Starshine Roots

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Starshine Roots Online women’s membership open. Celtic Shamanic Practitioner. Sound healing, drumming, circles and somatic healing for women.

I create containers where you can go bone deep - shedding what's not yours, reclaiming your voice, and remembering your power.

15/10/2026

I grew up in a strictly controlled religious society were I learnt that it was not safe to speak the truth. To be yourself.

Then I experienced similar within the spiritual community.

Spaces where curiosity was punished, where grief had to be the right size, and where it was easier to stay quiet than to risk getting it wrong.

So the spaces I create now are the opposite.

You can arrive anxious and say so.
You can share and it will definitely not be reinterpreted or fixed.
If a boundary is crossed, it gets named; early and clearly.

I know what it costs when a circle or ceremony isn’t held with care.

I’ve spoken out about it, because too many women have left spaces feeling that something was wrong with them.

That knowing is part of why the Women’s Celtic Shamanic Journey exists. An online circle for women.

A room where you are trusted to know your own body, your own emotions, and your own timing.

If you’ve been looking for that kind of container, here is more info: https://www.womenscelticshamanicjourney.com/

Founding member doors close on 8 November.

For years I would leave a circle or a workshop feeling something open in me.By the following week I would often feel I h...
12/10/2026

For years I would leave a circle or a workshop feeling something open in me.

By the following week I would often feel I had lost it.

I didn’t need another powerful experience.
I just needed a supportive space to come back to when I actually needed it.

So I began making it!

And last Tuesday, I opened the doors to the Women’s Celtic Shamanic Journey. An online circle membership for women.

Before drum circle that same day I sat by the fire and pulled a card.

Bramble.

A nest of eggs under the thorns. A web spun through every branch. Roots going down into a spiral of stars.

It took my breath away.
I had just launched this after everything it took to build it, and the universe put this card in my hand.

The thorns guard the nest.
The web holds it.
The roots reach all the way down.

That is what I want this online women’s circle to be.
A structure whose whole work is to keep something tender while it grows.
A hearth that stays lit.
A circle you can come back to at any time.

If you’ve been looking for the same thing, here is more info:https://www.womenscelticshamanicjourney.com/

Founding member places at £25 per month are open until Samhain on 8 November. After that, the membership cost will go up.

I used to wake most mornings with my jaw tight and aching.I thought it was just pain.Now I know much of the holding was ...
02/10/2026

I used to wake most mornings with my jaw tight and aching.

I thought it was just pain.

Now I know much of the holding was from anger that I had swallowed for decades.

The no’s I never said.

Years ago, a therapist asked me whether I felt angry about what had happened to me. I went looking for it and found nothing. Only a kind of numbness. I just couldn’t access the anger at all.

The shamanic path is a major part of what has walked me home to my body. The old stories, and the Celtic goddesses who are fierce and wild and hold their ground were and are an inspiration for me.

For me the fiercest of them is the Morrighan.

A shapeshifter who sees what is coming and says it aloud, she guards the land and its people, and she belongs to the dark half of the year. Over the battlefield she flies as a crow, and in the old stories her scream alone could stop a warrior’s heart.

Working with the old stories is so important for us women because we get to experience the feminine in all it’s parts. Fierce and tender, wild and wise, and all of it encouraged!

These days I can feel my anger rise without the old guilt or shame wrapped around it. I let it come. I let it move through me. I listen to what it knows.

So many of us learned to keep it down, and let our bodies carry it for us.

Over six weeks we’ll meet the Morrighan’s many faces. The warrior, who knows when to fight and when to let go. The shapeshifter, who keeps the parts of us we learned to hide. The seer, who trusts what she knows before she can say why. And the goddess, who takes up her space and doesn’t say sorry for it. We’ll come to her through the body, with drum, sound, voice, ritual and ceremony, and in the company of women.

The Wednesday circle is already full. There are two spaces left in Thursday’s Circle (starting 5 November)

⭕️ More info and application: https://starshineroots.org/events/bone-deep-womens-circles-autumn-with-the-morrighan-second

On Llwyna Farm, I allowed myself to receive.By land so loved I felt it rise through the soles of my feet.By a full moon ...
30/09/2026

On Llwyna Farm, I allowed myself to receive.

By land so loved I felt it rise through the soles of my feet.
By a full moon I could feel radiating through my entire body, alongside fire heat on my skin.

By owls calling on every side of me, their song in my ribs, my chest, my hips.

Already, something that was never mine beginning to loosen.

And by the horses.

Some of them found where I carried fear handed down through generations, fear that was never mine, and pressed their warm breath into it. My hips.

They looked at me as if they have always known me.
When I looked back, my breath deepened and my heart opened so wide it ached.

I felt I had always known them too.
Breath to breath, we are the same earth.

The old fear moved through me and out.
I felt it go. I wept.

I feel more in my own skin.
Lighter. Stronger. I am sleeping like a woman who has put something heavy down.
I feel like me.

Thank you, Miranda Carey Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy and thank you to the herd, for everything you do, and for all the love you pour into this land and work.

(This was Miranda’s family constellation workshop with her herd, which she holds twice a year at Llwyna Farm in Monmouthshire)

Every autumn there comes a moment when my body stops agreeing with my diary.My diary is becoming very full, and my body ...
29/09/2026

Every autumn there comes a moment when my body stops agreeing with my diary.

My diary is becoming very full, and my body is quietly asking for something else entirely.

To slow down, to turn inwards, to sit by a fire. Over the years I’ve learnt to listen to that quieter voice. The year is turning towards its dark half, and I think some older part of me feels it before I do.

The evenings are drawing in, and so much of my going inwards happens alone, with my drum, my harmonium and my own healing. I treasure that. But there’s another kind of warmth I long for at this time of year.

Women, together, around a fire.

I’ve come to believe it’s one of the oldest healing things we do. For thousands of years, women have sat close in the dark with the flames between them. Cold air at their backs, trees moving overhead, the earth damp beneath them.

Warming their hands and each other. Telling stories, singing, grieving, laughing, and letting the fire take what was too heavy to carry alone.

Something in us still remembers. I feel it every time we gather at Boiling Wells. Walking down through the dark trees, the smell of woodsmoke, and then a circle of women in the firelight. We settle. We soften. The rhythm finds us.

Next Tuesday, we will light the candles along the path and get the log burner going in the barn. The kettle will be on, the drums out, and the circle ready.

If you’re feeling the same pull, there’s a place by the fire for you.

Women’s Hearth & Drum Circle, Tuesday 6 October, 7pm, Boiling Wells of St Werburghs City Farm

More info and tickets here: https://starshineroots.org/events/womens-hearth-drum-circle

I studied what the medieval world decided a woman’s body was. I taught it at the University of Glasgow. Medieval women a...
23/09/2026

I studied what the medieval world decided a woman’s body was. I taught it at the University of Glasgow. Medieval women and gender. Eve the temptress. Mary the mother.

But I did not only read it in the archives. I was raised inside it, in Sunday school and Girls Brigade.

I am the first-born daughter
of a first-born daughter
of a first-born daughter,
going back five generations.

We held the emotional space for everyone. That long training made me skilled at containing what others could not hold.

That is one inheritance.

The church handed it down. Carry it quietly. Hold everyone. Ask for nothing. And remember it was Eve who brought the fall.

But in the archives I found another inheritance, running under the first. In the same centuries that preached about the sins of women, women were still passing healing from hand to hand.

Marie de France wrote one of those moments down in the twelfth century, in a Breton tale called Eliduc.

A wife, Guildeluec, finds a young woman, Guilliadun, lying as if dead. As she watches, a weasel lies still beside its mate, as if dead too. The mate runs to the woods and comes back with a small red flower. It lays the flower in the other’s mouth, and the weasel wakes.

The woman picks the same flower and does the same for the girl.

Red flower to red flower. Woman to woman.

Every hand in that healing is a woman’s. The wife who works it, the maiden woken, the weasels, both female, that show her how. It is a small vignette of healing knowledge held by women, never written down, passed from one to the next. That thread was buried by christianity. It has never completely frayed.

I am building a home where women can lay down the inheritance that was laid on them, the shame passed mother to daughter, and find the older inheritance waiting in the body. The one that was always ours.

I am opening the doors to this online women’s membership in early October. If you’d like to join the first-to-know list, you can do so here: https://starshineroots.org/online-womens-circle

Ruth xx

This summer was my winter.I went inward. A long, quiet season of integration after a year that asked a great deal of me....
16/09/2026

This summer was my winter.

I went inward. A long, quiet season of integration after a year that asked a great deal of me.

Two weeks ago I completed my training as a Celtic shamanic practitioner.

Rhonda of Rhonda McCrimmon | Celtic Seer, Author, Teacher held a space I could take myself all the way into, and trusted me to find my own way back. That is a rare and generous thing, and it is how I believe this work is meant to be passed on. Thank you 🙏🏻

This past year, the container was potent enough to move what had not moved in me before, and it walked me, and held me, as I journeyed to the places I had not fully looked at.

It was not comfortable. Growth never is.

This discomfort was a threshold, and I chose to walk through it. I made big changes in my own life to be able to walk through that door.

I have carried what was never mine. So many of us do. Those of us who feel other people keenly carry more of it than most. I learned it young. Put everyone first. Take up what others let fall.

This path took me to those places and asked me to lay it down. And there were days when I felt things that had never belonged to me leave my body. Old weight I had carried so long I had mistaken it for my own. It was never mine. It lifted, and it left, and I am lighter than I have been in years.

There’s been so much more...and I will always be learning...spiralling...weaving...

But I can feel where this is leading. The women’s work I already hold is deepening, into something for women walking this path beside one another.

A place to lay down what was handed to us, and remember what was ours all along.

I am making a space for that.

When it is ready, I will open the door!

A practitioner handed me The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle when I was in agony.They told me my chronic pain was accumula...
02/09/2026

A practitioner handed me The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle when I was in agony.

They told me my chronic pain was accumulated emotional suffering I was keeping alive by identifying with it, and that if I was present enough, awake enough, healed enough, it would dissolve.

I couldn’t help but feel how sickly ironic that was. I know all about emotional pain manifesting in the body. It is my work.

Six years ago I could not wash or dress myself. I could not get my own boots on. I was 42 years old.

What got me out of it was going into it. Years of it.

The body, the unexpressed grief and rage, the ancestral work, the wee parts of me that hadn’t caught up with where I am now.

All that emotional pain from what happened after the traumas I experienced. I did that work and I am still doing it.

They knew this but they thought they knew better because they had read a book.

I did not transcend. I descended. And then I went down again, and again, a bit deeper each time. Healing is not a straight line and not a victory. It spirals.

I can put my own boots on because of that.

That book was written by a man who has never had his body, his pain or his emotions systematically used against him. Transcendence is an easier sell when presence has never been dangerous. When your body was not the thing you had to leave in order to survive.

And think about who was handed this book.

Women in their forties and fifties, whose oestrogen is dropping and whose rage has arrived all at once, and they are told it is their pain body. Their ego. Their shadow. Something to rise above.

Told to be a good girl. Again.

The problem with this is the direction of travel. That healing points up and out. Everything I know about healing points down and in. Into the body.

I have written about spiritual abuse in my latest blog.

Blog link in bio.

Our ancestors knew that words are spells. To speak is to cast.And many of us have been casting the same spells, every da...
25/08/2026

Our ancestors knew that words are spells. To speak is to cast.

And many of us have been casting the same spells, every day, often without noticing.

✨The shoulds ✨
I should be grateful.
I should be over this by now.
I should not need so much.
I should be further along.

✨The could-haves ✨
I could have been someone.
I could have done more.
I could have been a better daughter.

Those words are rarely ours alone. They come down the line, mother to daughter to daughter, long before they ever reached us. We inherit the spell.

These are incantations but because we cast them in our own voices, we believe we are the one who wrote them.

The shoulds were often handed down by a woman who was punished for wanting. The could-haves often came from women who never had a choice, so she made her longing your inheritance.

They casted these spells to survive a world that had no room for them, and the spells kept working long after the danger passed, passed down to us.

I’d like to share with you my 4 week Ancestral Joy Circle starting Thursday 10 September.

It is for you if you are ready to meet the women in your bloodline: to grieve the ones who carried survival, poverty, patriarchy and war, and then to reach further back, to the wild ancestors who knew joy long before shame ever touched a female body.

There is an application and a short call with me first, so we can feel together whether the timing is right for you.

One place left. If it is calling you, info is all here:https://starshineroots.org/events/womens-ancestral-healing-circle-bristol

There is a moment I witness in every drum circle.A woman arrives carrying her whole week in her shoulders. Braced. Holdi...
20/08/2026

There is a moment I witness in every drum circle.

A woman arrives carrying her whole week in her shoulders. Braced. Holding it all together the way we're taught to. Then her hand meets the skin of the drum, the rhythm rises up through the floor and into her bones, and I watch something in her let go.

Her breath drops. Her edges soften. The wild, knowing part of her that never actually left comes back to the surface.

This is the oldest medicine there is. Fire and rhythm and women gathered.

The next drum circle at Boiling Wells of St Werburghs City Farm is on Tuesday 1 September, Bristol 🔥

No experience of drumming needed and rattles and drums available to borrow.

More info: https://fb.me/e/6pxLNs7Xp

Address

Troopers Hill Road
Bristol
BS58BP

Opening Hours

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

Telephone

+441173364015

Website

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