How to Come Home

Of Sea, Steam, and the Slow Arrival of the Soul

Hello dear readers,

I’m back in Ireland — although those four words don’t quite capture the fullness of it. You may have heard the Native American saying that our soul travels at the speed of a horse. In that sense, I haven’t fully arrived yet. I’m in the liminal space — neither here nor there. It’s a strange place to inhabit, one that calls for conscious awareness so we can go gently with ourselves and give our psyches time to land. It can be a difficult space too. I’ve noticed my thoughts growing fuzzy, my mood dipping, my focus scattering. But thankfully, each time, I catch myself and steer gently back. At times like these — and really at any moment of transition — it helps to simplify everything. Do one thing at a time, slowly, mindfully. And keep expectations soft and low for what can be achieved in a single day.

I have arrived back to Cork, this county I’ve called home since 2006. The weekend before I left in November to travel to Guatemala, I visited an outdoor sauna perched above Garretstown beach. It was close to closing time, and I had the place to myself. I jumped into the icy Atlantic three times, each time knowing there was a fire blazing in the sauna above to welcome me back to warmth. As fate would have it, the day of returning this week, I met a friend who happened to be heading there again — so I went too, marking a quiet but symbolic completion of the circle. Once more, three plunges into the ocean. A kind of ritual in itself.

That same evening, another friend sent me a link to an article about an ancient Irish sweat house discovered in County Leitrim. I’ve come across this before — stories of small beehive-like stone structures hidden in the hills, used for healing, cleansing, and perhaps even ceremony. Known in Irish as Tigh ‘n Alluis, or “house of sweat,” these were our ancestors’ version of the sweat lodge. Built from stone, heated with fire, they were places where the body was purified — and perhaps the spirit too.

The Leitrim Sweat House.

It moves me to think that this impulse — to cleanse in heat, to plunge in water, to mark a threshold — has always been here, embedded in the land and psyche of this island. That long before the saunas we know today, there were quiet domes of stone holding warmth, silence, and renewal. And maybe, in some intuitive way, returning to that sauna by the sea was not just a modern ritual of wellness — but a quiet remembrance of something older in my bones. Something still alive, waiting to be reawakened.

That was mulling around in my mind these last days. And I thought to myself, is it any wonder that mobile saunas are popping up everywhere around Ireland now. If anything I’m surprised it took so long. We are such delicate creatures, with our thin layer of skin, so exposed and prone to the fickleness of the elements. Why wouldn’t we whole-heartedly embrace this re-emerging culture of sweat houses.

We may cloak ourselves in Gore-Tex and central heating now, but I think the old wisdom still stirs in our bones. There’s something primal in us that remembers the need to gather around fire, to sweat out the cold, the stagnant parts of ourselves. The sauna, the sweat lodge — they aren’t just luxuries or wellness trends. They’re thresholds. They remind us that transformation doesn’t come from force, but from surrender. From entering the heat. From letting ourselves soften.

In rural Ireland, the old sweat houses were often just moss-covered domes of stone, tucked into the hillside, beside a stream or a spring. People crawled into them to sweat out fevers, or aches, or heartbreak. Some were used by women after childbirth. Some were perhaps social, others deeply solitary. But they speak to a time when the land itself held the space for healing. When we didn’t outsource wellness — we returned to the earth for it.

I’ve partaken in quite a few sacred sweats over the years — spaces where ritual and healing combine in the alchemy of fire, water, and steam. I whole-heartedly recommend it. The stand-out experience for me was in Mexico, back in 2017. I was in the selva baja — the low jungle outside Playa del Carmen, in the region of Quintana Roo — and joined a sweat lodge led by a Mayan elder named Abuelita Marguerita. I think I may have mentioned her here before. She was truly unforgettable — frail in body, weathered by time, but with a spirit that absolutely soared.

I crawled into the tiny stone lodge one evening with a group of strangers. Once you were in, there was no space to move — and no way out. The heat was intense. We sang, we prayed. At one point it became so hot we risked burning the person in front of us with our breath. And through it all, Abuelita sat calmly beside the fire, tending it, guiding the ceremony with chants and prayers. I stumbled out afterwards and lay on the earth for ten minutes, elated simply to have made it through — but also feeling cracked open, reborn in a way I couldn’t quite name.

And so, perhaps these re-emerging sweat spaces are more than just a trend. Maybe they’re part of a remembering. A re-rooting. A way to coax our spirits back into our bodies when we've flown too far or fast. Sitting in the steam, feeling the heat, watching the ocean crash against the stones, I sensed something in me catch up a little. Just a little.

Returning is rarely just one act. It’s a series of small permissions — to rest, to feel, to reacquaint oneself with the rhythm of home. This land I call home — wet, wild, temperamental — understands that process. If we know how to enter she will welcome us back.

And in that, I feel quietly grateful. To be back. To be arriving. To be, once again, learning how to return.

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Until the next step of the journey, sending you warmth and light from the south of Ireland, wherever you are

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Thank you