Deirdre Martin Counselling / Psychotherapy

12/03/2026

04/03/2026

28/02/2026

When someone encourages you, that person helps you over a threshold you might otherwise never have crossed on your own. There are times of great uncertainty in every life. Left alone at such a time, you feel dishevelment and confusion like gravity. When a friend comes with words of encouragement, a light and lightness visit you and you begin to find the stairs and the door out of the dark. The sense of encouragement you feel from the friend is not simply her words or gestures; it is rather her whole presence enfolding you and helping you find the concealed door. The encouraging presence manages to understand you and put herself in your shoes. There is no judgement but words of relief and release.

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Excerpt from his book, Eternal Echoes
Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/store

Clifden Cottage, County Galway, Ireland
Photo: © Ann Cahill

22/02/2026

Its time to self reflect my dear Empaths!

Time to discover who YOU truly are!

You have spent so long pleasing others, being who you think they wanted you to be, saying yes when you really meant no and only taking the mask off when you were alone.

Your identity up until this point isn't really what you believed.

You are being pushed now to stand up, use your voice and ignite the real you!

This doesn't come easy due to conditioning and past traumas but your being reminded right here...right now...that this is YOUR time!

The Soul Alignment Coach

23/01/2026

When the mind is festering with trouble or the heart torn, we can find healing among the silence of mountains or fields, or listen to the simple, steadying rhythm of waves. The slowness and stillness gradually takes us over. Our breathing deepens and our hearts calm and our hungers relent. When serenity is restored, new perspectives open to us and difficulty can begin to seem like an invitation to new growth.

This invitation to friendship with nature does of course entail a willingness to be alone out there. Yet this aloneness is anything but lonely. Solitude gradually clarifies the heart until a true tranquility is reached. The irony is that at the heart of that aloneness you feel intimately connected with the world. Indeed, the beauty of nature is often the wisest balm for it gently relieves and releases the caged mind.

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Excerpt from his books, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (US) / Divine Beauty (Europe)
Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/store

Lough Inagh, County Galway, Ireland
Photo: © Ann Cahill

16/01/2026

At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it? A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms, and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up. At this threshold a great complexity of emotion comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual. It is wise in your own life to be able to recognize and acknowledge the key thresholds: to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Excerpt from his books: To Bless the Space Between Us (US) / Benedictus (Europe)
Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/store

Clonmacnoise, County Offaly, Ireland
Photo: © Ann Cahill

16/01/2026

02/12/2025

“The burning question when one enters analysis is ‘Who am I?’ The immediate problem, however, as soon as powerful emotions begin to surface, is often a psyche/soma split. While women tend to talk about their bodies more than men, both sexes in our culture are grievously unrelated to their own body experience. Women say, ‘I don’t like this body’; men say, ‘It hurts.’ Their use of the third-person neuter pronoun in referring to their body makes quite clear their sense of alienation…

The body had become the whipping post. If the person is anxious, the body is starved, gorged, drugged, intoxicated, forced to vomit, driven into exhaustion or frenzied reaction against self-destruction. When this magnificent animal attempts to send up warning signals, it is silenced with pills.

Many people can listen to their cat more intelligently than they can listen to their own despised body. Because they attend to their pet in a cherishing way, it returns their love. Their body, however, may have to let out an earth-shattering scream in order to be heard at all…

It is possible that the scream that comes from the forsaken body, the scream that manifests in a symptom, is the cry of the soul that can find no other way to be heard. If we have lived behind a mask all our lives, sooner or later—if we are lucky—the mask will be smashed. Then we will have to look in our own mirror at our own reality.

Perhaps we will be appalled. Perhaps we will look into the terrified eyes of our own tiny child, that child who has never known love and who now beseeches us to respond. The child is alone, forsaken before we left the womb, or at birth, or when we began to please our parents and learned to put on our best performance in order to be accepted. As life progresses, we may continue to abandon our child by pleasing others—teachers, professors, bosses, friends, partners, even analysts. That child who is our very soul cries out from underneath the rubble of our lives, begging us to say, ‘You are not alone. I love you.”

~ Marion Woodman, ‘The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation’, pp. 24 - 25.

Extended Quote sourced by Charlotte Hoffman (.analyst)

Image Credit: Title unknown, illustration by Chinese artist Hao Hao

23/11/2025

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. "
Edward Everett Hale

Overlook,Yosemite,1910.

22/11/2025

Many different strands of your past experience begin to weave together until gradually the new direction announces itself. Its voice is sure with the inevitability of the truth. When your life-decisions emerge in this way from the matrix of your experience, they warrant your trust and commitment. When you can choose in this way, you move gracefully within the deeper rhythm of your soul. The geography of your destiny is always clearer to the eye of your soul than to the intentions and needs of your surface mind.

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Excerpt from his book, Eternal Echoes.
Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/store

Landing at Shannon, Ireland
Photo: © Ann Cahill