We have been taught that learning looks like a straight line.
Step one, step two, step three. Get it right before you move on. Follow the method. Master the technique.
But that is not how women have ever really learned, or shared, or passed wisdom to each other.
Our way is more like a spiral. More like a web. Like a circle. We learn through story and through body and through being in the room together. We teach each other without hierarchy. We remember things we were never formally taught.
The idea that there is a right order, a correct technique, a linear path to mastering the drum, that is an institutionalised belief. And like so many institutionalised beliefs, it was not designed with us in mind.
And the cost of that is real. When the system tells you there is one right way to learn and you are not following it, the conclusion you draw is not that the system is wrong, but that you are. Not ready yet. Not far enough along. Not enough. Women carry this quietly for years, doing more training, seeking more credentials, waiting for a feeling of readiness that the system is never going to give them, because the system was never built to tell women they are enough.
So if you have ever felt like you are doing it wrong, or not ready yet, or not far enough along, I want you to consider that you might just be learning in a way the system was never built to recognise. And that the problem was never you.
A word that changed everything
Last weekend I was teaching a Wrapped in Rhythm course, and afterwards my dear friend Claire Graziano told me that she loved how deinstitutionalised my training was.
I was extremely grateful for this word, because it describes exactly what I have been trying to do. When I look back, it was always how I wanted to teach.
Eleven years ago I was teaching Closing the Bones alongside someone more experienced than me, and I was taken aback when my mentor told me she much preferred my style. When I asked why, she said: your colleague’s teaching style is “this is my box.” Yours is “this is my box, take what you need from it.”
That has stayed with me ever since. And I have been trying to move further and further from institutionalised ways of learning ever since.
Simplifying Closing the Bones
I have been teaching Closing the Bones and rebozo techniques in various forms since 2014. I have trained over 1500 professionals in person and over 700 online.
The question people keep asking is: how do I do this? They want a precise, metric-measured answer. When teaching rebozo rocking, for example, they ask: how fast, and for how long? And they expect me to give them a number.
Except that is not how it works. Every woman is unique. The speed, the amplitude, the length of time all depend on what she needs and what she wants.
I was delighted when I attended a rebozo training with Mexican midwife Naoli Vinaver and she was asked exactly the same question. Her answer was: you just ask the woman.
How empowering is that? Instead of worrying about the right way to do this, which I know from experience is an incredibly common fear (and one I used to have myself), you realise you can never get it wrong. Because all you need to do is ask, and do what the woman wants.
And this points to something I have come to believe more and more the longer I have taught.
There is no single perfect way of learning. I have met people who had never massaged anyone in their lives and were clearly, immediately gifted. I have trained experienced therapists who struggled. And the opposite of both. What determines whether someone can offer this work well is not how many courses they have done or how precisely they follow a technique. It is something harder to measure and impossible to teach through prescription. A quality of presence. A willingness to listen to the person in front of them. An ability to trust what they already know.
That is what I am trying to make room for.
And there is something else I have noticed over years of teaching, and it took me a while to find the words for it.
Most of the women who come to learn with me already know how to hold space. They have been doing it their whole lives, in their homes, in their friendships, in their work with their clients, and in the ways they support the people around them. They just do not see it in themselves. They have been so taught to look for the credential, the technique, the external validation of their readiness, that they walk past their own gifts without recognising them.
What my way of teaching tries to do is not give them something they do not have. It is to get out of the way long enough for them to notice what was already there.
When I hand someone a drum with no instructions and they find themselves instinctively knowing how to move it over someone’s body, adjusting without being told, that is not beginner’s luck. That is a woman finally being given permission to trust herself.
That is what I am really teaching. Not a technique. A coming home to yourself.
Finding my own way with the drum
My journey with drumming followed a similar path.
I practised and learned almost entirely by myself for the first three years, and I am so glad I did. It meant I found my own way of doing it, rather than absorbing someone else’s idea of the only right way.
And after three years, I decided to take formal drum healing training by attending a Reiki Drum course. I gained some useful things from it, including a particular way of holding the drum to send vibrations through the body. But I found a lot of what was taught far too prescriptive.
And something else started to bother me. Before you can learn Reiki Drum, you have to first complete two levels of Reiki. The more I sat with this, the more it bothered me. Not because Reiki isn’t valuable, but because it felt like such a linear and patriarchal way of gatekeeping knowledge. You must do this before that. You must earn the right to the next level. You are not ready yet.
And then a few years later, when I started running a drum circle in Cambridge. I began suggesting that people drum for each other for healing, with no instructions at all. And I discovered something: they all knew what to do.
I had already been demoing drumming during my Closing the Bones training for years, and this often led students to want to learn drumming themselves. So I started handing students a drum with no instructions other than: just drum for the person you have just wrapped.
And again, they all knew what to do.
This is women’s wisdom in action. Not a linear staircase with prerequisites and gatekeepers, but an immediate, embodied knowing that was already there.
The birth of Wrapped in Rhythm
At the end of 2025 I facilitated a Closing the Bones wrapping and drumming workshop for 55 women at a drum convention. I lost count of how many approached me afterwards to say: this is life changing.
A couple of weeks later, as I taught a Closing the Bones workshop, I realised it was the last time I would teach it in its current form. I felt a deep need to simplify, and to make more room for the drum, and for women’s innate wisdom.
There are two reasons for this.
When I teach the hands-on massage techniques, they are quite technical. I spend a lot of time correcting people, and they spend a lot of time worrying they are doing it wrong. Very few women walk away immediately feeling confident. The wrapping and the rocking, on the other hand, everyone can do immediately without difficulty.
And the second reason is this: when I am correcting technique, I stay in my head. But when I facilitated the Drum Con workshop, I was able to drop into an altered state of consciousness, feel what was happening in the room, and respond from that place. That is the quality of presence I want to teach from, and the quality of presence I want to help others find.
As I write this, I have taught one taster workshop and two full Wrapped in Rhythm weekend workshops. The energy in the room has been extraordinary. Women who have never touched a drum feel they can. Women who have never touched a rebozo feel they can. Women feel safe enough to add their own unique gifts to the ritual. By the end, everyone feels ready to take this back to their communities and make their own magic with it.
That is what deinstitutionalised learning looks like. Not a staircase. Not a prerequisite. Not a moment when you are finally ready enough.
A spiral. A web. A group of women who already know, and simply needed someone to help them remember.
If this speaks to you, my next Wrapped in Rhythm workshop is on the 27th and 28th of June in Abington, near Cambridge. You can find out more here.