Chiron in Labrys
INTRODUCTION
My healing experiences began over twenty five years ago during a time of inadvertent spiritual retreat in the mountains of south Wales. I found myself living alone on a hillside in a lovely old farmhouse which had a panoramic view of the Brecon Beacons. For five years I studied the esoteric teachings of the eastern and western spiritual traditions. I spent much of my time immersed in the beauty of nature, in gardening and chopping wood, in meditation and reading. I was in particular influenced by the writings of Alice A. Bailey and Jane Roberts. Since that time I have done many things. I am a writer, teacher, sacred dramatist, ceremonialist and priestess of Avalon. I am also an esoteric soul healer, tarot and psychic reader and for a time practised as a therapist using emotional regression.
At present I live and work upon the Isle of Avalon, the legendary Western Isle of the Dead, a place of transformation, healing, death and rebirth. For twelve years I was involved in creating sacred drama for the deep healing of both individuals and communities. l am a co-founder of the Isle of Avalon Foundation, a registered educational charity, the Library of Avalon – a library of spiritual books, the Brigit Healing Centre and the Glastonbury Goddess Temple – a sacred space dedicated to the Lady of Avalon. I teach a year long intensive professional training in Esoteric Soul Healing for the Isle of Avalon Foundation, as well as a training to become a Priestess of Avalon.
In 1995 I suddenly found I was suffering from breast cancer and experienced the whole range of allopathic and complementary therapies including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy, as well as healing, massage, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, radionics, crystal healing, vitamin therapies, counselling and a few more. The whole experience brought home to me once again the realisation that disease and its healing are a spiritual as well as physical affair and that all healing is of the soul.
This book is based on my experiences both as a healer and as a patient. I began writing it about twenty years ago and it has been refined as my healing knowledge has grown. It is also in part a reworking of Alice Bailey’s classic teachings on Esoteric Healing. At the time that she wrote her many esoteric volumes, A Treatise on the Seven Rays (Lucis Trust), she felt it necessary to give information in a complex way that required students to search selectively through her writings to find the truths she wished to convey. She felt these truths could not be given out freely at that time as they might be misused. She wrote that a time would come when her teachings could be given in clearer forms to the world. That time is here now and I hope that this book is part of the unveiling of her mysteries making the practice of esoteric healing accessible to more people.
My aim in this book is to bring some of her inspired work forwards out of the patriarchal, hierarchical context in which she wrote. I wish to incorporate some of her ideas on energy and healing within a balanced, egalitarian, non-hierarchical world view. My aim is to bring clarity and common sense to the subject of healing which can often appear vague and wishy-washy or is put in such complicated language that few people can understand it and put it into practice. What! hope to show is that subtle invisible energies are not just amorphous and chaotic with no relevance to everyday life, but that they follow certain laws which can be discovered and used in healing disease.
Everywhere today we use the properties of non-material energies, such as electricity which give us light and heat, which we register with our physical senses, even though we still don’t actually know what electricity is. In a similar way we can experience and use the non-physical energies of emotion, mind, consciousness and spirit to transform our lives, without necessarily knowing what those energies are. These subtle energies are not physically quantifiable, because they are not physical, but they have properties which we can register with the subtle faculties of the psyche which we all possess, although in some people they lie dormant. It is these subtle energies which we use in healing disease.
I hope to demonstrate that the illnesses which we contract are not just things that happen to us from the outside, although there are definitely external agents of disease, such as bacteria, viruses, poisons and carcinogens, which are being produced in ever increasing numbers by our industrialised societies. Disease has causes which are intimately connected to the reality of our nature as human energy beings. When we are whole and in harmony with ourselves, with our soul’s energy, freely expressing what we sense, feel and think, then we are usually well and healthy. We don’t catch the everyday germs that we breathe in with every breath. When we don’t express ourselves, when we withhold our energy for whatever reason, we are likely to become ill – physically, emotionally, mentally, psychologically or spiritually. It is not usually a conscious choice to suppress our energy and disease is something that appears to happen to us from the outside.
Most of us have no conscious control over the expression of our energy. Some days we feel good, other days we feel bad. It often depends on how we feel when we wake up, on whether we have had good or bad dreams. We don’t seem to have too much choice over how we feel. We often don’t even recognise our own energy patterns. We don’t know what it is to be conscious, we are just getting on with living. We are at the mercy of fate. As we begin to become conscious of our true Selves susceptibility to disease can lessen, though the possibility of unravelling deeper and deeper layers of personal karma also increases, again bringing with it a susceptibility to disease. Our bodies are also prone to the diseases of the world in which we live, to the karma of being a human being on planet earth in the twenty first century. We cannot hide from the fall out from Chernobyl if it falls on the place where we live or fail to breathe in the pollution in our cities and landscapes.
With this one great provision about the erratic and accidental effects of living in a polluted environment, the effects of our common human karma, the teachings of Alice Bailey state that disease comes whenever the energy of our Soul is inhibited in its expression. This inhibition can be minimal giving rise to the coughs and colds which we all suffer, or on a grander scale in the major diseases which maim, cripple and kill us.
Disease by its very nature changes the way in which we experience the world around us. A headache can completely remove the pleasures of a summer’s day. A psychological depression can prevent us from getting out of bed in the morning, from relating to other human beings. A disease such as arthritis or cancer can immobilise us with pain, totally altering our everyday experience, confronting us with our human frailty and with death. The healing of such diseases requires radical transformations in our subtle bodies of emotion, mind and consciousness as well as our physical bodies.
In its positive aspect disease is associated with expanding consciousness. We are always changing, moving out from our spiritual centre towards greater personal fulfilment, reaching to the limits of our present physical and psychological forms. Whenever we near these limits or move faster than our personalities with their conditioned responses can cope, disease comes to accelerate the process and to help us break through into new awareness. Here disease and its healing help us see who we truly are as human energy beings and not just as physical creatures. In a sense disease itself is a healing experience.
A personal experience of healing is an initiation into new dimensions of reality for both the sufferer and the healer. It can bring with it the recognition that while we are mortal and human, we are also eternal, limitless Sparks of Life living in physical bodies. Healing brings the material and spiritual aspects of our humanity into sharp relief.
As healers our aim is to ease pain and suffering, to heal disease. In essence in esoteric soul healing our practice is to create an emanating energy field from within our own Soul, which allows the patient to come into contact with their own Soul’s energy which flows through their non-material bodies into their physical form healing them of their disease. Our work as healers is to catalyse the process of soul contact for a sick person who may be too weak, distracted or withdrawn, to do it for themselves. Healing is a joint process in which both patient and healer are transformed by the experience. Essentially we all heal ourselves, but sometimes we need a little help from our friends.
The planetary body known as Chiron was first sighted in the heavens on November 1st 1977 moving in an orbit between Saturn and Uranus. Its recognition heralded an upsurge in interest in natural and complementary healing therapies. In mythology Chiron was a centaur, part human, part horse, part god. He was famed for his knowledge of earth magic and healing. The sons of gods and humans were sent to him for training in the heroic arts. One of these, Hercules, accidentally shot Chiron with an arrow tipped with the poisonous blood of the Hydra. This poison was normally fatal but because Chiron was an immortal (born of the gods), he could not die. The wound however would not heal and Chiron had to live with its pain for the rest of his life. He was eventually delivered from his agony by exchanging places with Prometheus who lay chained to a rock having his liver eaten out by a griffin vulture as a punishment for stealing fire from the gods. Through this exchange both Chiron and Prometheus were healed of their pain.
Chiron is known as the wounded healer – the person who through their own suffering knows the pain of others. S/he is one who can heal others and herself through generating and transmitting soul energy. Astrologically the position of Chiron in the natal horoscope indicates the placement of an individual’s life wound, the karma that they are dealing with in this life. Transits of Chiron around the horoscope indicate opportunities to resolve the dilemmas this life wound creates.
The Labrys is the double-headed lunar axe which symbolises the phases of the moon – waxing, full, waning and dark, reflecting the cycles of the Goddess’s nature. Goddess is the ruler of nature, the Matrix, the Mother from whom we all spring. She is the context in whom we live and move and have our being. Worshipped throughout the ancient world her epiphany in the great matriarchal civilisation of Krete was the labrys, used for decoration, large and small, in paintings and sculpture. The complementary image to this labrys was the symmetrical butterfly, symbol of the soul, transformation and rebirth.
CHIRON IN LABRYS is a book about transformation and the healing of disease in both the sick person and the wounded healer, within the context of the natural energies of our Mother the Earth and the laws, rhythms and cycles of Her Nature. This book is about healing in the sense of making whole, balancing all the energies of soul, consciousness, personality and form. Disease arises essentially out of the suppression of Soul energy which needs to be released, and sometimes our Souls too are in need of healing. As healers we use Soul energy to help catalyse the healing process in our patients. This knowledge is esoteric in the sense that it involves an understanding of non-material energies, which are by definition hidden from normal sight and this knowledge has not been readily accessible to the public until now. This book is an introduction to the subject which will allow you to begin to practice esoteric soul healing. Once you have some experience of this form of healing I suggest that you explore Alice Bailey’s Esoteric Healing (Lucis Trust) for a deepening understanding of the subject.
In this book I shall attempt to give a description of who we are as energy beings, living out our lives in a material and spiritual universe whose underlying principle energy is Love. I shall give ways of getting in touch with and experiencing this Soul which we are and with the energy patterns and rhythms in which we all live and move and have our Being. We will look at the causes and nature of disease and describe two main methods of healing – Magnetic Healing using the energy of Prana flowing out through the hands and Radiatory Healing using the energy of the Soul flowing out through the aura. I shall also give information on specific forms of healing in the Emotional and Mental bodies, on Self Healing and on Death and Dying.
All the techniques given are stepping stones to the experiencing of certain energy states, which reveal the truth of the nature of our being and the worlds in which we really live. The methods themselves are not the Truth and should not be regarded as such. They are gateways through which we can contact the wisdom of our Souls and experience what is. It is here that we will learn Truth directly.
Once we know how to discriminate between different qualities of energy and recognise how they move and transform, the need to follow a particular method passes. We can heal in the flow of our intuition and inspiration which always comes.
Throughout the book there are exercises and meditations which are designed to transform the consciousness of the healer. The greater our personal Soul consciousness, the deeper our own inner explorations, the more we can assist other people on their journey of transformation. Our aim is ever to serve the healing spirit to whom in our hearts we are dedicated. That healing spirit has different names in different traditions. For some it is the Christ energy or the archangel Raphael or White Eagle. For me living here upon the Isle of Avalon, she is the Lady of Avalon, Goddess of Transformation. She is Bridie, Goddess of Healing. She is Ariadne, Arianrhod, Green Tara, Rhiannon, the Nine Morgens and Morgen la Fey.