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