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.

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.

🔥 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! 🤪😅

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. 🔥

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. 🥁

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

There is something that happens in the body when someone just ‘gets it’.No explanation needed. No context. Just that gro...
25/03/2026

There is something that happens in the body when someone just ‘gets it’.

No explanation needed. No context. Just that grounding sensation when another nervous system recognises yours.

It happened to me twice recently, in the most ordinary places.

In an osteopath’s waiting room, an older woman started talking. She was born at the start of the Second World War, in London, sirens and shelters and her mother scooping her up mid-play to take her underground. She told me that to this day, a siren will still make her feel deep fear in her body.

She looked at me and said: “I imagine, listening to your accent, you understand something of this.”

I did. I told her about what fireworks can do to my body. About the doorbell, and how for most of my life it meant danger, high alert, before my mind had a chance to catch up. How slowly, slowly, that has shifted after four decades.

We sat together for just a few minutes. Two women. Different wars, different generations. A similar body memory.

The week before, an older man in a charity shop. Late seventies. Irish regiment in the army. He spoke about Northern Ireland before everything fractured, about how it simply wasn’t the way people imagine it was. I didn’t have to explain a thing. The nuance was just there, held between us, in a way I rarely get to experience.

And I’ve been thinking about that. How in both these meetings, we witnessed each other. And how in that witnessing, in that simple exchange, was where the healing lived.

Grateful for these life-affirming encounters.

Yesterday afternoon I was in the woods, clearing a new grove, building a fire, and I loved every minute of it.The other ...
23/03/2026

Yesterday afternoon I was in the woods, clearing a new grove, building a fire, and I loved every minute of it.

The other groves were taken so I found one the trees were already holding and made it ready. By the time the women arrived something was already alive in that circle of trees. The elders.

We grounded into our bodies and into the season. We honoured the equinox and the women who have felt this turning on this land for thousands of years.

We drummed. We sang. We moved.

We let something ancient and joyful move through us.

Look at these faces! This is what happens when women gather in nature around fire with drums.

My heart is so full today!

Something is happening to us right now. A tightening. A narrowing. The sense that complexity is no longer welcome.My bod...
18/03/2026

Something is happening to us right now. A tightening. A narrowing. The sense that complexity is no longer welcome.

My body knows this feeling. It learned it as a youngster.

Othering, the tendency to see those who differ from us as less than, as threat, as other, does something specific to the nervous system.

It puts you on alert. It narrows perception. It makes nuance feel dangerous and certainty feel safe.

It's what happens when belonging feels conditional and difference feels like threat.

I work with women who carry this in their bodies without knowing where it came from. The tightness. The hypervigilance. The exhaustion of constantly assessing which version of themselves is safe to show.

Some of it is personal history. Some of it is ancestral. And some of it, right now, is the world we're living in.

We cannot heal in isolation what is being generated collectively. But we can learn to recognise it. To name what our bodies are responding to. To not mistake the bristling for who we are.

I know this particular pattern well. I grew up in Northern Ireland during the conflict, in a society so organised around division that threat assessment became a childhood skill. My nervous system learned othering before I had words for it.

I thought I'd left it behind. I haven't. None of us have.

The way through is not louder. It is deeper. Back into the body. Back into what is actually true for you beneath the noise.

Circle is where that becomes possible. When women gather without agenda, without sides, without the pressure to perform a position, the nervous system begins to remember something older than the division.

That we are more alike than the noise wants us to believe.

If this resonates and you feel called to circle, details of all upcoming women's circles in Bristol here: https://starshineroots.org/events

“You’re too sensitive.” “Your ego needs to dissolve.” “Your boundaries are just your trauma speaking.” “You’re too much....
12/03/2026

“You’re too sensitive.” “Your ego needs to dissolve.” “Your boundaries are just your trauma speaking.” “You’re too much.”

If you’ve spent time in spiritual spaces, healing spaces, in a relationship with someone who called themselves a healer, there’s a good chance some version of these words has been said to you.

They take the most alive, most honest, most embodied part of you and reframe it as the problem. Your feelings become obstacles rather than the path itself.

I have fibromyalgia. I was already doing deep somatic work. Already learning to come home to my body after years of chronic pain.

Someone I was close to handed me a book and told me to rise above it. To transcend. That if I was awake enough, I could dissolve my chronic pain.

Dissociation dressed up as enlightenment. My pain got worse.

Because the emotional suffering I was carrying from this relationship was feeding it.

This is spiritual bypassing. And it is patriarchy in a different costume. The language changes, ego, pain body, transcendence, presence, but the instruction stays the same. Feel less. Be less. Make yourself easier to be around. Directed at women in pain, women with depression. It is harmful.

I think about why Celtic folklore matters so much to me and to the women I work with. The goddesses hold the full spectrum. Sovereignty, rage, grief, sensuality, destruction, wildness. Not split into good and bad, pure and fallen.

The qualities we are told to transcend, the intensity, the feeling, the embodied messy aliveness, those are divine qualities.

Our healing is not above the mess. It is in the mess. In the anger that knows something is wrong. In the grief that loved something real. In the body that has been telling the truth all along.

Your feelings are not the obstacle.

They are the way in.

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

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