Buy Me A CoffeeJenny Ní Ruiséil is a musician and Yoga teacher, based in the west of Ireland. She creates music inspired by her roots finding her voice through singing in the Irish language, as well as taking inspiration from medicine music around the world and devotional chanting tradition of bhakti yoga and other spiritual traditions. Jenny is inspired by the continuously changing landscapes of the natural world, our human bodies, and the relationship between mind, body and awareness that we navigate on a daily basis.
My earliest musical influences were quite classical in nature – I trained from a young age on the classical flute and played in orchestras and concert bands throughout primary and secondary school. I was always enamoured with the idea of being a singer but I didn’t officially take any lessons until I was in about 5th year in school. I taught myself guitar at fifteen – on a right-handed guitar that my dad had lying around the house (I’m left-handed).
During my teenage years I was fortunate enough to attend the Gaeltacht (Coláiste Lurgan), where I subsequently worked. It was there that my love for music and songwriting was really given a space to flourish. I often say that if it wasn’t for Gaeilge (the Irish language) and Coláiste Lurgan, I would not be a singer today. Gaeilge literally gave me my voice. My boss in the college Mícheál Ó Foighil was the first person to ever put me in a room and say – ‘tá tusa ag canadh an amhráin seo’ (you are singing this song) – for no other reason that he believed me capable of it.
I can’t tell you how impactful that was. Or how impactful it was to be part of a community centered around speaking the Irish language and creating music for young people to reconnect to it. As I got older I began spending whole summers there, and ended up working as a múinteoir and stiúrthóir ceoil (musical director). My job (along with a small group of others) was to translate songs into Irish and adapt them to suit groups of teenagers to sing in groups. We would then record the songs in a studio and shoot music videos to upload to Youtube for them to enjoy at home.
Eventually, myself and the other teachers responsible for these projects formed a band, Seo Linn, who I sang with for nearly five years. Our music was mainly as Gaeilge (in Irish), with some bilingual songs too. We were really lucky to be given some amazing opportunities to travel to Uganda, Boston, London, Scotland and all over Ireland. We played for Micheal D. Higgins on a few occasions, as well as in venues and college bars all over the country, and I can safely say they were my ‘wildest’ days!
I took a ‘break’ from the band aged twenty-two that ended up being permanent, as my mental health wasn’t good and I was struggling with an eating disorder. It was from there that yoga and meditation became important staples in my life, and I went fully into studying and practicing yoga while I travelled. I didn’t sing for a couple of years then, until one day I found myself at a Kirtan session (a form of call and response chanting), and fell in love immediately with the practice.
It was a bit outside of my comfort zone at the time, as the only reference point I had for ‘devotion’ was something I associated with mass and the Catholic Church growing up. But I quickly realised that Kirtan (and yoga for that matter) were speaking to something much more universal, and something that any human with a heart has the capacity to connect to and feel impacted by.
I began hosting kirtan sessions back in Dublin in around 2019, and was starting to write my own original songs again by this point. It is still a journey for me to reclaim the idea of being a
singer-songwriter, but I feel that mantra and my yoga practice has really bolstered me to trust my creative instincts and capacity again.
My music now reflects this, and is still deeply influenced by the land, music, spirituality and mythology of Ireland as well as my own personal healing journey.
My hope for the future is to continue writing and creating more music that can connect people to the healing capacity of song and chanting, whilst also capturing some of the essence of Ireland and the magic contained within the language and landscape of this land.
BECOME A PATRON
