My Story
Samhain 2025 is almost upon us, and celebrations are just around the corner.
After completing a successful series of book launches around the country, in Limerick, Tipperary, Wicklow, Mayo and Cork, I was recently invited to put together a brief outline of my own story, which I have shared below.
If it resonates, feel free to reach out to me for a free discovery call.
When I was a kid, I got bullied at school.
Probably because I loved books. Always reading, always writing.
When I went home, I bullied my younger brother.
“Shit runs down” as they say. Took it out on him. Sorry kid.
I could be a right little shite. I stole sweets in the shop, and I stole money out me mam’s purse to buy football stickers I collected in a Panini sticker album.
I was footy mad.
Ashley family Last Drop Village, 1980
Captain of the school team, apart from the bullying, primary school was a piece of cake.
Then my nana, Sheila, died. I was about ten years old.
It was criminal that she hadn’t been allowed to see us when she was in hospital with lung cancer. Mum and her brother tried to protect us from seeing her unwell, but it must have killed her not to see her own grandchildren.
Then my mum and dad broke up.
I was still about ten years of age. My brother and I went from a home we knew, with a dad we loved, to another man’s home (my stepdad) in a town we didn’t know, surrounded by people we didn’t know.
Although some were friendly (like my stepbro Martin, God love him) most were unfriendly and didn’t care. Why would they? It was a nightmare.
Then I was sent to a big, posh Grammar school where it was all boys and they all wore dark blazers. Some teachers roared at you in a way which more befitted maniacal army sergeants. “You boy! Come here, now!”
Another nightmare, but at least I had football.
Then my gran, Bess, died. I was about twelve years old.
God love her she literally keeled over in the street, started foaming at the mouth, and had a heart attack at my feet as I looked cluelessly for someone to help.
Looking back now, it literally took thirty-five years before I could see the gift in that, and release the burden of guilt, shame, and grief. All of which had manifested as emotional constipation. At the time, they (family members and friends I had never met before) had all hailed me as a hero but I had been like a rabbit in the headlamps, until a kind lady had stopped to help out. It had been another nightmare.
Then my grandad, Ray, died. I was about fourteen years old. He had been a genial guy, teaching me Mensa puzzles and crosswords and other such things but had been said to have lost the plot a bit since Nana had died, and after being diagnosed with bowel cancer, he came ‘home’ to die in my bed.
Dad, Nana, Grandad, Brian and Jean, Christmas 1977
Within five more years, I found myself at Uni in Leeds.
I had been put into exams for Oxford but was more concerned with smoking a pipe and getting stoned than taking those exams seriously. I was already a full-time stoner at nineteen years old, checking out of reality as often as possible.
Freedom! Homemade cheeseburgers, hash, drink, speed, LSD, ecstasy, raves, parties and trying to be someone, be something, who could feel loved, seen, heard and accepted.
Which of course, would never come that way.
Nothing was ever enough.
Single for almost three years, I was in groups of friends who mocked me.
Nobody seemed to understand me, and I struggled to find a girlfriend, racked with self-doubt and lack of confidence.
Apart from when I was dealing blackjack and roulette in the casino, or playing pool in the pub. When I was hustling, I was cool.
But truth be told, underneath the nonchalant exterior on the inside I oozed lack of self-love and attracted likewise.
Going steady(ish) with a girl from London for a few years we moved back to Manchester where I became a dad. I would have been twenty-six years old by now and while the world partied on New Years Eve in 1999 I stayed in, ready for the waters to break and a dash to Tameside hospital in expectation of our daughter’s arrival.
Then I became a dad again. Our son arrived eighteen months after his sister, and we emigrated to Ireland soon after with two babies.
No money, no car, no job, no savings.
With the proceeds of the sale of a high-backed Chesterfield sofa (I still miss that sofa) we departed on a wing and a prayer for rural Clare. We landed in the parish of Newmarket-on-Fergus, in a place called Ballygirreen, near the fairy tree they built the main Limerick to Galway motorway around.
Blessed with the arrival of two more daughters in 2006 and 2009, I became a father of four. Despite getting married in 2007, honeymooning in Sri Lanka on a trip of a lifetime and buying our own house, twenty-two years, four kids, four dogs and a few cats later, we would separate.
Gaslit into believing I was a narcissist, and an abusive husband and father, although I had desperately quit drinking, smoking, gambling, and watching porn, as well as other lower vibrational energy behaviour patterns.
And despite cultivating a regular meditation and mindfulness practice by going to a Buddhist centre (Sunyata) to meditate with Thai forest monks in the tradition of Ajahn Chah and Ajahn Sumedho.
The crash of the economy hit me hard. In 2010 and 2011 I suffered with a lot of depression. By 2012 I had taken up writing my first book, The Fox and the Scorpion Meets Cold Turkey, which would take me a whopping four years. Retreating to my office to write, I found I could easily drink two bottles of red wine every night.
Then in 2016 just a few weeks after my book launched in Limerick and Clare, my dad died.
Dad in the beer garden at the Vivary Arms, Taunton, circa 2013
I still miss him and chat to him all the time.
Dad was a Leo, like my brother, and he’d had a big presence and a big influence on us. We became diehard City supporters just like him!
In the summer of 2017, I crashed my car into a ditch, swerving to avoid a head-on collision with a bus full of monks, returning from alms round in Ennis. It was freaky. Somehow the car nestled in bramble, fully immersed as I dangled in mid-air courtesy of a seat belt, I had put on literally a couple of seconds earlier.
Turning off the engine and taking a deep breath, I stepped out without a scratch on me.
Carl 1 left the screenplay, and Carl 2 entered, so it would seem.
Big changes.
The biggest transition being in the energy of who I was, migrating from addictions, depression, unhappiness, hungry ghost energy and self-service, to service to others and service to God.
I went from being a juke-box playing, pint-swilling, spliff-rolling manchild, to a man who collected crystals, wrote books and attended healing workshops!
For me it was a brave new world.
I ended up living on my own in an apartment in Limerick, and after a new hobby called dating, which brought hilarious and catastrophic results, I took up another new hobby.
Crying. I cried all day, every day for weeks. Literally weeks on end.
This was a very uncomfortable process. I cried in the car, cried in the gym, cried between phone calls at work. Cried at breakfast, lunch and dinner. Literally about fifteen times a day, every day for five or six weeks, maybe seven.
It was nuts. And yet one of the best things that could have happened to me.
It was in some way the letting go of all of the times that I had not grieved properly.
Embarking on different healing modalities, I took up a range of activities including family constellations workshops, sound healing and hot yoga. As the sweat was pouring out of one end of me, the tears poured out the other end. Hugely cathartic.
So was the writing.
Once I started, I simply could not stop!
Like the sweat and the tears, the words literally poured out of me.
I started to like myself, even love myself, and started putting my emotional needs first, or ‘unlearning lack of self-love’ as they say.
After meeting with numerous psychics and mediums, including an incredible metaphysical reading that confirmed for me in some sense that I had been late to wake up to my full potential. Late to wake up to my destiny as a mystic, psychic, even a cosmic master, incarnated here on earth to serve humanity and serve God.
Nobody’s eyebrows raised further towards the ceiling than mine, upon such revelations.
Me with Kai, Rosie, Saoirse & Orla, People’s Park, Limerick, 2011