WHO: "...We began balancing our efforts in recovery with plans for prevention."

While I was on Orcas Island sorting out my life I eagerly accepted an offer to contribute to a project that would force me to reflect and make sense of the career that I had loved and abruptly left.  The process was successful in ferrying me from who I was to where I've long dreamed of going - right here and now.  The book containing my contribution in its entirety is available on Amazon.  The excerpt below sums up "who" is behind this "Raising The Red Tent" project.  

"I was plagued by the feedback and questions from graduating clients about what happens when women leave treatment and re-enter the mainstream culture.  Fresh from the micro-culture of treatment, women often immediately felt the toxic common culture chipping away at them.  Many described the urge to lose weight, felt guilty enjoying food, or were enticed to join "calorie burning" yoga classes.
     Something became very clear: the sixth sheath, a female-only safe space, is not just important for a woman's recovery but can be essential for any female wanting to thrive amidst the current culture.
    Women have instinctually practiced self-care in community for millennia.  Historically, women came together in the red tent to attend the major transitions in their lives, birth, menarche, childbearing, menopause, and death, as well as tend to the monthly cycle of their fertility years.  In addition to preventative self-care, the red tent has long staked its ground in interdependence.  It has helped women find the power and reward of taking one's place in a greater community.
     Now more than ever women need such a counter-cultural safe house to heal their culturally inflicted traumas.  My work with women in recovery convinced me that it was time to resurrect the red tent for all girls and women.  I believed that by bringing the red tent back into the social fabric of daily life, not just for recovery but for continued well-being, girls and women would have an on-going opportunity to heal the toxic culture as well as themselves.
     Based on this belief I created The Red Tent in Venice, California in 2005.  It served in the ways that I had hoped, as a continued supportive space for women after eating disorder treatment as well as an entry point for women who were just beginning to identify their profound dis-ease within common culture.  It served in ways that surprised me as I saw women emerging from their own recovery to begin dreaming of a different future for the next generation of girls.  We began balancing our efforts in recovery with plans for prevention." 

Keating, Caroline.  "The Red Tent: Yoga Community in Treatment and Beyond."  Yoga and Eating Disorders Ancient Healing for Modern Illness.  Ed. Carolyn Costin.  Ed. Joe Kelly.  New York: Routledge, 2016. 195-200. Print.

Mother-Daughter Menarche Tea at The Red Tent,
Venice, California 2007

The Red Tent in Venice was an experience.  A phenomenon.  An unfurling of many women's authentic expressions into a communal creation.  We left off where I want to begin again today - with the plans we had for prevention.

"I'm so excited - I'm pitching a tent!"

Several years ago I rolled up The Red Tent in Venice to focus on sorting out my new life with children.  Once I took off the HEAVY mantle of "teacher" and its even more daunting badge of "healer" - I found that I had a much more to sort out than just how to handle my new role as a mother.  For years I had been on the front lines of a cultural war against women and in the midst of the carnage I hadn't noticed that I, myself, was bleeding out.  By the time I left our particular theatre - in-patient eating disorder and chemical dependency recovery for women - I was in need of my own rehabilitation.

 
My time off allowed me to figure out how to help my children stay whole while coming to my own senses about how I might be of service in the world with them under wing.  I am excited to say that I've got the beginning of a plan even though it's nothing new.  (It never has been. )  Yep, it looks like I'm raising a red tent again.

This time around I'm changing a few things.  I'm redirecting my energy from recovery to prevention.  I'm focusing on writing and I'm making this tent a traveling one.  Most importantly I'm not offering to teach or heal anyone.  I'm simply offering an opportunity.  I'm raising a red tent because I am raising a girl child and she needs one.  (As does the whole world if you ask me.)  I believe, that now more than ever before, we need girls who will be the living answer to Judith Duerk's long standing question, "How would your life have been different....".   I'm planning on staking the main pole and bringing the old fabrics but I need other women to pull (and reclaim!) the "guy lines" with me.

Which gets me to the subject line of this post; "I'm so excited - I'm pitching a tent!"  Yes, the pun is intended.  With me, the pun is ALWAYS intended.

What I am decidedly NOT changing this time around is what I've learned to be one of my most valuable strengths - I'm punny.   And, as it turns out, that is pretty important.  It might actually be the most important thing about my work. I'm punny, and occasionally funny, while trudging alongside other women through our common depths.  As any woman who has worked in recovery will tell you "our common depths" is a place often paved with tough crap.  The feedback I received most when I was acting as a sherpa through such shadowlands was that my candor, my willingness to "step in it" and not just admit it but laugh whole-heartedly about it was...refreshing and hopeful to other women.  There is a profound power to lightening up that I think we need to access NOW more than ever.  I believe it is a renewable energy source that will fuel us to rise and keep rising.

So, I am ready to strong arm the "locker room talk" into submission by not giving it (nor those who so casually use it) my power.
I'm reclaiming it all.
For all our daughters.