“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

This is a quote I have carried with me for years.

I have stood at the entrance of many caves. I have flown to the other side of the world to find them. I have driven down roads I didn’t recognise, booked flights to places where I knew no one, stepped into rooms full of strangers and sat down at tables that would change the direction of my life. I have learned — slowly, sometimes painfully — that the fear at the entrance is not a warning. It is a signpost.

It is telling you: here. This is where something important lives.

On 19th May, my new book Embrace the Edge launched in Sligo town. The subtitle says everything: Life is bigger when you say yes. I didn’t write that to be clever. I wrote it because I have lived it. Every single time I said yes to something that frightened me, something opened. Every single time I let the edge be exactly what it was — uncertain, uncomfortable, alive — I found myself on the other side of a version of me I hadn’t met yet.

Ten days later, on 29th May, I opened the doors of Temple House, County Sligo, to a small group of women for Voices Rising — Vision in Action.

I want to talk to you about why I created this retreat. And why I believe Temple House was the right cave.

Temple House is not a hotel. It is an estate. It carries centuries of living within its walls, and there is something about arriving there that does something immediate to you — something the body understands before the mind catches up. The wildness of Sligo. The sky. The sense that you have left the ordinary world at the gate and entered somewhere that operates by different rules. Somewhere that asks something of you.

That is exactly what I wanted.

I am not interested in a retreat where we feel comfortable the whole time. I am interested in a retreat where we feel met. Where the environment is beautiful and the company is real and the conversations go somewhere that our everyday life doesn’t have the space or the courage to go. Where we sit with other women and discover — sometimes with a kind of shock — that we are not alone in what we carry. Not alone in what we want. Not alone in what we have been afraid to say out loud.

Women travelled to be at this retreat. Some from across Ireland, some from further afield. I love this. I have always believed that the willingness to travel toward something matters. It is its own act of trust. It is the body voting for what the heart wants before the rational mind has had time to talk you out of it.

I have done it myself. I have booked flights and cleared calendars and said yes before I was ready — because I have learned that ready is not a prerequisite. Willing is the prerequisite. Willing to go. Willing to not know what will happen. Willing to be in a room where something real might occur.

This retreat was for that woman.

Not the woman who had it all figured out. Not the woman who needed no help. The woman who knew she was standing at the entrance of something — a next chapter, a bigger version of her work, a vision that had been sitting in her quietly for too long — and who was ready, finally, to step forward.

We worked with courage. With trust. With willingness. With the question of what it meant to truly embrace an edge rather than manage it from a safe distance. Each woman left with a copy of The Courage to Shine, a copy of Embrace the Edge, and a suite of Get Up and Go diaries and journals to hold and guide the vision she was creating.

But the real thing they left with could not be put in a bag.

There will be more of these retreats. Limited to 10 places. Only 10. I want a circle, not a crowd. I want every woman in the room to know that her voice is part of what makes the retreat work. That she is not an audience member but a full participant and contributor. That what she brings is essential, not optional.

If you have read this far, something in you is already responding.

Trust that.

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Temple House is waiting. I need to find my people.

Are you one of them?

Voices Rising — Vision in Action, 2-3 October 2026, Temple House, County Sligo. Details and registration will be provided on request.

Embrace the Edge. Life is bigger when you say yes.

Love and light

Eileen