The middle child of seven siblings, Shinan Barclay was one of six girls in an Irish Catholic family where menstruation was presented in a harmful, misleading manner, tainting her young-adult life. Years later, while studying healing traditions with Brooke Medicine Eagle, a Native American Earthkeeper, Shinan was awed by First People’s interpretation of menstruation as sacred ‘Moontime’, and vowed to empower pubescent girls about bonding with their body, spirit and intuition.
As Shinan explains, “My friend, Mary Dillon-Williamson, had studied a similar sacred tradition under shamanic visionary Vicki Noble. One day in 1989, when we were both living in Sedona, Arizona, Mary handed me a scribbled draft of Moontime for Kory, a story she’d channeled during her moon. Mary’s intuition said, ‘Take this to Shinan.’ And, my spirit said, ‘Get this out there.’ Mary brought forth the idea. I assured its place in the world, adding details from my life, including gathering moss on the tundra, weaving baskets from natural fibers and gardening with Nature Spirits. I developed the story and then published and marketed Moontime for Kory. Now, twenty years later, I’ve updated and rewritten the book to make it more compelling to our 2010+ audience, and to help women find their place in our changing world, I intentionally developed a sustainable community.”
Thanks to her artist parents, Shinan has cultivated a vital and enduring interest in natural living, native materials, and herbs. At nineteen, she began her teaching career in an Alaskan Inuit village, thirty miles above the Arctic Circle. There, Sedna, goddess of the sea, as well as the guardian spirits of each species were honored by the native people. “The Inupiaq were closer to their spirits than I was to my God,” Shinan writes in her memoir: Arctic Jewels & Denali Gold. “On the tundra, during the summer with indigenous women, I gathered sphagnum moss. Soft and sponge-like, it was used as the soles in mukluks, as a disposable lining in baby diapers, and as a pad for menstruation.” A few years later, in a botany class at the University of Vermont, Shinan learned that sphagnum moss contains a natural antiseptic.
After returning to the mainland from Alaska Shinan had numerous experiences that expanded her knowledge of sustainable living. While married, she and her husband raised chickens, milk goats and cultivated a large organic garden on their small farm in Vermont Shinan spent three years studying herbal medicine with Mary Carse, H.M.R.H., Her Majesty’s Registered Herbalist. (In the 1960’s, Mary was the only registered herbalist in the United States.) Herbs of the Earth, Mary’s A to Z manual, serves Shinan and her family to this day. Besides class time on methods, terms and herbal remedies, Shinan accompanied Mary on wilderness treks, learning to identify and gather wild herbs, which she preserved in her herbarium. A member of the Vermont Spinners and Weavers, a program that brought cottage industries back to that state, Shinan spun wool, bass wood and goat hair into fibers. Then, in 1970, she was initiated into Transcendental Meditation and forty years later still continues a daily meditation practice.
In 1982 she received an M.A. in Holistic Psychology from the University of Humanistic Studies, (California School of Professional Psychology, Del Mar, CA.) An excerpt of Shinan’s thesis, “Mud as a Healing Art,” was published in Holistic Life Magazine. She worked at the Anxiety Treatment Center in San Diego and continued to learn body-mind-spirit healing modalities. Nature spirits began communicating with her and revealing themselves in the forms of tree bark, seaweeds and leaves. She wrote about interspecies communication in “Communicating with Plants,” an article published by Holistic Living News and reprinted in the El Cajon News.
Overcoming her fear of public speaking, Shinan grew to become an award winning Toastmaster, addressing groups about PMS, First Moon and Rites-of-Passage. Her article, “PMS, Burden or Blessing,” was published in numerous magazines, and was recently republished in Hawaiian Woman’s Journal. In 1999, Shinan was invited to present at “Women of Power,” a conference at Southwestern Oregon Community College in Coos Bay, Oregon . For the presentation, she created a mythic journey to reclaim the sacredness of ‘Moontime’; women of all ages attended and found healing. In addition, while researching dolphin behavior for Moontime for Kory, Shinan was invited to swim with wild dolphins and spend time with ‘Aphrodite,’ at the Dolphin Research Center in Florida. Her experience of this telepathic communication is described in the story “Aphrodite’s Touch” in her forthcoming memoir, Sedona Calls. 
In Shinan’s elder years, Brook Medicine Eagle initiated her into the Lakota Sioux Grandmother’s Lodge—gray-haired women as wisdom keepers. These days, you’ll find Shinan writing and gardening at her tiny cottage in a huge, Oregon coast rainforest next to a Read more about Shinan’s life and work in her books, Align with Global Harmony, Arctic Jewels & Denali Gold, and Sedona Calls, as well as numerous anthologies: Chicken Soup for the Woman’s Soul II, Open My Eyes, Open My Soul and Grandmother’s Necklace, etc.
