Deep Rest, Willow And Water: Five Days At Medicine Festival
Medicine Festival has a dear place in my heart.
Two years ago it was a place of huge transition for me. And this year, again, something shifted.
I arrived knowing more about myself than I did last time. More about cycles. More about my connection to the land. And it deepened all of that, and helped me remember what’s important to me and how to share it with the women I work with.
There were so many themes that kept coming up.
My body knew before I did
As soon as I got onto the land, I needed to lie down.
There were points across the weekend where me and Lucy were lying down while everyone around us was dancing. Horizontal dancing. Still slightly moving to the music, just from the floor.
Then Uma Dinsmore-Tuli, talking to a group of us, told us all to lie down. To rest. So that we could really connect to our cycles and to our own deeper knowing. And so that this rest could help us through each initiation in life.
That word stayed with me. Initiation.
Because I’m moving towards perimenopause now, what Red School call The Quickening, and the symptoms we see all around us in the world are strong. They are really happening. And so much of it comes back to the same thing. We are all underslept and overworked.
Deep rest. That’s what came up for me over and over while I was there.
The land is on fire
We keep being asked to reconnect to the land. Not just that land, at that festival, but our land in general. To sit with it. To be with it.
And the land is on fire. We’ve seen it. We are experiencing it.
It’s telling us something. Like our cycles when they’re screaming at us.
The land is asking us to slow down. To listen. To care for it, to tend to it, and to trust that in turn it will care for us. We have been too brutal with it.
It’s cyclical, and we’ve been treating it like it can produce all year round with no season of rest.
Which is exactly what we do to ourselves.
Nobody is listening. Well, not nobody. But very few of us.
So get outside. Every single day.
This is the practical bit, and it’s the one I’d love you to take away even if you take nothing else.
Get outside daily.
Remember who you are out there. Get some fresh air into your lungs. Let the daylight tell your body what time of day it is, because that’s how your body knows when to wind down later.
If we can live cyclically, if we can get out onto the land and see real daylight, our sleep gets better. And when we sleep better, everything else becomes possible.
We are allowed to be playful
I danced a lot. I moved my body with other people.
FaceSoul, one of my favourite artists, had us all shaking a tail feather. If you don’t know him, go and listen to Grateful. You’ll thank me.
And then there was Carmen and her daughter Luna, who taught us egg egg sperm. Like duck duck goose, but not. A whole group of grown adults running around playing egg egg sperm, and it was such a beautiful moment of play to be given.
It reminded me how much we need this. Play. Creativity. Dancing. Moving our bodies because it feels good and not because it’s on a list.
That’s a reconnection too.
Trees, and the breath we share with them
As a breathing coach, I know this connection deeply. The symbiosis of it. Trees give us oxygen, and we reciprocate with carbon dioxide.
I spent time learning about druid lore around trees, and time with the Barefoot Forager learning what trees can offer us. What they can do for our breathing. What we can forage from them. How much is available if you know how to look.
I also learned willow weaving, which is far harder than it looks. Asking willow to bend and shape for you is a tough thing. It’s a focused thing. And it’s a beautiful thing. I want to keep doing it.
And then we celebrated the water
Medicine Festival usually celebrates fire. But we’re in a drought, so no ceremonial fires were allowed this year.
So instead we celebrated the water. We asked it to come back.
There is something about a whole festival changing its shape because the land said no. Not pushing through with the plan. Not doing it anyway.
Just listening, and responding, and giving the attention to what was actually needed instead.
I swam. I got in a lake and put my whole self underwater and it was so deeply needed.
Somewhere in all of that I came back to my own roots. To the practice that started everything for me. Yoga, asana, breath, pranayama, mantra. It all came back to me, along with just how much I love it.
Weaving it all together
Willow taught me the most about this, actually. You can’t force willow. You have to work with what it wants to do, slowly, paying attention the whole time, and then it gives you something beautiful.
That was the whole weekend really.
Lying on the floor with Lucy while everyone danced around us. Uma asking a whole group of us to rest. A festival built on fire not lighting one, because the land said no. Grown adults running about playing egg egg sperm. Trees breathing me in while I breathed them out. My whole self under the water of a lake.
Rest, land, play, breath, water. Every one of them was saying the same thing to me. Slow down enough to notice what’s actually being asked of you.
And underneath all of it, my own practice came back. Yoga, asana, pranayama, mantra. The things I already knew and had quietly let slip down the list.
Thank you
To the land first. For holding all of us for five days, in a drought, while it’s burning, and still giving us what we needed.
To Medicine Festival, for changing shape rather than pushing on with the plan.
To Uma, to FaceSoul, to Carmen and Luna, to the Barefoot Forager. And to many more amazing artists, wisdom keepers, healers and space holders.
I came home remembering what’s important to me, and how I want to share it with the women like you.
If this is stirring something in you
Because everything I’ve written about the land is true about us too.
For the land, it’s the fires and the drought and the seasons behaving strangely.
For you, it might be the week you feel like a completely different person. The days when you’re raging and everyone is annoying. The moment you burst into tears and can’t say why. The mornings where you have a sudden burst of energy which is as overwhelming as it is exciting.
Your cycle is offering you the wisdom it’s been holding for you for years, and you know it deeply, you just need to be ready to listen.
Breathe With Your Cycle is eight weeks of exactly this. Learning your own cycle and it’s inner seasons, using your breath as the way in, and finally understanding why you feel the way you feel each week instead of fighting it.
This is the last round of 2026. We start on 24 September, and it’s the final time it runs at £333 before the price goes up next year.
If any part of this made you go “oh, that’s me”, come and join us.