Jane Burns – Celtic Virtues to Cultivate Lasting Peace Within

Your opening class with Jane will focus on truly being present.

To live well and deeply, you must be grounded — and that means fully knowing yourself as you navigate the potent and mysterious forces of this world and the Otherworld of the unseen.

You’ll begin by examining your connection to the Earth itself — exploring the many ways it’s a reciprocal relationship, meant to be founded in mutual love and affection.

As humans we’re contending with seemingly endless dangers in the world — and that relationship of trust can become strained, leaving us fearful and seemingly alone, ambivalent about our lives, disconnected from our destiny, and separated from the Divine source that we serve by fulfilling our destiny.

You’ll start investigating the magic of Celtic wisdom and practices to make chaos and change your allies, not your adversaries.

As an antidote to fear and separation, you’ll practice aligning with Source through the Cauldrons of Energy, places in the body the Celts believed held more soul — your head, heart, and belly.

In this session, you’ll seek deeper grounding to achieve greater presence as you:

• Work closely with the Cauldron of Warming (also known as Fire in the Belly), the seat of your survival — and the strength from which you put yourself out into the world
• Study the myth of Fintan Mac Bochra and the Hawk of Achill — Fintan Mac Bochra is said to have lived for more than 5,000 years, and, having seen the passage of many eras in Irish history, is “the ever-present one”
• Journey to Fintan and visit Ash, the Celtic World Tree and the unifier of Heaven and Earth for strength and grounding
• Accept the benevolence of nature as a given
• Ascertain a part of your soul that you’re NOT living right now — and become more aware of how to be present
• Recoup what you’ve lost through ungroundedness

Sometimes sacrifice is necessary to loosen the grip of what keeps you in fear.

You’ll explore how trial and adversity are important allies in shaping who you become. And as you’ll discover, in most cases, your fiercest battles lie within you.

As great observers of nature, the Celtic people understood how chaos and destruction often brought much-needed change to the landscape and waterways.

It was natural for them to question in times of hardship: “How can I change myself to align with this new balancing?”

When we purposely leave our arrogance behind, as the Celts did, it can inspire courage to embrace new and different ways of being.

You’ll also continue working with the Cauldron of Warming, a source of strength, since nothing requires more courage than putting yourself out into the world and fulfilling your destiny — something you can’t achieve without grounding.

In this session, you’ll:

• Examine the role challenge serves in your life — and visit Holly, the tree that explores battle-readiness for the challenges you’ll meet
• Investigate the myth of Oisin Goes to Faeryland, in which Oisin, a patriot and noble warrior of the Fianna, finds himself in a land that asks nothing of him — and offers little to test his mettle
• Understand fear as an optional response
• Uncover what inner contest you’re most avoiding in your life
• Discern which sacrifices are worthy ones
• Embrace courage as an inner force that garners its strength from Source

Joy is a living and accessible presence in this world, a shaper of earthly life, and an equal partner to sorrow and grief.

You’ll explore the ways joy isn’t just a felt response to good fortune, but a force that’s constantly creating goodness in our world.

Jane will guide you to work with the Cauldron of Motion, located in the heart, that’s said to turn with the joys and sorrows of life. This cauldron houses and awakens the soul’s yearning and destiny.

As you tend and align the Cauldron of Motion with Source, you’ll also tend and align your destiny with Source.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• How joy is the force that melts and expands, while sorrow seizes and tempers
• How to explore and journey into the myth called Deirdre of the Sorrows — and understand the inextricable relationship between joy and freedom (saoirse in Gaelic)
• How to meet and seek a teaching from Honeysuckle, the consummate embodiment of the contagious nature of joy
• How to identify the accessible freedoms in your life you’ve been ignoring
• How releasing yourself from others’ expectations brings you joy — and how to anticipate joy as the reward for pursuing your destiny
• Ways to foster and tend to joy as you open your heart to nature’s innate goodness

Gratitude is perhaps the most appropriate response to everything that comes your way — and therefore, to the natural order of things.

You’ll discover how gratitude lets you trust and give way to the greater wisdom of providence. You’ll explore how saying thank you and assenting to that greater wisdom, even during times of misfortune, can accelerate the new birth it promises to bring.

Jane will explain how, whenever you cling to a course of action that’s clearly not ordained, you suffer — because on some level, you’re living and endorsing a falsehood or a false Self. The separation from your truth (which is fully aligned with Divine truth) can leave you feeling bereft and sorrowful.

In this session, you’ll explore further alignment with the Cauldron of Motion, which sources from the Sea and enables you to keep your balance in the shifting seas of life.

You’ll discover:

• The myth of the Selkie Bride, which examines what happens when the Divine order of things is interrupted and the soul’s yearning goes unanswered
• Hawthorn, the tree that teaches the necessity of sanctuary before rebirth
• How to stay in constant seeking and awareness of the immanence of God in all things
• Ways to maintain the right relationship with nature and Divine Order
• How you can learn from the selkies (magical folk) about a hidden treasure in the sea within you
• The inseparable relationship between grief and joy — and how each lives within the other

Through humility, you’ll gain direct access to Divine knowing. Insight and revelation can flow to you easily and unbidden, because you’ve released your need to know everything.

You’ll explore how knowledge can certainly make you feel more comfortable in your surroundings as you face the ongoing demands of life.

However, you can also become so attached to what you know that Divine knowing (the wisdom of the gods) can become blocked and unavailable.

Jane will introduce you to the Cauldron of Wisdom (Fire in the Head), which sources from the Sky or Heaven. You’ll learn how humility keeps this cauldron upright and open to receiving, while arrogance can turn it upside down.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• The myth of Diancecht and his son, Mioch, both gifted physicians and healers of the Tuatha de Danaan (magical folk with supernatural powers)
• Why the arrogance of Diancecht caused him to take the life of his son
• Why becoming master of any craft requires you to put devotion to the craft itself above devotion to the self as the craftsman
• White Poplar, a tree more tied to the whispers of the gods than any other
• How arrogance and pride leave no room for the whisper of God to enter — and what we mean when we say someone is “full of himself”
• An untapped part of your imagination (or pure potential)
• Ways to become more accepting of any personal misfortune, instead of masking it with pride
• How to gain greater comfort with not knowing and create an open door for Divine wisdom to enter

While you can easily pursue knowledge through an intentional study of life, wisdom is usually something bestowed on all of us as a by-product of hardship and trial.

In this module, you’ll learn how true wisdom is not normally sought — because we inherently know it comes with a price. In fact, wisdom has been known to grow when knowledge has either tapped out, or turned inward on itself.

In this module, you’ll discover why wisdom was more prized by the Celts than any other virtue.

You’ll also continue to invoke the Cauldron of Wisdom, which asks you to forget what you think you know so you can fill yourself with Divine knowing — the hollow bone of core shamanism.

In this session, you’ll explore:

• The myth of King Cormac, who loses everything he loves to learn that a life without adversity is a diminished one — and that avoiding challenge divorces us from wisdom
• How to journey to the 9 Hazel Trees that surround the Well of Wisdom for an important teaching about truth
• Uncover an untruth about yourself that you’ve long accepted as true
• Ways to see your experiences of adversity as resources from which the gold of wisdom can be mined
• The riches you’ve reaped from loss and hardship
• A litmus test for determining what’s true

Generosity is not just an outpouring of support and kindness to others — it’s a receptivity to all that life requires of you, a back-and-forth flow no different than the waves of the sea.

In this module, you’ll explore what it truly means to be unattached to outcome and unwedded to expectations of how things “must be” in order to be happy — so you can live and love unconditionally.

When you’re unattached to outcomes, life has more access to you — and can more easily bring the things that will inspire you and open your heart.

The ancient Celts looked to the generous spirit of nature to acquire and emulate this effortless, rhythmic flow. They admired how the nature beings yielded to the altering work of the elements — and did nothing to obstruct the changes it wrought.

As Jane will share, to transform your relationship with the change agents of Nature — the elements — you must step out of the fear of their power to dismember your life and yourself, and recognize the positive balancing forces they provide.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• Powerful examples of how humans relate so intimately to nature — for instance, how an inner imbalance of Water can leave you feeling ungrounded, unable to draw boundaries, while yielding to its weight and intent to rebalance you can lead to you finally saying what needs to be said
• The intriguing myth of Boann and the Well of Segais — and you’ll ponder whether it’s a cautionary tale
• How the apple tree can teach you the nature of generosity
• Ways to let go of outmoded habits and beliefs that don’t serve you — and identify new experiences and potential you’re not letting in
• How Water can come out of balance — and the cost of trying to impede it
• New ways of identifying and opening to the generous nature of life

In many spiritual traditions, compassion is a practice that can release you from bitterness, resentment, struggle, and separation. It teaches us all how to live not from the head, but from the heart.

It’s easy to be compassionate towards those who suffer — it’s a much greater challenge to be compassionate toward those who cause that suffering.

In this module, Jane will guide you through powerful truths, including how the exact life circumstances of someone you hold in harsh judgment — but for the grace of God — could be your own.

You’ll discover how the virtue of true compassion is both indiscriminate and unconditional — and how to observe your own actions and behavior as God would, with no judgment and with unconditional love.

In this session, you’ll:

• Continue your work with the elements by examining how Air impacts you — and how being too in your head can block intimacy, connection, and greater understanding of the human condition
• Dissect the myth of Riannon, a queen who was judged, disbelieved, and punished for a crime she didn’t commit — and as she struggled for years to attain mercy for herself, she ultimately came to regret an earlier lapse in her own compassion for another
• Explore how the Willow tree teaches you the skill of crying for those who can’t cry for themselves
• Place bringing an end to suffering ahead of being right — and stand in the shoes of those you judge
• Witness with detachment your “biggest mistake” and locate compassion for yourself
• Dismember the judgment you hold against yourself that keeps you suffering

Sometimes in the heat of struggle, the wisest course of action is to simply surrender — to lay down your arms and allow the process of transformation to just unfold.

You’ll discover why a common response to trial is to find a way out of the burning building as quickly as possible — but sometimes, sitting down in the fire and waiting for the dismemberment to occur renders us a much greater prize — a newly forged, more empowered self.

A kind of purification can then take place, releasing you from the seeming indignities and losses you’ve fought so hard against.

And the results are more lasting, deeply felt, and irreversible. When you finally elect to stop and sit down in that fire, you freely sacrifice what’s been blocking your pathway to power for so long.

As you’ll discover, the element of Fire within us all is what impassions our life, what sparks our creativity and ignites our imagination.

In this session, you’ll explore:

• How the Fire within you can burn out when you become too staid and complacent, too rigid in your thinking, or lacking in conviction
• Why it’s so common to avoid the parts of life that can embolden and reshape you — and why Fate is then obliged to bring to you the experience that will reignite you
• The myth of the Celtic god Bran the Blessed, who foretold and gamely surrendered to his own death because he understood that it was a pathway to power and protection for his companions
• The sacred tree, Furze (Gorse) — a golden, flowering plant that’s burned to the ground each year so it can grow more vibrantly
• How to identify and seek the fuel (or stimulus) that keeps your inner Fire burning bright — and what must be sacrificed so your deeper passions can be set free

In the Celtic vision, there are three strains of music: songs of joy, songs of sorrow, and songs of peace.

In this closing class, you’ll explore how peace is the third component that breaks the dualistic strain created between the other two components.

While the Cauldron of Motion turns with the joys and sorrows of life, the virtue of peace calms the shifting seas of earthly life and creates something else — Heaven on Earth, or the peace that surpasses all understanding.

As Jane will share, joy and sorrow are temporal. Peace, by contrast, is connected to the realm of the Otherworld, or the afterlife.

Deep down, humans have always sought to go beyond dualism, to locate a way of life where suffering is an option — and peace is a choice you’re free to make in every moment.

As you’ll explore, peace isn’t something you create, it’s something you allow.

In this final session, you’ll:

• Work with your inner Earth element, realizing that the source of your own restlessness arises out of the disconnection from Mother Earth
• Delve into the myth of the Voices of the Wells, which chronicles the history of the estrangement from Mother Earth and all we’ve lost as a result
• Journey to the Great Mother herself and ask to be taken back into the cradle of the Earth
• Visit the Yew tree, which often grows in cemeteries, and allow its soporific powers to lull you to sleep
• Discover a part of yourself you’ve been estranged from and call it home
• Allow yourself to be imbued, like the Voices of the Wells, with the wisdom of the Earth