My Shadow Witch Meditation

At 4 in the morning while the city and the house slept, I awoke without knowing why. As I tried to go back to sleep, fears and scenes from last year’s robbery started to reappear, trying to gain a holding and grow into worse and repeating scenes. Over the past year, I have tried to vanquish them, have tried to forget, to let pass, to stop their reoccurrence in that subtle space of my imagination where I know myself to be responsible, where without protection the negative can manifest itself as physically as wishes, drawn from the occult places of fear with as much imaging attention as a gardener watering and caring for plants. The fears in that pre-dawn witching hour poured themselves into a shadow form, having had been nourished here and there by my inescapable thoughts for months, and this shadow with the presence of a small witch began gnawing on my left hand and arm.

I had confessed to Christine yesterday my inability to forget the fear of last year’s robbery and my growing concern that I might actively be calling such fears into manifestation through my thoughts and fearful visioning. She suggested that I practice a meditational exercise: the next time those thoughts and fears begin to arise, I should imagine filling myself with light, expelling all shadowy and creeping thoughts with this light so that in its brightness the fear literally disappears. At the first sensation of the shadow witch’s gnawing, I began trying to calm myself into a meditation, humming quietly a hu song vibration, and then imagining my body slowly filling with light until my body was glowing, was shining. But the small shadow witch did not disappear and in the light I could see her form like a small child. I brushed my lighted hand across her cheek and I suddenly recognized this shadow witch, this manifestation of my fear, my creeping thoughts and negative emotions, she was a part of me and my path, and that she had to be loved to be transformed. I pulled this shadow witch, this abandoned child of my deepest self and embraced her to my chest, pressing her into my heart-center, transforming her shadow into pure light of love, holding her as part of me. I repeated the imagery over and over again, sensing her gnawing, filling with light, touching her face, embracing the cast aside parts of me, transforming fear into love.

Then I re-imagined everything in our bed with our house in Los Brujos, holding my shadow witch close, her shadow melting into light, all of us part of the same. With my breathing I imagined lapping waves and began to draw forth waves of liquid light over me, filling the room, expanding back and forth with my inhale and exhale. I filled our room, the bathroom, the rest of the house and loft, and pulled forth a burst of extra light as the golden liquid reached the altar, pushing toward the ceiling, every crack filled with liquid light. Then I let the liquid light overflow through the windows and door, fill the cats’ house and the dog’s houses, wrap the water tower, flow over the bee hives, fill the workshop construction project. Liquid light spilling over the worm compost and the henhouse and the woodshed, bursting extra light from the altar as I filled the greenhouse and sent a wave of liquid light down over the lower garden and up through the Puppeteers’ house-site. Outside the boys’ house I paused at the door and asked permission before entering, the door opening and then filling the house, the kitchen, the bathroom, the workshop, the bedroom, washing golden liquid light over the two sleeping boys. A final extra burst of light from the boys’ altar and the liquid light shone in beams, spreading out in all directions across the forest, leading the liquid waves over the neighboring properties, washing over our entire island of regenerating native, temperate rainforest. And now, from this oceanic base of liquid light, I pushed the wave toward the front gate.

I called forth the shadowy images of thieves coming up the path and sent my wave of liquid light over them, transforming them into their small, abandoned, fearful selves of shadow and these too I recognized as parts of myself. I embraced them to my chest with my shadow witch, I pulled them toward my heart center, I transformed their fearful shadows into love-filled light.

Now here hung the giant tidal wave of liquid light at the front gate overlooking the gravel road, the pine plantation beyond. The scarred landscape stretching down the hillsides studded with three-year pines among their predecessors’ stumps and passed-over branches, the left-behind tracks of giant machines still compacted in the hard, orange clay. And I sensed the hollow sadness of the forest, the anguish for what had been robbed of itself, and this pain too I recognized as part of myself. A rumbling lumber-truck hauled itself up the road and I launched my liquid wave of light as it passed, pouring light as love over and through the truck and its driver, all as a part of myself, and sent the wave freely flowing over every pine, every surface down the hillsides, washing every crack with a wave of golden liquid light.

I watched the wave flowing away out across the countryside, the neighboring forests and farms and plantations, from the resting trunk of El Brujo, the last pine to fall in the clear-cut harvest. The dogs and the cats joined me and together we sat against the remaining trunk of El Brujo with my small shadow witch quietly sitting beside. Everywhere around us glistened from the passing of the wave of light and my heart-center felt at peace, our sanctuary protected and healing. There I ended my visioning, my imaginative meditating. I know I will practice this exercise again and again in different variations and contexts depending on how fear and misgivings may next arise, but I am very content in the form the transformation adapted and the simple truths which were revealed in the unfolding: to love my every part of me.