About me

I’m a certified Red School Menstruality Mentor who is here to guide you through reclaiming your most authentic, wildest feminine power held in your menstrual cycle and conscious menopause.

I’m also a certified Ayurvedic Health Coach with the Kerala Ayurveda Academy and love to weave in life-giving Ayurvedic wisdom to help bring balance and meaning to our daily and seasonal routines.

I’m a professional writer and have worked creating content in the tech industry for 20 years.

I’m also a ritualist and sacred wisdom keeper. I love creating rituals for myself and others to help move through certain thresholds in life.

All my life I felt unrooted and like I didn’t belong anywhere. In my adult life, I desperately grasped at anything that I felt gave meaning and ritual, such as Judaism, new age spirituality, Ayurveda, and so on. I roamed all over the country and all over the world, so hungry for the stimulation and beauty that other cultures gave me. 

My life was moving along splendidly, and I eventually found myself living my European dream in Germany.

Then I turned the corner on my 40s. And everything changed. 

Suddenly it was as if the rug was pulled out from under my feet, and I couldn’t cope. My nervous system was shot. Intense anxiety I had never known flooded through me. I had been working enormously hard at a German company, then I just couldn’t cope anymore.

I experienced an epic burnout that led into a massive five-year period of an initiatory process that wiped out literally everything in my life and then beautifully rooted me into my own belonging and truth. 

But there was something about that liminal time that built my muscle for resilience and living with the unknown. I had no job, no home, no partner, no responsibilities, and it was frightening yet I was gloriously free and untethered. 

Without that open space, I probably wouldn’t have had the awakening I did, belonging to myself, to a spirituality that for the first time deeply fit me and felt right…a spirituality that is deeply rooted in the feminine, in the cycles of the seasons and the earth, in claiming my own ancestral lineage from England, Scotland, and Germanic Mennonites.

I awakened to my cyclical rhythms and cherished my cycle and moon blood.

But as I coasted past my mid-40s, there was still something that wasn’t quite right. I tried so many natural healing modalities. 

Then one day when I was 46, I watched a video with Lara Briden about perimenopause. I was stunned. That was the elephant in the room of my 40s life. Suddenly everything clicked into place.

I was frankly terrified about menopause looming ahead of me and kept my head in the sand. It took me months of grieving and coming to acceptance.

Once I learned the framework of what’s happening and what to expect, I came to actually very much love this rite of passage and claim it for my own.

So now I’m in my menopause sabbatical, living simply in a little cabin in the woods, resting as much as I can. I never knew this was something I could do, we’re not taught that. I didn’t think I could step off that trajectory of my life. But life unexpectedly made it happen for me, and here I am. 

I hope my story gives you inspiration for your own life, and welcome to the Red Earth Roundhouse.

Inspiration

I want my life to be an example of a vibrant menopause. It is possible.

About Red Earth Roundhouse

The vision for Red Earth Roundhouse has arisen out of deep ancestral healing and also claiming the land I live on as home. 

When I was feeling the sense that I was stepping into my menopause process for real, I felt the rumblings and took a journey to New Mexico.

I stayed in a little ochre red, round casita in the mountains of northern New Mexico that had beams circling around the ceiling skylight opening, where I could see the sun, stars, and moon. I realized it was like a modern-day Pueblo kiva, only as a guest house. 

Out the window, with an expansive view down the valley, there in the distance I was stunned to see the Pedernal, a flat-topped mountain that indigenous peoples consider to be sacred. The mythical Navajo Changing Woman was born on this mountain. Every spring she is reborn and emerges as a young woman. She becomes a mother in the summer. In the fall she becomes her menopausal aspect, and in the winter she turns into an old woman, only to be born again in the spring.

I immediately saw the connection. This little red round house with a hole to the sky and a direct view of the menopausal Changing Woman (to me) Pedernal became my menopause temple. I’ve come back various times throughout my own changing woman process.

The roundhouse inspired me to look at other examples, and I landed on the roundhouses of my own brythonic Britain ancestors, before the Romans invaded, bringing along their style of square-building architecture that we still have today. 

There is a primal feeling in my body when I’m in a circular structure. A circle symbolizes the interconnection of all living things. There are no sharp edges.

Intrigued by this concept, I want to create a sacred roundhouse gathering space for community and nourishing healing. 

And the red earth? The state I live in, Oklahoma, is renowned for its red dirt. Bright, iron red. To me, feminine red. Red of the Mother Earth.

I’ve always tried to run away from Oklahoma and Kansas, where I was partly raised (born in California), but somehow my life path keeps bringing me back. It’s grounding here.

When through ancestral research, I realized my main four lineages all converged in this region of Kansas and Oklahoma, I started to feel more at home. Though the decolonizing journey of the damage my more recent ancestors have actively created in this land is another story.

So, in a nod to my ancient ancestors and their feminine wisdom, the Red Earth Roundhouse was born. Welcome, the doors are open.

Questions? Let’s chat.

Have questions or just need support? Contact me here.

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