From Closing the Bones to Wrapped in Rhythm: Why I’m Changing How I Teach This Ritual

For over a decade, I’ve been teaching closing the bones, a traditional postpartum ritual involving rocking, massage, and wrapping with rebozos. I’ve worked with hundreds of women, trained over 1,000 students both in person and online across 30 countries, and continuously evolved my practice through experience, training, and intuition.

Now, I’m making a significant shift. I’m moving away from teaching the full traditional sequence and focusing on what I’ve discovered is most powerful: the wrapping combined with drumming. I’m calling this new approach Wrapped in Rhythm.

This isn’t abandoning the ritual, it’s distilling it down to its most accessible, intuitive, and transformative essence. Here’s how I got here.

The Evolution: From Complex to Simple

I started teaching closing the bones in 2014. Since I first started, the way I teach has evolved continuously, not only because I trained with a wide range of people, but because my own practice evolved over time, and is still evolving.

In the early days I taught a simple hip rocking, abdominal massage, and hip wrapping  process. Over time I learnt more massage techniques, and adapted some of them to make them more effective, and learnt to wrap the entire body rather than just the hips.

By practising this ritual with hundreds of women, teaching it to over 1000 students, and continuing to train with a wide range of teachers of this ritual and bodyworkers, I developed my own unique way of offering it.

Fairly early on I added drumming, because, even before I understood the way drumming slows the brain down and modifies our state of consciousness, it felt right.

There were several defining moments in my experience that changed the way I practiced. For example supporting new mothers post cesarean, and finding out that I could adapt the technique, and omit the lower abdominal massage and still provide deep healing. Another one was first during the 2020 lockdowns, when I supported new mothers in pain (read more about this here), I realised that just rocking and wrapping could still be immensely helpful (this led me to offer my closing the bones online course), and more recently when I trained with Mexican Midwife Naoli Vinaver, whilst going through a mental health crisis, I discovered how incredibly healing the wrapping alone could be. I started sharing the wrapping more widely with my local community, and this led to the ritual being done often on people’s birthdays.

I see a similarity between this evolution and how I originally practised when I first learnt Reiki in 2003: I thought it would only work if I had at least 30 min, had the person lying down on a couch and did all the hand positions in the right order. Then I read an article from a teacher who encouraged people to do just 5 min on someone sitting on a chair if that’s all that time allowed, and discovered that it could still be powerful.

Over the last 4 years, I have done a lot of impromptu closing the bones, sometimes having no rebozos with me, and borrowing people’s scarves, sometimes doing workshops, sometimes doing just a 10 min taster by wrapping the hips in women circles. Last year I attended a local retreat. I only had one rebozo, and I hadn’t planned to demonstrate anything but I ended up doing some impromptu wrapping because people asked me. I was amazed when a man had a very powerful emotional release when I wrapped his shoulders, and I think he was as amazed as I was. These experiences have taught me that 5 min of wrapping can be powerful in their own right.

The Drumming Deepens

I started adding drumming to the ritual in 2014, because I did a group ceremony during which a woman was drumming in the background, and it just felt right. Over the last 13 years my drumming practice has grown exponentially, from drumming during closing the bones, to training to become a Reiki drum practitioner then teacher, to drumming during births (read about that here), to publishing a article on the effect of drumming during birth in the international journal of birth and parenting education. All of this led to the writing and publishing of my second book, The beat of your own drum, the history, science and contemporary use of drumming as a path for women’s wisdom, health and transformation. As I write this I’m in the process of starting some research with Prof Joyce Harper, Professor of Reproductive Science at the Institute for Women’s Health, University College London, which we will publish.

The Power of Simplicity

In 2022, when I was in the middle of a mental health crisis, I attended a 3 day long rebozo training with Mexican midwife Naoli Vinaver. She showed us how to the closing the bones wrapping with 7 rebozos, something I was already doing. However, she showed a slightly different version of what I had been teaching. In particular she wrapped the head and eyes like a cocoon (I had been avoiding wrapping the eyes until then, believing that it might make people feel claustrophobic), and she also instructed us to tighten each rebozo until it was tight enough for the woman, then hold it until she said it was “done” for each wrap. The combination of the tight wrap around the head, helping me to go deeply inwards, and being wrapped and waiting until it was “done” felt incredibly powerful, and healing.

A couple of weeks after this training, I shared this experience with 30 of my friends in a local community retreat, and I could clearly see how powerful it was for everyone.

After this I shared it as widely as possible, and I changed the way I taught closing the bones workshops to reflect my new knowledge.

Towards the end of 2025, I got the sense that change was afoot again and that I was probably teaching the last of the current version of closing the bones in its current inception.

You see I’m someone who loves doing new things, and I like what I offer to reflect my evolution. I’ve modified my teachings to reflect my evolution countless times, forever creating new teaching plans and handouts as the practice evolves.

In November 2025, I led a large workshop at the convention of women drummer. Being aware that closing the bones can lead to big emotional releases, I has asked to limit my group to 30 women. However, due to venue constraints, I was asked to take half of the attendees (50 women), whilst the other half did a drumming workshop in the other hall. I asked my friend Malwina, who is also experienced in teaching closing the bones, to join me in holding the space for the workshop. It was no mean feat, and I had to bring my entire teaching stock of 47 rebozos, and ask Malwina to bring 10 extras. In the end we had 55 women attending the workshop. I shouldn’t have worried because it was utterly magical. I led women in groups of three, to wrap each other with 3 rebozos (shoulders, hips and lower legs), and then to drum over the wrapped woman. Was it because most women there were already drummers, and skilled at holding space? The energy in the room was so beautiful and healing as they worked. Thanks for over 15 years of facilitation experience, I was able to respond in real time and make changes according to what was happening in the room. I also drummed, played the flute, and sang whilst women were being wrapped. It went better than I could have imagined.  We even had time to show all the women how to wrap their own hips, and we finished singing and swaying in a big circle. Not only did it feel magical but I lost count of how many women came to see me after the workshop, and the following way to tell me it was life changing.

Why Wrapped in Rhythm Makes Sense

So I’ve decided to change the way I teach closing the bones, to make more room for the wrapping and the drumming. Instead of teaching a sequence of rocking, abdominal massage and wrapping, I’m going to teach the wrapping in more depth, with more options, and make more room for the drumming.

There are several reasons for this:

With my drumming work, I’m very keen to encourage women to drum intuitively rather than using set rhythms. This is because I use the drumming as a tool for self expression rather than a performance. When being asked about rhythms, I always answer that the best rhythm is an intuitive one that responds to the energy of the person drumming, or the person for whom you are drumming.

This is similar to what Naoli Vinaver said when people asked “How fast, how long, at what amplitude should you rock or wrap the rebozo” and she always replied (something I’ve always done too): you just ask the woman!

Everything in my work currently is leaning towards more simplicity and accessibility, towards the fact that we already know what to do, we have just forgotten how to do it. In my drum circle, during one of the rounds of drumming, I ask if anybody is particularly in need of healing, then I suggest there people lie down, and that the rest of us drum over them. I purposefully do not give any instructions and people (including people who have never drummed before) always know what to do, and report that they found it incredibly powerful to find out that they can do this.

With the wrapping is it the same: contrary to the abdominal massage, which requires skill and correction, and a lot of practice to become confident, everyone can immediately do the wrapping, after just a few minutes of demonstration.

Combined together the wrapping and drumming are powerful. The wrapping provides a deep sense of nervous system safety, brings you back into the present and into your body. The drumming adds to this by putting you into a deeply relaxed state of consciousness (like a deep meditative state), and from this place, the body and mind can reset into a place of calm and grounding. 

In the workshop I also want to cover both working on a mat on the floor and on massage tables so people can discover what works best for them.

With my desire to support more women  to go from a place of intuitive knowing rather than structured learning,this new modality, which I called Wrapped in Rhythm, makes a lot of sense.

Moving Forward

The essence of healing doesn’t require complexity. It requires presence, intention, and trust.

By focusing on wrapping and drumming, the two elements that are most accessible, most intuitive, and most transformative, I’m honouring what I’ve learned from over a decade of practice and countless moments of discovery.

I’m teaching the first taster workshop of Wrapped in Rhythm on Sunday afternoon, 1st February, and the full technique on Saturday 28th February and Sunday 1st March.

This feels like coming home to what the work has been trying to tell me all along: we already know how to heal each other. We just need to remember, to slow down, and to trust our hands and our rhythm.

The wrapping holds us. The drumming carries us. Together, they help us return to ourselves.