Welcoming Darkness Rituals for Samhain Season, November 2025: Shadow Dances & Guided Ritual Arts - for Ancestral Honouring & Dancing With Our Shadows. Click below to find out more and reserve your place for these intimate (just 13 places per event) and powerful facilitated gatherings!

This is a holding page for a newly-emerging heart project of many years in crafting, which began several years ago with the popular Roots & Resonance Seasonal Circles in Hebden Bridge. Here, you can find out about my evolving approach to animist ritual and healing arts, to shamanism, and the kinds of group spaces I hope to facilitate. I will also include a page on one-to-one healing, and what to expect from this work or what is involved. I am taking a 'waiting list' for this work, as I seek an appropriate venue; but can also do some of this work remotely via video call.

Since Roots & Resonance's offerings ended during the pandemic, I have been on a journey of self-growth including adjusting to health challenges, learning multiple wisdom teachings, academic study and integrating my work as a Therapist & Counsellor. I returned to the Calder Valley in winter 2025 - this magical place has drawn me back!

I am excited to share that I am beginning to open up one-to-one client work in animist (shamanic) & energy healing; alongside considering community & group offerings; likely beginning Autumn & Winter 2025 / from Spring 2026. Long term, I hope to offer courses tailored to the needs of our times, and our individual spiritual health.

What is Animism?

Animism is an ancient and timeless world-view, found cross-culturally, that honours and includes all life as sentient, aware and responsive to our relationship with them. All life including plants, animals, rocks, rivers, technology, ancestors, the dead, spirits of place...

Animism at its heart allows us to be in conscious relationship with all life - acknowledging human interconnection with nature, rather than dominance over nature, and that in return we are never truly alone. There is no hierarchy - humans are embedded in the natural world and our actions impact on our non-human kin. Animism has existed as a world-view since humans first started making meaning of the stars, the seasons, the migratory routes of animals. It served to remind humanity of their connection to and interdependence with nature and all other living beings, and is how humanity existed for thousands of years before the path of unsustainable extraction; a recent turn in human history of 200 year or so towards what Deep Ecologist and Systems Thinker the late Joanna Macy refers to as: 'the great unraveling'.

When you are in relationship in this way, as an animist, or with deep ecology leanings, or from a heritage that lives this way (meaning, you respect all life intrinsically, and their rights to live freely, rather than see life forms or the earth as a 'infinite product for relentless human use'); you show responsibility, care and custodianship. You show this towards the land you live upon, the food sources you tend and live alongside, and the health of the water all beings consume. Animism is as relevant now as it was thousands of years ago, and Earth needs us to know this.

Heeding The Call - Why Animism (shamanism) - Why Now?

In these times of great polarity and multiple global crises, which impact all life on Earth, many of us feel called to activism, care-taking or change-making; but can also feel overwhelmed, burnt out, powerless or even find our selves tapping into collective trauma states on a scale never before known.

Forming healing, inclusive and earth-centred community is a timeless and essential way to help us show up for our individual needs alongside those of our community; in witnessing each other, and relating more deeply to our lands, our home and the wider worlds - including the Spirit world, The Ancestors, or the Unseen. For example, regardless of your religion or beliefs on this; responsible care for the dead and our ancestors - human and other-than-human - is a powerful and ancient ethical way of life many of us have lost. Resilient and responsible community honours the joy, grief, messiness and beauty of alive-ness; and the shared weight of the collective shadows we're seeing in the world. This includes acknowledging the current challenge we see playing out globally in extremes, for example how to address the impacts of inequality, oppression, marginalisation; and how these play out in localised forms, in community? Can we hold difference with respect, and learn what is needed to apply restorative and regenerative ways? Gritty work!

And we begin by facing and healing our own fears, shadows and wounds. This awareness and practices for facing these aspects of self allows these parts to not 'take over' or project harmfully in our relationships, work and community roles. Perhaps that is the main work of our lives - and that in itself is a brave contribution to the collective and the wellness of our descendants. I am fascinated in the intersections between cross-culture spiritual practice and modern psychology/psychotherapy, as well as peaceful and honest community building techniques.

Animist practices and healing arts offer some powerful, simple and ancient tools and technologies that are true medicine for these chaotic, lonely and heavy times. They help us step into and co-create more robust, diverse and supportive communities. They can also be a powerful compliment to psychotherapy, trauma healing and other modalities. They can help us tap into meaning, our personal experience of it, without dogma or a need to fit into a particular way of being...And we can dance and play!

However, in westernised, non-indigenous and 'new age' contexts - without some key foundations and ethical practice - shamanic practices can be appropriated, misdirected, psychologically destabilising for some (or even dangerous), or used to bypass important psychological, political or social aspects of the human world.

My Approach to Shamanism & Ritual Arts

As a sacred activist and via my training with inspirational teachers and guides; it is my aim to invite in 'politics, intergenerational trauma or cultural ethics' to the healing process or the circle. The shadows need to be illuminated and explored - to be integrated - or they cause rampant chaos, inside of us, in our families, and out there in the world...'love and light' spirituality is not enough. Animism welcomes all shades of embodied experience; inviting you into circle as you are; including shadows, wounds, gifts and blind spots! From an animist perspective, at least in my experience, a spiritual quest is arduous and multi-layered - one of grit, periods of darkness, unravelling and suffering - as much as great moments of ecstasy, inner peace, and beauty. This is where guided shadow work, shared wise community and shamanic healing can be deeply supportive for some of us.

The technologies of how to perform safe, effective and personalised ceremonies and rituals can be life changing. Sitting in circle together, before heading off to a solo wilderness retreat or night vigil is a powerful experience. Learning to speak with your Ancestors and honour them, and in doing so begin to heal long-standing intergenerational wounding (literally, seeing it change your current family life) - is one of the most profound experiences I have had. Dancing with wild abandon to rousing drums...well, you get the idea! These are all examples of how liberating an animist world view can be, and how your soul will open up it's gifts and the masks will fall...

My approach is eclectic, from years of self-study, and with training from teachers with integrity. I incorporate my 25 years of psychological and spiritual influences into this work, from traditional paganism and eastern dharmic study, to integrating science-backed somatic and ecstatic practices. Many of the therapeutic interventions widely used today are strongly influenced by these ancient ways. For example, they help people stay grounded in their bodies and self-aware when feeling strong emotions, release their emotions in healthy responsible ways (and fear this less)- including the taboo ones like grief or anger, and provide relaxed or blissful states. Ritual arts can be deeply nourishing in aiding us process big life changes, step into new roles or life stages or to let go of what no longer serves us. They also help us show up daily to life with self-awareness; and can bring routine or medicine for daily challenges. Doing this in co-created ceremonial space can be life-changing, it has certainly been so for myself. These practices are earth-centred, and formed in such a way that a belief or following of any religion, or none, can be incorporated into your dedication, your presence, alongside others (or if working one-to-one).

My work is fuelled by reverence for the timeless and ancient, as well as modern psychology and what humans need now for current-world challenges. My belief is despite living on a land where my pre-christian ancestor's ways were persecuted and lost hundreds of years ago (before those same "institutions/systems" began colonising globally), spiritual community and practice can be re-envisioned and adapted to be responsive to the needs of people now. This is rather than appropriated from far-off lands; the exceptions being when express permission and training has been given from Elders & Wisdom Keepers. Upholding their voices as indigenous and global peoples is an ethos that belongs in community spaces, with so much the so-called western world needs to listen to from them. Alongside this, we have plenty of signs, messages, ancient texts, poems, and frameworks to draw on, even in the West. For example, I have a deep love of plants, kitchen herbalism or 'hedge witchery', astrology and divination, mythology, folklore and folk magic (especially of the Celtic and Northern Lands), story telling and the arts. I love to bring this creativity and playfulness into my offerings where appropriate; and encourage participants and collaborators to bring their creativity and passion into shared group spaces!

A note on culture & inclusivity: In my own experiences as a queer, neurodivergent person; I have often felt out of place in binary gendered e.g. 'women's circles' ritual or workshop spaces, or spaces that make assumptions about ability or sexual orientation. So, creating and facilitating spaces for diverse community is at the core of my work - my hearth.. My offerings welcome and celebrate individuals of all ages, backgrounds, heritages, sexual orientations, gender expression (trans and nonbinary affirmative), and level of curiosity or participation! I also plan to host some exclusive LGBTQIA+ and gender diverse spaces, to meet a 'gap' and the healing and affirmation required for people who identify in these ways. A culture of respect, confidentiality and wise speech is encouraged, practiced and facilitated in all spaces. And a simple framework for this is guided and adapted to each group.

What is being Offered and When?

Ecstatic dance / somatic movement rituals for Autumn 2025 are in motion! I am carefully curating my offerings based on what may be needed locally, and beyond. I am also managing my growing therapeutic practice - so bear with me. 2026 is likely the year of offering more group spaces, and seeking collaborations and new venues.

I offer one to one work, already, for those who feel some call to shamanic healing or have some prior experience / practice in this area, or wish to integrate this in to counselling sessions. Please note there may be a short wait, as I am seeking a new venue for this work. Some aspects of this work can be done remotely - please contact me to find out more.

I plan to develop introductory courses and talks, online and in-person, alongside themed / seasonal ecstatic movement & dance rituals and accessible community offerings. I am seeking to establish a monthly drumming circle into 2026, which will be a community offering (no fee), potentially outdoors by a fire, and with shared facilitation & organising.

Dream with me - please send me a message if you feel called to find out more or to collaborate!

Coming soon: Shamanic healing for one-to-one clients - this page is in development and will include specific information about this process. For now, please contact me to find out more and arrange a potential consultation call, if working in this way appeals to you.