To Love a Witch

I sat on a yellow chair at the dining table, inching ever closer to the window so the bright sunlight could  set my leg to warm tingling for as long as possible as it arched overhead, sipping on my tea that said this.

I was grounding in after a morning of multidimensional work - taking the energetic temperature of what the planet was asking me to broadcast out for this month's Full Moon intentions, doing some manifestation work for friends, and just having finished an Intuitive Healing Reading.

A book sat open before me on the table, my eyes dancing over the pages, nibbling on the easy prose. I love to do heavy duty research and immerse myself in ancient esoteric scripture as well as modern scientific academia, but every now and then, you need a good novel to just be human and enjoy that experience as much as the weightier stuff.

The book I was reading today was all about a natural born "witch" who, among other things, fell in love with someone she met in her ancestral land of Ireland.

The line that this man said about her being a magical person stopped me in my tracks and had me open my computer, log in, and type up this blog entry. What I read was as follows:

"Because it's there. It is. And I'd like to know one single bloody man," he continued with some heat, "who wouldn't give it some considerable thought."

I sat still for a moment, my eyes'  dancing pace down the page stopped cold. I'm a fast reader, and for me, books are more delicious snacks or yummy meals than long undertakings.
But I was stumped. I felt the truth of what he said resonate in my being. And I remembered how often I'd felt this energy come from people who could love me, who perhaps did love me, but who feared me more, because of something I was born with.

Love can't survive a fear like that. Especially not budding, new love. Even when one has been "warned" about the unexplainable nature of happenings around people like us, it is different when sh*t gets weird with you standing there.

And why, I must add, is natural magic anything to be WARNED about in the first place?

Part of being human is being magical, intuitive, empathic, and conscious of energetic lines running through the world around us.

Mothers can hear the slightest sounds their babies make down the hall. A "mother's hearing" is more often intuition than auditory sensitivity.
I'm sure you reading this, no matter whether or not you think of yourself as magical or intuitive, have thought of a long lost friend before only to have her or him call you in the near future.

When people we love hurt, we feel it. When people we love triumph, we feel that too, often before the phone rings.

But when there are people who have a stronger attunement to such things innately, does our culture treat them like natural mathematicians or musical prodigies?

When a child can call up the winds, talk to animals, or even do something more intense like make an object glow or float (yes, I have seen it), what is the response?

Sadly, it is all too often
Fear.

"Don't bring trouble."
"Don't show anyone you can do it."
"That is demonism."
"It can be dangerous."

Well, so can driving a car or wielding a knife for dinner, but the keys and knives aren't all locked in a vault deep in our subconscious minds.

We learn to use those more mundane parts of existence that can be seen as dangerous, not hide and starve them.

Back to the point of this blog entry -
So many times over my life I've had to have the "I'm not like other girls" chat with potential suitors.

Sometimes this freaked them out right in the beginning and that was that.

Sometimes they laughed it off until they saw something odd happen, and then they vanished.

Every now and then someone would act interested and even fall in love with me seemingly because of the refreshing quality of my magic, only to eventually get overwhelmed and see me as something frightening.

I'll never forget the phone call with a college boyfriend who told his roommates about that conversation we'd just had and later said to me,
"They said I'd better be careful not to make you mad, because you're a witch."
We both laughed.
"….you're not a witch, are you?"

What could I say? Clearly when he said the word "witch," this image is what he was picturing.

In my world, being what I am (which I don't ordinarily call "witch," but which does fit the description if the true one is used, not the fear-mongering one left over from mass hysteria driven by patriarchal mob mentality afraid of the power of the female) this is what I see when I think about how to describe the gifts I was born with and have never been able to ignore with much success.

Luckily for all of us, we are coming into a new paradigm of belief where the less scientifically explainable side of life is no longer cause to board up your windows for fear of rocks or stay inside at night for fear of pitchforks or burning effigies.

Nowadays, people are understanding that magic is something that we ALL have. And whether or not we choose to use it can be a similar decision as whether or not we choose to learn to play the piano - pianists are not better than those who can't read music or plunk out tunes.

It is just a different specialization.

When I think about what it must be like for someone who has never thought about magic being actually, literally real to come into a conversation with someone like me who not only believes it, but uses its principles daily to make the world a more amazing place in whatever ways I possibly can, from energy healing to imbuing spaces with sacred symbols for activation and harmonic alignment, I get that it can be scary or daunting.

Everything new is a challenge.
Will we accept that which is different?
Will we be tyrants all over again?

And for those of us who are consciously evolving in this way, will we, in turn, be the tyrants, judging those who do not choose to focus on this specialization as something "lesser?"
Yes, that happens, and no, it isn't okay.

It takes all types to live and love on our beautiful planet.

We are here for the rainbows, after all.

Rewriting the Empath

            This morning I do feel slightly different. I feel as if I am pushing through a transition, one that is difficult to describe but that is also giving way before me, slowly but surely, unveiling a new way of living, of being, of thinking, feeling, and experiencing the world. And the world itself is changing too, as well as my place in it.

            I used to wonder if I could hold the responsibility and charge that I could feel headed toward me. I think that this was an unconscious fear – one that I never quite let arise to the surface of my thoughts, but that only bubbled and swirled deep within. Now, I feel confident, from experimenting (and mostly seeing how frustrated interactions are when I DO “play small” and people assume me to be less than I am) that I can in fact complete my next mission. I test it from time to time, allowing the thought forms in any given area – a grocery store, a restaurant, a city square – to merge together into one flavor of varied, yet unified thoughts and feeling. In my olden days, this “noise” deafened and confused me. I remember afternoons spent lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, drifting in and out of consciousness with a pain that no one around me understood, all as a result of simply spending a few hours in a crowded place. Now I can name that feeling. Empathic overload. The lines are too stretched, and rubbed raw by the fears, worries, rage, and disappointments of others. If everyone went around swimming in gratitude and enjoyment, the backlash wouldn’t be a backlash at all. But historically, we haven’t reached that place quite yet.

            In trying to describe what this feels like, I often reference radio static. Because I’ve devoted my life to it over past years, my intuition and “reading” ability has increased to the point where I could potentially pick anyone in any crowd and give you a low-down on their situation, and their feelings about life  - their “flavor,” so to speak. Sometimes I practice this ability in traffic by reading the person driving a car before I can see them, and then once they are visible to me, checking for accuracy by using visual cues and personality assessments the way they are taught in conventional psychology to see whether or not I was right when I received my impressions. At this point, my accuracy is pretty much 100%. Great. So those degrees were good for something at least. J

            Before I could control this, as I said, it was as if there was static all around me, all the time. Wait, who am I kidding – there is STILL static around me all the time. But it isn’t verbal, as in hearing a running stream of consciousness the way movies portray this type of thing. Rather, the static is made up of emotion. Of fears, judgments, worries, addictions, envies. This is because most people walk around in this state most of the time. And since it is as if I have no skin in this matter, and I can just feel what someone else is feeling, especially when I am in an enclosed space with them (don’t even get me started on conferences,) if there are people around I always feel a blurry jumble of subjective life experience that isn’t mine.

            This can be crippling. Historically, it was for me and it still is for many, many people. And I, too, have to work around this – I had to cut a day of errands short last week here in Portland, explaining to my father (one of the people I’m visiting here) that I was brushing up against empathic overload. We were headed into a coffee shop and I balked.

            “I just don’t think I can be in a small room filled with people right now,” I told him, my eyes filming over with unshed tears.

            He startled and looked more closely at me, and then agreed that the coffee stop would be canceled.

            Over the next few moments I explained to him how it’s basically just in my code to not only feel things, but to cleanse them with my aura –

            “I’m like a walking Brita filter. For emotion, and karma, and people’s journeys.”

            Which makes me great at my job, but hinders me at, you know, life.

            However.

            Now, I am reaching this new state where I am finally VISCERALLY FEELING what the other side of the empathic spectrum is.

            Put simply, it’s this:

    Remain in your awesomeness and everyone else will have no choice but to come too.

            A common misperception is that empaths need to change those around them in order to thrive.

            Nope.

            All you have to do is HOLD YOUR CORE VIBRATION, focusing on your breath, on your movement, on the easy smile on your face and how it is sending soothing chemical triggers to your brain and body, and choosing to mentally focus purely on the game – on the sensation of downloading in here, into this very intricate role playing hologram, and rocking your Avatar in your own specific, unique ways.

            In my experience, this is only half of it. I’m pressing up against the barrier of the next phase of my mission – one that will be more challenging than others, but also almost certainly will make all other rewards I’ve gotten on all levels pale in comparison.

            About a year and a half ago,  when my guides were adjusting and tweaking EVERY second of my life down to the way my foot hit the pavement and the angle to which I held my head (I’m not kidding,) I had a moment when I felt completely fed up and exhausted.

            “Come on. I need a freaking carrot here. Show me what I’m working towards.”

            And I did that familiar whoosh through time and space meditatively, until I was standing on a stage in front of a stadium full of people. I knew that this wasn’t the present “me” because although I was technically in what appeared to be the same body, I was SO much stronger – my meridians were lined with steel basically, flowing shining energy through more quickly than I’d ever experienced. My inner state was calm, happy, languid, and completely focused. I was speaking to the assembled group, and I had no clue what I was saying, even in the moment. This was because what I and everyone else were experiencing had nothing to do with English. I was interacting, verbally and energetically, with the complex, living, moving, fractal mass of consciousness floating in the middle of the stadium, made up of the combined thoughts, feelings, emotions, potentials, and gifts of each person there. It appeared to 3D eyes that I was speaking and that was it, but both I, and everyone there, could feel the truth. There was a massive healing and activation going on – and I wasn’t directing it, I had simply refined my form and structure enough to be a conduit for Divine source energy, that could pour through me, splash right into that beautiful behemoth mass of combined focus and consciousness, and then filter down through unique and living lines to each person seated before me, shifting and altering to give them exactly what they need.

            That is what I am training for, these long years.

            Well, one of the things.

            And it sounds pretty freaking fun, to be quite honest. I’ll take it.

            My guides assured me a few days ago that I’m closer now to my perfect potential reality than I ever have been before. I believe that. And while this current nomadic life certainly has its challenges (many of them having to do with breaking from ingrained cultural paradigms,) I won’t lie – it’s also pretty awesome.

Gargoyles

This one definitely goes under the category of "too odd to have made up."

This morning at about 2:45am, I found myself drifting in and out of sleep in the usual wee-hour-of-the-morning way. When I gently opened my eyes, I was surprised to see Lillithia, my beautiful little cat, perched above me and slightly to my right, sitting and leaning her head down in the graceful way cats do when they're checking something out.

Then I realized that Lill was asleep next to my pillow, and when I looked back at the shadow, it had transformed into the top part of a chair sitting next to where I was sleeping. 

Hmm. The chair looked nothing like it just had a moment ago... Oh well.

I closed my eyes to drift some more, and the next time I opened them, this time looking toward the opposite wall of my room, I saw another small (about a foot and a half tall, seated) somewhat feline shadowy being looking at me. I blinked hard and this time the shadow transformed into another benign object.

Hmm. I could have sworn that was just something else...

I still didn't think much of it (such is the yummy emotional cloak of sleepiness) until I began to do some multidimensional work. I just spent a decent chunk of time in Sedona, most definitely on assignment, both healing and activating aspects of my own consciousness stream and assisting others to do the same. I found myself being pulled back there now, zooming astrally across the landscape toward the red rocks, then accompanying some Sedonian friends deep into the mountains, flipping energetic switches and powering up aspects of the city that have been dormant for way too long. 

To assist in this work, the portion of my consciousness that still rested in Los Angeles activated my heart chakra, swirling my torus field and reaching it upward, toward the sky. When my energy reached the ceiling, a very odd sound jerked me back from my multidimensional travels to the space where I am now sitting and typing this blog post. I slammed back into my body at the same moment as Lillithia waking with a jolt, jumping to attention next to my head, looking at the window.

We were listening to a short, shrill scream or call, repeated about three times. It was not quite animal, and definitely not human, but very close. Half a second later small feet scampered across the roof.

Hmm.

At this point, I began to remember the odd "shadows" I'd seen in my room a few minutes before and replay recent events in my mind.

What exactly was going on?

Seeing shadows or patterns morph into beings and then back into recognizable (and often abstract or otherwise non-uniform structures) is a common way to use intuition to perceive other realms. It is one of the many versions of multidimensional sight, and it is very handy when on a shamanistic journey, whether the journey is purely done within oneself through meditation, or externally situated, such as on a walk through a nature preserve or park, made with the intention to connect with multidimensional beings.

What could I have seen just now?

Well, the creature(s) had reminded me of my cat, Lillithia. And since connecting with her, she has often reminded me of a dragon - so much so, in fact, that I am mostly convinced at this point that cats actually evolved from dragons (which I believe actually existed.) Have you ever really looked into a cat's very reptilian eyes? Or watched them hunt? Scales could have become fur over millennia... 

So although that particular theory is neither here nor there, as the similarities to Lill came to my attention I also remembered last fall's visit from a very magical kindred spirit of mine, who came to stay with me for a week from her home on the East Coast and reported seeing gargoyles on the roofs of houses in my neighborhood (including mine.) 

At the time, I didn't think much of it - I had definitely felt presences outside before (and still do, especially when leaving for the gym in the still-dark pre-dawn hours) and when she mentioned gargoyles, the energy of the concept rang true. That said, I hadn't woken to one leaning over me before.

But what about the scream and the scamper? That gave me pause. Did it get freaked out by my heart energy? If so, something must be done about that - I'm not particularly into beings hanging out in my bedroom who get burned by love...

So I took a look.

I sat up into lotus pose (my preferred meditation style) and began to balance my chakras. Once I felt all open and flowy, I sat my intention origin point firmly in my heart chakra, using that impenetrable energy as a shield (just in case,) and projected my consciousness onto my roof.

Yep, sure enough, smallish shadowy beings darted around me up there, doing the energetic equivalent of sniffing me.

In that moment, I came from a place of defensive offense - if they wanted a fight, I could give them one (albeit one of the heart - a great loophole way to get things done when it comes to clearing space without tying more karmic knots around yourself and an opponent.) That said, I'd much rather parley.

The conversation we had next was not a verbal one, but rather a communication made of feelings, mental images, and impressions of somewhat nebulous ideas and intentions. This is normal when speaking to beings who aren't human.

Yes, they live here.

Yes, they were looking at me.

No, they didn't want any trouble.

In fact, although their energy was not exactly fluffy, they also weren't unfriendly. I do think that there is a potential for friendly camaraderie there.

So I left them a warm greeting and a thought of openness to a chill and mutually beneficial relationship when needed, and I descended back into my body.

There are some people who have a type of racism against certain creatures - and gargoyles fall into this category of being seen as scary and dangerous. But in my experience, the truth is a little different - these are protective beings, originally dragons in the old myths, who have been invoked for centuries to keep places and people safe. 

They don't have to be scary.

And who doesn't want a posse of badass beings who can help when needed? I'm not turning that down.

We'll see what happens....

One more thing. When searching for an image to describe what these dudes looked like, this is the most accurate one I found. (No, they weren't grimacing or snarling, the way you see many gargoyles portrayed in art...)

Happy awesomeness hunting!

(PS: I'm still working on my next book, Starseed Wilding. It'll be about fairies, DNA activation, and other generally randomly interesting stuff. Go here for more info.)

<3