Finding my path

For several years I spent my time honing my practices and learning new skills; mostly associated with shamanic witchcraft from my teachers, Bob and Gede. I began to understand my strengths and weaknesses, which aspects I preferred to work with and where I fitted in the scheme of things.

Most of my practice is devotional in that I foster relationships and work with various deity spirits. But I also found myself becoming involved with spirits of other varieties. I would delve down into the earthen chambers of passage tombs and climb up into new realms (in my trance work), and when out on the land, found myself continually drawn to communing with stone. Natural stone mostly, which to me often appears as a vision of an opening eye, in skin much like that of a reptile. The spirit of stone that I would speak to may be sleepy, may show me images that it was witness to or sensations it experienced or just blink and ignore me. I would see shapes and colours associated with the stone, which I came to learn was a representation of the stone’s vibration. And I saw serpents in the land.

Bob would give me the task of feeling into the landscape I was in and finding energy lines. Seeking them out, knowing where they were, and describing to him how they looked or felt to me. The lines would often appear as serpents of specific colours; green, being healthy, orange and red, being in need of purification or healing, were the main colours I would see. Sometimes blue, which would be much less dangerous and not need purification or healing.

One time at work, I wasn’t feeling very well and was open when I should have been closed. I felt a probe from below (the land on which my work place is situated is poisoned due to the former occupation the space was used for). I answered, felt my energy draining very quickly, and saw a spherical sinkhole open up around me absorbing my energy. I almost passed out. At the time, I didn’t realise what was happening or why, but it was a very good lesson for me and I learned to shield myself more effectively. I later came to understand that what happened was linked to what I do: my path. The energy was sick, and my energy was used to help to heal it. Of course, it needed more than I was able to give, but the understanding was the beginning for me of finding my path.

Sometime later, at a workshop during trance work, I found myself called by Mother, the spirit of an Aboriginal woman that I met some years previously. The trance experience held me for the duration of the work, and I found myself unable to let go until I was finished. Mother took me through a landscape I didn’t recognise to a cave near water. In the cave were oval shaped rocks. My task was to paint them with wavy lines, eyes, and a mouth, and set them in a circle. Around me in the workshop, energy was being raised. I found myself tapping into and pulling down that energy, using it to charge the painted stones, and to heal or purify the nearby land serpent and send the pulse of healing energy into the land.

It was only after this experience, which left me drained for several days, that I understood Mother was a land spirit and that I was being called to perform some healing work needed by the land itself. Discussing it with Bob I also began to understand that land energy healing work is something witches have always done; that it is in my blood and I have ancestral connections to working with land in this way.

The thing was – Mother is Australian Aborigine land spirit and my ancestry is from England, Scotland and Ireland. To my mind, initially at least, there were issues with the work as a result of this that I needed to resolve. It was more than the possibility that my ancestors were quite probably involved in activities that harmed Aboriginal people and this land. It was also the logistics of how to go about doing the work; how to apply it in a way that would be acceptable.

Upon my initiation from the Shamanic Apprenticeship I had undergone, I found my answer.