The burning times & healing the wounds...

Posted by Laurie Hadden-Deering on

The Witches Revival, Lancaster.On Tuesday evening during our monthly women's circle, I guided a womb yoga class & it was the last step in my training as a womb yoga practitioner. I filmed the 40 minute class, as was needed to receive my certificate, or at least I thought I had, to find I hadn't recorded any of it.
I managed to get the last 5 minutes of the class and the women who attended very kindly did write ups of their experiences.
I sent what I had to my teacher & yesterday I received the news that I HAVE PASSED.
This news came to me after I returned home from a trip to Lancaster for The Witches Revival Weekend. For those of you who haven't heard of The Witches Revival, I'll explain a little about it here...
Put together by 4 truly wonderful women who also offered The Medicine Spoon Collective around 2 years ago. Their offerings are to allow us to heal the collective wound caused from the witch trials.
You may be thinking that the witch trials don't particularly effect you ... But I am pretty confident in telling you that they absolutely do.
If you've ever felt like you can't use your voice, if you've ever felt like you need to make yourself smaller to be accepted, if you have felt jealous of another woman, you've spoken badly of another woman, you've felt women are hard work and it's easier to get along with men... These are just some of the symptoms of the witch wound.
You see, these women were healers, birth keepers, medicine women, sisters, daughters, mother's & wives, they had dreams, they had people they loved.
                                 THEY WERE INNOCENT WOMEN.
Once accused, they'd be imprisoned, tortured! Broken fingers, broken noses... They'd come out to the jeering crowds, fingers crooked, noses crooked, hunched in pain (sound familiar to the witch image you see today?) And they'd be hung, drowned or burned as people stood by and watched...
These women were no different from us. It is our duty to remember them and to heal this wound so that we can heal our past and our future blood lines.
Why have I tied this information in with the information on my yoga qualification you may be wondering?
Well, that would be because, we are doing the work.
When you step into the circle and open your heart, when you look each woman in the eye and see her as she tells her story, when you support, offer words of love , when you laugh with her and cry with her...
You are healing.
When you see another woman asking for help and you offer it to her...
You are healing.
When you cheer another woman on and encourage her success in bettering her own life instead of feeling jealousy or bitterness...
You are healing.
Without this community of women, I don't think I would have survived the heartache I was put through 9 months ago.
I never would have had the confidence to go for these courses and better myself.
I never would have taken the step to find a space of my own.
These women have allowed me to see in myself what I see in each of you and I am forever grateful to you each and every one.
I cannot express how truly honoured I am to walk this path with such powerful women.
We are healing together & it's not easy to do this work, in fact far from it.
Shits about to get harder, tougher, uglier. You're going to be faced head on with every wound. It'll rip through you like an Earthquake and leave you gasping for breath.
You will recognise your own toxic behaviours and traits, more symptoms of this witch wound. 
You will look at how you have been treated by your mother, friends, other women. You will question how you've unconsciously projected these wounds onto your children.
No one ever said healing was easy or linear. But I will tell you this...
If you do it alongside your sisters, if you stand hand in hand, side by side, you'll do it.
There's so much power in us working together. 
So take my hand sister!

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