Sacred Schooling

Bronwyn Ayla
Apr 28
5 min read

Raising a child to live an extraordinary life

For a long time I kept a small public field — first under the name SacredSchooling.com, more recently as the Unschooling section of my older site — about the way I'm raising my daughter Nymue. I'm bringing that body of work home to bronwynayla.com, because the thread that runs through it is the same thread that runs through everything I do.

“Giving children a space of love, and a trusting environment to explore from is some of the most sacred work we can do. I want to prepare Nymue to live an extraordinary life — to do what it is she came here to do, to enjoy the incredible opportunity of being alive, to be kind and embodied. I want her to have the opportunity to shape herself into herself.”

That was my prayer when she was small. It is still my prayer now, with her at thirteen and a half.

Three names for one path

What I do with Nymue lives at the intersection of three philosophies. They aren't separate methods; they're facets of the same instinct.

Unschooling is the philosophy that when we trust children's innate curiosity for life, they flourish in a constant state of learning. Children are capable of learning the way adults and babies are — by what is interesting to us in this moment, in the rhythm of an actual life. They don't need to be coerced, put in specially curated environments, or have their thinking planned and ordered for them in order to learn. They need a world worth being curious about, and adults around them who are alive in it.

World schooling is the practice of exposing children to many languages, cultures, and landscapes — usually by traveling and living in a wide array of places. Place is teacher. We've spent stretches of months in Europe; we'll spend stretches in Japan, in Spanish-speaking places, in South Africa. Nymue speaks English, is working on Spanish, and will likely add Japanese. The languages matter, but the deeper learning is what a child takes from belonging to somewhere before they belong to anywhere.

Sacred schooling, a term I coined, is what holds the other two together. Sacred schooling is about holding daily rituals, life, our bodies, the environment, and connection as sacred. What makes something sacred is the way we relate to it and hold it. Anything can become sacred by the quality of attention we give it. A meal. A walk. A wound. A morning. The body's signals. A grandmother's recipe. A diviner's offering. The thing being held determines very little; the holder determines almost everything.

What I'm trying to grow

My prayer, the one I started with and haven't moved off of, is that by stewarding the next generation of wisdom keepers to hold life as sacred, more of them will be able to cultivate right relationship — with the environment, with animals, with nature, with the seasons, with each other.

I'm not raising a checklist child. I'm raising a sovereign one. The standards are met because she meets them, not because they organize her days. Her interior is allowed to grow at the speed it actually grows. The elders around her are real — lineage carriers, practitioners, a diviner I sit with, a teacher who can hold a room of grown adults without flinching, a grandmother who knows how to grow food. Known beings, in known relationships, doing real work.

That is the architecture. The mystical part is that a child raised inside it learns to attend — to what is happening, including inside themselves. That is the soil from which a vocation can grow.

What it isn't

I want to be careful here. Sacred schooling, the way I practice it, is not a rejection of rigor. Nymue reads, writes, does math; the standards are not the organizing principle, but they aren't abandoned. It is not a rejection of community — we live inside a circle of other families doing related work, and Nymue has the full social texture any thirteen-year-old has. It is not a sealed system; she may at some point want to step into conventional schooling, or university, or something I haven't imagined, and the work is to give her enough sovereignty to choose any of those from her own ground. And it is not a posture. It isn't a way of feeling superior to other parents. Most parents I know would do something similar if their lives allowed it. Mine has allowed it because I built a life that allowed it. That is its own privilege, and I'd rather name it than hide it.

Why this is folded into the larger work

For a season I treated this work and the medicine-and-mystery work as separate channels — two domains, two audiences, two voices.

I no longer think they are separate.

The Mystery School I'm building, the Sanctuary I run, the clinic I founded, the practitioners I'm training, the pilgrimages I lead — they're all expressions of the same instinct that has organized our days with Nymue from the very beginning. The instinct is this: humans are designed to be initiated by elders into a tradition of meaning, in real bodies, in real places, over real time. When that doesn't happen, people get sick — in their bodies and in their souls. My work is to make those initiations available again.

Sacred schooling is the version for children. Mystery School is the version for adults. They are the same school.

If this is your work too

If you are a parent doing this work, or considering it, or in the middle of it and feeling lost — I would love to support you. Twenty-plus years of raising Nymue this way has taught me a great deal, and I'm genuinely happy to share what we've learned.

Book a one-on-one session with me. We can talk through your specific situation — your child, your family rhythm, what's working, what isn't, what you're trying to build. Practical guidance, grounded in real experience. Book an online session.

Nymue offers sessions directly with kids. She's thirteen and a half now, deeply embodied in this way of being raised, and she loves working with other children — talking with them about their interests, their questions, their inner lives, and what it can look like to grow up sovereign. You can find her work at www.nymue.com.

Or do your own initiation. If what's actually pulling you isn't another technique but the deeper work of becoming the kind of adult your child can grow up next to, come into Sanctuary or Mystery School. That is, very often, what a child actually needs — not a better curriculum, but a parent who has done their own work.

Whichever gate you are at, you know where to find us.

— Bronwyn (and Nymue)