Women's Circles, a commissioned piece for Womancraft Publishing

Women’s Circles: the magic, the undertow, the tides

Women’s circles have long been spaces of profound growth, healing, and connection. I know this personally; I have had the joy of being in many. I have circled with women over and over in woodlands, roundhouses, moors, cottages, by open fires, rivers, and tucked up on a multitude of soft, welcoming sofas. They are places where we gather to share stories, honour our journeys, and witness one another in our fullest truth. In a world that often thrives on competition and isolation, these circles offer a powerful counterbalance—a model of community grounded in collaboration, empathy, and shared wisdom.

                                                   

Being with sisters can be the most incredibly moving and heart-expanding experience as we hear each other’s words, as we live through starbursts of joy, terrors that numb us, bone-deep grief, and all the days of life and love that are in between. We delight in talking sticks made of crystal, stone, carved wood, feathers, and other magical talismans. We drum, sing, swing our hips together, stamp our feet, howl at real or imagined moons, and even descend into wild and fabulous madness and uncontrolled laughter. These are our sisters; we are bonded by tears, woven together in solidarity and deep and authentic care.

Women’s circles matter, they always have. We conspire together, that is, we breathe with one another - conspirare - and midwife each other through the very many chapters we live through, as twisty and turny as they almost certainly will be. To be truly seen and understood kindly and in our full selves, is one of the most healing and beautiful gifts we women can receive from each other.

These circles are all the more important as women’s experience and the body politic are still substantially different from men, and a safe space is needed to navigate ways together through intersections of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. As women, we are brought up to expect predatory aggression, insults, and constant messaging that we’re not good enough. We are trained to be pitched against each other, to be small, and to fit in at any cost. So meeting with women in circles, we have a chance to reframe, unlearn all that we were told. We understand that there is a strong need to begin to shape new cultures, new narratives.

So far so good, but as well as this hallowed space we women create, what of the undertow, tides, and currents that we may have to swim against?

The experience for many women in women’s circles and groups is that after a sweet time of togetherness, cracks appear, difficult behaviours can start to arise, and often the circle implodes, breaks down, and replicates the very same oppressive structures that we’re culturally trying to escape from in the first place.

So how is it that things can go wrong, and how do we find a way through?

Why do some groups work beautifully well, and other groups flounder? How do ‘difficult’ people integrate in our circles?

Women’s circles can be romanticised ideals of what we’d love sisterhood to be, without the recognition that we are pre-formed and moulded in a trauma culture. Sometimes a binary narrative is wrapped around women being good, and men bad. We can hold the naive belief that either conflict won’t happen, or that if it does, we are all reasonable and nice enough to find a way through it. Women can be silenced with emotional bypassing, in a ‘we all need to love each other’ narration, a form of toxic peacekeeping that will quietly erode from the inside outwards. We appease too quickly, rather than speaking plainly about what we see happening. We swallow down our discomfort yet again, because this is what we’ve learnt to do, to be safe. Each time we do this, each time we don’t give voice to our worry and distress, everything that follows will be a little less honest. We begin to pull away. Or perhaps we do speak out and are met with dismay, judgement, and a shutting down of our voice. We are on our own and in a wilderness we do not understand, or know how to get out of.

What we can fail to recognise is that we are not all equal in terms of our capacity, needs, and privilege. We can lack an understanding of neurodivergence and trauma, and the tools to navigate gender questioning. We don’t have enough trauma-informed awareness to hold us safely in groups. We’re hungry to get together, but we don’t know how to do that well, and healthily.

At a time when we need our circles to be truly resourceful, we perhaps don’t recognise that we are operating within parameters of white feminism, which has traditionally copied patriarchal, top-down power structures. Many of us have experienced the woman who strongly needs her vision to be adhered to, at any cost. The woman who’s started the circle, or who owns the house or land where the women meet. This all feeds in to unequal power dynamics. When dysfunctional behaviours arise, to stand and call out women is to be exiled.

Finding a healthy way through conflict is not about persuading each other that we’re right but about embracing the idea that we hold different values, emotional language, and capacities. Can we compassionately seek to understand each woman present in the circle? When our nervous systems are on high alert, how do we stay safe?

One way would be to move towards a flat model, where each woman holds equal status, or sociocracy - where consent and safety are sought, or consensus circles where each voice is heard. All these are helpful, but not always possible. The alternative to unhealthy leadership can often result in groups having no structure, no leadership, which could free-fall in to chaos and dysregulation. The group can then lack clarity, and the woman who does perhaps have a vision and the organisational skills to implement it gets disempowered. Rejecting the old power paradigms will be a positive thing, but then what? We need to bring our full attention and robust skill of relating to the models of being in circle with each other.

Miki Kashtan, in her groundbreaking and visionary work in non-violent convergent facilitation, invites us to focus on willingness and stretching towards each other to find a place where we can meet comfortably and with open hearts. Rather than fleeing from what is contentious and troublesome, or shutting down, she invites dissent. She welcomes failures and sees the value in deeply listening to the outliers. Traditionally we have been discouraged from expressing anger or addressing conflict directly, but when women can take shared ownership of the conflict and potential wounding, we become stewards of the circle. Inviting dissent helps us let go of the pressure to agree to something that we feel inside doesn’t sit well with us. It makes it safe to speak what feels true to us then, even if we are the lone voice in the group. Suddenly we are not seen as the problem but as the gift bearer.

So perhaps if we unlearn all we think we know about women and conflict, all we’ve been trained to subjugate within ourselves and the wider group, we can begin the work of rebuilding healthier circles. We lead with bravery and resilience, but most of all with heart and kindness. We begin to expand our tolerance for sitting with what is deeply uncomfortable, without judgement. We hold outlier sisters in compassionate resonance, knowing that they hold treasure for the whole group. When we understand the landscape of what is most painful, we can move towards a willingness to find solutions that all the women in the circle can feel good about and give consent to.

We understand that within the sacred spaces of our beautiful women’s circles, the echoes of collective and individual wounds will arise. This is not the problem - how we journey through this pain though, is everything. We know that these dynamics can sometimes be fragile; we know we fall, but that we can pick ourselves up and try again. It can ultimately be healing, empowering, and an act of wild rebellion to find new, strong ways of being together. And that we can do this in a difficult, quickly changing world that seeks to destabilise women at every turn. We stand upright in our collective sovereignty, hands at each other’s backs. When we commit to this work, we not only strengthen our circles but also transform them into sanctuaries of authentic connection, power, and integrity — wonder filled and magical cauldrons where every voice is valued, and every wound has the potential to heal.