The Red Tent Temple 

The Red Tent Temple Movement is more than a gathering; it is a remembering. What first arose as circles around menstruation has blossomed into a sanctuary that honors all aspects of the Divine Feminine—her blood and her breath, her fire and her silence, her grief and her joy, her fierce rage and her radiant love.
It is a movement rooted in the ancient ways women have always known—storytelling, ritual, communal care—and also a living, breathing response to the needs of women today. It is both a healing space and a quiet revolution. A reclamation of what patriarchal systems tried to erase: the sacredness of the feminine in all her forms, across all cycles of life.
In these tents, we honor the maiden and the crone, the mother and the mystic, the wild woman, the witch, the warrior, the healer. We honor women who bleed and women who do not. We honor survivors, seekers, elders, daughters, and dreamers. All women are welcome here—cis, trans, nonbinary siblings who walk with the feminine, and every woman who longs to sit in a circle where her whole self is seen, heard, and honored.
The Red Tent entered modern consciousness through Anita Diamant’s 1997 novel The Red Tent, which re-imagined the biblical Dinah’s story and gave voice to a crimson sanctuary of communion, power, and rest. Readers felt the ancestral ache: I want that tent. I need that tent. From that ache, women began weaving the tents back into existence.
In the early 2000s, ALisa Starkweather, feminist spiritual leader and founder of the Women in Power Initiation, formally birthed the Red Tent Temple Movement. Her vision was simple and radical: monthly gatherings of intergenerational women sharing story, healing trauma, and reconnecting with the wisdom encoded in their bones. “Women have always gathered,” she reminds us. “We just forgot how.”
The Red Tent is not bound by dogma. Each circle is its own medicine, draped in red cloth, lit with flame, alive with song, tears, laughter, silence, and prayer. It is a sanctuary for rest and renewal, for weaving grief into gold, for remembering that we are never alone.
We walk in the footsteps of our foremothers. Indigenous moon lodges and menstrual huts—among the Navajo, Ojibwe, and countless others—once recognized menstruation as powerful and holy. As Judy Grahn writes in Blood, Bread, and Roses, “The first rituals were menstrual. The first calendars were based on the moon and the bleed.” The Red Tent carries that lineage forward, but also expands it—honoring not only the blood mysteries, but also the mysteries of voice, body, soul, and spirit.
To enter a Red Tent is an act of resistance. Against capitalism’s speed and extraction. Against misogyny’s erasure of the body. Against silence in the face of pain. And yet it is also an act of fierce tenderness, rooted in our values of inclusivity, sovereignty, reciprocity, and belonging.
There is no central authority, no single gatekeeper. Anyone can raise a Red Tent. They appear in yoga studios and church basements, community halls and living rooms, forests and sanctuaries—wherever women dare to weave red cloth and say: here, we honor the sacred feminine.
The Red Tent Temple is not only about menstruation, though it began there. It is about the fullness of the feminine life cycle. It is about healing together what we cannot heal alone. It is about reclaiming the ancient power of women’s circles for this time of planetary and cultural change.
In a world that rewards speed and disconnection, the Red Tent Temple Movement offers slowness, softness, and sacred pause. It is a living vision aligned with our mission: to gather women in ways that are trauma-informed, inclusive, rooted in ancestral wisdom, and oriented toward collective healing and liberation.
As ALisa Starkweather has said, “If we want to change the world, we must start by changing the way we gather.”
And so, we gather.