“And then there are the cravings...
A woman may crave to be near water, or be belly down, her face in the earth, smelling the wild smell. She might have to drive into the wind. She may have to plant something, pull things out of the ground or put them into the ground. She may have to knead and bake, rapt in dough up to her elbows.
She may have to trek into the hills, leaping from rock to rock trying out her voice against the mountain. She may need hours of starry nights where the stars are like face powder spilt on a black marble floor. She may feel she will die if she doesn’t dance naked in a thunderstorm, sit in perfect silence, return home ink-stained, paint-stained, tear-stained, moon-stained.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Once a month, on or near the night of the full moon, we gather in a circle of women, weaving our stories with music, breathwork & somatic movement, leaning into the wisdom of our feminine ancestors as we howl & shake, releasing what no longer serves, calling in what emboldens us to come fully alive & stepping forward to embody our cyclical nature in community, sisterhood & solidarity.
Somewhere in your cellular composition is the memory of a matrilineal moon circle.
The trance of the drum. The heat & smoke of the fire. The thrum of bare feet on earth. The sound of reclamation throughout the bodies in motion.
Women have gathered like this for millennia—under the ache of the full moon, just as the veil thins, when what’s been hidden begins to stir.
We gather to listen to what the body knows.
To shake off the dust of domesticity.
To meet the sacred feminine, not as an ideology but as a living presence in our marrow.
Howl & Shake is a remembering.
A full moon embodiment circle.
A reckoning.
A re-entry into the body as temple.
When women gather to translate the language of the body, something ancient stirs.
There is a hum that begins beneath the skin—an intelligence beyond the reach of the mind.
We begin with awareness, the first pillar of embodiment.
Awareness is coming home.
It is the slow, reverent noticing of sensation:
breath against ribs,
warmth of palms,
tremor in belly.
It’s the moment the mind stops narrating and the body begins speaking.
Awareness is the portal.
From there, we move into breath.
Not the perfected inhale/exhale of wellness culture,
but the wild, animating current that reminds us we are A L I V E.
Breath is the bridge between the seen and the unseen,
between the story we’ve lived and the one trying to write itself through us, as us, for us.
It unfreezes what the body has been protecting.
It is how our grief loosens
And our joy re-inhabits.
Then comes movement.
Not choreography. Not performance.
Movement as truth telling.
We let the body speak in gesticulations—impulse, instinct—
a hip that circles until anger releases,
a spine that arches in defiance,
a shoulder that drops when the need to hold it all finally softens.
Here, no movement is wrong.
Every twitch, every stomp, every sway is prayer.
Sound rises last—the fourth pillar.
Vibration echoing what words cannot.
Sometimes a sigh. Sometimes a sob.
Sometimes a guttural howl that splits the night wide open.
Sound is the unmasking,
dislodging feminine obedience from every single solitary silencing.
A women’s embodiment circle is not therapy, it’s not self help, and it is not spilling the tea—
This is sanctuary.
It’s where the sacred feminine is courted back into flesh.
She lives in our cells, our pulse, the rhythm we suppress, repress & depress to stay pleasing, tame, appropriate.
And when we circle, we make a covenant to reclaim Her—together.
There is holiness in the together:
Every time one woman shakes off shame, another feels permission.
Every time one woman breathes into her full belly without apology, another exhales completely.
This is co-llective regulation, ancestral repair.
Nervous system sovereignty. Braided with sisterhood.
The circle is the oldest architecture of belonging.
No one at the top. No one at the center.
Only a field of mirrors, each woman reflecting the Divine to the others.
We witness without fixing.
We listen without judging.
We hold without saving.
That’s what makes it sacred.
Howl & Shake isn’t about becoming wild;
it’s about remembering you already are.
It’s about the body’s native intelligence—
the one that knows exactly when to tremble, when to roar & when to rest.
It’s about shaking loose the patriarchal assimilation
that’s kept our hips tight and our throats closed.
It’s about rewriting the nervous system’s code of safety—
not as silence, but as truth in motion, with our full range of emotion.
When we stomp, growl, shake & howl under the moon,
we’re practicing sovereignty as a somatic art.
Letting the body animate what the mind cannot.
Metabolizing what history, family & culture have asked us to hold.
There is absolutely nothing tidy about it—
It’s sweat and tears and a cacophony of groans and growls.
It’s women remembering their animal body; la criatura.
It’s the maniacal laughter that companions letting go.
It’s the cathedral of quiet after—a peace that passes understanding.
This is why we gather:
to feel life moving through us instead of around us.
To remember we are whole and holy— not broken—only bodies in process.
To root the sacred in flesh,
to bring the Divine back down to earth where she belongs.
When we circle, we remember we are the medicine.
Our breath becomes invocation.
Our movement becomes devotion.
Our sound becomes liberation.
This is the sanctity of women’s circles:
pilgrimage sites where we return to the rhythm of our own becoming.
Evidence that embodiment isn’t indulgence—it’s our initiation into ourselves as miracles, as living altars.
So when the moon swells and the air thickens with everything still unsaid—come.
Come howl. Come shake.
Come find yourself in the sacred chamber of women who refuse to stay small.
Come remember that freedom isn’t a concept—it’s a felt sense.
It’s breath and bone and song and marrow.
And It’s your fucking birthright, Womban!
SHESkool
PO Box 304 Frankfort, MI 49635