You’ve probably talked to a tree before. Almost everyone who has a connection with Nature has, usually in a moment of grief, frustration, or wonder, standing under some ancient oak whispering something we’d never say to a human. What’s rarer is sticking around for the reply.

If that sentence made you smile, or made you wonder whether my mind has finally wandered off into the faery woods for good, read on.

A Familiar Feeling

Have you ever stood beneath a willow tree and felt calmer? Walked into a redwood grove and sensed you’d entered a cathedral? Maybe you picked up a river stone and felt more grounded.

I have experiences like that just about every day. One of my favorite things is walking my neighborhood to greet the trees. Some feel like old friends, others seem to pop out of nowhere, though I’d walked past them many times before.

And it’s not just the trees. I silently say hello to the birds and squirrels and flowers, and often they reply in their own way.

It seems like most people explain away things like that—just pretty scenery, fresh air, an overactive imagination (that old scapegoat, blamed for everything from ghosts to good ideas).

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What if the living world has been talking to us the whole time, but we have become too distracted—or too embarrassed—to notice?

Everything Is Aware, Just Not the Way We Expect

Part of the great shift happening on our planet right now is the return of a very old idea: everything is alive. Not just biologically. Consciously, each with its own particular flavor.

The ancient mystics knew this. So did my Celtic ancestors and other indigenous cultures the world over. I think we all knew it as young children, but modern life trained us to see things differently.

The old Celtic stories treat trees as elders, stones as memory-keepers, rivers as living beings with moods of their own. That wasn’t poetry to my ancestors. It was just how the world worked.

Even modern science keeps nudging in that direction. We’re discovering that forests trade nutrients and warnings through underground fungal networks.
Plants recognize their own relatives. They respond to touch and sound and the approach of insects.

Science hesitates to call that awareness. But modern science seems to be a bit behind in the realm of consciousness. Fortunately, for many of us, that pendulum is beginning to swing back toward the wisdom of our ancestors, which is a long way from seeing Nature as dumb, passive matter just sitting there to be used or exploited by humanity.

Everything Is One

As I have come to understand reality, everything is an aspect of the same Source—Spirit, All That Is, God, Goddess, the Great Mystery, whatever you want to call it—so every part of creation carries a spark of that awareness. Animal awareness. Oak awareness. Rose awareness. Granite awareness—a continuous web of life flowing through all things.

Bashar puts it simply: consciousness isn’t produced by physical reality, physical reality is consciousness expressing itself. I love that.

You don’t have to buy into his whole cosmology to find that idea freeing. For me, it relaxes the need to decide in advance what is possible. It makes room for curiosity: what changes when I approach a tree as a presence rather than scenery?

What Findhorn Gardeners Figured Out

One of my favorite stories relative to this comes from the early days of the Findhorn community in Scotland, where vegetables grew to outlandish sizes in sandy, wind-battered soil that had no business producing much of anything.

Dorothy Maclean, one of Findhorn’s founders, said she worked directly with what she called the devas—the guiding intelligence behind each plant—and received clear impressions of what every plant needed to thrive.

You can take that literally, intuitively, symbolically, or with a raised eyebrow. But the gardens were real. And the relationship between the gardeners and the land transformed both.

How to Actually Try It

You don’t need to move to the north of Scotland, or memorize the names of every tree in the Celtic Oghm. You just need presence and the willingness to quiet your mind, listen, and feel.

Choose a tree you are naturally drawn toward—by its shape, shade, age, scent, or simply the fact that you keep noticing it. If none seems to ‘invite’ you, choose one near your home and visit it more than once.

Some trees seem much friendlier than others. I’ve noticed that most trees have visible faces and some people say the lower on the trunk you find the face, the friendlier the tree will be... but I haven’t tested that out. I just go by whether it feels welcoming or not.

Sit beside it. Rest a hand on the bark or a root if that feels right. Slow your breath. Notice the light moving through the leaves.

Then say hello. Silently is fine.

Ask something simple: What would you like me to know? Or how do you experience the world?

If you feel appreciation, offer a thank you.

Don’t expect hearing words back. The reply rarely arrives in words. For me, the response may be a lifting in my chest, an image that lingers after I walk away, or the simple realization that I need to slow down.

A message can come as a feeling, an image, a sudden knowing, an emotional shift, or a thought that sounds wiser than your usual mental chatter (like the one narrating your grocery list).

The Stones Have Opinions Too

Communication isn’t limited to trees. I’ve had surprising impressions holding crystals, sitting with large stones, and putting my feet on slippery river rocks.

Stones have witnessed millennia without rushing anywhere, which may be why they are so good at helping us get grounded. They remind me of qualities I’d like to borrow. Steadiness. Endurance. Stillness.

Now and then I feel a stone asking to be picked up, like it wants a different view and, of course, it can’t move on its own. I’m happy to give it a ride. Other stones want to stay right where they are. A clear quartz crystal once told me it was finished with me and wanted to go live with my ex... I tried not to feel insulted.

The Question That Matters

I’ve stopped asking whether these conversations are objectively real. The better question is simpler: do they make us happier? Do they inspire us to be kinder, or more attentive to the world around us?

If done right, conversations like this will inspire us to care for the Earth we're standing on, and for all our relations—the trees, the stones, the creatures, everyone and everything woven into this one family of consciousness.

When I greet the redwoods outside my window as neighbors instead of objects, I treat them differently. When I’m aware of the forest as a community instead of a stack of lumber, my choices shift without effort.

So next time you’re in the woods, lean against a trunk. Say hello. Then actually listen.

At worst, you get five peaceful minutes with a very old, very patient tree.

But more likely, you’ll find out you were never walking through a silent world at all.

Many years ago, when I was about to get married, my dad pulled me aside and told me that my now-ex and I had a critical mass of integrity. I think what he really meant was that we were both too stubborn to sustain a marriage.

The marriage did fall apart, but my dad’s diagnosis was wrong. Integrity was never the problem—in fact, I still admire that about my ex. What ultimately did us in was a lack of emotional connection. I was looking for affection and the feeling of being seen and appreciated for who I am, without criticism. I suppose we all are.

From the time we are born, we are bombarded with criticism and judgements. Cute baby, wish it had been a boy, she won’t stop crying, children should be seen and not heard. Endless little comments that have a way of shaping us into something we’re not.

Many of us buckled under the pressure and spent our lives trying to conform and please others. Some, like my ex and me, dug in our heels and refused to be shaped—but that can bend us too. It requires building armor. And armor, though it feels protective, can keep people out and make us a bit rigid.

Either way, there is still an authentic core inside every one of us. There is a soul that chose to dip a toe into this dense, confusing reality, and it keeps sending us signals... however weak they may now seem.

It gives us little stirrings in our hearts, occasional goose bumps, gut feelings, thrills and chills. We may have trained ourselves to ignore them, but the body doesn’t lie. It keeps asking us to pay attention.

Finding Your Authentic Self

That’s the you in you—the real you that hasn’t been buried by criticism, judgements, or well-meaning advice from parents, teachers, or friends.

At this point in your life, you may have strayed far from that real you. Made so many compromises it doesn’t seem possible to ever find your way back to authenticity.

How many ways do you hide your true feelings? What have you been afraid to create and share... or even keep to yourself? Where is the childlike enthusiasm for life you once had?

I’ve been asking myself questions like this for a while now. Peeling back layers of expectations and fears that keep me locked into a version of me that doesn’t align with the calling of my soul. And the answer that keeps coming back is, trust your gut, follow your heart, let enthusiasm lead the way.

That means ignoring conventions, other people’s expectations, and my own inner critic. Being true to the core essence of who I am... which is something I can never fully predict.

Know Thyself

There’s that famous inscription at the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Know Thyself. It may be the most profound advice ever written.

Because the only way we can truly know ourselves is to express the inner essence of who we are. And the more we explore and express it, the more it expands in an infinite spiral of discovery.

That’s what makes life fun!

That’s where fulfillment comes from. And that’s also where service comes from... which may be a surprise to you if you’ve been trained to kowtow to everyone else in the name of service.

We humans have a knack for getting things completely backwards. We’re taught to sublimate our own desires in order to serve the needs of others, but what others really need is our authenticity.

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There are people out there just waiting for the spark of inspiration that comes from your self expression. It could be as simple as a smile in a supermarket, or as profound as the great American novel. It doesn’t matter. Life doesn’t give points for popularity or the human definition of success.

A mother’s homemade cookie baked with love is as important as Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa—both expressions of authenticity that touch the lives of those they are meant to touch. Both serve the whole in ways that can’t be measured.

The key is that they both express the essential nature of the person who created them—the greatest service of all.

The Call to Authenticity

Whether you’ve been aware of it or not, you’ve been hearing the call to authenticity all your life. That temper tantrum you had at two years old. Your fascination with horses, or rocks, or rocket ships. The impulse to paint, or write, or build birdhouses. All messages from your soul saying this is who I am. This is what I came here to explore and express.

And the world has been waiting for it, because you are the one piece in the jigsaw puzzle of life that makes the whole thing work.

I bet you’ve been taught not to believe that. Most of us were. But more and more, I see how true it is. The entire universe is waiting for your authentic self expression, because you are the universe. I am the universe. It’s all One. And the One is incomplete without you.

A Critical Mass

Now that I think about it, my dad wasn’t entirely wrong. My ex and I did have a critical mass of integrity, but that’s a good thing.

Critical mass is a size, number, or amount large enough to produce a particular result (Webster). That result can be positive or negative. When it comes to integrity, the more the better, because the particular result is authenticity.

That’s the You in You this post is all about—the You before the criticism and the armor and the compromises. You don’t have to overhaul your life to find your way back to it. Just pay attention to those little messages from your soul.

• The spark of interest when you notice a new movie coming out

• The subtle urge to take a walk in the middle of a work day

• The calmness you feel when you decide to stay home rather than go out to a party...

• Or maybe your delight in getting together with friends

You may have to dig deep to find some of the treasures that got buried under critiques and judgements over the years, but every treasure comes with a golden gleam that feels like curiosity, excitement, or even bliss. Whatever that is for you, try following it and see where it leads.

I know from experience, it will lead you home to you.

There’s a woman somewhere right now lighting a green candle for prosperity, maybe sprinkling cinnamon on her doorstep or tucking a bay leaf in her pocket, all while fearing she won’t be able to pay her rent next week.

Her magic probably isn’t going to work.

A few of decades ago, that was me. Sometimes little rituals like that seemed to help, but often they didn’t. Even when they did, the results never lasted—and I never understood why.

It didn’t occur to me that I was casting two spells at once, and they canceled each other out. The very same thing happens so often in the magical and pagan community, and I think it undermines our effective use of magic.

There’s a lot of emphasis on creating beautiful rituals, learning spells and chants, drawing sigils and gathering herbs at the right phase of the moon, all while focusing on fixing some negative situation or experience. It can be rewarding and even uplifting, but where are the results?

The Why Beneath the Outcomes

There’s very little discussion about why these things work—or don’t work. As in many other spiritual traditions, we are expected to take it all on faith.

I wasn’t much good at that as a kid in Catholic school, and apparently I’m no better at it now. Faith, after all, ought to have a practical application. Otherwise, what good is it?

If you’ve spent any time visiting Faehallows School of Magic, you may have wondered why Law of Attraction is woven into our Foundation Course. It’s right there on our home page: Celtic Magic Courses Online—Where Celtic Lore and Faery Magic Meets Law of Attraction. That’s not marketing jargon. It’s the core of the kind of magic that actually works.

You can’t have magic without Law of Attraction. I’ve heard well-known magical teachers claim otherwise—that it’s all about following tradition and performing the correct rituals, quite separate from anything as New Age as “alignment” or “vibration.” But I think they are only seeing half the process and mistaking it for the whole.

Every magical working, no matter how well designed or performed, runs on the same universal law: what you give out is what you get back.

Candle or no candle.

Prove it to yourself

Here’s where it gets practical. Your candle spell didn’t fail because you used the wrong shade of green, or the moon was waning. It failed because your dominant feeling while performing it was scarcity, and that’s the vibration Law of Attraction responded to.

Rituals, spells, and intentions are delivery mechanisms, but emotion is the signal that’s being delivered. If those two things are not aligned, the emotion always wins.

You don’t have to take my word for it. As Dr. Michael Gregor likes to say, put it to the test.

Try a spell while you’re feeling uplifted and joyful and notice the results—as opposed to trying it when you’re feeling like a desperate victim.

Magic and Law of Attraction go Hand-in-Hand

An effective magician isn’t the one with the most elaborate ritual, or the most books published. It’s the one who’s learned to notice, before striking the match, what it feels like when she pictures the outcome.

Relief? Good—that’s alignment. Light the candle.

Dread, or a mental list of problems? That’s useful information too. It means you’re not ready to cast your spell.

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Your first task is to take a few minutes—or days—to shift into a positive feeling, remembering or imagining how it feels to have what you want. Then light the candle.

Cast your circle from relief, not from need. The rest—the chants, the timing, the crystals—is stagecraft designed to get your subconscious mind involved. What Bashar calls permission slips.

Once aligned, the ritual and the emotion create the potent force we call magic.

Magic and Law of Attraction aren’t separate systems. They’re different languages describing the same underlying mechanism: consciousness shapes reality.

Whether you’re casting a spell or visualizing your desired outcome, you’re working with the same fundamental force. The semantics change. The mechanics don’t.

Let’s talk about why this matters—especially if you want your magic to work.

Magic Without Alignment Is Just Fancy Wishing

At its core, magical practice is intentional creation.

You set an intention. You cast a spell.
You work with symbols, spirits, or natural forces.
You expect a result.

But here’s the part many people skip over like an inconvenient footnote:
your subconscious beliefs and emotional state are broadcasting constantly.

If your conscious intention says, “I call in prosperity,”
but your nervous system is chanting, “It’s not safe to have money,”
guess which one has the stronger signal?

(Hint: it’s not the one with the pretty candle.)

Law of Attraction simply names this dynamic: what you habitually think, feel, and expect becomes the clay your magic shapes.

Magic doesn’t override your vibration.
It amplifies it.

The Ancients Knew This (They Just Used Better Poetry)

The idea that belief shapes outcome isn’t new. The ancient Celts understood that imagination wasn’t “pretend”—it was creative.

Modern Law of Attraction language talks about vibration and frequency.
Ancient magic talked about harmony, right relationship, and walking in accord with the land and spirits.

Different metaphors. Same operating system.

Why Ritual Alone Isn’t Enough

Rituals can be powerful. They can raise your vibration and lift you out of the doldrums.

But ritual without internal alignment is sending mixed messages to the universe.

You can’t:

• Perform a love spell while convinced you’re not lovable

• Call in clients while fearing being seen

• Work prosperity magic while believing money is corrupt

Law of Attraction shows us why spells sometimes seem to fail; your internal set-point secretly vetoes them.

And the universe—being exquisitely polite—always agrees with you.

Law of Attraction Is the Spell Beneath the Spell

Think of it this way:

Ritual is the choreography.
Law of Attraction is the dance.

You can do all the right steps, but if the rhythm underneath is off, the dance feels… awkward.

Your daily thoughts, emotional habits, and beliefs are the spells you are always casting—long before you light a candle or step into a circle.

This is why casual, mundane moments matter:

• How you talk to yourself

• What you assume is possible

• What feels “normal” to receive

Magic isn’t confined to sacred space.
It responds to the patterns you live in every day.

When Magic and Attraction Work Together

When you consciously work with Law of Attraction as part of your magical practice, something delicious happens.

Spells feel stronger. Results arrive almost effortlessly.
Synchronicities multiply. You stop trying to force outcomes and start allowing them.

You’re no longer chanting intentions into a void or hoping some distant goddess will come to your aid. You’re tuning yourself to a reality that’s already responding. (Because it already exists, but we’ll save that idea for a tumble down another rabbit hole.)

This is why advanced magic often looks deceptively simple.
The work has moved inward.

The Real Secret Magicians Don’t Always Say Out Loud

Here’s the “Secret” every effective magician knows:

Your state of being is your most powerful spell.

When Law of Attraction is woven into magical practice, magic stops being something you do and becomes something you embody.

And that—is when a magical synchronicity takes hold and life starts to feel almost effortless.

Here’s what one of my students had to say about that:

“Within one year, the changes were immense. I felt grounded, connected to Universal energy, and empowered by good magic. It worked in so many ways for me.”

— Kimber Sobec

Curious? Find out what Kimber found so inspiring at CelticMysterySchool.com

A note on illustrations: I create most of my images with AI tools and/or Canva, and use them on Pinterest to find new readers. I'm not in favor of new data centers, and most of the ones we already have need improvements for energy and water use—but their overall footprint is only about a tenth of the footprint of animal agriculture, which I haven't supported in any way for over a decade (with the added bonus of big improvements in my health).

As a painter and writer, I have learned from many other artists and authors. It’s what all of us do, and I see no reason AI shouldn’t be allowed to do the same. Unless I post a © symbol under an image (which means it’s an actual original painting of mine), you are free to borrow any of my AI images for your own use.

Otherworld journeys like this are known as Imramma in the Celtic tradition. In Gaelic, Imramma means “Wonder Voyage.”

It is a form of magic that can transform your consciousness from the inside out.

Moonlight Hallows © Bernadette Wulf—Buy prints

Join us at Faehallows School of Magic for more guided shamanic journeys live on Zoom. We meet on or near every Quarter and Cross-quarter holiday of the Celtic wheel of the year. Sign up for notifications here: https://forms.aweber.com/form/44/1002275544.htm

Celtic Year Inner Circle members are automatically included in all eight wheel of the year journey workshops.

(Note: There’s a recorded audio version below—for paid subscribers)

It’s a good idea to read through the journey first, so you have a general idea where you’re going. Then get into a relaxed state as you read through it a second time and enter into the journey.

Are you ready?

Find a relaxed position, sitting or lying down...

where you can remain awake while entering the land of dreams...

Close your eyes...

and take a few minutes to breathe slowly

in and out...

relaxing each part of your body in turn...

Take your time...

Now, you find yourself standing on the shore of a calm sea at twilight.

You notice a small boat approaching...

rowed by an ancient ferryman with a dark hood covering most of his face.

He lifts his hood...

and smiles.

And the twinkle in his eye draws you closer.

He motions for you to step into the boat...

and you know immediately that you can trust him.

You sense that a wonderful voyage awaits you...

As soon as you are seated the boat begins to float out to sea.

You notice a few stars peeking through the darkening sky...

as the soft, rhythmic splashing of the oars

lulls you into a deep state of relaxation...

As the boat continues to gently rock over the calm waters, you notice a thick mist beginning to swirl around you.

It feels cool and refreshing on your face.

Even the stars have disappeared now...

and you find yourself wrapped in fog...

in a world of your own...

aware of only your own breath...

softly moving in and out...

in and out...

Until at last the fog begins to clear...

and you are greeted by the dim light of dawn.

Not so far away you can see a beautiful island...

covered with green grass...

apple trees...

and wildflowers.

Your boat is heading toward it.

In another moment...

you feel the boat scrape against the sandy beach...

and you step out onto the shore

feeling a sense of wonder...

and anticipation.

You see a path before you where the grass has been trodden by many feet.

You wonder where it leads...

and you begin to follow it...

across a meadow...

and through a wood...

until you come to a wide, clear lake.

Just as the sun emerges over the distant horizon...

you see a woman stepping into the light of the first sun rays.

She holds a sword that gleams with light...

and you want more than anything to hold it, just for a moment.

Knowing your wish...

she steps forward...

and places the sword in your hands.

You feel the cool embossed gold of the hilt...

and marvel at the brilliance and sharpness of the blade.

You immediately know how to use this sword.

And you begin sweeping it in a circle all around you...

intending to cut away all the chains that bind you...

the illusions...

limiting beliefs...

fears...

frustrations...

and false programs that you picked up from others...

You keep sweeping the sword around you...

cutting away anything that no longer serves you.

Soon...

your heart feels lighter.

You begin to feel unfettered by expectations and conventions.

You breathe a deep sigh of relief...

and hand the sword back with a smile.

The woman nods with a knowing look in her eyes as she takes it back.

Then...

she sinks into the lake...

disappearing, as if she had never been there at all.

Before you have time to think about how strange it is...

you notice that the sun is now blazing high above you...

As you look up at it...

you see a brilliant man...

radiating the light of the sun.

A spear of light shoots out from his arm...

hitting you right in the solar plexus.

It feels warm...

and strong...

stirring up passion and power in your gut.

He then points his spear at your heart...

and it feels like the light and warmth of the sun is bursting in your chest...

Next, he touches his spear to your forehead...

igniting your third eye

with a brilliant sunburst...

You hear a whisper saying...

“Awake.”

And you become aware

of the life force vibrating through your body...

You look up to thank him...

but he is gone...

...Now the sun is setting...

and you stand at the edge of a churning ocean.

The sky is filled with glowing clouds...

in pink and gold sunset colors.

Not far away...

you see a woman stirring a huge cauldron.

Her energy is so powerful

that you dare not go closer.

But she looks up and smiles...

waving for you to come near.

Her eyes are like brilliant stars...

and you cannot look into them...

but you know her heart is kind...

so you approach her.

You look into her swirling cauldron...

and see spinning galaxies of stars...

and more stars are continually bubbling up

from the center of the galaxies.

She gestures for you to step into the cauldron...

and you realize that it is the cauldron of plenty...

that regenerates all life.

With gratitude...

you step into the swirling waters...

and immerse yourself from head to foot.

Immediately you sense that all life flows through you.

You are the cauldron.

You are the galaxies.

You are the Universe.

It feels blissful...

and perfect...

but you cannot stay.

It is time to re-emerge...

and return to your journey.

As you step out of the cauldron you find yourself standing at the foot of a grassy hill in the light of the full moon.

Billions of stars twinkle above you...

and the air feels cool and calm.

As you look up to the top of the hill...

you see a large, upright stone...

glimmering in the moonlight...

and you feel compelled to touch it.

It is no ordinary stone...

and you sense that it is sentient

and aware of your approach as you make your way up the hill...

Kings and queens have touched this stone

and received their power from it.

Will you be able to touch it?

You wonder as you move closer.

Suddenly...

you cannot take another step.

The stone is almost within reach...

but you cannot move any closer.

Is it because you are not a king or queen?

Or is there another reason?

You look around for help...

and notice a haggard, old woman standing nearby.

You ask...

“Is it you I have to appease?”

She shakes her head...

no.

Then you realize the truth.

There is nobody you have to appease.

You are sovereign in your own life.

She smiles...

and transforms into a beautiful queen...

adorned in robes of Earth colors and a jeweled crown.

She gestures for you to touch the stone...

and you humbly put your hands on it.

Sovereignty...

you realize...

is not about power over others.

It is power to choose your own path...

in service of the whole.

It is the birthright you received

when you emerged into this Earth plane reality.

It comes from Earth...

and will return to Earth when you leave.

You feel your connection with the core of Earth and with the entire universe around you.

You are the center of the universe...

and you have a unique destiny...

that only you can fulfill.

You may not know what it is yet...

but you know the next step...

and you resolve to take it.

...As you rise and walk away from the stone...

you feel called to return to your boat.

But before you leave...

you take one last look around the island in the dawning light...

From the top of the hill.

Right in the center of the island...

you see a massive spinning vortex

that rises up...

cascading into a huge torus field...

like a pulsating doughnut of energy...

surrounding the entire island.

You notice that the center of the vortex is like the trunk of a tree...

a tree of light...

and energy.

And you realize

that you are looking at the Tree of Life.

You feel a similar torus field

surrounding your own body...

and know that you are a reflection

of the Tree of Life.

For a moment you just stand

and feel the life force energy pulsing through you.

But your boat is still waiting...

and you must say goodbye...

With overflowing gratitude you walk back to the shore...

and climb aboard the little boat.

The ferryman rows you back to sea...

through the veil of mist...

and back to the sandy beach...

where you started.

You step onto the shore,

remembering everything you experienced...

and you bow in thanks to the ferryman...

and then turn away...

back to the needs of your body...

back to the feelings in your arms and legs...

fingers and toes...

back to the breath moving in and out of your lungs.

Take a moment to stretch...

and move.

Get yourself grounded...

back into the reality of everyday life.

Welcome back.

You might want to take a few minutes to write down any important insights

or experiences you had on your journey.

They tend to fade quickly...

Do you feel different now than you did before the journey?

That is magic at work.

You have changed your consciousness at will...

and what changes you... changes the world.

——————

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We can even combine them by putting our heads together, because two heads are better than one… ideally not on the same body.

Falling head over heels never made sense to me. Isn’t that where our heads naturally belong, at least while we’re upright?

You can have a big head. That happens when you let success go to your head. You can even bite someone’s head off, or laugh your own head off, both of which sound terribly painful.

And one of my favorites is bury your head in the sand, which I was always told had something to do with ostriches, a rumor apparently started by Pliny the Elder.

No. Ostriches are not that dumb. They would have been wiped out long ago if they had done that… and gotten a lot of sand in those big eyes of theirs.

All of which leads me to the conclusion that our heads are very important in the general scheme of things, which I suppose is pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain. As vessels containing our amazing brains and rational minds, our heads have become the main focus of our Western educational system.

But What if We’re Using Our Heads the Wrong Way?

Schooling aside, what if your head or brain is really only meant to focus you in physical reality and help you interpret your immediate experience—not to control every outcome or figure out how your life path should unfold.

That’s an important distinction.

Bashar and other teachers tell us that our Soul, Higher Mind, or Higher Self, is the part of our consciousness that actually conceives our thoughts and ideas. It can see the whole picture of our life, past, present and future, so it knows where we need to go. The brain and its rational mind cannot, because it is basically just a receiver or translator.

Rings true to me.

In other words, the Higher Mind broadcasts the signal—inspiration, intuition, impulses, and the larger organizing perspective. While the brain functions as a radio or TV antenna.

The best tasks for the head/brain/rational mind are noticing, interpreting, and experiencing whatever shows up in our physical life. But it is never the original source of ideas and cannot be relied on for finding our direction in life.

In other words, contrary to popular philosophy, we’ll never understand things like our purpose, our life path, or the direction we need to take to have a fulfilling life by using our heads.

But our heads can help us take care of the present situation and practical details. We can also use our heads to make choices and take concrete action on what feels most alive, attractive, or exciting.

Heads are great for:

• Observing results and circumstances without assuming you must know the entire path in advance

• Identifying beliefs—especially fearful or limiting ones—that color your interpretation of events

• Translating inner guidance into workable action in day-to-day life

What Your Head is Not for…

Bashar’s point is not about “abandoning logic.” Rather, he warns against using the rational mind to seek certainty, predict every step, or dictate how your preferred outcome has to happen.

He describes that as outside its “job description”—though it’s great at perceiving how something already happened, it can’t know beforehand how things will happen.

So, when we say, “get out of your head,” it means: stop compulsively trying to control or over-analyze the route, while still using your practical mind to assess physical reality, make decisions, and act responsibly.

So how can we tap into that all-knowing wisdom of our soul or Higher Self?

That’s where things really start to get fun!

(The remainder of this article is available to paid subscribers of my Substack, Enchanted Planet Community—where your generous support buys me an almond-milk chai latte a month, and keeps the faeries supplied with chocolate.)

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About the Elves…

I wanted to share this delightful Real Fairies website, because it has such interesting stories of encounters with elves and faeries.

Here’s the page that tells about how two sisters began their adventure of communicating with the elves of Fyn: http://www.realfairies.net/the-elves-of-fyn/communicating-with-the-elves

Explore the site and discover all sorts of fascinating information they have gathered from interacting with elves, faeries, and nature spirits.

“Before all this happened, I guess you could say we lived a fairly normal life. I have always been into spiritual/new age type of things so meditation was a common thing for me. Neither Susan or I thought much about fairies, elves or the fairy realm before any of this took place, it just wasn’t on our radar.”

All that was soon to change!

How You Can Communicate with Elves & Faeries

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You can learn to communicate with elves and faeries too. They are often around us, watching from the trees or peeking out from the flowers.

Some people seem to have a natural gift of communication with unseen beings, and even plants and animals, while most of us have to learn how to quiet our rational minds and trust the inner messages.

You may already be hearing the voices of elves and nature spirits, but your own thoughts can easily overwhelm them—overriding the subtle voices of the otherworldly beings.

Listening Improves with Practice

That’s one reason we offer so many experiential workshops online at Faehallows School of Magic. Our channeled shamanic journeys guide you to meet and communicate with faeries, elves, and many other beings of the otherworlds.

On or very close to each of the Celtic quarter and cross-quarter holidays, we invite you to join us for an exploration of faery magic, Arthurian lore, or Celtic mythology.

Sign up for Faehallows email list to be notified about upcoming workshops.

The more you practice, the more confident you will be and the more clear your communications will be.

You may also develop ongoing relationships… maybe even friendships… with particular Otherworld allies, like dragons, gnomes, or Avalon faeries.

Are Elves the Same as Faeries?

That depends on who you ask. Elves are commonly mentioned in Germanic and Norse cultures, while faeries are associated with Celtic cultures and the British Isles.

In my experience, they are the same, though the word fairy, at least in America, has come to include the entire faery realm and the nature spirits within it.

Tolkien had intended to call the elves in his novels faeries, but that term was associated with gay men at the time, so he chose to call them elves to avoid confusion.

Either way, these beings are tall, usually taller than humans, very beautiful, and are known by various names, like the Shining Ones, the Good Neighbors, the Other Crowd, the Fair Folk, the Gentry and many others, all meant to avoid offending them.

Offending a faery could bring serious consequences, so people were very careful about messing with them. Even now, most Irish farmers won’t cut down a faery fort in their field—and entire roads have been rerouted in Iceland and Ireland to avoid offending the elves or faeries.

To learn more about faeries visit FairySource.com

To find out more about Faehallows School of Magic past (recorded) workshops visit https://www.wulfworks.com/magical-zoom-workshops/

For one thing, faeries are non-physical beings, so “seeing” them with physical eyes is expecting a lot… not that they can’t occasionally lower their vibration enough to take on some semblance of physicality, but they would need a good reason.

Arthurian lore is full of faeries who seem to have taken human form, including King Arthur’s mother, Igraine, and his wife, Guinevere. But they were involved with Merlin’s plan to reconnect humans with the faery realm and plant seeds of a New Earth reality, which I think was a very good reason.

These days, however, the seeds have been planted. The human and faery realms seem to have drifted apart more than ever. So we probably won’t be seeing many faeries in the physical world.

That being said, our ability to see actually happens in the brain, not the eyes. So we can still “see” non-physical beings when the brain picks up their vibration and creates an image to match. That doesn’t mean the beings actually look like that. The brain creates pictures based on our expectations.

If you believe faeries look like slender girls in leafy dresses with dragonfly wings, that’s what you might see. If you were from another culture, you might see a little bearded man in a green hat, or some type of animal… all interpretations of the same being.

And that is always fun. I love catching an occasional glimpse of faery beings. But it’s not necessarily the way they look to each other. After all, faeries are shapeshifters and tricksters and they can appear any way they choose.

Asking how to see faeries puts the focus on the wrong sensory experience. Same with hearing faery voices. The brain can create auditory hallucinations too.

Learn more about faeries at FairySource.com

So what can we trust?

How can we know when we really meet a faery or whether it’s just a hallucination?

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If you’re interested, just check back at here to see what’s new (or old and recycled). : )

WulfWorks—Enchanted Planet Community

Practical enchantment for a more joyful, meaningful, and magical life—rooted in Celtic wisdom, faery magic, nature spirituality, and the art of attracting what you love.

By Bernadette Wulf

What is a Book of Shadows?

Inspired by: http://themoonlightshop.com/blogs/news/16061076-the-book-of-shadows (appears to be no longer available and redirects to a Redbubble page).

You might have seen fancy Books of Shadows (BOS) in movies and TV shows (like Charmed) where the book is filled with spells and information about almost anything a witch might need. There is a really cool Book of Shadows in the series Discovery of Witches that contains the origins of witches, vampires and demons. Good show on Netflix… and I loved the first book too.

As much fun as those fictional books may be, your own Book of Shadows will probably be a lot more practical.

Also known as a Grimoire, a Book of Shadows is any book you use to write down your spells and other rituals you want to remember. It should be handwritten, but we’ll get into that in a moment. Your BOS is a sacred tool. It’s an item you imbue with the power of your intention and it’s important to take good care of it. Just like you would with any other magical tool.

My Experience

It has always been a question in my mind whether to keep my magical notes in a regular spiral notebook, or write them in a fancy, “special” Book of Shadows.

I tend to have numerous spiral notebooks where my magical records get mixed with random musings, channeled messages, and notes from various workshops I’ve taken. I just sent about thirty of them to recycling, because… well, after a few years they just don’t seem worth hanging onto.

I did go through them all and pulled out anything that still seemed important, but then I had to find a way to organize a pile of loose pages with tattered edges.

Truth be told, I have never been very organized about keeping track of it all... at least not until I got a zip-up 3-ring binder. Now I have a place to keep all my loose notebook pages about magical stuff together in the binder. It’s probably the closest I’ll ever come to having a real Book of Shadows.

Someday, when I have a lot of spare time, I would love to copy all the best workings, insights, spells, and messages from my inner journeys into a beautiful book like I’ve seen on TV.

Why Handwrite Your BOS Passages?

Writing by hand imbues your pages with your own magical energy. Plus, it activates a different part of your brain than typing does, which makes what you write more memorable. Think of it as casting a spell.

A spell, after all, is an intention spelled out. Whether in a BOS or on the back of an envelope, it’s that intentional spelling with your own hand that anchors it in your consciousness and attracts it into your experience.

So choose your style. An ornate book that looks like it came from the Middle Ages might be just what you need to awaken your own inner magic.

Me, I’ll probably stick with my binder.

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Shadows, Secrets, and Spells

Have you wondered why the BOS has Shadows in its name? Or why witchcraft in general has an aura of secrecy around it?

In part, I’m sure much of that developed during the Inquisition and witch trials that demonized, or even murdered, anyone suspected of witchcraft. That would sure make me want to keep my activities secret.

But even before all that, there were mystery schools around the world that only shared secret teachings with their own initiates and adepts.

It may not seem fair to keep important teachings away from people who could have benefitted from them, but I don’t think that was their intention.

Mystery school teachings were not about intellectual ideas that could be shared in books or casual conversations. They were experiential.

Initiates had to do the inner work, explore the shamanic realms, learn how to contact and work with otherworldly allies, and know themselves and their own power to change reality.

Most people were either not ready or not willing to do the work of knowing themselves and living the mysteries. Keeping them secret was for their own protection.

But times have changed. Though most people still seem unwilling to do the work, the mysteries are now being revealed to anyone who is interested.

Witch trials have ended, for the most part, and light is shining into the shadows. The time for secrets is almost over as we move into the New Earth reality… at least for those of us who choose it.

So, while your BOS has its origins in secrets, maybe it would make more sense to call it a Book of Light now, because… at least for me… our notes and spells are full of wisdom, helpful insights, and light.

And of course, whenever light shines the shadows appear, so we could call it a Book of Shadows and Light.

I like the idea of a fancy book—and I’m sure I’d admire yours—but I’m too busy creating new workshops, lessons, blog posts, and all the fun illustrations that go with them to take on that sort of project any time soon.

Either way, your BOS is a treasure that holds the secrets and the light of your own personal magic and wisdom.

What about you?

Is a fancy Book of Shadows an important item in your magical work?

If so, you might want to find a beautiful notebook to start your own.

What Does Anxiety Have to Do with a Rubber Band?

A lot of people are feeling it. That subtle anxiety just under the surface that sometimes bubbles up and knocks you off balance. The ugh you feel when you read the news, or notice that you have a flat tire... or wake up on a bad hair day.

It’s usually nothing dramatically life changing. Just something that’s going to take more time or money or mental focus than you have available at the moment.

And then you start thinking, what else could go wrong? Which is exactly the wrong thing to think if you want things to go right, because Life has a way of answering according to how you ask the question.

On a personal level, the cause of your anxiety could be something as minor as a disagreement with a stranger on Facebook, or as major as a cancer diagnosis. Whatever the source, it shakes your foundations a bit... or a lot.

On top of that, we have collective unrest fueled by rising inflation, a shifting job market, ongoing wars that destroy the lives of people we may not even know, yet their pain and fear is woven into our collective consciousness. We hear about plastic in the ocean, starving whales, widespread fires, animals going extinct, trafficked children, heatwaves that boil potatoes in the ground, unbridled pollution, and so much more that it becomes overwhelming.

It’s tempting to put a face on it... that idiotic president, or those greedy corporate fat cats in expensive suits. But to some degree we are all tangled up in the system. Maybe that’s why the anxiety is so hard to shake.

And maybe that’s a good thing.

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Here’s where my rubber band analogy comes in.

You know how a rubber band builds more and more tension the more you stretch it? When it reaches maximum tension, two things can happen. The band breaks, unleashing it’s own kind of chaos (like snapping in your face), or... it is released toward a target, intended or not, with a force equal to the amount of tension it was holding.

Seems to me, our collective rubber band is getting stretched about as far as it can go without breaking and sending our whole system crashing down around our ears... but I’m betting that’s not going to happen. At least not in the timeline I’m choosing to occupy.

The other option—the one I’m choosing—is that we identify a desirable target and direct the released tension toward it. With all the tension we’ve built up, the rubber band will have a whole lot of stored force to propel it toward our chosen target.

But it doesn’t happen all at once. Life will keep presenting us with challenges that add more tension. So we have to keep returning our focus to the target every time the tension rises... and let it go again.

We need to do that both in our individual lives and collectively, because collective change starts with each of us.

Change is always an inside game, because metaphysically speaking, that’s all there really is... but that’s a rabbit hole for another day. Just allow that it might be true.

Allow that maybe... you can actually change the whole scenario right from where you are. At least the scenario you personally experience.

Choose Your Target

At the moment, right where we are might feel like the rubber band is stretched so tight our collective arms are shaking with the effort of holding on. We don’t want to let go because we don’t know what it will hit, or what it might destroy.... like we’re aiming a slingshot at nothing in particular. Just hanging on.

There’s a tremendous amount of energy there, just waiting to be released toward a target. Our job is to choose the target.

So I ask you,

• What do you want your world to look like?

• How do you want to feel when you wake up in the morning?

• What kind of world do want your children and grandchildren to inherit?

• How do you want to see humans relating with Nature and each other?

• What are you willing to focus on long enough to see it manifest in your life?

Ask yourself questions. Use your imagination. Dream big.

That’s your target.

And once you have a clear picture, start to replace the dread, the confusion, and the horror at what’s going on in the world with a clear, repeated focus on your target.

Your mind can only focus on one thing at a time, so every time you shift your focus to your target, it has to release whatever is causing the tension for as long as you keep focusing on what you want.

Train your brain to keep going back there every chance you get—until it becomes a habit (which apparently takes 66 days to anchor).

Clearing Your Pesky Old Habits

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been inundated with negative programming all your life. Between news programs, the slings and arrows of life in general, and disturbing information shared by well-meaning siblings, you know way too much about what has gone wrong and how bad things can get.

Like finding out that 99% of all meat, dairy, and eggs sold in the U.S. comes from animals raised in horrendous factory farm conditions. And just this morning I read that women in Afghanistan are still prohibited from getting an education beyond elementary school. And... well, you get the idea.

It may not seem easy to let those kinds of things go. It’s all real stuff after all, and it’s not pretty. Our natural inclination is to want to stop it.

But if you know anything about how universal laws work, you’ve heard of the Law of Attraction—or as Bashar puts it: What you put out is what you get back. Your beliefs, focus, expectations, definitions, and energetic orientation shape the reality you experience.

So change your focus. Change your beliefs about what’s possible. Start expecting something better... and then something even better than that.

Whatever that is, that’s your target. Aim for it.

Whenever you get pulled away from your focus by events in your life or in the world around you, just turn your focus back to the target. Again and again and again.

Then the released rubber band will have nowhere else to go but toward your target.

It will get easier with practice.

Which is not to say you don’t also need to take action. Physical action—even as small as picking up a piece of trash, donating to a cause you believe in, choosing organically grown products, or ordering an oat milk latte—is the way things change in the physical world.

Such little acts may seem inconsequential in the whole scheme of things, but they signal massive shifts in your consciousness... and that’s how reality changes.

Before you know it, the world you experience will start looking and feeling different. Probably not all at once.

You might notice a particularly sweet birdsong on a foggy morning, or happen to see an article about a company selling toilet paper and using their profits to provide wells and toilets to people who don’t have reliable access to clean water and sanitation (a little plug for Who Gives a Crap TP company—a shining example of how to pick a target, take action, and change the world).

You could wake up with a new idea that shifts your reality, or just find that you’re being nicer to your kids.

Bottom line, your focus will change your reality, because what you put out is what you get back. That’s one of the five unchangeable laws of the universe.

In case you’re wondering what the other laws are, according to Bashar:

1. You exist... always have, always will

2. Everything is here and everything is now

3. The One is All and the All are One

4. What you give out is what you get back

5. Everything changes except the first four laws

What About When You Can’t Let Go?

Sometimes tension keeps sticking around no matter how many times you shift your focus back to your favorite target.

I’ve been there too. That’s when I pull out my little bag of tricks. I’m using one of them right now.

• I write. Writing gets things out of my head and onto paper... or a computer screen where they are much easier to release.

• For persistent emotional static I often use EFT, AKA Tapping, to clear and calm the nervous system and shift limiting beliefs. It can work like magic when you pinpoint the underlying source of your tension. I’ve been helping clients clear their angst for nearly 30 years with EFT and its cousin Matrix Reimprinting. If you think it might help, I invite you to learn more here.

• Another surefire way to get myself back in harmony with my target is to get outside–ideally with bare feet in the soil and a relatively mindless task to perform, like mowing the clover or tying up tomato vines. Nature has a way of putting things into perspective like nothing else can.

I’ll conclude by offering a grudging thank-you to our presidential buffoon and his not-so-merry band of cronies. They’ve pulled the rubber band so tight that I can practically hear it twanging as environmental protections are bowled over, prices rise astronomically, social programs for the needy are obliterated, and the lies... oh the endless lies keep tumbling from their tongues.

They’ve helped to make my personal target crystal clear. Which, in case you hadn’t guessed, is pretty much the opposite of everything they do and stand for.

My beautiful, beautiful target.

A New Earth Golden Age of harmony, cooperation, and abundant prosperity for all life.

A note about my illustrations. People often comment on them, mostly pro, some con. I create them with various AI tools and/or Canva and include them for three reasons:

1. I’m an artist. I love creating images—and AI is so much faster than painting them (which I’ve also done plenty of over the years)

2. I post the images on Pinterest, which is a visual search engine, to help new people find my Substack posts (hint to other writers looking to expand your audience)

3. Most people who mention my illustrations tell me they enjoy them (and I’m happy to engage in respectful discussions about AI’s impact on the arts and the environment, which I’ve thought about a lot)

There are so many ways to work with healing energy.

You can tap away your emotional stress with EFT. You can clear your chakras, or draw lemniscates in your energy field, Donna Eden style. Or run reiki energy that comes in a surprising number of different styles—I’ve seen lists of over thirty different forms of reiki.

For me, Usui reiki, Bars, EFT and a few other modalities are go-to tools for working with energy-healing clients. But the one I use for myself most often is Faery Reiki. Most people have never even heard of it, but it feels like home to me.

Faery Reiki is exactly what it sounds like—Reiki with faeries, nature spirits, elemental energy and a distinctly Celtic flavor direct from Avalon, with it’s own symbols and recommended procedures. It’s rather like discovering that your sensible little cottage has a secret door out the back leading to an enchanted forest.

And why on earth wouldn’t you open it?

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A Little Reiki History, Briefly

The original Reiki system was developed in Japan by Mikao Usui in the early twentieth century. Usui Reiki works with what’s understood as Universal Life Force Energy, using hand positions, symbols and intention.

It has traveled a long way since then. Once Reiki found its way to the West, it acquired practitioners, treatment rooms, certificates, massage tables and an astonishing number of websites with a penchant for purple.

Faery Reiki takes that same energy and brings it into relationship with the natural world with new symbols channeled by Violet Pallie. Which is where things get interesting, because nature isn’t simply a place we go for a walk when we’ve been sitting at a computer too long.

Nature is alive.

Trees have awareness. Water has presence, and the wind has opinions. Certain places have an unmistakable feeling to them, as though the landscape has noticed you’re standing there.

Faery Reiki invites you to pay attention to that.

How Faery Reiki Differs From Usui Reiki

Here’s the short version: Usui Reiki gives you a way to channel Universal Life Force Energy. Faery Reiki invites the natural world into the conversation.

The two aren’t rivals. You don’t have to pick a side, as though you’re being asked to declare allegiance to either the Reiki Council or the Faery Parliament.

Faery Reiki sits comfortably alongside Usui Reiki and other forms of energy work. It just draws more heavily on the Celtic and elemental traditions rather than the Japanese—on our relationship with Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Ether… and on our connection with faery and elemental beings.

That shifts the whole experience. You aren’t only sitting in a room sending energy to someone. You might be aligning with faery allies, sending roots deep into Earth and surrounding yourself with flowers, dancing with the wind, relaxing with water, or cleansing with fire.

You start noticing things. And noticing, it turns out, is a powerful magical practice.

You Don’t Need to Live in an Enchanted Forest

This is my favorite part: you can bring Faery Reiki into completely ordinary life.

The Faery Reiki symbols feel alive to me—living elemental beings who uplift and heal every aspect of my life. They are always ready to step in—or fly in—and help keep my life in balance.

There’s one symbol connected with Fire. Use it while making your morning tea. Wrap your hands around the cup. Feel the warmth. Take a breath and notice the cleansing element of Fire—warmth, light, energy, transformation, life. Then drink your tea. Congratulations—you’ve just had a small magical experience before breakfast.

The Flower Faery Symbol is connected with Earth. Connect with it while gardening. Kick off your shoes and stand on the ground. Put your hands on a tree trunk. Notice the roots, the bark, and what happens inside you when you finally stop long enough to be fully present.

I probably feel most at home with the symbol connected with Water, Graceful Faery. While washing your hands, imagine whatever you no longer need flowing away with the water. Near a river, lake or ocean, just sit for a while. No ritual required—you don’t even have to know what you’re doing. Water has a way of inviting deep relaxation without effort.

The symbol connected with the Air element feels very responsive and active to me. Go outside. Feel the breeze. Take a breath and let it move through you. Sometimes clarity shows up because the mind is finally open enough to hear it. Sometimes it shows up because the wind blows a leaf directly into your face. Either way, message received.

I almost forgot the Queen Faery symbol. She brings all the others into harmony and balance and she’s connected with the element of ether.

And, perhaps the most mysterious symbol of all, the Faery Reiki Master Symbol opens a portal to Avalon… which, I find useful whether I’m using Faery Reiki or not. Because, who doesn’t want their own secret passageway to the Isle of Apples?

Everyday Faery Reiki

You can, of course, also use Faery Reiki on yourself—before sleep, when you’re anxious, or when you’ve spent so long caring for everyone else that you’ve forgotten you’re one of the people who needs caring for too.

There’s a step-by-step outline of how to do Faery Reiki healing in the manual, but you can also just follow your intuition. The healing faeries will assist, no matter how you proceed.

Once you’ve received the Faery Reiki Attunement, just put your hands on your heart, or your belly, or wherever feels right. Breathe. Envision the Faery Reiki symbols, one at a time or all at once. Invite Reiki to flow. Then allow the healing to balance and harmonize your energy field.

Note: Not all faeries are interested in working with humans. Some are downright opposed. The Faery Reiki symbols call in particular faeries of Avalon who are very interested in humanity and helping us heal our imbalances.

My guess is that this also serves them. I mean, who wants to live with unbalanced neighbors?

You Can Receive Faery Reiki Attunements and Healing No Matter Where You Live

One of the best things about Faery Reiki is that you don’t have to live near me to receive an attunement. No need to travel to Sonoma County, camp in a redwood grove, or explain to airport security why your suitcase contains crystals, feathers and a book about faeries.

Faery Reiki Attunements can be sent from a distance, wherever you happen to live. The attunement is an energetic initiation—opening a way to consciously work with Faery Reiki in your own life.

The reason that works… and yes, I’ve wondered about this myself… is because we are all connected. As Bashar says, All is One and One is All.

Intention is everything: my intention to send the attunement, your intention to receive it, and the faeries’ intention to facilitate it. I can simply envision you in front of me and pass the attunement.

You don’t need a lifetime of mystical experience to be attuned, or even a belief in faeries. You don’t need to recognize a leprechaun at twenty paces, and you don’t have to be particularly woo.

You just need to be curious about whether the world is more alive than you’ve been taught, about what happens when you slow down enough to sense the unseen—about the wisdom of trees, the intentions of the wind, the dance of water, and the small flashes of intuition that show up once you stop trying so hard to manufacture answers with your rational mind.

That, for me, is the real gift of Faery Reiki. It isn’t about escaping ordinary life—it’s about making ordinary life more magical. The garden becomes a wonderland. A walk becomes a conversation. A cup of tea becomes a tiny ritual. A tree becomes an old friend.

And the world starts to feel less like a collection of objects and more like a living, mysterious place we’re lucky enough to inhabit. Which, when you think about it, is a rather lovely way to go through life.

If something inside you just whispered well, that sounds interesting—pay attention. That might be the faeries. It might be your own intuition. Either way, it’s a message.

If you’d like to receive your own Faery Reiki Attunement from a distance, no matter where in the world you live—or just learn more about faeries—visit FairySource.com.

No passport required. No special wardrobe. Wings entirely optional.

A note about my illustrations. People often comment on them, mostly pro, some con. I create them with AI tools and/or Canva and include them for three reasons:

1. I’m an artist. I love creating images—and AI is so much faster than painting them (which I’ve also done plenty of over the years)

2. I post the images on Pinterest, which is a visual search engine, in order to help new people find my Substack posts (hint to other writers looking to expand your audience)

3. Most people who mention my illustrations tell me they enjoy them (I’m also happy to engage in respectful discussions about AI’s impact on the arts and the environment, which I’ve thought about a lot)

Surviving plagues, shipwrecks, slave ships, famines, genocides. Or maybe just one bad winter that wiped out most of a village. Otherwise, you simply wouldn’t be here reading this with your coffee going cold beside you. It’s not a metaphor. It’s arithmetic, and it’s the kind of arithmetic that should probably stop you mid-stride more often than it does.

An Inconveniently Large Family Tree

Somewhere in your ancestry, or mine, or the person’s next to you on the bus, someone walked out of a burning village during the Crusades. Someone survived being loaded onto a ship in chains and, against every design of that system, lived long enough to have children who had children… who had you.

Someone hid in a forest outside a camp whose name still makes the room go quiet, and made it to a boat, and never talked about it, and raised a family anyway. This isn’t a competition of suffering—it’s a strange, uncomfortable club that everyone alive today belongs to, whether they’ve ever thought about it or not.

My own family tree runs through Ireland, and Ireland has never been shy about keeping its grief on the record. Between 1845 and 1852, a potato blight wiped out the one crop poor tenant families needed to survive—while, at the very same time, ships bound for England kept leaving Irish ports loaded with the grain, vegetables, butter, and animals produced by Irish farmers.

That detail tends to get left out of the tidy “crop failure” version of the story, and it shouldn’t be. Nearly a million and a half people died on that tiny island, mostly from diseases that starvation leaves behind—about 12% of Ireland’s inhabitants.

Against All Odds

Over 20% of the surviving population fled to other lands, many of them on ships so overcrowded and fever-ridden that historians now call them coffin ships. More than five thousand people died at sea trying to get somewhere safer. And still—enough of them made it.

Enough of them got married, had children, taught those children how to bake bread and hold a grudge (my Grammy was a champ at that, bless her soul) and laugh at funerals. Those traits still live in my family and color the way we see the world.

And somewhere as a result of one of those unbroken chains, here you are with a history of similar challenges in your own lineage, and here I am—blinking at a screen and wondering what any of it has to do with us today.

Turns Out, Quite a Lot

Here’s the part where it stops being history and starts being personal. Survival wasn’t only a matter of luck, weather, and politics—it required something within the people themselves. Inner strength. Stubbornness. Resourcefulness. The kind of hope that keeps showing up even after it’s been shut down a dozen times.

And none of that simply evaporated once the crisis passed. It got carried into our DNA. Passed down the way eye color gets passed down, or a particular laugh, or the family’s questionable taste in feuds that outlive their original cause.

Modern research into epigenetics has started poking at this idea seriously—the notion that trauma and resilience alike can leave chemical fingerprints on how our genes express themselves, like fingerprints that outlast the generation that endured them.

Scientists are still arguing over exactly how far that inheritance travels and through how many generations. But you don’t actually need a peer-reviewed study to notice that you come from people who did not quit. That fact is sitting in your cells whether or not anyone’s published a paper confirming it yet.

They’re Not Finished Rooting for You

Here’s where it gets even more interesting, if you’re willing to follow the thread a little further than the science currently goes. In most every tradition that predates the modern world’s discomfort with mystery, the ancestors were never considered fully gone.

The Celtic understanding of thin places—those spots where this world and the next lean in close enough to touch—was built on exactly this idea. The people who came before you aren’t a closed chapter. They’re more like a support crew that never clocked out, still invested in how the story turns out.

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How to Actually Use This

None of this is meant to be a nice thought you read once and set down.

Start with your parents and notice what traits you inherited from them. Then take a look at your grandparents if you knew them. How were they like you? How were they different?

What still supports you? What challenges you? Just be aware of how their experience still shapes your sense of self, your view of the world, and your ability to function in life.

Do some research on your family line. How did they come to live where they lived? How did you end up being born where you started out? What sort of resilience did they need to survive?

Did they face slavery, genocide, famine, war? What did they do for fun and entertainment?

In short, get to know them, as far back as you can trace. Feel your way into their lives. It’s okay to imagine how they lived. Imagination is a doorway to truth beyond rational explanations.

What Is Remembered Lives

Once you have a sense of who your ancestors are, try this: next time you’re facing something that feels too big—a diagnosis, a move, a decision you keep circling without landing—sit for a minute and picture the ancestral line behind you. Not as ghosts. As your ever-present backup team.

Ask, out loud or silently, what they want you to know. You already carry whatever it was that got them through against overwhelming odds. It didn’t skip you. It’s simply waiting to be remembered.

You are the proof that it worked. Every time.

And it’s still working. As they say in many pagan communities, What is remembered lives.

So remember. Tap into the generosity, the resilience, the humor, the stubbornness, and the pure joy of existence that kept your ancestors thriving for thousands of years—and remember, that is their gift to you right now.

—

I’m already thinking about Autumn Equinox (or Mabon as some like to call it in recent years). For some reason it feels connected with ancestors… at least that’s what’s coming through right now as a possible theme for Faehallows’ next shamanic journey workshop.

If you want to stay in the loop to get updates about my upcoming workshops, join my email list here: https://forms.aweber.com/form/21/720037221.htm

The faeries gave me a message for someone. Maybe it’s you.

From their point of view, human beings have an impressive talent for making simple things complicated.

Give us a sunset, and we’ll photograph it and post it on Instagram. Give us a bird singing outside the window, and we’ll wonder what species it is and pull out our local Audubon guide.

Ask why we’re here on Earth, and within a week someone will have invented a twelve-step certification program, with a color-coded personality chart.

Life purpose has become one of those things we search for as though it accidentally fell behind the sofa.

The faeries, I suspect, find this endlessly entertaining.

If you spend any time with the old Celtic stories, you’ll notice the faery folk never organize meetings for strategic life planning. They lure people into forests, or tempt them to follow haunting music they almost remember.

Faeries understand something our culture keeps overlooking: your soul already knows where it’s going. Always has.

The challenge is trusting it.

Follow Your Bliss Was Never About Comfort

Joseph Campbell gave the world one of its most quoted pieces of wisdom: follow your bliss. The phrase has suffered the fate of many beautiful ideas—printed on coffee mugs, stitched onto pillows. It’s been repeated so often it risks sounding like mind chatter.

Sort of like: ask and it is given. Sounds great, but how many people actually believe it? (I’ll have to write a post about that one sometime—much food for thought!)

Campbell wasn’t talking about chasing comfort or hedonistic pleasure. Bliss is what rises when your life lines up with the chosen focus of your soul. It feels like recognition—like a tuning fork struck inside your heart.

The faeries recognize that immediately. It is woven into the fabric of Nature. Sit with an old tree long enough and you notice how nothing in Nature tries to become something else. Ferns unfurl at their own pace. Rivers flow along the path of least resistance. Ravens never try to be anything but ravens... which appears to involve intelligent conversation and the occasional theft.

Nature carries an ease that has little to do with effort and everything to do with allowing. Somewhere along the way, we humans decided all good things had to be earned.

And that’s where we went horribly wrong.

How to Recognize Your Inner Golden Thread

Most of us have felt an inner pull without naming it. A certain subject keeps finding us and sparking our interest. We read every book on it. Our conversations drift there. We lose track of time. We might call it coincidence. Your soul calls it life purpose.

I call it your golden thread.

Add some flowers to my garden

If you want to trace your own golden thread back to its source, ask yourself these three questions:

1. What did you love before anyone told you it wasn’t practical?

2. What keeps sparking your interest—through conversations, books, strangers—no matter how many times you set it aside?

3. Where does time seem to disappear completely?

None of these are distractions from your real life. They’re clues your real life keeps leaving for you, one at a time, like breadcrumbs that only make sense once you’ve followed enough of them to see the trail.

Why the Faeries Will Never Hand You a Map

The faeries don’t use GPS or maps. They follow their inner golden thread—the path of joy, excitement, bliss... or simply peace.

They offer invitations instead of roadmaps, one step at a time. Follow the light between the trees, listen, cross this stream, meet this stranger, stay curious. Each choice leads to the next one.

That’s probably why people who find their purpose often struggle to describe how it happened. Looking backward, the pattern seems obvious. Living it may have felt like wandering through fog with a lantern that lit only six feet of trail at a time.

The soul is content with six feet.
The mind wants the entire itinerary, and that tension fuels most spiritual journeys.

While we wait for certainty before taking the next step, life simply moves forward.

Take a step. Any step. And the next one will appear.

Did you get that? It’s important.

Even a very small step sets your purpose in motion. Waiting simply stands still.

That very motion, even if it is as small as stepping outside to water your flowers when you feel the urge, rather than telling yourself you need to finish checking your email first, can make a huge difference in the trajectory of your life.

Just like when a ship makes a very slight turn early in its voyage that takes it to a whole different continent than where it seemed to be heading at the start, your very slight shift toward joy now could open doors to vistas you might otherwise have missed.

Campbell mapped this terrain through the Hero’s Journey: every meaningful adventure begins with an invitation, every hero hesitates, and every hero eventually reaches a point where trust becomes more useful than answers.

The old Celtic tales tell the same story from a different angle. The doorway to the Otherworlds rarely opens in the center of town. It appears in unexpected places, along forgotten forest paths, beside ancient wells, beneath hills that look ordinary until the light changes.

Your purpose unfolds the same way. It rarely arrives with trumpets. It arrives as a subtle pull that feels a bit more uplifting or exciting than other options. A spark of interest. A moment of enthusiasm.

Keep me inspired to share more

Aliveness Is a Better Measurement Than Achievement

While the world measures success by achievement, the faeries are much more interested in aliveness. One fills a résumé. The other fills a life.

Beauty is a big part of aliveness. It serves no purpose other than it’s own expression, slowing us down enough to hear our inner selves again. Imagine a shaft of sunlight through cedar branches, the scent of rain on warm soil, the face of a child laughing with joyful abandon.

Beauty reminds us that our souls have always been pointing us toward our purpose. The question was never whether guidance exists. It’s whether we pause long enough to hear it.

A Practice for This Week

Purpose rarely arrives as a single revelation, so treat it like a step-by-step practice instead of a puzzle to solve.

Each morning this week, ask one question before you check your phone: what is life inviting through me today?

Write down whatever comes up, even if it seems small—a phone call you keep putting off, an hour you want to spend outside, a class you’ve been circling for months. Follow one of those threads before the day ends. That’s the whole practice.

The faeries never ask for a five-year plan. They invite you to explore the next six feet of trail.

Your soul arrived carrying your own unique song. The faeries hear it clearly. They would never ask you to become someone else.

They invite you to remember who you’ve been all along. Joseph Campbell called it bliss. The Celts might have called it lowene, an old Cornish word meaning “joy, bliss, gladness, or mirth.”

Whatever you call it, follow it. It’s the path your soul laid out for you before you were even born.

The faeries... well, they’re not too concerned with your soul path. They are too busy following their own. They would probably just smile, disappear into the trees, and trust you’d find the path once you stopped trying so hard to locate it.

I have a feeling they’re right.

°°°

My exploration of Celtic shamanic faery magic has opened many magical doors and windows in my life. It’s one spark on my golden thread that I love to share with others. If you’d like to learn more, visit Faehallows School of Magic.

Shared from my Enchanted Planet blog.

When I look around at the world, fires everywhere, people dying of heat, whales dying of starvation, safety nets being pulled out from under the most vulnerable people in our communities, and... well, you know the drill. It can be discouraging. Even downright depressing.

And I think, wait a minute. Isn’t this supposed to be the dawn of a golden age for humanity? Didn’t I come here to help activate the New Earth? Why all the doom and gloom?

Politically, at least in America, it seems like everything is moving in the opposite direction of a New Earth. Environmental safeguards that took decades to build are being wiped out left and right, even while the oceans warm and heat waves wipe out thousands of people. Endangered species protections are vanishing before our eyes, as if it doesn’t even matter if hundreds more creatures go extinct in our lifetime.

It’s painful to witness.

The Birthing Behind the Scenes

Here’s a thing about birth: the process looks nothing like the thing that’s being born.

A caterpillar doesn’t sprout wings mid-crawl. It dissolves first, completely, into formless goo inside its chrysalis. If you cracked that chrysalis open halfway through, you wouldn’t see a butterfly-in-progress. You’d see something that looks like decay. A biologist who didn’t already know how the story ends would have every reason to call the whole experiment a failure.

My own two kids came into the world the natural way, at home—and I remember the feeling of being totally, impossibly out of control as the process took over my body. Nothing was wrong. That’s just what the middle of a birth feels like from the inside.

The fear rippling through people right now is real in the same way. My kid’s health insurance premiums have skyrocketed. Just the day before yesterday here in Sonoma County, we had some of the the worst air quality readings in the world due to a nearby wildfire. None of that is abstract to me, and I’m not wanting to paper over it with “everything happens for a reason.” That kind of spiritual bypassing helps no one, least of all the whales.

Dying Systems Get Louder.

The systems collapsing right now were never going to retire gracefully. Extraction-based economics doesn’t hand in a resignation letter. It gets louder and more desperate the closer it gets to its expiration date, the way a candle flares brightest right before it gutters out.

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A Mother’s Perspective on Transformation

With both of my kids, there was a stretch (pun intended), maybe twenty minutes, maybe an hour, I probably blocked it out, actually. It felt like being torn in half. Like there was no way a human could come out of me. Then, almost too fast to register, a whole new person was suddenly breathing air.

What a rush!

I think we’re headed for a rush like that on a planetary scale, except the timeline is years instead of hours, so it’s harder to feel progress of it while you’re inside it.

Right now it can feel like the dark forces have the wheel. I watch the news some nights and think, how is everyone not as horrified as I am?

The Math of a Tipping Point

But here’s what actually cheers me up: polling has consistently shown only about a third of Americans support the current direction, which means two-thirds don’t. And the political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s work found that sustained nonviolent movements mobilizing around 3.5 percent of a population have historically been effective, while Damon Centola’s tipping-point research found that some social norms can flip when about 25 percent of people adopt a new position.

Either way, we’ve got the numbers to shift the entire paradigm.
That means you and me and everyone at my last workshop.

The Sea Change Beneath the Noise

I don’t have a statistic for this part, just what I notice. I was heartened to see people on my street campaigning to outlaw abusive factory farms in our county, a first-time U.S. ballot measure. Unfortunately, it lost, but at least it got people paying attention.

I’m inspired by a friend of mine who teaches yoga to her neighbors for free. That sort of thing doesn’t make the news. It’s happening behind the scenes. And it just keeps happening, underneath the noise, while the noise gets all the attention because noise is a lot louder.

I think about the faeries here, not as Disney caricatures, but the real ones I work with in shamanic journeys—ancient, patient intelligences who never need human approval to keep tending the harmony of Nature. When I sit with them at dusk under the redwoods in my yard, what comes through isn’t reassurance so much as indifference to the human timeline. They’re not waiting for the New Earth. They already live there.

Because we’ve had more than our share of wildfires locally, it’s pretty obvious when I drive around afterward that the faeries are at work. Fireweed and lupine show up in the scorched soil before anything else can, doing the unglamorous work of making the ground fertile again for what comes next.

The blackened hillside isn’t the end. It’s the ugly middle of the forest becoming something else, and if you’ve ever hiked through the Mark West burn scar a year out, you know renewal can happen fast.

Some of us are at that fireweed stage right now. Others are still in the fire. Most of us are some uncomfortable combination of both, trying to figure out which parts of ourselves need to burn away so something more beautiful can take hold.

If you wake up in the morning wondering whether the New Earth got called off, don’t worry. You haven’t missed anything. What you’re seeing is what a paradigm shift looks like from inside the chrysalis, before any wings show up.

The appearances aren’t lying about what’s visible right now. They’re just not showing you the whole picture, because the whole picture is still assembling itself, heart by heart, underneath the surface of what you can see on the news.

What This Means for You

You don’t have to solve any of this today. The birth process has already taken control, and it will go easier if you stop bracing against it and just breathe.

And remember, it’s an inside job. The outer chaos is reflecting something collective in us that hasn’t fully sorted itself out yet. Not a comfortable thought, but a useful one, because it means the New Earth is already available inside you, any time you choose it.

And since we’re living in bodies, in a physical world, physical action still matters.

Plant the pollinator garden. Donate to the local food drive. Write the letter, cast the vote, foster the dog you can take in this month. Let the grief be real. But let the hope be just as real, in the same body, at the same time. That’s what it feels like to live inside a birth.

The New Earth isn’t something you have to wait for. It’s already underway, and you’re already part of building it... if you choose.

(And Lugh Wants You to Notice)

You know that moment when you walk past a garden in late July and the tomatoes have gone from “maybe someday” to “oh my gods, eat me now”? It’s definitely happening in my garden.

That’s not just a tomato thing. That’s a you thing too.
Even if I’ve never met you, I can assure you that you have important gifts to share with the world. Probably the things you feel least confident about.

You know... those secret journals you’ve never shared with anyone. Your passion for singing, even though you think you can’t carry a tune (so you save it for the shower). The time it just felt right to drop everything and take a walk and you actually did it, even though there was work to do.

Those are little gems hiding in your psyche, waiting to find a way to shine in the world.

• I’m not saying you have to publish your journals. Heaven forbid! But maybe it’s time to start writing a book or a couple of blog posts, since writing comes naturally.

• Maybe your silly doodles are a doorway to painting—or guiding others in neurographic art for stress relief and manifesting their dreams.

• Do you find people often laughing around you? No need to change anything. Just own your talent for making people feel at ease.

This is Lugh’s season, and Lugh is never one for modesty.

I suppose he must be a Leo.

He was the multiple-arts god—master of poetry, smith-craft, healing, music, strategy, and pretty much every skill his fellow gods could name, which is how he talked his way into Tara’s royal court (as the story goes, he showed up, listed his talents one by one, and the gatekeeper kept saying “we already have someone for that” until Lugh asked if they had anyone who did all of it at once—nobody did, and in he walked).

So stand at the threshold of life and claim your gifts as Lugh did at Tara.

It’s the only way to enter the feast. The effortless flow. The joyful expansion you came here to experience. No holding back!

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In case you’re not familiar with him yet, Lugh is the Irish god of mastery, sunlight, and the confidence that comes from being genuinely good at something—unapologetically.

His feast is Lughnasadh and it’s almost here, which means the wheel of the year has rolled around to the first harvest. It’s the moment when what we planted in spring finally ripens, ready to be gathered.

I’ve picked a few zucchinis and lots of tomatoes from my garden. The basil is abundant too, which is a must for our extended-family pesto dinners. Our local Gravenstein apples are showing up in the markets. And somewhere inside you, something has been ripening too—a skill, an idea, a piece of your own magic—and it’s more ready for the world than you may think. It’s what you came here to explore and express.

That’s the energy of this holiday. It’s not just “the crops are in,” but “look at the gifts you have to share.”

The Harvest Isn’t Just in the Fields

I’ve noticed, in thirty years of coaching, that inner gifts are easily overlooked. Other people often see them before we do. Our dogs definitely see them.

Often they are things we are afraid to share, or things that seem like second-nature to us. Yet other people may marvel at them.

My mother was a master at making pies. I have a friend who can engage just about anyone in a lively conversation, a talent she assumes is available to anyone. It’s not!

Another friend can keep people fascinated with his stories for hours, but it’s so effortless he doesn’t notice what a unique talent that is.

Like gold, those gifts are precious. Nobody hands you mastery. It’s cut, threshed, and separated from the chaff over months (sometimes years) of living, and Lughnasadh is the moment you’re invited to stand in the field and say look what I grew.

And there’s also a darker thread running through this holiday: nothing ripens without something being given up first. The old stalk dries up so the grain can be gathered. The seed had to disappear underground before it could sprout.

Whatever you lost, gave up, or released this year—that sacrifice fed this harvest. It counts.

Gold, Sun, and Crystals That Match the Season

Have you noticed that unique color of late summer light? A golden glow that makes everything look like it popped out of a Maxfield Parrish painting, especially late in the day. If you want to work with that glow on your altar or in meditation, try using something made of gold, or choose a crystal or gemstone with a golden hue, like Citrine, golden topaz, or golden calcite.

Build a small harvest altar if you like to celebrate that way—bread, grain, late-summer fruits (just make sure the mice can’t get to it), a gold candle, and maybe one of these stones sitting in the center like it’s holding court.

It doesn’t need to be elaborate.
Lugh was a master of many arts—not many props.

A Practice for Lughnasadh

If you want to celebrate Lughnasadh on your own, try this: open a journal and list your gifts. Not your job title, or your résumé. Actual skills, insights, and inner resources you’ve noticed or developed over your lifetime, even the small or unglamorous ones that don’t seem important.

If they express who you are, they are the most important gifts in the world.

Have you learned to say no without over-explaining? That’s a harvest.
Finally trusting your intuition in a decision, no matter how small? Also a harvest.

Write them down.

Then ask the question every good harvest requires: what’s actually ripe and ready to be shared, and what still needs another season in the field?

Not everything is ready to share with the world at once. That’s not failure—it’s just how ripening works.

You’re Invited to Gather Your Harvest With Me

If you’d rather explore all of this with Lugh and the crystal devas as guides, and human company instead of a solo journal session, I’d love to have you join us at Crystal Clarity & the Golden Harvest of Your Soul Gifts.

It’s my Lughnasadh workshop on Zoom this Saturday, August 1st.

Join the Crystal Clarity Harvest

We’ll gather crystal clear insights from the crystal devas, take guided shamanic journeys to mine our inner gold, and harvest any gifts you’re ready to claim and share. We’ll call on the light of Lugh to illuminate what’s ripe in your life right now, and anchor it all in the hidden caverns of your heart.

Come gather your golden harvest with us.

Save your spot here → https://www.celticmysteryschool.com/crystal-clarity-your-golden-harvest/

Do you ever get the ughs? I guess everyone does now and then. It happens to me sometimes when the world overwhelms my oh so sensitive nature.

Like when a customer claimed I misrepresented a Celtic magic course I’ve been selling since 2010 with never a complaint… and actually, a lot of expressions of gratitude.

I start thinking, “What did I do wrong?” I mean, it’s not like I’m out to mislead anyone. In fact, that’s the thing that I find really annoying. People expect that these days.

They expect lies.

And I’ve been misled by lies myself a few times. Paid a lot of money for products or services that didn’t even come close to their advertised promises. Believed news stories that turned out to be B.S.

Or had someone tell me they didn’t do something that they clearly did. “No, I didn’t throw your tea kettle across the room at my boyfriend.”

I guess that big dent just appeared out of nowhere. Right!

That sort of thing fries my circuits… or as a somewhat famous computer put it, “Does not compute.” I can almost feel the steam shooting out my ears. Though if steam actually came out, I'd at least be able to get the wrinkles out of my curtains.

Maybe I have an exaggerated reaction, but I’m sure I’m not the only one. In fact, anyone who works with the faery realm would probably have a similar response. Lies are just not allowed there.

Like in the tale of Thomas the Rhymer, he came back from the faery realm with a tongue that could not lie. That’s the faery way.

But it’s obviously not the human way.

Short of moving to the faery realm, what's a truth-loving human supposed to do?

Turns out there's a way through it. It starts with the last person I expected.

What to Do About Lies?

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and the lies seem to be getting worse and worse. Even the U.S. president can hardly open his mouth without a stream of lies pouring out.

The weird thing to me is that it doesn’t even seem to bother most people. Or maybe they just don’t notice or care.

I notice. I care. And sometimes it nearly drives me up a wall.

So, my question is what to do about it.

I know I can’t stop the world from lying. And I don’t want to be a hermit living in a hut in the forest. So I need to find a way to live in the world without feeling constantly irritated by lies, misrepresentations, and rip offs.

Okay, not constantly. At least not on a conscious level. Most of the time I sail through life with hardly a care in the world, but then…

It’s like walking into an electric fence. I come upon a lie and ZAP! My whole body reacts with an annoying buzz running through it.

I wonder if that’s what the faeries feel and why they tend to stay away from humans.

As far as I know, humans are the only beings who lie, at least on this planet. I can’t speak for any other planet or dimension. Some say there are lying demons or devils, but personally, I’ve never met one.

Though to be fair, I also haven't met a Tasmanian devil, and I'm assured those exist too.

The only liars I’ve met are human. Which means I’m not immune to the occasional white lie myself… the slight fudge to spare someone’s feelings, the looking the other way when I really should cop to something.

Starting With Ourselves

We’ve all done it. And maybe that’s where we have to start, since everything really goes back to ourselves.

There’s something called “radical honesty” that was popularized a while back. I always interpreted that as blurting out everything you think, even if it hurts someone, but that’s probably not what it was really about.

Telling your neighbor her new haircut makes her look like a startled dandelion isn't going to serve any positive purpose, even if it's true.

What I’m thinking now is that radical honesty is probably more about being honest with ourselves. Anyway, that’s where we can actually change things.

So I can look at this challenge as a little upgrade in my personal integrity. A call to notice when I play it safe by hiding a truth that should be shared, or when I make a choice out of fear rather than joy or passion, which means I’m lying to myself about what I really want and what I came here for.

Changing Consciousness at Will

As for what to do about the inevitable lies in the world around us? That’s where the magic comes in: changing consciousness at will.

I have a few tools to help with that.

• Water—from a hot bath or shower, to watching a stream or fountain. Even the silly little solar fountain in my birdbath has a way of soothing my energy and getting me back in touch with timeless truth.

• Fire—a candle flame, or a blazing bonfire. I just tune in to the dancing salamanders in every flame and remember that any irritation can be burned away, leaving calm in its wake.

• Air—breath is its own kind of magic. Centering. Holding space here and now. Breathing in slowly and out even more slowly resets the whole nervous system.

• Earth—grounding into the foundation of all life. Walking barefoot in the clover. Anchoring awareness in structure and timeless universal law. Rock solid. Always dependable… unlike my wifi.

• Ether—the element of magic, imagination, unseen templates of perfection, and of course the faery realm. Tapping into the higher vibrations of joy, play, creativity, and wonder. Rising above the mundane.

Rising Above

That last one may be the key to all of it. When I raise my vibration, none of it even bothers me anymore.

I remember that it doesn’t really matter what anyone “out there” is doing. I’m creating my own beautiful bubble. And that’s how I find my way back to the New Earth… again.

Soap bubbles pop the second reality pokes them, but mine's had a surprisingly good run—and I can always create a new one whenever those lies poke through.

As a coach, this is one of the questions I hear people ask more than almost any other, in whatever words they use to ask it.

It tends to sound something like this:

“What am I supposed to do with my life?”
“What is my purpose?”
And sooner or later, almost everyone lands on some version of: “What are my gifts?”

It’s a curious question, because most of us are looking in the wrong direction when we ask it. We search outward, as if the answer were hiding in a horoscope, a career quiz, or someone’s latest program.

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We imagine our gifts should light up a room, or solve one of humanity’s persistent problems. Perhaps we expect a celestial committee handing us a certificate: “Congratulations. You were born to become a healer, an artist, an explorer.”

Nature doesn’t work that way.

A sunflower seed doesn’t wonder whether it was meant to become a sunflower. A hummingbird doesn’t question whether it flies well enough. A crystal doesn’t question its own clarity.

None of them compare themselves to what grows, or flies, or sparkles nearby. Only humans seem to have perfected the art of overlooking what comes naturally.

The Gifts We Dismiss

After more than forty years of working with people, I’ve noticed something fascinating. Your greatest gifts are usually the ones that feel most ordinary to you.

Stopping to enjoy a sunset. Listening without judgment. Creating a little beauty wherever you go. Seeing patterns others miss. Making people laugh exactly when they need it. Finding elegant solutions to complicated problems. Helping others feel seen.

Because these qualities come so naturally, you assume everyone else can do them too. They can’t, as you already know if you’ve ever tried to teach someone your “easy” gift.

That’s precisely why they’re your unique gifts.

We rarely recognize our own strengths, because we’ve lived with them for so long. They’re as familiar as our own voice, or the color of our eyes. Other people often notice them long before we do.

Following Your Bliss Illuminates Your Gifts

Here’s the part most people miss. Your gifts don’t reveal themselves through analysis. They reveal themselves through bliss, or even a little excitement.

Notice what makes you lose track of time, what you’d do even if no one paid you for it. That feeling isn’t a distraction from your purpose. It’s the compass pointing straight at it.

Your soul didn’t come here with a resume. It came with a longing, a specific flavor of aliveness that only shows up when you’re doing what you love.

Follow that feeling and it leads you home to the gifts you already carry.

Nature Doesn’t Question

One of the reasons I love spending time with Nature is that questions like that don’t exist there.

Everything fulfills its purpose simply by becoming more completely itself.

Imagine if, instead of asking why am I not more like her, you asked what life is trying to express through you, and followed whatever lit you up in answer.

That’s a very different question. And I suspect it’s much closer to the answer you’re looking for.

The Harvest of Your Gifts

This is one of the reasons Lughnasadh has always been one of my favorite Celtic festivals. It’s the first harvest festival of the year.

Most people think of harvest as something external, fields of grain, baskets of fruit, abundance measured in bushels or bank accounts.

But the old stories hint at another kind of harvest. A harvest of wisdom, of courage, compassion, creativity—gifts your soul has been growing every time you chose bliss over shoulds.

By early August, the sunlight of the past months has transformed tiny seeds into nourishment, month by month.

Our lives work the same way. Every conversation, every challenge, every joy, every heartbreak, every unexpected turn, all of it has been ripening something within you.

Sometimes we don’t recognize the harvest until someone invites us to look.

The Gold Hidden Within

Gold has always fascinated me, not for its monetary value, but because it reminds me of pure sunlight.

Deep beneath the ground, gold waits within the rock until the right conditions reveal it. Crystals do something similar. They hold and transmit light in extraordinary ways, revealing colors we wouldn’t otherwise see.

Our inner gifts are like that. Waiting for the right light, the light of doing what genuinely uplifts you, to reveal them. Not because they were ever missing. Simply because we hadn’t followed the bliss that reveals them.

A Different Kind of Prosperity

When most people hear the word prosperity, they think about money.

Money certainly has its place. But I’ve come to believe there’s another kind of prosperity that comes first. The prosperity of knowing who you are, of trusting your own gifts, of bringing those gifts into the world in ways that nourish both you and the people around you.

From that place, life feels less like striving and more like an adventure, less like proving your worth and more like expressing it.

Your Harvest of Crystal Clarity

This Lughnasadh, August 1st, I’ll be leading Crystal Clarity & the Golden Harvest of Your Soul Gifts, guided journeys into the hidden underground realms, where crystal beings, gnomes, and the radiant presence of Lugh invite us to discover the treasures we’ve been carrying all along.

Every journey unfolds differently. Some receive guidance. Some encounter unexpected allies. Some simply leave with a deep sense of peace and a renewed trust in themselves.

But beneath every experience lies the same invitation. To remember. To recognize the gifts that have been ripening within you. To gather your own golden harvest.

Because the greatest treasure isn’t gold after all. It’s revealed in the light that has been waiting, all along, for you to follow it... the joy, the passion, the excitement, the bliss.

And maybe—just maybe, those crystal caves underground have a lot to do with the inner caverns within your own heart.

Learn More About Crystal Clarity

If you’d like to gather your own golden harvest this Lughnasadh, I’d love for you to join us for Crystal Clarity on Zoom. Come curious. Come tired. Come however you are. Your gifts have been with you the whole time, and your bliss already knows the way.

I’ve been thinking about crystals a lot lately. Tuning in to hear their messages. And they have a lot to share.

How can you listen to a crystal? I’m sure some of you are wondering.

You may not even think it’s possible. I mean, aren’t they just fancy rocks, lifeless minerals?

That’s one way of looking at it, but I see things quite a bit differently. My sense is that everything and everyone is connected in one sentient web, and we can communicate with any part of that web.

Each part of the web has its own characteristics, like a personality. And crystals have their own unique ability to hold wisdom.

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You don’t need a special gift to listen, and you definitely don’t need a fancy crystal collection.

Even a simple stone from your yard works just fine, though it will have a different perspective from a crystal.

That surprises people. We tend to think the mystical stuff requires the right tools, the right training, the right amount of experience.

But every shamanic journey I’ve ever led or experienced has taught me the opposite: the willing heart matters more than any training or experience.

When you relax into stillness and listen, the messages come through. Maybe not in words. It could be a fleeting feeling, a flash of color, or an unexplained fragrance in the air.

Take note. The messages may be subtle, but they are very real.

Join My Email List

This Saturday, August 1st, is Lughnasadh, and I’m inviting you to Crystal Clarity & the Golden Harvest of Your Soul Gifts, a live 90-minute Zoom journey into the hidden realms beneath the Earth, where crystal beings and gnomes tend the ancient wisdom of the mineral kingdom.

Together we’ll uncover your own inner veins of gold and follow Lugh’s light as it illuminates your unique gifts, deeper clarity, and a renewed sense of purpose.

No previous journeying experience required. No expensive stones required. Just you, a comfortable place to sit, a crystal or pretty stone if you have one, and a willingness to relax and listen.

I’m still working on the sign up page, so keep your eyes out for updates.

Meanwhile, send some appreciation to the mineral kingdom around you!

Bernadette

Faehallows School of Magic

I mean the kind where you type:

“best online magic school”

…and suddenly you’re staring at links upon links of mystery schools, witch academies, and something called Quareia that looks like it might require a torch, a cloak, and at least three lifetimes of dedication.

So I did what any curious human would do: I opened all of them and started poking around.

What I discovered is this:

• Not all magic schools are trying to do the same thing.

• And that’s where things get interesting.

Don't Miss Any Magic

First, a Little Reality Check

Most people think they’re choosing between better or worse schools.

They’re not.

They’re choosing between completely different experiences of magic:

• The “read 400 pages and report back in 6 months” path

• The “learn a specific tradition properly” path

• The “light a candle and change your life” path

All valid.
All quite different.

The “Roll Up Your Sleeves and Get Serious” Path

Let’s start with the one that made me sit up straighter in my chair:

Quareia

This isn’t just a course. It’s… a journey.

A long one.
Like, “pack snacks and maybe notify your next of kin” long.

It’s completely free, which is both generous and slightly suspicious (in a “how is this much content legal?” way). According to their website, their teachings draw “from various magical, religious, and mystical practices that have influenced magical thinking in the Near Eastern and Western world since the early Bronze Age to the present day.”

But here’s what you need to know upfront:

You’re on your own. Quareia doesn’t hold your hand.
It hands you a map, points toward a mountain, and says:

“See you at the top.”

No live classes.
No community cheering you on. In fact, they actually discourage study groups. Just you, the material, and your willingness to keep going when your brain starts sizzling.

Perfect if you:

• Love structure

• Thrive on independence

• Have a deep desire to master something

Maybe not if you:

• Are looking for connection and community

• Want encouragement

• Get overwhelmed easily

• Prefer a little magic with your theory

Support My Muse

The “Let’s Do This Properly (and Respectfully)” Path

Next, I landed somewhere that felt like stepping into a well-told story:

Irish Pagan School

This one is rooted in Irish tradition—and I mean Irish. Not Celtic, Welsh, or Scottish, and definitely not including Celtic lore from Brittany, France, or Galicia.

It’s not trying to be flashy or mystical-for-the-sake-of-mystical.

It’s more like:

“Here’s our tradition. Let’s learn it the right way.”

There’s a strong emphasis on Irish culture, mythology, and lived practice.

And you can feel it.

This is not “grab a spell off Pinterest and hope for the best.”
This is lineage. Context. Respect.

Perfect if you:

• Feel drawn to Irish roots

• Want cultural authenticity

• Like being taught by native Irish humans with real experience

Maybe not if you:

• Want fast transformation

• Are more into manifestation than mythology

The “Classic Witch School” Vibe

Then there are the schools that feel like they’ve been around forever (because they kind of have—at least in internet terms):

Witch Academy

Wicca Academy

Sacred Mists Academy

These are your “textbook meets spellbook” experiences for generic witchcraft.

You’ll find:

• Herbalism

• Tarot

• Ritual basics

• Structured lessons

They’re a bit like enrolling in “Witchcraft 101” at a very open-minded university.

Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it’s exactly what some people need.

Perfect if you:

• Want a broad generic foundation

• Like clear lessons and progression

• Appreciate a modern approach

Maybe not if you:

• Want something deeply transformational

• Are craving a more intuitive or nature-immersive path

• Want to follow a magical tradition based on a particular culture

Top Up My Cauldron

The “Step Into a Living Tradition” Path

Avalon Mystery School (Chalice Centre)

This one has a quieter presence.

Less “course,” more “path.”

It draws from the Western Arthurian Mystery Tradition—Avalon, the Grail, inner work, archetypes—and unfolds slowly over time.

There’s an initiatory feel to it. Not dramatic. Just… steady.

Good fit if you:

• Feel drawn to Avalon and Arthurian myth

• Want a structured but inward path

Maybe not if you:

• Want fast results

• Prefer a modern, casual style

The “Yes, This Is an Actual Wizard School” Path

Grey School of Wizardry

This one tends to surprise people.

It’s structured like a school—with departments, classes, even a bit of a Hogwarts feel—but it’s real, established, and surprisingly thorough.

There’s a mix of mythology, magic, and personal development.

Good fit if you:

• Like a school-style experience

• Want something structured but imaginative

Less ideal if you:

• Want a strictly traditional or cultural path

• Prefer something more minimalist

Feed a Faery

The “Wait…Magic Can Actually Change My Life?” Path

Faehallows School of Magic

This is where things shift from learning about magic
to living it.

Recorded guided journeys.
Deep connection with the Celtic Wheel of the Year.
Living relationship with trees and faeries.
Manifestation woven into everyday life.

It’s experiential. Personal. And very much about what actually changes when you practice magic.

Here, you’re not just studying Celtic mythology or memorizing correspondences.

You’re:

• Going on guided journeys

• Connecting with spirit guides, faeries, and nature spirits

• Using manifestation principles alongside ritual and mythology

It’s less “pass the test”
and more “notice how your life starts to change.”

And that’s a very different experience.

Perfect if you:

• Want transformation, not just information

• Love nature, faeries, and Celtic mythology

• Prefer guided, experiential learning

Maybe not if you:

• Want something purely academic

• Are not open to aligning with universal laws

• Value structure and authority over intuition

So…Which One Is Best?

There isn’t one. There’s just the one that meets you where you are.

• Structured → Quareia

• Cultural → Irish Pagan School

• Foundational → Witch Academy / Wicca Academy

• Initiatory → Avalon Mystery School

• Experiential → Faehallows

• School-style → Grey School

Different doors. Same curiosity.

A Thought That Might Help

You don’t need to choose perfectly. You just need to choose something that feels like a yes and follow it to see where it leads.

That’s your soul guiding you on your path.

Quick FAQ

Is magic real?
Magic has been defined as the art of changing consciousness at will. That’s definitely real. And when you change your consciousness, your whole reality changes.

What is the best online magic school?
It depends on your goal. Some people prefer structured systems like Quareia, while others look for experiential paths like Faehallows.

Are online magic schools legit?
Most are legitimate educational platforms offering structured or guided training, though they vary widely in style and depth.

Can you really learn magic online?
You can learn the principles anywhere. What matters is whether you practice them.

Do I need an “in-person” initiation?
Not at all. After all, initiation simply means beginning. Though some traditions include in-person initiation, it is not required to begin or deepen your magical practice. At Faehallows, initiation is seen as something that unfolds through your own experience, intention, and connection with the natural world. It comes from the magic itself.

If You’re Still Not Sure…

Here’s a ridiculously simple way to decide:

• If you want discipline and depth → go structured

• If you want roots and tradition → go cultural

• If you want tools and foundation → go classical

• If you want experience and transformation → go experiential

None of these are better. They’re just different flavors of magic.

Final Thought (The One I Wish Someone Had Told Me)

Magic isn’t hiding.
It’s not locked behind the “right” course or the “perfect” teacher.

It’s already inside of you.
It’s responsive. It meets you the moment you start paying attention.

So whichever door you choose…

Open it.

Step through. And see what answers back.

Want more magical posts? Join me on Substack!

It’s a big subject. Healing. Whether from a holistic or allopathic point of view, whether using drugs, herbs, or energy healing modalities, or even when miraculous cures seem to come out of nowhere, it all boils down to one thing.

Call it expectation, or call it belief. Whatever you want to call it, healing is always an inside job.

Why? That’s the question that took me decades, one very close call with a semi truck, and an embarrassing number of Bashar videos to even begin to answer.

I came upon a few claims this week that made me realize how much my understanding has changed.

The Sentence That Boggled My Brain

You know that feeling when one sentence makes your brain hit the brakes?

That happened a few days ago. A friend posted a thoughtful piece on Reiki misconceptions, based on her many years in the field—which, synchronistically, exactly matches my years in the field. We were apparently vibrating on the same frequency for decades without ever meeting. Yet, somehow, we came to very different conclusions.

(Link to her post below, because credit matters, even when I’m about to disagree with some parts.)

Most of it was excellent—reading exactly the way you’d expect from someone who’s logged countless hours at the Reiki table. Wise. Compassionate. Sensible.

Then the Line That Triggered My BS Meter

Here’s the claim that made my BS meter buzz: instant healing isn’t possible. Not with anything recurring, not with anything serious.

I sat with that one for a second, because it wasn’t a small disagreement. It was a full collision with my version of reality.

Sure, instant healing is rare. But rare and impossible are not the same. I’ve seen and heard enough “impossible” things in my lifetime to leave the door propped wide open for whatever we don’t yet understand.

As far as I’m concerned, anything you can imagine is possible, somewhere in this universe or maybe the one next door—and every so often it shows up in a physical body, on an ordinary afternoon. Most people call that a miracle. I call it just another day.

If I were choosing an energy healer, I’d want one who leaves room for the miracle. Not expecting it on command, but not slamming the door on it either.

Somewhere along the way, healing got sold to us like a payment plan. One appointment at a time. One breakthrough after enough diligence, patience, and money spent—like frequent flyer miles for your nervous system.

But what if that’s only true on one timeline? What if, sometimes, it’s a doorway, and you just have to be ready to step through it to a different timeline?

The Semi Truck, the Ice, and a Timeline Jump

Years before I had language for any of this, a snowstorm had swept across Northern California’s Highway 5, leaving patches of black ice in random spots. I was heading south in the fast lane as a massive semi truck approached, filling my rearview mirror like a wall of steel, closing at seventy miles an hour.

Then the ice. My truck spinning like the dial on a compass. Semi closing in. None of it under my control. My little Ford Ranger was pirouetting across the lanes like a crazed dancer.

I thought—with strange calmness—I was done for.

And then, in an instant, my truck straightened. Facing forward. Cruising down the highway as though none of it had happened, as if some unseen hand had reached down and simply edited the scene.

Angels? Guardians? Maybe.

A different explanation arrived years later, courtesy of Bashar: that wasn’t a rescue delivered from outside. That was a timeline jump, a clean step sideways from the version of reality where the crash was already underway into the neighboring one where it simply wasn’t.

Could it be that instant healing is no different from escaping a collision with a semi truck? Just jumping to a timeline where you’re already healthy? I’d say yes.

Buy Me a Vegan Latte

The Healer Who Never Heals Anyone

As I continued to read, another claim set my meter buzzing. It was the pushback against an idea that’s been circulating for years: a healer doesn’t heal you. A healer holds space while you wake up your own inner healer, and you heal yourself.

That phrasing tends to get credited to Maryam Hasnaa, though Bashar was teaching a version of it long before she did: a healer never heals anyone directly. A healer [read Reiki in this case—ed.] sets up a vibration representing the healed state, and if you choose to match that frequency, you’ve healed yourself.

In other words, all healing is self-healing. Nobody else is doing it to you or for you.

Forty Years, One Unusual Résumé

I’ve been a Usui Reiki Master since 1997, a Faery Reiki Master, a certified Matrix Reimprinting and Bars practitioner, and an EFT teacher. None of those modalities convinced me that I or Reiki were doing the healing.

Reiki helps. It provides the vibration of Universal Life Force Energy that flows through the practitioner to the receiver. But it is up to the receiver to align with that energy or not.

If Reiki was actually doing the healing, everyone would heal, but it doesn’t happen that way. Not with Reiki or any other healing modality—from allopathic to Voodoo. Healing is never 100%, because it all depends on whether the receiver, or patient if you prefer, is ready to match the frequency of the healing energy.

Every Modality Is Just a Permission Slip

That tends to raise eyebrows in Reiki circles, but here it is: the modality, the tool, the drug, is never what is doing the healing.

Not the crystal, or the tapping. Not the herb, the surgery, or even a healer with famously gifted hands. Every single one of them is a permission slip—dressed up in symbols and rituals and impressive certificates—that gives your mind, your nervous system, your whole stubborn belief system, a reason to loosen its grip on the old version of reality and choose something new.

And when that grip lets go, everything can change. Either gradually or instantly.

Healing happens... in whatever way you believe it can happen.

But nobody is actually becoming healthy. Somebody is embodying the healthy version of themselves that was always available. That’s a very different idea, and it changes everything downstream of it.

A tuning fork doesn’t invent music in a guitar string. It simply reminds the string of a note it already knew. Humans are often slower to align than guitar strings.

Sometimes that reminder takes twenty sessions to land. Sometimes it just takes one gentle hand placement on one unremarkable Tuesday afternoon.

Negative Energy Doesn’t Sneak In, It Resonates

There’s one more little bone I have to pick with the Reiki article. About how negative energy gets discussed in spiritual circles. The usual story says an unwanted spirit or negative energy enters because someone allowed it in. Allowed has never felt like the right word to me.

Resonance fits better. A radio doesn’t play every station broadcasting nearby, only the frequency it happens to be tuned to. Fear is a frequency. Disease is one too. So is joy. Which one are you tuned to? Whatever matches your frequency is what you pick up.

The good news is buried in there: changing your frequency can be a great deal more effective than building stronger walls.

The Truth About Protection

Which brings me to protection, where my take veers from the article… again. I’m all for grounding, all the time. But protection raises the question, protection from what?

As I see it, there is nothing “out there” to be protected from. We are the whole tamale. There is only Oneness reflecting itself back to itself.

Bashar again, saying what rings true for me:

“The belief that you need protection invites the idea of attack. If you understand that nothing can attack you, nothing can harm you if you don’t operate on the same frequency domain, then you will understand you don’t need protection... you will be invisible to anything you are not the vibration of.”

“If you need a permission slip, if you need to believe in something that acts as protection for you, there is nothing wrong with that... just understand that you’re the one creating the scenario that you need protection from.“

“You cannot experience anything in your life that you don’t agree to experience... you are your own reality experience.”

Feed My Writing Addiction

But enough theory. Let’s look at some practical applications.

A Mini Practice to Follow Energy Healing

Use this when you feel “off,” drained, or worried about negative energy. The goal isn’t defending against attacks. It’s returning to your natural frequency of safety, clarity, and joy.

1. Ground and Arrive—Sit comfortably, feet on the floor. Take three to six slow breaths. On each exhale, imagine tension draining down through your legs into the Earth. Silently say: I am safe in this moment. I allow my system to relax.

2. Rule Out the Mundane—Ask: am I tired, hungry, stressed, overstimulated, or unwell? If yes, do one small nurturing thing right now. Water. Food. Rest. A step outside.

3. Check the Belief—Finish the sentence: right now, part of me is afraid that ___.
Then try: a more supportive belief I can reach for is ___.
Example: I am always protected by my own alignment.

4. Choose Your State—Instead of asking how do I protect myself, ask: how do I choose to feel? Pick one or two: calm, clear, grounded, safe, loved, joyful. Say it out loud.

5. Align Gently—Try a white light breath, imagining soft light filling you on the inhale and radiating out from your energy field on the exhale. Or a simple line: I align with love, clarity, and joy. Only what matches this can remain near me.

6. Close It—Hand on heart, breathe slowly: I am invisible to anything I am not the vibration of. I don’t need to fight anything. I simply return to my soul frequency.

No drama. No battle. Just a return to your own inner signal.

Healing Doesn’t Arrive. It Was Always There.

I’ve watched decades of pain dissolve in a single afternoon, more than once—most often with EFT. Reiki tends to be more subtle, working more on the energetic level than the emotional. Both depend on the person’s readiness to allow healing.

If instant healing sounds impossible, that makes sense in the context of collective consciousness and cultural programming... right up until it happens in front of you.

Which brings me back to timeline jumps. What if you can just as easily jump out of cancer or diabetes as you can jump out of a crash with a semi truck? Bashar says you can. So does Abraham-Hicks.

This is not to say you should refuse medical treatment. Your belief system is still running the show. Go with what you truly believe will bring healing.

Just plant the seed: healing doesn’t always have to take time. Sometimes the soul unwinds its knots one thread at a time, patient and thorough. And other times a person simply remembers who they already are, and in that exact instant, steps onto a different timeline entirely.

Healing didn’t arrive in any of the sessions where the shift happened in a single breath. It was already there, just waiting for the person to step into it.

It was always an inside job.

And, in case you’re wondering, you always have my permission to choose healing.

If any of this resonates with you, I offer long-distance Reiki, EFT, and Matrix Reimprinting sessions—visit Healitall.com to learn more.

Faery Reiki Attunements also available.

In-person Reiki sessions, Bars sessions, and Usui Reiki I, II, & III Attunements are also available in Sonoma County, CA. Schedule your appointment at Healitall.com.

Here’s the post I referred to about Reiki misconceptions: https://ravensview.wordpress.com/2026/07/08/common-reiki-misconceptions/

You and I came here to experience the awakening, the Shift, the thing that has our world turned topsy turvy on its head at the moment—because it just might be the biggest news in the universe right about now.

Nobody hands out awakening like party favors at a mediocre wedding—here, have a napkin with a couple of interlaced rings printed on it, or here, have some cosmic clarity.

You signed up for it. Whether you remember signing the paperwork or not. And your timing is perfect.

The Ones Who Came Early

There’s something most people don’t realize about Earth school: some of us showed up early. Not like “beat the traffic” early—early like let’s build the whole event venue.

Back when the collective consciousness of Earth was still mostly asleep on the couch with the TV on (though, that does still happen to me sometimes) we were cutting our teeth on Seth books and dusty old grimoires.

We came in ahead of schedule so we’d already be warmed up by the time things got interesting. And things, in case you hadn’t noticed, have gotten very interesting.

You might be the only person at your Thanksgiving table who’s clocked any of this. Your cousin still thinks “vibration” is something his phone does. Your mother still calls it a phase.

That’s fine. You don’t need consensus to carry a frequency—your presence in the room is the magic. It does something whether or not anyone claps for it. Think of it less like preaching and more like tuning a piano nobody asked you to tune. The room sounds better. Nobody has to know why.

Everything, All At Once

Everything does feel like it’s speeding up, doesn’t it? Days used to have edges. Now they blur into each other like a watercolor painting left out in the rain, and half the people you know are either having a spiritual awakening or a nervous breakdown, and from the outside those two things look suspiciously similar. (They are not the same. One of them leads to a relatively effortless flow. The other ends with a group text you regret.)

Staying Rooted As Things Speed-Up

Staying grounded through this isn’t optional anymore—it’s the whole game. Keep your body strong. Keep your fear on a short leash. Let go of every tired story about what you’re “too old” or “too overwhelmed” or “too late” to become. And hang onto your hat. It might be a bumpy ride.

Your timing is perfect and you’re exactly where you need to be right now.

Isn’t that a relief?

You’ll feel the truth before your brain catches up to explain it—that’s not woo, that’s just how discernment works. The vibes give people away every time. You sense which ones are in expansion mode. You resonate with each other. You amplify each other.

Don't worry about the rest of them. They're not behind. They're just on a different clock.

🔒 This is where it gets weird. Paid subscribers only from here.

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