THE BRAIDED WOMEN GATHERING TRUST 2019
Events offered throughout the year of 2019

The Creation Group of the Braided Women Gathering Trust decided to offer six additional events over the year of 2019 involving the celebration of the change of seasons and the Sabbath rituals of the pagan calendar year. These were in addition to the main annual event in November!
These events were for the women of Christchurch and the wider Canterbury community as some travelled from further away to participate.
Each event was held on a Sunday evening at Avebury Community House in Christchurch and the attendance was between 20 and 25 women on average. Feedback received was highly appreciative of the events offered, the way the circles were held, the rituals facilitated and the warm atmosphereof Avebury House.

The dates and titles of these events were:
~17th of March 2019 Autumn Equinox
~5th of May 2019 Samhain…preparation for the darker month to come
~23rd of June 2019 Winter Equinox
~4th of August 2019 Candlemas or First Light of new beginnings
~23rd of June 2019 Winter Solstice
~22nd of September 2019 Spring Equinox

A Gold Coin donation was covering the costs of rent and materials.
The Braided Women Gathering event from Friday 15th to Sunday 17th of November 2019.
As every year this 3 days event was held at the Staveley Campsite in Canterbury with a picturesque view of the surrounding Mountains and nestled among NZ native bush.
The Creation Group had chosen the theme of Courage for our gathering and for the first time we decided to sent out an invite to the women who had attended our events in the past to come forward to be our guest speaker for 2019, exploring and presenting a talk around the topic of Courage Lou Warren stepped up to the challenge and delivered a wonderful talk which had a lot of space for audience participation and led into some deeper personal sharing of moments in women’s lives where there is a dance between fear and vulnerability and gathering up the courage to create changes to live more authentically. Lou’s sharing was greatly appreciated by the women who attended.
Throughout the Gathering we created space to sit in circles with all women present and continued our exploration of the theme of Courage.

Over the years we were able to observe how much trust and warm generous intimacy can be created when women sit in circles and take turns to share their stories, dreams, fears and respond to each other with such care and support. Truly amazing and very healing!
A big part of the event was our main ritual celebration in alignment with the theme of Courage where we all come together in our most beautiful outfits and ready to step into a special, sacred space. We sang and danced, took turns to step into the middle to be witnessed in our expression of heartfelt sharing and process of change that requires a lot of courage….at the end of the ritual we transitioned into wild and happy free style dancing and a sumptuous late night supper.
The last day invited women to share more stories of courage and ended with a beautiful closing ceremony and rounds of expressed appreciation and feedback forms collected.
A huge thank you was expressed to our two cooks and the entire kitchen/ camp helper crew which not only had provided us all with the most nourishing, fantastic meals and a tidy clean environment but without them we could not have created such a successful event at all!!!
They are already booked for the Braided Women Gathering 2020!
Mother nature had supported us with beautiful sunny weather and rainbows on our way home…a grand finale of a wonderful gathering.
The Creation Group felt that this event had been the most successful of the 4 gatherings we had in total.
Our feelings were reflected in the feedback of the 46 participating women who seemed to have found renewed Courage to to move forward on their path and hopefully we will see them again in
2020!
This has been our Story for the year of 2019
The Creation Group of the Braided Women Gathering Trust