Parenting Wisdom From Medicine Festival
Seeing the transformational gathering through our daughter's eyes.
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Resonant Parenting Project #28
With summer now officially over, I’ve been reflecting on the highlights of the past few months — and especially Medicine Festival, a transformational gathering in Berkshire that we’ve attended every August for the past five years.
Bringing together Indigenous elders from around the world, and incredible musicians and wisdom teachers, the four-day gathering at the Wasing Estate creates a truly unique ambiance of magic, reverence, nature connection and community that our six-year-old daughter Matilda loves as much as we do.
Seeing Matilda and her cousins racing around the alcohol-free festival site — a series of wooded forest glades, pathways and fields that feels very safe — reminded me how important it is for kids to enjoy a sense of independence and agency.
Freedom can be difficult to find in our overscheduled, over-supervised world, where children are under constant watch at school, or on playdates — and many of us parents lament the lack of opportunities to roam that we enjoyed growing up.
I’ll always remember watching Matilda, up way past her bedtime, ecstatically cartwheeling across the field, wearing a halo of coloured fairy lights — revelling in the mysterious atmosphere created by the colourfully-dressed festival goers, and the sound of drums and singing echoing through the trees. I like to think that the primal experience of community she’s found year after year at Medicine Festival is now wired into her system.
Medicine Festival is also unique in the sense that it’s a family-friendly destination that parents enjoy as much as the children. We love taking Matilda to theme parks such as the ROARR! dinosaur park in Norfolk, or Chessington World of Adventures (which we visited last week as an end-of-summer treat). But Medicine Festival is on an entirely different level: It’s like stepping through a portal into a parallel reality, where people chat more readily, smile more freely, and adults show they know how to dance, and have fun, without the help of a drink.
It’s also commonplace for adults, teenagers and older kids to fall into easy conversation in a way that just doesn’t happen in the two-hour queue for the Vampire ride at Chessington, where families tend to stick to their own bubbles, and the emphasis is on frenetic thrill-seeking, rather than relaxing into nature’s embrace.
Now a Medicine Festival veteran — having been going since she was two —Matilda starts talking about the next festival around January — when we all start discussing the kinds of outfits we might wear. Kids love familiarity and structure, and the annual sense of anticipation that starts building as we move through Spring is another bonus.
That’s maybe why we don’t feel like we’re “taking” Matilda to the festival — it’s as if the festival is taking each of us on our own unique journey; and it’s as much of an adventure for me and Matthew as it is for her. (Nowhere was this more apparent than the Chalice in Wonderland Magical Tea Ceremony — where White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts, Cheshire Cat and of course Alice led us on a woodland adventure to brew our own special teas from herbs and infusions).
Connecting to the Land
We learned early on in our Medicine Festival days to buy a wagon, so we can take Matilda out in the evenings, and she can snuggle down and sleep in her sleeping bag, while we can sit around sacred fires, listening to exquisite music. This year we delighted in the sounds of Peia, Chandra Lacombe, Afriquoi, Porangui, Danit and Yaima among many others.
But there’s also plenty of activities designed specifically for kids. This year, Matilda and her cousins particularly enjoyed den building — a favourite run by WildWise (whose instructor Elena Harris we’d met during our trip to Pitchcott Farm in July). They also enjoyed making memory jars, collages and clay faces in the dedicated family area, learning flint and steel fire-lighting (with marshmallow toasting); balancing on straplines strung between the trees; and rocking in a hammock.
But perhaps the most memorable moment for us was meeting Aunty Puna Kalama Dawson, a Hawaiian elder who had travelled to the ceremony from her home in Kaua’i, and who was one of the festival’s wisdom keepers.
Singing With Aunty Puna
Aunty Puna had come with her team to share some of the traditional mele (songs) and hula dances of Hawaii, explaining their cosmological symbolism and significance in island culture. Aunty Puna creates such an atmosphere of warmth, humour and compassion that I could sit in her presence all day; and she clearly loves children.
She was especially kind to Matilda, sitting her down next to her on the stage at the Goddess Fyr where some of the festival-goers who had been learning Hawaiian dance had been invited to perform.
When Aunty Puna told us parents not to shush children in the audience who had begun chattering, my ears pricked up. We can understandably get worried about what other people think of our children’s behaviour, and our impulse to shush our children can often come from a place of managing others judgements of our parenting skills — rather than what’s best for our children.
I’d noticed some of that anxiety in myself a moment earlier — wondering whether Matilda would be focused enough to sit still on the stage. It was such a relief when Aunty Puna gave us permission to let all that go — and shared that in her culture, children are regarded as the carriers of the deepest wisdom, and we need to remember that their voices matter. Given that she has 22 great grand-children, I couldn’t help picturing how lively it must get at her home when her family gets together.
Aunty Puna’s message aligned with what my friend and parenting coach, author and teacher Felicity Evans was telling me last week about the importance of avoiding the trap of dismissing our children, or using any kind of disapproving or controlling language — what she calls Put-Downs — that can harm a child’s confidence and self-esteem.
Watching how at ease Aunty Puna was on the stage, sharing Hawaiian tradition, and welcoming the voices of children, I thought of the contrast with our own culture — where parents and teachers are constantly struggling to get children to keep quiet. The risk is that all our shushing of our children eventually causes them to start to suppress themselves — leading them to mask who they truly are, and depriving all of us of what they have to share.
Aunty Puna embodied an entirely different quality of parental authority — in her presence, it was obvious that children would simply find their rightful place, and that their voices would be celebrated and received.
Carry Peace
After six straight years, the organisers of Medicine Festival are taking a break next year, and letting the land lie fallow, until the gathering resumes in 2026.
As I reflect on what we’ve learned through these past precious years of attending, I recognise that the heart of Medicine festival is all about ceremony.
It’s about Indigenous people sharing their wisdom with us at such a crucial point in our human journey. It’s about connecting with a form of knowing that lies beyond intellect and academic study. It’s about being open, curious, and creative — which are ultimately innate traits of all children. I feel very fortunate to have been able to provide my daughter and other children in my family with a chance to connect with these qualities at Medicine Festival, but my deepest desire is that all children be exposed to these ways of being.
Let’s ask ourselves: How can we see our whole life as a ceremony where we honour each other, our families, our communities, and our planet? How can we take the lessons and learnings from these transformational gatherings into our everyday lives, and live in gratitude, and connection?
The theme of Medicine Festival this year was Carry Peace. It felt like such an important message for us all; and particularly our younger generations, who need to experience what compassion, gentleness and peace feels like within to be able to be part of the generation that actively embodies peace in the world, and moves towards creating peace on earth.
Wishing you a wonderful start to the new school term,
I write the Resonant Parenting Project in between my work as a conscious parenting coach and looking after my six-year-old daughter Matilda. Any support from readers through liking, sharing, subscribing or buying me a coffee helps make this work sustainable. Thank you!
Sounds so lovely! 😊
Sounds wonderful. Is the festival only for families or are single adults welcome too?