There is a quote I have carried with me for years.
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” (Joseph Campbell)
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 launches 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 up. 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.
I have always wanted to host a Retreat. A special kind of retreat … for those willing to go beyond what they already know, and discover what could be possible when they get together to envision a new kind of future; a future informed by the past but inspired by the future.
On 29th May, the doors of Temple House, County Sligo, will open for a small group of women for Voices Rising — Vision in Action.
Temple House is not a hotel. It is an estate. It carries centuries of past 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 house grounds you in the land, while the view also presences you to the expanse of the sky. The sense that you have left the ordinary world at the gate and entered somewhere that asks something of you … to come home to the longings of your heart.
That is exactly what I want.
This is not a retreat designed exclusively for rest and comfort. While comfort is in abundance, this is a retreat where you will be met where you are; where the company is real and the conversations will likely take you somewhere that your everyday life doesn’t have the space to go; where you can sit with other women and discover — sometimes with a kind of relief — that you are not alone in what you carry. Not alone in what you want. Not alone in what you have been afraid or reluctant to say out loud.
I’m inviting women to travel to be at this retreat. Whether you come across Ireland, or from further afield, I have always believed that the willingness to travel toward something that matters, is what makes it worthwhile. 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.
If you are that woman, this retreat is for you.
The woman who knows she is standing at the entrance of something — a next chapter, a bigger version of her work, a vision that has been sitting in her quietly for too long — and who is ready, finally, to step forward with confidence.
We will work with courage. With trust. With willingness. With the question of what it means to truly embrace an edge rather than manage it from a safe distance. Each woman will leave 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 is creating.
But the real thing they will leave with cannot be put in a bag.
There are 15 places. Only 15. This matters to me. I want a circle, not a crowd. I want every woman in that room to know that her voice is part of what makes this work. That she is not an audience member but a 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, 29–31 May 2026, Temple House, County Sligo. Email eileen@eileenforrestal.com for details and registration
Embrace the Edge launches 19th May, 5.35pm. Bistro Bianconi’s (Upstairs) Sligo town.
Life is bigger when you say yes.
