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Feathered Blessings

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The peach coloured feathers you see above were sent to me this week from our friend and animal communicator, Kye Wunjo Crow from her Camel Sanctuary in NSW - Major Mitchell Cockatoo feathers. I have only ever seen photographs of these beautiful birds, they are not visitors to Sherbrooke Forest. As I was opening Kye's package, I looked down and to my right I saw a flash of yellow. It was a feather from a the comb of a White Cockatoo - a beautiful quiff! Another feather I have never found before now. Rare and beautiful treasures waiting for the right medicine doll.

The package from Kye also contained a beautiful rainbow wrap hand-dyed and created by Kye. Have a look at the rest of her rainbow treasures here. Blessings and graceful journeys Kye x

We have moved - thanks for your patience!

We are still without Internet yet in our new nest in Sherbrooke Forest so I have not been able to post over the last week. We have settled in & it is beautiful. We look forward to welcoming you into the forest for your Swan Blessing ancestral medicine sessions. We are taking bookings by phone so until we are web weavers again please get in touch to book sessions or to request a doll by ringing: 0421249183 or leaving a message on our Facebook page. Hopefully all will be back to normal by the end of the week.

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Guardians of the Threshold - Death and Dying

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Hello everyone our Death and Dying wisdom circle: Guardians of the Threshold is now completely full. For all those joining us we will meet on New Moon Saturday 1st March 1-5pm at Kumbada Studio. I will send out a preparation email tonight to all participants. We are looking forward to welcoming you to this beautiful and sacred work. 

For those who have missed out on a place, we will be holding a second workshop Rites of Passage in May and will have more details soon - get in touch if you would like to be included in this circle.

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Dreaming back the Outcast - Singing Home the Wolf Sister

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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

Return of the Medicine Women - encaustic 2014
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Swan Blessing Past Life Story - Unbinding Plant Wisdom

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Offering from the Amazon Shuar Series by Susan Thompson

Today I share again with you the moving Swan Blessing experienced by our dear sister, Nicole Ahava, doll enchantress and plant medicine woman. These are not titles that Nicole gives herself but this is what I see and feel around her so strongly. I will always be grateful to Nicole for awakening my own ancestral memory of shamanic doll-making and plant medicine. It is a path that once re-awakened, is hard to ignore!

We both knew that there was a memory with Nicole of still needing to hide and work in secret. This is something that many of us feel now and it can be very hard to reconcile with only the rational mind. I hope Nicole's story helps all of those feeling this fear to come out of the darkness and share your wise medicine with us again.

I am walking barefoot through a familiar forest. I come upon the well. I look into the deep pool and see her. She is a tribal woman, with long dark hair and dark eyes. She takes my hand and we cross the threshold, I am there. It is dark, the land is barren.  She dances around a fire. I see so much pain inside her. This is a dance of mourning. Her face is full of sorrow as she stomps and writhers around the fire. 

She shows me her journey. I see her wondering naked on the bare earth. She is a very small child. There has been a great upheaval and her family has left her behind. She is found by a wise old woman who takes her in, raising her and teaching her wisdom. They walk the earth together. This is where she learns her medicine. Later she is a grown woman she takes me to her village. We are in front of her mud hut with her six children. They are so beautiful. They have very little but there is so much love. She shows me her work with plants making medicine.    

There has been great famine, all the people in her village have been driven away from their lands. They now live on barren land, fighting starvation and illness. Her husband has gone to a far away land to work.  The women from the village cover their heads as they go to her for medicine and scurry away quickly with her brew hidden in their robes back to their huts. She is living in fear and isolation. She shows me how they come, soldiers, tearing her children out of her arms. They are taking them away, she pleads with them desperately, she vows never to use her medicine again, but they take them all away.   

Finally I see her lying on the bare earth, she is old and lonely, overwhelmed with grief. She lets her body go and is instantly free.
I am back in the forest at the water’s edge we are facing each other. I honour her. I understand why she made that vow. She smiles at me. She knows why we are here. It is time to let it go. We hold each other with deep love and she transforms into light she is surrounded and embraced by her family, her children, her husband, the wise old lady and her mother they are all free. 

I am standing before the daughter of the well bound heavily. Together we cut the bindings and instantly I feel myself expand, I am free. She takes me into her sacred well, all the daughters are there. I am floating in the sacred well. The daughters are washing away all that burdens my soul. I am cleansed, pure, light and free. 

The first time I got an email from Sacred Familiar about the swan blessing I knew it was something that I just had to do. I put it aside for a while but the swan medicine continued to call me. It is a very sacred and profound blessing. In this life I was born a healer. As a child I would give healing to sick animals, I would lay in my bed at night and send healing to people. I was cut off from my medicine after receiving one of my vaccinations and very quickly it was forgotten. Years later when I began to explore my own healing I became a Reiki master and it all came back to me, but I would find that every time I shared my medicine the energy would get stuck with me or my children would get sick. I could not share my medicine because I was afraid that it would harm my children. 

The swan medicine really is very gentle as she continues to unfold and expand in my life. There have been many changes I have been able to share freely without fear, I feel as though a channel has been cleared from which I am free to connect and receive more clearly and my medicine is changing, becoming more potent. Julia really is a divine magical being.  I extend my deepest gratitude for these beautiful blessings to you Julia beautiful sister. Thank you. 

Nicole 2013

Thank you precious sister for your healing story. I believe it is a beautiful gift and medicine that Nicole holds in her gentle soul. Nicole will be holding her Spirit Doll Workshop at Seven Sisters Festival next month. When she came for her Swan Blessing I saw that Nicole is a powerful healer and one of her strongest gifts is working with Plant Medicine to create 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. For those who wish to look into purchasing one of Nicole's healing dolls or receive a distant healing session from Dream Empire, you can find her here and on Etsy.

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Swan Blessing - Religious Vows of the Seer and Mystic

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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)
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Asha's Swan Blessing Story - BoneWoman

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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

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forest cuties saved from the fires

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Baby Ringtail Possums

The recent fires in Victoria have been catastrophic for many communities. My heart goes out to all those who have experienced loss. Yesterday it finally rained! Here are some forest cuties who are currently being looked after by local wildlife carer, Annie - she is just one of the hundreds of volunteers who give their time and love to orphaned animals before they can return to the wild.

Can you see the huge difference between the Brushtail Possum and the Ringtail Possum? I think the baby Brushtails look so much like kangaroo joeys. Annie, told us they are also completely different creatures in personality and behaviour. Thank you to all of the FIre crews and volunteers who have helped so many in the last 3 weeks.

If you can donate, we support the amazing Colleen Wood and her volunteers at Southern Ash Wildlife Shelter - you can sponsor you very own koala until they are well enough to return to the forest.

possum smooches x
Baby Brushtail Possum