Re-emerging from my Mourning Times

It has been a long time coming; over a year in fact since Mum died and I found my writings on hold. But I am re-emerging and really feeling the Call to share what I have to bring. So, thank you, to YOU the ones on my mailing list who have showed me your support over the years. If you are not yet subscribing I would absolutely love to invite you to do so for £5 per month to receive my regular writings... click on Subscribe if you haven't already.

To whet your whistle I have just re-written the About Me section, this is who I am feeling like, today:

I find myself, today, in a very interesting position. I know that I am but one tiny speck in an infinite universe, one tiny cell in the body of humanity and I am powerless against the tides of the systemic collapse we are collectively facing; and yet, still... in the darkness of the night and in my dreaming I find that I am filled with an unwavering hope.

This hope I feel does not have a vector, it is not a hope in an abstract future where something is better than where we are. It is a hope forged in the moment, moment by moment, of witnessing the great surges of humanity and compassion that are rising at this time. The protest and vigils and the uprising of good conscience asking for a better world.

And it is a hope, personally to me at least, that I have something of immense importance to share with the world, that if people were to listen, we could turn the tide of violence towards Peace, we could return from our lonely islands of individualism into Community and we could transmute the traumas of our collective past into Unity.

And, if everyone were to listen... would we save this planet and all of humankind? Oh... I wish, I wish. It would certainly give us the best chance of doing so but almost more importantly, as I see it, we would restore our Humanity in the face of Death. We would be restored collectively to integrity and honour. So, whether we go down together in the rising tides of climate disaster and the follies of war or whether we birth a new world; the insights I would wish to share would be both the vital hospice of what is dying AND the midwifery of what is being born.

Who are you, tiny speck, oh mite of dust? What makes you think you can change the world for the better?

Well... could it be that my "nothingness" and "no bodyness" is on my side? That I might slide along in the shadows whispering my rituals of atonement in places unseen, in homeopathic doses, long before the powers I undermine might see and take me seriously? Maybe my brokenness and my own humanity is what prevents me from rising up a false and teetering hierarchy of old-school leadership where I am forced to fall from a slippery pedestal.

I was born of humble stock; my ancestors were poor people defined by displacement and famine. Once they were subsistence farmers and worked the Land in simple ways but in recent generations came through Wales and Liverpool. I am of Scots, Irish and Welsh heritage; I grew up in North East Wales, educated in Chester. My father died when I was 14, my mother died in 2024 of Parkinsons. I am a carer by nature, of course that is woven with codependency. I grew up in addiction; inherited from my near distance ancestors. I am, today, clean and sober and have been for over 15 years.

I am not sure that it was indeed the death of my father that made me a death midwife or doula; I suspect its roots go deep into my ancestry and showed up in my childhood clairvoyance and relationship with the More than Human. But, if we take Dad's death as the first on my tally then I am more than 30 years a death doula and, specifically, I am a keener and lamenter. The story of the night my father died deserves a whole page to itself but I intuitively lamented over his body and went through death rites with him, at age 14. And I have been lamenting ever since.

My teens and 20s follow three concurrent threads that plait together age 30. The first is that I was a seeker, a seer, a clairvoyant, a psychopomp and an intuitive poet... I sought form and guidance from all the different world faiths and new age practices and found almost none of them fulfilled my hunger. I trained and studied many different spiritual practices (as so many white women do!) and the ones that continue to stay with me from that time are Animism, Sufism and 12 Step Recovery. The rest have fallen away.

I had a career too, my seeking and spiritual courses were my "hobby"; I was a youth worker and later worked in social services in strategic commissioning. My specialism was in community engagement in public policy. I was a high flyer, completing a government funded senior management fast track programme and landing my first senior management job age 25 (I burned out by the time I was 30, so it's not a great accolade!).

I was mentored through my 20s by an incredible human who was world class in his field; if he ever consents I shall share more about him but he too moves in the shadows and doesn't seek (more) fame or any glory. He educated me on the delusion and lie that is white "supremacy", he showed me the real life ongoing consequences of empire in the lost lives of black youth and he broke my fragile white ego right down by his unwavering Love and patience.

Another significant influence on me in my 20s was Roger Woolger and his opus of Ancestral Fieldwork; ancestral healing in the collective field. Roger died before writing the book but I do believe The Work continues in my own body of work; especially when it comes to ancestral atonement and the need for repair in the Unseen fields.

So I was a seeker, a high flying manager of people and public resources... and I was an addict. In private, I was tormented by compulsions that harmed and sabotaged me just as my parents and forefathers were before me. When I was 29, my Saturn return should you believe in astrology, I came to my absolute rock bottom with a complete mental health collapse and I left behind the fervent seeking and careerism and surrendered, completely. I gave my life and will to the Great Mystery and since then it has got, well... Cosmic!

With sobriety and clarity of mind the first thing I needed to do was feel all the feelings I was running from and stuffing with addictive behaviours. I keened and lamented like I never had before (and survived!). I started a new career as a funeral celebrant, I took ordination as an interfaith minister only to later renounce my vows and any connection to the organisation that trained me, I was called repeatedly to the bedsides of the dying, I became a birth doula... and realised, hang on a minute... I am a death doula!

I looked around for death doula trainings and not finding any that met my own learning style and preferences I co-founded what was then called the Red Tent end of life doula preparation course with a friend, under the umbrella of Nicola Goodall's Red Tent birth doula school. We offered circle-led spaces, non hierarchical, where Death is the Teacher and before we knew it the course was in global demand. So we evolved to become Sacred Circle Training Co CIC in 2018 and our growing global community of Death and Grief doulas number over 600 today.

So I am director and lead facilitator of this social enterprise. In 2020 when all travel and in-person gathering paused I wrote my first book Lost Rites: Ceremony and Ritual for Death and Dying as an online course and it became a published book. The concept of Lost Rites is simple and yet has proven to be the devastating key to understanding what this world is most lacking; it started as a play on words between Lost Rites and Last Rites; but ends up tracking the consequences of what was lost to us when the doctrine of sin and the Roman Empire conquered Europe.

We lost our indigenous connection to land and landscape, to the animist inter-relationship with the More than Human world, we lost our tribal communities and villages, we burned our wisdom keepers, spiritual midwives and keepers of the herblore; we were controlled by church and state, the poor worked to serve the landowning elite, that spiritual hunger at the heart of Europe led to colonisation, slavery, empire and latterly to capitalism and consumerism. We are collectively, an addict.

So, for wherever the descendents of Europe have settled there is a disconnect with the ancestral lineages and traditions that once shored up community and connection. We lost our ability to lament together, as a way to process collective trauma. We lost our authentic ritual and ceremony and the language of togetherness. And so we take it, steal it, appropriate it wherever we go. All that spiritual seeking and qualifications in yoga and fake-shamanism and taking medicines from other lands without honouring their lineages, the consumerist spirituality of the new age; is a blight and a symptom of the Lost Rites. The only proper response to realising this is to grieve and atone.

The second book Lost Rites Community of Grief and the third Lost Rites of the Ancestral landscape chart a pathway between death rites and grief ritual from the personal to the collective to the systemic. I am half way through writing a fourth book called the Lament of the 13 moons which takes up 13 contemporary Rites of Passage identified in the Ancestral Landscape and explores them through the lens of death rites and lament.

Somehow, without really ever planning it or trying to be, I find myself now an authority on ceremony and ritual, particularly death rites, personal, collective and systemic. I am one of two teachers of lament that I know of; many people practice lament personally, some lead lament in groups; myself and Tuomas Rounakari, with whom I collaborate often, are the only folks I know teaching the teachers and leading the leaders.

Lament is an ancient technology that charts pathways through the Unseen landscape. It is not merely crying about something sad, oh no, it is the use of Sound and silence, of resonant frequency and the power of prayer to move between realms, to untangle what is tangled and repair what is torn in the Unseen landscapes. Lament has the capacity to psychopomp the dead, to heal the bereft, to bring communities together, to dissolve old grudges and resentments; it has the power to bring about revolutions, it expands consciousness, it reunites us with the More than Human allies, it guides and protects us.

So... I started this introduction by saying I am but one tiny speck in this infinite Universe but, sometimes, in the darkness of the night and in my dreams I feel the Infinite Universe within me. And I may be a very average human being with my modest little cottage in Eryri, North Wales; with my mundane loves of hill walking and labradors but I am also feeling that these Times we are living in (turbulent, terrible and exquisitely heartbreakingly beautiful too) are the Times I was born for. And all that I have to bring... I want to bring... will you receive my words and thoughts? And will you support me please to do so?