a walk with us in Sherbrooke Forest

This week felt so light after two weeks of wild storms and heavy rains. I couldn't help but feel the invitation from the trees to leave everything behind and walk, look and gather. Here are some photos taken on our foraging journeys, gathering plant medicines to place in our dolls and medicine bundles for healing. Wherever you are I hope this helps you to feel the green and nourishing love of the earth.

A Doll for Alice Savage

I have just finished weaving a medicine doll for Alice Savage. Alice is an Italian illustrator and spirit sister and she has been creating illustrations inspired by my dolls. The illustration above is of the doll, Heart of Fox - with a little Vali Myers inspired moustache no less! I am so excited and honoured by this collaboration and I couldn't wait to create for Alice a doll to hold her very own personal medicine. Alice and I have spoken about the intention and healing wishes she would like her doll to hold and I came to feel that it was important for Alice's doll to be both strong and soft together. As I began I kept envisioning deep blue oceans and the creatures that journey to the deepest depths. When I looked into my medicine box, which is actually a very old hat-box, the first beauty to catch my eye was a cuttlefish bone.

I found the cuttlefish a few months ago on a foraging trip to Phillip Island in part of Cat Bay. That's a lovely weaving already as I know that the Cat is sacred to Alice and are her dear familiars. What I didn't foresee was that the doll would ask for a chestnut to be placed with the cuttlefish and at first I questioned the paring in my mind. Yesterday Alice told me a story of beautiful chestnut grove that she used to love to visit and hopes to return to it again. I love that the doll knew what medicine was needed. This information cannot come from the mind as it is unknown but by listening to the doll with your own childlike heart, you get a strong urge or pull towards what is needed. Alice's medicine is also linked to crystals and stones and she felt complete with the placement of a seed pearl in the centre of her heart. She is a beauty! Just like you Alice. Blessings on your journeys to the deep blue together.

And here is one of the latest medicine doll illustrations by Alice: Heart of Fox - complete with her own Vali Myers inspired spirit moustache! LOVE HER xx

New Forest Space for Sacred Familiar

Hello dreamers we have now opened our new space in Kallista surrounded by the green wonder of Sherbrooke Forest. Ancestral Medicine sessions will open on Monday at the New Moon Solar Eclipse. Hope to see you soon. We also offer sessions by Skype and telephone for our faraway friends. Green love to you all for your weekend wanderings, Julia and Tony x

Spirit Dolls for the HomeBirth Medicine Tree

Last week I sent two beautiful mamma dolls to be with the Birthkeeper Medicine Tribes gathering this weekend at the Homebirth Australia Conference. I was so happy to weave dolls for the midwives, doulas, healers and educators who together are bringing back the Ancestral Medicine of holding sacred space to birth without fear in our own homes and communities again. 

I felt grateful to have the opportunity to provide dolls for this birthing tribe and it was a small way that I could thank the many midwives and doulas who have visited me in the forest for Ancestral Medicine sessions. It was in fact, the plight of a midwife being treated unfairly in regards to a homebirth that inspired me to become more public with Ancestral Medicine work 3 years ago. A homebirth may not be for everyone but the fact that there are groups who want this ancient and natural practice eradicated and heavily controlled by outside authorities, spurred me on to step out of the shadows and approach the midwifery community. And so Swan Blessing actually began as a service to clear past life trauma of being persecuted as a witch, healer, herbalist, teacher of plant medicines for midwives and doulas so that they would not feel fear in their sacred work of holding space for birth. And now I see people from all works of life - artisans, teachers, mothers and fathers - all coming to reclaim their memory of Ancestral Medicine again. I call it simply Grandmother Medicine because up until just 2 generations ago, these knowings and wisdoms of Birth and Death and everything in between was passed in the family and taught with great love and trust. 

It has been my honour to come to know so many birthkeepers over the last 3 years particularly my sisters at the School of Shamanic Midwifery. These women and men who are brave, honest and funny and so very very wise. How lucky we are that these guardians are back to hold space for our birthing again. 

Paying homage to the sacred birth process I am showing here, for the first time, some of the ways the dolls begin their lives. Here are photos of the dolls birthing themselves with gumnut hearts filled with mountain ash resin in full flow. The wee baby in the papoose was made from an oak acorn. They have a mandala of herbs and plant medicine in their tummies including: Motherwort (known as Lion's Tail), Myrrh, Moss, Wattle and Mapacho Tobacco for protection. 

Love to all who gather this weekend at the Homebirth Australia Conference, blessings on the connection back to your Ancestral Medicine trees and the new fruit waiting to blossom. Thank you for all you do for us and our children and their children to come. 

Womb medicine - Gumnuts filled with Mountain Ash resin

Oak Acorn and pure Merino Wool

Plant Medicine Mandala to go inside the dolls

HawkWoman Medicine Doll Snakeskin over her pregnant belly and Hawk Feather wand

Guided Medicine Doll for New Mamma and Baby

Dreaming back the Outcast - Singing Home the Wolf Sister

Dark Moon blessings to you all. We are preparing to move to our new nest in Kallista. Exciting and daunting (packing...). so I won't be here much this week. From 6th March I will be holding Black Swan Blessings - Past Life Lilith story healing to sing home the Wolf Sister and Wild Feminine. I feel drawn to hold this work particularly before we gather for Seven Sisters Festival - it can be so hard for the lone wolf, the outcast to join big groups and so if you feeling drawn to be with your sisters but are also feeling fear of entering the circle, of being vulnerable in a group, get in touch and I will be honoured to hold space to help you sing the Wolf Sister home. This year we are being asked to share our personal medicine together, in community - my wish is that you will be there in the circle with us. These sessions are also offered by Skype and phone for our Faraway Sisters, love, Julia

you can read more about these sessions here

Return of the Medicine Women - encaustic 2014

Swan Blessing - Religious Vows of the Seer and Mystic

Today I share again Sharon's Swan Blessing story of the release of the Vows of Chastity and Poverty taken as a nun in a past life. Sharon felt these vows very keenly in her present life particularly the Vow of Poverty. And there was also something deeper, harder for Sharon to name or understand with her conscious mind. It manifested as a deep fear of rejection, particularly by her family and also a need to hide her true self in belief that to reveal it, would lead to the dreaded outcome of being rejected and outcast, not only from family but from society itself.

As the Swan Blessing opened Sharon's gift of sight, she saw a lifetime that began with abandonment. She saw herself as a baby being left on a doorstep by parents too young to keep her. She was taken in by a family who did not welcome her as a child of their own but as an unpaid servant. It was a childhood of hard work and of feeling unseen but deep within the child was a knowing that she was somehow meant for greater things. She was a child with a gift to see and communicate with the angelic realms. This secret gift was the only source of solace and joy in her life but when revealed became the source of ridicule, forcing her to run away from the adopted home. Like many female mystics of the past, she entered a religious order in the belief that she would not only be allowed to carry on her spirit communication but that she would be understood and honoured.

To enter the convent she had to take the heavy vows of Chastity and Poverty - vows that meant little to the young girl who was seeking a safe place to share and celebrate her medicine as Seer.  She was again relegated to the duties of servant. Over the years she gradually managed to rise up in rank in the convent but again felt the calling of her medicine, a deep knowing that she was made for deeper and stronger spiritual work and began to slowly reveal her gift of communication with spirit. In thinking that by entering a convent she would be in a place where this gift of direct revelation with spirit would be honoured and accepted she was greatly mistaken. Instead she saw herself experiencing the fate that befell many healers and medicine women of the past, she saw herself suffering the greatest of betrayals when her gift was labelled as witchcraft and she was burnt at the stake.

By releasing this story that has bound and held her medicine for lifetimes, Sharon felt enormous release and sense of freedom. I am glad that she is able to begin to embrace her ancestral wisdom once more and share her gifts in this lifetime free of fear.

"I Sharon am a Healer. 

Dear Julia, I just wanted to say thank you so much for yesterday's session. I had an AH-HAH moment in the car on my way home. Now it all makes perfect sense as to what has been going on in my life. 

As I looked into the well and saw that girl aged 15 with her piercing blue eyes and long blond hair, I felt a sense that I was looking at myself from centuries back. When she showed me that she was in a nun's outfit. 

She was such a tough little girl, to be abandoned by her parents when she was a baby, being rejected from her first day of life. Then to be taken in by a family where she never belonged and felt rejected once again, being a maid. Her only solace was talking to her friends the angels. Then being ridiculed because people thought she was crazy when she told people about her gift. Her only option was to run away.  

She thought that being a nun was her only way of being able to talk to the angels again, but she was made to be an outcast, so she renounced her gift and took on the vows of poverty and chastity and joined the order. Yet she never felt that this was her vocation and when she had risen through the church and decided to once again explore her gifts, she was burnt. 

This all makes sense to me, all my life, I have tried to do everything for my family. I always feared that they would reject me if I did anything wrong, This caused me so much anxiety and I even suffered from depression. 

The vow of poverty resounded so well for me, never being able to have a stable job because I didn't think I belonged anywhere and never giving myself fully to a relationship. This is all about to change. I am reclaiming my freedom and from this day forth I will ensure I lead my life . I am so looking forward to opening myself to the spiritual realm, to explore meaningful career opportunities and to welcome abundance. Thank you so much."

Blessings, Sharon

 

Artwork: Suscipe Me Domine, John Henry Frederick Bacon (1895)

Asha's Swan Blessing Story - BoneWoman

Susan Seddon Boulet

Today I share with you Asha's Swan Blessing story of past life Ancestral Medicine.

There are many reasons why we block and resist opening full connection to Ancestral Medicine again. Sometimes the medicine we have access to is so ancient and unknown to the mind that it frightens us. It may also carry the bindings of memories of carrying these gifts in times when it was dangerous and misunderstood. Many witches, healers and shaman were persecuted for possessing healing medicine that was viewed by a later religion as evil. The seeds of Ancestral Medicine are ancient and indigenous to the land they were birthed through, but these lands may not be where you find yourself living now and the wisdom needed to understand your medicine may not be available to you in your current environment or family.

When Asha came to me, she came with a heavy fury and pain. She also came carrying deep shame from lifetimes of believing that she had been the cause of a terrible and traumatic event. Asha's medicine in another lifetime was that of BoneWoman and Midwife. In this lifetime Asha had been drawn again to shamanic midwifery but was experiencing great pain and confusion when she sat with her sisters. In journeying back to the point of Soul Loss and closing down of her medicine, Asha saw that she'd lived in a time of high infant mortality and was a healer from the forest who was looked on with fear as she came not to birth the baby but to save the mother after the baby had died and heal the baby's soul and spirit through bone magic. Like many female healers, Asha experienced being blamed for the illness and 'bad luck' in her village and was made to watch as her sisters were murdered for her supposed crime. This led Asha to make the Sacred Vow to close down her Medicine and close her heart to Love.

This Swan Blessing was painful for Asha but so very beautiful in it's healing and return to Love. Asha gifts her Swan story to us here to help anyone else who may be resonating with these feelings.

"Her eyes are dark, black like ink. Thick black eye brows snake to a sculpted nose and her hair like coal rests heavy down her breasts.  

She is enraged, I feel it in my body, a hot convulsion, a shudder behind my brow, thick in my throat. But she trusts me, she trusts me and she reaches out her hands and I fall quickly and wholly through the inky pools of her eyes. I am in a dusty street, and alley between square earthen homes. Little stalls line the street and although it is not overy busy I cannot see her. Then it is that I glimpse her, see her walking briskly, almost, almost running, her scarf and clothes conspiring in the shadow of the buildings to conceal her almost completely. We come to a door way and when I enter at first I cannot see. There is a smell of death and metal. I cannot decide if I am in a home or the halls of a sort of hospital, not as I know it, but there is a long dark hall and I feel if not see many rooms. I feel other midwives, and also I don't and then we are in the room and my eyes have adjusted, just, and there is a mess. Blood and sweat and tears and the echo of pain to great to bear drench the air. A metalic stench. The mother, thick and heavy with her body's outpourings, past screams that have racked her body, and her hallow moans are all the worse for their subdued volume. A liquid is given, brought I assume by my dark eyed self but it is not she who holds it to her lips. Her entire focus is elsewhere. The babe stuck and dead.  

I watch her a long time. I think she wants me to know what it took. The physicality, her whole body wrenching from the woman's now limp one the the dead babe. Every thing she had. And more. And the numbness necessary. A resigned determination. Or a determinded resignation. She does not know if the mother will live, and in this very moment, in a certain way, she does not care, and the babe is too long dead. But she must pull it free. All she knows is that she must. And then it is done. There is a chaos in the room but we are removed from it all. No one looks at her. No one looks at the baby. No one looks at us. Too many dead babies.  

We are in the forest. A very small clearing created from the felling of one tree on whose stump rests something important. Show me, and she does, but it comes slowly. There are bones. For a long time all I see is the bones. As she moves them I understand she has collected them. Here is the skeleton of a rabbit. A deer. At first I do not understand. Teach me. She carefully aranges each bone to form the skeleton of the creature it once was. But one bone, one bone she takes from the baby. One bone she replaces. And then she breathes on the bones. She breathes the breath the babe never took. She breathes it into the rabbit bones until they breathe themselves. The rabbit lives, and the child lives in the rabbit. In the deer, in the birds of the forest. She is calm. She is sad but she knows what to do.  

She is old. She is so old. She is bitter. So bitter. I shake with her rage and she tastes like poison, like bile, yellow, green, black. The front of my body rots from it. And I ask her why. And she shows me. There is blood. There is blood. And there are limbs. Pieces, pieces, pieces of them. Mothers, daughters, sisters, midwives. They are hacked. They are hacked. They are hacked. And their blood pools and she is held. She is held by hard rough hands and arms, it takes many to hold her. There is an arm thick with muscle with soft blonde hairs. But they make her watch. They make her watch what she has done. They tell her this is her fault. The blood. The faces. The pieces. What do they call her? Witch. 

And it shivers though our spine. And it shivers through our time. I have to fly above it to understand what cannot be understood. But she is held in place. All she can see are those she has killed. She is old again and she coughs up the binding like stale phlegm. I will not help. I will never help again. What I know her to say is, I will not love. I will not heal. I will not love again. She binds her love and her healing gifts. I go to her. With my heart I see her. With my heart I understand. And I love her. I forgive her. And I tell her we are free. 

Our soul family comes, her sister midwives, and we are shocked, because they welcome her, they love her with open arms, here are her sisters who died, whose deaths we feel responsible for. But they do not ask us to hold this pain. They ask us to let ourselves be forgiven. And they become light like balloons, light like feathers, and she is rabbit, she is deer and she bounds into the forest. I cry for us because we are welcomed. We are welcomed home. We are welcomed back into love.  

I am as heavy as she is light. The daughter comes to me. I see my binding, it is arms. It is hands wraped around my torso. It is metal shackles on my ankles. The daughter comes to me and she hands me a scythe, the same one, and I shudder, but I hack away the hands that bind, and when they fall I slice smoothly through the metal on my ankles, the chain crumbles into dust. But the real work is the poison. The daughter puts her mouth to mine and she sucks the poison. She sucks and she sucks and she is serpent and woman and she sucks and she sucks. And she is done. Except there is something left. I spit out the last bit of bitterness.   

We are free. 

And I, I am safe to love again."  

.........

Deer Julia,I have felt profoundly this releasing. I am feeling more whole and more held in this life. And I can see today swan and in her gentle permeance. Gliding on the rivers of my journey. I have called in my sisters when I have felt my need, and they have come. And I feel them, all the women who have chosen to love me in this life. All the women who have chosen to love me in many lives. And I am releasing my shame. And in allowing myself to receive this love, allowing myself to be part of this cycle, allowing myself to love, I am coming to the freedom to be more and more alone. More all-one. Asha, 2014

Thank you Asha for sharing your heart and your story, oceans of love for the gentle holding of your beautiful medicine again, love Julia x

Swan Blessing with Julia

heart alchemy - healing the lineage

Stacia Napierkowska

Today I am creating a bespoke medicine doll for a seeker who wishes her doll to hold the spirit of Avalon. This morning I began gathering ferns and moss and oak leaves from a tree nearby. I will place an acorn in her hands - perhaps in a basket. I did a final walk to see what treasures were on the ground waiting for this doll and as I lay them out I began to feel what resonated for the doll and thought this is like alchemy, it is always a delicate balance of different plant and animal medicine. Some medicine feels distinctly feminine or masculine.

As I was laying out plants and feathers I received an email with the gift of the photo above of Stacia Napierkowska. The woman who sent it to me was in need of a session to heal the wound story of the lineage of women in her family. She remarked on how similar the photo felt to the card The Fferyllt representing the archetype Temperance in the Druidcraft Tarot. The Fferyllt were the Druid alchemists - creating the Sacred Marriage of balance between the Sacred Feminine and Masculine. We see this work here in the element of Water (in the cauldron) representing the Feminine and the Fire below as the Masculine. 

This healing of the Sacred Union is such important work for us now. These wounds may come from your own experiences in this lifetime, from the lineage wound in your birth family, the collective unconscious or carried over from past lives. This heart alchemy will not only be a benefit to ourselves but also to the lineage of children to come and the ones who came before us. Ancestral healing teaches us that we are all linked - when one hurts, we all hurt - when one heals, we all feel the benefit of that release. To do this healing work for your lineage, family and community is a great gift. Sending love to all those finding the delicate balance of heart alchemy today.

Swan Blessing: Return of the Medicine Women - Healing & Blessing the Ancestral Lineage at Seven Sisters Festival

Druidcraft Tarot

the wild wisdom of death and dying

Hello everyone, on the New Moon last friday, we met with Rainbowalker to consciously open the dreaming well for Guardians of the Threshold. In this circle we will be sharing practical information on how to care for loved ones during the shamanic threshold death and dying. You will also have the space to share your own stories and wisdom, together we can bring light back to an area of our lives that is so beautiful and natural but has been shrouded in fear and taboo.  

Not too long ago this wisdom was a part of ancestral wisdom or 'granny wisdom' as I call it. There would have been someone in the family that was called on whenever a family or community member was nearing the threshold of death. They would have come to your home and gently consoled the family and made the dying as comfortable as they could be. Most importantly they brought peace and solace to the dying, often just by being a calm and gentle presence in the room and held their hand as they made the Great Journey. And this wisdom would have been passed to a child who perhaps at a young age began to accompany the granny in her work and showed a natural ease and knowing with this medicine. 

This is very specific medicine that may not call to many of you, but if you are feeling drawn to know more or if you are already making the journey with a loved one in your family, we encourage you to get in touch. For too long this natural process has been surrounded by fear and just as it is important to have a conscious life, it is important to have a conscious death.  When we lose our fear of death we can begin to truly live.

Click here to register for Guardians of the Threshold

Hair Like Seaweed - Lucy Hardie

Mary by Lucy Hardie
Ink on cotton paper  2012

I am looking forward to meeting artist, Lucy Hardie. I was introduced to Lucy's artwork by my best friend last year and I was awestruck at the intricacy and detail of her drawings and also the mysterious potency in the eyes of many of her characters. I am also drawn to her themes of death, transformation and rebirth. The artwork above, Mary, particularly intrigued me, I could sense so many layers, so many stories... Today Lucy shared the story behind this bewitching image and now I am even more eager to sit down and talk with her about the ancestral medicine carried in her lineage. 

"This piece was inspired by my great grandmother, Louisa 'Mary' Dundas, who worked as a Medium in London in the early 1900's. A story that has been passed down through my mother's side is that my grandmother once walked in to the room when Mary was holding a séance and saw a person levitating. Another story is that when Mary saw a portrait that Hungarian artist, Philip Alexius de László had painted of her, she said he'd made her hair look like seaweed.

I used these stories in forming the composition. The poppies in her hair were included as my way of honouring her memory, and more broadly, as symbols of life after death, and awakening. While this image was inspired by an individual who I share a personal relationship with, I wanted to capture in her a sense of what exists in all of us, to evoke a deeper experience of who we are beyond our stories as separate self identities."

Limited edition giclée prints of Mary are available for purchase at Salt Contemporary Art, Queenscliff, Victoria, as part of Lucy Hardie's show, on now until Nov 24. Open Friday - Monday 11am - 5pm and Tuesday and Wednesday by appointment.
Sales inquiries: info@salt-art.com.au or (03) 5258 3988