Swan Blessing - Releasing the Vow of the Outcast

Sylvia Ji - Shapeshifters

On this Full Blue Moon morning I share again with you Kristan's Swan Blessing Story of the Outcast. In her past life, Kristan belonged to a tribe that could not accept the powerful medicine that she carried. In her tribe this medicine was seen as taboo for woman to hold. She was asked to obey or to leave. She chose to say NO to the tribe so that she could say YES to her spirit.

Many of us have experienced similar stories in past lives and in our present lives. We have felt that to truly be ourselves, we must journey alone. Or we have put up with behaviour that hurts us just to stay a part of the tribe whether that tribe is family, society, peers. In this time of the rise of the Divine Feminine we are being called out of the shadows to embrace all of our natural gifts and to release the fear of being rejected and cast out by those who do not understand or accept us. Saying NO when it is right for us is a practice of honouring ourselves. When we release the belief that there was ever anything 'wrong' with us we remember that we are all creatures of the earth - as individual as every animal and plant and an integral part in the wheel of life.

Looking into the waters of the crystal ball of consciousness, I stared and I waited and I imagined I would not see anything. And I saw nothing for what felt like such a long, long time, I was beginning to feel I would not see, that my mind was too strong to allow my soul to show me what I needed and wanted to see

I stayed with prayer, asking and pleading at one moment to see, please let me see  . . .  and then the mists began to clear and I could see a clearing in the mountains, green pine all around, the smell of freshness and soil, and a teepee 

And horses, many horses And then I saw HER, myself in another time By the teepee, the wild life of the mountains surrounding HER  Ah, she was alone, living an isolated life, no tribe, a sadness surrounded herI could also sense an understanding, acceptance of her situation as the best possible outcome for her at that time and place We saw each other, she smiledI could see her deer skin clothing, her turquoise choker with red beads HER long, long braids of dark black hair I could feel HER and I felt a relief that we had met, that the veils had parted and that we could meet I began to track why she was alone in the woods, her only communication with the forest life; the birds, woodland creatures, trees, the natural world who heard her and loved her 

A new vision appeared
I found myself within a tribe of teepees A fire A Father, a Chief at the door of his teepeeAnd a Mother and more children (my siblings) sitting at the door of her teepee I stood by my Father, the Chief as he asked me again if I would do what was expected of me
and again, the 12 year old HER (me) said NO
I would NOT 

I was banished from my tribe 

For being who I was For speaking who I was For saying NO to what was not true for me I caught the eye of my mother and she caught mine sadness but understanding i saw there
and in my father too, not as cheif, but as my father a sadness and again an understanding
And away SHE went, alone, to live a life of isolation, to be herself
Again, I find myself back at HER teepee This time we connect, we stand in a pool of water, a water fall, falling behind us The vines from below come up, writhing and cover her, strangle her, snake like she is bound I connect with HER, I cut with my teeth the binding reedy vines I free HER She smiles at me, she becomes as of light and as a shooting star Returns  

The wounding: I will be rejected, cast out, banished from my tribe if I am myself, authentic and truth speaking, if I say NO to what does not feel right I release this binding, this wounding as I bite and free the vines of that lifetime  

The blessing: authentic, true and free, I express myself fully, I am my actualized self, accepted, loved and cherished by my tribe, now and for eternity

Thank you Kristan Read, for sharing your beauty, strength and truth. Kristan is a Shamanic Midwife, Teacher and crafting creatrix extraordinaire! You can experience Kristan's inspiring medicine for yourself through her work at www.atmypractice.comand www.thecrafthive.com

Reconnecting to the Roots of our Medicine - Journey to the Magdalenes

A month ago Tony and I opened a medicine circle - dreaming well,  an energetic pool at the site of the Magdalene Laundries at Abbotsford Convent here in Melbourne in preparation for Femmina Unbound. I created this pool with intention and love to connect to the women and children whose spirits are still bound to this place, I asked the indigenous Aboriginal ancestors of the Wurundjeri to allow us to enter and to open up a pathway back to the Ancestral Medicine of the Grandmothers. Down at the Yarra River that curves around this site, I called mightily to the Grandmothers asking them to join us here to help all of the women who will be joining the medicine circle and to assist the spirits to return home. You see I have been wanting to help the Magdalenes for many years now but always doubted that I could be of any assistance - it always felt like such a huge undertaking. And I doubted my medicine - was it enough to help? Over the last year the fire has grown, particularly with Royal Commission into Child Abuse being launched by the brave detective Peter Fox - some call him 'whistleblower' I call him the brave Fox. I knew that if I did not do something, that the rage and pain would eat me alive. And so I began to plan a day of bringing women's medicine to such a place as the Magdalene Laundries this year I received confirmation that the time was now. I realised that I could do something, it may be very small in the scheme of it all but I could do something.

When I launched Femmina Unbound and especially when I physically opened the dreaming well, I began to have nightmarish visions and waves of fear moving through me particularly early in the morning. I received another vision to help me understand what I was feeling. I saw a young woman screaming at me and I felt her hysteria. Her hysteria, her madness, terrified me more than anything else. And I recognised it in myself, because it lives so deeply entrenched in the females in my family. We carry strong chords of madness, suicide, depression in my blood line, in our lineage. Many of the women in my family are psychic and Catholic - something that they never seemed to be able to hold together in harmony. And then in the vision I saw this frightening 'Lilith' cowering but still hysterical as someone came towards her to help her. And she became like a small frightened dog who has been beaten too often. I saw the dog bite the hand that wanted to help it and return back to the abuser instead. The dog had lost all of it's natural animal instincts. I saw that this is what happened to the women when we had our ties to ancestral medicine and wisdom cut by religion and patriarchy. We lost our power and knowing of our own spirituality. We lost connection to our instincts and intuition. We no longer knew what was good or bad for us - we had become conditioned. To receive this message was huge for me, it has helped me to understand many of the women in my family, to understand my own poor choices of the past. In that moment, I felt the line of women in my family released and unbound from a belief that we needed to be forgiven.

Enormous tree growing outside the Abbotsford Convent windows

3 nights ago I dreamt of an enormous tree. A tree like the enormous Moreton Bay Fig at the top of this post. I took this photo 2 weeks ago while holding Swan Blessing in Sydney - the place of my birth and family. In this dream I was shown that we are 'sleeping trees' when we have not reclaimed our ancestral roots and medicine. But like a sleeping tree, when we are ready to awaken, we can blossom and grow to monumental heights. I received a vision on the morning of this dream and in it was shown that one of the most harming outcomes of religion and patriarchy upon Feminine Wisdom was that it cut the tap root to the Ancient Mother. When people move trees from different lands without wisdom, they often do not take care to look after the tap root - a root that travels far down into the earth way beyond the reach of the main roots. When they sever the tap root they cut a chord that draws from the deepest part of the Earth and this is vital to the health of the tree. And so when the tree is re-planted in a different environment, even when feed and watered and cared for, the tree never grows in the same way again and in many circumstances, the tree withers and dies. My vision told me that we are not dead, that our wisdom is not so far removed from us in the modern world that we cannot find our way to it again. By consciously creating an energetic tap root back to the Ancient Mother, we can awaken and leave our slumber to blossom fully in this country, and in this time now.

When I felt the gift of wisdom that came when I connected my own tap root back to the Mother, I was filled with such trust and love for my own way of being in the world again and a healing of my 'hiraeth' ancestral longing for the mother country of my ancestors. In that moment I felt the waves of fear and sadness I had been experiencing about returning to such a place as the Magdalene Laundries fall away. I felt the power of my love to acknowledge, remember and assist the spirits of these women and children rise up. And it was a gentle, radiant rising - it was not about fighting, warring or revenge. It was a knowing that with the love of all of the women attending this medicine circle together, that we would remember how powerful we have always been and how ancient our power and medicine is. Just like the ancient earth itself, our wisdom has been here forever. These buildings that held the incarcerated women and children are so superficial - so new in our ancient world. We are stronger than these buildings, we can heal these places of deep wounding and return love to the earth.

And so I write this today, to share these visions and dreams of my own journey to my medicine for all the women who are feeling to come and be a part of this medicine circle but are holding back. I just want to say that I understand your fears and your concerns but I want you to know that these fears you feel do not belong with us in this time - they are from the past. Whether that be from a recent or distant past - they are past. Whether they are flowing from the wounds of your own blood lineage - grandmother to mother - they are past. The ancestors are waiting for us to remember who we truly are. This is not a war or a day of intense pain - it is a day of honouring and blessing ourselves and reclaiming the sacred land beneath the buildings. A day to fully experience our own power to heal the spirits of our ancestor sisters, the Magdalenes, and sing their spirits home to the Deep. It is a day of honouring the indigenous tribes of Australia and bringing our own Ancestral Medicine into alignment with the spirit of this ancient country. I urge you to bring yourself forward sisters, you are all worthy, you are Medicine Women.

Femmina Unbound at the Convent - Medicine Women Return.

Tree growing in the quadrangle of the Magdelene Laundry compound

Here before the convent - Yarra River below the grounds

Juliette of the Herbs

I have just spent this afternoon by the fire creating plant medicine dolls and watching this beloved documentary again. Herbalist, writer and champion of gypsies and the animal kingdom, Juliette de Bairacli Levy, was generations ahead of her time and so courageous. And so like Vali Myers in many, many ways. Enjoy...

Juliette of the Herbs from DeepGreenGreenie on Vimeo.

Swan Blessing Story - Child of the Forest

The Barefoot Princess - Igor Oleynikov

Today I share again the Swan Blessing story written by Kat or Kat-Fox as I call her. I never could really put my finger on why I called Kat that until her Swan Blessing and then I got a glimpse of the beautiful, wild girl that had been bound by a Past Life Vow of Silence. This is Kat's story of the untamed child, the child of the forest and how this wild knowing, our intuition, can be taught through nature, through the land itself. Even in present times, the self-taught child, the one who is comfortable playing on her own, or the child who communes more easily with trees and animals is still feared and misunderstood. Thankfully we are waking up. We are opening and I hope that we will find new ways to welcome the wild child, to learn from her before it is trained or tamed out of her. Those secrets of the wild world. It is time to lift our Vows of Silence, to break the ties that bind our voices, our unique expression. For all who feel this ancient restriction, particularly around the throat chakra, find ways to speak and write and sing your words - let the wise trees be your first audience.

She emerged from the waterfall and stepped towards me. Her skin was glowing olive smooth. She had toiled, but not in the sun. Her green almond-shaped eyes held the memory of a smile. Her white fine hair cascaded in waves down her back. She trod lightly, silently, her back was rod-straight.She led me back to her home, the entrance of which seemed to be an invisible knot in the trunk of a tree. Her home was without edges and warm with dusk light. A wooden table with two chairs, a few pots and pans, a kettle. Little but ample. Herbs drying in bunches hanging from the ceiling.Tea poured, she took my hands and looked into my eyes. My breath seared my throat as she took me back… 

A small girl, about eight years old, playing. A perfect circle of light gleaming down through the tall trees onto her honey curls. She lay on her belly, her feet languidly searching for clouds oblivious to the butterflies dancing between them. Her play was serious, focused: naming the plants for herself, steeping them in her kettle, experimenting.Barefoot she ran, darting between knees and dodging heavy baskets, through the dark clouded marketplace. She headed precisely to her destination, barely detected but not oblivious to predators. She approached his tiny table quietly, head bowed respectfully. He was small and gnarly, and benignly nodding his ragged grey beard towards the tiny bundle of sticks at the end of the table. She pawed them nimbly, knowing they were exactly what she had been seeking. With silent thanks, she turned and disappeared into the darkness, flying towards her clearing, eager to progress her research.A dark cloud loomed across those almond-shaped eyes as rivers streamed down our cheeks…They came for her: tall, black, hooded, angular. Grabbing her roughly by the arms, lifting her feet from the earth. She kicked and screamed, writhed and bit, like a wild wild thing. She summoned the image of her protectors: young, love, glowing. They were far far away, and could not help her now. The marketplace table of the gnarly old man was empty, his chair smashed on the cobblestones.Times were changing.All that she had done, all that she had been, was wrong. A threat. Her solitude, her freedom, her enquiry, her craft: unacceptable. And those hooded ones: they did not even know half her story. 

Twenty years…
That wild girl who had run like a fox and communed with the trees in a circle of light now lived somewhere stone, cold, square. Her back was straight. Her mouth firmly closed. Her eyes hooded, downcast. Her wild hair pulled back, lank and dull. She walked with muted purpose alongside those long cold walls. She washed, she swept.At night she lay staring up at the blank ceiling, that thick coarse rope biting into her back. Gritting her teeth she vowed that she would never completely dampen her flame, that ember in her womb, that spark of curiosity, that life that had been hers. One day, she knew, she would walk right out of that place. Until then, she would not speak, she would not sigh, she would hardly breathe.And then, that day came. It was all over.Her chin rose, eyes meeting the horizon…The gates of that forbidding place were prized open by forces completely unknown and entirely irrelevant to her. Without loyalty, without regret and without rancour, she walked as she always had done: unseen. In the midst of the chaos. Right out of those front gates. As the walls crumbled around her. She walked.No direction but forward. She walked and walked and walked. Never looking back and never to return.The place that she found was not so different from that clearing where she had played as an ancient child. She made her home, stripping bark and twig slowly from one gnarly old man tree, taking her time, open to the gifts of the forest spirits and the seasons.She looked me straight in the eye. She saw me and showed me what I needed to see…
That vow of silence: it bound her forever. It was a vow she had been forced to take, symbolised by the rough rope binding her waist, constricting her breath, knots slicing into her spine. That ache would never quite leave her.The daughters of the well emerged from the waterfall and ignited the rope. It disintegrated to ashes, which dispersed on the breeze. We saw that we were now safe to nurture that ember, the flame that had been dampened for so many years. We understood we would nourish it back to crackling roaring life, one golden feather-like filament at a time.This was our work.My almond-eyed olive-skinned crone took my hands for one last time.She was safe. She welcomed fatigue, hunger, cold. She could endure.She lived alone and invisible to most. She was never lonely.And she healed, those tiny ones had started to arrive. Tiny as she had once been. Wordlessly peering into her window, gratefully pawing a lovingly-bundled collection of sticks carefully placed on the table within a small arm’s reach, knowing that it was exactly what they had been seeking. 

Post script: I have had a lower disc injury in my back, the origins of which has – up until the Swan Blessing – always been a mystery to me. 

Post post script: Whilst undertaking the Ninth Wave Water Rites to complete the Swan Blessing, I received my calling: to heal with words. Daughter of a nurse and an educator, gifted with words, I finally saw my life’s true purpose. The vow of silence, the prohibition on healing, had been broken. For this, I will be eternally grateful to Julia and Tony, and the daughters of the well.

Thank you Kat-Fox or Kat McNally as some of you may already know her, through Kat's writings and blog: I Saw You Dancing.  Tony and I are thrilled that you received the message about your true vocation in your Swan Blessing. Love to you Wordsmith and we can't wait to read and hear your beautiful healing stories. The fox is free xx

Ritual Adornment in West Africa by Phyllis Galembo

I am fascinated by these West African Masquerade photographs taken by Phyllis Galembo, particularly the use of plants in the adornment. Phyllis' portfolio is amazing. I encourage you to take a look through her fascinating work exploring the themes of sacred decoration and ritual adornment. This sacred dressing is an important part of Ancestral Medicine and something that all indigenous cultures share. I believe it is a deep and important part of our psyche. We remember this.

This year as we feel so many changes, I am ever conscious of how I choose to dress and adorn myself in my day, in my work. And I am noticing this with other friends and artists and practitioners. It is not to take yourself seriously but to put meaning and conscious awareness into what we are wearing and how we are wearing it. Does it feel authentic? What is natural to you? How does it feel to wear, where was it made? Do you dress in a special outfit to do sacred and meaningful work? 

I believe we will be returning to creating our own clothing - how beautiful it will be to see more people expressing their spirit through their dress and moving away from the mass produced and cheap labour-fuelled 'uniforms' that have surrounded us over the years. The Artisans of Adornment are returning.

 

 

RIP The Outcast Dead - Re-enchanting the Land

Sometimes, when Tony is asked to come out to a home or workplace to create sacred space and clear energy it is not the building that is 'haunted' or unhappy, it is the land itself. The land carries histories of human life beyond what we can see with our eyes and much further back in time than the current residents can remember. This is when Tony is called to speak with the spirits of the earth and to clear and honour the traumatic events that have happened there so that the current tenants can live in harmony and peace. In our current culture we have not been taught to understand that we are residing on a living organism - the body of the Earth. Just as we carry emotional and physical scars long after a traumatic event, the spirit of the land also carries energetic wounds. We have found that very often what is required is an honouring of the event and the souls that were involved, quite simply, what is needed is for us to acknowledge and remember.

An example of this honouring can be found at what is known as The Cross Bones Graveyard in London. In operation at around 1598, it was a graveyard that the church would not consecrate because it was for the hundreds of young prostitutes known as the Winchester Geese. Ironically and terribly they were known as the Winchester Geese because they were actually licensed by the Bishop of Winchester as the church held so much power in London at the time. So they were in effect, licensed and managed by a church that would not bless the ground that they were buried in - damned in life and damned in death. In the victorian era it was known as a pauper's graveyard and at the time of closing in 1853 it was 'completely overcharged with the dead'. Long since forgotten and neglected, it was only during excavations in 1991 that it was rediscovered.What you see in the images above and below are the honourings and blessings for the forgotten Winchester Geese. And this was all made possible by the work of playwright, John Constable who together with a small informal local group, Friends of Cross Bones, fought to save it from redevelopment and to honour it for the very first time as a sacred space. In the image below you see many names on ribbons, naming the women and children buried here. John Constable has also written The Southwark Mysteries, a cycle of poems and mystery plays inspired directly by the spirit of a 'Winchester Goose'. Now this site is open for visitors to pay their respects and to finally remember the Outcast Dead and because of it, this sacred site has been re-enchanted and become a place of positivity and healing.Just as your own spirit yearns for re-enchantment, for the honouring of it's sacred essence, so does the land that we live on. She needs your love too.