Healing

On Thursday August 25^th, 2011 I had my first major panic attack.  I have covered the day and most if it’s events in a little crazy, just like me.  I had a massive panic attack, that made me regress me to a younger age, in fact I went so far back I ended up thinking I was in one of my past lives.  I have spoke of this day with some breath, but I have not discussed, so far, what happened to me after wards, nor have I discussed the spiritual aspects of this event.

For two weeks after I came home I had the worst headache of my life.  No medication could touch it.  I found it difficult to pray or to journey.  Now I have been journeying for a long time.  To journey, for me, means I put myself in a semi-trance state and go to visit the other side, where my dead and my animals are.  I have been doing this for at least as long as I have defined myself as Pagan, although my techniques have changed over the years.  It is often something I do in times of stress.  It gives me great comfort.

This is totally my UPG.  I tuck myself in bed, because I usually go to sleep at some point during the journey.  It is rare that I come back all the way back across to the land of the living.  The way I journey is, in my mind I stand on my front porch and look down at my outside altar, which is next to a great, big, old, tall Pine tree.  I call for Bifrost, the rainbow bridge, and Heimdall who controls it.  He comes to me on what like a wooden bridge painted a rainbow of colors, on both the walk way and the rails.  He ties up to the porch and I step on.  He is behind a great big, tall, desk with a wooden wheel attached to it, which is always on my left as I step on.  He greats me with a hug and sometimes a kiss and asks where I am going.  I tell him Holda’s Gardens, this is what I have come to call her lands over the years as I have never known the proper name for it.  Heimdall then asks for an offering.  I usually give him what I have had to eat that evening with a glass of sweet tea.  He seems to really like my tea.  It always makes him smile.  He thanks me and he directs the bridge, which acts a bit more like a boat, over the swirling and misty air. 

We soon come to the gate to Holda’s Gardens.  I see it as black wrought iron, filigreed, arch with a half doggie door.  Heimdal ties up the bridge to two statues or columns on either side of the bridge.  I don’t know it’s always kind of misty.  I open the door and go in.  Once I am safely on the other side, he takes off and tells me to call for him when I am ready to leave.  I enter what is essentially Holda’s yard.  Weather it is the front yard or the back I don’t know.  On the other side I find a sandy dirt road, that always feels good under my bare feet.  To the right is Holda’s House, to the left a line of trees that separates the house from the pond.  There is now a bench, in front of the trees, for me.  I often sit under these trees, on the ground with Punka in my lap looking out over the pond.  I do this especially when I’ve had  a bad day.  The sandy road stretches on past Holda’s mill, into the trees, and beyond to the pastures where my goats are.  I usually don’t go down that far.  My guess is this is where the livestock lives.  That area is very green and hilly, like at the base of a mountain or in a valley.

From the spot where I stand I can call any of my deceased animals to me.  It may take them a minute to come to me, as they have to quit what they are doing first.  I often see Precious the first, zoom past me on her wings, chasing the bunny, sometimes it is the other way around.  She informs me the chase is the important thing, not the catching.  So they take turns. 

Holda is almost always the first to greet me, wearing her white dress and her blue apron.  I almost always see her in her grandmotherly form, about age 50 or 60 I would guess.  Then Momma Muriel and Oma come out. Sometimes Father Frey is there as well.  It just all seems to depend on what I need. I can never really see their faces.  I think it is just too much for my human brain to process.  Sometimes we all go into the kitchen and I am fed some type of apple dessert, hot cider or coffee.  I know there is a rule about not eating in the other worlds, but I do not wish to offend her.  When I have refused to eat in the past she gets annoyed with me and says, “EAT!”  I am often surprised she does not slap me in the back of the head when I do this.  It is there I will catch them up on what I am doing and why I have come to visit: occasionally it is to cross a dead animal’s spirit over, sometimes I have a question, sometimes it is to ask for healing for a friend,  or I’ve had a bad day or I just miss them so much. 

Now if all this sounds bizarre or made up to you, I’m sorry.  It is simply how I experience the divine, and it works for me.  All this spiritual healing is about to get a little stranger.

Not long after I had been hospitalized for my first panic attack, Holda came to me in a dream and said, “I don’t want you to journey, work magic, or even pray until after your initiation.”  I was a bit confused, but I agreed to do as I was told.  Every time I tried to do any of this, it just made the headaches worse.  I would do just about anything to make the pain stop.  Holda then took me to a women, in a temple with lots of herbs hanging around her.  I don’t know who she was.  My guess is either Eir or Brigid.   

I asked, “Where we were going.” 

She said, “I am taking you to be healed.”

“Why can’t you heal me?” I asked

She told me she did not do this type of healing, or that I need healing she could not do.  I don’t remember. 

I then asked, “Who is she?”

“She is my sister,” is all she would reply.  I am still a bit befuddled.  As far as we know Holda has no sisters. It is my guess that she used this title to apply to another Goddess.

Within a few days, whenever I closed my eyes, I began to see another Goddess as if she was standing before me.  She had coal black hair, pale skin and red painted on lips.  She would take me to a Greek or Roman style temple.  She asked me to lay down on a stone platform like bed and roll on my right side.  She would then take a large bowl of water and pour it threw my left temple, and into my brain.  I kid you not, from my right temple would pour out snakes.  As she did this technique my headache would lessen, and I would find some relief.  For a long time I thought the snakes were symbols of my illness.  I wonder now if they instruments of her healing.  This went on for several weeks.

Towards the end I asked what her name was.  She told me her name was Danube, and that she was the Goddess of rivers.  I thought, “Oh I will have to look that up.”  She looked at me and said, “you will not find me,” and she was right.  I have yet to identify her.  I have yet to meet anyone who knows who she is. 

I went to two of my elders, in the community, in between being hospitalized and being initiated.  My HP and I were trying to decide if I should still be initiated given my then mental health status.  I believed Holda was telling me yes.  I had hoped a tarot card or rune reading would give me confirmation of that.  I also went to them to ask if they had any idea what had happened to me, and to see if they knew who this mystery goddess was.  They told me they did not know who the Goddess was, but that if she was helping me I should continue to work with her.  I don’t remember what the cards and runes said.  They brought out a Tibetan singing bowl to get a reading on my chakras.  I had a blockage in my 1^st and 2^nd, that I was not terribly surprised at. I am infertile after all.   I was also having a blockage in my crown chakra, something I had never had a problem with.  I wonder now if part of the headaches, was having all that energy stopped.  One of the elders did tell me, that it was not unusual, for pagans to have some type of mental break or psychotic event prior to their first initiation. 

Apparently after I left, one of the elders sent a nasty email to my HP, saying she should never consider initiating someone in my mental state.  Yeh she was not pleased with me about that one.  I did not know, until years later, that she did not like them.  Although we were never sworn to secrecy about anything in the coven, she did not like me talking about such matters with outsiders.  We decided to do the initiation anyways. 

On September 9^th, 2011 I was initiated as a witch into my HP’s coven.  I will only speak to you of one part that occurred during that ritual.  I consider the rest too sacred. At one point I was laid on the ground and covered with a black sheet.  When I arose I felt better than I had in weeks.  My headaches were gone.  There were pictures taken of that night, long since lost to me.  But in the one of me lying on the ground, you can see tons of orbs.  Upon closer inspection you could see a sickle with 13 different points.  The sickle is one of Holda’s holy symbols.   There could be no doubt that the initiation was her wish. 

Even though in a few years time I would be asked to leave the HP’s coven, I have never been sorry I was initiated.  I have never been sorry that I spent my time with them.  I am honored to have learned under the HP. 

Ilsa