The heART of Ritual
biophilia mentorship
A year-long personal, one-to-one online mentorship with Niamh Criostail
Irish cosmology · Celtic Wheel of the Year · Seasonal observation · Archetypal psychology · Land and inner landscape
November 2026 - October 2027
Three places offered each year.
Applications close on Sunday 27 September.
'I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.'
~ Mary Oliver
About
What would it mean to spend an entire year learning to read the relationship between the landscape around you and the landscape within you?
BIOPHILIA Mentorship™ is a year-long personal, one-to-one online mentorship in which you and I travel together through a complete turning of the Celtic Wheel of the Year. Grounded in Irish cosmology, the mentorship begins at Samhain in November and continues until the following October, allowing us to encounter the full seasonal cycle together as it is actually unfolding.
The Celtic Wheel of the Year provides the architecture for that journey. As we move through its different phases, we work with the archetypal, elemental, psychological, philosophical, mythological, ritual and practical dimensions of each point in the cycle, alongside eco-psychology, land-based observation and creative practice. The solar, lunar and earth cycles provide more than a calendar around the work. They offer a living framework through which we learn to recognise pattern in the seasons, in the landscape immediately around us, and in the movements of our own inner lives.
Observation lies at the heart of BIOPHILIA. We pay attention to what is actually happening (both within us and around us) - how the light is changing, what the weather is doing, which plants and animals are appearing or withdrawing, what is happening above and beneath the earth, and what becomes visible when those observations are placed in conversation with our own experience. Sometimes the outer season and inner weather correspond and sometimes they do not. Both are interesting. The purpose is not to impose meaning upon what we observe, but to cultivate the capacity to notice relationship, distinction, repetition and change.
There is considerable curiosity and pleasure within this way of working. Something you have walked past for years may suddenly become interesting. A question may lead towards a plant, a place, a material, a story or an aspect of yourself you had never thought to place alongside it. A familiar landscape can become newly articulate when we give ourselves enough time to pay attention. The framework provides structure, while the year itself continually introduces the unexpected.
A year lived in real time
The duration of BIOPHILIA is fundamental to the way it is taught. We do not move quickly through the Wheel as a body of seasonal information. We spend a complete year living within it.
Winter is encountered in winter. The first movements towards spring are observed as they are actually occurring. We arrive at Bealtaine as the land moves into that threshold, continue through the expansion of summer and Lúnasa, and experience the movement towards harvest and autumn within the particular conditions of that year.
Your landscape will not necessarily look like mine, nor should it. You may be experiencing an Alpine winter, an Atlantic spring, a Scandinavian summer, a North American autumn or the very different seasonal expressions of the Southern Hemisphere. Part of the work lies in learning to observe what these larger cyclical patterns look like where you actually are, rather than attempting to make the land conform to an abstract calendar.
This real-time relationship with the year gives us something that cannot be replicated by simply reading about the seasons retrospectively. We are able to observe what is happening while it is happening, bring those observations into conversation and return to them as the cycle continues to turn.
How the mentorship unfolds
We meet once each month for a private three-hour session, giving us thirty-six hours of individual conversation and teaching across the year. Each meeting is shaped by the particular territory of the Celtic Wheel through which we are travelling, while remaining responsive to what is actually present in your own life and landscape at that time.
Our conversations move through the teaching associated with that phase of the cycle, its archetypal and elemental qualities, its philosophical and psychological ground, and the practical and ritual implications of where we find ourselves within the wider arc of the year. There is time to ask questions, make connections, return to earlier conversations and follow an enquiry deeply enough for something unexpected to emerge.
Each session closes with three carefully considered invitations, arising directly from the seasonal, elemental, archetypal and philosophical territory we have been exploring.
These invitations are a vital part of the integration of the teaching. They carry our conversation into the weeks between meetings, allowing the month itself to become an active part of the mentorship. What we have explored together can then be observed, questioned, tested, experienced and lived through your relationship with yourself, your inner world and the world immediately around you.
How you respond is personal. You may find yourself writing, researching or walking, drawing, making, cooking, gardening, working with colour, clay, fibre or other materials, paying attention to dreams, developing ritual practice, closely observing changing flora and fauna, or discovering another way of responding entirely. There is room for seriousness and play, intellectual enquiry and tactile experience, sustained observation and creative experimentation.
When we meet again, we return to what actually happened. What you noticed, what shifted, what resisted, what surprised you, what became unexpectedly absorbing and what remained unresolved can all become part of our next conversation. Each session therefore grows from the one before it, while your lived experience during the intervening weeks helps to inform where we go next.
Something encountered around Samhain may return differently at Imbolc. A question that seemed peripheral during winter may acquire entirely different significance as we approach Bealtaine. Something understood intellectually in one season may take several months of living before its meaning becomes apparent. Because we have travelled far enough together to remember where a thread began, we are able to recognise its return.
Across the full turning of the year, teaching, conversation, observation, creative enquiry, invitations, lived experience and integration become part of one continuous journey.
Personal one-to-one mentorship
There are very few spaces left in contemporary life where somebody gives sustained attention to another person's learning across an entire year. This quality of relationship is fundamental to BIOPHILIA.
I know the person I am teaching. I remember what we spoke about the previous month and what appeared six months earlier. I can recognise a returning thread, remember the question that remained open, notice where your understanding has changed, and shape our conversations in response to what is genuinely happening in your life and practice.
With only three BIOPHILIA places offered each year, there is time for that degree of attention and for a genuine relationship between you and me to develop. You are not moving anonymously through a programme alongside a large cohort. Our conversations take place in real time, and the teaching has room to respond to the particular person, questions, landscape and experience that you bring into our year together.
The pace is deliberate. BIOPHILIA is intellectually substantial, but there is also pleasure in allowing ourselves time to be curious, to notice, to make connections, to follow something unfamiliar and occasionally to be completely surprised by where an enquiry takes us. A three-hour conversation gives us space to enter a subject without hurrying towards a conclusion, while the weeks that follow allow us to discover what happens when those ideas meet the texture of an actual life.
What develops across the year
Over the course of the mentorship, something begins to change in the quality of attention itself. You become increasingly able to recognise seasonal, elemental and archetypal patterns as they are occurring, to observe the relationship between the landscape around you and your own inner weather, and to distinguish between what belongs to the wider movement of a cycle and what is particular to your own experience.
Season, place, pattern and inner experience gradually become more familiar languages. Through repeated observation, conversation and direct experience, you develop greater fluency in moving between them and greater confidence in reading what is actually before you.
The purpose is to cultivate an observational intelligence of your own - the capacity to notice more closely, recognise pattern, question assumptions, make connections, discern difference and orientate yourself within change with a clearer awareness of where you are in the wider cycle.
That literacy continues beyond the mentorship year because it belongs to you. The seasons continue to turn, landscapes continue to change and your own life continues to move. What the year offers is an opportunity to develop ways of observing and relating that can continue to deepen long after our final session together.
Cultural ground and oral tradition
BIOPHILIA is taught from within the Irish culture and oral tradition into which I was born and raised, and which continues to inform how I live and work both personally and professionally.
Oral transmission is relational by its nature - knowledge carried between people through speaking and listening, questioning and remembering, observation and lived practice. Bringing that intimacy of transmission into a contemporary one-to-one mentorship allows the teaching to remain alive and responsive while retaining its cultural ground and provenance.
Irish cosmology and the Celtic Wheel of the Year provide the particular framework through which I teach BIOPHILIA. They are approached as a living tradition rather than material separated from the culture and landscape from which they arise.
At the same time, you do not need to be Irish, live in Ireland or arrive with prior knowledge of Irish cosmology to enter the mentorship. The landscape with which you develop a relationship is the landscape in which you actually live, and the life you bring into our conversations is your own.
Who this is for
BIOPHILIA is open to people anywhere in the world and from all walks of life. You do not need to follow a particular spiritual path, have previous experience of land-based practice or arrive knowing the Celtic Wheel of the Year. Curiosity and a willingness to pay attention provide ample ground from which to begin.
Your year may take shape through close observation of your immediate landscape, through writing and reflection, through creative or ritual practice, through questions arising in your personal or professional life, or through forms of enquiry neither of us can anticipate when we begin.
People come to this work from different countries, professions, ages, cultural backgrounds, interests and ways of understanding and expressing themselves. That individuality is fundamental to the mentorship. We share the same seasonal architecture, but what becomes significant within it will be particular to you.
Exchange
BIOPHILIA Mentorship™ is offered through three exchange levels, allowing you to choose the level most appropriate to your financial circumstances. Each exchange provides exactly the same complete mentorship - the full year of personal teaching, twelve private three-hour sessions, the carefully considered invitations that accompany every session, the ongoing process of integration between our meetings, and our complete journey through the Celtic Wheel of the Year.
Acorn - €1,495
Sapling - €1,745
Oak Heart - €1,995
Please choose the exchange that most appropriately reflects your financial circumstances. Your choice has no bearing upon the teaching, time, attention, invitations or opportunities you receive during our year together.
BIOPHILIA is a year-long commitment, and the exchange is non-refundable once your place has been accepted.
Applications
The next BIOPHILIA Mentorship™ begins at Samhain in November 2026 and continues through October 2027. Three personal, one-to-one mentorship places are offered. Applications for the upcoming mentorship cycle close on Sunday 27 September.
The application gives you an opportunity to tell me something about yourself, what has brought you to BIOPHILIA and what has made you curious about spending a year working together in this way.
Once I receive your application, we arrange a telephone conversation. This gives us an opportunity to meet, to talk about the mentorship and the questions that have brought you here, and to explore the possibility of spending the coming year working together. A decision is made within one week of our conversation.
If you would like to explore that possibility, I invite you to complete the application below.