"In the red tent, the truth is known."

Photo essay #2

Photo Essays: a series I share once a month of photos that tell a cohesive visual story—client work or personal work. All photos: © Olivia Marie Olszewski. Please reach out to license or order prints.

I recently came across these gorgeous photos I took in 2022 at The Red Tent women’s immersion with some wonderful facilitators that I’m so grateful to have met that day.

When Ariadne Rigas (a client & now dear friend) reached out to document this offering, it was an immediate full body YES. I had been searching for feminine arts facilitation and women whom I could relate to and be in-person with. Even if I wasn’t participating, just being in the energy is such a blessing.

Transformational embodied spiritual classes and events are few and far between where I live now, on Long Island. My previous experiences had been mostly online through my VITA coaching certification and various other communities that I immersed myself in from 2020-2022.

It was such a pleasure to document this beautiful sensorium.

“The great mother whom we call Inanna gave a gift to woman that is not known among men, and this is the secret of blood. The flow at the dark of the moon, the healing blood of the moon’s birth―to men, this is flux and distemper, bother and pain. They imagine we suffer and consider themselves lucky. We do not disabuse them.

In the red tent, the truth is known. In the red tent, where days pass like a gentle stream, as the gift of Inanna courses through us, cleansing the body of last month’s death, preparing the body to receive the new month’s life, women give thanks—for repose and restoration, for the knowledge that life comes from between our legs, and that life costs blood.”

― Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

With full sensual presence,
Olivia