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(video transcript)

Hello and welcome to Poetry Alchemy Infusions, infusing you with the magic of poetry alchemy, to ignite the visionary within and to support you to bring your visions into visibility in the world.

Hi, I'm Rionach Aiken, founder of Poetry Alchemy and creator of Visionaries Becoming Visible. You can find me online at RionachAiken.com

So welcome, this is my very first Poetry Alchemy Infusions podcast, the first of many. I created this series of short poetry podcasts to share the power of spoken poems, which is something that I love to do. So to honor this new beginning the poem I want to share with you today is 'For A New Beginning' by John O'Donohue.

John O'Donohue is an Irish writer and philosophy, poet and priest. He's one of my Irish inspirations, and this is a poem that's very dear to my heart. It's one that I connected with in 2012 and it changed the course of my life. I came to it a time when I was really feeling off track and lost, and it reconnected me to my...

Have you ever felt so frozen with fear you couldn’t put yourself out there and just be yourself? Even though you had a deep longing to share, create, make a difference? It felt safer to stay in the shadows.

I get it.

Every woman has her own story of invisibility.

Here’s mine.

I was the little girl who disappeared behind the curtains when strangers visited.

I didn’t join groups as a child because I’d freeze with self-consciousness.

When I moved to a new, larger school for a year I was so shy I didn’t make any friends. I sat alone at break times with tears rolling down my cheeks.

Painful, right?

Even when I grew up I avoided career moves that threatened to put me in the spotlight.

My first business failed because I was too scared to put myself out there and market my services.

I had a successful career in education, but chose management roles that were less scary than teaching.

Rather than step into leadership, I supported others. I had the ideas. They...