Gazing in the barn, the other side...

I recieved this email this morning and am sharing with permission:

Gazing On a dark and windy night in late October, I was sat in an ancient, candle lit barn, beside a gently snoozing wood burning stove, taking part in Maddy's Seid evening gathering.

This was my second experience of "gazing" and the results were intriguing and unnexpected.

Gazing is the practice of looking at another person with soft focused eyes and allowing your sight to relax and accept any images, sounds, colours, words that come to you without censoring. My partner was J, who at the time of the exercise I did not realise I had met at the Tarot workshop. It was dark in this place and I had not really talked to J other than to say "Hello", so what happened next was a surprise to me.

After a minute or so, J's face took on the appearance of a North American Medicine woman and the longer I gazed at her the more this countenance became real to me. I had to blink and return to normal sight on a couple of occaisions to make sure J was still there. The only thing they appeared to have in common was the long hair that seemed to come down the side of their faces. the Medicine woman had one slanted feather in her hair and stood in front of a pine forest. Over her left shoulder I could see a male moose with large antlers, it appeared in the distance but apart from looking in our direction it did nothing but quietly observe what was going on. This materialisation of all the things i noticed took a few minutes, the picture was building as I watched, and occasionally it disappeared but came back when I focussed softly on J's face.

The medicine woman bought me a little bag that contained herbs. I did not hear her speak; rather the name of these herbs gradually came into my awareness. I'm not a herbalist and apart from a few herbs such as dandilion and feverfew, I know nothing about their medical properties, so the herbs she mentioned were a mystery to me: why these, the first mentioned was Comfrey, the second Liverwort and the last Wormwood.

Eventually the gazing exercise came to an end and after thanking each other, we exchanged the information we had gthered. She was surprised to hear about the medicine woman, she told me then that she was learning about the medical qualities of herbs, but did not know what the three mentioned were good for. I eplained to J that my daughter had problems with her digestion, she also suffers from mild asthma and that the medicine woman indicated that the remedies were for her.

The next morning I looked on the internet to find out if those herbs were medicinal and if so what they were good for. It surprised me to find out that all three were used to aid digestion and Liverwort, as the name would suggest, was particularly good for liver function. In spite of its name, I have never thought of it as a medicinal herb, maybe it was an association with the name that came to my mind when recieving the bag of herbs from the medicine woman, but it is very relevant to my daughter who has a liver lesion that is currently being investigated.

Comfrey is an anti-flammatory, good for stomach problems and asthma. Liverwort similary is used to treat bronchial inflammation and gallblladder and liver problems. Wormwood is used to treat liver and gall bladder disease, as well as upset stomach and intestinal spasm.

The surprising thing is that I knew nothing of J's interest in herbs and certainly knew nothing of the herbs that came to me and yet it was all very relevant.