Welcome
A warm welcome to this work of honouring our daughters as they grow up and deepening our journeys as women as we do. We celebrate and honour the potential that initiation into womanhood brings to find out more about our unique gifts. We seek to find ways that girls and mothers alike can find and bring our visions to the world. What we do makes a difference and finding ways to support this being life affirming really matters.
I feel passionate about the value of this work for our individual health and happiness and also for the regeneration of healthy culture. How we hold a young woman’s transition tells her so much about how she is valued and seen as a woman, offering her messages she will embody and live from. Supporting this to be life affirming feels very important. There is growing evidence that without rites of passage shared within community young people create extremes for themselves in an effort to self initiate. Many of us are concerned about high levels of self harm, drug, alcohol and sexual exploitation that raise important questions about how we can help our young people transition safely and with support into healthy adulthood.
There are four strands to the work.
- Regular gatherings for mothers and daughters together. Currently these groups are for 8-13 year olds and are stand alone days, so you don t have to commit to a full season. (Welcoming our daughters). A new program of these days will begin in 2025 when we have secured our new venue.
- An annual immersive camp for 8 -13 year olds and their mothers.
- Weekend workshops for women without their daughters present (Welcoming Ourselves), with Tatiana Shuttleworth.
Growing a healthy and diverse community that our girls can lean into if they choose is a big part of this initiative.
Welcoming our Daughters Lodge 8 - 13 year olds - Saturdays or Sundays throughout the year. 10am - 3.30pm.
Dates for 25 to be confirmed
£60 per mother daughter pair Concessions available on request
The regular gatherings support natural, whole and authentic self expression in our girls and ourselves. The gatherings are for mothers and guardians of 8 to 13 year old girls, and the girls themselves. We call them the lodges because in indigenous times the women gathered to share knowledge, wisdom, experience and support the community in the community space, often called a lodge.
We weave together circle, education, nature awareness, community and ceremony. We are a team of passionate and committed mothers and grandmothers. We have the greatest respect and acknowledgement for the wisdom and we all carry and welcome your experience into our space. The days are fun for the girls, holding a strong underlying intention of respect and celebration for the feminine.
Please see below for dates and booking. To read more about the vision that underlies the work, or for a welcome letter for your first gathering please follow the links below.
lodge dates
Welcoming our daughters summer camp for 8 - 13 year old girls.
WIth Samsara Tanner, Agnes Ashbell and Poppy Lewis Brown.
1pm 29th May - 4pm 1st June 2025. Sacred Earth Land. Horam. Sussex.
Camping, fully catered with wholesome food. £550 per mother daughter pair. Some concessions available
We warmly invite you to our camp for mothers and daughters to be on the land and connect deeply to ourselves, one another and the natural world. The intention is to offer our daughters a real sense of blessing for who they are, unique and separate to us. To support them to activate their unique gifts and relationships to Life. To impart to them some of the magic and magnificence of womanhood and how to work with their cycles in ways that help them tend their own lives and the lives that they will touch. We will hold ourselves as adults with the same love and regard, honoring our own journeys as women and tending life inside and outside of ourselves. We gather in community to explore how we can regenerate healthy cultural frameworks and address together how we can best serve the initiation of our daughters and ourselves.
A Taste of our fun, creative and informative program
We have many delights planned for our time together, weaving together time in circle, deep nature connection, arts and crafts, story telling, singing and drumming, ceremony and the gift of time with ourselves and one another. Our program is fun, creative, and informative and rooted in healthy community.
In gentle and age appropriate ways, we will explore the cycles of life and the wisdom of these phases using art and stories. We will honour the girls as they transition through middle childhood. They will have the opportunity to participate in circles and other activities that allow them to engage with the women's mysteries in the way that feels right for them. We will work with deep nature connection and practices that open up our senses.
There will be sessions with skilled and compassionate facilitation for mothers without our daughters present to explore our journeys as women.
Together we will remember and celebrate our wisdom, offer a taste of the healthy feminine to our daughters and nurture ourselves. We will hold our vision of creating a space where all of us is welcome and foster the opportunity for our girls to stay in touch with their own powerful inner knowing of what is right and feels authentic to them.
WHO RUNS IT?
The camp is facilitated by Jill Kettle, Samsara Tanner, Agnes Ashbell and Poppy Lewis Brown.
You can read about me elsewhere on this site, but the essence is I am a mother, acupuncturist, doula, Shadow Work coach and workshop leader with many years of experience working with women. I co founded the Brighton Red Tent, work as a Women in Power facilitator, and created and deliver the 'Welcoming our Daughters at the Threshold of Womanhood, Welcoming Ourselves' programs with amazing collaborators.
Samsara Tanner is an experienced Doula, childbirth educator and rites of passage facilitator for women and girls. She created and ran a program for many years in Australia called "personal Journeys" for primary year old girls, celebrating their passage from young girl to maiden. She is a Grandmother, an elder and wise woman of great love and experience. Find our more about her here
Agnes Ashbell has spent most of her working life immersed in nature (mostly on and but also in and under the water) imparting practical and emotional skills to young people, children and adults. As coach, guide and counsellor, she spent years with the Venture Trust in Scotland, running intensive, wilderness-based personal development courses for youngpeople referred through the criminal justice system and social services, leading expeditions in the mountains, on rivers and the sea. A skilled mentor, forest school leader and facilitator of deep nature connection experiences, she now works as a consultant with various organisations, both locally and nationally, to create and deliver alternative / holistic education and youth rites of passage programmes. She is particularlypassionate about women and girls’ work. She runs a monthly mentoringgroup, Girls Go Wild, a woodland based provision for girls from 11-15yrs, which includes residential camps, and she co-facilitates (with a large international team) a yearly initiation and empowerment programme for adult women. She also runs a woodland-based community mental health intervention that emphasises cultural repair and regeneration as the most direct means for fostering individual and collective health. Using a diverse range of techniques and trauma-informed practices including mindfulness, CBT, deep nature connection, facilitated listening circles, and practical care-taking tasks in the woodland, she co-creates an accessible, fun and deeply healing space in which chronically unhappy people learn to tend themselves and reconnect with life in healthier, happier ways. She is now embarking on a private psychodynamicpractice as a Shadow Work Coach, continuing this focus on creating supportive learning environments, where people feel safe enough to break from their familiar patterns, to open up, and allow something transformative to take place.
Poppy Lewis Brown Poppy is 20 years old and living in the South East of England tucked away in a secluded pocket of nature she calls home. Her main line of work and passion in life is nature connection. She facilitates and co-leads outdoor forest school groups for children and teens and support and teaches on adult courses too. Her goal is to connect people to nature and themselves in a way that provides nourishment and health and happiness for all involved. She enjoys teaching fire by friction, wild foraging, skinning, sensory awareness and other nature-based survival skills the most. She also supports and helps to hold various kinds of ceremonies, quests and camps as part of her work. Regaining knowledge and sovereignty in the context of nature connection and returning to the land and ourselves is something she hope to continue as those who came before have done. She also love to travel, grow food using sustainable farming practices and be with my animals.
I am so glad Poppy is joining us as she is a fantastic young mentor really grounded at a young age in a sense of the value of tending the feminine cycles and I believe she will be someone the girls can really relate to.
Daughters of the earth.
We belong to the land.
Come little sisters.
Take our hands.
Circling around you.
Circling with you.
We’re right beside you.
Being woman.
- Emma Vada
