JOURNEYING TALES

Seem to have started meeting with some friends to do journeying. A couple of weeks ago we did soul retrievals for each other, and then today checked in how that had unfolded. It's been a while since I've done much of this work, but it seems to be time. When I was working, my body was possessed by the spirit helper, and I was vocalising intensely - that itself is part of the energy work, and the person afterwards said they felt something quite ancient and raw was working through me. It seemed to do the job, something underlying was catalysed for the person over the last 2 weeks :)

For myself, there is a way I become out of sorts and feeling bleak and uncared for in the evenings, and I reach for the red wine to comfort myself. Work was done on that. The outcome was that it had got worse by a few days ago. And I just had to sit with it. I got the 4 of Swords when I pulled a Tarot Card, pointing me inwards. And I recalled the 'sky-like' attitude to difficult mental states from my Buddhist days: eventually they pass. And it did. Late Friday night I remembered my animal helper, and immediately I felt comforted. When I'm in a bleak state, it is because I feel disconnected, and so I forget the spirit help that is always there, and it does help. I recommend it, that is what these helpers are for.

Saturday morning and the storm had passed. I was still feeling fragile in the aftermath, but something had shifted. That was how the soul retrieval worked for me: it made things worse before they got better. So Saturday night I bought wine to celebrate rather than commiserate, and a pizza on which I put loads of chorizo and chilli, and watched 3 episodes of Vikings. Now that is what I call a party. I had earned it through sticking with all that shit, which has been going on for months now. Childhood stuff.

So today we were just hanging out with our animal helpers. As I said, you may want to travel a long way to the Lower World to meet them, but when you've had helpers for years, often they are just there, you don't need to go anywhere. Those 3 worlds are just a useful structure to get you going. Even the Otherworld is just a structure, this world and the Otherworld, indeed life and death, are for the Shaman the same place. As William Blake said, death is just like moving from one room to another, and he was looking forward to it.

The other 2 did their journeys lying down. I was on my bison hide crawling around, and pretty soon I realised I was embodying a crocodile, which was a first. The animal can do so much more, can get into you so much more, when you let them embody you. You get a felt physical sense of the animal. I thought I'm NOT going to look Crocodile up in a book, this has to be purely my own sense of it: that is how these things work if you want to do it deeply. It has to be your own.

 

 

The Crocodile has a skin as tough as you like, and nothing to fear. He is also a very ancient species, and has the knowing about life that comes with age, especially this big mother that I was embodying. And that is something for my anxiety and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Don't let any of it bother me, let it just bounce off me. And sit there patiently and watch, like the Crocodile does for its prey.

I am not on a career trajectory that requires plans and busyness. I am on the slow path of working for Spirit, where a lot of deep work can be done in a short time, you can have a lasting impact in just a few short years, look at Jesus. So there is no hurry. Just wait, do nothing for what may seem an interminable time (and my life has often felt like that) and then bam out it comes, do a bit of work and watch the ripples, remember the ripples that you won't know about. Just who we are can have a tremendous effect. So this Crocodile turned up today just after I'd had all this shit to go through, giving me a new toughness and a shifted perspective.

I've had the Journeying thing on my mind for some years, not quite sure when and how. I learnt all the 'core' stuff in the 90s, but I have always felt compelled to go away and not do much with it until I'd really made my own deep original connection with it, and to do that I needed a deeper connection with myself first, and that has taken 20 years. So Spirit will show me the way in with this. It's fantastic work.