To Dare Together, with Erin O'Brien

Erin O'Brien, LPC, LLC

Hello friend! Welcome, my name is Erin O'Brien, and I'm daring to create and hold space for decolonized healing, transformation, and collective liberation.  I'm a licensed psychotherapist for over 20+ years, a relationship counselor, a spiritual intuitive, a shadow worker, and witch, and I believe that true therapuetic practice, calls for right-action and remembers all the ways of wellbeing.  This is a place that will remember the old truths and reconnect them to their land and to their people.  Together, we will unite the relational, social, spiritual, psychological, ancestral, scientific, environmental, political, and magickal, because it is most powerful when working as a sacred whole ~ AS ARE WE!  2026 is a time To Dare to create the world that we've been dreaming of.  To Dare to be the dream we have been waiting for...   Let’s do it. Together, we will restore right-relationship to ourselves, to each other, to the land, and to the Divine.  We will seek to know the truth in the depths, and dare to tune into the wisdom and pleasure of our bodies.  To honor the places that hold pain and renewal.  To descend and arise, transformed in the cycle of death and regeneration. To reenchant the world around us from a truly embodied and integrated place.  To be in honest connection where liberation, love, equity, accountability, repair, beauty, joy, gratitude, sensuality, generosity, prosperity, dignity, and reverence for all life on earth is at the heart of our community.    We will dare to align our body, heart, mind, soul, and spirit.  Ready to couragousely examine our original and chosen families, relationships, communities, cultures, systems in society, intergenerational patterns, ancestral wounds and wisdom, and the great expanse of our collective.  Because when we are together, we will seek to know what is true.  We will alchemize and transform, knowing that our fates are inevitably intertwined with one another.  So let’s will it together.  Our bodies hold so much intelligence if we just slow down enough to listen.  When we know how to keep silent and just be, just breathe, just listen, we know how to summon our greatest powers of transformation.  My offering each episode will be a combination of solo explorations and deep dives with other like-hearted therapists, space-holders, embodied healers, spiritual intuitives, magickal practitioners, artists, abolitionists, astrologers, visionaries, witches, and more.   We will focus on embodiment, trauma integration, and nervous system regulation.  We will work with our unconscious/shadow to illuminate what needs to be transmuted or released.  We will dismantle our internalized systems of dominance and extraction so we resonate with the reciprocity and abundance of life.  We will understand how colonization wounds are at the core of our dis-ease and disembodiment.  We will create ways of relating that promote connection, celebrate differentiation, respectfully move through conflict, and preserve each other's dignity.  We will conjure the wisdom of our ancestors to strengthen our communal spaces.  We will create rituals to attune with the cycles of nature, lunar rhythms, astrology, and the wheel of the year.  We will do pathworkings and divination, and so much more.  Are you ready To Go? Once again, THIS IS THE TIME To Dare to create the world that we've been dreaming of.  To Dare to be the dream we have been waiting for...   Let’s be it together.  “As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.” – unknown

  1. APR 4

    Embodiment Series Week 3: Science of Safety & Voicing Victory

    Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Week 3 of my new series called Embodiment as Sacred Force for Change!  Today’s episode was recorded under the Full Moon in Libra amidst Aries season, and we acknowledge this week's outrageous, yet sadly unsurprising news that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments about birthright citizenship; in law birthright citizenship is simply defined as automatically granting citizenship (as a legal status) to children upon their birth, regardless of parental citizenship status.  We name how the case is part of a larger web of imperialism, supremacy systems, and forced migration driven by colonization.  We hold the essential question: how do we stay regulated enough to respond with clarity and power? Under the Libra Full Moon and Aries Season Fire, we explore balance and spark, differentiation and action. We name why modern nervous system science like polyvagal theory and interpersonal neurobiology need to be held alongside older truths that were practiced long before institutions tried to patent and gatekeep them. Decolonized healing means remembering that embodied wisdom is not owned, and that access to regulation, connection, and well-being is for all.  We then go into the autonomic nervous system (sympathetic and parasympathetic), cues of safety, co-regulation, and the social engagement system, plus a deep dive into the vagus nerve and the autonomic ladder; ventral vagal (parasympathetic), sympathetic fight-flight-freeze, and dorsal vagal shutdown (parasympathetic). I also explain the Safe and Sound Protocol as a listening therapy that uses filtered sound frequencies to help the nervous system detect safety again, especially for complex trauma, chronic stress, and neurodivergent sensory patterns.  We close with a vocalization ritual and a victory chant, plus an invitation to speak, howl, or scream sacred rage in a way that frees the body and calls in the world we are building together. If you’re ready for more then join me each week! Get ready to dare, together! If this resonates, subscribe so you don’t miss out, share it with someone who needs nervous system support right now, and leave a review to help more people find this work.  Check out the links below to connect with the brilliant people and their work mentioned in today's episode: https://integratedlistening.com/products/ssp-safe-sound-protocol/ https://www.stephenporges.com/ https://youtu.be/Cxn9SyW0DvM?si=GZzIASyq83aYMpI_ https://therapistuncensored.com/secure-relating/ https://www.decolonizingtherapy.com/ https://www.decolonizingtherapy.com/podcast/ https://www.morrigan.academy/

    48 min
  2. MAR 27

    Embodiment Series Week 2: Decolonizing Our Bodies

    Send us Fan Mail Welcome back to Week 2 of my new series called Embodiment as Sacred Force for Change!  Today’s episode occurs during a powerful triple conjunction with Chiron, Eris, and Venus in Aries, while the first quarter moon is in Gemini.  We explore how the energy of this moment pushes honest questions and sacred speech.   Eris represents profound spiritual warrior energy, acting as an agent of change, and is a fierce disrupter on behalf of those who have been systemically silenced.   We use this bold timing to dare to speak about the colonization wound as a living pattern in our bodies, our relationships, and our healing spaces, including the way Eurocentric Western psychology and the mental health industrial complex has tried to strip spirit, ancestry, and land-based wisdom out of care.  We confront how colonization shapes disconnection, disembodiment, distrust, and suffering across lineages, and the path of healing involves daily acts of intentional resistance.  We will remember who we are, and that we are love.  We will relaim our bodies by decolonizing them – one breath, one tear, and one song at a time.    In today's emobdiment pracitce, we return to vocalization as a pathway to regulation, expression, and energetic movement. The voice connects with the vagus nerve, and humming, toning, and finding a comforting middle note can cue safety and soften the throat, breath, and heart  -- deepening spiritual practice and making space for guides, ancestors, land connection, and sacred speech. If you’re ready for more then join me each week! Get ready to dare, together! Check out the links below to connect with the brilliant people and their work mentioned in today's episode: https://www.decolonizingtherapy.com/ https://www.decolonizingtherapy.com/podcast/ https://www.laurakchung.com/ https://www.embodiedastrology.com/ https://www.morrigan.academy/

    41 min
  3. MAR 20

    New Weekly Series: Embodiment as Sacred Force for Change!

    Send us Fan Mail I'm back with a focused new Spring series called Embodiment as Sacred Force for Change!  We'll be using the potent New Moon and tomorrow's Spring Equinox to tend to our personal earth, our body, and plant powerful seeds for our future.   Weekly embodiment focused episodes will be aligned with the moon phases from the Spring Equinox until the Summer Solstice.  I will show you why deepening our capacity to stay present, connected, and courageous is an essential path to our healing, transformation, and collective liberation. It comes down to the most vital question: what happens when we’re disembodied? Who and what actually benefits from our chronic immobilization and the illusion that we are powerless? Over the course of these next 14 weeks, I will make it my personal mission to convince you that when our nervous system lives in chronic threat, it’s easier to control us, divide us, and keep us stuck in fear. Embodiment becomes sovereignty, a way to enhance presence with our autonomic nervous system cues, honor our survival strategies, and still choose right relationship to our body, our integrity, and our communities, knowing that when we are united in collective embodiment we are able to uplift each other, and that’s when we harness our greatest power for change. Our first practice today is vocalization, because the voice holds so much history. We explore gentle sound on the exhale, humming, and simple ways to experiment even if you “can’t sing,” then connect it to polyvagal theory, vagus nerve stimulation, and why chanting and group rhythm can support mood and regulation. If you’re ready for embodiment reclamation practices, nervous system regulation, and true integration, then join me each week! Get ready to dare, together!

    39 min
  4. 12/20/2025

    Sacred Void 12/19/25-12/21/25: Choose Who You Become

    Send us Fan Mail In today's episode we use this rare double dark moon (micro moon) on December 19th and the days leading up to the Winter Solstice on December 21st as a potent threshold.  Release what’s done. Bless what taught you. Name what you refuse to carry forward. Then claim who you are and what you choose to focus on creating, expanding, and birthing for the year ahead: a practice you’ll keep, a cause you’ll serve, a truth you’ll speak, a joy you’ll protect, the magick that is uniquely yours to bring forth into the world.  Over these next few days use this portal of exquisite darkness, to slow down, reflect, tune in, and just be.  Expressing your quiet commitment is spell work and this moment is THE TIME TO DO IT.  When the first crescent appears, you’ll already be transforming, aligned and steady, birthing who you have always been in a sacred spiral that remembers you even when you forget yourself. SO MOTE IT BE!!! *If you are interested in working with Professional Astrologer, Tony Steele, who is amazing and native Irish, here's his website: https://magickalcreatures.com/horary-astrology-readings. *If you are local to Delaware, and want to connect with a trusted pagan meetup group for community, organized by my Hight Priestess, Jae Sea, check out https://www.meetup.com/the-wilmington-pagan-meetup-group/ *If you are interested in the pagan tradition with 14+ covens all across the Mid-Atlantic Region, check out the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel here: https://www.sacredwheel.org/

    38 min
  5. 11/21/2025

    Water Trine & New Moon in Scorpio: Truth Rises from the Deep, Now Speak!

    Send us Fan Mail In today's episode, we look at the celestial influences of the New Moon in Scorpio, which arrives like a tide at midnight—quiet on the surface, roaring beneath— and this week’s grand water trine turns that tide into a mirror.  With the Sun, Moon, and Mercury all in Scorpio, Saturn and Neptune in Pisces, and Jupiter in Cancer, the chart invites a deep wash of intuition, clarity of heart, memory, and emotional movement. Water holds truth and it reflects what has been hidden.  What has been whispered, denied, or distorted? Which truth wants current, not containment? And with Mercury retrograde, we are called to reclaim, revisit, and remember the power in our spoken truth.   It can align responsibility, integrity, and care for ourselves, our communities, the land, and the Divine.   We explore the power of voice and devotional work with The Sovereignty Goddess Herself, The Morrigan, and center Her peace prophecy, imagining abundance shared from sky to earth, declaring prosperity and peace.  Next we read her second prophecy, warning of evil times ahead when leadership is false.  We credit Lora O’Brien’s native Irish sources and multiple learning paths for deeper practice at https://www.morrigan.academy/ and Morgan Daimler's translation of Irish text https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cath-maige-tuired-morgan-daimler-author-of-irish-paganism. We explore the magick of Rosc poetry to take a stand using the power of our voice and how the energy of this week supports our righteous word, even when it's hard and vulnerable to declare. I share my first Rosc poem related to personal truth. Water remembers. Words travel. Under Scorpio’s new moon, seeds of speech root deep and weave justice.  Call your power back with care, and let your voice make it real.   Recorded on 11/20/25

    32 min
  6. 11/07/2025

    Samhain Season Ancestor Practice with Susan Rains

    Send us Fan Mail On today's episode, I have the amazing honor to interview my beloved friend and fellow witch, Susan Rains, who is a part of a sibling coven, Coven of the Mystic Path, based in the Philadelphia and Springfield, PA area.  Susan shares her unique and profound Ancestor practice for working with her recently dead family members and beloveds for deep healing and transformative connection.   She shares several offerings with us and how they connect to one's spiritual path and evolution.  If you want to work with Susan and develop your own Ancestor practice, Altar, or if you want to take her up on her generous invitation to help you audit your home in the spirit of Samhain season to release what needs to go and create a more intentional environment, you can find her here: https://www.rains-design.com/  Susan works both locally to the Philadelphia metropolitan region and remotely, so she’s accessible no matter where you live! Here are the books Susan recommends to support your Ancestor practice: "Spirit Speak: A Comprehensive Guide to Connect Beyond the Veil" by Ivo Dominquez Jr., (Foreword by Mat Auryn) www.barnesandnoble.com/w/spirit-speak-ivo-dominguez-jr  "Communing with the Ancestors: Your Spirit Guides, Bloodline Allies, and Cycle of Reincarnation" by Raven Grimassi www.thriftbooks.com/w/communing-with-the-ancestors-your-spirit-guides-bloodline-allies-and-the-cycle-of-reincarnation_raven-grimassi Information on the incredible community and magickal tradition that both Susan and I are a part of called, Assembly of the Sacred Wheel: www.sacredwheel.org Episode Recorded on 11/3/25

    57 min

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
5 Ratings

About

Hello friend! Welcome, my name is Erin O'Brien, and I'm daring to create and hold space for decolonized healing, transformation, and collective liberation.  I'm a licensed psychotherapist for over 20+ years, a relationship counselor, a spiritual intuitive, a shadow worker, and witch, and I believe that true therapuetic practice, calls for right-action and remembers all the ways of wellbeing.  This is a place that will remember the old truths and reconnect them to their land and to their people.  Together, we will unite the relational, social, spiritual, psychological, ancestral, scientific, environmental, political, and magickal, because it is most powerful when working as a sacred whole ~ AS ARE WE!  2026 is a time To Dare to create the world that we've been dreaming of.  To Dare to be the dream we have been waiting for...   Let’s do it. Together, we will restore right-relationship to ourselves, to each other, to the land, and to the Divine.  We will seek to know the truth in the depths, and dare to tune into the wisdom and pleasure of our bodies.  To honor the places that hold pain and renewal.  To descend and arise, transformed in the cycle of death and regeneration. To reenchant the world around us from a truly embodied and integrated place.  To be in honest connection where liberation, love, equity, accountability, repair, beauty, joy, gratitude, sensuality, generosity, prosperity, dignity, and reverence for all life on earth is at the heart of our community.    We will dare to align our body, heart, mind, soul, and spirit.  Ready to couragousely examine our original and chosen families, relationships, communities, cultures, systems in society, intergenerational patterns, ancestral wounds and wisdom, and the great expanse of our collective.  Because when we are together, we will seek to know what is true.  We will alchemize and transform, knowing that our fates are inevitably intertwined with one another.  So let’s will it together.  Our bodies hold so much intelligence if we just slow down enough to listen.  When we know how to keep silent and just be, just breathe, just listen, we know how to summon our greatest powers of transformation.  My offering each episode will be a combination of solo explorations and deep dives with other like-hearted therapists, space-holders, embodied healers, spiritual intuitives, magickal practitioners, artists, abolitionists, astrologers, visionaries, witches, and more.   We will focus on embodiment, trauma integration, and nervous system regulation.  We will work with our unconscious/shadow to illuminate what needs to be transmuted or released.  We will dismantle our internalized systems of dominance and extraction so we resonate with the reciprocity and abundance of life.  We will understand how colonization wounds are at the core of our dis-ease and disembodiment.  We will create ways of relating that promote connection, celebrate differentiation, respectfully move through conflict, and preserve each other's dignity.  We will conjure the wisdom of our ancestors to strengthen our communal spaces.  We will create rituals to attune with the cycles of nature, lunar rhythms, astrology, and the wheel of the year.  We will do pathworkings and divination, and so much more.  Are you ready To Go? Once again, THIS IS THE TIME To Dare to create the world that we've been dreaming of.  To Dare to be the dream we have been waiting for...   Let’s be it together.  “As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.” – unknown