Red Tent Temple Movement

The Red Tent Temple Movement is introduced as a women-centered network that sought to create regular gatherings for support and healing, including attention to menstrual cycles. Lindy West’s account of attending a gathering on Vashon Island shows both the movement’s spiritual practices and the ordinary welcome it offered: although she remained skeptical of much of its cosmology, she found the circle unexpectedly nurturing and its acceptance meaningful.

Origins and Aims

In August 2010, The Stranger received an email from an organization called Vashon Red Tent announcing that a Red Tent Temple Sisterhood was coming to Vashon. Its press release described a wider ambition: gatherings in towns across the country where women of different ages could meet regularly, share their stories, support one another, and acknowledge monthly menstrual cycles. The movement was inspired by Anita Diamant’s novel The Red Tent. West knew little about the novel beyond her college roommate’s memorable reaction to it, so the invitation arrived already colored by her suspicion that the gathering might be unfamiliar and uncomfortable.

The announcement offers a statement of purpose rather than a detailed account of the organization’s governance, membership, or reach. The Vashon gathering is the concrete example West describes; the press release’s national vision should not be mistaken for evidence that every community had an active group. In the account, the movement’s central method is intimate and local: women sit together, speak in turn, and make room for experiences that might otherwise be treated as private or unimportant.

The Vashon Gathering

West went with her friend Jenny, nearly missing the ferry from Seattle. Before entering, the pair stopped at a grocery store for boxed wine and jelly beans, a comic preparation that reflects West’s anxiety rather than any formal ritual requirement. She almost turned back. As someone who preferred clinical explanations, she found the gathering’s spiritual atmosphere foreign; she also described magic as something she enjoyed more readily as escapism than as a claim about the real world.

Inside a community center, the women had removed their shoes and sat on pillows beneath a homemade canopy of red scarves. The makeshift room was not literally a tent, but it provided the gathering’s defining image and a sheltered setting for the circle. Conversation began with chocolate. One attendee passed a Hershey’s bar around, and the group’s playful talk about goddesses made West feel affection for them before she had accepted their beliefs. Chanting followed, and the leader, Isla, spoke about an astrological configuration called the Cardinal Cross and the work of local angel healers. West reports these statements as part of the meeting’s spiritual vocabulary, not as facts she herself endorsed.

The meeting also included claims about spiritual DNA. One woman attributed a change in how she felt to a twenty-four-strand DNA activation performed with a crystal wand; she described additional spiritual strands and a process that had taken ten hours. Another attendee connected the idea to the Mayan calendar. West did not understand the explanation, and the episode makes clear that the circle contained beliefs she found difficult to follow. Her account presents these moments alongside the more accessible practices of conversation, humor, and collective attention, rather than treating the group as defined by any single doctrine.

Participation and Mutual Support

During a round in which attendees stated their intentions for the coming moon cycle, many spoke in terms of balance, rhythm, or manifestation. West chose an ordinary aim: organizing her apartment. She felt mundane beside the others, but the group approved rather than judging her contribution. For her, that response fulfilled the promise of the press release: a place where younger women could ask questions, find mentors, and encounter acceptance.

The gathering’s welcome did not depend on West sharing its spiritual framework. She writes that she did not believe most of the things discussed and suspected that belief itself might be essential to how the practices worked for those who did. Even so, she found it surprisingly nurturing to sit in the circle for several hours. The distinction matters to her account: skepticism and participation could coexist, and an experience could offer care without persuading her of its supernatural explanations.

West’s Assessment and Significance

Afterward, West and Jenny left with their legs asleep from sitting cross-legged on the pillows, ate more jelly beans, and talked about their feelings. At work, West expected that her role would be to make fun of the gathering. She decided she did not want to. The women had been kind and sincere, and she questioned the value of turning that sincerity into an easy target. Her response was not an endorsement of every claim made at the meeting; it was a refusal to make ridicule the only available form of critical distance.

West also connects the gathering’s appeal to the labor women perform in everyday life. Reflecting on her parents’ long working days and her mother’s return home to make dinner, she recognizes the idea that women need opportunities to replenish themselves. The Vashon circle thus appears not only as a collection of spiritual practices but as an attempt, however modest, to make a few hours for women to be heard and supported. Its significance in the memoir lies in the contrast between West’s initial unease and her eventual appreciation: she can remain clinically minded, question what she hears, and still recognize the value of a community organized around welcome.