EMPOWERpause
A 6 week online ritual circle for women.
EMPOWERpause
A 6 week online ritual circle circle exploring the three phases of women’s power: menarche; menstruation; menopause.
A sacred circle for women to explore the blood mysteries, cycles of power, and the transitions that shape our lives.
6 Online Sessions
Monday 7 - 9PM
April 13 - May 18, 2026
$199 / $275 after April 6
YOU ARE INVITED TO JOIN A CIRCLE OF BELONGING
RITUAL
DISCUSSION
SHARING CIRCLE
LIGHT MOVEMENT
GUIDED FULL-BODY MEDITATION
Women’s lives are defined by the moon cycles of blood; the onset of fertility, fertile years, and those that come after. Each stage is an empowerment and an opportunity for transformation. Yet these distinct phases of women’s lives are often opaque, even to us.
Each phase is a threshold space replete with opportunity for investigation, integration and expansion. The liminality extends to the blurred transitions between phases.
3 PIVOTS OF POWER IN WOMEN’S LIVES
ONSET OF FERTILITY ~ menses approaching
FERTILE YEARS ~ menstruation
BEYOND FERTILITY ~ perimenopause & menopause
The last stage, absorption of the blood, has often been associated with diminishment of potentiality. We are here to reclaim, to imbue the absorption with meaning and empowerment, to expand the mystery.
RITUAL
Ritual transforms the space of encounter from the mundane to the sacred. It generates presence and creates a space apart, a container of depth and soulfulness to venture deeper into the secrets of your soma and the cave of your heart.
Bring candles, flowers, precious objects, incense, pomegranates.
DISCUSSION
Each session Dearbhla will share mythological teachings to explicate and unpack the 3 phases of the blood. She will draw from her own experience of each phase as marked by anticipation, loss and disappointment, but also as portal to integration, expansion and empowerment.
There will be time for question prompts to stimulate enquiry into your own lived experience of embodiment through the phases of blood.
SHARING CIRCLE
You will be invited, though not required, to share your insights, epiphanies, and embodied beliefs with other participants.
A cone of silence will be invoked at the beginning and end of every session to ensure the confidentiality and safety of our container.
LIGHT MOVEMENT
Movement helps to connect to memories which are encoded at a cellular level; sometimes that feels like reclamation, sometimes not so much. Movement also helps to flush beliefs, emotions, feelings and memories through your soma in a ritual of release. Light movement (basic yoga poses like supine hip openers, forward folds and easy supine twists) may be introduced at different junctures throughout each session.
Please wear comfortable clothing.
GUIDED FULL-BODY MEDITATION
Each session will include a guided journey through different layers of your being: somatic, energetic, feeling, thinking, conceptual / beliefs. Dearbhla will guide you through meditations which will presence your connection to your body and particularly your second chakra area, your centre of feminine power.
You may experience each meditation as an awakening, an opening, a release and an opportunity to feel replenished and restored.
EMPOWERpause
You are invited to join your sisters in a circle of belonging to explore the blood mysteries, cycles of women’s power. Starting with our own embodied experience we will draw from myth to explore symbolic interpretations of the phases of women’s lives and unpack what those myths tell us about the shadows, gifts, and possibilities of women’s embodiment. We will call on our ancestors and each other to deepen and integrate our understanding and appreciation of the complex journey through and beyond fertility.
~ See & be seen
~ Listen & be heard
~ Witness & be witnessed
~ Come together & come apart
~ Embrace complexity
~ Integrate & expand
~ Celebrate & honor
~ Enter the space of the collective unconscious
~ Explore shadow
~ Connect to women across the ages through the shared experience of cycles of power
EMPOWERpause is a place for women of all ages in any stage of the cycles of blood to gather in ritual space to explore mysteries of embodiment, integration and expansion.
Why EMPOWERpause?
Participating in our ritual circle you will have the opportunity to:
Revisit and reclaim your relationship to your body
Revisit and reimagine your experience of initiation into the empowerment of blood
Integrate myth, ritual and body awareness
Leave with deeper self-understanding and belonging
Strengthen your connections with other women
Increase understanding and empathy
Experience community with other women navigating the cycles of power
Gain deeper understanding of the bewildering changes that can occur during perimenopause
Acquire practical tools for navigating perimenopause
3 Phases of Blood
Approach (Menarche)
Revisiting the transition into womanhood and the beliefs formed at that threshold. Was it a time of celebration? Empowerment? Excitement? What changes occurred in your relationship to your body and your self-conception?
Colour: pink
Symbol: half moon
Blood Years (Menstruation)
Fertility / infertility; conception; birthing; miscarriage; abortion. Your relationship to your blood. What changes occurred in your relationship to your body and your self-conception?
Colour: red
Symbol: pomegranate
Absorption (Perimenopause and menopause)
Abiding in the threshold between fertility and absorption of the blood. Navigating physiological, emotional and psychic changes. Reframing the transition beyond fertility and (re)claiming it as an empowerment.
Colour: purple
Symbol: salt
6 sessions online, Monday April 13 - Monday May 18, 7 - 9PM
Session 1 — Opening ritual & introduction
Session 2 — Menarche
Session 3 — Blood years
Session 4 — Blood years
Session 5 — Absorption
Session 6 — Integration
Sessions will meet on zoom and given the sensitive and intimate nature of the material, these sessions will not be recorded.
EMPOWERpause is not strictly educational, it is a participatory ritual experience that invites you to revisit, reframe and reclaim your relationship to your body and your blood as portal to integration and empowerment. A place to tap into the ancestral realm, the collective unconscious of women throughout the ages moving through the phases of blood. A portal to spiritual initiation into empowerment arising from your own embodiment.
EMPOWERpause may be for you if you are:
Menstruating
Navigating perimenopause
Menopausal
Seeking deeper connection to your body and enhanced understanding of the cyclical nature of women’s embodiment
Grieving infertility or abortion
Feeling alienated from your body and your deeper self
Wanting to cultivate and connect to your feminine essence
Longing to feel yourself as part of an unbroken lineage of women yoked by the power of blood
Ready to go deep in a robust container of deep listening and clear boundaries
YOU ARE INVITED to EMPOWERpause
Come as you are, wherever you are in the passage through the phases of feminine power. Together we will weave a tapestry of empathy and inclusion, a place of belonging amongst women bound together in the mysteries of the cycles of blood.
YOUR GUIDE
Dublin native Dearbhla Kelly (M.A., E-RYT500, YACEP) has been teaching yoga since 2003. Her superpower is holding a robust container with empathy, intuition, deep listening, vibrant presence, and humour. She invites her students to go deeper, to embrace challenge, expand the edges of their capabilities and step into the unknown. Dearbhla has been studying philosophy since 1990 and South Indian mythology since 2020, both of which inform her holistic approach to yoga.
In 2023 Dearbhla was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, she completed treatment in early 2024. She has been navigating the stormy weather of perimenopause for some years. Her own experience of the life-changing impact of hormone replacement therapy (HRT)for dealing with perimenopausal symptoms and the challenges she faced resuming HRT after breast cancer have given her valuable resources to share with other women.
Dearbhla is committed to amplifying the conversation around women’s mental and physical health.
Logo by Kim Saigh.