Our May 2025 retreat is now full. A second retreat on Sat 30th August - Sat 6th September launches on Friday 21st February 2025. Click on the link below to sign up and I’ll share the webpage when the retreat launches as well as a Zoom gathering for a retreat overview.
“Gather the keeners, for we need new rituals. We need each other, we need the tears, laughter, and love. We need the magic and lamenting as the world unravels. ”
Gathering at the Well of the Holy Women in the village of Grulin - a traditional chant which was sung at the edge of the ocean, guiding the soul of the deceased homewards, out to the setting sun and the lands beyond. - Sung by Dana Murphy
This retreat was exactly what I needed as a caregiver and a mental health worker – a break from rushing around and a chance to connect more fully with myself, my surroundings, and the people in my life. There were many unexpected moments of laughter and playfulness – I I even had the chance to fly a tiny kite by the Loch of the Big Women. I arrived home with a full heart and a handful of tiny shells.
Rebekah P, USA.
There's something about crossing the sea and stepping on to an island that gives you perspective on your life. The retreat provided a perfect balance of reflective time and sharing, exploring and experiencing the land and creative time to process emotion. The time dedicated to grief rituals was invaluable. The carrying of the names from the cleared village to the church along the coffin road felt really important and sacred. The keening ritual was an opportunity for me to tend to my grief in multiple different ways leaving me with tools to use in future and to find what worked best for me. Each member of the group brought their unique perspective to the mix creating a rich and deep experience. Deeply nourishing with delicious food for the body, mind and soul. And our little rabbit friend who came to die outside was the greatest teacher of all.
Morag D, Northern Ireland
A wonderful retreat blending wild Scottish landscape, and a spiritual exploration. Powerful dreams and visions gained through this work and land enabled me to carry out a ritual which I feel in my bones healed a deep scarring in my female linage. I am still connected to the stone I planted in the islands soil and on challenging days I see through its eyes and am reminded of who I really am. Lengthy walks, delicious eating, and sincere mindful women made this a life-changing experience.
Gayle Mair, Asheville, NC, USA
Jude’s depth of understanding and passion of the ancestral mothers inspired me to want to know more and connect more deeply with them. As the retreat progressed, I felt myself connecting more and more with each passing day. I particularly enjoyed connecting with the Big Women through making my doll, feeling her come alive more and more to where I felt the spirit of the ancestral mothers both in her and myself. The retreat offered me a richer and deeper understanding of where I’ve been and new inspiration and vision for where I want to go
Katherine Daniels, Texas, USA
Jude is an excellent facilitator leading us on a journey to meet the ancestral mothers and to find their strength within ourselves. Through journeying, hill walking, storytelling and doll making her style is gentle and the schedule relaxed. The food was nutritious and fortifying to enable our exploration of the island. The women were each amazing and a delight to be with from the first moment to the last. I made connections to the land and nature on Eigg. I knew this retreat would be life changing but I didn’t know how. I find that I have much more confidence and determination with the ability to handle higher levels of stress in a clam way than I did before. This is a life changing adventure that you don’t want to miss.
Kat Toebes, USA
Jude is so much more than tour guide and retreat leader. Her connection to Eigg – the island and its residents – deepened and grounded my soul-expanding experience. All the while, Jude deftly handled the practical and complex tasks of leading a retreat, while providing a relaxed, trustworthy container throughout the week where personal transformation, and even magic, took place.
Our stay on Eigg was a satisfying balance of communal time and individual contemplative time. Through Jude’s weaving of academic and mythopoetic history – derived from years of study and her creative re-imagining of old stories and song into our contemporary world – the island becomes imbued with the feeling that the Ancestral Mothers on Eigg are alive and energetically powerful, and sometimes mischievous.
Caroline Mason, Asheville, NC, USA
Your Guide
Jude has been visiting the Isle of Eigg for over 20 years and has formed deep ties with the land and made friendships with the islanders. As an artist and writer with a background in Human Ecology her work explores connection to the land through art, story and ritual.
Her approach is in re-envisioning keening, being inspired by this age-old practice - taking the remaining threads and weaving them into new rituals while remaining rooted in an ancient spiritual bedrock. These new rituals can help us change our relationship with grief, to reclaim grief and find the words and expression of grief through art and ritual. This reclaiming is an act of resistance which can help us to heal and transform ourselves, work which can then become an effective tool within our communities.
Her focus centers on the liminal, the in-between and on the edge places which we experience in keening circles, art and in the land. These are the places the keening woman worked and it’s here we might find healing, or begin our journey towards healing.
She is a Radical Doll Maker viewing her art as part of a practice that stretches back to the first dolls fashioned from bones and stones – such as the Woman of Willendorf. She uses dolls as a way of connecting to ancestral figures, as well as dolls themselves as becoming part of our healing process and holding and speaking to our grief. As a painter she explores stories of the land, her images incorporating local soils.
She gained her MSc Masters Degree in Human Ecology at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow and lives on the West Coast of Scotland on the banks of the River Clyde, near Loch Lomond. She is currently writing her first book, Walking the Path of the Ancestral Mothers.