The Well-Rounded Witch Training

The Well-Rounded Witch Training: Learn Different Fairy Magics so You Can Improve Your WHOLE Life

The Well-Rounded Witch Training

Learn Different Fairy Magics
so You Can Improve Your Whole Life

Starts January 23, 2022

Classes are teleseminars—group meetings by phone. Just dial the phone to participate.

The Well-Rounded Witch Training consists of four courses, each focused on a different magical speciality.

These four areas of magical expertise contribute to your being a well-rounded witch who has the exact powers needed for any situation.

Fairy witches tend to be eclectic. I strive to be a sorceress who can use all the types of magic that’ll improve my inner and outer life. This series of courses is for individuals like me.

I want magical abilities that can meet any challenge or opportunity. This includes rituals that foster the mundane abilities needed to meet any challenge or opportunity. This series of courses is for individuals like me.

I’ve taught some of these classes since the ‘80s because they’re magical training that makes a difference.

The courses are Fey-touched, not abstract theory about Faerie shamanism. The Well-Rounded Witch courses train you in elven wizardry—application of Faerie shamanism to real life. Shamanism can not be learned in a vacuum. Learning shamanism requires applying it to real life. As a result, you enjoy a wonderful life blessed by the Fay Gods, and your own unique Fey light shines fully.

The Fairy Gods are alive. They are movement. They are fecundity. Reduced to theory, They’d be immobile, dead, and fruitless.

The Fairy Gods are every moment.

Life is movement and a series of ever-changing moments, not static. These classes help you feel your movement, fecundity, and ever-evolving being, within a larger fecundity, a bardic symphony, an enchanted dance—a beneficial flow of blessings surrounding you and your days to create positive change, right direction, and the happy breaths of a fulfilled person. You directly meet and dance with the Old Gods.

This is mysticism grounded in practical spell-crafting—witch spirituality integrated with common sense; the combination improves your whole life.

The four courses of The Well-Rounded Witch Training combine to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Lessons help your innate metaphysical power grow, so spells you cast from any course become more effective because you’ve taken the other courses. Also, you learn enchantments that, while actualizing the goals on which they’re focused, also spread blessings to the rest of your life; the more magic you do toward some of your goals, the more all your other dreams are fulfilled.

The weave of the four classes also provides the following benefits or brings them to the next level:
** Profound soul-healing occurs, sometimes so easily you don’t notice it till later.
* You Honor and draw on the Deity within.
* Serving all our relations in the ways your heart wants becomes more possible.

No prerequisites required to delight in these Faery Faith rituals and mysteries.

The training is suitable to all levels. Adepts experience sufficient depth. Beginners are not overwhelmed or left to fall behind but given the guidance they need.

Any two of these courses can be used as the two qualifying electives needed to participate in the autumn 2022 advanced Fairy Witch Training.

This eight-month shamanic journey has four powerful aspects:

1) 28 lessons. We meet in teleseminars—group phone calls. To participate, just dial your phone.

We’ll work in old-style oral tradition, allowing immense headway quickly. Enrollment is limited to 16 people, to allow ceremonies that can only happen in a small group, and so each participant can receive individualized attention, should they want that support.

I commit to my students. A shamanic journey is personal. Traditional shamanic lessons include individualized attention, which tailors the training to you.

2) Direct spiritual transmissions occur each meeting, deepen the rituals, make them safer, and increase experiential understanding of the course material.

The transmissions also enliven your cells, so your magic wakes to its next level of power as do your mundane strengths.

There are other benefits; the transmissions’ energies adapt to your needs, blessing your internal and external life.

I cannot imagine oral tradition without direct spiritual transmissions. They seem part and parcel.

(I’m not explaining what spiritual transmissions are because the important thing is the benefits they’ll give you during the training. If you want a definition, click here—https://outlawbunny.com/2020/11/19/what-is-a-spiritual-transmission/—and be apprised that my definition is not typical.)

3) One-on-one support by phone. I’m available should you need to privately discuss anything, or if something comes up for you during a group meeting and would take too long to discuss during that meeting.

Below are the four courses, in the order they’ll be held.

Course One, Herbal Magic of the Faerie Faith

Course One: Herbal Magic of the Faerie Faith

Learn magical herbalism taught by the Fey Folk.

* theoretical underpinnings of effective plant-based rites

* practical herbal spells for love, protection, and bounty

* green enchantments for spiritual-healing and inner wisdom

* sexual health through mystical foliage enchantment

* the hidden freedom, wildness, and passion that flora offer us

* spells based in solid effective magical techniques

Plus, your connection to the Old Gods automatically deepens so Their blessings in your life increase, and you can revel in the blissful joy of Their company.

These particular herb lessons also ignite a Fey-touched joy that helps make life worth living.

Since 1988, this Third Road herbal training has provided rare Faerie spells and lore. (Third Road is the name for the body of material I teach.)

I channeled this sigil and put it here to bless these courses.

Course Two: Writing Magic!—Word-Craft to Transform Your Spirit and Your Life

Course Two: Writing Magic!—Word-Craft to Transform Your Spirit and Your Life

Anyone can use word-magic, not just people who think of themselves as writers or are experienced wordsmiths.

FaerieRlmWetWPnk99Learn the bards’ skills—the magical art of shaping reality for yourself and others by writing, e.g., journal entries, musings, stream of consciousness, poems, songs, rituals, or tales.

Writing Magic! draws on traditional witch wisdoms to:

* Reach your life goals through bardic magic.

* Use word magic as a tool for inner and outer transformation.

* Use writing to heal your spirit, enrich your inner and outer life, and also to make a difference in the world.

* Overcome challenges to authentic self-expression.

* Meet the Muse and find inspiration for writing, other art, and a happy life.

* Learn how to get yourself writing, which helps you also get going on any project, e.g., cleaning the house, exercising, or practicing a new art form.

Bardic magic also automatically imbues your daily activities with confidence, passion, and vigor. You are better able to center into your power and essence so you make powerful decisions.

Whether you’re a complete novice or professional writer, whether you prefer to journal unread or hope to publish, you can expect to grow as a person, magician, and wordsmith.

You’ll create a new world, not merely on the page but in your actual reality. A word-magician’s language comes alive with enchantment and joy.

“A lot of melody just comes to me but I hated the lyrics I wrote, so stopped trying. After three weeks of using Francesca’s material, two whole songs just came to me. I’m writing!”—Bob W, producer, songwriter

Relevant background: Francesca De Grandis’s bardic works—written texts and oral teachings—shaped the liturgy and culture of the Pagan movement. Her bestselling, lyrical album of original songs Pick The Apple From The Tree was a top ten in New Age Voice and selected by SageWoman magazine as one of the thirteen most important albums of the Goddess Spirituality movement.

Course Three: Living Tarot—the Major Arcana

Course Three: Living Tarot—the Major Arcana

A tarot deck traditionally consists of Major Arcana cards and Minor Arcana cards.

This class focuses on the Major Arcana cards, which represent major changes and patterns, such as the overall spiritual and mundane journey through life. We will explore the Major Arcana’s

* divinatory meanings (fortune-telling)

* metaphysical teachings—esoteric wisdoms that empower you on the otherworldly and worldly planes

Strength, tarot card, Francesca De Grandis, 12-03

Strength, tarot card, Francesca De Grandis, 12-03. Click on the painting to see it larger.

This two-pronged approach to tarot fosters your Fey-touched mysticism while also providing you with down-to-earth guidance about finances, love, and other worldly concerns.

You will learn how the Major Arcana can guide and inform you about anything. For example, the cards can
* Expose the back-stabbing at your place of business so you can navigate it successfully.
* Reveal your inner blocks to happiness and how to move past them.
* Affirm your particular abilities as valuable to community.
* Point out the steps toward being of maximum service to your tribe.

And your inner guide will automatically become stronger.

Methods to draw on the Major Arcana’s divinatory and esoteric powers will be taught in an organized and experiential program of inner change and magical spell-work.

No previous background in Tarot required..

Fool, tarot card, Francesca De Grandis, 12-03

Fool, tarot card, Francesca De Grandis, 12-03

Students need a deck of Rider Waite Smith cards (also known as the Rider Waite deck) with them during class meetings. If you prefer using another Tarot deck, the lessons are applicable to most, but we all need the Rider Waite Smith deck as a common visual reference during the course.

My qualifications: I have been a tarot reader since the 70s, professionally since the 80s. Most folks do not know that Third Road classes started with Tarot classes. I regularly taught Tarot as a tool for divination, personal growth, and magic for many years. Now I teach Tarot only occasionally. My Tarot—and other mystical—methods are so innovative that they have been integrated worldwide into numerous systems of inner change. This has happened so often that a lot of my techniques are considered traditional, anonymous material.

Course Four: Animus Power—A Ritual to Claim Your Healthy, Joyous Masculine Power

Course Four: Animus Power

A Ritual to Claim Your Healthy, Joyous Masculine Power

This course is a seven-week shamanic ritual for women, men, and individuals of any other gender identity or lack thereof.

2ndGreenMan1

My description of this event and ideas about related matters are not intended as definitive gender statements, but are how I express theories and modalities I developed based on my experiences of my animus and the animus of other individuals.

Language can limit communication. Shamanic empowerment is communicated energetically and experientially. I encourage you to revise my words according to your beliefs if you want. You can use this course’s tools to transform you and your life in ways nothing else can. They’ve changed person after person’s life substantially for the better. So much freedom has been reached!

And with that:

Everyone has a male aspect. (The word animus means a person’s male aspect.)

In most people, the male aspect gets seriously wounded. Society works hard to blind us to this wound. Many individuals with a wounded animus don’t recognize that some of their major life problems stem from that wound.

In this course, we heal that injury and empower a caring, healthy, holy, joyous masculinity within ourselves.

We also discover and embrace the internal, loving father.

The animus healing and empowerment I’ve described helps you:

* Take action on your visions, making your dreams a reality. E.g., you acquire the power to serve your tribe

* Replace frustration and hopelessness with the determination to accomplish whatever is important to you.

* Stop procrastination and other self-sabotage that keeps you from following through on your objectives. Work toward your happiness right to the finish line.

* Express yourself fully and with confidence. When we set free the suppressed animus, we become assured and buoyant. It can be overwhelmingly difficult on one’s own to find one’s animus let alone recognize it as suppressed. I will show you how to do both.

* Heal the (often subconscious) shame of a suppressed animus. Expect a big boost in self-respect when you take this journey with me.

* Leave behind the depressing inability to find solutions. More easily see ways to survive, thrive, and self-express, and have the power to do so.

Those are big benefits that spare us misery and help make life joyful.

Starting about 1987, I led this Animus Power ceremony regularly for years. Though it helped attendees considerably, I stopped offering the event for a long time to focus on other shamanic work, though I consistently shared some of the ceremony’s material in my classes and with clients one-on-one. I started offering the ritual again but not on a regular basis. I’m thrilled to be in a position to lead the ritual this year so you can experience all its joyous, important material.

My relevant background: I developed innovative modalities for—and understandings of—gender empowerment (for example, my concept of, and rites to free, a suppressed animus). I am trained in traditional shamanic healing forms of gender empowerment and also did original, related anthropological research.

“Her insightful research in anthropology led to her innovative work in the modalities of spiritual healing.”—S.S. Kush, Professor of Anthropology

Participants have found this ceremony to be an irreplaceable pivot point toward reaching inner and outer goals that previously had them stymied. Nothing like this process is available elsewhere, even after three decades of my teaching it.

AnimusDetail

Schedule

This eight-month training has 28 lessons, all on Sundays, 3:00 to 4:00 pm, EST (noon to 1:00 pacific time), starting January 23.

Course One, Herbal Magic of the Faerie Faith, is seven weeks long, from January 23 through March 6. Reserve 3:00 to 4:00 pm est, Sunday March 13, for a makeup class in the unlikely chance I’m unavailable for one of the planned sessions.

Course Two, Writing Magic, is six weeks long, from March 27 through May 1. Reserve 3:00 to 4:00 pm est, Sunday May 8, for a makeup class in the unlikely chance I’m unavailable for one of the planned sessions.

Course Three, Living Tarot, lasts eight weeks, May 29 through July 17. Reserve 3:00 to 4:00 pm est, Sunday July 24, for a makeup class in case I can’t attend one of the planned sessions.

Course Four, Animus Power, lasts seven weeks, from August 14 through Sept 25. Reserve 3:00 to 4:00 pm est, Sunday Oct 2, for a makeup class in case I can’t attend one of the planned sessions.

There is a break after each course to keep the schedule from being overwhelming.

Enrollment

Total cost—for 28 classes, direct spiritual transmissions, and one-on-one private support should you desire—is $200 a month. Your carrier might charge you for the phone calls into the lessons.

Enroll securely with PayPal. Use the Subscribe button below for automatic monthly payments of $200, for eight months.


Pls give me yr phone #



Upon receipt of payment, your place is reserved. If you do not receive an email confirming your payment within a few days, please check your spam filter and spam mailbox. If the email isn’t there, or you want to discuss a scholarship, semi-scholarship, trade, or a payment plan other than the subscription option on this page, or you need more information about the course, please call me at the number below. No refunds. However, you can cancel your subscription any time after the two payments for the specific course you’re in at the time of cancellation.

A few days before your first class, you receive an email with the course details—e.g., the phone number to dial for the meetings.

To participate in only part of this training, contact me, letting me know which course or courses you want. I will invoice you for $400 per course, paid in installments of $200 a month. Each course stands on its own, a training unto itself.

If you’ve taken any of these courses, repeat enrollment is half-price. Contact me, letting me know which courses you want to repeat, and I’ll invoice you through PayPal.

If you want to study these fields of magical expertise, now is the time. I’m pretty sure I haven’t taught the Tarot course and the Herbal Magic course since 2012, so who knows how long it will be before I teach them again. I probably won’t offer Animus Power again for another five years. It’s been years since I’ve taught Writing Magic!, and I don’t know if I’ll teach it again. Take these classes while you can. Embrace your animus power, herbal power, bardic power, Tarot power.

These lessons have saved me over and over. I’m blessed that the Goddess whispered them to me. More on my curriculum-creation process:

* When teaching orally, I’m ensconced within a family oral tradition I entered in infancy, learning magic con leche. I received experiential wisdom-lessons not taught elsewhere.
* Raised in a European-based shamanic family tradition that includes both Italian sorcery and Celtic shamanism, I teach a multicultural Faerie shamanism.
* I joyfully, carefully channel curriculums, constructing lessons over time. This tunes us into enormous, subtle powers. You won’t pay for a jumbled rehash of same-old same-old white-bread ideas that an unprepared teacher declared, “Voila, genuine Paganism!” 🙂 Instead, I committed my life to developing material for you.
* I received full-time, long-term shamanic training. It was not academic but an experiential training of skills. That focused study gave me the ability to trance into the heart of reality, 24-7, where I channeled lessons for seven years.
* For decades since, to ground me, my Gods asked me to trance only part of the day. Feet more on the ground than ever, I continue to explore our magical yet earthy cosmos and channel new earth-based mystic material, because resting on my laurels would be no fun. I like fun.

Fairy witch, Francesca De Grandis, is the bestselling author of the books Be a Goddess! and Goddess Initiation.

A mystical event is no substitute for medical care by a trained physician, psychiatric counseling, or other therapeutic treatments. Participants are personally responsible for the consequences of their voluntary participation.

Honoring the Ancestors: The Man Who Raised Me

Photo of my beautiful young parents

Honoring the Ancestors: The Man Who Raised Me

Honoring ancestors has many aspects for me as a witch, and just as many for me as a human and individual. I want to touch on a few, before talking about my dad.

Ancestors Who Were Oppressors

Human nature being what it is, we all have ancestors who were horrible people, and some who were outright oppressors.

When I teach how to contact ancestors, do ritual with them, and live in alignment with the old ways of our forebearers, someone inevitably asks, “What should I do about awful ancestors? I don’t want any contact with them, let alone honor them.”

Whether the student deems those ancestors oppressors or terrible in other ways, the question is important.

The answer can’t be one-fits-all. Nor can I personally hang the problem all on one hook; I’ve had to approach it from a lot of different angles, including the following:

I myself have had to make peace with awful ancestors. For one thing, I don’t want hate in my heart. I can no longer bear the damage it does me.

For another, making peace helps me regain wisdom lost over the ages—herbal medicine, witchcraft, and other empowering choices suppressed by oppressors.

My very first ancestors at the beginning of human time (well, I believe the line from which I descended started long before that, but I won’t get into that here) started threads of wisdom and power that have spun forward in time. Every one of my ancestors has held and holds a piece of that thread. I don’t want my resentments to break the thread any further than has already happened. Even if an ancestor contributed to that breakage, I want to repair it.

Making peace doesn’t mean I ignore injustices ancestors have perpetrated, any more than I’d bury my head in the sand about living family members who are complete racists or otherwise awful.

But I find some peace in my heart, and that is how I honor ancestors whom I otherwise want nothing to do with, and thus repair threads that might’ve been damaged by them and my own hate. This is what I’ve learned through my own trial and error and what works for me.

What Is Ancestral trauma?

Ancestral trauma—or ancestral wound—is the suffering of a family member or members that then passes down to the next generation and the next, until it is healed. Though it’s passed down through behaviors and internalized oppression, as a shaman I also sense a maimed energy that each generation picks up. That energy also transforms the familial DNA. The behaviors and internalized oppression help create and maintain the energy. And vice versa.

Finding peace about awful people in my familial line is part of how I’ve healed the ancestral wound they passed down to me from the trauma they themselves caused to my other ancestors and that they themselves might have suffered. Carrying hate in my heart continues the legacy of hate and holds trauma securely in my DNA. Feeling hate is one thing. Holding onto that hate is another.

Ancestors if You’re Adopted

Another common question is how to deal with ancestors if you’re adopted. There are so many questions when it comes to that, including one relevant to this post: making peace with an abusive adoptive parent who has passed on, or with their ancestors.

A family member of any kind carries (or breaks) the thread of ancestral wisdom, power, and information. My theory is that, should that family member have adopted you, they hold a piece of the thread not only in their own bloodline, but surprisingly enough, hold a piece of the thread in your own bloodline. There’s not space here to go into that theory. But, if you’re like me, making peace with adoptive parents who’ve died could be important.

Awful ancestors are no small concern. There can be huge challenges, including endless questions. It takes time to deal with it all.

For example, it’s taken years to make peace with my father who has passed on. And I still experience some hate for him. I will continue to work on it.

Learning to align with my ancestors that I might live in the magic, beauty, wisdom, and power known by my forebearers has been an ongoing process. There’s been no single step then, voila, all done. But I take one step at a time, and that yields big results.

I’ve repeatedly needed to take different types of action.

For example. I’ve had to channel a lot of ritual to do this work. But now I have a body of rituals I can continue to use and also teach in my classes, and draw on for one-on-one shamanic counseling sessions. (Links to information about classes and counseling are below this essay.)

My first ancestors spun threads of wisdom and magic. Generation upon generation added more threads, until now thick ropes connect me back into the past, to my very first ancestors.

The answers that help me might not be the right ones for you. My experiences are not your experiences. But sharing our experiences can be healing. The following story about my father represents a bit of my journey making peace with him.

May 12, 2020:

Honoring the Ancestors: William Stafford

Dad, looking worn My father was always on the outside looking in. And he loved music beyond all reason.

He was a small-minded, violent man, who suffered a hard life.

I found his name in the census, which shows that, at seven years old, he disappeared from his mother’s household.

I found someone by his name in another household, that of a farming family. I suspect Bill had been sent out to work and live on a farm because there were too many mouths to feed in his own home. This is possibly corroborated by information one of my relatives has provided. In the census, Bill appears back with his mother a few years later.

Around the time he disappeared from home, his mom remarried. Did Bill’s stepfather not want him? Was this one of the first times Bill was on the outside looking in, face pressed up against the glass?

After a stint in the military during World War II, he returned from overseas and disappeared again. As a child, I was told that, during that period, he was in the south, “living with hillbillies, and ended up on a Georgia chain gang.”

My young father in uniform

Decades later, I asked him about it. All he’d tell me is that it wasn’t a chain gang. It was prison or jail, I can’t remember which, and he wouldn’t tell me why he was arrested.

After his time in the south, Dad came back to Boston—where we lived—and continued to be on the outside looking in.

He would pretend to be Irish, in a town that adored the Irish.

He would pretend to be a cop. In 1964, I was 14, and the Beatles were playing in Boston. The arena was a madhouse. When the concert was over, the crowd poured out into the lobby, and there was my dad, come to drive me home.

“How did you get in, Dad? Why did they let you in?”

He had convinced the security guards that he was a cop. Perhaps he’d flashed them a fake badge; I can no longer remember.

There was a police radio in his work room in the basement. My dad, the not-cop.

He chased fire engines. One time, he pursued one of those howling trucks, only to see it turn onto our street. He kept following. The truck stopped at our house.

Always on the outside looking in. A spectator to his own house on fire.

The man was as right wing, racist, sexist, -ist, -ist, -ist, as you can get. But when I was sixteen, I met a guitar-carrying hippie who didn’t have a place to stay. I brought him home. In retrospect, I don’t know why. Dad hated hippies.

But dad didn’t throw the kid out, didn’t care that he was a peace-loving hippy with long hair. The guy was carrying a guitar, and that’s all that mattered.

Or, maybe, Dad knew what it was like to not have a place to stay. Perhaps that’s what happened.

Bill loved folk music as much as he hated liberals. In those days, folk music was paired with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and revolution. Dad didn’t care.

I wonder if his appreciation of folk music came from his hillbilly friends.

Bill loved show tunes. This macho man raised me in a home where vinyl recordings of Broadway musicals constantly played in the background. I still know a lot of those lyrics by heart, and still happily belt them out to entertain myself.

Dad looking worn but happyWhen I was 14, I asked him and Mom if I could start going to folk music clubs. These were clubs for adults, and were not in my neighborhood. They were in downtown Boston and Cambridge.

Mom and Dad went to a club with me and decided I could go to them on my own.

Their attending the club with me was bizarre because they usually had very little to do with me. I was a feral kid who’d raised herself.

But there was Dad’s love of music again (and Mom’s huge-hearted ability to foster my wild dreams and artistic escapades).

Within months, I was playing some of those clubs myself as a musician.

When Bill died, I felt like someone hit me in the head with a 2 x 4. But only days later, I needed to be in the music studio. Before recording my album, there’d been 10 years of starts and stops. Recording were finally underway, due to circumstances that were temporary, the deadlines were incredibly tight, and I didn’t know how much longer Bruce Smith—my coproducer—would be available. It was now or never for this, my first, album.

It just so happened we were scheduled to record a song I’d written about Dad years back. When I arrived at the studio, I told Bruce that I’d probably break into tears at some point, and to give me five minutes to cry, and that then I’d be as professional as always. I also told him to not pull any punches when we were critiquing the mix; I didn’t want him being sensitive to my feelings; I wanted the best possible recording.

When recording the song, I thought of how Dad’s face was always pressed up against the glass, an outsider looking in. He would’ve loved to have been in that studio with me that day when I was recording a song about him, would’ve loved to have been on the same side of the recording booth’s glass walls.

The album was a bestseller. Dad would’ve loved that.

Mark Chimsky, who’s edited some of my books, asked me for a blurb today. I don’t usually give blurbs. The whole blurb thing is often just one big dishonest elitist scam, with people in power giving blurbs only to other people in power, and excluding most everyone else. But Mark is one of the most ethical, dear individuals I’ve ever met. He would’ve opened the window if he’d seen Dad’s nose pressed against the glass.

Later that day, I saw my blurb along with 19 others. The top blurb was from Johnny Cash. There was my name right below Johnny’s. I wanted to cry. The two names together would’ve meant a lot to Bill.

It doesn’t matter whose name is where. It’s all ego and illusion. Bill’s lack of self-worth drove him to construct a false ego, which he kept inflated by pretending to be Irish in the Boston of my youth, where Irish was a big deal—and an Irish cop at that, which was an even bigger deal—and by bragging about his teenage kid who played guitar.

He kept his false sense of self inflated by hating everyone who wasn’t … him. America was better than the rest of the world. Massachusetts was better than the rest of the country. Our neighborhood was better than all the other neighborhoods. Our family was better than all other families. And he was better than everyone else in the family.

He’d disappeared from the census, disappeared into prison, and disappeared into the recesses of his own self-doubt. So he bragged and hated.

I’m not saying his choice to brag and hate is the inevitable result of being made invisible and being shoved to the other side of the glass.

I’m not saying he shouldn’t have been made accountable for his hatred. I’m saying his choice is understandable.

I didn’t like Bill. He was an awful man, in ways there’s no point in giving details about here. A few years ago, when I found out that he wasn’t my biological father, it was a relief to know that we didn’t share DNA.

But I’ve come to understand that he was an intelligent, passionate, inventive fellow, and that he was shoved around and denied, denied, denied. (For one thing, he was a self-taught electronics engineer and resented that lack of college education kept his earnings low, despite many years in the electronics field.) I’ve come to compassion for this guy who helped make my childhood miserable.

No, I didn’t like Bill. But I’ve come to appreciate him.

… I guess in that sense I’ve come to like him. I appreciate his wandering restless spirit that led him to the south after he’d already been in Europe, long from home.

I appreciate his intelligence, vehemence, passion, and determination.

I’ve often wondered if he was one of the young boys who hopped trains during the depression, thrown out of the house because there wasn’t enough food. If so, that was a hard time, and he was a vagrant, wandering. I appreciate that he wandered away from his own soul, and the closest he could get to chasing after it was running after fire engines.

Wherever he thought the fire engines would bring him was an illusion, even when a fire truck brought him home to our house. And somehow, I’ve come to even like Bill for that.

I imagine somewhere, on the other side of the veil, Bill is wandering. I can’t imagine he’s been laid to rest. I can almost see him with my otherworldly eyes, see him waiting for reincarnation, needing another chance.

Dad looking worn but happyThough it’s geared to inflate his false ego, I’m happy today to tell his spirit, wherever he is, “Dad, look, look where my name is. Next to Johnny Cash’s.” And, “Dad, I never mentioned it before. My album with the song about you on it? It was a bestseller. And that book I told you I was writing, right before you died? Bestseller and dedicated to you.”

It doesn’t matter whose name is where. The prestige of a best seller doesn’t matter either. It’s all ego and illusion. But I’m happy to tell Dad where my name went today and to tell him the album and book gained recognition. Because illusions can be all someone has. Blessed be, William.

Additional Material

Honoring mothers: https://stardrenched.com/2017/09/18/ancestor-magic-mothers/

Mentioned above, the best editor ever: https://markchimskyeditorial.com

Newsletters to stay abreast of upcoming classes: https://outlawbunny.com/newsletter/

Spiritual counseling for ancestral trauma and other concerns: https://outlawbunny.com/pastoral-counseling/

My Wonderful Students

My long-term shamanic students are the best people. It’s such a gift to have them as my fellow seekers.

I celebrate them today by introducing you to three of them and the remarkable work they do in their respective fields.

sarah_photoSarah Josey—see above photo—is a Clinical Herbalist, Nutritionist, and Sacred Living instructor. She says she’s “passionate about helping people achieve health through natural means and supporting people on their life path towards overall wellness and happiness.”

Sarah started studying with me before entering her profession. I had the joy of watching this dynamic, young woman grow into her career. I try to empower my students, but it is up to them to take the ball and run with it. Sarah has definitely done that.

She owns an herbal apothecary in Fort Collins, CO, and also spends part of her year in Fairbanks, AK. Check out her work at SarahJosey.com.

I spend as much time as possible in trance because I love it, but I also believe my shamanic classes should create concrete results, improving all aspects of someone’s life. So it’s always a joy to work with someone who’s multifaceted. Kathy Crabbe, who is wrapping up a two-year shamanic training with me, is an artist, illustrator, writer, and soul reader, and lives in Southern California in an adobe style home she and her husband built.

Here’s Kathy:
kathy-crabbe-bio-pickAlong with her impressive list of talents is Kathy’s commitment to using her gifts in service to community.

Kathy blogs at kathycrabbe.com/blog

A spirit portrait I painted of Rommy Driks gives a sense of this writer who has studied with me for eight years:
starfirestargazermergedRommy says of her blog, “I create strange brews of urban myth and faerie tales, while grooving to good music and sipping better tea. Stop by and enjoy a cuppa and a story.”

That’s a modest self-description, considering her writing is truly original, exquisitely crafted, and conveys important ideas. I thoroughly relish her “strange brews.”

Check out Rommy’s work at http://kestrilsrhythmsandgroove.blogspot.com/

I am blessed to be surrounded by exceptional people.

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