The day I met my Witch Wound

Content warning: I write about past life persecution in this article. Some of you may resonate and even recognize yourself in my story, and find healing and support through these words. For others, your Witch Wound may be too tender and not ready to read this yet. If that is you but you're still curious about the Witch Wound, I invite you to read What is the Witch Wound? instead.

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Back in 2009, when I first moved to Portland and first began to put myself out there as a fledgling massage therapist, I started to develop some right upper leg and hip pain. I didn’t think a lot of it, and it would come and go over the years, sometimes screaming at me loudly and other times quiet and in the background. It was pretty silent for a few years and then started up again maybe 8 years ago, so loudly that I was concerned.

I didn’t injure it, and it wasn’t responding to my typical body-support tactics, so I began to explore it in my somatic therapy session with my practitioner who is also an energy healer.

When she put her hands on my leg, it almost immediately began to shake and I was overcome with an immense amount of fear and grief. We were both pretty stunned, and she had me lay on her table. As she held space for me, I began to recover images from a past life where I was being tortured. I will spare you the details, but so much of the torture was happening was to my right leg and hip. It was excruciating.

I was filled with so much pain, so much grief, so much terror, so much anger and feelings of being betrayed by someone I trusted. It was more emotion than I thought I could feel, and the most emotional pain I’ve ever been through.

The only word I have for it is excruciating. But I was held, and I allowed myself to feel as much as I could bear, and to speak what was happening to my therapist who beautifully held the space.

I knew that I had been a medicine person. I knew that I had been a healer. I knew that I had served the earth and my people and was being harmed for it. It was such a confusing and painful experience.

After that session, my right leg pain disappeared for nearly 3 full years, as I continued to integrate the past life experience and tend to that part of my soul.

How the Witch Wound impacts us today

Then, as I began to plan for and launch the first year of the Golden Stone Wisdom School’s Immersion, some of those leg pains began to come back. Much quieter this time, but I knew what they were saying. They had come to warn me of the risk of putting myself out there. The fear of persecution for being a witch, for being a priestess, for speaking of magic and earth medicine.

This magical one in me is here to try and keep me safe. Understandably so. So I continue to keep her close, to hold her tender heart every time I put myself out in the world in a new, bigger, or “riskier” way.

This is the Witch Wound. The remnants still living in our bodies of burnings, persecutions, tortures that were so terrible, that to risk being seen for our magic is utterly terrifying.

You don’t have to have a direct past life to be impacted by this. You don’t even have to have an ancestor who was tortured or killed for their healership to hold this story of fear in your body.

These targeted executions happened over hundreds of years. Many generations of ancestors terrified to speak out, terrified to go against the Church, the Patriarchy, the new Law that uprooted the old magic, the old folk ways of wisdom.

And this didn’t just happen in Europe during those hundreds of years, of course, but all across the globe: wherever the Colonial Empire touched ground, the indigenous ways woven in interrelationship with Earth were shattered and people were killed.

And, this is still happening today in some parts of the world, where folks (mainly women) are afraid to step out of the grasp of Patriarchal societies for fear of being killed.

Yes, we are waking up. Yes, we are reclaiming this medicine again for the Earth and ourselves. And, we still carry this heavy truth in our bodies that needs to be held, loved, and encouraged to soften it’s grip so we can be the medicine that the world needs right now.

The Witch Wound isn’t just some overused flighty term. This shit is real. So real, I tell you. It definitely won’t live inside your body the same way it lives in mine. It might be more subtle. But if you feel held back in your medicine, this might be a key piece to address.

Honoring the Witch Wound

In this season of the witch, let us honor the witches, honor the ancestors, who were violently killed or who had to drive their magic underground to stay alive:

We love you.

We honor you.

We are so grateful for what you endured, for what you kept sacred, for what you kept alive.

We feel you here with us now, encouraging us to step back into these old ways.

To reawaken relationship with Earth.

To remember the magic of being a body on the earth.

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