The ‘good life’ way to holistic healing

Lifestyle –  Judy Murphy meets a couple who have tapped into their local community to set up unique holistic centre

Driving up the narrow road to the townland of Ail Preacháin in Furbo it’s difficult to believe you are in Connemara.  The landscape is lush and green, in marked contrast to more barren, rocky terrain of the surrounding area.

Up that tiny roadway, where there is barely room for two cars to pass each other, is Nadúir, a unique centre for holistic health, run by local woman Ciara Ní Dhiomasaigh and Austrian-born Josef Steiner.  Here people can avail of a range of therapies and activities from massage to biodynamic craniosacral therapy to meditation and yoga.

There’s a sign outside the gate, but even if there hadn’t been, it’s obvious that this place is unique. The timber-framed house with its zinc roof, fits into the landscape while outside in the large vegetable garden, a group of people are at work, weeding.

They are part of a monthly meitheal who help out in the garden, explains Ciara. In return, they get produce and Ciara teaches them how to make delicacies such as herb salt and herb butter. The group has just had lunch, followed by a herb demonstration, leaving delicious aromas to linger in the large, airy kitchen.

Josef meanwhile, returns from his trip to the village where has been buying feed for their geese, hens, guinea fowl and a variety of ducks.  This, indeed, is the good life and the two of them are an advertisement for it. It looks idyllic and it is, but it took a lot of hard work, training and commitment to get here.

Ciara laughs as she says she was the member of her family who wasn’t expected to settle locally.

“I was supposed to be living in a yurt in Mongolia, milking horses and making weird concoctions. But everyone else has moved on and I am here!”

Massage therapist Ciara had a difficult relationship with Furbo as a youngster, she explains, because she was dyslexic, which made school tough.

“I knew I could make it in other places, but felt I could never be ‘my weird self’ in Furbo. But what amazes me is that the more I am me, the more people respond.”

Josef first came to Ireland for six months as a student, working on a friend’s oyster farm in Oranmore.

“I really liked it and kept coming back and in 1993, I moved over,” he says.

He had studied architecture in college, but didn’t finish his degree, instead getting involved with building projects in his native Austria and later in Ireland, where he imported eco-friendly houses from his homeland.

It’s in one of those beautiful wooden buildings that he and Ciara now live.

“This one was the last, designed and built to our own spec,” explains Josef.

Compared to the average bricks and mortar house it was expensive, but it represents value for money, as their heating and water bills are next to nothing.

It was built using timber, glass and zinc – the only concrete involved was in the foundations, he explains. They began work in February 2008 and had moved in by July.

Ciara and Josef first met at an Aikido martial arts class in Galway City, where Josef was the teacher.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.