I can't believe I did that - part 2, 1989 to 1994

Moving to Sheffield didn't really go too well for me - I found going back to what felt like the daily grind of being an employee difficult in that it put a real cap on my zest for life. I worked in rehabilitation and citizen advocacy with the most vulnerable of vulnerable people: those with serious mental health problems, abused women, ex-prisoners, people with learning disabilities, and felt my energy being drained by so much of the appallingness I saw in their day to day lives. Needing to find something to help me ground, replenish and to keep myself safe without closing down completely, I found myself drawn to the ceremonies and the teachings of the medicine wheel and the Native Americans.

1989-1991: the shamanic path

A summer camp run by the group Prana in west Wales found me participating in my first sweat lodges and other shamanic ceremonies, and connecting strongly with the earth and all the elements for the first time. I joined a local group of people following the Sweet Medicine Sundance Path, taking part in in ceremonies in the Peak District, and then joined 20 or so other women on a year's shamanic journey, meeting every 2 months in the south, west, east and north and centre of England as we journeyed around the medicine wheel, then spent 10 very wet summer days together in wild Wales, ending with each of us undertaking a vision quest. We lived most of that time together in a huge tipi around the fire, and I have an abiding memory of stopping in a motorway service station with a friend on the way home and noticing everyone looking at us in disgust; it was only later that I realised we smelled very strongly of woodsmoke and probably looked as though we'd been dropped in from a different planet! I went on working with different shamanic teachers, and taking part in several alternative camps where everyone lived in circles around a central fire.

Those years, and the shamanic path, were both highly challenging and incredibly rich for me - not only did I begin to come into my power as a woman, but I also began an enduring appreciation of the power of ceremony for change and healing, and of being alone in nature. To this day I can't bear to go walking in wild places with other people. 

1992: firewalk and community

At the end of a summer camp in Wales, I felt drawn to stay on and live with some of the people I'd spent time with over the last couple of years. And so I simply didn't go home! My job contract was coming to an end anyway, so with my partner T's blessing I stayed in west Wales, making a bit of money by making and selling cards and bead jewellery.

We collectively organised a week long workshop with an American facilitator KC which brought together many of the friends I'd made on this bit of the journey. It was such a powerful workshop, one that challenged us all in every way through a mixture of enlightenment awareness practices and encounter group work, and at the end of it KC offered us a firewalk, one of the things for which he was well known. A firewalk is a ceremony - used for thousands of years in cultures all over the world - in which as a group you prepare a fire (and yourselves) over several hours, and then when the flames have died down, you walk barefoot over the red hot coals. It symbolises courage, going beyond everyday limitations and often initiation of some kind - a symbolic rite of passage. (And no, I didn't get burned). My mother had passed on to me some of her fear of life and of taking risk, so dancing on glowing coals was for me one of the pivotal experiences of my life.

KC was inspired by a radical psychospiritual community based in Vancouver, and following the workshop many of us decided to come together as a community on the same lines. While there was a lot of good stuff in what we were doing, I began to see that the Canadian community was actually abusive, and our own community itself started to go the same way, especially after a visit from some of the Canadian members. I was the only person at that time calling out the abuse, and I was made to feel unworthy and inadequate, as if I wasn't up to this life. It was a very painful and lonely time. Eventually I knew I had to leave, though my leaving was barely acknowledged. Much later, though, others left too for the same reason and in time the community broke apart - as did the Vancouver community itself.

Winter 1992 to 1994 - community again

I moved to Dorset to live with some people I knew from the Scarborough years and from some of the alternative camps I'd been to who were involved in running events, camps and retreats. I started doing some more training in bodywork therapy, and somehow we persuaded the bank to give us a huge mortgage to buy a big and beautiful thatched farmhouse where we lived as an income-sharing community, ran events, workshops, retreats and trainings, and where some of us practiced as therapists. In the summer we went on the road to run a series of summer camps where we camped and cooked together in campfire circles and shared dance, music, ceremony, meditation and nights under the stars.

It was not a happy ending. The community broke up painfully - and expensively! - in 1994 and I returned, briefly, to Sheffield to reflect on everything that had happened. It's taken me many years to process everything and to come to terms with what felt at the time like a double trauma and betrayal, though I've become very much aware that of course I also played my own part in it all. I spent a summer doing ordinary things - travelling to Kerkennah with T, then to Zakopane in the Tatra mountains on my own, going to the theatre, going out for coffee or pizza ... and slowly I began to decompress.  Although it's taken me such a long time to deal with it all, I certainly don't regret the community years, which taught me so much about myself and other people.