Faery-tale Trickery, a story of the most intense house-clearing ritual yet
Last month, I worked with the Spirits of Place on clearing a very haunted house in Washington, DC.
I had worked with this home and its spirits two years ago, but the particularly nasty spirit evaded me, and re-infected the home after a month (sometimes this can happen when someone dies within the home, and the shell* does everything in its power to remain attached to the property).
Caroline and I worked together, and brought in two other shamans to help. Four shamans working in concert together felt like an army, and I was excited to bring in the "big guns" for healing!
The four of us were trained similarly, but have different hearth cultures. However, many of us resonate with the philosophy of "wrathful compassion", exemplified so well by the Tibetan Helping Spirits. We were prepared to fight for the healing of the land, out of our love for the proprietors. However, the powerful negative entity was also prepared to fight to remain in its vampiric state.
The healing ceremony lasted well over three hours. After the first hour of drumming, singing, yelling, cajoling, and trickery, we all took a break to regroup. We realized that our methods were not working, even with the four of us trying different things.
Grabbing our drums and rattles, we got back into it, going through the whole house room by room. We met in the central living room, and received a spark of inspiration: ask the Faeries for help!
Immediately, the feel of the ceremony changed. Instead of a fight for supremacy in the physical world, there was a vision of a party within the home and outside garden. The Seelie were everywhere, dancing, playing music, and offering drink and food. We witnessed the shell* that haunted the house drink a bit of the Faery wine, and flirt with one of the Elven Men. At that point, the shell* started to loose cohesion, and became part of the Faery Realm. Just like in myth, by drinking and eating things from the Otherworld, the shell was now part of that Otherworld, and could not return.
We ended the ceremony with gratitude for the Nature Spirits, and for their wonderful trickery and healing!
*shell: Ivo defines this wonderfully in his book, Spirit Speak. For me, it is the coagulation of the lower selves after death, when a Soul has not moved on, or been Psychopomped properly. Sometimes, other negative entities can join with shells, making it a very powerful and difficult haunting to remove.
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Caroline and I worked together, and brought in two other shamans to help. Four shamans working in concert together felt like an army, and I was excited to bring in the "big guns" for healing!
The four of us were trained similarly, but have different hearth cultures. However, many of us resonate with the philosophy of "wrathful compassion", exemplified so well by the Tibetan Helping Spirits. We were prepared to fight for the healing of the land, out of our love for the proprietors. However, the powerful negative entity was also prepared to fight to remain in its vampiric state.
The healing ceremony lasted well over three hours. After the first hour of drumming, singing, yelling, cajoling, and trickery, we all took a break to regroup. We realized that our methods were not working, even with the four of us trying different things.
Grabbing our drums and rattles, we got back into it, going through the whole house room by room. We met in the central living room, and received a spark of inspiration: ask the Faeries for help!
Immediately, the feel of the ceremony changed. Instead of a fight for supremacy in the physical world, there was a vision of a party within the home and outside garden. The Seelie were everywhere, dancing, playing music, and offering drink and food. We witnessed the shell* that haunted the house drink a bit of the Faery wine, and flirt with one of the Elven Men. At that point, the shell* started to loose cohesion, and became part of the Faery Realm. Just like in myth, by drinking and eating things from the Otherworld, the shell was now part of that Otherworld, and could not return.
We ended the ceremony with gratitude for the Nature Spirits, and for their wonderful trickery and healing!
*shell: Ivo defines this wonderfully in his book, Spirit Speak. For me, it is the coagulation of the lower selves after death, when a Soul has not moved on, or been Psychopomped properly. Sometimes, other negative entities can join with shells, making it a very powerful and difficult haunting to remove.
Very enlightening!
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