Why We Created The Red Tent Australia Inc.: My Journey Back to the Feminine

If I'm honest with you, much of my life before 35 was spent searching.

Searching through careers, relationships, countries, achievements, teachings and experiences. From the outside, it may have looked adventurous. I built a successful corporate career. I travelled the world. I became an award-winning travel writer. I sat with wisdom keepers, studied meditation, explored spirituality and sought answers in books, philosophies and traditions.

And while each experience taught me something valuable, I now see that I was searching for something I couldn't find outside of myself.

Then something shifted.

The masks began to fall away.

The identities I had built my life around no longer fit.

The achiever.
The traveller.
The successful woman.
The version of myself I thought I was supposed to become.

For perhaps the first time in my life, I stopped asking, "What should I do next?" and started asking, "Who am I beneath all of this?"

That question changed everything.

What followed was not a journey around the world, but a journey inward.

Into the body.
Into the heart.
Into grief.
Into shadow.
Into the forgotten places within myself that had been waiting patiently to be seen.

The deeper I travelled inward, the more I encountered myself as the feminine—mystical and untamed, formless and free.

For the first time in what seemed like a lifetime, I met the living intelligence moving through my body, through intuition, through cycles, through emotion, through relationship and through connection to life itself.

And once I met myself in that way, I began seeing the absence of the feminine everywhere.

I’d ask myself, “How did we forget Her?” "

Where were the stories of women?
Where were the rituals?
Where were the spaces that honoured the feminine experience?

The deeper I explored, the more I found myself immersed in mythology, history, spirituality and the forgotten threads of what some call the Divine Feminine.

I devoured books.

I read about goddess traditions from ancient cultures. I explored the Gnostic Gospels and alternative spiritual texts. I became fascinated by the stories that sat outside the mainstream narrative—stories of women as mystics, priestesses, healers, creators and wisdom keepers.

Meanwhile, I was learning to meet Her through experience. I trained in meditation, learned to hold space, and studied ceremony and ritual under a Druidic priestess whose teachings helped me reconnect with the importance of gathering, storytelling and honouring life's transitions. I learned to serve cacao from a Mayan elder in ceremony and witnessed the power of what happens when people come together with intention, offer reverence to the Earth and remember our connection to the unseen.

It was during this period that I read The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.

The story imagined a time when women gathered together through the major transitions of life. A time when wisdom was shared between generations. A time when girls were welcomed into womanhood rather than left to navigate it alone.

Whether historically accurate in every detail or not, we will never know. But the deeper truth remained.

Women need spaces to gather.
Women need community.
Women need meaningful ways to navigate life's transitions.

The more I reflected on my own journey, the more I wondered what might have been different if I had experienced that kind of support growing up.

What if our first period was recognised as a meaningful transition rather than something embarrassing?
What if young girls were taught to understand their bodies with confidence and pride?
What if mothers and daughters had spaces to learn, share stories and celebrate these milestones together?

These questions eventually became the foundation for The Red Tent Australia Inc.

Through education, community gatherings and modern rites of passage experiences, our hope is to create spaces where girls and women feel seen, supported and celebrated through the many transitions of life.

Because if there is one thing my own journey has taught me, it is this:

We are not meant to walk these thresholds alone.

With love,

Bianca