Vindos Vindos Vindos
by the Winter Wind
I call to You
Vindos Vindos Vindos
Father of Night
oh hear my cry
Vindos Vindos Vindos
in the darkness
make me one with You
Vindos Vindos Vindos
heal my wounds
on this dark night
Audio HERE
*A chant to Vindos for all those in need of healing over the dark moon and winter solstice period.
Shamanic energy healing is a form of energy healing in which a practitioner works with their spirit helpers and traditional shamanic tools such as a drum and rattle to heal ailments which have a basis in a client’s energy body.
The notion that we have not only a physical body but an energy body and that they are both expressions of energy is common across indigenous and Eastern cultures. It was lost in the West due to the hegemony of our rational scientific worldview yet is now coming to be accepted in modern science. Einstein states E=mc² – energy and matter are basically the same thing.
There are many models of the energy body which share a common core. Firstly, energy runs in channels through the energy body (in India these are referred to as nadis and in China as meridians). Secondly, there a number of energy centres within the body with the main ones located along the spine. From the Indian yogic system is derived the modern seven chakra ‘wheel’ model you may be familiar with (root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, brow, crown). As it is the best known this is the one most practitioners use. Thirdly, the body is surrounded and interpenetrated by an energetic field known as the aura.
A shamanic energy healing session typically begins with a scan of the client’s energy field and chakras to assess the overall flow and to locate any problems. Blocked or congealed energies are moved and / or transformed. Energetic imbalances are corrected. This might be done by the use of the hands or bodily movements (on an energetic level not touching the client), with a drum or rattle, the voice, or with a natural object such as a feather.
In some cases an extraction is required. Extraction involves removing intrusions. An intrusion is negative energy that does not belong to a client and intrudes into their energy field, often when they are feeling low. Intrusions can appear as objects such as arrows or stones or can take the form of beings, most commonly as insects or serpents. They are extracted from the energy field into an object such as a stone, crystal or feather then returned to the elements in some way (for example I put my crystals in salt water to neutralise the negative energy and hang my feathers on a tree). Because the extraction leaves a gap it is usually necessary to bring positive energy in. This can be resonant energy from the client’s energy field or might be brought from elsewhere by the practitioner or the spirit helpers. It might take the form of light, a colour, or an object such as a crystal.
The practitioner may also be guided to work with one or more of the chakras. Each chakra relates to a different system within the body. For example, the heart chakra to the circulatory system and the sacral to the reproductive system. The chakras can reveal what is happening in the related system.
I’ve found that it’s possible to journey, with or without the client, into a chakra in order to gain a vision of the ailment within the body or to trace its origin in history or ancestry or on a symbolic level within one of the Otherworlds. Healing work can be done within a chakra. Cleansing and energising the chakra once the work has been done also has a positive effect. The session might be finished with healing drumming or a rattle cleansing.
The energy system can be shaken up by the process and symptoms can get a little worse before they get better, but this only something to worry about if the aggravation is excessive or lasts for more than a few days.
*
In preparation for energy work with clients I spent a good couple of years beforehand getting to know and working with my own energy body. This was through yogic techniques such as meditation and breathwork focusing on the pancha kosha ‘five envelopes’ energy body and seven chakra model. I chose the yogic system because my personal spiritual path, Brythonic polytheism, shares its roots with yoga with both being Indo-European traditions. On advice of my mentor I also did journeywork with my chakras, exploring the inner landscapes and how they relate to my physical body and building a map of personal associations including their guardian spirit animals.
I offered the sessions in person, online, and, for the first time, provided a distance healing option. This consisted of an online interview followed by a remote healing session with an audio recording and an email summary.
I worked with eight clients in total. Most clients came to me with more than one problem. The most common were musculoskeletal. I also dealt with digestive ailments, eye and throat problems, womens’ issues and cancer.
I’ve learnt a good deal from these shamanic energy healing sessions. Each client and each ailment has led to a deeper knowledge of physical anatomy and how it is linked to the energy body and to energetic disturbances.
On several occasions I was prompted to mime the work I was doing on an energetic level on the physical level without touching the client (ie. stirring, swaying, massaging) and this felt very natural and intuitive. Having done some physical work and put in physical effort made me feel as if I’d worked more towards the effect and brought about more of an energetic shift.
Another point of learning was that I was guided to merge not only with my own spirit helpers but those of clients. This was most often with power animals but on a couple of occasions it was with angels (with whom I wouldn’t usually work in my day-to-day practice). This gave me a strong sense of their power and energy and how it might augment a healing. On a couple of occasions I had the opportunity to work with others who have relationships with Gwyn ap Nudd (my patron God) and working with His guidance and channelling His energy was a powerful experience for both myself and the clients.
I had the opportunity to work with one client who was far more clairsentient than clairvoyant (which is my main channel). I really had to listen to my body and in combination with what the client was feeling in order to build a rapport and tune in to what spirit was saying to both of us. It helped me develop my own clairsentience and ability to work with someone through this channel.
In most instances, I found that an ailment could be healed by pure energy work but, in others, that it was necessary to address the root cause, which in a couple of cases was power loss or soul loss, necessitating power or soul retrieval. In another couple of cases ailments were ancestral and communications with ancestors and addressing ancestral patterns and trauma was needed. My existing training stood me in good stead for bringing in other techniques.
An important point to note is that the shamanic energy healing was quite often a supplement to existing treatment from doctors and physiotherapists. It was encouraging that my findings and healings resonated with advice from the traditional medical professions and that they sat well side by side.
I found that whether I did sessions in person, online, or remotely did not affect the efficacy of the healing or the emotional intensity. I wondered whether the remote healings would feel more distant, but as soon as I with the client in spirit, it felt no different to being with a client in person.
Over the course of the sessions I have grown in confidence and feel that I now have the ability to work with my guides on any problem a client presents with recourse to my mentor and / or the medical professions where needed. I’m looking forward to exploring shamanic energy healing further in the future.
I am now offering shamanic energy healing at a student rate of £30 a session contact lornasmithers81@gmail.com
Fellow Brythonic polytheist Greg Hill has recently put together an important booklet presenting ‘A consideration of the argument that Medieval Welsh tales contain elements of Brythonic mythology and a critique of the argument that because they share motifs with folktales they cannot count as stories of the gods.’
Herein he critiques ‘the refusal to accept that there could be any continuity of coherent narrative tradition from the Pagan Iron Age to the Christian Middle Ages’ in the works of Ronald Hutton.
This is a really important piece of scholarship arguing that through ‘folklore motifs… stories of the gods were carried through the generations to be made into written tales in the Middle Ages’ and experienced in place and time through ‘experience of the numinous’.
Please read the article HERE and share.
A poetry collection charting the story of a personal alchemy and learning how to love based around my sacred marriage to my patron God, Gwyn ap Nudd, as Sister Patience of the Heart of Annwn.
Published posthumously as a way of saying a final goodbye to Sister Patience at summer’s end HERE.
Oh Gatherer of Souls
the autumn leaves begin to fall.
All the trees look behind them
as they hear Your call.
Oh Gwythyr ap Greidol
Your summer is done.
Oh lords of the world
your time is come.
Audio HERE.
A memoir in the form of a novella based around my childhood, teens, and twenties. It records a confrontation with the darkness within the land, our culture and in my own psyche and a failed initiation into adulthood and shamanism. Finally, how my patron God, Gwyn ap Nudd, saved me from myself.
Free digital copy HERE. If you enjoy it please share the link to this post.
Vindos God of Clear Light
grant to me Your Clear Sight.
Free me from the fog of self-deception
and remind me of my deathless nature.
Audio HERE.
~
This prayer, which can also be sung as a chant, is based on the famous Hindu Mahamrityunjaya ‘Great Death-Conquering’ Mantra HERE – a prayer to Shiva for liberation from our attachments to ignorance and untruth and a reminder of our immortality. When I was studying yoga with the Mandala Ashram I sung it for 20 minutes every week. I have started singing this prayer / chant to Vindos for 20 minutes each morning for clearer vision as I face a difficult period after giving up being Sister Patience.
We have not the myth of a son
of the sun who got burnt
by the sun and fell.
When Maponos
stole the horses of Bel
and rode skywards to the horror
of His mother He did not come to grief.
Although Maponos burned He was not burnt.
He returned instead alive and ablaze,
replenished, youth renewed,
as the Sun-Child.
So, why, black poplars, do You grieve?
Do You grieve because Your brother lives?
Do You grieve because You are jealous?
Do You grieve because You got no grief?
Or is there a story of another brother?
A forgotten son of Matrona,
daughter of the King of Annwn,
who mounted a black horse and rode
after the black sun when it set and sunk
to the depths of the Underworld?
Did He drown in a black lake?
Was He eaten by a black dragon?
Or does He still wander lost in sorrow
through a labyrinth unillumined
by the rays of the black sun?
Poor brothers, did You search
for Him and almost lose yourselves?
Did You get trapped in a dark prison
and scrape Your bloody fingers
against the walls and weep?
If so, how did You get here?
Did You ride with the black sun
or with the King of Annwn on the back
of His black horse who carries lost souls?
Did He plant You here, He and His Queen,
with labyrinthine roots winding down?
Did He seal Your tears deep within?
Did He kiss Your fingers like His Bride’s,
tuck them into a yellow bud
to emerge again
only in the spring to reach
not for the black sun but the love of a mate?
Did He bring You here to tell me when
I grieve my fingers are not talons
to scrape the walls
and my tears are not sap
to entrap the insects who get in their way?
Did He bring You here so I could learn
from Your clawing, Your crying,
my clawing, my weeping,
to turn my grief inward in winter
and then, in spring, to reach out in love?
*This poem is addressed to the two black poplars who stand at the source of Fish House Brook, near to the Sanctuary of Vindos, in my hometown of Penwortham. The photograph is of one of the fallen catkins, taken in spring 2022, not quite emerged.
Beside the source of the brook in Greencroft Valley stand two black poplars. There aren’t any known British myths about black poplars but, in Greek myth, they are associated with Hades (the Underworld) and death.
In Homer’s Odyssey, poplars, described in different translations as ‘tall’ and ‘dusky’, so likely black, with willow, form Persephone’s Grove. Springs, throughout world myth, are seen as entrances to the Underworld.
In another story from ancient Greece, Phaethon, son of the sun God, Helios, drives his father’s chariot too close to the sun. His blazing end brings deep grief to his sisters, who are transformed into black poplar trees. The amber sap is said to be their tears. Thus its associations with death and sorrow.
In more recent folklore the red male catkins are referred to as ‘Devil’s Fingers.’
This leads me to believe that there might have once been parallel British myths about black poplar, connecting it with springs at the entrance to Annwn and with the groves of Annwn’s Queen. Perhaps there was once a story in which the red male catkins were the bloody fingers of Annwn’s King?
I will admit that I’m not sure if these trees are true black poplars (Populus nigra) or hybrids because black poplars are rare. Plus, I’m not referring to the true source of Fish House Brook but to the outflow pipe that the culverted brook emerges from. The original source would have lain further south, somewhere on Penwortham Moss, which has been drained and replaced by housing. The brook is culverted under the gardens on the other side of my street, Bank Parade, also giving its name to Burnside Way. I feel this relates to my founding of the Sanctuary of Vindos / Gwyn ap Nudd, a King of Annwn, very near to the ‘black poplars’ at the ‘source’.
In a shamanic journey I visited the poplars for advice on descending to the ancestors in preparation for some ancestral healing work. I was shown the left tree represented my mother line and the right my father line. I slid down the roots of the left into a cavern where a group of spirits were drinking from cups from the same source. I was told that on the new and full moons I must consecrate a cup of water and make an offering:
“To the Gods,
spirits and ancestors –
we all drink from the same source.”
I felt this related to keeping the source clean – something I have been trying to do as a volunteer in Greencroft Valley with the Friends group I set up (now part of Guardians of Nature).
‘Gwyn ap Nudd, helper of hosts,
Armies fall before the hooves of your horse
As swiftly as cut reeds to the ground.’
~ ‘The Conversation of Gwyn ap Nudd and Gwyddno Garanhir’
So far it’s been a grim month. Grey skies. Heavy rain. Storms.
The scythe of the Reaper has been swinging, chopping, cutting. The cut reeds have been falling swiftly. The huge round hooves of His horse, of the horses of Annwn have been trampling them into the rain-soaked ground.
Sister Patience, chop, cut, gone. The Monastery of Annwn, chop, cut, gone. My dream of living the rest of my life as a nun of Annwn, chop, cut, gone.
It’s happened so suddenly. Yesterday I spent a moment, like waking in the morning after a night I’d self-harmed, in shock, thinking what have I done?
Yet this was not the work of my blade but the Reaper’s blade…
Gwyn was there to reassure me, His hand on my shoulder (slightly bony) letting me know that it was for the best, that dying reeds have got to fall.
I could see the monastery was dying but Sister Patience felt alive to me.
“Sometimes you don’t know you’re dying until it’s too late.”
I trust His wisdom in taking a part of me – a sacrifice to save the whole.
What now? I stare down at crushed reeds in the muddy churned-up ground, attempting to scry a message from the mess of my life – the mash of criss-crossed stalks and the rain-filled half moons of the hoofprints spilling into pools.
There’s always been an obvious road that I’ve never managed to take. Write that much-needed book on Brythonic polytheism or Brythonic shamanism. Write some how-tos on how to meet the Brythonic Gods. It’s always been blocked. That dark hooded figure with His scythe in the way.
“That is not your work,” he slides a whetstone along the curved blade. “I want you to write the words that cut to the truth, that hurt, that have edge.”
I see I’ll always be an edge person. Not salesy enough to sell. Not humble or practial enough to crawl away from the blogosphere and get a proper job. Suburban in the sense of lower down rather than rows of identical houses with cut lawns (although I live in one). Far too English to be properly Brythonic.
I’ll never be able to say, “Look at my bright shiny life you can have this too!”
Yet, in giving voice to uncomfortable edges, to exploring the messier, lesser-spoken side of relationship with Gods and spirits I feel I have a place as a writer and guide.
A place of cut and trampled reeds, muddy waters, dark hooves, forever shadowed by the Reaper’s hooded form and His skeletal touch.
The Sanctuary of Vindos 