The Red Tent

I’ve been reflecting on the red tent and on the growing call for the red tent to be returned.

I've been thinking about these two incredible expressions of Shakti

Marilyn Monroe and Jackie O

Marilyn Monroe:

sensual, seductive, glamorous, artistic and incredibly intelligent.

Jackie Onassis:

beautiful, elegant, composed and possibly more intelligent.

like so many women I see both of them as hurting.

Both, carrying that same deep, guttural ache of rejection.

What is grace?

I keep wondering: is “grace” something we’ve inherited from a masculine dictionary?

Grace, as it’s often defined, can look like composure.

Poise. Control. Softness that never spills over.

A kind of palatable femininity that doesn’t inconvenience anyone.

But what about the grace in tears?

What about the grace in rage, rejection, grief

in the raw truth of what it means to be alive in a female body?

If we bypass those feelings and cling to “grace,” does it become a disguise?

A performance? Emotion repressed and renamed as virtue?

Because if we are energy — and if energy healing is real — then suppression is not the recipe.

It doesn’t disappear. It stores. It hardens.

It leaks out sideways later as anxiety, depression, numbness, burnout, illness, addiction.

We need space for the dark feminine

I believe that in this era, there must be space — in education, relationships, culture, and reform — for the dark feminine to be felt.

And it requires time.

Shakti, especially in her darker aspect, needs rhythm and flow.

She needs patience. She needs cycles to be honoured, not managed like inconveniences.

Time to sink deep. Time to cry. Time to rage. Time to bleed. Time to grieve the loss and yes, to grieve the blood.

For women these cycles are never-ending, woven through daily life. Trying to live them inside a relentlessly masculine structure — productivity, performance, “push through,” “be professional,” “don’t make it messy” — is exhausting.

It strips joy.

It strips embodiment.

It strips the very essence of

Shakti: feeling, expression, creativity, movement.

How, honestly, now, is she supposed to put on a suit and walk into an office as if nothing is happening?

We’re not just ignoring something.

We’re suffocating the essence of movement itself.

Women were never meant to do this alone

Women work in community: in circles, in groups, in shared tending.

So when one — or ten — of us go off into isolated structures, what happens to the two left at home? Who protects them? Who witnesses them?

Who values what they’re carrying?

The old systems taught women to disappear with their pain.

To be quiet. To be “good.” To hold it together. But the red tent was never about disappearance. It was about visibility. It was about being held. It was about a culture that understood the cyclical nature of a woman’s life and made space for it — without shame.

And I do ponder. I think that, in the beginning, men did have our backs

they did offer direction, guidance, faith.

I think eventually it was a misunderstanding on both parts of the very depth of shakti

. It felt like we were made “less than.” But maybe it was never “less.” in the beginning

Maybe it was simply what Shakti desires — what the feminine requires — and somewhere along the way it became misunderstood, controlled, or dismissed.

I also suspect men often know us better than we know ourselves — not because they are superior but because they have the most beautiful ability to sit back and observe. They watch the currents. They feel the waves and the force and, often, they don’t know what to do with it.

Bless them — many of them are helpless in the face of something they were never taught to honour.

Lets's Wake up. Remember. Return to the tent.

Rise and be part of the movement — not as a trend, but as a RECLAMATION