Healing Doll

Rainbow Love - new plant spirit dolls

I am Love, You are Love St John's Wort medicine doll

These are some of the plant spirit dolls that have been birthing here in the forest in the month of February - lots of pink and red hair/hare I see! I am particularly enjoying creating the dolls made personally for their keepers. I loved making the Oak and Moss Avalon Mysteries doll you see below. She has a lot of style! The beauty of birthing dolls is that I do not choose the way they look, they come through with their own personality and talismans required for their new keepers. Some are elaborate and some are beautifully simple like Pelican Womb Healer. She carries Pelican smudging fan created and gifted to us by Nature's Art Melbourne. Thank you!

Blessings and love to all the new doll keepers x

Custom doll for Louise - Oak and Moss Avalon Mysteries

Pelican Womb Healer Spirit Doll
carrying sacred women's herbs blessed in ceremony - overcoming obstacles with ease
Rain Spirit Doll completed on the day the rain fell over the burnt lands 15th Feb, 2014
Full Moon Passionflower Medicine Doll created on full moon 15th February, 2014 
RedHare Elemental Shapeshifter Doll Holding Mountain Ash Resin staff
Tree Lover, Hive Mother - Bee Pollen and Beeswax Doll

Moon Horse Spirit Doll Winner!

And the winner of the Moon Horse Spirit Doll is Emma Rochester! Thank you to everyone who entered and booked a Tarot reading last month. It was an exciting step over the threshold with you all. I loved discovering your gifts and teachings of last year and hearing all about your new dreams for 2014 - I hope we created pathways to help to make them REAL for you this year. Keep riding into the Sun dear Dreamers.

Emma Rochester is an amazing textile artistan and in her reading she shared with me that she had just completed a book that was 10 years in the making. So deserved! Moon Horse will be galloping to you this week Emma x

New Moon feathers of Rosella wings around her heart and Kookaburra (tigresse) smudging feather

the spring, the doll and the gang gang cockatoo

Every 3 weeks we travel to the purest spring we have ever known, the well spring at the top of Mount Donna Buang in Warburton, Vic.  We went yesterday to draw water for our ceremony on Friday night and for new essence creation. Often when I visit I will leave a spirit doll to thank the spring but to also thank the other visitors to this sacred place - the water freaks/ enthusiasts! Every time we visit we meet another water lover and this time it was a man in his 60s who was riding a motorbike across Australia. As soon as he tasted the spring he began to fill every container he had with him for his travels. He told me he'd never tasted anything as good.

The doll I gave to the Spring and her friends was Healing Spirit, a medicine doll that I'd finished on the weekend after attending the Wurundjeri Welcome to Country ceremony. The doll was with me as I'd passed through the welcome smoke and I was fascinated to hear in the ceremony that along with the gift of Fire to welcome visitors to their lands, the Wurundjeri also gave visitors water. I have no doubt this spring has been known and held sacred to the Wurundjeri for a long long time. 

I placed the doll under a small fern just behind the spring and prepared to leave when a family of Gang Gang Cockatoos began to call and one ancient grandfather landed and sat in the small fern above the spirit doll. I had never seen this type of Cockatoo at the spring before and he sang and spoke to us before flying down to the spring itself and drinking from it.  When I gift dolls at the spring I leave a little note to let people know that this doll is a gift for visiting this sacred place. And here is the beautiful family that found her! The family of local artist Lucy Pierce and her babies. I was thrilled. Lucy is a dear sister and her sculpture was a beautiful element of our ceremony held last year for the women and babies of the Magdalene Laundries at Abbotsford Convent. It felt very right that this doll would come to live with Lucy and her family.  

In these changing times there is so much being released but there are so many gifts to be received. I think we are all finally learning to appreciate simplicity again and receiving pleasure from small treasures made with care. And we can all play a magical part in this weaving with the universe. What small treasure can you gift to someone this week? I love to hear these stories of how a mysterious gift can be just what is needed to really lift someone's  spirit.  The morning after finding the doll, Lucy contacted me - there were Gang Gangs singing in her backyard.

Oceans of love to you all for your New Moon blessings. If you are joining us on Friday night please bring along a special cup or glass to share in the watery goodness of this ancient spring - water is life! 


Let it Go, Let it Flow - journey and meditation circle to farewell the year of the Water Snake.  

Gang Gang Grandfather blessing Healing Spirit with his song
Lucy and her family after finding the doll by the spring

Doll Lineages and the Wild Bee

Flower Faerie custom plant medicine doll for Asha's Grandmother
'you are never too old for a doll, you are never too old to play'
I am always thrilled to make a new doll. It's something that I just never tire of because the doll is, right until the end, a mystery to me. Sometimes I am shown colour to begin and other times I am shown a tiny part of a design. When I was asked to create a doll lineage on the weekend I was very touched. I have now created dolls for the daughter, mother and grandmother. The doll you see above is for Grandmother. She was meant to start her birth on Sunday but she was so excited that she came through on Friday night. All I knew when beginning was that she has a 'dress of flowers'. I had expected to make a serious 'Elder' doll but instead this delightful Flower Faerie came to be Spirit Sister to the Matriarch of the family. She told me that everyone has an inner child that loves to play, it doesn't matter how old you are.  
The doll below was another custom order from a man for his mother in Israel. I love to see these wee wise women travel far and wide across the Earth. They are living in many countries that I am yet to visit myself! My friend Gwen suggested that we could have a page of photographs of the Spirit Sisters in their new lands - that would be fun. 
I am now about to start creating a doll for Ruby a four year old girl about to turn five who has told me very clearly that she'd like her doll to hold 'cat energy and a crystal' !! Can't tell you how much I'm already looking forward to meeting this wise being.
I am taking a new round of orders for the next tribe of custom-made Spirit Sisters, order information can be found here.


I was also gifted organic Bee Pollen for the dolls this weekend and it seems to me that the Bees are bringing a new radiance. The dolls seem to glow. It is so important that we create gardens that are safe havens and invitations to the Wild Bees. 
Custom medicine doll for Mother in Israel
her name is 'Bee Light' and she assists with indecision

Violet's Link to Plant and WOmen's Mysteries - Spirit Doll Medicine

Violet - Emily's Spirit Doll
Dear Julia, 

Here is the story of my Violet Medicine Doll... 

On the weekend of the Swan Blessing Spirit Doll workshop I had only recently discovered I was pregnant. I had been keeping this delicious, mysterious secret inside. Only my husband and I knew and we were surprised at how deep and dark the knowledge felt...how wrong it would be to talk about yet. 


I had been sleeping and dreaming a lot and was just starting to get waves of nausea when I woke or during the day when my mind wandered the dreamworld. A lot of my dreams felt heavy and I was having flashes of past life traumas. I started taking walks in the morning by the river to let these feelings flow through me and away. I was drawn again and again to a patch of violets growing in the shade along my walk. Their delicate smell made me feel better, like the flowers understood the important work I was doing and gently supported the secrets within me. So I came to the workshop with these violets, knowing that the doll I made would be a Violet Medicine Doll, one who could travel the darkness of my dreams with me and remind me of the delicate beauty to be found there.
The journey the Swan Blessing took me on was surprising but perfectly synchronised with the energies I've described...

I gaze into the pool and see the face of my other self. She is tall, slim, queenly. She shifts from being black haired and young to silvery and old. Sunshine and moonlight. Masculine and feminine. She is a desert woman, Bedouin. 
 


She works with the plants of the desert, the ones that bloom in oases in the moonlight, and survive in cracks and crevices and caves. Slow dripping, seeping water underground. Women’s mysteries.
 


She sings the song of the desert, she calls these plants into life. She tattoos the journeys and knowledge of her people onto her skin. She bathes in underground pools at night. She is strong, powerful, respected and loved.
 

She binds her wisdom when white men arrive to “study” their nomadic way of life. She puts a halt to the growth cycles. She will never share the songlines, the stories. The plants will die and wither away to dust, unnoticed in their secret places. She has forseen the destruction white man will bring so she will not pass her knowledge on to her daughters. She will not burden them with the secrets.
The binding is tight around my waist, my solar plexus. I cannot be true to myself. I cannot reveal the full extent of my wisdom, or pass it on to the baby in my womb. I am withholding, withering inside. I feel sick to my stomach.The sister of the well hands me a knife to cut the binds and I hear my other self begin to sing the desert heart song again. Her wisdom is free and it flows through her, through the desert sands and winds and the moonlight, through my open centre and into my baby. I feel the unfolding of my mysterious violet baby just as the desert plants unfurl and come to life in the secret dark places.Together we will find the balance again of sunshine and moonlight, masculine and feminine, learning and intuition, spirituality and grounding.
 

I place seven violets inside my doll for each chakra and a sprinkling of Uluru red earth at her heart and feet to ground us in this land, connect us to our songlines and dreaming tracks. She carries the sacred gum in her medicine pouch. This baby will know the songs of the desert and the ocean, the blinding sun and the darkness. All the polarities. 

The doll dances and sways forward. She knows where she is going and where she is from. The strength and fragility of violets drifts from her like a sweet scent that you almost can’t catch except in your memory.

I am so in awe of the power of the spirit and medicine doll and the journey they take their creators on as they are made that I have begun collecting these journeys as part of our Swan Blessing book. Perhaps there will be so many that they will make a book on their own. I am also researching the history of this ancient ancestral practice of making a doll to help ourselves or someone else heal and it is a beautiful journey of it's own. Thank you Emily for sharing such a precious experience and time in your life, oceans of love to you and your growing tribe. If anyone would like to share their doll and the story of it's making you are welcome to send it to us. 

Our next Spirit Doll workshop: Reclaiming Ancestral Medicine of the Spirit Doll will be held on Saturday 19th October. 


New Spirit Dolls and Spring Equinox Balance Readings

Moon Medicine Doll - the Herb Gatherer: Aya, Passion Flower, Ethiopian Frankincense
For gathering strength for the Journey

$70 plus post
$120 plus post with personal Equinox reading

These new plant wisdom dolls were created in the weeks just before and after the Magdalene ceremony at Femmina Unbound. Wee wise women, guardian dolls for new journeys...

I will be offering Spring Equinox Balance readings with each doll if requested. I will also be offering a limited number of longer personal Spring Equinox readings in person or by phone from Monday 16th Sept. Bookings.

The Diviners, Sister-Readers - Egyptian Roses, Frankincense, Myrrh and Motherwort
Sisterhood, support and friendship - made to stay together

$100 plus post for both dolls
$150 plus post with personal Equinox reading

Lion's Tail Motherwort Dollfor Courage to be Seen
$60 plus post

$110 plus post with personal Equinox reading 

The Shapeshifter : Cat-Like
Patchouli, Sweet Myrrh and Palo Santo
Moving gracefully between worlds

$70 plus post
$120 plus post with personal Equinox reading 

Medicine Woman Motherwort Doll
for clearing fear and holding space for the birth of the new

$60 plus post
$110 plus post with personal Equinox reading 

Treasure found under the Mountain Ash Tree
nature's jewels for plant wisdom dolls

Spirit Sisters - Plant Medicine Dolls

White Cedar Woman - connection to World Tree Medicine
wisdom for ceremony and ritual preparation

And so the journey with my plant medicine dolls continues as I prepare to hold the space for the return of the medicine women of Femmina Unbound at the Convent. I have begun to understand that they are part of new pathways, perhaps wee bridges to the magic of the Otherworld, creating new root systems for plant medicine and ancestral wisdom to take hold in our world again. Let me know if a doll is calling to you - I am only the midwife, these dolls have lives to live away from me, with their Spirit Sisters.

Wattle Sun Magic - The Solar Astrologer
New beginnings, fire seeds of inspiration
Patchouli and Sweet Myrrh plant medicine

Singer of the Birds, King Parrot wisdom
Patchouli and Ethiopian Frankincense Plant Medicine

Dream Weaver - Passion Flower and Patchouli
Birting Dreams into Reality

Custom order for Vision Quest: Thunderbird Dancer

The Doll Enchantress - Nicole Ahava

Bridge Between Worlds Medicine Doll - Nicole Ahava
When I think back to where my journey with Spirit Dolls began, I can see that as a child I had many. I made them from all kinds of things and I turned what looked like very mundane items into spirit dolls just by focussing my love into them and speaking to them daily. I had forgotten all about this until last year when I received a Dream Doll as a gift from doll enchantress, Nicole Ahava. Nicole is so much more than doll-maker. Through her work at Dream Empire she imbues sacred objects such as spirit and medicine dolls with healing energy, strong intention and love. Nicole is also a Plant Medicine Woman and has great wisdom and knowing of the sacred plants and often places leaves and flowers of plant medicine from sacred sites around the world inside her creations. 
When I was gifted my doll - Little Girl for Healing the Inner Child, from Nicole I was searching for our new home in the forest and it had not been an easy search. In fact, I was starting to wonder if the messages telling us to move to Sherbrooke Forest had been right - we had seen so many houses over the months but none had ever come up in Sherbrooke itself. When I first picked up this wee doll, I could feel the soft energy of peace radiating from her body. I became attached to her very quickly - keeping her inside my wooden Tarot box with my beloved cards. I was amazed at the affection I felt for her and the support I felt her giving to me. And I remembered this connection with my dolls as a child. Within 2 weeks of working with my Dream Doll, of telling her my woes and my dreams and talking with her daily, we found our home in Sherbrooke. I was so glad to meet Nicole in person this year at Autumn Equinox and thank her in person.
Mother with child Custom Doll
Mother with Child - Custom Doll
Brigid, Celtic Goddess of Fire Needle Felted Doll, Pure Wool
Brigid Celtic Goddess of Fire - Nicole Ahava
Nicole was also sharing her medicine at Seven Sisters Festival this year and teaching her Spirit Doll workshops. When I came to the workshop on Saturday morning it was a after a night of deep visioning and no sleep. I was in a very strange state indeed after spending most of my night being visited by the Ancestral Grandmothers. With Nicole's gentle guidance and very little words really, just her energy alone, we all created the most amazing dolls within a short space of time. I made for myself a Grandmother to honour my vision and also to represent the grandmothers I had never met in this life as they had passed before I was born. 
I began to understand the significance of having something real to hold when focussing our love and intention and I could see that many of the spirit dolls were representations of the Dreamer within us all. I also felt the deep shamanic practice of doll-making and how the quiet focus of crafting gave us a clear channel to receive messages for ourself and for others and to imbue sacred objects with power and intention. And so I have asked Nicole to take part in the next Swan Blessing workshop - Enchanting the Dreamer at Winter Solstice. In this workshop not only will we clear Past Life bindings from our Dreaming Self - the magical and intuitive sister or brother who lives in the Otherworld, we will now also be able to hold them in a doll created in their essence to help us create a strong connection with our intuitive self at all times. 
I asked Nicole how did she come to her craft?

"When I was a child I was incredibly empathetic (I still am) it would cause me so much pain to see any person or animal suffering. I would cry for the homeless old man in the park and plead with my family to take him home with us. I would hear of an illness in the family and that night I would lay awake and send them healing. The next day a family member would call and tell my mother that the person was better. I would do little rituals to wash away the pain of starving children in Africa while I washed up the dishes for my mother. Find little stones and feathers and build altars in the playground. I trusted my feelings and I trusted my medicine. But it all stopped as I was walking home from school in grade 5 after I had received my Rubella vaccine. I was thinking my knowing was telling me the vaccine was wrong but all these people were saying it was right so I must be wrong.

A few years ago I was attuned in Reiki and it has all started coming back. I started making dolls for my girls. Intention is very important for me in all aspects of my life especially in creative action. It was very natural for me to put intention into these dolls. A lot of the time as I am making the dolls, other medicine will come up and I allow that to flow into the doll. Putting sacred objects into the dolls intensifies their power.

I have only ever made myself one doll and that was after my Swan Blessing."

I believe it is a beautiful gift and medicine that Nicole holds in her gentle soul. When she came for her Swan Blessing I saw that Nicole is a powerful healer and one of her strongest gifts is creating Medicine Dolls for sick children - beautiful comforting dolls for them to take into hospital when they are feeling afraid and to become dear friends to them in the long weeks of recovery at home. If you are facing such a time with your child I cannot recommend Nicole's healing dolls highly enough. I encourage you to seek her out to create a custom doll for your child and for the inner child within yourself. You will be amazed at the circle of love that you feel.

To join our spirit doll circles you do not need to have any experience - your spirit has gifts beyond time. You Remember This.