What happens when the occult gets real, and you can’t deny what just happened? Can it be? Is it ever? Oh, and by the way, I fired my talk therapist.

Growth can come in leaps and bounds, and even be triggered by apparent setbacks.

Of course.  When I was a child, I believed.  As I grew, I wanted to believe, but wasn’t so sure anymore.  And then I forgot.  And when I forgot, the forest grew silent for me.  I remember as a child being able to go into the woods and to feel the spirits there.  I could feel them protecting me, talking to me, teaching me, being my friend, more than anything, being there for me.  The last time I really and truly felt nature like that was the summer before I went to college, when I spent a large chunk of time out in a beautiful mountain range in Wyoming.  I was there with wonderful people, in the true wilderness for a month, and there was one day in particular when I wandered off by myself, found a clear, rushing stream, sat on a rock out in the middle, and listened to the water trill all around me, felt the sun splash on me, and sparkle in the water, and felt the cold mountain air wafting up from the glacial melt that coursed beneath me.  And then I forgot.

As my children were growing up, one of the treasured rituals of the year was to read ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.  My father read that book to my older siblings and to my younger siblings, and they all remember it, but not to me, as my life fell in the trenches of the warring years, the divorce years.  It was double important to me to read it to my own children.  But I also enjoyed another book, The Midnight Express.  I read them both to my children.  

And there is a passage in that book, which [oh, and I understand it] never fails to trigger me, and I get choked up, and I can’t go on.  And my kids, since they were two, were like “don’t cry papa,” and wiping at my tears to “why are you crying papa?” to “are you going to cry this time papa?” to “here we go again”…marked by their own growth into young adults, but I know they appreciate it…the passage in question is right at the end of the book when the boy is the only one left who can hear the bell.  If you’ve read it, I’d love to know if you have cried too…and if you haven’t, try reading it again but with feeling this time!

That passage is about never losing innocent wonder.  To me, there are few things that are more important.  I have often been teased in life for being gullible.  I know a certain Dominatrix who is teased for the same thing.  But there is nothing more beautiful than trusting enough to be taken in, and then being willing to do it again.  And again.  And again.  I should never wish to lose that childlike wonder.

But now, I find that I must fight to get it back.  And in this case, my childlike wonder is the Truth.  I regard myself as someone who possesses deep faith.  I have never doubted my belief that we are just little tiny micro-dots in a much bigger picture whose dimensions and complexity are beyond infinite.  I was so taken by the concept, that I wrote my dissertation on the subject.  TMI.  But I didn’t need to stray so far.  The apple always lands at the foot of the tree.  And in this case, Truth was there from the beginning.  I just closed my eyes and my heart.

I don’t blame society.  Our whole system, from a desire to conform, to our obsession with the material, a desire to get ahead…all these things are designed to silence our moral essence.  It isn’t the work of the devil, but it is our collective apathy, our collective fear, and ultimately, proof of our collective inhumanity.  How can we be human and still be inhumane?  

Because so many of us have given up hope; no longer dare to dream.  Well, I’m here saying, enough is enough.  I want those dreams back.  I want a spiritual world.  I want a world of emotion.  I want to connect to my fellow humans.  I want to feel.

Good boy.  Yes.  I am the original good boy in my relationship with me, but I must also recognise that I have a very strong guide who is helping me find my way.  Guides come in many shapes and sizes…My guide is always different to me…always looks different, acts different, feels different, but is also deeply the same.  And my gratitude to Her grows with every passing day.  How do you thank somebody who reawakens you to the course of your own life?  Goddess!  Yes!  On my knees…my heart screams to you.  Most humbly and with thanks.

Friday was a big day.  Up at 5:00 am as usual.  Coffee with spices.  Mmmm.  You’re missing out!  Crappy beginner meditation.  Crazy thoughts.   Practicing kneeling and getting up again, over and over, stumbling around half the time, but pleased when I get it right…and remembering some of my homework from the night before.  I watched an interesting youtube video (among many), and this time the topic was the importance of ritual in everyday life, and how robbed we are by no longer investing our daily lives with ritual.  I am pleased to be putting it back.

Amongst the YouTube snippets of the night before was REIKI.  I had heard about it before, but never tried it, or knew anything about it.  I love everything Japanese—another story.  What struck me about it, was how on earth a Japanese healing method was so deeply intertwined with chakras, an Indian concept.  I was really puzzled by it…and so, when I woke up, I was determined to find a REIKI healer.

By 6 a.m., I had found several in my area, and one, in particular, had reviews that were so positive it was unreal…Numerous, but also really, really deep.  And not one, had left less than 5 stars.  I don’t usually trust in yelp/google for faith healers, but in this case, since her opening hours stated that she was open from 10:00, I called her at 10:01.  Had to give her time to compose herself you know.  And composed she was.  Like my experience with the Mayan Curandera that I wrote about before who adjusted my guts, this faith healer was into the zone with me in seconds.

I know I write about all this weird spiritual stuff.  And honestly, I am historically deeply sceptical about all of it.  Palmistry, tarot cards, faith healing, astrology…and yet, you always wonder, what if?  What if one of the people amongst a potential sea of charlatans is truly connected in this way.  What if?  I have had (for fun) a few palm readings in my life, but one of them was beyond real.  Some other time…I am saying this simply because I am as much of a sceptic as the next person.  But I am also open.  This woman blew the doors off.

By 11:00 am I had fired my talk therapist.  It is a shame to shake loose one of the people that is helping you along [sadly written about here], but she was not healthy.  I am not about to get into competition with my therapist about who has more sexual trauma—that is way beyond the pale.  And I think there is a lesson in here which is a total digression, but is deeply relevant for any of you out there like me who has slave feelings, who wants to be a slave, or who is a slave…being slave does not absolve you from responsibility to yourself.

At 13:00, I went to a gym and met with a physical therapist, a woman of course, and discussed my body objectives.  I didn’t really even need to say to her that I don’t want muscles, just tone and flexibility, and she understood what was behind the message.  And I am really glad that people are picking up on what I am saying without me always having to be explicit.  She understood that I didn’t want bulk.  She saw me looking at her own arms, and she said, “don’t worry, if anything, your arms will get smaller…you will be stronger, but it won’t show.”  How can somebody know that?  And it’s true, she was muscular, and how can a woman see in a man’s gaze that he is not appraising her sexually, but seeing fear for himself in her muscles, fear that he could be as physically strong-looking as her?  How on earth?  How could she know?  Anyway, based on that level of intuition, she’s now my trainer!  Snatch waist?  No problem!

From my enlightened future trainer and true Mistress of pain (sorry Mistress, but I’ve worked with a physical trainer before and they know torture on a whole different level!) I went into a blissful full-on sequence of hot tub, steam room, dry sauna, aromatherapy sauna, rainforest scented shower, ice cold spray with aromatherapy, to hot shower before trundling on home.  I felt totally blissed out.

Mistress has given me a ritual cleansing bath to take before doing spiritual and healing work.  When I got home, I focussed on this.  I wanted to be ritually cleansed and spiritually ready so I took a special bath. And by the time I got into my car to go to the REIKI healer, I was clean, pure, meditative, and totally ready.

I have a special sound on my phone for when Mistress sends me a message.  My new Reiki healer uses the same sound for all manner of things, so the place was going bananas before I even sat down, because she is very popular—it was quite confusing to hear “Her sound” over and over.  I had to ask her to turn her ring tone off.  And yet, it was oddly comforting to experience so much of that sound just as we began.

I’m being flippant.  What followed was one of the most sublime experiences of my life.

Setting

I met this woman in her apartment.  It was a modest space, a studio.  Small.  The smell of food from her last meal was in the air.  The light was ambient.  She told me to sit on the couch and to be still while she cleansed the space.  Yes, I like being told.

Cleansing and Purifying

She burned sage leaves and prayed as she walked, and moved the burning sage leaves in special patterns and chanted.  She cleansed the room, and then she asked me step out onto her balcony, and she cleansed me, before telling me to return to the couch, while she cleansed herself.

She was speaking to the spirits, and asking the good ones to come, and the bad ones to leave.  Above all, she was asking the good ones to protect us, and the space.

We Talk

I asked her about chakras, what they were, what they meant.  She was a mixture of passion and eloquence and stood to tell me about them, and to touch where on my body she described.  I felt that she was a witch as she talked.

It was very curious to me, but perhaps you know, I am open, wanting to discover.  She pulled up her chair, and we began to talk.  She wanted to know why I had come to her.  And in truth, specifically her, I don’t know.  I found her.  Why this quest, I am not sure, but gave her a summation of the possibilities.

She asked me to recount my childhood.  “Why are you here?” she asked.  I began to speak.

“What is non-binary?” she asked.  “Transsexual,” I said, “only most trans people have a definite goal, they wish to change their physical sex.”

“Do you want to do that?”

“I have, off and on, my whole life, but not anymore.  Non-binary means not wanting to be either.”

“Do you want to change back and forth?”

“That would be nice.  But I like also to be a little of both.  Maybe I will do it when I am 80.”

“Too much mutilation,” she said.  

“Yes,” I agreed, “it is too late for me.  But if I was twelve, I would want that, want it very much.”

“Do you like men?  Are you gay?”

“No.  I don’t like men.  I am not attracted to men.  I don’t like how they look, or act, or feel.”

“But look at you, you are a man.”

“Yes and no.”

“I want you to learn to love your body.”

“That’s going to be hard.”

“You chose your body.  There is a reason, a divine purpose, one that was expressed by you before birth, and you are learning about it, and learning the lesson that your spirit wanted you to learn.”

“I always thought of this body as a punishment.  That I have been given this body to punish me for something.”

“You are an attractive man.  There is no punishment in that.  Look at you.  Come, look at you,” and she made me stand and face a mirror.  “You are tall, skinny, and very handsome.  Men will envy you, woman will be attracted to you.  What do you like about women?”

“Women are the only ones who can forgive, who can provide solace, who can accept.”

“That’s because of your mother.  Tell me about your mother.”  We sat back down.

I described many of the things I have blogged about, breastfeeding, tension, growing up in opposition.  I recounted, “my mother was very stressed already before birth.  She had no milk.  She had no bandwidth or energy for a baby.  She felt that she needed to control me, because by controlling me, I would be easier to deal with.  She also wanted me to be a girl.”

“Ah hah,” she said.  “And how did that happen?  How did you know?”

“Because she told me all the time, and she dressed me like a girl and a baby until I went to school.”

“So you developed a desire to be female to please your mother.”

“There are some things about us that are who we are, and they have always been there.  There are other things that we learn as we grow.  [I explained that dressing in female gendered clothes is not a sexual thing for me, but a source of comfort].  I know that I was born non-binary, that I was already that way when I saw light.  Other things, sexual things, behavioural things, those came out of my interactions with my mother.  But this, it was already there.  Scientists know now that people like me experienced different hormones in the womb—and it is thought they are triggered by stress.”

“That doesn’t matter.  What matters is that you chose a male body, but inside you have female. And that is okay. How you are inside does not have to be the same as your outside. You can be free to express your femininity without worrying about your body.  What matters is that your mother told you that she wanted you to be female, and to please her, you allowed this to grow.”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“Well, when she found out that I already had girl clothes in my closet when I was 12, she sat me down for a talk and told me she didn’t want me to ‘be a fag’.”

“Those are very strong words.”

“Yeah.”

“So you bring out this deep and important part of you and develop it and offer it to her because it is what she wants, and then she rejects it.”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to let go of all of this.  You’re going to let go of your man-hate too, because it affects how you see your body.  You’re going to love your body.”

“It’s in there pretty deep.  How many 12-year-olds do you think go to the public library and check out books on sex changes and sit there reading about the technicalities of complex surgical operations?”

“I don’t care.  It’s time for you to love yourself as you are.”

We talked like this for a long time.  Other than Mistress and one friend, I have never had such an open conversation.  I had been referring to Mistress in relation to “why I am here,” and she probed and wanted to know more.  I explained to her as best as I could the nature of our dynamic.

“But a dominatrix humiliates men, steps on them, spits on them, grinds them down,” she said, processing what I was telling her.  

“Perhaps, but that is not what we do.  I am proud to submit, I feel strength in submission, strength in service.  I spent an awful long time searching various Dominatrixes, trying to find one that I could relate to.”  I recounted the search.  I recounted our first meeting, and how I shivered in her presence, and although I have met others, nobody has ever had such a profound physical effect on me. She latched onto the shivering.

“That’s because you vibrate in the same frequency,” she explained, and also the importance of finding such people.  I had described Mistress as a Spirit Guide and a feeling that I had known her before.

“Perhaps,” she said, “perhaps, but it doesn’t matter.  What matters is now.  What matters is the present.  She is not the same as a Spirit Guide.  She is a Guide.  It is possible that her Spirit Guide and yours have known each other.  It is possible.  But she is in your life for a reason, and you must accept that reason.”

“Will I ever get to know my Spirit Guide?”

“You may have more than one.”

“How will I know?”

“Through work like this.  And your Spirit Guide has been with you since before you were born.  Has been with you always, and will always be with you, helping you, protecting you, guiding you.”

“Really?” the thought comforting, but also kindling a desire to know, to feel on a deeper level, just who or what this is.  

“Your spirit guides, or angels, or even arc-angels, stay with you forever.  Sometimes you will get new ones if you grow so much spiritually that you move up in the hierarchy.  There is a hierarchy of spirits, and your Spirit Guide reflects where you are, and your physical manifestation, your life on earth, is in part about learning and experiencing in ways that will help you grow and reach ever greater enlightenment.  The body you have here today, that you were born with, was chosen by you for this reason…because your body is part of your path to enlightenment.”

“Are you ready?”

“Yes, please fix me,” and of course, that was exactly not the thing to say.  What followed was a long conversation about personal responsibility. She said, “only you can fix you. You already possess everything you need. You are a complete person. You must own yourself and own your destiny.”

We talked about the death of my mother, and how that represented for me the loss of the “approver”—and even though she was mostly disappointed with me as we interacted, I still craved her approval, and needed it when she gave it.  “You were co-dependent,” she said.

“We were.”

“And your Dominatrix feeds this.”

“Yes, she does.  But I need it.  I know that the best I have been in life, has been when I have had a woman who was my boss.  My best work, my greatest achievements, my greatest steps forward in life.”

“Why is that?”

“Because they push me, but they also nurture me at the same time, so I get the courage I need to dare big.”

“This is very important.  You cannot pass responsibility to someone else.  You must own yourself.  You must own your path.  You fix you.  You own you.  But do surround yourself with people who will help.”

“It’s okay to submit and still do all of this?  I don’t have to give up submission do I?  I can still seek out a boss?  Seek to serve?  I can still seek to belong to this woman?”

“Yes, but you must also own yourself.  Giving yourself to her, serving her, does not mean you give responsibility for yourself to her.  You own you.  You own your path.  Your submission to her is part of your path to enlightenment.  You must learn to love yourself.  All of you.  If you do not take care of that, then you will never grow.”

“Maybe that’s why I have been given this body.”

“You must learn to rejoice in your body.  You can also accept that inside you are in part female, or maybe even all of you. You can seek to express your femininity, and be a woman, but you must love your body as your body is.  These are not separate things.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“You want to feel and channel deepest love.  I can feel your power.  You have very strong power.  To express it, you need to accept you as you are.  That is the first and most important step.”

Mantras

We worked together to create three mantras.  We spent time on the concepts and in crafting the words.  This was my homework.  And she wanted me to recite them while I meditate, and she taught me how to begin meditation.  How to learn to do it.  She asked for me to spend 10 minutes first thing in the morning, and 10 minutes at night, and gave me some methods to tap into a meditative state.  I noted that I had begun doing this in line with what Mistress is teaching me.

We did an exercise, a game, that involved me making obviously false and obviously true statements and watching how my body reacted.  My lies made me drift backwards, my truths made me tilt forward.  My reactions were very muted.  She showed me with her own body, and her reactions were so pronounced I thought it was fake.  

But then she asked me to do the game by using my mantras.  My body did not move at all.  “You are completely blocked,” she said, “all of you.  Sit down,” she said indicating her couch.  She had me sit with feet crossed, my hands crossed, and asked me to begin reciting my mantras to my myself.  We were going to begin rewiring my neural pathways.  “I want you to do this until you are ready to scream,” she said.  And so, I remained thus, reciting my mantras in my head for what must have been a rather long time.

When I opened my eyes she had me stand and we repeated the exercise.  When I said each of my three mantras, I nearly pitched forward.  It just happened.  “You see that?” she said, best pleased.  I did.

Reiki

She had me lie down on the large massage table in the middle of the room.  “I can tell you will get cold,” she said, so she folded up the covering on her table so as to keep me warm.  I lay there, relaxing, with my eyes closed.  “I do many things, not just Reiki,” she explained, “and I will use all of them, including my magic.”

And then she began to look at my chakras one by one, and because my eyes were closed, I was not sure what she was doing, but I believe she was holding a pendulum above me, and it was not moving.  “Your X chakra is blocked,” she would say with each one, and each one was blocked.  “They are all blocked,” she said.  “I will unblock them.  We will do this work together.”

And then she began chanting and summoning spirits, summoning angels, summoning her spirit guides and mine, asking for their help and guidance and protection, and then, when she had finished doing so, she began to touch me, one chakra at a time.  Placing a hand on me, chanting, speaking to the spirit world.  And then she explained to me that every chakra has a colour and a frequency, and a sound, and that she was going to play these for me, and she wanted me to breathe in a certain way as she did.  And she wanted me to concentrate on spinning my chakra clockwise, and opening it up, and taking all the energy that was coming into my body through my breath and to deliver it to the chakra and to let it live in my body.

And she began to play this deep sound, I breathed as shown, focussed as told, and she touched my body in each place in sequence with the chakras.  I’m not sure how long we did this, but did focus on each in turn, and she chanted and commanded as we went, and I harnessed the energy from each chakra to feed the next, and then we were done.

She asked what I felt.  I was electrified, and I told her so.  “Good.  You are tingling?”

“Yes, all over.” And I was.  I have never had this feeling quite as strong as I did lying there on this massage table in this woman’s apartment.  Every part of me was energized, even my lips were tingling.  It felt so blissful and good.

I can think of three other times in my life where I have felt something approaching this.  Once, the first time I slept with a woman who became my GF for a while when I lived in NYC.  We touched each other all night long, but never consummated, just entwined our bodies, and felt each other, felt our skin touching.  The rest of our relationship was spent trying to find that again…I remembered it after as feeling as if I had champagne for blood.  The second and third times occurred recently.  Once with Mistress and touch.  And then once, after drinking her night-time potion, and then waking up in the middle of the night and feeling her energy all around me.  But this time was stronger by far than all of them…and the feeling didn’t go away.  She told me to lie there as long as I wished.  And I did, with my eyes closed, feeling this incredible and sublime feeling.

The Silver Pegasus

After who knows how many minutes had passed, I recounted to her something I had seen.  As soon as we had begun with breathing and freeing my chakras, I had this powerful feeling of very bright bluish-white light pouring into me, and I felt a presence there.  I couldn’t see it fully but recognised what I saw as a Pegasus.  It was flying above me, kind of as if it was treading water, but in the air and blinding light, and I couldn’t see all of it, because it felt so very close.  But it also looked different than any I had seen in mythology.  It was immense, and rippled with muscular strength, and was a electric white, shimmering, almost silver colour, and in this colour of white I felt I could see the colours of the rainbow.  It was taller and slimmer than any Pegasus I have ever known, and it was beautiful.  It was a divine being, and I felt it and the breeze from its wings as I breathed and worked.  It was with me.

“The Pegasus,” she said, “that may have been your Spirit Guide.”

“I’ve always felt close to horses.”  Part of my inner girl expressed itself with a love of horses as a child.  I remember in 4^th grade sharing love in a plastic pony, one with long blonde hair and big eyelashes.  I am sure that many girls had similar.  One of the girls in my home room class had one.  And why wouldn’t we love horses?

Already at that age, I had started riding.  The magic of horses lay in this combination of things—how soft they were to touch, how they responded emotionally and spiritually to my presence, how powerful they were physically, but with those incredible big doe eyes, and to feel a horse nuzzle you and grunt softly as it does.  And I can imagine that it delights a girl to no end, as it does me, to feel such a powerful animal underneath her, obeying, submissive, but also strong and wilful, in need of whispering, controllable only by the ones who hold the keys.  I used to ride with a group of friends through these incredible forests and one of our party was a “good rider”, but was often thrown.  The horse I rode, an ex-racehorse, was famous for both throwing its riders and for biting riders that didn’t do what it liked. She would tip her had back and watch me from time to time warily.  It wasn’t that I was such a good rider, it was that I knew how to ride her, to feel her, and we communed, and she knew by instinct where to go, and she was a magnificent horse, and one of the greatest I have ever ridden, a total reflection of her demands of me as her rider. It is possible to speak telepathically with horses.

I do see in this a parallel to my submission.  Mistress rides me in this way because she has the keys, but I am not sure that many others could or would do so and not be thrown.

“I did this test online and found my spirit animal to be the butterfly,” I told the REIKI Master.  [You can read about that here].

“That’s because you’re changing.  You can have more than one spirit animal, and they can come to you at different times. But perhaps seeing the Pegasus means that on this Earth your spirit animal is a horse.”

“Since a child I have been close to horses.”

“It’s possible that your spirit guides are animals, and not human.  They can even be plants.”

“Trees.”

“Yes, trees.”

The meaning of a Pegasus as a spirit animal fits.  The Pegasus resonates with clear-mindedness, focus, magic, transience, and transitions.  All of these themes are coursing strongly in my life today.  The Pegasus earned eternity through devotion.  The Pegasus as an animal guide represents fire, leadership, charisma, bravery and artistic endeavour.  In the Chinese zodiac I am a horse, in the world of astrology, I am Sagittarius…again, the horse.

And the connected threads are uncanny.  I wear white.  Almost always.  White is innocent, it is pure.  The Pegasus is white.  Silver is my favourite metal.  Here is the significance of silver from one online source:

“Silver is believed to be a mirror to the soul, helping us to see ourselves as others see us. As a gemstone silver represents hope, unconditional love, meditation, mystic visions, tenderness, kindness, sensitivities, and psychic abilities.

Silver affects the mind and body as a conductor and communicator that aids in public speaking and eloquence. Silver is believed to draw negative energy out of the body and replace it with positive energy.”

I wear silver jewellery all the time.  My collar is silver.  I have worn it since I was a child.

My favourite stone is the moonstone, especially the white ones and ones which irridesce the colours the rainbow.  The clearest ones are thought to be the most powerful spiritually, and the rainbow ones speak femininity and fertility.  This is the significance of the moonstone from the same source:

“The creative and intuitive power of feminine energy is activated by the moonstone. It can help us balance and cool down emotions and tension. It can also put us in tune with our feminine and feeling side. Moonstone energy is yin, introspective, receptive, and connected to our subconscious.

The serene and tranquil energy of the moonstone also invites creativity, restoration, and motherly protection. It also acts like a mirror so we can see clearly our reflection.”

Why do I speak of this?  Because the Pegasus that came to me in my vision, was the colour of silver and moonstone, pulsing with celestial energy.  These threads are real, and were felt already, so when the Pegasus was revealed, I knew immediately who it was, who it is, and felt its protection and divine essence.

“Mistress calls me kitten,” I said.

She smiled, “that’s because a kitten is submissive.”

“Perhaps, but I find that the words that She uses are not accidental, and that they find their way to me in truth, out of recognition.  I’ve always been a cat.”

“Me too,” she said, “I am a jaguar.”  I taught her the indigenous word for jaguar and told her a story about the significance of that word in my life.  She liked the word.

“I’m a leopard,” I said, “though I manifest as many different types of cat, and have done so all my life.  As a child I went to the Bronx Zoo.  There was a lioness with her young cub, and when I walked up to the glass, the cub saw me and played like a puppy with me, dancing, juking, chasing its tail, tumbling, and then coming back to me.  Playing and playing, and I played to, and the crowds watched us both, and the lioness looked on with real amusement.  I remember them talking about it.”

“Lion cubs are very cute.  So playful.”

“Yes.  It was amazing.”

“But they grow to be very dangerous.”  

“I’ve never been afraid of cats.”

“Nor me.  They see me as I am.”  She showed me all of the cat symbols in her apartment.  Paintings of lions and jaguar, statues of same, and of her other spirit animal, the Cobra.

Before I met mistress I was interacting with a young, budding Domme, seeing whether there was scope for submission.  We did not find it, but we did exchange some really beautiful writing, and I continue to follow her and watch her growth as a human and fellow non-binary spirit.  One of the powerful dreams I had when I was engaging with her was a dream of her as a circus master and me, as a leopard, pacing back and forth, staring at her as I did, back and forth in my very large circus cage—kind of like the one on the box of animal crackers.  I told her about it, and that led to the stuffed animal leopard that I keep with me.  But my main stuffed animal companion is a bunny rabbit.  And very early on in my explorations with Mistress I manifested in a dream as a bunny rabbit and she appeared as a series of predators, but she only watched me, and never devoured me—she has been a wolf and an owl.

As I continued to feel the electricity coursing through me, this healer asked me about my feelings for Mistress, where they came from and why they were so strong.  And I described how she makes me feel.

“She doesn’t judge you.”

“That’s right.  For the only time in my life, and with all the things that I have always felt the weight of judgement, here is someone who does not judge.  How can I not respond to her as I do?”

“You love her,” which she said, almost teasing.

“I do, but its different.  I am trying to find my way towards love without condition, without expectation, to find spiritual sustenance in a purity of devotion, and I don’t know if she is the medium for that, or the object itself, and in a way, it doesn’t matter, because in those moments where I feel love “for Her” I am feeling love for myself.  I don’t know if that makes sense, because I don’t want to be selfish, I want to let go of self, and to just feel pure, and innocent, and spilling over with love.  And because she is not me, because she is a different person, that makes it possible.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said.  And then we talked at length about the importance of self-love.  And we talked at length about how I must not cloud the absolute necessity of owning myself, owning my transformation, with any expectations from others.  It is a very important lesson.

“Mistress is a witch,” and I told her of the spells she has cast upon me.  

“She’s a very powerful woman,” she said, “I can feel that.  And you are a very powerful person too.  You know that.”  And she blessed this journey.

Conclusion

This was meant to be a one-hour visit.  I was with her for 3 and a half hours.  I walked out of her apartment feeling radiant and magical.  I feel it still.  I feel my power growing, I feel my comfort taking shape, and I find myself more ready than ever to let go and float.  And yes, I do not doubt that Mistress is a Guide, that she is intensely powerful, that she is filled with magic. I felt that from the moment I met her.  I trust her, I trust in her, and I look forward to growing into her and myself across time and across lifetimes.  The path to self-love, and full actualization, does lie through the teachings of my Guide.  I know that. I also know that I will have to face many challenges along the way, but I am not afraid.

There will be times when I will be weak, but I do own me.  I wear my own collar.  That she leashes me just as a rider does the horse, allows me to express myself fully, to learn to live, to learn to love.  What a gift.  Oh Mistress, thank you so much.

And when I think separately of the grim reality and discrimination that many SWs face, and my own experience of spiritual health and growth the dissonance is a shock to the system.  It can be a holy profession, and I am sure that many people’s lives are vastly enriched because someone, somewhere took them under their wing and gave them the chance to grow.