The Astonishing Powers of Intuitive Healing There are four amazing gifts of healing by simply ‘reading’ the energy or spirit in a person’s aura using intuition and inner sight, gifts I think would help virtually everyone to understand. The first is the ability to tap into the unconscious in moments. As a clinical psychologist, I was trained in the old therapeutic talking method. This means walking clients through memories, often from childhood, in order to bring forgotten fears into awareness. This is because any event that is pushed out of an individual’s consciousness is locked in. Growth from new experiences and healing efforts cannot reach it. Only when the fear…

Lughnasa Lughnasa is my very favorite spirit time of year. The solstice/equinox and cross-quarter days mark the cosmic openings of the eight basic aspects of spirit in all things, shifts that are quite powerful. If you are into feeling energy or spirit, these can easily be felt. The masculine openings occur at sunrise, the feminine at sunset on the eve of each holy day. Early in each year, at Imbolc, this spirit opening feels like a baby, a little Girl. Then comes the Boy of the Vernal Equinox, the Virgin Girl and Boy of Bealtaine and Midsummer, the mother and father of Lughnasa and the Autumnal Equinox, the Grandmother at…

Working with Shadows With all the news about self-harm lately, I decided to write about working with shadow energies this time. As a psychotherapist and light healer for forty years, I’ve seen a whole lot of them. And there are a few basic ways of dealing with fear that I wish everyone knew. The first one is that fear has no power of its own. It wants to steal our power by getting us to believe in it, focus on it, and do fear-based things. All of these; thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and actions have creative power, which create our own personal futures and add to fear’s power. So, the first…

Tree Magic I wrote about the druid moons and the trees of the druid year in my third article quite a while ago, but this time, I just want to tell the story of my love affair with trees and how powerful they truly are. As I playfully experimented with reading the energy of life forms around me over twenty years ago, I gradually came to understand that all trees have a very specific energy, each tree family with a definite focus of help or healing. For instance, heart shaped leaves indicate that tree helps heal issues of emotion, the heart. Palmate leaves, like maples, help to heal issues of…

The Wild Rose of Druidry The Celtic path is unlike any other, unique in ways that mean so very much to me. The first blossom of this path is that it imposes absolutely no restrictions, except that one should not harm another (which seems like quite a sensible restriction to me!) In the Celtic pagan tradition, all paths are good, and everyone has total freedom to be, to wander into darkness and shadows, if one wishes, then out again into light. I searched for many years for a spirit tradition that would allow me the freedom I longed for, going through Congregational, Presbyterian, and Quaker phases over the past thirty…

Healing the Pagan-Christian Divide An ongoing sadness of my life has been the great divide between Celtic Pagan practices and Christian ones. Folks I’ve met are nearly always vehemently for one and against the other. But I love both traditions (though each has some pretty hefty distortions that need to be healed!). My own inner feminine has been a Pagan Priestess over many lives, my masculine, a Christian Minister several times over. It isn’t always easy for them to get along, either. So, during this Christian Holy week, just past the celebration of Alban Eiler, I think it’s a good time to ponder the intermingling of the two and, hopefully,…

Unearth Your Own Ancient Goddess As I walked my solitary path, the Goddess led me carefully, slowly, tenderly. First, I made a long journey around Scotland, my motherland. And as my family and I went sunwise round the coast, visiting stone circles and souterrains, and barrows all along the route, I could feel buried memories and slumbering parts of myself awakening. Sitting in a dolmen in the Celtic ruins on the western coast, the wind hushed in the cave-like interior, I saw a circle of women in the ethers threshing grains onto a hide beneath, chanting in an ancient tongue. And I knew I’d been one of them, long, long…

The Goddess we need more than anything else on Earth! I write this during the ancient Celtic new year, Nov. 24th through 28th, the intercessory days the Celts called Samhain (pronounced sahven). These were days of celebration to thank the Goddess for the living of the year and to remember all who crossed over to the Otherworld during the passing skyturn. They called Her the White Tara then, and Her Beloved, the high God, Oghama. And the veil does thin greatly during this time, for She draws very near to remove projects or efforts no longer needed and break them down into that pregnant primordial sea of Hers, awaiting Oghama’s…

The Druid Year, Solstice/Equinox/Cross-Quarter Day Impulses, 15 moons, and Sacred Alphabet Twenty years ago, when I began my Celtic path, my inner druid guides suggested I make flower essences for all the sacred trees over the cycle of one year. And it was good advice, for I could feel the spirit of each tree through its particular 24-day moon, all 15 of them. And I was also guided to do simple ceremonies for the eight equinox/solstice and cross-quarter high holy days of the druid year. As the year went along, it was easy to feel the portals of spirit these days truly are. I was guided to draw the Ogham…

Kindred Spirits of the Forest Glades      For years I’ve dreamed of doing a ceremony in gratitude to the fae folk who’ve been constant guides and helpers along my lifelong spirit path. Such a ritual would have to be held in a quiet forest glade, near the gurgling song of a river with an overhanging white oak. Standing stones would add a mystical touch, too. And it would need to be at sunset, that time of night when dusk deepens the forest and the wind drops to a whisper, when the sense of mystery just beyond the veils is strongest, the time between, when we can slip through small…