Long Story Short (and Short Story Long)

Here is the long story short; I am a Grief and Death Doula of over 30 years experience; I founded the Sacred Circle Training Co CIC, a social enterprise dedicated to grassroots community education and development in the field of death, dying and grief; I developed the flagship Death Doula course “Journey with Death” 10 years ago and remain both the Managing Director of the company and a lead facilitator. I am author of 3 published books, called Lost Rites, the first is Ceremony and Ritual for Death and Dying, the second is Community of Grief and the third is Ancestral Landscape. The books chart the loss and reclamation of Death Rites from the personal, to the collective and systemic. I am also a Ceremonialist facilitating both personal and collective ceremonies. I am a performance poet, a pilgrim for Peace, I am voice for the Unseen especially the Dead. I am a Key Note speaker on topics such as “Love, Loss and Community Renewal” and all things “death, dying and grief" (personal, collective and systemic). I live in Eryri, North Wales and travel to teach, speak and facilitate nationally and internationally. Most importantly I am a Keener and Lamenter, I use song, sound and silence to channel sorrow and grief as potent forces for collective liberation.

And if you are interested, here is the short story long… !

My near distance Ancestors are of Scots, Welsh and Irish stock, stories of displacement and diaspora; before them my roots were Scandivanian and the Baltic lands and my memories fade thousands of years back into also being Oak Tree, Rock and River. In recent generations the port city of Liverpool became the ancestral seat, my parents Joe and Lynne Wilson (nee Deakins) spent their childhoods on the Wirral. I feel closest to my mother's paternal line of ancestors who were most rooted in place and landscape from Llangunllo in the Welsh Marshes on the borderlands. Before me my parents lost two boy children, I was a twin in the womb but born alone, I was the first child to survive and I was born, for no obvious good reason, in Middlesbrough in 1980 and, according to family lore, my name Alexandra arrived with me “defender of humanity”. My parents lived in North Yorkshire at the time because my father was working off shore on the North Sea oil rigs and my mother placed herself half way between Aberdeen and Liverpool. Shortly after I was born we relocated to Chester where my brother was born in 1982. And we lived in Chester until 1991, when I was 11, my father lost everything and our land, animals and home was repossessed and as the family lived out the ancestral pattern of poverty and displacement once more we ended up relocating just over the border to Hawarden in Flintshire, North Wales.

Our family holidays were often in North Wales, particularly the Llyn Peninsula. My first brush with Death came when I was 7 years old and I was swept out to sea by a rip tide at Porth Oer. I was a long way from shore and couldn’t keep myself above water, exhausted, I felt as if some unseen presence cupped my chin and kept me there until I was rescued. As I sat on the beach wrapped in a sandy towel and in the crook of my fathers arm, I stared out at the horizon which grew in light and heat to embrace me, I felt infinite Love and a connection to all things. My young mind clocked that I should have drowned and did not although I did not have meaning for it then. I had been particularly “open” and sensitive before that incident, always aware of the whispers and nudges of the Natural world. I was attention deficit and wild in the classroom and struggled with human friendships but I did find my kin amongst the trees and stars. At times in life I have wished that someone like me now could have put a caring arm around my shoulder then and reassured me that I was vitally lovable as I was but sadly I internalised so much bullying and abuse as being what I was worth that I developed eating disorders and addictions at a very young age. I was using substances and behaviours to shut down the overwhelm of being so open and sensitive and I did not find my elders and mentors until much later in life.

After relocating to North Wales my father was spiralling into a darkness that I could only sit alongside him in; I adored him and yet he was mostly a depressive, angry presence struggling with his demons following his bankruptcy. When I was 14 his health collapsed and he went to his doctor only to immediately be taken into hospital. He had a rare and aggressive form of leukaemia and from diagnosis to death was less than 3 months. I spent time with him in hospital, we would meditate together, his legs and arms would levitate away from the bed when we did. I massaged his feet and hands and tell him stories of my day. Just before my 15th birthday a call came to my school that I needed to go straight home; my brother and I were taken to the Royal Liverpool hospital and we spent the evening with him as he drifted in the In-between talking to his ancestors. As midnight approached and we hadn’t eaten Mum took us to get a sandwich and when we returned a light was flashing in the corridor and we were ushered into a side room where a kindly nurse and my mother came to tell us “he’s gone”. I was expecting it, whereas the others were not. I was encouraged to go alone into the room with his body and I did, his last breath was still hanging like static in the air. From no where, I knew what to do… I started to touch his cold body, and a wailing came, and a lament. My tears fell directly onto his forehead and I wiped them with my thumb in a form of anointment. I lay down with him and fell into a deep sleep during which I travelled with him until I could go no further; we exchanged love and forgiveness and he went on and I came back.

In the years that followed my mourning was different to those who did not have the privilege of doing those death rites; it consolidated in me the seekers path; having not been raised with religion at all I had no spiritual framework to understand my experiences. I took a buddhist teacher first aged 15, he gave me a journal and encouraged my poetry, at age 17 I learned the practice of past life regression, at 21 I took attunement to Reiki, I explored all the world faiths and many practices, those that were most Earth-y and animist appealed most to me. I found myself in my mid 20s evolving from the past life work to Ancestral healing following a west African model of lineage healing; I later outgrew that too but that is a much bigger story than I have space to tell you here. I took transmission from a respected teacher not long before his death of a framework of Ancestral field work, working with the collective and systemic Field for mass healing. I meditated with the Sufis, I became a Reiki master, I trained to teach yoga and meditation; I was following a classic new age trail of self development as many white folk do unaware, often, of its neo-colonial tone.

In parallel to the spiritual seeking I also pursued a career and was successful at it to a point. I was always a really skilled manager of people, able to inspire and lead and organise groups. I was a youth worker at first; I studied languages and graduated with 2:1 and won a place on a prestigious and competitive senior leadership fast track programme for local government which gave me a post graduate degree in Management from Warwick Business school and really progressive management soft skills and leadership training. It also springboarded my career into the middle, and soon, senior management levels of public service. I gained a MA degree in International Relations and Peace Studies. I worked for the Fire Service and Police for a time before moving into Public and Third sector partnership spaces specialising in Community engagement and inclusion in public policy development before entering Strategic Commissioning for Adult health and social care. I first established myself as a freehance consultant in community engagement in public policy nearly 20 years ago and have been really sought after and successful in that consultancy role, although these days I am very selective about which organisations I am willing to work with.

The most remarkable thing, for me, about both the high flying career and the spiritual seeking was that I did all of that despite being in addiction and eating disorders. In hindsight the energy and passion and commitment that I gave professionally, voluntarily and in parallel to my own spiritual development seems so high, definitely insane. My clairvoyant sensitivities to the otherwise Unseen would haunt me as I moved through the world of sudden and violent deaths, shocking bereavements and violence in my work. By the time I reached the end of my 20s I was in mental health collapse and I had what they used to call a “nervous breakdown”. One minute I was functioning and then suddenly I was… not. I lost everything my job, my home, my car, my health. I gave into it so I literally gave everything away; my nice clothes and possessions and dreams. I folded into fatigue and depression and entered an underworld state where on the surface I was bankrupt, like my father, and homeless once more but something deep within me was aligning….

I found recovery from the addictions and this involved handing my life and will over to a power greater than myself. In all my spiritual seeking I had never really been actively confronted with a “God” and I had never been either asked to, or shown how to, surrender. I needed that utter crushing rock bottom to teach me the gift of surrender and from there I was able to forge anew a relationship with the Mystery. These different masks I had been wearing all fell away, all the threads plaited together into one. I was no longer living parallel lives but integrated and I was driven deeply and passionately into Service. That is all I want and need… to be in integrity and to be of service. Initially this new Guiding principle in my life took me to study over 2 years and take ordination as an Interfaith Minister in 2013 and I joined the organisations team and repeated the course and ordination process in 2016 as a mentor. I later parted ways with this organisation over some tricky collective shadow issues and renounced my organisational vow and any connection to them. This was due to my awakening that had begun decades before but was consolidated by seeing the “light supremacy” (white supremacy) in new age spiritual circles and no longer being able to be complicit in it. I became a thorn in the side of any organisation I was part of when I saw this light / white supremacy playing out.

All of my important mentors and teachers in my life have been Black, I say this to honour them although they don’t wish to named per se, and to also to reflect that I have since I was in my teens, actually, inspired by my mothers book collection of anti-racism and feminist literature; been predisposed towards allyship of the historically oppressed. By the time I was through my breakdown years I was catalysed in the clarity of seeing without doubt or refute the ongoing consequences of the British Empire and knowing in my heart that my knowledge and experience of Ancestral Fieldwork was leading me towards leveraging my white privilege towards collective liberation; and it seems obvious to me that collective ancestral atonement and healing is the only real way to get there. Ask me about this if you wish to know more. For now suffice to say I followed the teachings and guidance of my Black mentors and am on the long arc of the journey of decolonisation within and active anti-racism and anti-oppression with-out.

This social activism element of my work is also the reason why my spiritual teaching and practice has to remain accessible to the mainstream and so, despite being a cosmic being with the capacity to navigate between realms, communicate with the more-than-human, clear the souls of the masses and lever healing at a systemic level; I also inhabit and embrace my mundane humanness with a vulnerability and as much reckless honesty about my flaws and failings as possible. I have been called an “explainer of things” and this sits well with me; I have the capacity to understand and synthesise complex, multi dimensional information and present it in accessible ways that most people can understand.

In my mid 30s I was living off grid and enjoying a very simple lifestyle amongst the oaks of North Wales when I met with a group of birth doulas. I had been at one birth at this point and I was being increasingly asked to attend more. I had no experience of birth or pregnancy so I went to learn how to be a birth doula with the Red Tent Doula Preparation course led by Nicola Madiyyah Goodall. So many things dropped into place for me there; I loved the way that Nicola positioned herself not as a teacher per se but a facilitator of Circle, that we learned from stories and from each other in a non-hierarchical way and I also finally realised that I was a Death Doula. I had known the term existed but I hadn’t claimed it for myself. I looked around at what training was out there for Death Doulas and not seeing anything that met my own learning style and Nicola’s inclusive ways; I paired up with a friend Awen Clements to launch, under the umbrella of Nicola’s Red Tent, the (mouthful) Red Tent End of Life Doula Preparation in 2016.

By this point I had been running Grief Circles in my local community for a couple of years having been first introduced to griefwork back in my 20s when I trained as a Work that Reconnects practitioner in the model of Joanna Macy’s Active Hope work. Through the Griefwork an emerging practice was moving through both me and the Circle and that was, initially, simply sounding and toning through Grief. What happened when the sound took over was always electric! The catharsis was radical and transformational every time. I was often, in my unmasked state in public, found to be weeping without restraint and increasingly being affirmed and celebrated for it, so I followed the flow of the tears. I was told that this was called “Keening” which began a fervent journey of exploring the Welsh, Irish and Scots traditions of keening that were clearly in my blood. I didn’t immediately find human guides for this but I found that when I took my keen to Nature the rocks, rivers and trees were paying full attention! I was guided by the more-than-human to integrate the keening more into ritual spaces, to use symbolism and poetry to increase its universality and to use it, too, as a means of psychopomping the Dead. My early initiation into lament with the death of my father coming into full play now.

The Red Tent End of Life Doula Preparation course took off in a way we did not anticipate - the small and experimental circles with Death as our Teacher started to fill and the invitations to travel with the circles internationally rolled in. Awen stepped back and I formed the Sacred Circle Training Co CIC to hold the work so that I was not alone with it, a board of directors held me as guides and mentors to the work. Importantly these gatherings dedicated to Death as our Teacher also became safe portals for the exploration of the keening and lament under the premise that if you have not expressed your own Grief and you cannot bear witness to others in raw states of authentic emotion, then how can you really be ready to accompany the dying and the bereaved? In 2019 I travelled 12 times internationally in one year with the course, I was burning out, something needed to change.

In 2020, I turned 40 and to honour myself at that time I instigated a ceremony in which I married the Oaks, which sounds incredibly woo woo but what I mean is that I surrendered fully the need to meet and marry a human soul mate, to make peace with and love myself exactly as I am and to honour my connection to the more-than-human. So this is when I surrendered the patrilineal surname of my birth and adopted for myself the name Alexandra Grace Derwen, defender of humanity by the grace of the oaks. In March 2020 after my 40th birthday party I took myself off on pilgrimage for my 4th Camino de Santiago, this time taking the Camino Primitivo through the high mountains of Northern Spain and not looking once at the newspapers or headlines. As I came one day into a town called A Fonsagrada a spooky sight met me; the entire town was out in the streets looking panicked, the bars had TVs on shouting out in Red text that Spain had declared a state of national emergency, 2 people had died in the immediate vicinity that very week, the queues were around the block for food and the Albergues were closing. I had no choice but to book the very last plane out of Spain and evacuate on bus after bus full of coughing people to Bilbao and fly home. As a precaution I took myself into quarantine in an empty flat owned by a friends parents; and there I got very sick indeed.

It was in the depths of the darkest night of that Covid that I became convinced it was going to crush the air out of me and I would die there alone in that empty flat. I reviewed my life and encountered Death and realised to my dismay, that despite preparing hundreds of people for their own end of life there was a distinct fear in me of dying. The thought occurred to me that my mother, from whom I was mostly estranged, did not know how much I loved her. My amends was not yet complete. From there I returned and it did not take long before, much against my own sense of reason, I ended up moving in with her during Lockdown in Denbigh, North Wales. A whole story that I have not told here, so you may need to ask me about this if you are interested, is the story of me and that statue in Denbigh town square of HM Stanley, who was born in Denbigh and went on to become King Leopold II’s right hand man in Congo. Its appalling plaque reads “Africa’s Greatest Explorer” with no consciousness, conscience or sense of irony. Anyway, that story began for me as part of the Ancestral fieldwork back in 2010 and came into play in 2020 when the Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the world following the murder of George Floyd and I coordinated a show of solidarity, in the middle of lockdown, around the statue the same weekend as they toppled Colston into the water in Bristol and catapulting me for the first time into some kind of unwelcome limelight as the media sought to cover the story of why we picked that statue in Denbigh. It resulted in me going on the national news and saying that that statues like this show what we celebrate collectively and they perpetrate the pernicious lie of white “supremacy”; one of my proudest moments but also a threshold where I was no longer able to stay small or quiet.

Privately through 2020 I was in Hell. My mother was too and we were triggering the sh*t out of each other. Something was wrong but we didn’t know what and after a decade of estrangement that we should be in such close proximity was excruciating. We endured it together, one day at a time, with her having to witness me lament and me having to rapidly clear, release and heal old traumas so I could be of service to her in a compassionate way. There is much more to this story but it turned out she had Parkinson’s and the beginnings then of Lewys Body Dementia which led to hallucinations and psychosis. I was, despite all my self care and boundaries, 100% enmeshed in the unfolding drama of being her carer at a time when health and social care systems were revealing themselves to be broken. And I was broken.

I say I was “broken”, was I? It felt like it but somehow, by accessing reserves of energy and resources that I did not know possible I was able to sustain the Social Enterprise at that time by writing my first book and online course, the second and third books followed as did a pivot and rebrand of the course as Journey with Death. I managed by Grace and miracles to care for Mum until her death in 2024, in the end with unconditional love and deep forgiveness, to keep the business afloat and also to write and publish 3 (imperfect) books.

Once I had that body of work as my platform I could take the Lost Rites on tour and in February 2024, before Mum died and she was by then in a care home, I went on a tour of Wales, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland on what I called the Lost Rites: Rituals of Lament tour. I identified sites of shared and collective trauma around the British Isles and invited people to come lament with me there. This is a form of activism; in naming the internal colonisation and traumas of recent history and lamenting them as both cause and effect of the phenomenon of colonisation, I was inviting consciousness to the ongoing impact of the legacy of the Empire and our shared responsibility today towards at-one-ment in the Ancestral Field. I ended the months tour at Skibbereen where the graves of tens of thousands of people who died during the holocaust of Ireland by the British required a significant Lament. I do not consider my small lament rituals to be any like a complete gesture but simply a homeopathic dose at sites of great potency of land energy; I like to believe they have ripples out into the world but if they didn’t they also are my own tiny gesture of acknowledging my privilege despite my humble origins and making atonement for my part in perpetuating violence.

The Rituals of Lament tour culminated in a retreat in Ireland conceived of by a mutual friend that brought me together in person for the first time with Tuomas Rounakari to collaborate on a Lament retreat we called Bear Awakens. Tuomas and I found an immediate kinship in our lament work, a rare mutual understanding of what we both actually do! And what it takes, and what is being carried. This has begun a still ongoing collaboration with subsequent retreats and travel together in the Heart of Europe to lament. Tuomas has recently joined the social enterprise as my co-director and we are collaborating to create an international Lament community platform called Portal of Tears.

Also in 2024 a documentary was made about my work called Grief Astronomers, director Alexis Gregorieff, and that film is now available for screenings if you wish for me to present it to your group or community it would be my honour.

Today my ongoing work remains to manage and facilitate the courses both Death Doula and Community Death Educators courses under Sacred Circle CIC, to work alongside Tuomas with our lament offerings, and I offer talks, workshops and group facilitation, bespoke poetry and key note addresses at large events and to MC also. Ultimately my vision is the creation of Earth Hospice which would be centres in communities of grassroots community care of the dying, dead and brokenhearted. I believe this is my life’s work and mission. I would be delighted if local groups could help me identify “taproots of shared trauma” in the collective and host me to facilitate a community lament; willing to do this anywhere in the world provided I am resourced to do so. I come from humble peoples, I have never come from financial wealth and I am dreaming into what it would feel like to be financially free to do this work unencumbered by the constraints of palliative stage capitalism; so if you would like to support my work you can make a donation through this website and / or you can subscribe to my newsletter for a monthly or annual blessing.

Within each of these paragraphs there are whole story arcs that I have not explored, like my cosmic pilgrimages, like my connection to Congo, like my international adventures, like my personal struggles with ADHD and dyslexia, like my recovery journey, like how I came to love and forgive my Mum and the story of her death and my ecstatic mourning time since… so much, so much… I am 46 this year, as I have learned over the years witnessing so much loss…. we never know that we have a tomorrow. So I live for this day and if I were to die today and the above is my legacy I am so immensely honoured to have met, loved and witnessed so many beautiful humans in their most vulnerable times. I am so grateful to the Great Mystery, that divine, loving intelligence that pervades all things and simply Is all things. I don’t have words to describe It, I certainly don’t think of It as a deity god but rather, as Richard Rohr says, Process. Process is God and I trust the Process. So, if you have read this far and you sense your process and mine are meeting for good reason then, wonderful! I look forward to meeting you and hearing YOUR story.

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