“At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want. There is only one time when it is essential to awaken. That time is now. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”

— LAO TZU

Hello there!

Hello… it’s wonderful to meet you… and this is Socks and Lucy.

I’m Lydia: changemaker, businesswoman, Integral Facilitator, coach, mentor, trainer, healer, mother, homebirther, doula, tea n’ croissant lover. I live on a mountain by a lake in the wilds of Wicklow in Ireland… and while I absolutely love all those roles, sometimes I simply long to see what the next breath feels like… and feel my son’s snuggles while listening to the rain.

A Life of Inquiry

My path is one of deep questioning and spiritual wayshowing though growing up I’d never have called it that - it was just life living me. I was raised in a cross-cultural context in a spiritual community in 1980s Ireland where we were chanting Sanskrit and meditating from the age of four. alongside our beautiful, wild landscape and culture was the haunting cloud of the Church. This gifted me early exposure to transcendental and Eastern traditions, giving me a deep anchor in contemplative practice, and also a lived innerstanding of cultural shadow and spiritual bypassing. 

From the cushion to the boardroom, my twenties were a dance between inner transformation and outer action. I trained in law, worked in business, studied as a minister, and kept returning to the enquiry: How do I fully and truly live, while I’m alive?

This quest led me from law firms to leadership retreats. It brought me into HIV counselling in South Africa, prison ministry in Ireland, leadership training in India, and working with child soldiers in Uganda. These were not detours but formative threads of my spiritual inquiry: What does wholeness mean in a breaking world?

Systems Change in Action

In the decades since, I’ve built a body of work that bridges the personal and the systemic, holding the belief that the world changes only when we do.

Some of the work I’ve led includes:
• Corporate wellbeing and culture change in companies like Apple and Microsoft
 • Cultural dialogues at Trinity College Dublin
 • Entrepreneurial training with changemakers in the Netherlands
 • Community healing in Northern Ireland
 • Conflict resolution in the Balkans
 • An AI-driven mental health initiative in London (in 2016)
• Annual conferences on mindfulness and education reform in Ireland

Across every context, my aim is to support the emergence of relationships and systems that are more life-giving, inclusive, and whole. This means working at the level of connection, communication, leadership, and collective nervous system, rewiring how we relate, decide, and create.

Remembering the Earth

I grew up in an artistic, entrepreneurial family with a love for land and beauty. The land has always spoken to me, even when I didn’t yet know how to listen. Over time, I was called home to the indigenous and Celtic roots of my own lineage.

This has meant returning to ritual, ceremony, and ancestral knowledge, honouring the lower and the cosmic worlds, the cycles of nature, and the wisdom held in the soil. It has also meant reckoning with colonisation, in my body, my spirituality, and my cultural inheritance.

My work now includes the decolonisation of leadership, the re-membering of pre-Celtic, matrilineal ways and the reclamation of land-based intelligence. I believe the land speaks, and I listen. I believe the future is ancient. And I believe that belonging begins vertically.

My Practice Today

The three strands of indigenous wisdom, systems transformation, and consciousness work are not separate. They are one weave. Together they form the ground from which I facilitate, teach, and guide others. I am a committed meditator and mother to an 10 year-old boy, who of all the teachers I’ve had is my greatest experience of love, presence, and humility.

The Principles I Live & Work By

  • We are one universal family with celebratory distinctions.

  • Leadership is love made visible.

  • The inner and outer are reflections, transformation begins within.

  • The ends and the means are the same.

  • The present moment weaves the ancient and the possible future.

  • At our essence, everyone is whole.

  • We dance with polarity, not against it.

  • The Earth is alive and intelligent, and she’s listening and speaking.

  • Life begins in the darkness and we must align with death to live fully.

The Spirals of My Work

BIO

Trainings, qualifications, and accreditations.

  • Integral Facilitator - Diane Musho-Hamilton and Ten Directions
    Professional Coach membership - International Coaching Federation
    Retreat Director, Senior Coach - The Foundation for Transformational Leadership
    Trainer of coaches, facilitators and mentors - The Foundation for Transformational Leadership
    Trainer - Kingstown College
    Mediator - Mediation Institute of Ireland

  • Mindfulness studies - University of Massachusetts Medical School via Centre for Mindfulness in Ireland
    Mindfulness Teacher - Mindful Schools
    Energy Healer - National Federation for Spiritual Healers
    Celtic Shamanic Practitioner - Slí an Chroí
    Doula - Doula Training International

  • FE1s - Griffith College Dublin + Law Society of Ireland
    Legal Studies, Dip - Dublin Business School
    Humanities, Dip - Irish American University,American College Dublin
    History, BA (graduating 2024) - Irish American University, American College Dublin

  • Former Chairperson - The Change Leadership Foundation, a leadership development charity across 5 countries with 10,000+ alumni
    Former Board memberships:
    The Sarah Bird Foundation - an international trauma healing organisation
    Herstory - a cultural movement that tells the life stories of historical, mythological and contemporary women
    Open FM - Ireland’s first LGBTQ radio station
    Lucca Leadership Ireland - the Irish affiliate of The Change Leadership Foundation
    Co-founder National Grieving Day - an annual series of events honouring grief, loss and transitions in life
    Co-director Mindfulness Practice in Schools - an annual conference that ran five sold-out events for pioneering teachers and culture shifters in Irish education.

Portfolio

Selection of recent consulting work.

  • Co-facilitating year long journeys for women through an evolutionary development programme using the map of the Celtic Wheel, with wisdom teacher Mari Kennedy.

  • Mindfulness and wellbeing programmes delivered in KPMG, IRFU, City Group, GE Capital, Takeda, Metlife, Aviva, SAP, Cluid Housing, Community Credit Union, World Rugby, Teamwork, Segment.

  • Coaching MBA students around leadership and personal development.

  • Directing weekend business training retreat for a female leadership team, developing conscious network marketing and new paradigm entrepreneurship.

  • Delivering facilitation and consciousness capacity building for a leading edge initiative at the intersection of mental health + artificial intelligence.

  • Training computer coders how to meditate, aiming to elevate the quality of experience for end users.

  • Creative Director for annual conference for educators and teachers bringing mindfulness and a mindful culture shift to education in Ireland.

  • Ran a retreat for conscious entrepreneurs on graceful, authentic marketing with Sara White at Right Track Creative. 

  • Co-celebrant at a handfasting marriage ceremony.

  • Had a natural homebirth – the biggest initiation of my life!

Testimonials

Client quotes sharing positive experiences and results.

  • "I attended mentor and coach workshops facilitated by Lydia. She is an excellent coach and facilitator. I would describe her approach as high energy and warm."

  • "Lydia is an engaging, warm, and wonderfully positive person to work with. My experience of collaborating with her is that her integrity, caring, and compassion shine through in her work and her personal life. I would highly recommend Lydia."

  • "I have had the pleasure of working with Lydia over a number of years in a number of capacities – we served as coaches together on programmes, we designed and facilitated together and worked alongside one another on various projects…It was always an absolute delight and pleasure to work with Lydia. She has a professionalism that is just wonderful to be around as she does so with an energy that is infectious and a regard for others that means her work is at the very centre of her focus. Lydia is able to engage and inspire a group in such a special and unique way, and her thirst for learning, openness to others and energy for life mean that having the privilege to be in a room with her is a gift to anyone lucky enough to be alongside her. I would happily and graciously recommend Lydia for any work that involves human beings, old or young!"