Starshine Roots

Starshine Roots Sound healing, drumming, circles and somatic healing for women.

I create containers rooted in Celtic folklore and trauma-informed practice where you can go bone deep - shedding what's not yours, reclaiming your voice, and remembering your power.

I didn't know what was going to happen when I took my drum back to the NW of Ireland a few weeks ago.The land my Dad and...
28/05/2026

I didn't know what was going to happen when I took my drum back to the NW of Ireland a few weeks ago.

The land my Dad and I walked.

As I drummed along Lough Foyle, I felt so present in my body.

I felt joy. A joy that would not have been there if I hadn't have felt the grief.

I was utterly alive in my body.

Over the years, the drum has supported me to stop numbing, so when I actually felt the anger and the grief, I stopped abandoning myself. I started putting myself first.

This is one of the reasons why I love facilitating women's drum circles.

A drum is such a simple thing. And yet when you find your own rhythm, something shifts.

You can remember what it feels like to put your needs first.

đŸ”„ Women's Hearth and Drum Circle.
Tuesday 2 June, 7-9pm.
Boiling Wells, of St Werburghs City Farm, Bristol đŸ”„

💚 No experience needed.

đŸ„ Limited drums and rattles available to borrow.

More info and tickets:https://fb.me/e/61KLiIxLX

I called 999 once, convinced I was having a heart attack.The paramedics came, ran the tests, told me my heart was fine.I...
30/04/2026

I called 999 once, convinced I was having a heart attack.

The paramedics came, ran the tests, told me my heart was fine.

It happened a few days after my first public sound bath. After a moment of being genuinely, fully myself. And my body responded with severe heart pain because it interpreted it as dangerous.

Because for a long time, it was.

I grew up learning to disappear. To be the fixer, the pleaser, the one who made things easier for everyone else.

Being seen, taking up space, shining in any way that might draw attention; my nervous system filed all of that under threat. And it kept that filing system running for decades, long after the original danger had passed.

For many decades, I didn’t notice it. I just thought “that’s who I am”. Someone who stays quiet. Someone who makes herself small. Someone who apologises for existing too loudly.

But that’s not who I am. That’s what survival taught me. That’s what survival teaches many of us.

There’s a reason women coming back to themselves so often find their way back through the land. Our sense of place and our sense of self are not separate things. When we lose one, we lose the other. And when we begin to come home to ourselves, something in the body recognises the earth as part of that homecoming.

Áine knows this. She is a sovereignty goddess whose land and spirit are too firmly intertwined to ever be separated. She was the land.

She is the energy of summer, of being fully present in your own life, of belonging entirely to yourself.

That is what we work with over six weeks in circle. Not performance. Not fixing. Just slowly, carefully, coming back.

Bone Deep: Áine begins 21 May. One space left for Thursday’s circle. ⭕



đŸ”„ More details on how to apply: https://fb.me/e/9P0swrCQn

Have you ever stood in a circle and felt yourself slowly disappear?You came looking for something real. And somewhere yo...
27/04/2026

Have you ever stood in a circle and felt yourself slowly disappear?

You came looking for something real. And somewhere you felt yourself leave.

I know that feeling. I first felt it as a child in Sunday school. Saturday nights were dread because Sunday meant catechism. Words I had to memorise and recite on demand. I didn’t know what most of them meant. I asked my teacher. I never got a real answer.

The message was clear. It didn’t matter what they meant. What mattered was whether you knew them.

Something in me, even as a child with no power to say so, just knew. This is wrong. This is meaningless. These words don’t belong to me.

Fast forward decades. I’m at a pagan gathering, a new moon ceremony. I arrived expecting something powerful.

Instead I was handed a piece of paper.

These are the words, I was told. Say them at the right time.

And I left my body instantly. Floated right up above it. I recognised it immediately because I’d lived in dissociation for nearly four decades.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote that the body remembers. The bones remember. The joints remember. Even the little finger remembers.

I’d add: the body also knows when it’s being asked to pretend.

Women tell me this all the time. That they’ve stood in circles where there was an unspoken script, an unspoken aesthetic, everyone seeming to know the moves. Where they went through the motions and came home feeling more alone than when they left.

That’s not ritual. That’s performance.

Real ritual isn’t learned. It’s remembered. It lives in the body before it ever finds words. It doesn’t ask you to perform or to know. Just to arrive in your own skin and let what’s already there come forward.

This is what I saw yesterday morning for Beltane in the woods. Women around a fire. Mud on their boots. Nobody performing anything.

Just women, present, real, bringing whatever they actually carried and letting the circle, sisterhood, embodied ritual, fire and the drum do the rest.

đŸ„ The next Women’s Hearth Drum Circle is Tuesday 5 May at Boiling Wells of St Werburghs City Farm đŸ„

đŸ”„ More info and tickets: https://fb.me/e/8x3sXvvMw

23/04/2026

By the end of last week my body was tired in that deep-bone way that those of us with chronic illness know well.

Seven days of shifts at the planetarium, no walking, no solitude, no drumming, none of the practices that usually keep me steady.

For someone with fibromyalgia, that kind of week has a predictable ending.

A pain flare. Anxiety spiralling. My body calling time.

None of that happened.

On day six I held my first group healing circle as part of my Celtic shamanic practitioner training. I expected anxiety. It didn’t come. What arrived instead was something I could only see in hindsight.

I had been living the medicine of flow all week without knowing it.

The circle was built around water, around flow, around the wisdom of the water cycle: nothing lost, nothing stays fixed, the cycle always begins again.

And that is exactly how I had moved through those seven days. Not fighting the lack of time or space. Not catastrophising. Just flowing.

My guides had arranged it that way. I hadn’t prepared it consciously.

What I held that day was one of the most grounded containers I have ever created. And when it was over, I wasn’t depleted. I was resourced.

I am still standing. Standing pretty well, actually.

This is what a strong container does. Not just for the people inside it. For the one holding it too.

Grateful beyond words for this path.

And for the incredible water instruments from Nazar Drums Workshop which were an integral part of the healing circle!

I was six years old when my mum placed an ammonite in my hands at the Ulster Museum in Belfast.Four hundred million year...
16/04/2026

I was six years old when my mum placed an ammonite in my hands at the Ulster Museum in Belfast.

Four hundred million years old. A creature that breathed and moved and died before there were trees. I stood there holding it and something opened in my heart that I had no words for. I still don’t, really.

In Glasgow in my twenties I sat in a Zeiss planetarium and the fibre optic stars came on above me and I wept. I hadn’t expected it. The sheer scale of the dark, and in the middle of it this small, breathing, improbable planet we all live on together.

I felt the weight of how precious it is. How fleeting. How extraordinary that any of us are here at all. I was crying and I was full of wonder at the same time, and I didn’t need to choose between these two states of grief and joy.

This week I am volunteering in a planetarium. Brian Eno and Aphex Twin playing. The cosmos projected all around me and something in my body went very still and very awake at the same time.

I have been in that state before. In stone circles. In ancient woodlands. In valleys filled with heather and gorse. On the Atlantic coast of NW Ireland where I am from.

It is always the same. The ordinary self goes quiet. Something underneath it...remembers.

The iron in our blood was made in dying stars. The spiral of an ammonite and the spiral of a galaxy are not a coincidence. We are not separate from any of this. We just forget.

The work I do with women is, at its heart, about that remembering.

I see it when a woman drops out of her head and into something much older in herself. All the noise falls away. Something ancient and unbroken moves through her.

If this landed somewhere in you, I run three women’s drumming circles a month in Bristol, and Bone Deep: Áine begins in May.

Six weeks of coming home to yourself, to the earth, to something older than memory.

đŸ”„ More info here: https://starshineroots.org/events

PS, I made the hat for this week and as you can probably tell, I am very pleased with how it turned it out, especially the structural engineering parts! đŸ€Ș😅

For most of my adult life I didn’t know who I was.I was the fixer. The one who was told they had it ‘all together’. Who ...
10/04/2026

For most of my adult life I didn’t know who I was.

I was the fixer. The one who was told they had it ‘all together’. Who held space for everyone, put everyone first, organised myself so completely around others that the question of who I actually was underneath all that tending never had room to arise.

Perimenopause arrived like a stripping back. And slowly, imperfectly, I started putting myself first. I had already been doing this because of my healing work but entering this stage of life, accelerated the process!

Friends fell away. What I felt wasn’t one thing.

Grief, relief, loneliness, spaciousness, and underneath it all something that felt like coming home to a house I had never actually lived in.

I understand now that part of the medicine I carry was forged in that wound.

If any of this feels familiar, I have written a blog about Áine, Irish goddess of sovereignty, and why real bloom has never once required a flower crown.

🌾 And if you’re ready to come home to yourself, Bone Deep: Áine, series of 6 circle starts on either Wednesday 20 May (Cohort 1) two spaces left or Thursday 21 May (Cohort 2) one space left. 🌾

Blog: https://starshineroots.org/blog-1/done-with-performance-ine-amp-the-truth-of-full-bloom

Circle: https://starshineroots.org/events/bone-deep-womens-circles-summer-with-aine

All winter we arrived in the dark, no light anywhere, head torches on, feeling our way to the barn. We brought the candl...
08/04/2026

All winter we arrived in the dark, no light anywhere, head torches on, feeling our way to the barn. We brought the candles and the logs and made the warmth.

And I love that about winter circles, the cosiness of them.

But last night we pulled up and it was still light. Still warm. Birds singing. Evening still holding in the trees. Something in both Leona of and I exhaled.

We lit the outside fire and drummed there first, the woods around us, the sky slowly deepening above us. Then we moved inside into the candlelit dark after the tea break, and the barn held us in a completely different way.

After the voice work, something broke open. Drums and voices and bodies moving, women on fire. đŸ”„

And then the circle was carrying itself. I got to hold space, witness it and be inside it all at once. Dancing. Shaking. Howling.

Women at the end were saying it felt ‘otherworldly’, ‘ancestral’, ‘powerful’, ‘psychedelic’ and so much more.

Grateful for every woman’s medicine. For Leona’s support in setting up and holding space and for the beautiful Boiling Wells of St Werburghs City Farm

Most ancestral healing work asks: what did they pass down that hurt you?That matters. But there is something else waitin...
07/04/2026

Most ancestral healing work asks: what did they pass down that hurt you?

That matters. But there is something else waiting.

What joy did they carry, before the forgetting, before the shrinking, before land was owned, still waiting in your bones?

At the second week of the Women’s Ancestral Joy Circle, we journeyed back through time. Past the recent ancestors. Past the generations who had no choice but to make themselves small to survive.

All the way back to the medicine women, the celebrants, the wild ones who are in all of our lines.

And what landed in the room that night was this: they want to be your allies. They want to support you. Working with them, calling them in, can support us to heal the line.

I believe this is one of the most loving things we can do as women alive today.

This circle runs again in September. DM me if you’d like to be on the first to know list. 💚

02/04/2026

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t show on the outside.

You’re functioning. Holding it all together. But something quieter in you knows you’ve been running on empty for a while now.

This is the work I do with women, online now as well as in person. Sound, body, voice, parts work, ancestral healing. Whatever your system is asking for that day.

“I’ve been feeling so much lighter in the way I show up every day. The anxiety and stress over all the responsibilities I’ve been carrying are dissipating. It feels really good to approach each day in the present moment.” - Kristen

“Life had been feeling unrooted lately. The sound experience was incredible. The session left me feeling centred and grounded and able to deal with very challenging situations with grace. I didn’t expect that with it being online, but it created further depth for me.” — Meg

If something in you recognises this, you can DM for a free discovery call.

Some of my happiest memories are of my Nana’s kitchen.She’d lift me onto a stool so I could reach the bench. The air sme...
27/03/2026

Some of my happiest memories are of my Nana’s kitchen.

She’d lift me onto a stool so I could reach the bench. The air smelled of apples and blackcurrants and raspberry jam. She’d put something in my hands and we’d work side by side.

Her hands were gnarled with arthritis. Rheumatoid. The kind that comes, I believe, from a lifetime of giving and giving and giving. Tending everyone else, last in the queue for her own needs.

The giving was real, the love was real, but nobody really showed how much she mattered too.

This martyrdom runs in my line.

I learned it early. Absorbed it without knowing. But I’ve been carefully unravelling it over the last few years.

And yet that kitchen was magic. The warmth she created, the care she poured into everything, even at cost to herself.

The gift was inside the wound all along.

I think about her when I open the barn doors at Boiling Wells.

Something happens when women gather there. I’ve watched it enough times to trust it. Something ancient stirs, a recognition, a familiarity. Like a memory in the body rather than the mind.

Like we’ve done this before, across many lifetimes.

Because we have.

When I tend that space, prepare it, pour care into making it warm and nourishing and magical, I’m not repeating the pattern. I’m transforming it. Doing what my Nana did, but consciously. From choice rather than depletion.

And I believe that when women gather like this, around the hearth, with our drums and voices,, something heals. Not just in us. In the line. In all the women who gave too much and were never able to gather like this for themselves.

This circle is for them too.

The next Women’s Hearth Drum Circle at Boiling Wells of St Werburghs City Farm is on Tuesday 7 April at 7pm. đŸ„

đŸ”„More info and tickets: https://www.facebook.com/share/18Qrcmt7V8/?mibextid=wwXIfr

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Troopers Hill Road
Bristol
BS58BP

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Monday 9am - 8pm
Tuesday 9am - 8pm
Wednesday 9am - 8pm
Thursday 9am - 8pm
Friday 9am - 8pm
Saturday 10am - 2pm

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