Samhain Gathering : Healing The Witch Wound

🖤✨ Samhain Women’s Retreat ✨🖤

Sunday 2nd November | 1–5pm | The Barn Temple, Doddleton | £55 | 12 spaces only

Samhain is the ancient Celtic festival of the final harvest, the great turning of the wheel, and the moment when the veil between worlds grows thin. This threshold is a time of deep remembrance - to honour our ancestors, to give thanks for what has sustained us, and to prepare for the dark season ahead.

For our ancestors, Samhain was not “Halloween.” It was a time of ceremony, feasting, and honouring the dead. Women, the keepers of earth medicine, once marked this threshold with reverence. But through centuries of persecution, the image of the witch was twisted - from healer, protector, and guide to something feared and ridiculed. This wound - the witch wound - still ripples through us today, shaping how we see ourselves, how we relate to one another, and how we carry our power.

The witch wound is the collective scar carried by women through generations - the pain of persecution, silencing, and fear that arose when wise women, healers, and truth-tellers were branded as dangerous. It is the grief of those who were burned, shamed, or erased, and it still echoes in how we doubt ourselves, compete with other women, or shrink our power. To tend the witch wound is to remember the truth: that we are keepers of earth’s wisdom, born to heal, to speak, to create, and to rise together in strength and love.

This retreat is a space to remember, to grieve, and to reclaim.

🌿 What We Will Share Together

✨Opening ancestor altar ceremony -  women are invited to bring photographs of loved ones who have passed and any written words they wish to honour. Together we will create a collective altar and leave food offerings so our ancestors may join us in spirit.

✨Journaling ceremony for the ancestors -  guided writing to bring forward memory, grief, gratitude, and connection.

✨Sharing circle -  to witness and speak of the witch wound and the sister wound: the grief carried by women across generations, the ways it shows up in our lives, and the ways we can begin to weave healing together.

✨ Crafting our own witches’ brooms - threshold-sized brooms made with dried heather, herbs, and crystals. Once a proud sign of the medicine woman hung above her doorway, the broom is reclaimed as a symbol of power, remembrance, and connection to the earth.

✨ Seasonal feasting - more than cake, a table of nourishing, hearty foods to ground and share in community, honouring the tradition of laying a place for the ancestors.

✨ Closing celebration - stepping into the dark season not in fear, but with reverence, strength, and the remembrance that we are the medicine.

✨ Details

📍 Location: The Barn Temple, Doddleton

📅 Date: Sunday 2nd November

⏰ Time: 1pm – 5pm (with time for breaks and shared food)

👭 Capacity: 12 women only (intimate circle)

💷 Exchange: £55 per person

This will be a four-hour retreat — a sacred space to honour the ancestors, reclaim the witch, and heal the wounds that still ripple through womanhood today. Together we rise, together we remember, together we reclaim what is ours by birthright.

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