The role of the Priestess is to not only walk between the worlds, but to merge them together, to take the 'as above so below' truths and bring them into one, solid, grounded focus.

 

The Priestess connects to the Earth, the Underworld and the Higher Realms and lives centred in herself as she accesses these dimensions. 

 

In the beginning of my training I participated in a four week moon workshop lead by the Priestess that began my ordination process. We began with the Crone moon and the Crone Goddess, my favourite at the time. Though I was only 24 I felt more connected to my inner Crone than I did my inner Maiden, as an old Scorpio soul I craved the depth and wisdom that She carried and sought out ways to live a Crone led lifestyle. 

 

As we, my three soul sisters and Priestess Aquarius, settled in on a cold and rainy November night to begin our Crone workshop I smiled a contented smile, unlike the Maiden workshop that I expected to bring up some shit, this was a night I was prepared to just sink into.

 

Oh that lovely trickster Crone energy had my number, because right at the very beginning of that evening's work She revealed to me a key aspect to Her energy that I needed some deep healing and revealing around.

 

This revelation took part in our opening guided meditation, which began quite Zen Goddessy as I like, we listened to Aquarius's hypnotic voice and began to journey down into the depths of our watery womb, we were envisioning the colour of our inner wombs, I saw bright orange/pink light, feeling the temperature and sensation, I was sinking down into bliss, deeper and deeper, until....she began to guide us right into the centre of the womb to access our ancestral wisdom, clamp!, like that I shut down. I could still see the pinky orange and feel the warm water but I couldn't journey any deeper, I couldn't join my sisters in accessing the wisdom and what I assumed to be deeper magic of the moment.

 

When we came back into the room and connected with one another I was ripe with questions and indignation, "why in the world did I have to connect to my ancestors ?! I don't care what they have to say, I don't want guidance from them!"

 

Aquarius, never phased and always one with a mirthful twinkle in her eye, calmly explained to me the theory that the wisdom we all carry within our DNA comes from those that have walked before us, the wombs that have birthed the women in our lineage and lives in our blood.

 

Suddenly deflated I felt as though I was falling slowly from the mystical west coast land that I had moved so far away from my family of origin to, it was as though where I came from would taint me forever, no matter how far I moved away and no matter how deep my personal development work was. Regardless of my hours spent in spiritual circles, healing circles, doing deep transformative work, my lineage was still with me, embedded within the blood that was coursing through my veins and there was no escaping the marks of them in my life.

 

I had visions of my dysfunctional home flashing through my mind, visions of stories that I had heard of the older generations in my family, the alcoholism, the abuse, the dark skeletons in our closet that I am not at liberty to disclose via social media to the world, all of those dark ancient memories began to cloud around me as I sat in the midst of my sisters and my Priestess.

 

"Well my ancestors aren't wise and I don't want to connect to them, so....." I let my words linger off in a quiet mumble of defeat and defiance.

 

"Why do you think that Candise?" Aquarius asked me.

 

I began to share a bit about my history, the household that I had been raised in, the dark and humiliating memories of my childhood reluctantly coming out in quiet whispers, and then I shared about the long line of alcoholism on both sides of my family. 

 

"My family are a bunch of screw ups," I told her and the women sitting with me. I had a distant vision of old Ireland in my mind and in the distance I felt a woman from my ancestry, I saw that but I felt the stories of drunken debauchery that had plagued both sides of my family and felt that we must have been the town fools even back then.

 

"Why do you think your family drinks so much Candise?" Aquarius asked.

 

"I don't know, alcoholism is in our blood."

 

"Well what's the solution to it?" she asked me.

 

"It's a spiritual solution, the only thing that will arrest alcoholism is a spiritual solution." I informed her.

 

"So," she gently continued. "With all that we know about the patriarchy and the witch burning, about the millions of people that had to lock their magic and their personal connection to the Goddess away, deep within their psyches, can you imagine that pain, to have to sever that power and Sovereignty, do you think some of these powerful people may have drank to ease that pain?"

 

As she was talking I began to reflect on the other aspects of my family, a grandmother that was a metaphysical minister, a lady that had stopped her psychic powers from developing when they began to come to her in mediation, for fear of them. A mother that had spent her very dark and disturbed childhood with her nose stuck in spiritual books, even my maniac of a father was always studying and seeking a higher way of being via motivational teachers. On both sides of my family I had seekers and even spiritual rebels as we grew up in a very right winged bible belt and yet I was raised to believe in reincarnation and told that hell didn't exist and God was never upset with me, I didn't ever have to fear God. Perhaps beneath the shame were some powerful beings after all

 

This was all the beginning I needed to open up to the possibility that I too had wise ancestors that not only could be accessed, but that I wanted to access. I began to feel that all of the debauchery, the mistakes, the humiliations, the pain, all of the lower dimensional experiences that my ancestors had walked through had been left behind here, within my blood and the blood of my living relatives, lessons for us to transcend and elevate in consciousness, and that my ancestors were within me, all around me, waiting to teach me their medicine, to impart their wisdom now that they were free and soaring amongst the stars.

 

It's been a mysterious and slow walk for me as I have endeavoured to tap into the ancestral wisdom within me. There are very few historical records of my ancestors and I know very little beyond some stories about my great grandparents, despite this lack of concrete facts, I have felt them with me and have followed in the path that I have been guided to in order to continue elevating our bloodline.

 

Interestingly I began to keenly feel the presence of my ancestors wisdom when I became pregnant with my first child. The way that this wisdom presented itself was much different than I had imagined, rather than mysterious spirits whispering enchanting lessons to me I began to experience extreme waves of anxiety and fear, fears that weren't 'mine' and I just knew in my gut that they weren't brought here from a personal past life of mine.

 

As I spoke with my guru, she explained to me that we come here with the lessons and blessings that are carried over from our ancestors, much like in the book Celestine Prophecy, a good portion of our gifts and lessons can be traced by looking back at the gifts and lessons of our parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles and so on. She informed me that the more of the lesson 'pie' I could eat now, the less my children would have to work through. And so it was that my deepest lessons with my ancestors were not borne out of moments of sweeping inspiration, but rather moments of great darkness and fear.

 

With Samhain approaching and my personal preparations for this potent time at the forefront of my mind I am reflecting on my relationship to fear. Scorpio to the bone I have rallied for the benefits of the dark, spoke out against the bad wrap that the dark, the shadow and the hidden has received. I am a huge proponent for going into the unknown, embracing the shadow and getting to know our own darkness. I am not afraid of the dark. I am not afraid of Samhain or spirits or working in the other realms. Area's that others find spooky feel like home to me. However, it wasn't until recently that I became aware of my relationship to fear, I full on assumed it was a negative experience to be rid of as quickly as possible, simply because fear feels very scary for me. My Samhain ceremony will involve honouring the dead, speaking with the spirits of those that have gone before us, and calling upon the ancestors, the ancestors that I am now realizing have spoken to me through my fears.

 

For example, after the birth of my daughter one of my greatest fears, the kind that would have me breathless and unable to speak at times, was the idea that something outside of my control would separate the two of us. I would envision monstrous situations arising, and every time that she would cry out to me and I would respond to her my heart would ache and my blood would pound as I would imagine what would happen if one day I could not respond.

 

I utilized trauma techniques I had learnt in counselling, applied breath work, did yoga and called upon my spiritual toolkit to help me to cope with these moments of sheer panic, moments that could last days. Over the past three years, as my daughter has grown into more and more independence and her relationships with our family have deepened my fears have loosened to a large degree. However, now that I am pregnant with our second child, I feel those familiar fears creeping up again. 

 

While I was walking through the autumn foliage with my daughter last week I began to pray on the fears that were creeping up. As I prayed an old memory of a story I had been told a few times in my lifetime began to rise up into my consciousness.

 

When my grandfather was a child he lived on a farm with his parents and siblings, they were poor and had to work hard to keep the farm going. His mother, my great grandmother that I have never met, was diabetic, she was very overweight and was in a wheel chair due to her ill health and having lost a leg to diabetes. One day the boys of the family, my grandfather being one of them, had been taunting their mother, misbehaving and running away when she would try to discipline them, because they knew that she couldn't get out of her wheel chair to truly discipline them. That very evening, a social worker arrived at the farm and took my great grandmother to an old folks home, despite her young age, she lived the remainder of her long life in an old folks home. My grandfather and his siblings were placed into foster care, shortly after my great grandfather had my grandpa and two of his brothers returned, however, his other siblings were not to be seen again until my grandpa was in his 60's and my mother tracked them down.

 

This story always brought up great sorrow for my poor grandfather, he is a buddha of a man, quiet, serene and content, I couldn't imagine something so traumatizing happening to me at his age, he of course, blamed himself thinking that if they had behaved and hadn't taunted their mother the social workers wouldn't have come.

 

As this memory rose to the surface of my mind during my autumn walk I began to conceptualize the pain, the terror and the helplessness of my great grandmother. In the stories I had been told she was described with very little emotional descriptions, probably because the story was only known through the eyes of a child who was focused on their own pain. My mother told me they visited my great grandmother in the old folks home and she seemed bored, but that was it. On the walk I envisioned the terror of being removed from her home, having her children ripped away from her, having her daughters gone for life from her and never being able to return home to care for her family. Suddenly it became apparent to me that my fear of being separated from my own daughter was grounded in a wound that hadn't originated in me, it was the unprocessed pain of my great grandmother, a pain that was so deep and a memory so traumatizing that I was struck dumb with fear, a fear that was paralyzing and prevented me from digging any further into it's origin.

 

It's funny how the Goddess gets our attention when we listen, I truly believe that when we start our day in prayer and mediation and give our day to the Goddess we can assume that nothing is happening by mistake. This week a good friend of mine, (in fact one of the two other women who took that first moon phase course with me when I began my opening to the ancestors), and I were pming about The Walking Dead of all things. As we mused back and forth about the 'deeper' meaning behind the show she continued to talk about her belief that the show is about revealing societies unprocessed fears, and she shared about how powerful and important she thought fear was. It took a few times of reading her messages about fear until it really all clicked together for me. Fear is another doorway into the Underworld, the dark, the mystery, the shadow. While I have not feared being in the Underworld, one major aspect of entering it has kept me from fully uncovering what lessons lie deep within it's depths for me, my fear of fear.

 

This year as I prepare for my Samhain circle, I am choosing my great grandmother as the ancestor that I focus on, I will honour all of my ancestors, and the loss of a pregnancy that happened earlier this year, as well as a father-in-law that died suddenly, however, my focus will be working with my great grandmother and my intention is to face the fear of separation, powerlessness and false persecution that has lived within our bloodline ever since her traumatic experience occurred , for while she didn't appear to be falsely persecuted a society that didn't have enough resources to support her in her journey towards health and motherhood stole her life away from her, locked her up and forgot about her. This Samhain I will face the fear and I will dig deeper beneath the fear, to clear the energy of the pain and the heartbreak that was energetically left behind in my DNA. I have been told that when one of us heals our entire lineage behind and ahead of us heals. My blessed great grandmother is at peace in the Upperworld now, but her pain was left behind in my family's lineage, it is a pain that I carry with me and I am endeavouring to walk through it to completion.

 

Wisdom comes to me in many forms, fear was a surprising form that I had never expected. I enter Samhain with a sense of hopeful anticipation, fear has plagued me my entire life, now fear has a new meaning for me. I come from a line of traumatized family members on both sides of my family, I don't have to identify with their stories, but I can clear that energy and usher in a clearer and more free generation of beings into this realm. The fear is no longer fearful, it is an echo of the past, an ancient call for me to dig deeply into my Scorpion gifts of unearthing and transforming to rebirth beauty and freedom into the world through my bloodline. That is powerful hope for me.

 

When Samhain dawns upon us this year I pray that those of us who hear the call open wide and listen to the whispers of their ancestors, not only to the higher knowledge that they have access to in the realms that they now inhabit, but also to the ghosts of the unprocessed pain that was left behind in our blood. If we can all learn to walk into this pain, to frame these ancient battle wounds within our blood as initiations into a freer and lighter way of being in the world we can begin to birth the New Earth that has been foretold to be on it's way.

 

Blessed Samhain to you and your beloveds, may the ancestors be honoured, may they be heard and may we all walk through the darkness into a new dawn as strong, free, bold butterflies of transformation.

 

Grace Be With You,

Priestess of Grace,

Candise Soaring Butterfly

 
 
 
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