About Alexandra Grace Derwen

“I am Alexandra Grace Derwen, born in Middlesbrough in 1980 to Joe and Lynne Wilson, Lynne was Deakins. I have two older brothers I never met in Spirit named Colin and Simon and I have a younger brother who is very much alive called Tom. My father Joe was the eldest of 6 children to Ted and Norah Wilson, Norah was Banks and my mother Lynne Muriel was the younger sister to David, born to George Harvey and Julia Deakins, Julia was Raynor. I grew up on the Welsh borders in Flintshire and now live in NorthWest Wales in the Eryri Mountains which the English call Snowdonia. My ancestral seat of near distance generations is the City of Liverpool however my DNA shows I am 48% Scottish, 25% Welsh and 25% Irish with roots reaching to Iceland and the Baltic regions. My mothers paternal line are Welsh and they are my strongest ancestral connection, they were hill farmers and lived simple lives in relationship to the Land. In 2020 when I turned 40 I relinquished the name Alexandra Jane Wilson I was given at birth and I took the name given to me by my Guidance which is Alexandra Grace Derwen. It was that same year I wrote the first of the Lost Rites books and also became very conscious of the collapse of my gender identity; so despite having a feminine name I consider myself to be non-binary and I use they/them pronouns. The name was given to me at birth by my mother who had thought that if I were born (assigned) female I would have been called Grace. It transpired however that when I was born my parents thought “that’s not a Grace” and the name Alexandra appeared in my mothers mind. Many years later I did learn that there are Alexanders in my paternal ancestry. For most of my life I was known as Alex (which would be a far more non-binary name if I were to follow convention) but as I approached the end of my 20s I came to really appreciate that it is a title of sorts, an initiatory mission. I understand it to mean either “defender of mankind” or “defender of humanity” and I take the title earnestly. So I do prefer to be met with my full name Alexandra, please. I also, at times, really love being referred to simply as Derwen, which means “Oak” or “Of the Oaks” in Welsh.

My life has been probably more sad and difficult than average but certainly not as traumatic as the worst that humanity endures. Today I look back at the traumas, pain and struggle with immense gratitude that it softened and formed me, informed me, shaped me to be the person that I am today and I call upon all the empathy and understanding that comes from experiencing a dysfunctional and addicted upbringing when I meet others in struggle. I was asked when I was 7 what I wanted to be when I grew up and I replied “secretary general of the United Nations!”, which was precocious yes, but it was really born of a desire my young self had to bring Peace to this world and that was what I had heard was the most influential person to bring Peace. Obviously I know better today but it shows how deeply Peace mattered to me even then. 

I had a series of traumas in my early years including nearly drowning, sexual abuse and sustained bullying and exclusion at school before my father lost everything to bankruptcy when I was 10, we lost our family home and the land, animals and trees that were my friends and a couple of years later my father died of Leukaemia when I was 14. Dad’s death was a seminal moment in my development as, by a miracle given we were in the Royal Liverpool hospital, I was alone with his body for 3 hours after his last breath. In that moment I knew very clearly what to do and I intuitively performed Death Rites. This experience of being beyond the veil of death then set me on a life of spiritual seeking as a way of making sense of what I saw and felt. A lifelong clair-audient I also studied in my teens and 20s practices of psychopomp, past life work and ancestral healing, I was a reiki master by the time I was 28, and trained as a yoga and meditation teacher. My spirituality was my hobby as I worked in gritty jobs by day, I was a youth worker, worked for the fire service and later social services. I also studied for 3 university degrees included a Masters in Peace Studies. All this time I was masking to fit into a society that valued career success, good salary and material possessions but I the price I paid for that masking was addiction and eating disorders. By the end of my 20s my mental health collapsed, I hit “rock bottom” and I lost everything, just like my father had done. My house, my possessions, my car but crucially also my health and ability to do everything alone. Since the age of 30 I haven’t drank alcohol, taken mind or mood altering substances and I haven’t either binged or purged food. My sobriety marked a renaissance and new beginning as I surrendered my life and will to power greater than myself. 

Initially I heard the call to ministry even though I don’t have a religious bone in my body. I went to London and lived with a friend while I trained at the Interfaith Seminary and took ordination as an Interfaith Minister in 2013 before then joining the training team at the seminary as a mentor and experienced the course again with my mentees taking ordination in 2016. Through that experience I realised I needed to part ways with that organisation and I relinquished my vows to them in 2016 but I retain for myself the vow I made to myself and I still experience my work in this world as a form of secular but spiritual ministry. It was when I was in London in my early 30s that I started working for a charity in the East End called Down to Earth, a Quaker Social Action project, which gave me the immense privilege of sitting alongside people, often people who had nothing and nobody, at their end of life. It was also at this time that I started leading funeral ceremonies, something I have made a name in since having led thousands. I relocated back up to North Wales in 2014 and in 2015 I was asked to accompany a friend through childbirth for the first time. This incredible invitation led me to seek out a Birth Doula course and I sat with Nicola Goodall of the Red Tent Birth Doula preparation and, long story short, ended up conceiving of a Death Doula course which Nicola graciously allowed my business partner and I to establish under the Red Tent doula umbrella. In 2017 we ran the first End of Life Doula Preparation and it got so big so quickly that it became clear it needed a structure to hold the course and the community developing around it. So myself and a board of directors founded Sacred Circle Training Co CIC and the work of the social enterprise continues to this day.

In 2020 I was locked-down with my ailing mother and I needed to generate work and income to sustain not only myself but the Social Enterprise during the pandemic. So I penned the first of the three Lost Rites books “Ceremony and Ritual for Death and Dying” and an online course that accompanied it kept us afloat financially but more than that, a phenomenon was born in me. What was originally just a clever title playing on the words “Last Rites” became a portal for somatic understanding in me of just what was lost through the colonisation of Europe, the doctrine of Sin, the divine right of Kings and the conflation of church and state. All the pain and trauma of the past 2000 years or more of the British Isles created a brutality and hunger that led to the colonisation of the world at large and began with internal dynamics of colonisation at the expense of our Rites, rituals and culture. What was (all but) lost were the indigenous pathways and knowledge of the descendents of Europe and the “Lost Rites” became a rallying call to remember and reclaim, to repair and restore, the threadbare fabric of our communities and our culture. My personal passion and interest in lamenting and the cultural forces of shared grieving then came into focus for the second book Lost Rites “Community of Grief” which positions grief as a force of Love with the potential to re-weave community as the medicine for trauma. The third book Lost Rites “The Ancestral Landscape” maps for those interested, the esoteric and systemic at work in the world behind the façade of the mundane. The third book takes the position that just as a person who is dying needs to put their house in order literally and metaphorically so do collectives and so does humankind at this time. It is an invitation into Atonement.

So, I have come full circle to that 7 year old me that wanted to bring Peace on Earth. I am far too world weary, ground down, burned out and cynical on any given to day to believe it is possible. But that child in me will not lie down and be quiet. I do dream of a better world, I long and yearn and call out for a more peaceful world with every fibre of my being. And the death doula in me knows that so much is dying at this time, so much is being lost to us and so much must be mourned. So I know we need to hospice our systems and institutions but I also wonder what is rising at this time, in this world and the next, that needs midwifery. I realised through the writing of the third book that Peace Building as an active skill is also a collective rite of passage and ultimately my work is all about collective rites of passage. And I have trained in Peace processes and conflict mediation over the years; the skills I have from that are woven into my doula work and my teaching work. So, this is where I find myself – having said I would never write another book, I am at the jumping off point of creating another level of this body of work.

What else would you like to know about me? I love wild swimming and walking pilgrimages, I am a Labrador lover and suspect I am part Labrador as well as part Oak. My Big Vision in life is to build Earth Hospices in every community. I love people and I love nothing more than roaring belly laughing and I laugh big when I do. My favourite person in the whole world is my 10 year old niece Caitlin. At the time of writing my long journey of caring for my mother in her ill health has eased as she is now in a care home but she is not long for this Earth. So I dedicate this writing to my mother Lynne Muriel Wilson may she find her peace and freedom from suffering soon and for my lovely Caitlin and all her generation, for whom we have to dig deep and try again to Build Peace.”