land, no understanding of the language, no lived relationship with the spirits and deities of this place.

We have watched the shallow shamrock spirituality, the Celtic NeoPagan nonsense, the plastic paddy fantasies flood the market, drowning out the real voices of real Irish practitioners who actually live here, who speak the language, who walk the land, who carry the tradition forward not as a hobby or a brand, but as a life.

And we are done with it.

When Jon and I founded the Irish Pagan School, we made a commitment, not just to the Irish Gods and the Othercrowd, but to this culture and this island.

We will teach authentic Irish tradition to those who seek it with respect and integrity, but we will not contribute to the cycle of cultural extraction and appropriation that has done so much harm already.

So we hold this boundary. Hard.

Who This Protects

This ethical stance protects two groups.

First, it protects Irish culture itself. It protects the integrity of living tradition, which is not a product to be harvested and monetised by anyone who takes a course or reads a book.

It protects the voices of native Irish practitioners who deserve to be centred in their own tradition, not drowned out by louder, wealthier, more commercially savvy voices from outside.

Imagine trying to read an article that was printed out, then photocopied 40 times? Yeah, don't be the photocopier.

Second, and this might surprise you, it protects YOU.

It protects you from becoming the kind of person who appropriates, repackages, and profits from someone else's culture without understanding or living it.

It protects you from the shallow performance of teaching something you have only just begun to learn yourself. It protects you from the ego trap of spiritual entrepreneurship, where your worth gets tied up in how many followers you have, how many courses you sell, how visible your platform is.

It protects your integrity as a grounded learner and practitioner.

Because here is the hard truth, the Old Gods know we need more of it in this world. Being a practitioner of Irish spirituality, rooted in this tradition with depth and respect, is not the same as being a teacher of it.

And just because you CAN monetise something does not mean you SHOULD.

What You Become Instead

When you let go of the pressure to perform, to feed your own ego, to cash in either financially or socially, to build a brand from Irish tradition... something shifts.

You stop collecting. You stop curating your spiritual life for an audience.

You stop second guessing every ritual, every offering, every moment of connection, wondering if it is good enough content for your next post or course module.

You start practising. You start BEING.

You build daily relationship with the Irish Gods, not as a public performance, but as private and personal devotion. You learn the language, not to prove anything, but because it matters to you and to Them.

You work with the lore, the land, the ancestors, the Othercrowd, because you want depth and transformation in your own life, not because you are building a curriculum.

You become a grounded practitioner.

Not a spiritual influencer. Not a Celtic coach. Not an Irish tradition teacher.

And that identity, that rootedness, is worth so much more than a platform or a profit margin.

The Activation

So here it is.

If you're here to deepen your own spiritual life with respect and integrity, you recognise yourself in this. You feel the relief of that boundary, the freedom of not having to turn everything into content or credentials.

You are ready to stop seeking and start practising, to step into the identity of a rooted, accountable, daily practitioner of living Irish tradition.

Fáilte, welcome. This is your place.

But if you are here to collect credentials, to extract cultural content so you can repackage it and teach it for profit or clout, to add Irish spirituality to your eclectic menu of spiritual services you can offer, this is not your place.

And that is not me being cruel, or elitist, or gatekeeping. That is clarity.

We teach you and share with you, direct from our Irish tradition. We do not train you to become Irish tradition teachers.

Your practice is personal depth, transformation, and right relationship. Not platform building, not cultural extraction, not entrepreneurship.

If that sits well with you, if that feels right and true and like exactly what you have been searching for, then you are already halfway home.

Come in. Sit down. Do the work. Become the practitioner you are meant to be.

And leave the teaching of Irish tradition to those of us who live it, daily, here on this island, in this language, with these Gods, carrying it forward as life, not performance.

Sláinte.

Lora O'Brien is an Irish Draoi, author, historian, and co-founder of the Irish Pagan School. She lives in County Waterford, Ireland, and has been dedicated to An Mórrígan since 2004.

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