I had a life-changing experience with the 2,000 year old yew tree in Devon 5 years ago and I wanted to introduce this particular yew to my soul sister Tor.
We began with experiencing Nessi Gommes in concert in St Marys church in Totnes. We sang about how we are all related. We sang about rising up together. We cried. It was nothing short of holy.
We stayed in a BnB that backed onto this same St Marys church graveyard. By accident.
We swirled in delicious feminine energy. Constantly losing track of time. We lay in our beds chatting until 2am. We shopped. We laughed.
We decided we wanted to meet the yew with full feminine void energy. We were not asking her for any guidance in particular. We did not set an intention. We fasted for 24 hours to empty ourselves so we could embody more deeply the feminine void (for anyone that knows me well, they know that this is somewhat of a sacrifice for me as I normally eat so much and so regularly).
We went to the wrong church to begin with: also called St Marys. By accident.
We bathed in the final golden rays of father sun in a nearby beautiful forest. We mused how poetic this was as the masculine was pouring gold into our bodies – in service of the feminine - to prepare us for our night with the deep dark feminine.
We asked around and finally found the correct church with the 2,000 year old yew tree. Guess what it was called? St Marys church. The whole trip was like this – synchronicitious - free-flowing – feminine – mysterious.
As we approached the ancient yew tree, a beautiful ancient song about grandmothers poured through Tor. We shivered with excitement and reverence. We asked the yew’s permission to vigil with her. We hugged her. We sang to her. We prayed.
An opening ceremony just unfolded from us without any preparation or consultation and it was so completely beautiful and perfect.
No more words from then onwards. Phones were turned off. No watches. No food. No sleeping. No distractions. We were in silence until the next day.
We took our seats on the rich fertile soil at the base of this epic tree and watched the sky deepen her ink into black as the sun went to bed.
The first few hours were painful for me. It had snowed earlier that day and was about 1 degrees. The cold sharply penetrated my bones and it physically hurt. I was so uncomfortable.
I wanted out.
But I knew that discomfort is a great teacher. I knew that we are far too obsessed with comfort in the West, which means we don’t get to meet so many versions of ourselves (e.g. our cold self, our hungry self, our bored self). I knew that disturbance is transformational.
So I continued to sit. Hours went by. I was bored. I thought how I would have nothing to tell Tor at the end of all, except moaning about the pain of the cold.
Surrounded by 360 degrees of gravestones, I started to think a lot about death. I imagined my own funeral and thought how I just wanted to be remembered by the way I made people feel (seen, loved, and held in their highest light, I hope). That was all I wanted really (and for my ashes to be buried in the roots of a tree obviously).
The graveyard was about as quintessential as you can get. Old stone church tower. Big stone crosses casting long black shadows. Mist low on the earth. Cold smoke coming out from your exhale.
I giggled to myself when thinking about how creepy we must have looked. Fully witched out sitting at the bottom of a yew tree in a graveyard in the middle of a snowy winter’s night.
A black cat prowled between the gravestones like a sexy mini jaguar on a catwalk. The owls were hooting away, obviously. And some sort of beast was howling in the distance. The three spirit animals tattooed on my body are jaguar, owl and wolf, so I knew I was safe and protected.
I felt no fear whatsoever.
I realised I didn’t need a man to look after me, given my deeply intimate relationship with the universe. That she may drag me to the depths of her wells and, ultimately, she will compost me back to star dust. But I am so very okay with that. I am a bride married to amazement (Mary Oliver) and I felt a deep sense of trust and surrender in my every cell.
A few people and dogs walked through the graveyard over the course of the evening. But I knew they wouldn’t see or sense us. Because I discovered that I could make myself invisible. It was a huge expense of energy but I was sure I could do it. I knew that Tor was discovering this too at the same time. So I felt I didn’t need to help her energetically because she was doing what I was doing. When we shared our stories the next day, it turns out I was right. She was discovering she had an invisibility superpower too and she also knew that I was discovering this at the very same time!
That was the first half of the vigil. I was definitely operating in ego consciousness during this first part because I was aware of ‘self’ and I was the central narrator in my own thoughts.
I was so very very cold, and although I was musing how at peace I was with dying and such, I didn’t actually fancy freezing to death that night.
So I started breathing more consciously – inhaling as slow and deep as I could – holding at the top – exhaling as slow and deep as I could – holding at bottom. This type of breathwork felt exactly right for this vigil with this particular tree. I discovered the next day that Tor was doing the exact same breathwork too (but we didn’t know each other were doing it).
I then noticed that I didn’t actually need to breathe for a very long period of time at the top and the bottom of my breath. Like for minutes at a time I was completely empty.
And that’s when the second part of the vigil kicked in... I somehow came out of ego consciousness and was mid-wived by the yew tree into oneness.
It wasn’t just that the contours of myself softened, but there were no edges of myself at all. I was merged completely with nature and with love and with source.
I was still in every sense of the word. Like frozen in a time warp. It was hours I think but could have equally been minutes. Time was not a thing. I was the perfect temperature all over my body. I felt the pulsing rhythm of life itself inside my body.
It was truly heaven on earth.
And then the tower of St Mary’s church turned into a big blue being of light and he reached his arm out to me and touched my third eye. He poured blue light through my whole body. Waves of blue. He was putting me to service to expand the consciousness of love.
Things got even deeper and wilder than that… so much so that I can’t share them here. Only to say that what happened next in terms of my own experience was shared exactly by Tor. We had no awareness whatsoever of this at the time but when we shared our experience the next day, we were utterly speechless.
We went back to our beds in a little BnB in Totnes, fell into potent lucid dreams, journalled privately, ate a lot, and then shared for hours in front of a fire.
We realised many things, including that masculine energy is the container of our lives. It gives us form in the shape of a body. Feminine energy is the pure potentiality of everything that is, so she births us. She also burns it all away in death. Death and darkness take the shape away and return us to the feminine, to the shapeless, to the infinite, to the void, to truth itself, to creativity, to the mystery.
By avoiding death, by being afraid of the dark, we are not nourishing and feeding the feminine. We decided not to turn our faces away from death, from winter, from crones, from blood, but instead to continue to explore the treasures that lye in this ‘illuminous darkness’.
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