During a recent retreat, Róisín Ingle heard the remarkable story of Fergal O'Connor, for whom Mother's Day is about two mothers.
In a country house in Cork, an administrator, a human-resources manager, a writer and a couple of journalists sit around a large candle, gazing expectantly at the smiling figures of Fergal O'Connor and Peter Thompson. The lights are low, the air is scented with incense and the atmosphere is so calm that, after my journey from Dublin, I'd fall asleep on the sofa were I not worried that it might be considered rude. On the other hand, we have come here on a spiritual retreat, created for high-powered corporate types, to relax and escape the demands of our busy work lives. We've barely been introduced before we are breathing deeply into our hare, or centre, and massaging each other's hands with aromatherapy cream. Falling asleep, I am quick to conclude, would probably not be frowned on.
Tomorrow, among other exercises, we will get lost in ourselves while beating drums. We will sway - some of us more than others - with abandon to eastern music. We will sit in a circle and share with each other a story about a time in our childhood that taught us about love. Tonight, though, after a sumptuous dinner with too much organic wine, we take a moonlit walk along a nearby beach and do stretches in the dark.
That's where I learn more about O'Connor, who is, among other things, a masseur. We swop India stories. I tell him about a guru in Rishikesh; he explains how he went there to study holistic medicine when he was in his early 20s. Drawn to India as a teenager through reading an autobiography of a yogi, he remembers experiencing, as the aircraft descended into a sunset over Madras airport, an intense sensation that he was coming home. At the time he was in the process of tracing his birth mother, and while he was there his mother, at home in Cork, told him that the woman who had given him up 32 years ago had been in contact. "She told my parents that it made perfect sense that I was in India, because that's where my birth father was from," O'Connor says, smiling.
For him, Mother's Day, which falls tomorrow, is about two mothers: the Cork woman who raised him and the woman, now mayor of a New Jersey town, who gave him up for adoption when he was eight weeks old. When he was conceived, his birth mother already had a son whom she was bringing up alone. In the early 1970s she didn't feel she could cope with bringing up another child unmarried.
"She kept the fact that she was pregnant a secret except from her mother, who desperately wanted her to keep me, and went to London until she was ready to give birth. I was born in a mother-and-baby home on Navan Road in Dublin," says O'Connor. "My mother held me in a taxi all the way to Cork. I was adopted there by my mother and father, who at the time were convinced they couldn't have children." Just before she was due to collect him, his adoptive mother found she was pregnant; she went through with the adoption anyway, excited about having another child.
O'Connor always knew he was adopted; he says it was only after he was rejected by a childhood crush at 14 that he felt any pain about his situation. "I believe now I was processing the rejection I felt as a baby, being turned away by a woman - my mother - I wanted to be with," he says. "At this time I withdrew into myself and got into poetry and philosophy. I went inside and started questioning, which led me to India and to the work I do." He has since been reunited with his biological mother and is in the process of tracing his biological father, who has no idea he exists.
O'Connor met Peter Thompson in the course of running the holistic side of motivational retreats with Pat Falvey, a mountaineer. They came up with their idea of corporate spiritual retreats, aimed at successful but stressed businesspeople who might learn how to balance their lives better.
They are looking forward to the challenge. Thompson, a psychotherapist and masseur, had already done "taking stock" courses for managing directors, and he was keen to hold purpose-designed retreats. "We could sense a huge need in the professional sector," he says. "Businesspeople are capable, motivated and go with their gut instinct on things. They are hugely creative and innovative, but where they fall down is in balancing work with quality of life, which is where we come in."
O'Connor and Thompson say a two-day retreat can provide practical tools for cultivating well-being at home and in the workplace. "We want to create a space where businesspeople can replenish their stores of productivity, where their work has deeper meaning. Otherwise," says O'Connor, "they are just running on empty." u
The next retreat takes place on June 4th-6th at Ballymaloe House, Shanagarry, Co Cork. Call 021-4533599 or see www.lumosireland.com