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.

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.

This week, we gathered for the sixth and final time at our Bone Deep Brigid Circles.The table was laid. Bread baked. Tea...
06/03/2026

This week, we gathered for the sixth and final time at our Bone Deep Brigid Circles.

The table was laid. Bread baked. Tea made. And I served it in my Mum's china.

She was given those cups on her wedding day in 1976, along with what felt like an entire shop's worth of crockery to cook and serve food in. The message was clear enough.

She kept them in their boxes. Never opened them. That was its own kind of quiet defiance.

My Nana cooked every day of her life largely unseen, largely unacknowledged. My Mum received the cups and refused the story that came with them. And I asked for them because I wanted to use them for something different entirely.

Last night, women drank from those cups not because they were serving anyone, but because they were being held. Six weeks of going deep, of being witnessed, of learning what it feels like to stand in their own centre.

The teacups used not as instruments of obligation but as vessels of something freely given and freely received.

At the end of our final circle, we held a tea ceremony. Rosemary, thyme and fennel, cut fresh from my garden. We toasted each other, what we'd learned, what we were carrying forward.

I toasted the women in my line for the sacrifices they made so I can do this work today in England.

I don't have words for how much it meant to hold that space in this way.

The Women's Ancestral Healing Circle begins 18 March. One space left.

More info and tickets: https://fb.me/e/4ecjrmrEJ

We are so busy being strong.What if the most powerful thing we could do is rest?Over six weeks with Brigid, goddess and ...
03/03/2026

We are so busy being strong.

What if the most powerful thing we could do is rest?

Over six weeks with Brigid, goddess and saint of forge and healing, we tended our inner fire, visited our inner well, forged our creativity, learned to receive a wee bit more, and explored how sometimes that quiet strength can be the most powerful kind.

A rested woman is a rooted woman.
A rooted woman is a force.

This has been the work of the Bone Deep Brigid Circle.

“Ruth is a gifted healer. Her Bone Deep and other sister circles are literally life changing. I have gained more from working with Ruth over the past 6 months than I have in 30+ years of therapy. I cannot recommend Ruth’s work enough.” - Kate

Places are already going for the next Bone Deep series with Áine and two spots remain on the Ancestral Healing Circle starting 18 March.

Event Link in bio

Thank you to for the beautiful stained glass art of St Brigid. And to for the beautiful altar cloth. 🙏🏻☺️

02/03/2026

Many of you know I have fibromyalgia and I'm in perimenopause. The anxiety that comes with both together is immense!

There's no point talking ourselves out of it. Our bodies don't listen to words. We can scan, find nothing wrong, tell ourselves we're fine. But our bodies aren't convinced.

This morning on waking, my anxiety was making my stomach churn and my heart beat fast but that's all gone now after 15 minutes of drumming.

This drum has been with me since the start of my deep healing journey. My best friend. She has held me through seismic changes, through chronic pain, through so much.

I cannot imagine my life without her now. That's how powerful she has been and continues to be for my healing.

And I love bringing this medicine and creating space for other women to experience it.

It's our birthright.

Tomorrow evening we're gathering at Boiling Wells of St Werburghs City Farm for a women's drum circle around the hearth.

More info: https://fb.me/e/4anvSENLL

On the first Tuesday of each month, women come together in the Boiling Wells barn, log burner lit, drums in hand, to rem...
25/02/2026

On the first Tuesday of each month, women come together in the Boiling Wells barn, log burner lit, drums in hand, to remember something our bodies already know.

We open the circle and settle in. A somatic meditation roots us in the season. We set an intention. We drum. We chant. We break for tea and let it all move through us.

We pause to share and witness each other. Just a moment. Then we drum again.

We rest. We land. We close the circle.

No experience needed. Drums and rattles to borrow. Just bring yourself and an open heart.

🔥 Tuesday 3 March, 7 to 9pm
📍 Boiling Wells Barn, of St Werburghs City Farm Bristol
🥁 Tickets from £14

More info and tickets: https://fb.me/e/4anvSENLL

I can feel my Nana in me when I'm in the kitchen.The need to be in control, to do everything, to carry it all without co...
24/02/2026

I can feel my Nana in me when I'm in the kitchen.

The need to be in control, to do everything, to carry it all without complaint. Pure martyrdom. And for years I thought it was just... me. But it is common in many of us, and especially so in Irish women.

But it isn't mine.

I've spent years noticing when it arrives, learning to set it down with love rather than guilt. But last year something shifted. During a shamanic reiki session, I finally grieved my Nana.

Something lifted. She felt lighter. I felt a boundary I hadn't known was missing.

Ancestral healing keeps teaching me that we don't finish the grief and then get the joy. They live together. Grief opens something. In the space it makes, aliveness and joy can return.

This is the work I hold in circle for women who have done enough of their own healing to be ready to reach back through the recent lineage, and further, to ancestors who lived before these patterns took root.

The Ancestral Joy Women's Circle starts on 18 March for three Wednesdays.

Only 3 spots remain.

More info here: https://fb.me/e/4ecjrmrEJ

Any questions, please get in touch.

Yesterday the sun came out for us while we drummed.Gathering in the woods with women around fire is just the best thing....
23/02/2026

Yesterday the sun came out for us while we drummed.

Gathering in the woods with women around fire is just the best thing. The joy of it never gets old.

Women dancing round the fire. Some connecting with the trees, the sky, the earth. Some sitting. Some singing. Some with their eyes closed and their whole bodies moving. Everything welcome. Nobody performing.

So many new women walking over the threshold for the first time, working with the blackthorn as our keeper.

When women come together to drum, something happens that we don’t have to think about. It just moves through the body. We sync up, we support each other, we work together without even trying. It’s cohesive and powerful and so, so beautiful to be part of. 🌞🥁

Next drum circle is around the hearth at Boiling Wells of on Tuesday 3 March. Event link in Bio. 🙏🏻💚☺️

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

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+441173364015

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