legacy
Honor Your Pagan Heritage This Halloween
Samhain holds special significance for those who practiced paganism in a past life, especially those who were involved in magical practices as seers, soothsayers, druids, and witches.
For us, this time of year evokes a deep sense of nostalgia, spiritual reorientation, and a return to ancient wisdom as the veil between worlds thins and we reconnect with our ancestors and the spirit realms.
Samhain is an ancient Celtic festival marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, traditionally celebrated from October 31 to November 1. It is one of the four great Gaelic seasonal festivals, along with Imbolc (February 1), Beltane (May 1), and Lughnasadh (August 1).
In Celtic tradition, Samhain (pronounced “sow-in”) is a liminal time when the boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds is thinner, allowing the spirits of our deceased loved ones, ancestors, and other spirits to cross over more easily.
In ancient times people would light fires and wear costumes to ward off harmful spirits, while also honoring their ancestors with offerings of food and drink.
Samhain is considered the origin of modern Halloween traditions, although Halloween has evolved and incorporated elements from other cultures to become a mostly secular and commercial holiday. For Neopagans and Wiccans, Samhain remains an important festival for honoring the dead, celebrating the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, and connecting more deeply with the spirit realm.
My Mystical Encounter With A Music Box
I go through my house at least once a year to get rid of some of the clutter. I even have a large bin labeled “donate,” and when stuff has outlived its usefulness, it goes in there.
Recently, I took some of these unwanted items to the charity thrift store they were intended for.
Whenever I go into an antique or thrift store, I immediately lower my psychic awareness and energetically shield myself as a precaution. I have to, or the energy residue and imprints in those places will wreak havoc on my auric well-being and state of mind.
Not protecting my energy and not blocking out incoming psychic impressions in such an energetically dense environment would be like hanging out at a funeral home, absorbing everyone’s sadness and grief and then taking it home with me. It is basically the psychic empath equivalent of sunbathing on the beach for hours without sunscreen!
Before I learned how to “unplug” and “shield up,” I would feel so unbalanced and completely drained afterwards that I would lie in bed for days to recharge my batteries. I would feel overwhelmed with emotional and psychic overload, which is both mentally and physically toxic. Fortunately, over the years I have learned how to protect my auric energy and “turn off” my psychic abilities to use at my discretion only when needed.
After dropping off my bags at the store, the man behind the counter went into sales mode and excitedly informed me that he had just received a ton of cool new items. His sales pitch was charming, and I decided to poke around the store for a few minutes to see what I could find. I had no intention of buying anything, and thankfully I didn’t. I didn’t need any more clutter!
Grieving The Loss Of Loved Ones With Grace
Few of us have not experienced the loss of a loved one, a parent, a partner or even a child. Most of us have also witnessed or experienced the many ways in which people try to cope with such an insurmountable loss.
Coping with the huge gaping hole that such a loss leaves in our lives can have a negative impact on people’s behaviour. Some turn to extremes: alcohol, drug abuse, overeating, prescription drugs, or any of the other things people use to numb their pain and deflect the overwhelming feelings associated with loss and grief.
What we ultimately learn is that there is no set time frame in which such profound pain can be dealt with. It can take weeks, months, years or even decades for some. But even when the worst is over, we never really get over the sense of loss. We simply learn to cope and get on with our lives, forever changed, as best we can.
However, the greatest tribute we can pay the loved ones we have lost is to grieve with grace and dignity. Abusing substances or indulging in other distractions may temporarily numb our pain, but how does that honour the memory of the one we professed to care so much about? It also does not allow us to confront and process our emotions in a healthy and constructive manner. Grieving is natural and necessary. When we try to avoid our grief, we miss out on opportunities for personal growth, self-reflection, and ultimately finding peace with the loss.
Breaking Free From A Toxic Family Curse
Over the past year and a half, I have been working with a client who grew up in one of the most toxic families I have ever encountered in my work. It has been a long time since I have been so moved by a client’s tragic story and ancestral legacy. With her permission, I thought it might be helpful to share some of her experiences.
She was raised by an extremely narcissistic mother who manipulated and emotionally abused her for most of her life with belittling scapegoating and harsh criticism, until she finally managed to break free and set healing, healthy boundaries.
But once those long overdue boundaries were in place, she suddenly discovered that her siblings had taken it upon themselves to continue their mother’s toxic behavior toward her! While she thought she had finally found some peace in her life, and could safely confide in her siblings about her healing journey, she soon found out how wrong she was.
Until recently, she had openly shared her thoughts and feelings about her mother with her siblings. They, in turn, wholeheartedly agreed and confided that they felt the same way. As her younger siblings, they claimed to have endured similar abuse from their mother. No matter what they said or did, they were also constantly verbally attacked and criticized by her.
Meanwhile, none of her siblings claims were true. As the family scapegoat she was in fact the only one who endured all their mother’s abuse. I tried to caution her every time we did a reading, but she suffered betrayal blindness when it came to her siblings, in the same way she did for many years with her mom.
Heal Your Toxic Family Legacy With Ancestral Guidance
Our loved ones in spirit are aware of things that we cannot see. Once they have crossed over to the other side, they begin to connect with us through signs and synchronicities, as well as in the dream state, to guide us on our life journey.
One of the life challenges they can assist with is healing generational trauma and breaking the cycle of toxic family abuse. In their new state of higher consciousness, they are now able to clearly see how they may have wronged us while they were here, and how they contributed to a dysfunctional ancestral legacy, often going back many generations.
As part of their own life review and soul evolution process in the afterlife, they want to provide us with insight and guidance, to help us undo some of the mistakes they made and break the family curse of dysfunction and abuse, so that we can be blessed with healing, joy and unconditional love.
I have channeled many readings for clients over the years to offer them this type of guidance from their loved ones and ancestors in spirit. The spiritual guidance they received proved to be of great value in their lives and brought much peace and healing to their families, as well as their romantic relationships and marriages.
Some of the self-care goodies and nuggets of divine wisdom that my clients have received from spirit over the years include:
Dealing With Ancestral Karmic Debt
When a loved one crosses over, they transcend this dimension to enter the next. In the spirit dimension we revert from human ego consciousness back to universal consciousness, and our awareness is no longer limited by time and space.
I like to think of our constantly evolving soul or spirit as ‘cookie dough.’ When we cross over and revert to the broader perspective of universal consciousness, our soul energy is like a ball of dough that has been proofing for a lifetime.
As the Universe, or the Divine Cookie-Maker, rolls out the dough of our returning soul, there will be some karmic ‘lumps.’ These lumps are the unwise choices, mistakes, transgressions, missed opportunities, failures, crimes, and sins for which we didn’t make amends during this lifetime. It then becomes our karmic debt.
Some of these karmic debts go back many generations and have become part of the ancestral legacy of our soul family. It has sometimes dire consequences for everyone we are spiritually connected to in this life and the next. It becomes a shared responsibility for the entire soul family, for which someone needs to step up at some point to break the cycle.
Making amends and striving towards karmic healing is therefore not just something we do for our own sake, but also for those that came before us, and especially for those who will come after us.
Our ancestors on the Other Side are also continually striving to resolve their karmic debts, and for this they may need our help and support. If we hold them, or ourselves, in a state of unforgiveness, they cannot move forward with their karmic healing, or the next stages of their soul journey.
Remembering The Lost Wisdom Of Lemuria
In 2013, the scientific journal Nature pusblished a report that a long-lost continent had been discovered hidden under the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. This was furher confirmed by another study pusblished in 2017. What makes this unprecedented announcement especially interesting for the modern estoteric community is that it confirms the long-held belief that a lost continent called Lemuria, or the Land of Mu, did in fact exist, exactly as some scholars had speculated as far back as the mid-1800s.
Although not yet confirmed by modern science, it is also believed that this lost continent was once inhabited by an extinct race of prehistoric humans known as Lemurians. It is believed the Lemurians coexisted with the dinosaurs. They are even said to have had four arms and very tall, large, adrogynous bodies.
The legend of Lemuria and its inhabitants gained increased interest in the esoteric community when Helena Blavatsky, the Russian mystic and co-founder of the Theosophical Society, published her famous book The Secret Doctine in 1888. In the second part of the book, she describes how humanity originated and evolved from seven “root races” dating back millions of years. According to Madame Blavatsky the third root race was the first to be truly human and they existed on the lost continent of Lemuria, while the fourth root race is said to have developed in Atlantis.
“Occultism rejects the idea that Nature developed man from the ape, or even from an ancestor common to both, but traces, on the contrary, some of the most anthropoid species to the Third Race man,” writes Blavatsky.