I Will Not Be Burned in This Life

There's a message that keeps coming back to me. It arrives in dreams, in journey work, through the faces of elders and ancestors and crones who visit me in that liminal space between waking and sleep. And the message is always the same.

You won't be burned in this life.

Many years ago, I was doing a past life regression early in my spiritual journey, and what came through wasn't subtle. Life after life, I had been a young woman, poor, and living on the margins of a village. Someone who knew things about herbs, about healing, about the rhythms of nature. Someone whose kin had taught her how to work with the land. And life after life, I had been killed for it. Hanged, guillotined….always young. Always for my gifts.

When you carry that kind of cellular memory, it doesn't stay in the past; it follows you. As it did into this life, (but that’s a story for another day).

I think about how many women today have an unexplained fear of being visible, or a fear of speaking up, of putting themselves out there, of owning what they know. We call it imposter syndrome, or anxiety. We tell ourselves we're just being realistic. But for some of us, particularly those of us drawn to intuitive work, to herbalism, to natural medicine, to anything that might have raised the suspicions of a neighbor 300 years ago, I believe there's something older underneath that fear. Something encoded at a soul level.

That's what I mean by the witch wound.

I'm not saying every woman who fears visibility was literally burned at the stake in a past life. What I am saying is that this wound, that this collective memory of what happened to women who were too powerful, too knowing, too much, lives in the body. It lives in hesitation. And it lives in the voice that goes quiet right when it matters most.

About a month ago, on the day after my birthday, I did a journey. At the end of it, a crone came to me in a meadow. She looked at me with the kind of steadiness that you can only find in a face that has seen everything and feared nothing. And she said: You are on the right path, stop second-guessing this. You won't be burned in this life. She said it more than once.

I've been sitting with those words ever since. Because the truth is, for the two months before that journey, I had been questioning everything. Whether I was on the right path. Whether any of this was real. Whether I was allowed to take up this kind of space.

The modern-day burning looks different now. It's those social media trolls, family members who mock what they don't understand, or the slow, quiet pressure to stay small and stay safe and not say the things that might make people uncomfortable. It doesn't leave a physical mark. But it can absolutely silence a woman just as completely.

To every woman reading this who has felt that pull to hide, I want you to know that the fear you're feeling might be older than this lifetime. And it might not be yours to carry anymore.

Today, I remind you that wherever you find yourself on your personal journey, it's safe to share your gifts now.

If this resonates and you're curious about exploring your own past lives, I offer past life regression sessions. You can learn more and book here.