CIRCLE: Healing the Witch Wound
Circle for healing and reclaiming.
The witch wound roots in history.
The witch wound carries a legacy of undeniable violence, hatred, greed.
The witch wound speaks only in duality: right/wrong, good/evil, self/other, rich/poor, divine/not, so it was an easy application onto cultures beyond.
Racism is the witch wound.
Colonialism is the witch wound.
Sexism is the witch wound.
The witch wound is globalization.
The witch wound is earth degradation.
The witch wound is speciesism.
The witch wound is religious superiority.
The witch wound is fear.
It is a wound opened culturally in a psychological sequence, the same temporal arena as land privatization, the advent of capitalism, the creation of racism and the export of these ideologies through colonization. These are all connected. How can we understand the fulcrum, the matrix, the axis apart
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How do we heal, reweaving threads so long torn? The answers may lie in ancestral memory. In this circle of learning and communal exploration we travel to remember through the clues in story and myth and make visible ways before the wounding. Through experiential, embodied practices, sacred art and story showing, we may discover/re-member our unique pathways to healing and restoration. We must help each other see through eyes absent the lie of "progress," through landscape, through reclaiming a living, animist, collectively diverse worldview. We heal when we live into nonlinearity, community, sovereignty, activism, action, solidarity, regeneration, reparations, and deep listening to the wounds of others. Liberation from dominant culture and its insistence on historical superiority is dependent on addressing the witch wound. We must remember, reweave, live in to the source.
Where does the witch wound live in you? In me it comes up as chronic anxiety, my fear of potency, visibility and waves of disconnected shame. Individualized and claimed, these patterns become imbalance...but addressed, spoken to, acknowledged, contextualized, they become essential to our growth, sovereignty and service.
This circle is a place of seasonal practice, visioned in several waves over the course of a solar year. During the season, which lasts from three to four moons, we meet once per moon online to share resources, create alternatives and weave together. In the weeks between we work through experiential practices, read and respond to writings, and develop mythic rituals to connect us with our deepest ancestral knowing.
This class has been offered annually since 2019. When you register for this class you can access all of our past seasons, including readings, materials, preparations, rituals and circle recordings. Past season topics include:
Past Witch Wound Healing Seasons
The Medieval Penitentials and the Witch Wound
All Oppression is Connected
The Masculine and the Witch Wound
Mental Health, Magic and the Wound
Meeting the Bone Mother: Death, Grief and the Wound
Earth Grief with guest Mary Good
Reflections and Intentions
Fear of Persecution/Paying Ancestral Debts
Feast of the Divine Mother of Herbs/Feast of the Three Sisters
2021 Healing Seasons: A Year of Devotion
This year's Witch Wound Healing will center around two devotional practices, mirroring the traditions of the Dísablótand Eleusinian Mysteries in the spring and autumn. The intention behind these practices, with their opportunities for community ritual, support and gathering, is to deepen into our purpose and path while restoring connection to the earth, our ancestors and each other.
This is a different model from past years, but with the difficulty of 2020 and the collective fatigue, employing practices of nourishment felt like the priority.
March 2021: The Feast of the Dísir: A Devotional Practice for Honoring the Ancestral Feminine
August 2021: The Feast of the Three Sisters: A 30 Day Lunar Journey
Long ago in the north a Goddess was burned in the first war of the world. She was Gullveig, and through her transformation, burned three times, she lived, becoming Hei∂, who offers magic with a playful intent and is beloved of those who are ill. Here in her seed story is a way for us to heal: thrice burned, and yet she lived. Through adversity we can transform, anneal. Burn bright.
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Your Instructor
I'm a storyteller, artist and educator transforming a path of dís-ability into initiation, healing and community. My research interests include folk spirituality, ancestral lifeways, mythology, ritual and the sacred creative. I am the author of The Moon Divas Guidebook: Spirited Self-Care for Women in Transition, The Moon Divas Oracle Book and Card Deck, and Wild Soul Runes: Reawakening the Ancestral Feminine. The Wild Soul School was founded in 2014 as a supplementary space to live courses. I was a university professor of English and Writing, creating programs in Civic Engagement and Community Storytelling before I became severely ill in 2016. Chronic illness has been a transforming rite of passage, and in that time the school also transformed to hold a creative sharing, a mythic journey. For more information visit laravesta.co, or become a patron and help support this work in community: https://www.patreon.com/laraveledavesta