Following my spiritual calling is about finding the strength within…my development as a witch

I am a witch.  I was born a witch.  I am descended from witches—not just from one, but from a lineage of it.  I carry witch-blood in my soul.  My matriarchal lineage has more than one woman put to death for having been accused of witchcraft.  In a recent book I was reading about one of them, I was frustrated by the attempt of the author to whitewash away her witchiness, and to instead convey that everything that was done to her was done because of the nefarious plottings of the community that rose against her.

That bugs me.  It is just like so much of how society treats women generally.  Women are mysterious, at times dark, witchy, and when society becomes uncomfortable with that, they are shunned, ostracized, discriminated against, or worse, put to death.  Women are seen as “unclean” by some societies, menstruation is considered gross, some process that means women should be isolated, not touched or their bad energy will rub off on the man who touches.

When a man and even some women tell me to not have a vagina, they are tapping into this same zeitgeist.  And honestly, who cares?  Why should someone else care if I have a vagina or not?  I want to embrace the “gross”.  I made a solemn oath to myself and to whatever spirit thing I was engaging with during my first Ayahuasca weekend…and that is I will step all the way into womanhood, with no limits…and will take the good with the bad.  

A part of this is to embrace what has lived inside of me since I was a child.  The certainty that I possess magic, that I am a witch.  This has manifested a great deal in my life, particularly when I was young, and now, it has come roaring back.  Puberty hid it from me, my life as a man hid it.  As those things are left behind, the threads are back in my hands, and like the horses’ reins are guiding me ever more sure-footedly into this spiritual expression.

The main focus of my life now, and for the rest of my life, is to scrape away the parts of me that prevent from stepping into full witch.  What does that mean?  It means to cultivate listening and seeing…not just this realm, but in the realm of energetic fields.  This comes to me through spiritual practice…but also through fasting…through body care…and most of all, just slowing down.

Sometimes I write about the bizarre coincidences of my life.  These are not abating.  They are only growing stronger.  It is as if God is a giant AI dropping predictions and suggestions in my lap.  And the cosmic and karmic things that are happening to me would each merit a novel.  I’m just riding the wave.

The third sex

In traditional societies, being trans was not some awful stigma as it appears to be to some (mostly those who are not trans—so you have to ask yourself, ‘what’s up with those people?’…I mean that there are people out there who get so worked up about what people have between their legs or how they dress that they want to legislate out of existence.  Pathetic.). No.  On the contrary, the trans people were seen as having a gift of seeing.  Shamans.  Star Child, bless her, has been teaching me about these cultures.

I think it is beautiful that a random and chance encounter in my life led me to meet someone at a funeral, mainly because she was the most beautiful person there, so I immediately found myself in conversation with her and nobody else for the rest of the evening…and what would you know, her educational training is on transgender shamans (of which I am clearly one)! Too weird.

People come into our lives for a reason.  It is hard to see into the future, and streuth, I do not try, but I think she is here to introduce me to Buddhism, or at least to Buddhist thought.  Plus, she was jealous of the reading lists that my Dommes have given me over the past years, so immediately gave me her own.  Within five minutes of meeting her for our first date I told her I was a slave.

“Interesting,” she noted, and then asked me if I thought her ex was a slave. After she gave me the run-down of the symptoms, I gave her my thoughts.  It didn’t sound like it, but there was something going on with extreme chastity.  But that’s not my story.

She’s submissive, or so she says, but had no problem handing me her umbrella and asking me to walk her to her date and to keep her covered while we walked.  Life is beautiful.

There is no doubt to me that the life experience of a trans person, encompassing as it does a markedly broader gender experience, is a rich one.  That richness imparts wisdom.  I do not call myself wise, but my body is feeling wise for having taken this step…and that is coming out as radiant calm.  My energy was always not alarming, but it is becoming ever more soothing to those around me.  I know this because I am told it is so.

The witches training

The witches “power” that courses through me has nothing to do with me.  I am but a vessel.  But I am not an empty or passive vessel.  I am obsessed with learning.  Voracious reader, hungry for an ever-increasing diversity of life experiences, being a sponge for the stimulus around me, it has at times felt like a wildly spraying garden hose, snaking this way and that.  Enter training.

To help direct and apply this energy, there are a number of concrete steps I have taken to make it come to life.  A gifted and inspiring Domme friend of mine asked me to write about what it takes to be a good submissive, and this is another aspect of that same motivation.  I do this for myself, as it is my destiny.  When my therapist asks me to become my own dominatrix, to be the domme that slave me needs, and to be the slave that domme me would appreciate and cultivate, this is the purpose around which the energy revolves.  To not just step into my witchiness, but to master it.

As a result I am now a certified nutritionist.  Yay.  More to the point, I am also now a certified medical herbalist.  That’s a long story, but it sure felt good, and I loved every minute of preparing for it.  What else?  I am taking a degree in formulation—that means to take raw ingredients and to put them into potions, lotions, creams, balms, teas, food…in other words, to heal through what we eat and what we anoint ourselves with.  Coming soon to a bodega near you!

I am also on a long path towards being certified as a somatic therapist.

I didn’t even know what that was until Ex-Mistress enlightened me.  And boy, did she have magic power.  I remember that she could just touch me, knowing exactly where, and at what time, and a flood of emotion would come out.  To my dear reader Mark who talks to me about the joys of a snotty cry, Ex-Mistress got more snotty cries out of me than happened in my life before or since, combined.  And that was a result of her knowledge of the somatic arts.

And so, I pursue that path, but it will be a full few years before I am allowed to practice officially (for pay), but thankfully I have a clutch of guinea pigs, who let me practice on them.  Think of it as therapy that uses both touch and talk at the same time to explore how trauma and stress reside in our bodies.  The idea being that if you can find it, understand it, you can liberate it in ways that either body work or mental work on their own cannot heal.

Separately, I’m not sure that reiki practitioners would like to think of their art as Japanese witchcraft, but that is what it is to me.  And after having experienced life-changing reiki on a handful of occasions, decided I need to become qualified.  And so I have.  It feels awfully good, as my first conscious moments in life, my first taste of aesthetics, my first discovery of human beauty, my first love for the dominant female (my nanny, who was Japanese), my first experiences of dysphoria, my first words, my first baby language all came to life in Japan.  The circle closes.

Now dear reader, it all begins to make sense.  The love of the kimono.  The love of the chopsticks in the hair, hair-do.  The love of shibari.  The love of all things Japanese in style and food and philosophy.

But reiki is magic for me.  And since I became qualified, I feel upgraded.  I feel the earth through my feet with every step, and I feel the heavens open above me.

What kind of a witch am I?

I am a healer.  That’s it.  No black magic.  No gazing into the future.  No attempts to have power, or to think I can…

Instead, being a witch is a gift offered to the willing.  And to do this with not even thinking for one second that there is something I should “get” for it, or of wanting something in return, is in itself a religion…and my desire to control and to stamp out any chance of such feelings are part of what Buddhist practice will help do.

Being human is not enough.  We can surely strive to be better than this.  I’ll be sure to let you know of both my experiences with skinned knees in the gutters of life and the moments where I am floating.

The moral of the story?  Let life flow.  It will anyway, but if you surrender to it, you might just see a lot more.