When Hannah Bowler moved to London at the age of 21 to work in the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, before going into the music industry and touring with Florence and the Machine, it was the life of excitement and glamour she had craved.
But instead of enjoying her achievements, she was tormented by mounting insecurity.
There was such a contrast, she explains, between what her life looked like and what she felt about it. Guiltily she kept asking herself, “Why am I not just loving my life?”
“I was not prepared to be catapulted into this kind of world,” says Bowler, now aged 34 and a holistic therapist, “although lots of it was amazing.” She had grown up on a farm in Co Wexford, before studying journalism in Dublin City University and “was not robust enough to handle” the working and partying in the orbit of celebrity lives.
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It was a very early lesson in “that cliche, that all of the things that you chase for happiness don’t actually make you happy”.
Rather, they were fuelling her addictive tendencies “across the board”.
“Addiction is always a way of managing something, a way of suppressing and avoiding something,” she says. It comes in many guises, from endless shopping and Netflix bingeing to excess socialising and using substances. “For me, it was definitely: ‘How do I get out of how I am feeling?’”
When she was 25, a close friend took his own life. It was the catalyst for her to address her struggles with addiction.
Looking for a new path in life, an interest in plant medicine took her to Peru. She sublet her London flat for what she thought might be a few months. But, in the Amazon rainforest, she felt more content than she had ever been and ended up staying for a year.
From there, Bowler’s “journey” continued, both through physical travel and psychological self-development as she experienced other cultures. She studied yoga and meditation in India; and consciousness with the Kriya Lightning Foundation in Thailand.
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When Covid started to ground global transport in 2020, she returned to Ireland “for a visit”, having not been back for a couple of years. However, four years later, she is still here, happily living and working in Cork and currently studying for a master’s in depth psychology, which is “about how we learn to decipher what’s happening in our unconscious” – an approach championed by Carl Jung.
For some time, Bowler had been mulling over the idea of creating a community for people interested in looking more closely at why they behave, think and feel the way they do. But she thinks it might not have moved beyond a notion if she had not started chatting about it to a fellow student on her depth psychology course at the Limerick campus of Technological University of the Shannon, Wayne Dignam.
Having had some similar thoughts himself, “he straight away said, ‘this is a great idea, let’s do it’.”
In January this year they cofounded Síolta, which can be loosely described as a co-operative of wellbeing practitioners. In choosing the name, the Irish for “seeds”, they were envisioning how this venture could enable personal growth, connection and healing.
The energetic Dignam (48), who lives in Limerick, knows plenty about personal growth and healing. He has spent decades coping with the emotional fallout from a very troubled early childhood, during which he and his siblings were in and out of care and a younger sister was killed.
But at the age of eight he was fortunate to be fostered by a loving and resourceful couple in north Dublin, who had six sons of their own and whose surname he later took through deed poll. He thrived through education, studying engineering and maths at Trinity College after school, and is now pursuing a third master’s in his “spare” time. He works as commercial manager with AirNav Ireland, which provides air traffic management services, and Síolta is his latest social enterprise.
A decision in 2008 to talk to The Irish Times about his childhood experiences and the effect they had when it came to the parenting of his own three children brought Dignam to public attention.
“It propelled me into a whole new area, a whole new way of being,” he reflects. The thing he is most proud of was being involved in the launch of the children’s referendum in 2012, which was “a significant time for me to speak my truth”.
He also founded the Care Leavers’ Network, seeking better support and services for the estimated 500 young people who exit State care each year when they turn 18. In 2015 he won a national funding award from Social Entrepreneurs Ireland, which enabled him to extend the network to four other EU states. But the death of a fellow care survivor and network advocate, Shane Griffin, on December 31st, 2019, at the age of 33 after a long struggle with his mental health, rocked Dignam. He has since stepped back a bit from the network.
“A lot of it was too close to the bone for me. But I learned a lot about what works and what didn’t work for care leavers. Then I saw how I could maybe bring that to other people.” Síolta was born out of that belief, after his and Bowler’s paths converged.
“Wellbeing” covers a multitude and she acknowledges it comes with a “large shadow”, with some operators “feeding off people’s insecurities”. The dozen practitioners who have received the Síolta stamp of approval so far are ones she knows personally and can vouch for the integrity of their work. Their expertise ranges from yoga, breath work and pleasure coaching to nature guiding, shamanism and holistic psychology.
It aims to be a blend of alternative and conventional therapies, often regarded as opposites, so people can pick and choose what works for them. It is targeted towards “anybody on the personal development or self-inquiry journey”, she suggests. However, this is not only about individual introspection, but also collective wellbeing.
“We have to look after ourselves, but also show up for the community and show up for the planet,” says Bowler, who is delighted that Síolta has recently been approached about going into primary schools to conduct wellbeing sessions. With a particular interest in relationship work, she believes young people don’t adequately learn skills that are important for human interaction.
While the Covid-19 pandemic undoubtedly had an impact on socialisation, technology is a far bigger factor, she points out. There is a sense we are connecting online, but “it’s such an artificial form of intimacy”. The dopamine addiction of social media leads to a “hollow” form of connection.
“We have this persona that we all buy into, this external sense of self.”
But when that is at odds with who we actually feel we are, it creates a barrier against showing vulnerabilities in real life.
Both Bowler and Dignam talk about bringing their own experience of what is needed “to heal and to grow” to the new project. He has also co-authored a book on trauma due to be published by the Cork University Press next year. While he was subjected to exceptional trauma, Dignam says “everybody has something that they need to work through”.
Síolta offers different entry points, “where people can share and work through stuff at different levels, whatever they feel that they’re open to”. If too much talk of the “inner journey” is intimidating, there are “simple things like getting together, having a chat, having a cup of tea. It doesn’t have to be too deep. Just having connections, to check in with people.”
A recent event with the Co Clare Hometree charity, for instance, involved planting trees followed by lunch. They also organise educational talks, hikes and volunteer work.
I like to meditate and keep fit. I also really love going to the mixture of Síolta events. It’s like a medicine
— Wayne Dignam
Through the changing nature of society, not helped by the impact of Covid, Dignam believes “we’ve lost a lot of community; we’ve lost a lot of the opportunities to share, to be authentic and to be vulnerable in a safe space”.
Ensuring accessibility, both financially and geographically, is something the pair are trying to ensure. They operate a sliding fee scale and while in-person events are their priority, online sessions broaden their reach. They have also started some gender-specific work, partly to encourage participation by men who might not want to risk being the lone male in a group.
Dignam, to maintain his own wellbeing, enjoys hiking and being out in nature; spending time with family and friends. “I like to meditate and keep fit. I also really love going to the mixture of Síolta events. It’s like a medicine.”
Bowler does meditation and yoga practice “pretty much daily” and attends a therapist, although being in nature is her “number one” therapy. She and her partner are both into relational practices and work together within the context of their relationship.
“I find that really transformational,” she adds, “because, you know, your intimate relationship, the person that sees you in all of your s**t every single day, is often the most fertile ground to do kind of self-reflection and personal growth work.”
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