“People say you don’t find witchcraft, witchcraft finds you.” Terry Pratchett

Hasn’t 2021 been an awesome year! Chur! I’ve achieved very little. And I’ve achieved a lot. I wrote over 91,000 fictional words/2 books. I cast a lot of spells, and I carried my crystals down to the river. I tried my hardest to learn to meditate. I welcomed long-gone children back home. My empty nest and my heart filleth with love. I baked no sourdough. I did pick eleventy trillion peonies and plant the equivalent in Snapdragons. And earlier this year I plucked up the courage to get in touch with my chakras. I have told no lies in the following recount of: 

‘What Really Happened at the Crystal Healers’

I’m not really in tune with my four chakras I told Pandora (while dying to ask her if her mother had really named her Pandora Patchouli!) There are seven chakras Pandora informed me. Then she rattled off their Sanskrit names and pointed to each chakra point in her body, from crown chakra to root chakra. Reminding me of an air hostess, double handed-ly, pointing out the exits. Inwards.

Prostrate on Pandora’s ‘work table’, my feet anchored on what looked like a lump of obsidian, I felt as relaxed as a sleeping cat. I nary twitched. A loose weave cotton blanket was placed over me and then the contents of multiple crystal mines, by the feel. No, not really. The only heavy crystal was over my solar-plexus-chakra. I did wonder if this lump of quartz on my stomach added to its gurgles. These turned into a waterfall soon after Pandora felt strong vibrations and a sense of deep sadness within me. I’m going to draw out the negative energy, she said, and started this incredible breathing. She had an impossibly long out-breath. I opened my eyes. Pandora’s were closed. Her hands were sweeping over my body in short and long ushering movements. During the course of the session, she held my feet and firmly patted my left thigh and my left hip. It felt intimate. But it was when she had her hands cradling my head that it all started pouring out. That sadness. I was asked to call my guides when I’d breathed myself up and out of my crown chakra into outer outer space. I tried and tried. I longed to meet them. Who are you I implored? But it was just me floating up there in an infinite void of black. 

Then I started to see things. Conjure up memories. I saw myself as a happy child in my great-grandmother’s walled garden, high on Napier hill above the grey-green Pacific ocean. I was six. My dress was flowery. Homemade. My hair surfer blonde and pixie-chopped. I saw my dead brother. Then he disappeared. Pandora told me it was my time to receive love. I smelt my great grandmother’s shortbread and the leaky gas in her dark kitchen. As a child, love is unconditional. No one knows the person you’ll become in adulthood. The time when every human starts to feel unloved in varying degrees. Questions love given. I am loved, I reminded myself. Tears streamed from my eyes. They ran through Pandora’s fingertips down into my ears. She did not dry them. My body was as still as an actor playing freshly dead in a movie. All the same. I shook inside and swallowed back the salty tears now in my mouth. Curiously when Pandora’s hands released my head, my heart instantly ached something wicked. An axe could have been stuck in it. Holy healing powers, was I having a heart attack? I felt for the crystals on my heart chakra, they were two, and small. 

When I sat up at the end of the session, I was exhausted, drained. I asked, Who are my guides? (You have one male and one female.) Well, I met my dude. But my female remains elusive. I often end up in the ocean looking for her so I’m guessing she’s one tough as, don’t mess with me mermaid.

Pandora told me to be kind to myself for the next 72 hours. Drink lots of water. Don’t interact with arseholes. Your sleep may be disrupted for the next two nights. You’ll have one good sleep. And one disrupted sleep. The world might seem brighter. One hundred percent hi-res. I walked outside expecting to be hit by asteroids but wasn’t. I sat down at the wharf and wrote six pages of nothing much in my journal. I tried to surreptitiously take a photo of an unkempt couple with a scruffy dog in a pram. The lady saw me and told me to fuck off with a vengeful grimace. Arsehole, I mouthed back. That evening I took the ferry to a friend’s book launch in Ponsonby. The women’s book shop was packed and glowing with the joy of a new publication. Author and friends went to dinner afterwards. At one point, I regaled details of my crystal healing experience. And laughed on the inside as their eyes glazed over at my spiritual levitations.

The next morning, I was a ball of energy. My chakras were on fire. Especially my sacral c. Good lord, Pandora did not warn me that I’d be boasting in the comments section. I decided I’d fit in some fitness before werk. I jogged to the nearest park. Yes, I jogged. A track zigzagged through trees around the park’s periphery. It was one of those city parks with fitness stations. I participated in every single one of them. There were ten dotted along the circuit. I even threw in my own versions of outdoor gym work. I was bouncing. A set of lunges. Sets of triceps dips on a park bench. I even planked for one minute on a patch of grass partially behind a shrub. (I timed myself on my phone’s stopwatch.) When I got home, I flipped out my yoga mat and did four sets of four: roll downs, plank, press-ups, downward dogs, roll-ups. Four. Sets.

The next day I could barely move. My obliques ached. My hamstrings snapped. My abs would not laugh. What a div. I meditated at lunchtime. The sun shone onto my flowery duvet and me. I breathed my way up through my third eye, through my crown, way up through the sky, and into that black space. I saw my grandfather again. He wore his vicar attire. White dog collar, robes. He smiled his thin-lipped smile. He died when I was six. I did not know him well. But I got the feeling he’d hung around.

I’m not a religious person but I do believe in some sort of spirit world. I have a growing collection of crystals. I leave them on the window sill, in the full moon. I take them down to the river to bathe. I meditate (but mostly fall asleep.) Anything, that gets you through. 

Merry Christmas, friends! Love & light in 2022

Jane x