ChapterThreeJourneyofaWitchbyCE

It certainly is. It grabs you by the guts, twists them, and makes you sit up and take notice. Some people call it gut reaction. You must know it, that flutter in the pit of your stomach that lets you know whether you're doing the right or wrong thing.

Intuition.

A great gift, but boy! has it got me into some strange situations!!!

For a period of some years I played hostess at my house to a number of dubious people I referred to as "friends". My house was tiny, but was always full of people who ate my food, drank my coffee, and generally dumped all their woes on my doorstep. Life these days has changed somewhat to a sort of hermit mode, I only see those I wish to see, and only at my convenience. Not 24 hours a day. Only by moving away from the area, assessing my own needs, then playing the hermit on my return was I able to cut the cords of the needy, and reclaim my own energies. I don't believe for one moment that it was their intention to drain my resources, they were just invited in because I was so sympathetic to their hardships.

"Oh, Kriss," they would say. "No-one understands like you do."

Hardly surprising, since I am an empath.

It is important to remember that sympathy involves feeling sorry for someone, while being at a distance from their troubles. An empath feels every ounce of their pain. I don't have to try to put myself in somebody else's shoes; I am catapulted there by my ability to actively share their sorrow. When they cry, I cry. I feel their pain.

Lucky me. Another skill with which to enrich or upset my life, depending on your point of view. Five years ago it was the latter, as I never had a moment to call my own and my life seemed full of the problems of others. And I was always straight in with both feet, completely unable to differentiate between their pain and my own, so both got equal attention. Also in matters of love - so many times have I been carried along on the current of someone's love for me, mistakenly believing the feelings to be my own.

A tiring period in my life, but I learned a lot about suffering, and how to alleviate it. I also discovered how much I wanted to be able to help, just not in normally accepted ways like nursing or standard counselling.

I therefore became "Mama Kriss", beloved of all problem teenagers and tortured adults. Always ready with a cup of tea and a deeper level of sympathy (ie, my empathy) than any other person for a ten-mile radius.

This appalling state of affairs, which served only to bolster my self-confidence, came to an abrupt end one summer evening. It almost took my self-belief and confidence with it. Let me tell you a little tale of intuition, and why I trust mine implicitly now. This is what can happen when the strength of intuition is denied, when life is not lived by way of heart and truth.

I will not name the people concerned, they know who they are, and I still see two of the four. I count them as friends, because they have stood the test of time and have apologised for their part in the proceedings. One thing I wanted to do was forgive, and they humbly accepted that forgiveness, then proved their friendship by sticking around and learning by their mistakes.

Of the other pair involved, one grew up to be a single mum. What a good example I must have set, she lived around the corner from me for months, but never came to call! She had a cute baby, mind.

The other was a very special young man, with a lot of empathic skills, to whom I was quite close for a while. To this day I do not understand why he was prepared to be party to the whole charade. He has left Yorkshire now, and no-one knows quite where he went. He made me feel like a Queen without once ever touching me (a fact I often regretted later!) He showed me the joys of driving cars extremely fast in the dark, too! We would drive for hours - it was wild, exciting, the chemistry between us was electric. Yet we never once betrayed our respective partners by ever doing a thing about it. (Yes, please, I would like my halo in that particular shade of gold, thank you!)

At the time I counted them amongst my dearest friends.

They showed up at around 10pm, dishevelled, nearly hysterical each of them in their own way, bruised and scared half to death. On opening the door I instantly knew by their eyes that the latest escapade had not been good.

"My God, what's happened?" My instant reaction, one of concern, naturally.

"We've rolled the car."

"We've crashed the Mini." "It was an accident."

"My mum's going to kill me!" This from the youngest member of the tribe, whose mother owned the car.

"I think you'd all better get inside. I'll check you over and we can figure out what to do. You all need to sit down and have a cup of tea." Mama Kriss, aged about twenty-three, archetypal mother hen. I bet you've met one of these before, somewhere, sometime. Irresistible mothering…

I let them in, my friends, shocked and afraid. I administered sweet tea and tended their cuts and bruises. Mama Kriss responding to their shock and fear.

"Does your mother know?" Already I'm thinking ahead, to the consequences.

"No, no! I can't tell her! Don't you dare tell her!" The young girl speaking.

Of course I wouldn't tell. The girl was only fifteen, maybe sixteen, still afraid of "Mother's" vengeful wrath.

So, what was the story?

Apparently, the younger of the two men, the only qualified driver of the quartet (and damn good at it too), had been driving the car in a particular part of the city and a child had run out into the road. He swerved, hit a kerb, and flipped the car. Seems a reasonable story. A story fully corroborated by all four, I might add.

Which was odd, since the area of the town mentioned was completely industrial, not a house in sight, therefore no children available. So what's the secret? I felt a creeping coldness in the pit of my stomach, a fluttering which quite pointedly let me know that something was amiss. That feeling. So of course I queried. At which point the young girl succeeded in becoming quite hysterical about the whole business. And managed to avoid the question entirely. Good tactics! If anything, I insisted that I could do a better job of lying to her mother if I had the truth to begin from.

They stuck to their story. And I knew it was a lie.

In actual fact, they stuck to their story for over four months, embellishing it occasionally. I later found out that they thought I would not notice! And I, I sat with my feeling and I listened, and I knew in my bones it was untrue. They perpetuated this lie every single time I confronted them about it, and for the life of me I could not understand why.

It turned out that they were far more afraid of my wrath than that of their parents! (Pray tell, when did I become such an ogre?)

Life with my partner was not easy at that time, fiery at best (I pick a good fight if my defences are up). The people who visited us most at this time were that quartet, whom I no longer trusted. My man, being just that, had not a clue what my problem was because he couldn't put himself in my shoes. I knew our "friends" were liars, he was convinced I was going mad. Led by my unsatisfied gut feeling, I sank into depression. My doctor gave me pills, I flushed them down the loo. I've yet to figure out how one can look after a toddler while experiencing a narcotic stupor.

The story persisted, perfect in every detail except one. I knew, I knew, that there could not have been a child in that place at that time.

And so it went on. Eventually everyone became cross, accusing me of paranoia. My four friends and my man said I was "not myself", meaning I was losing it. My man said I needed help. The four agreed.

I picked up my shattered confidence and personality, dumped them on my doctor's desk and said, "FIX IT!!!" Counselling, then. That's how I met Dawn, psychiatrist extraordinaire.

I often wondered how it would feel to tell this part, to confess to mental illness and run the risk of experiencing the stigma attached to such things by our narrow-minded society. It strikes me as totally bizarre that a quarter of the population suffers a mental illness at some point in their lives, each one of us knows someone who is having that kind of problem right now, and yet it is still a taboo subject. Well, taboos don't scare me any more. Let the masses see no further than the end of their noses if they choose to do so. We are on this journey together, you and I, so stuff 'em!

What a woman Dawn was. I spoke to her of my intuition, my childhood (naturally!), and the repetitious systems of behaviour I used at times of stress. I told her how sometimes I would damage myself and not even notice I'd done it. And I told her of my previous therapy directed at a persistent and irrational fear of sickness. Try living with somebody, going on a bender at the pub, a coach trip to a Rock concert, with that kind of fear eating away at your insides. Try all the experiments with soft drugs that my peer group so enjoyed, then try them with a phobia like mine and you'll know what anxiety is really all about. Total, constant.

In the light of the complexities of my psychosis, regressive hypnotherapy was suggested. I welcomed the opportunity to escape, and to rest my tortured mind. I embraced the techniques required with a whole heart. We then proceeded to lift the lid on a complete can of worms which had been lurking in my psyche for years.

For now, let's just say that I remained in therapy for over two years while we waded through the chaos. The hypnotherapy unfortunately had to stop, on account of the fact that I was able to create my own reality in the trance state and use it to explore and ask questions of my own, rather than those of Dawn's choosing! The down side of this was that my explorations easily enabled me to sidestep the job at hand in favour of making my first tenuous connections with Spirit - I actively avoided solving my most pressing problems in favour of esoteric enlightenment, even though I did not really spot it as that at the time. I looked forward to my "adventures", the clarity with which I could see when I visited these places, and the total control of that inner environment. It was MINE - no-one else's - I could make choices, I could shape events, and all this in a world to which others had no access. I was later to learn that the treading of these inner paths is the lesser part of The Story…

But then I learned the truths which the inner world can impart. At a time of such great personal stress I embarked upon a series of travels, during which I saw prophecy come true and symbolic messages become pertinent to my everyday life. I know now that all this information was reserved for me, that the closest friend I could ever have hoped for accompanied my every step and guided my responses, shaping me for the task ahead, whatever it may become. I learned to listen to that voice inside my breast, the voice which always spoke the truth in that split second before my receptors closed down and the conscious took charge. On the whole, we call it Intuition and then promptly ignore it. Now I know that friend and I can speak to her. She can speak to me. On matters Otherworldly.

Dawn, the Shrink, has no real idea how much she helped me, I suppose? Not so much with the problems at hand, nor with the crisis, but with honing the perceptive skills so vital in my work. Or maybe she had some idea. It was certainly apparent, as I waded through the morass of childhood misunderstandings, that the complex connections served some purpose. I know that to be my learning.

So, of course, it came as little surprise in the light of my heightened perceptual skills, when I learned the truth of the matter regarding a seemingly inconsequential (for me) incident regarding said written-off Mini. Naturally I plied the people concerned with untold amounts of beer at a party one night and the story just seemed to unfold…

And now you really want to know what happened, don't you? It's so nothing-y, yet it must be relevant. Inconsequential would be a suitable word for an event like this, but my subsequent learning was huge. Doors were opened which would never quite close again. I learned the difference between friends and acquaintances. And I learned to believe that I could see the truth in all things, if I chose to look. I lost my trust in the basic goodness of the human race and saw the selfishness, the shallowness of the majority. And after that I learned to love and trust with eyes and heart open, only when it was right and proper. I learned to value a part of myself that was wholly available to no-one and all, and I learned how to follow the feeling that would lead me to know when and to whom. It was some years, however, before I became aware of the lesson learned in its entirety.

As I waffle, you become more intrigued. Think of all the waffle I experienced at the time, share the frustration. Just as what I have to tell you is nothing much, so was the situation at the time. But I did not know that. Perhaps I should keep you on tenterhooks, say it's in code throughout the following chapters? No - deception and petty tricks are no longer my style. And there is too much to share in the remainder of this biography. Where I came from, how I got here, and how I'm a very nice witch really. Or is it sorceress?

The young girl was driving - illegally. Speeding, in fact. Along a dead straight road in open countryside about 20 miles north of the city. Being exceptionally inexperienced, and egged on by the others which meant she lost concentration. She lost the entire plot for no apparent reason whatsoever and rolled the car. I'm sure there's a lesson in that somewhere. If they hadn't all been belted in they would have been very dead. End of story.

Yes, folks, that's it.

And I ended up suffering the way I did - for that?

Not really. It was so I would learn, apparently.

Does that sound cock-eyed and unjust to you? Only an almighty cosmic boot up the rear end could have made me face my ghosts at that time, so it was duly administered. Compare their fear of my anger, the possibility of my telling their parents, and it's small fry indeed. See how little we as humans see of the real picture. Until enlightenment comes we are all as fools.

Knowing then that my powers of intuition were sound, and that they were uncommonly developed by this point, I began to read anything and everything on witchery, except the standard stuff. With no teacher I blundered forward into the mists, discarding most of what I read as self-important claptrap (a bit like this book really!) and found gradually clearer paths to the truth.

I see two of the quartet still. They do not forget my suffering, it is written in their eyes. I need not use it as a weapon against them; they manage that on their own. They were easily led by their own humanity, as I was easily led by unformed and untrained intuitive powers. I can train my instincts but they will always be the victims of theirs, such is the nature of things. More options are open to me now.

So I did benefit in the end. Dawn showed me the easy ways to escape to my own Inner Realms, to recharge my batteries and find my real self. Each time we wander into our unique inner realities we find more of the self we never knew we had. Through hypnosis, and with the correct prompting did I discover the secret, non-ordinary places which have now become such an important part of my life.

She also helped me to seize my past, not to deny it, and to face up to what the lessons were. Our learning together was an incredible experience, opening unforeseen doors to the me I had never met. Towards the end, as the partnership in itself began to assume irrelevance, the therapy and spiritual exploration became one. Using Dawn's clinical methods my ability to slip into trance became commonplace, occurring at will in any safe place as I explored the new environment. Perhaps there was a little of the soul midwife in her too, to be able to help me access the good which had to come out of such sorrow. Perhaps that's down to how one perceives such things.

So - that feeling.

Currently I seem to have three (always eager to confuse!). According to a wise, and not so terribly old sorcerer I met, the heavy feeling in my back which coils around my spine is my intuition. Not to be confused with the sickly one just below my navel which, again according to the wise man, is my will. That feels like a whisk turning in my belly as I grapple with truth. Too right I don't understand that one yet! I often get the two together, as though I fight internally with my intuition and the will to comprehend its power. The third is the total body shiver that accompanies an absolute truth, as imparted with the assistance of Spirit, and I don't even bother to argue with that one but merely accept the information I have been given, or file it until I can.

The hardest part is accepting that these feelings are right, and learning to trust them implicitly.

Dawn was a small, quiet woman. I felt big and loud when I was in a room with her, and I know that to endure such disquiet was part of my learning to accept myself, big and loud or not. She often dressed in green or brown, like a sprite in the forest of Somewhere. She taught me how to open to myself, how to dream. Hypnosis is about relinquishing control, I believe hypnotherapy taught me how to seize it. How to reach my other world. To see, and to ask questions. Now I can do it at will, at any time. So can anyone who chooses to look into his or her own inner realms.

Dawn may have a lot to answer for!

Only by allowing her to guide me to those doors within myself was I able to tap in to knowledge and understanding of which I had never dared to dream. She opened me to my inherent dreaming abilities and I embraced them with love, as a part of who I am, as a place of comfort and respite within at times of stress. I honed these new-found abilities and still do now, constantly alert for that feeling.

After all, admission of ignorance is the beginning of true wisdom, and as a witch one accepts that there is always a new adventure around the corner, and another opportunity to learn about oneself and the rest.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chapter Four

Let us know what you think of the writing so far

e-mail CrystalHealer

Top of Chapter Three