The Light and the Dark.

What do you do when the weather is fair yet overcast?

What can you do when raging rivers threaten to disturb the natural equilibrium of your lives?

What do you do when disaster seems to lurk around every corner?

And what do you do when at every turn obstacles, to the fruition of your dreams, manifest?

What do you do when all that matters is suddenly swept away?

What do you do when life’s little jokes threaten to upset all your well-planned dreams?

What do you do?

If all of life were under your control…would you handle it differently?

Would you plan it all so very carefully that there was no room for adventure or surprise?

Would you look at your diaries everyday and think ‘where can I fit you in’?

Would you turn every opportunity into a business proposition?

Or would you instead decide that life was too precious to be organised and so turn aside from the meticulous planning of your lives?

The time has come to decide whether being in the world means being in control of it,  or allowing it to guide you.

Do the rivers ‘decide’ to flow along a particular path, or do they find their route through the obstacles and rocks in their way?

Does the tiny plant decide not to grow beneath that tarmac, thinking that it might never achieve it’s goal? Road surface is rather tricky after all!  

Does the violet, which grows beneath the tree, decide that ‘this place is too dark for me. I should really grow where there is more light’.

And does the winter snow decide where it will fall?  Man only likes it’s beauty aspects, so perhaps its creative artistry is wasted on roads and buildings.

It might decide that it is too damaging after all to fall where it will.

And yet, this is what you do every day. You allow the ‘real’ to fall away and allow only that which you think is good and right to enter your world.

But this we say to you.

Who are you to judge, in your rational minds, what is right and what is good?

How can you tell, if all that you experience comes from the ‘light’?

Think of the violet beneath the tree. Its colour is vibrant, its scent is sweet, because it grows in the shadows. Growing in the light is not its path. It cannot survive in it.

The snow too has its function. Without it your trees are not so fruitful.

Plants which need extreme cold cannot survive without it. You need it.

But if all you think about is the light you miss all of those incredible, yet painful experiences of growth.

Your soul needs the dark and the light to thrive. Just as seeds germinate in the dark so do your greatest gifts.

So who are you to think you have the right to create only the light?

Look into the darkness sometimes.

Look into the dark cellar, the steps of which grow ever darker as you move down them.  

Investigate what the darkness holds for you.

Do not be afraid to it. It holds many mysteries.

If it is your fear of the dark which holds you back, investigate that too. Where does this fear come from? Confront it. Do not fear it. It is there to guide and teach you.

Remember Anubis, guide to the Underground realms. Let him guide you now through the mysteries of life and love, the darkness and the light. For they are brother and sister in truth. Not darkness and light. Reframe your perceptions of what it means to grow and you will find that your growth is accelerated, not retarded, by your journey.

That is ALL. 

Yesterday morning, Sunday, I was listening to the radio 4 church service. The teaching was ‘The loaves and the fishes’. You know?  The one where Jesus miraculously fed the 5.000 people with only 5 loaves and 2 fishes after the death of his friend and teacher John the Baptist? As I sat, finishing up a beading project, listening to the teaching, I was struck by the fact that people never questioned this story. They relate it as though it was an absolute truth. But to me they were completely missing the point!  Jesus was a spiritual teacher and everything he did was designed to teach people something significant. There is a deeper meaning to this story, a mystery which is still not acknowledged today.

People, such as Dr Marcellino D’Ambrosio,  have looked into certain Judaic meanings behind the symbolism, such as the five loaves representing the Mosaic teachings in the Torah. There are 5 books in the Torah.  So perhaps, on one level, Jesus was expanding on the teachings and inner story of Moses, who was a great prophet and teacher.

But Jesus is also quoted as saying that he is the ’Bread of Life’.  To my mind this in a mis-interpretation. He is also known as the ‘Water of Life’. That feels more appropriate somehow. But can he be both bread and water? All spiritual nourishment?  To many he is but I have experienced a completely different awareness of what the bread represents. Over the past fifteen years of doing energy healing at many sacred sites around the world  I have found that the Bread actually is the Bread of the Mother, of the earth.

My first experience of this came in 2006 in Cumbria at a stone circle complex in a woods called Broomrigg Plantation. One of my psychic gifts is the ability to tap into ancient knowledge and experience it in the present. I learned this while studying an archaeology degree in Winchester and have learned more history this way than through any amount of archaeology! It is a form of psychometry I suppose. Tapping into objects or places and opening doorways into past lives.

Broomrigg Stone Circle

But on this occasion, standing on an ancient stone which has once formed part of a stone circe, I went back to the Bronze Age and found myself watching an ancient winter solstice ritual. I saw  the circle as it had been then and within stood a priest. Within the circle also stood containers of wheat which had been harvested the previous autumn. There the priestess, who personified Artemis (Was a little surprised at that!) drew down the energy of the sun and brought it into the earth which opened like a womb to accept the solar energy, thereby fertilising a giant ovum and filling the womb with golden light. The priest had strewn wheat grains around the inside of the circle petitioning the Goddess Artemis, within whose hands he had placed a sheaf of corn. As this happened the wheat in the containers were also ‘charged’ with solar light which effectively imbued them with life so that when they planted them again in the spring their produce would be abundant. At the end of the ritual he then sprinkled water around the inside of the circle also as without rain the wheat could not grow.

Once the ‘ritual’ had been completed some of the grain was taken from the containers, ground into flour and made into bread. Each household in the tribe was given a portion of this ‘charged’ bread in order to bring fertility to the entire tribe over the coming year.

This was an amazing experience and it opened the doors to many questions. Over the past few years some of these questions have found answers. I had on occasion had to travel back to Ireland for Catholic funerals or memorial services and noticed during the consecration of the bread and wine, during the Mass, that all the energy from ‘Above’ seemed to charge the wine but not the bread! I noticed this on numerous occasions. I also thought it was significant that only the priest drank this wine, thereby gaining the benefit of its charged energy but the communication wafers, the ‘Bread/Body of Christ’ had no energy whatsoever and this was distributed to the people during the Mass. I thought that this was very interesting! Why was the bread not ‘charged’ and why was it only the priest who benefited from the spiritual energy which should have benefited everyone? I wondered if it was to do with power dynamics within the early church? Communion is such a significant part of the Catholic Mass ritual. I can remember as a child taking communion seriously, believing that I was eating part of Jesus’ body! When it stuck to the roof of my mouth and broke, when I tried to remove it with my tongue, I felt it was a serious disaster! Jesus was as real to me as the priest, but with much more importance!!!

Communion.

The word communion signifies a joining, a sharing of energy, but there is no energy here! It is rice paper!!! So for years I have wondered why this change had come about. I only rarely have communion now. If I feel an impulse I will take it, even though I know it contains nothing. However, this year I experienced another ‘teaching’ through ‘time-travel’ that explained more of the mystery! It was in St. Dogmaels’ Abbey in Wales, near Cardigan Bay. I was doing my usual energy work as I do in many churches, both ancient and those still in use, when I was impulsed to stop at a point which was below ground level. In the past the altar of the church would have stood above this room and as I stood in the centre of the ‘cellar’ I felt a powerful female earth energy, like a vortex. It was still active and very strong. When I stood in it I began to ‘see’ a monk standing in front of the altar in the room above me. He was consecrating the wine and the bread but as he did the bread, which was a round loaf, he drew the energy of this vortex into the bread, spiritualising it with this female energy of the Earth, the Mother! Next he drew down the energy of the sun and consecrated the wine with this energy, the Male fertilising principle! I was fascinated!!! Finally I understood! Somewhere along the line this connection and honouring of the role of the Mother, Earth, in sacred ritual became lost.

The Abbey itself was built in the 12th Century and is a Trionian Abbey, founded by monks from France who were dissatisfied with the way things were going in the French Monasteries. They wanted to get back to a simpler way of living and serving God. But obviously they also knew that the balance depended on honouring both Mother and Father.

At one point during this exploration through time I was also given the understanding of the Holy Trinity!  The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father is obvious, he is the male principle, Solar, Christ Light. The Holy Spirit is the Mother, the Female principle, the Earth and the son is the priest /medium. The Son, of both Mother and Father, is the priest, the medium between the two, who is able to work with both of these energies and  who is trained to the point where he can materialise both these energies in the bread and wine, thereby bringing succour to the community through their distribution! What is missing here of course is the female representative! But at least they still knew what they were doing! Even though they were using both energies in a less earth-focused way than our ancestors at Broomrigg had done.

But, what I still do not know, is when even this understanding disappeared. Perhaps during the dissolution of the monasteries, when the Divine Feminine, through Mary, was removed from the collective consciousness. Perhaps that understanding will come late.

So, back to the loaves and the fishes. It seems to me that Jesus too was trying to teach about this balance between the Masculine and the Feminine. The bread of Life comes from the earth, from the Mother. The fish is a male symbol, and one which I also have experienced in the course of my work, and I know that it was a symbol of life in the Ancient Solar priesthoods of Egypt, Greece and Western Europe. But I am still learning that one. The symbol of Christianity is the Fish but we don’t know the full story yet. Jesus was teaching the multitudes about Honouring the Mother and Father, the Earth and the Heavens. Just as the commandments said. Not just your earthly Mother and father, but all of life through the earth Mother and Father Sky, or God! Feeding the people is teaching the people.  I believe the story tells us that nourishment comes from Mother and Father. What comes from the sky is Masculine, sun and rain, which fertilises the earth, the feminine, so that all her people can live. You cannot exist without both. What can you create with water and sun alone? Without the mixture of earth, what is it? If you honour both you can feed thousands. So maybe we need to get back to that!  We need to relearn all of these ways of thinking about the earth, or Gaia and her relationship to God, in order for us to live sustainable and fulfilling lives. Its really not that hard. We just have to change our core beliefs. It might take years but at least the world of the future will be one worth living in again!

Mottisfont Abbey, Serpent and Rose.

Posted by gaiamethod on July 31, 2011 | EDIT

I went to Mottisfont Abbey in Hampshire thinking I would do some more Earthwork there but, apart from some very nice ice-cream, abysmal coffee and a nice walk there was no energy work to be done. But I did get the chance to get some photos. 

This is a Rainbow Trout which was swimming in the small river Test which runs through the Abbey grounds and no doubt the river was much of the reason why the Augustinian Priory was built there in the 13th Century.

The name Mottisfont refers to the natural spring, which never runs dry, and which rises above the river. It is also believed that that it was originally important in Saxon times as a Meeting place, or Moot. Hence the name ‘Mottis’ or Moot, ‘Font’ spring.  However, springs such as these were also associated with the Mother Goddess so there might very well be older associations. A site as perfect and as fertile as this would not have been missed by earlier cultures. Mottisfont  is also famous for its rose gardens and has some beautiful varieties of rose, some of which I now have in my own garden. The spring itself seems to have an interesting energy. There is a serpent energy which seems seems to go underground in the summer when the water level is low and is very present in Winter when the water is in full flow. We made a a lovely essence of Serpent and Rose here which is a combination of  Goddess Love and fertility.

This beautiful swan was also swimming in the river above the fish. It was lovely to see them all vying for the food which visitors threw in for them.

One of the cygnets on the river Test.

The Priory itself was founded in 1201 by Richard Briwere, who was a trusted advisor to King Richard the Lionheart and others. It is quite disappointing that there is so little information on this early history of the priory as most of the attention is focussed on the later renovation of the house and the Whistler Rooms. However, there is some of the original Abbey still existing. The crypts beneath the house are the original storerooms of the Abbey and here you can still feel the original energy. I could spend all day there!

The energy of the Priory is still very much present here and it feels familiar and comforting. I always feel more comfortable with energies of the past when they were of a sacred nature. On a physical level I like the damp smell of the bricks and mortar and the darkness. I always want to touch the damp green algae which grows on the brickwork as the damp of the earth seeps through the walls. As always happens when I am here I can feel the energy of the sacred earth beneath my feet and I always follow the impulse to walk out of this door and into the cloisters which once lay outside it.

Directly across from the crypt entrance and hidden in an alcove is a beautiful mosaic angel. It is created beside an original doorway of the abbey. It has taken me so many times to find this angel as it is literally hidden beneath the building so it feels like  finding a treasure once you have actually found it!

And this treasure? A beautiful, and very old tree beside the river. Although I think it is two trees which have grown together to form one. The Two become One. I love this tree.

So, although it was a lovely walk and a relaxing time there was nothing to do but enjoy. So enjoy I did!!