Hagitude teachers
& workshop details
Please note that guest teachers are independent and not part of the Hagitude team, and their views are there own. You might not agree with all of their opinions, but we hope you’ll find their overall contributions enriching.
Mary Reynolds Thompson
Mary Reynolds Thompson is an award-winning author, internationally recognized speaker, and a facilitator of poetry therapy. A pioneer in the spiritual ecology movement, her focus is on the transformative power of landscape archetypes and nature metaphors to reveal our true purpose and right relationship with the planet.
Author of A Wild Soul Woman and Reclaiming the Wild Soul, a 2015 Nautilus Award-winner, Mary’s writings have also appeared in numerous other publications and anthologies. Through her books, courses, and talks, she reaches creatives, change-makers, and seekers who long to awaken to their most courageous and Earth-connected selves and have the impact they desire.
Christa Mackinnon
Christa is a psychologist, therapist, shamanic teacher, Earth activist and author of three acclaimed books about shamanism and therapeutic shamanism. After working for many years internationally as a complex trauma specialist and lecturer, and two transformational near-death experiences, she decided, approaching middle age, to follow her deeper calling by apprenticing to indigenous teachers in South and North America and learning from shamanic teachers around the world. She is the founder of ‘Bridging the Worlds’, which trains therapeutic professionals in shamanic approaches and co-founder of ‘Women Weaving Change’, a training school for modern Medicine Women which focuses on exploring, embodying and empowering the feminine, enabling women to bring their gifts to the fore and into the world. Three years ago she co-created ‘Sacred Earth Activism’, an organisation that brings together activists and earth wisdom teachers and integrates shamanic practices – such as ancestral work, dreaming, visioning and ceremony – into direct action on the ground.
Christa’s workshop will focus on the ‘Inner Medicine Woman’.
Manda Scott
Manda Scott has spent a lifetime combining spirituality, creativity and activism. From her earliest novels, through the Boudica series and beyond, her writing has always had a subtext, available to those who wanted to access it. Since the early years of the new millennium, she has taught shamanic dreaming, always with a focus of action out in the world: ‘What do you want of me?’ is the core question – and in her personal experience, has always led to deeper connection to the web of life combined with more concrete action in the world.
Manda’s workshop will run during our ‘Sacred activism’ module.
Carolyn Hillyer
Carolyn Hillyer is a renowned musician and artist who lives and works on a thousand-year-old farm in the ancient belly of Dartmoor, a mist-veiled landscape of wild hills, peat bogs and heather moors in the south-west of England. The inspiration for all her work is drawn from the raw beauty, untamed spirit and primordial memory of this ancestral land. Her creative output includes albums of powerful songs and chants, concerts, books and workshops, paintings and art installations, and traditional drum-making.
Carolyn will join us to talk about her Book of Hag, wrapped around travels into old age and towards ancientness, and the grandmothers from her Weaver’s Oracle, created from thirty years of paintings, mythic tales and work with women’s archetypal mysteries.
Anne Baring
It seems entirely fitting that Anne Baring, at the grand age of 91, should be the inaugural guest teacher for our Hagitude program. Anne is one of the great pioneers in the work of reclaiming the divine feminine.
Anne is a Jungian analyst based in England, and is the author and co-author of seven books, including her groundbreaking 1993 volume, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, with Jules Cashford. Her latest book is The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul. She is passionately interested in the fate of the Earth and the survival of our species in this critically important time of evolutionary change. Her work is devoted to the recognition that we live in an ensouled world, and to the restoration of the lost sense of communion between us and the invisible dimension of the universe that is the source or ground of all that we call ‘life’.
Mary McLaughlin
Mary McLaughlin is a singer / songwriter / teacher / academic who is steeped in the Ulster Gaelic song tradition of her native Ireland, where she was born and raised. For many years Mary performed on the English and American folk scene and founded a Gaelic choir in California in 2007. She has released four solo albums and two teaching books, sang the theme song for the PBS special about the Titanic, ‘Lost Liners’, and contributed to 13 compilation albums on major labels. Mary was the singer leading off the hugely popular Narada /EMI hit ‘Celtic Voices’ (1995), which included ‘Sealwoman’, her composition over a traditional Scottish chant. She also collaborated with William Coulter on ‘Celtic Requiem’ (Windham Hill / Sony – 1998) to international acclaim.
Today, Mary teaches classes in Gaelic song and its surrounding culture, mostly online. She specialises in The Keen (Irish Funeral Lament) and Fairy Song. She holds certificates in Vocal and General Education, Shamanic Studies and Sound Therapy. She also has an MA in Chant and Ritual Song and a PhD in Traditional Irish Song Studies, which she began at the age of 60. She is currently working on a book about the Irish Keen.
Mary will lead a class on the Ancient Irish Keen focusing on its history and context as well as sharing examples.
Heather Munro Pierce
Heather Munro Pierce is a dancer, mother, embodiment guide and consciousness teacher. She has been leading movement for more than 30 years and has held sacred space for over 1000 women’s circles. She is the founder and lead teacher of the Women’s BodyMystik Dance Tribe, offering in-person and online dance rituals and workshops. She has taught nationally and internationally, including at Esalen, Spirit Rock, the Omega Institute, Science and Non-duality Conference and her own women’s dance temple.
Her passion for teaching and leading springs from her own experience with dance and embodied awakening as a path to health and wholeness. As a young woman dance was crucial in her journey of surviving and integrating lessons from drug addiction, anxiety, depression and loss. As an elder she is committed to creating spaces where movement and music facilitate greater resilience, resource and vitality. She inducts a felt sense of permission and deep presence, inviting each woman to claim her unique engagement with the dance of life.
Heather will offer an experiential workshop on dance movement medicine for the embodied elder. All movement at your own pace and interpretation.
Moya McGinley
Moya McGinley is based at Cosán Ciúin, in Co. Leitrim, Ireland: a peaceful, natural haven – complete with triple-spiral labyrinth – which invites us to enter into a space of relationship with the earth and nature surrounding us.
Moya will offer us a workshop on working with the energy of Death. Moya has been apprenticed to Death for a lifetime, beginning with a brush with Death as a child in a near-drowning experience; subsequently, she worked as a nurse in Complementary Therapies with a Specialist Palliative Care Service. She now consciously walks with Death by her side – which, she considers, makes every step sacred. Moya considers Death to be her greatest teacher and friend, and her life is enriched by the presence of Death.
During this workshop, Moya will share her understanding of the energy of Death, and we will explore the ways in which we can welcome this energy into our lives so that we can live more fully.
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