One of the most beautiful and deeply connective circles I run, is centred around ‘The Stories of our Red Thread’— our maternal lineage, the women who came before us, and the threads of strength, and sorrow we carry within our bones.
If you’ve never woven this theme into a circle before, here’s a simple way you can do it:
🌹 Invite the Women to Bring a Piece of Their Red Thread in
Ask attendees to bring a photograph or small memento that represents their Red Thread — this could be of their daughters, mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers or other maternal figures.
🌹 Call in the Red Thread
Begin your circle by calling in these women with a simple but powerful introduction:
“My name is… I am the granddaughter of… I am the daughter of… I am the mother of… and I’m calling myself present to the circle today.”
Invite each woman to place their item or photograph on the altar as they speak.
Often, storytelling naturally unfolds here as women share memories about the photos or objects they’ve brought — a beautiful, organic way to deepen connection in the group.
🌹 Share This Quote From Layne Redmond
I read this aloud
“It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mothers heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mothers blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mothers ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four month old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmothers womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mothers blood before she herself is born. And this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.”
— Layne Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women
🌹 Open a Conversation on Ancestral Influence
Talk about the concept of the Red Thread — how the stories of our maternal line may influence us.
Introduce the idea of birth imprinting — the way our gestation, birth, and postpartum experiences (and those of our mothers and grandmothers) may shape our lives, our patterns, our memories, and our rites of passage.
🌹 Hold a Sharing Circle
Use this guiding question:
“What have you been told about your birth story — how YOU were born? How has this impacted you?”
Prepare for stories of pain, shame, joy, love, grief, and resilience.
Welcome all of it.
🌹 Facilitate a Guided Meditation or Drum Journey
Close your eyes together and guide the women into a meditation where they meet with their maternal line — their Red Thread — and see what unfolds.
🌹 Finish with a Song
Sing ‘Red Thread’ by Olivia Fern together.
You don’t need to be in tune. The act of singing with other women is medicine in itself.
✨ Ready to Learn the Art of Holding Deep, Transformational Women’s Circles?
If weaving meaningful rituals like this into your circles calls to you — this is what I teach inside my Together: Women’s Circle Facilitator Training.
Learn how to structure powerful gatherings, honour ancient wisdom, and build community in a way that works with your season of life.
