Mary Ann Clements - Red Tents: Unravelling our Past and Weaving a Shared Future

RED TENTS

Unravelling Our Past and

Weaving a Shared Future

Mary Ann Clements and Aisha Hannibal

WOMANCRAFT PUBLISHING

This book is a bold and courageous antidote to racism, oppression and exclusion. The authors offer a step by step guide to creating liberatory Red Tent spaces where women share collective leadership, listen deeply to one another without trying to fix anything, and inclusion is a central pillar holding up the Tent. The reflective questions peppered through the book encourage a personal journey for the reader. I highly recommend this book for any woman wanting to set up or participate in a Red Tent.

Nicola Kurk, Shadow Work trainer, facilitator and coach

A must-read for women yearning to create Red Tent sisterhood. This book captures the magic of the global Red Tent movement and provides new insight into how to celebrate and honour what it means to be a woman.

Isadora Leidenfrost, PhD, Red Tent movie filmmaker Things We Dont Talk About and author The Red Tent Movement: A Historical Perspective

Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. This book is so important in opening up vital conversations for those facilitating spaces for women it feels like absolute gold dust. What is explored here is what I feel has been missing from the core values of many groups within the Red Tent movement and womens sacred circles. For those striving for more inclusive spaces, it is long overdue. I am very grateful to the writers for putting what many of us have been thinking and feeling into this very clear and well-written book. I will be buying copies for everyone I know and recommending it far and wide. Thank you.

Clare Jasmine Beloved, artist, poet, irreverent Liverpool creatrix, creative activist, circle sista, sharing the medicine in our stories and finding the magic in the margin

In this fast-moving and ever-changing world, the need for Red Tent spaces is bigger than ever. With this powerful, and at times challenging, book, Mary Ann and Aisha offer a guide to how the Red Tents of now and the future can unpick old ideas and offer brave, intersectional spaces where all voices can be heard. Whether youre new to the ways of the Red Tent or are an experienced circle leader, this visionary book is much-needed and offers necessary input from a range of experiences about how the Red Tent has the potential to co-create healing and learning communities for the benefit of all.

Awen Clement, founder of The Earth House

Refreshing, renewing, restorative and indeed, revolutionary, this book nourishes a community-based approach to Red Tents that is both anti-oppressive and expansive, guiding you into the terrain of the liberatory while simultaneously honouring the messy, embodied complexity of doing this world-changing work. This book is a good addition to the resource library of the global Red Tent movement as a whole.

Molly Remer, author of Womanrunes , rural Red Tent Circle priestess, Red Tent Initiation program creator, creatrix and circle-tender of Brigids Grove

This book is a radical manifesto. It is an honest and practical manual, both challenging and reassuring by turns. Draw the curtains, pull up a comfy chair and settle down to listen to this collective weave of many voices, including your own, as you answer the many thoughtful questions it contains. Find out what being in a Red Tent could mean for you. A wise guide to making change, one rest at a time.

Liz Rothschild, author of Outside the Box Everyday Stories of Death, Bereavement and Life , actor, funeral celebrant and founder of Westmill Woodland Burial Ground

Red Tents is a practical and deeply insightful invitation to firstly look at how you are nourished within your own inner world, and then to consider how you may work in collaboration with others to co-create Red Tent spaces that are truly welcoming and accessible to all women who may feel drawn to be held in the deeply calm, inclusive and courageous space Red Tents have the potential to be. An invaluable resource for everyone creating and holding safe spaces for womens authentic sharing, showing up and connection.

Clare Cooper, author of Milestones of Motherhood

I appreciate this very thorough examination of the many issues involved with hosting Red Tents, including cultural appropriation, gender issues, white woman spirituality and more. Much food for thought is generated by the many lessons the authors have learned to help those who have not had the experience of forming a Red Tent. Mary Ann and Aisha put deep consideration into how to bring women together for connection, inspiration and healing. And then they went back, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, to include virtual Red Tents and how this vital work can continue in todays current environment. Theyve created an essential resource for those hosting Red Tents and for those who wish to do so.

Caryn MacGrandle, creator of The Divine Feminine app

Copyright 2021 Mary Ann Clements and Aisha Hannibal

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Published by Womancraft Publishing, 2021
womancraftpublishing.com

ISBN 978-1-910559-56-7

Red Tents is also available in print format: ISBN 978-1-910559-57-4

Cover image Leigh Millar

Design and typesetting: lucentword.com

Candles: Pular/Shutterstock.com

Womancraft Publishing is committed to sharing powerful new womens voices, through a collaborative publishing process. We are proud to midwife this work, however the story, the experiences and the words are the authors alone. A percentage of Womancraft Publishing profits are invested back into the environment reforesting the tropics (via TreeSisters) and forward into the community.

For all those who have come before us, our ancestors, all the mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, the elders, and the wisdom they held and passed on.

For all those who will read this book: those in our lives, women throughout the world who contribute to the collective consciousness of the many facets of woman and to much-needed change in our world at this time.

For all those yet to come, yet to be born, yet to bring their wisdom and their gifts to share, who will continue the future line of women.

Foreword
by ALisa Starkweather

As well as being the founder of the Red Tent Temple Movement I co-founded other initiatives, one of which was Women in Power in the UK. This is where I met and formed a deep and lasting bond with the authors of Red Tents: Unravelling Our Past and Weaving a Shared Future, Mary Ann Clements and Aisha Hannibal. From our many years together in a community which values extraordinary transformational work of facing our darkest shadows, these are women who can be trusted. Quite different from the Red Tent Temple Movement, Women in Power is a more radical body of work where women confront internal hatred from patriarchy and rewire the perpetrator-victim cycles embedded in our own trauma histories and nervous systems. Together we have witnessed first-hand the courage it requires for people to live the story of disrupting harmful ancestral lineage patterns and what it means to be held through rage and grief as the most traumatic of our wounds surface to be healed.