SHE-EAR, Glastonbury Goddess Temple
Healing the Emotional Body of our Community
Here in Glastonbury we have built a wonderful committed sister/brotherhood of priest/esses of the Goddess. As the community has grown in size, little and big personal dynamics have arisen, and in response to a felt need for somewhere to process uncomfortable emotions arising within this community, a group of five priestesses created the Goddess Community group She-Ear, an acronym for Sacred Holding for Emotional Expression and Release.
This group meets approximately once a month and performs a fire ceremony together with those who choose to turn up from the larger community. It has been a very nourishing experience for all who have been involved. It is a simple concept used already in many traditions, but here made available in a very unfussy and simple way. You just come, call in Goddess in all the directions, especially the Goddess of Fire. When your turn comes, you sit with Her fire and feel and express your emotions while being witnessed, supported and encouraged by the rest of the group. At the end of your session, you state how you want to feel, envisage the healing that you need, and call for a new creative and uplifting energy to enter into your body from the Goddess’ transforming Fire.
For those who have worked with the Cauldron of Keridwen, or with the Morgens of Avalon, it bears a resemblance to that kind of edgy noisy raw energy of release, and there is always a significant change in how we feel after a good Fire Release Ceremony. Sometimes the ‘stuff’ really does completely dissolve and we cannot even remember what the fuss was all about. Or sometimes we are enabled to understand ourselves and our wounding better and reduce the amount of blame we are projecting onto another, and the energy of compassion and love starts to flow in us again.
It is a spontaneous experience, you can do as you wish with your time in front of the fire, move, shake, dance, drum, sing, or be totally silent if you would rather. She is the Fire Goddess and consumes and transforms all that you name and offer to Her flames.
In this way of working, you are encouraged not to get into psychological complications or stories, or to particularly name anyone who you are feeling ‘stuff’ about, but you can be as vocal and abusive and angry or upset as you feel, and give it to the Fire Goddess, to those hot transformative flames. The most important aim of this ceremony is to be held while you move what is in your body. The stuff in your mind and heart seems to move more easily then because you just feel so much better after a bit of banging about and making some of your own authentic sound. Those who joined us in our Fire Ceremonies all said they had an amazing experience, felt a lot clearer afterwards, and would really like to come back and do it again.
This testimony is from someone who came to one of our Fire Release Ceremonies:
“The She-Ear fire ceremony I attended was such a transformational and alchemical experience. I emerged from the ceremony feeling as though I had allowed myself to set free those places that needed to be released, I felt cleansed, charged and rejuvenated. I also found it as transformational to offer to the fire as it was to witness others surrendering. The process of offering to the fire, through sound and movement, while being held within such an amazing circle of sisters, allowed me to delve deep into the root causes of what I wanted to let go, unlocking new areas of myself I hadn’t been able to reach before. Truly such important and powerful work, I recommend this to everyone in the Goddess community and beyond.”
Everyone understands that we need to heal our emotions. After all, it has been many generations that we have all lived within a patriarchy that undermines and understates the importance of emotional well-being. Here in the Glastonbury Goddess Community it feels as though we have been aware of this and working at it one way and another for a long time. There have been many offerings coming forward, methods of processing emotions have been evolved within Priest/ess trainings, and group sessions for the purpose of clearing early and/or past life trauma have been made available to help us heal ourselves and arrive more fully into relationship together.
The truth is that even though all members of our community have done various kinds of emotional healing, something happens when we all get together to manifest our common vision, and as we get closer to each other in the creative flow, issues emerge which were originally hidden and unknown. There is still a lot of work to do it seems, mainly because we are truly attempting to create something new together, a living dynamic community built on inclusion, trust and real communication, something very different to anything that has been before, well certainly in my life.
We can’t model this new community on the past because we are in times that have never been like this before. We are in the 21st century, and it is all happening at breakneck speed. The world around us is in a state of chaos and we are the ones who need to bring in the new way. Here in the Glastonbury Goddess Temple community, we call it ‘The Mother-World Way’, a way led by feminine principles of trying to run things in circles by consensus, sharing and co-operation together.
It can be a very intense experience to try and change the old patterns engrained in us all and we have to really focus on this new creation if we want it to work. We can’t afford to mess up, we can’t afford to let up on our intention, and we need everyone to get involved fully, which is one of the most difficult aspects. It doesn’t mean people have to do loads of stuff, turn up to give loads of time and energy, hold endless meetings. But it does mean us all agreeing on some principles together and supporting each other in creating new ways to think and care about people, about each other, so that we all feel included, honoured, heard, permitted to speak exactly what we feel without being judged or criticised for it, and allowed to bring our own authentic creativity to the mix.
There was a massive ‘walkout’ in the Glastonbury Goddess Temple a few years ago, issues that came up between a number of priest/esses, and it seemed nothing could be resolved for quite a long time. Eventually one or two of those people ‘returned’ and made their peace with some of those they had fallen out with, thank goodness. However, some of those priest/esses have still maintained their separation from the Glastonbury Goddess Temple, which I feel is a very sad situation, truly a loss on both ‘sides’. And some really hurtful things were said which have probably struck heavily into hearts and minds; it is not easy to heal these things without a lot of effort, emotional processing, reconciliation, mediation, and forgiveness on both sides; and unfortunately I think some people truly lost faith in each other, and so also lost the will to even try and heal the situation. These may not be the facts, but this is how it seems to me.
We could of course say ‘Ah well, it’s just human nature, people fall out, that’s life’. And yes there is a truth in that. But surely it is good to try and understand WHY people fall out. Is ‘Goddess’ not a synonym for Love, Harmony, Beauty, Peace, Compassion, all things Good , Real and True? And as priest/esses of Goddess we do all believe and have faith in ‘Goddess’, even in Her ‘dark aspects’, when She confronts us with our pain and negativity.
Surely we do not want to repeat patriarchal history and fight over our Goddess beliefs in the way that humans fought over which God or gods were the most powerful etc, which was then proved on the battlefields with blood and gore, horrendous pain and death? And surely we do not really want to each hide away in our separate little worlds, even if they become little worlds of three or four, or even 50, agreeing together to be separate from ‘the rest’, or agreeing that ‘those others’ have got it in for us, and we only feel safe with a chosen few. The truth is we are at the very beginning of creating a new way, a Mother-World way, a Goddess-led way, and we literally don’t know what that looks like yet.
It is the passionate belief of many in the growing Glastonbury Goddess community that we can bravely go forward and create new traditions together, find what really works that eliminates backbiting, gossiping, and the subtle undermining of each other because of hidden fears and suspicions running in the underground of the community heart and mind. Many of these wounded behaviours are a hangover from centuries of surviving within patriarchal and hierarchical power-over societies.
We all do in fact believe in fundamentally the same simple precepts, namely that we want to create a different kind of world based on love, co-operation, communion/community, peace and harmony. And if we really put our heads and hearts together, I believe we can identify the building blocks that can form the foundation of a new kind of community lifestyle and ethos. And one of those building blocks is the understanding of how to deal with/accept/resolve DIS-harmony and conflict!
There is so much wisdom within the community, so much creativity, so much love, so much longing for compassion and kindness, such a great desire to belong to this newly emerging society. I am writing this article as a contribution to this big rising energy which I sense is waiting to come forward within everyone, still kind of underneath, a bit blocked, not knowing quite how to express itself, though it is getting stronger by the minute.
Indeed I am sure that by the time this article is getting shared, things will have evolved for the better, as it is wonderfully inevitable that situations improve when we bring our attention to these deep places in us all! Emotions need a particular kind of attention, and when we give them the right kind of holding and listening, they change miraculously, and love emerges from the depths within us. Where there’s a will to love, there’s a way to love!
When things get psychologically complex and complicated, it is often difficult to unravel the issues, as although everyone has a total right to their feelings, Chinese Whispers on the high street and in pubs and cafes in this/or any small town end up grossly distorting the truth, so that in the end the real facts of situations become very blurred. Eventually the original events withdraw into the mists of time, and instead we are all dealing with strange fabrications that bear no relation to the original feelings and truth. Sometimes even the originators of problems have changed their own stories over time and come to believe in a grossly distorted version of the actual facts.
Priest/esses are extremely sensitive people who care deeply about being honoured and believed to be good and true vessels of Goddess, so any kind of undermining for any reason is a truly poisoned arrow that can penetrate deep into the heart and will remain there until properly removed and the poison taken out. This can only happen when people sit together and really listen to and witness each other in detail as to what actually happened so that understanding can be reached on all sides. It takes patience and time (the lack of which is often the reason given for not showing up), and also the wisdom and skill to truly listen to each other without interrupting or reacting. And all of this takes practice, we have to actually do it!
Fire Release Ceremonies are not always the entire solution to emotional healing. Sometimes it is really necessary to process emotional pain and confusion by talking it through privately with a counselor or a wise being we trust in our life. It is always a good idea to take our distress ‘aside’ and not ‘run’ it on one another in the course of our day.
It is probably one of the most important building blocks in the creation of ‘emotional safety’ within our community that we all try very hard to become emotionally responsible and ‘hygienic’ in every possible way. This means catching those little habits of saying things about each other that aren’t really true, and that are in fact feelings we have within ourselves that we are ‘displacing’ onto others. And also, it means being brave and asking to meet with any person or persons we have difficult feelings about or with as soon as possible, if necessary together with someone experienced in holding a safe space in case emotions need to be expressed strongly. Feelings are there for a reason and we can all learn from each other if we are brave enough and humble enough to really care and listen to each other’s feelings.
Once these new habits are adopted, less people will get hurt, more trust can be developed, less time will be wasted sorting out endless misunderstandings in order to establish the truth. And most importantly, we can get on with the exciting business of building a new world on the solid foundations we know are truly there, because we made it so, and we are committed to keeping it so.
After all, there are now a growing number of us world-wide co-creating a new inter-connected Goddess-loving Mother-World, and here in Avalon we have the most wonderful opportunity to create a long-lasting community, as the foundations have been being laid here for the last 25 years. We just need to strengthen and practice these new ways of working together and add to them from our combined wisdom and experience together.
It is also important to mention that there are many priest/esses doing amazing healing work here in Glastonbury and elsewhere. I am definitely not suggesting that She-Ear Fire Ceremonies are the only way, but that they are an important offering into the mix, a wild few hours to bring you back into connection with yourself and the deep feelings within you.
There are many other important offerings brought to you by priest/esses here in Glastonbury ; personal counseling; seeking the counsel of the Goddess Oracle; deep soul healing; sexual healing for both individuals and couples; emotional healing release ceremonies (weekend courses enabling you to explore deeply all aspects of your wounding in a safe and held group space); dark moon ceremonies where you can be held in your emotional process; equine assisted soul therapy; therapies such as reflexology, Indian head massage, deep tissue massage, acupuncture, yoga; deep womb healing ceremonies; healing through gnostic mysticism; crystal healing, toning, and releasing through sound; and this is to name but a few, as there are many Goddess-aligned therapists working in Glastonbury town and in the Goddess House and Temple every day doing one-on-one and group sessions, as well as weekly healing by donation.
May the Healing Fire Goddess bless us all with her Transformative powers!
With Love and Blessings
Sally Pullinger, Trance Medium of Chung Fu, Priestess of Avalon, Priestess of Isis/Isa Isa.
SHE-EAR Priestess group, Glastonbury Goddess Temple
11 minute read
