"A further development of the medicated bath was the hot-air bath, used in Ireland as a cure for rheumatism until recent years. The structure in which these baths were given was known as a Tigh 'n alluis or 'sweating house'. One such ancient structure survives on Inishmurray in Donegal Bay and several have been described in the last century particularly in the north of Ireland. They are small constructions of stone, five to seven feet long. A turf fire was kindled inside until the house was heated like an oven. The fire was removed. The patient, wrapped in a blanket, crept in and sat down on a bench. The door was closed up. The patient remained until in a profuse perspiration and then, on leaving, was plunged in cold water and then rubbed warm. The patient was then encouraged to meditate (dercad) to achieve sitcháin (a state of peace). It is not beyond the realm of possibility that this act, found in many cultures in the world as a religious action, had similar religious connotations in the Celtic world."

A segment from A Brief History of the Druids by Peter Berresford Ellis

Note: What you’re about to read was written & shared to my Patreon blog last April. I was maximizing what one can do with a Gold’s Gym membership (plenty), and hadn’t yet tried formal cold therapy settings beyond- as you’ll read ahead- running from the sauna into a cold shower, in the locker room. Since this article was written, however, I was deeply blessed to not only go on pilgrimage to Ireland and spend plenty of time running around the countryside there, but specifically to spend time soaking up the very magic and chatting with one of the owners/curators of exactly the kind of practice I was researching and dreaming about at the time I originally wrote this article last April: Tigh n Alluis.

As Berresford-Ellis wrote in his Brief History, “tigh n alluis” translates to exactly what it is: a sweat house. So please, I hope you enjoy the original article below: but beneath it, find my updated additions after experiencing the stuff of my dreams in Ireland for myself. Blessed gamos season!

—-

I’ve noticed more spas and wellness studios offering what's called contrast therapy; jumping from the sauna to ice baths, and/or more sophisticated forms of cryotherapy.

I love to see this, but as evidenced by the wonderfully inspiring note above-- this practice goes way back across many cultures, including but of course not limited to the ancient Celts. When I initially came across that quote while reading Berresford Ellis' delightful book as part of the Ar nDraiocht Fein dedicant path reading list, it tickled me pink to see a practice that's gained (or re-gained) traction in the modern fitness & wellness spheres having such ancient and druidic roots. There are Irish wellness centers continuing the practice in Ireland today, and just know-- I will not rest until I experience them for myself!

So, while I’m sold on the Los Angeles adaptations of this ancient practice, my wallet is not- and it really doesn't need to be. Plenty if not most modern commercial gyms feature all the amenities you'd need to make this happen for yourself without much fuss, so I’ve started really maximizing what a Gold’s Gym membership gets you.

At almost every location (except the original, which remains fairly bare-bones as modern amenities go) you’ll find a steam room, sauna and of course showers. One of the perks of Golds’ is that there are, thank the gods, sex-specific saunas and steam rooms in the male and female locker rooms— you’re not expected to share with the entire gym, like at 24 Hour or elsewhere. I’m no misandrist, but seriously— men are truly the stinky sex and I’m not interested in sweating it out with y’all in close quarters like that. When it comes to smelly cooties, fuck equality— I’m sticking with the ladies!

Anyways— it may not be formal cryotherapy or a hop in Irish mountain water, but after an arm workout this past week, I intuitively decided to hop from the sauna to the showers at coldest temperature they’ll go a few times around. It was amazing!

I felt my blood flow harder and freer, I felt my senses sharpen, and I felt myself distinctly present in a way that I often fight to feel. Beyond that, I felt myself starting to enter that physicality-induced flow state of inspiration I so love to visit in multiple different avenues. During a cold shower part of this whole post-workout experience, I felt myself start to be visited by lines of poetry that I started repeating to myself so as to remember them long enough to write it down when I left the shower.

Between constant screen exposure on phones and computers and mental issues more personal to me, brain fog and a numb sense of detachment from my body are something I fight very hard to banish— this shit knocks that right out of the park.

I’ve spoken before about how I make my strength training a devotional offering to my patron goddess, the Morrigan, but to be honest, I’ve not been huge on the sauna until recently. Even now, I do it out of challenging myself rather than loving every second.

It’s a few things; I’m often rushing to get home and take care of everything else in my life, but I also have some kind of issue with my nose where I feel like I’ve been congested for years, so it’s extra taxing when I can’t breathe properly to begin with (the last doctor I consulted told me to “do a saline rinse”— jackass; I’ve since discovered it’s a deviated septum). But since I’ve decided that this is the year I stop being afraid to grow and actually put in the work to get more visibly muscular, I’m giving the sauna a real shot.

Let me take a moment to emphasize what should be obvious: I really do not respect the junkie-like attitude of going crazy hard at the gym or any physical activity with little to no regard for recovery. I may not be the strongest woman alive, but every truly accomplished bodybuilder I pay attention to reiterates that muscles truly grow in the kitchen and in bed (while you’re actually sleeping, whores) as much as they do in the gym. So, running around like a psycho not eating or sleeping and just lifting weights is a recipe for self harm: not strength. So not to worry, I prioritize sleep and rest already— but as my practice in the gym intensifies, it’s important to me that my recovery does as well. Especially when my strength practice holds the spiritual significance that it does to me— especially when the time I spend in the gym, in the sauna, doing whatever I’m doing for my body feeds out into the rest of my life as well. I get my greatest ideas for future projects, rituals, essays, photoshoots or personal endeavors directly after hard workouts.

One of the greatest aspects of strength training and fitness is the knowledge that you can get through damn near anything. If I can push through this shitty workout, I can handle the stress of my day-to-day. If I can push through this heat, I can push through my fear. If I can get through this cold, I can get through the moments where that voice in my mind tells me I’m better off dead or living as a hermit somewhere. So between embracing physical pain and having friends that I can talk with honestly on the good days and the rough, I’m good. Not good as in I’m happy all day every day; some days we might power through on spite and vengeance. Like Henry Rollins, I’m a big believer in harnessing vengeance to become greater. If someone tells me I can’t do something, talks shit behind my back, uses their time and energy to put me down in any way— it will directly fuel my working to be better.

While I’ve gone by Awen for a while now, several years ago I legally changed my name to Lilith. As far as goddesses that embody the power of harnessing chaos, condemnation and vengeance— you’d be hard-pressed to find greater. I don’t focus on my relationship with Lilith online for a few reasons; one of them is that while I don’t wish to fearmonger, she’s no joke, and I honestly don’t recommend most people work with her. Inviting that energy into your life, even for the best of intentions, will rock your fucking shit in ways that may sound glamorous and cool, but are actually just brutally hard and painful. If you can get through it, you have a goddess of next-level strength for life… but it’s really not necessary for everyone to go through that. Inevitably that’ll just make it sound cooler to people who want to be edgy, and I can’t prevent that; do what you will.

Other reasons are that I don’t have an interest in or calling to become a public voice on anything related to that entire pantheon, and it’s something that remains more personal for me. The demonic-goetic-Kabalistic type folks seem to be the ones that primarily focus on her in any depth, and that’s not really me. Not least of all though, the relationship is just extremely personal and I don’t feel the need or wish to share it; there’s plenty of writers and sources you can learn as much as you want to know from.

My relationship with the Morrigan is different; with her, part of my calling is to speak, teach and share. As other Morrigan devotees have been saying for a while now, she is recruiting and I know I have a part to play in that, so I do as I feel called to and I’m grateful it resonates with some folks. To that aim, shameless self-promotion: I am leading a workshop specifically called Courting the Morrigan in LA this summer!

I bring all of that up to say… part of the beauty of a truly pagan mindset is that it doesn’t entail rejecting “dark” energy or emotions, and only acknowledging the “love and light.” Some of the most powerful catalysts lie in harnessing that which could easily destroy us. Some of the most powerful knowledge lies in embracing the full spectrum of emotions, energies, themes and seasons. The earth cycles through it all, the gods go through it all— why wouldn’t we?

"I used to fight the pain, but recently this became clear to me: pain is not my enemy; it is my call to greatness. But when dealing with the Iron, one must be careful to interpret the pain correctly. Most injuries involving the Iron come from ego. I once spent a few weeks lifting weight that my body wasn’t ready for and spent a few months not picking up anything heavier than a fork. Try to lift what you’re not prepared to and the Iron will teach you a little lesson in restraint and self-control.
I have never met a truly strong person who didn’t have self-respect. I think a lot of inwardly and outwardly directed contempt passes itself off as self-respect: the idea of raising yourself by stepping on someone’s shoulders instead of doing it yourself.
When I see guys working out for cosmetic reasons, I see vanity exposing them in the worst way, as cartoon characters, billboards for imbalance and insecurity. Strength reveals itself through character. It is the difference between bouncers who get off strong-arming people and Mr. Pepperman.
Muscle mass does not always equal strength. Strength is kindness and sensitivity. Strength is understanding that your power is both physical and emotional. That it comes from the body and the mind. And the heart."

Henry Rollins, “Iron and the Soul” (for the love of every god, do yourself a favor and just read the whole essay)

Often, as Wesley so sagely said in The Princess Bride, “Life is pain, princess— anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.” Embracing it is a reminder that we can get through it, and that it will pass. I strongly reject the idea that anything is ever “just” one thing— that we all “just” need to be spiritual, that we all “just” need to exercise, that we all “just” need to read a book. For one, nobody “needs” to do anything— and bullying them about it isn’t the way to inspire whatever it is you think you want them to do.

Fundamentalists take on all different flavors, but they’re all ultimately the same: there is only One True Way, everyone else is wrong, even if you agree with them you’re probably Not Doing It Right, and preach-bullying people takes the place of genuinely engaging as a human being rather than connecting empathetically and letting the value of what you’re proposing speak for itself.

So for my part, I don’t believe in “just lift weights” any more than I believe “just go to therapy” or “just eat right (whatever the fuck right means?)” or “just talk to your friends” or “just be pagan” or “just” anything… let’s do away with “just,” it’s almost always attached to a sales pitch and whatever the hell people make entire personalities out of to get attention on the internet, at the cost of their own intelligence and integrity. Dogma makes for such a miserable way to live.

The point (or one of them) of the druidic perspective is that the interconnectedness of all life and uninterruption of us from nature means life flows through many avenues. We don’t sustain that interconnectedness by becoming dogmatic and fixating on only one realm. The real modern druid is someone that knows the value in it all, and strives for a genuinely holistic perspective: striving for the wisdom and wit of the bard, insight and vision of the ovate, the community connection and larger perspective of the consummate druid.

On the topic of that balance, I feel like it's not a reach to say that our current swing in society's pendulum has been a massive emphasis on talk therapy and all it entails. While this is truly great for those that need it, I feel we’ve swung a bit hard too hard towards the internal alone— talk therapy, labeling, identity, everything in the realm of the emotional and ideas... without the complementary force of externality, physicality, the theme behind telling folks to "touch grass" when they're starting to sound nutty from being terminally online and not getting out into real life enough. Don’t get me wrong— all of the aforementioned practices have their place. But let me use myself as an example; I’ve had therapists that were huge parts of my journey from insane, dysfunctional, freshly traumatized survivor to what you see today. If you think I'm a wild woman now, good gods you didn't know me when I was truly insane! Select handfuls of my talk therapy experiences but DBT specifically truly went a very long way for me, and I will forever be grateful to the professionals who engaged with me as a human being, validated me when I needed it, and also challenged me to keep growing so I could actually live my life. I’ve also had therapists that were a little overly fond of navel-gazing and wanted to endlessly rehash how stressful it is to go to the grocery store while I realized what I needed wasn’t more therapy, validation or overall anguished navel-gazing, it was really just a different job and a car— i.e., actual practical independence and options to keep moving forward in my life. It sounds overly simple maybe, but having more options and to be emotionally and mentally capable beyond just good is crucial towards actually moving past trauma and living your own life on your terms. So yes: therapy, introspection, all of that good stuff has its place. But the full spectrum balance-craving druid in me feels like that’s just half of the equation, and to focus solely on introspection without the external experiential is anemic and cutting off half your being. Physical practices can be just as healing, and it's cool to live in a time where so many of them are so doable at every price point. So whether you lift or not, I invite you to give a shot to physical recovery and wellness methods. As the ancients knew, they go so much deeper than simply physical recovery!

On to my update:

Not quite in Donegal Bay, I found Tigh n Alluis in the “heart of the Dublin mountains” specifically by hopefully, wistfully Googling to find a sauna-icy plunge experience that was even somewhat traditional, or at least in the vein of what I was reading about, in Ireland today.

I found it. Located within the Glencullen Adventure Park (a bustling, energetic hub full of young bicyclists doing tricks off great manmade dirt mounds in the great outdoors), the sweat house requires a walking journey even after you’ve driven as far as you can and parked. I appreciated the time this gave me to shift my headspace; while I’ve been drawn to it for years, I had never actually done a real ice plunge before my first visit to T&A, and was nervously excited. I was greeted by a wonderfully warm reception from Karl, one of the two brothers that own and operate the facilities. While his brother (who I didn’t get to meet this time) specialized more in the explicitly spiritual facet, Karl told me, he himself was a longtime teacher of Gaelic — a passionate lover of the language and conscious cultural revival that comes with teaching it in 2024. This is part of what makes Tigh n Alluis so special; it is a thoughtfully created, lovingly crafted, family-run immersive experience into a profoundly Gaelic cultural, spiritual revival. It is a visceral experience that you feel your way through, rather than words on a chalkboard or Zoom call. That’s what makes it so vital and alive, so unparalleled.

This was how I spent my birthday (Halloween) morning. None of the photos you’ll see are from that first visit, though— I only photographed my return visit on my way back out of the country through Dublin, roughly two weeks or so later.

While the gods can be communed with anywhere you feel called to them, there are some spirits and experiences so uniquely elemental and regional that they just cannot be replicated or conjured up anywhere else. I got that sense at Oweynagat, at Newgrange, at Slieve na Calliagh- and I got it here.

*Shot off my trusty Nikon, this isn’t even half of the area- but it’s where I spent most of my time running back & forth*

While running between the sauna and the pond, I let myself enter a flow state. For me, a good amount of the hangup and negative buildup really was mental— mind over matter is one of the most powerful lessons you can take away from anything, and it’s why I’m drawn to some of of the mind-body practices I am.

Minimal thoughts, all physicality, just a process of one to the next that I only wish I had more time to remain in. I wasn’t alone the entire time; some of this experience was shared with a local, adventurous father and son duo that told me about their wintry ocean dips, barefoot hiking and other “extreme” wellness pathways through the sweat, while I shared my ambitious intinerary. (For any ladies who think there are no loyal men left, this guy lovingly mentioned his wife within 30 seconds of speaking to me. They’re out there. Gods bless.) From my experience, the Irish I encountered may not have had the priority on explicit weight lifting or regimented exercise in a gym setting that many of us do here, but they’re deeply active naturalists that seemed to live and breathe outside and actively as much as possible. Forgive me for romanticizing a very real culture, but I have to appreciate that— it’s a far more well-rounded, genuinely mind-body-emotionally-healthy approach than the heavily sedentary doomscroll-and-consume culture that proliferates far too much out here in the states. You don’t have to lift weights or take ocean dips in the winter, but simply having a living relationship with the great outdoors and some basic activity is a damn good baseline. Before I left, Karl took the time to show me a nearby stone circle not far from a plaque bearing the poem “The Giant’s Grave” by Dutch author Jan de FOUW, who made a home in Ireland and clearly took a liking to this particular patch of forest.

When I came back for my second visit, Karl and I shared thoughts on the need for more confrontational, visceral ritual experience— how something like this is precisely what more modern-day “pagans” could use. Fuck the armchair, stop complaining, log off, do it for real. Mid-conversation, I revealed that I’d written this little post for my blog last summer— and since Karl asked if I’d send it his way, I thought I may as well share it for whoever else cares to read. (If you’re subscribed to my Patreon, I promise you’re still special— I’ll make it up to you!)

To the soundtrack of “Go Dig My Grave” by new-to-me Irish band Lankum, I sweat and swam and ranted past the setting of the sun and solidified a new friendship with a kindred spirits of sorts. The fact that it was my last night before leaving the country made me appreciate the experience even more acutely; this entire pilgrimage was years of dreaming made real, and this journey in particular. While I never need anyone to share anything resembling my perspective, practice or worldview— there’s nothing quite as refreshing as sharing your passion with someone that genuinely understands. Druidry, magic— whatever you want to call my Irish-inspired American muttcraft— has always been the love of my life, and the warm hospitality I was met with on this “side quest” will stick with me all my life.

(When I came back to add my update to this article, it brought such a smile to my face to see my “I won’t rest until I try it” and “it’s not Irish mountain water, but”— I got there after all.)

So if you find yourself anywhere near the hills outside Dublin with even an hour or two to spare, I cannot recommend this experience enough. It was an absolute blessing to visit towards the beginning and end of my trip, and I hope to return not too far off into the future. If you do, say hi for me— I’ll be back soon.

Hot ‘n Cold: A Poor Man’s (or Ancient Druids’) "Contrast Therapy"

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