There’s an old saying about witches and their cats: “Every witch needs a familiar”. It’s believed the cat (familiar) and the witch are drawn to each other intuitively and form a lifelong connection.
As a former cat owner, I’ve jokingly refer to myself as a witch who needs a ‘familiar’ and these comments have sometimes caused an expression of disquiet to pass over the faces of people around me.
“But you’re not really a witch, are you?” they’ve asked. You can tell just the word, witch, conjures up unsettling images of supernatural spells, dark places, steaming cauldrons and women with nefarious intentions and wart-topped noses perched on broomsticks. She might even have green skin (if you watched The Wizard of Oz as a child).
At this point, I usually make a joke and lightly move the conversation on to other subjects because I know they feel confronted and perhaps a little afraid of what I’m saying.
I don’t usually refer to myself as a witch because it’s not a term I’ve felt overly drawn to. But I know that in centuries past, someone with my psychic skillset would have been called a witch. In those times I might have been sought out as a healer, a soothsayer, a maker of potions and so on. I may have been feared, ostracised or burned at the stake for my naturally-occurring gifts, even if I used them to help others.
In those times it was wise to keep a low profile.
If you fast forward to the 1960s and 70s, women with metaphysical gifts were depicted in television shows like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. Samantha and Jeannie (the respective main characters) were bright, creative and energetic women who were forced to hide who they truly were because their husbands could never feel comfortable with their special gifts and worrying about what the neighbours might think was a big concern.
Shows like these gave my mother’s generation very clear messages about conformity and that openly claiming your metaphysical gifts could not occur in mainstream society. The underlying themes of masculinity being unable to hold space for gifted women was also very revealing (but that is a subject better dealt with in another post).
Fast forward to Halloween 2018 and many little girls across the world donned black hats, wigs and false noses (with the obligatory wart) and (cackling witchily) they moved from house to house asking, “Trick or treat?”
Clearly, the somewhat negative perceptions of witches persist today.
The women I know with metaphysical gifts (and I know quite a lot of them) do not look different from any other person you might meet on the street. They do not have green skin or nefarious intentions for the world around them. They are flawed humans who have special gifts they use to help others and make a difference to the planet in whatever way feels right for them.
They may call themselves witches or herbalists, clairvoyants, psychics, channels, healers, shamans, lightworkers, empaths or any other name that feels right to them.
Their gifts in another time and place would most certainly have defined them as witches.
It’s part of my mission to draw the veil back from the mystery of metaphysics and help others understand that psychic and energetic skills should not be feared, but should be embraced and owned. As I sit here in my make-up and stilettos, writing this post, I also want people to know we are often living in our suburban homes or apartment buildings and participating in mainstream life, just like you.
We’re not weird and we don’t usually have warts on our noses. Some own cauldrons (shout out to my close friend S, you know who you are) but a lot of us don’t. Others work with crystals while some have never used a metaphysical tool in their life. We are all as diverse and unique as the rest of the human race.
And fortunately, in most places in the world, we can no longer be burned at the stake.
Lucretia is an author, psychic channel and transformational teacher who helps women harness their intuition so they can live their Soul’s Mission. You can find more of her work onFacebookandInstagram.
There were people stealthily dragging bodies around in the roof cavity of my house last week. The noises started late one night, not long after I’d turned out the light.
I lay frozen for a moment in the dark before mustering my courage to turn on my bedside lamp and determinedly got out bed to investigate. No bumps in the night were going to keep me cowering under the covers.
I stood in the hallway and briefly wondered if the source was physical or metaphysical. As a psychic channel, I sometimes host unusual visitors at my place and they’re not always in a physical form. I’ve had the spirit guide of a boyfriend drop by (while we stood in my kitchen talking one afternoon), an auntie who had passed over drop in during a reading for her niece, and a spirit who smelled like roses who turned up unannounced a few years back. I even had the spirit of a young man in his late teens who insisted on jamming my front door shut for days until I finally made the time to connect with him.
But, on this occasion, I knew the noise in my roof was physical. And then came that dragging sound again. Yikes!!
I stood listening for a while longer and eventually the noises stopped. Had they escaped through an unseen roof exit? Or could they somehow sense me there, underneath, waiting, wondering what the heck to do?
I went back to bed and the next day, I turned to Google for answers. The noises weren’t the product of lifeless bodies after all. It was rats. Rats in my roof, enjoying themselves by dragging my electricity cords here, there and anywhere else they found amusing. Rats.
I bought some Ratsak but couldn’t bring myself to throw it up through the manhole. It seemed mean somehow. Then my Dad suggested camphor. He’d used it to get rid of the ship rats that had taken up residence at my parents’ house. “They hate it!” he said. Camphor.
I could remember the overpowering smell of camphor throughout my parents’ house around that time. Was it the answer? Did I (and my home) need to smell like an elderly person who was fearful of a moth invasion?
But I needed to consider the wiring. It would be expensive to replace it. So I put aside my concerns and threw a few camphor balls up there and guess what? For the next few nights, there were no more noises, no more unsettling dragging sounds. Could it really be that quick and easy, I wondered.
Unfortunately, they came back last night and fearlessly had a roof party in my house around 10pm. I was the only resident not invited. Today I’ve been more heavy-handed with the camphor. Hopefully that will help my unwelcome rat visitors to cut their visit a little shorter than they had planned.
I’m also pleased to report that I can’t smell any camphor in my house. But I do have some niggling concerns that perhaps I’ve just become immune to the smell and it actually reeks.
If you drop by for a visit, you might want to bring a peg for your nose, just in case.
Lucretia is an author, psychic channel and transformational teacher who helps women harness their intuition so they can live their Soul’s Mission. You can find more of her work onFacebook and Instagram. #psychic #metaphysical #spirits #intuitive #spiritguides
Many years ago my Dad suffered a minor heart attack and, as we sat in a curtained cubicle in the Emergency Department, the doctor came by to chat to us about what was next. During that conversation he talked about the causes of heart attacks. He even spoke about how some people literally have their heart broken by grief or loss and experience heart problems as a result.
I found it fascinating that a medical professional would openly acknowledge that our emotions can create such a strong physical response in our bodies.
I can totally relate to what the doctor was saying to me, and I’m not alone. Practitioners such as Louise Hay (You Can Heal Your Life) have written extensively about how our physical ailments are often a manifestation of our emotional states and the way we view our world (and ourselves).
Often the emotions we carry forward with us from the past into our present are “negative” such as grief, loss, sadness, rage, disappointment and anger. I’ve placed “negative” in inverted commas because although these are normal and very human emotions, we are often conditioned to see them as being negative and discouraged from owning or openly expressing them. This is particularly true for many women who are brought up to be ‘nice girls’ and therefore taught to push down and repress these emotions instead of owning and expressing them in healthy ways. It certainly doesn’t encourage women to process their emotions and associated challenges in ways that empower them to move forward and, in essence.
It is only by truly owning and acknowledging all the parts of ourselves (including the more “negative” parts) that we can truly claim our power and step into the expansiveness that is possible for us to experience. Unexpressed emotions lead to constriction and yes, sometimes resulting physical and mental ailments that restrict us further.
For those of us who highly empathic and consequently feeling lots of emotions a lot of the time (often from other people), suppressing what we truly feel is not a recipe for success.
It’s important to find safe ways to release the emotions from past experiences from our bodies in order to be healthy. Clearing out our emotional junk may take time but it is definitely a worthwhile exercise.
I’ve found letter writing to be a successful and cost-free way to release my emotions from the past. It’s as easy as picking up a pen and some paper, finding a quiet spot where you won’t be disturbed, then writing Dear [name of the person who has made you feel angry, sad, etc.] and writing whatever comes to mind without editing your words, judging yourself or even thinking about it too much. During the writing process I encourage you to be ruthlessly honest with the person about how you feel. DO NOT HOLD BACK!!! Remember, this is your time to own and fully express how you feel.
When you’ve finished writing, don’t read the letter (because the whole idea is to purge the emotions out of you rather than suck them back in). Simply dispose of it in a way that feels right to you. For example, you might shred it into little pieces, burn it or bury it in the garden. And while you do this, I invite you say “I release you, I release you, I release you” so the Universe knows that it is time to take all those emotions and energy from you.
Of course, I know that many of you might feel tempted to send the letter to the person has upset you. After all, you want them to know what they’ve done and how they’ve made you feel…right?
Actually, if you do that you are completely giving your power away (and that defeats the purpose of this exercise). The whole point of writing this letter, just for you and owning your emotions then releasing them, is to help you reclaim your power and equilibrium so you can move forward freely. The minute you give that letter to the other person, you make the process about them, not you. So don’t give it to them. Instead, claim this as your moment to acknowledge and release emotions that are keeping you stuck so you can move forward feeling lighter and more free than before.
Lucretia Ackfield is a psychic channel and author who helps women reconnect to intuitive power and manage their psychic gifts so they can fully live their Purpose, create Positive Change on the Planet and Serve Humanity.
Picture this. One Sunday, you sit down in your kitchen with a friend who, like you, is a psychic channel. Shortly afterwards, over a cup of tea, you agree that you’d both like to do some trance channeling of your spirit guides.
It’s something you’ve both done before but it’s been a while, at least a year or two. Longer for your friend. However, it seems like an opportune moment.
Then you hit the record button on your phone, take a final sip of water, shut your eyes and tune in. For a few moments your mind says things like, “Maybe I can’t do this anymore. Do I need to get my channeling crystal from the office to help me do this? Perhaps I’ve forgotten this stuff. Who am I kidding? Could I ever really do this?”
Then, from somewhere else comes a quiet voice that simply says, “You can do this. Just breathe and allow it to happen. There’s no rush. Just be here and allow it to be.”
So you breathe and relax further. You trust that you still know the way to connect. Then you feel the familiar, telltale constriction in your throat, like there is a huge lump that won’t go away. You remember this feeling because it has happened every time you have trance channeled your guides. When you first began doing it, your body was so resistant that you would gag and the partner you were working with (because you always do this with a partner) would often lean back in alarm as they expected to be vomited over imminently.
You know it is happening.
You can sense your Gatekeeper Guide organising the others off to your left. He is doing crowd control as they all jostle to be the first to come through. He’s good like that; he keeps them in line, most of the time.
You feel the energies of a few of them pass through you. Which one will be first? And then you know. It is the one who wears the pretty dresses and dances barefooted through the streams and grassy hillsides. What will she say?
She begins to speak through you. She has guidance for you and your friend. Your friend asks questions and recognises your guide from the other times when you’ve channeled together. This is because your voice changes when you channel your guides as they each have their own, very unique personality. Many who have watched you channel before also talk of your face changing as you do so. It changes to reflect the guide you are channeling.
You hear what your guide is saying but it’s as if you are off to the side, observing it happen. You are still present, still in the room, but you have stepped aside for a while to allow your guide to bring through the information you seek. It is such a curious process.
Some people might ask, “Is it like an out-of-body experience?” Your answer would be, “No, not quite.”
But it is strange and to someone who is unused to it, you’re sure it would seem rather freaky indeed. But it is real. It is not imagined. And you are not crazy. Remember, if something happens repeatedly, it really is happening.
Another two guides come through in quick succession, each with their own unique style of delivery and focus. Then it is done and you find yourself re-emerging consciously into the present and you open eyes.
You make eye contact with your friend and suddenly you are both laughing. Your guides have such big personalities and they certainly made their presence felt. You both marvel at this skill you have to connect to energetic beings in this way.
Then you eat some food, drink some water and go for a wander around the house to ground yourself back onto the earthly plane before your friend takes her turn at connecting into the energetic realm.
Some people may read this anecdote and dismiss it as the fanciful ramblings of a deluded woman. Others may feel fear because it is a world they know little about. Meanwhile, there will be readers who feel their curiosity aroused and they will feel drawn to know more.
All of these responses are valid and I respect them all because they arise from the experiences of the individual, the cultural and faith-based contexts they’ve been raised within, the perspectives they’ve developed over time and the teachings they have absorbed from others. We are a product of our experiences and our exposures to the world around us.
My purpose in sharing my experience – because this anecdote is from my reality – is to share information about what it’s like to be psychic from my perspective. There are so many of us out there who reside at various points along the intuitive spectrum and I think it is time to shed light on these gifts so we can build understanding and acceptance within ourselves and, in turn, with others.
Above all, my goal is show that you can be a psychic channel, intuitive, work with energy to heal others, see auras or even be an empath. You can be any or all of these things, or have other energetic gifts I haven’t even touched on here. But having these gifts doesn’t mean you are some weird hippie chick. You can be psychic and live in the mainstream world. After all, I do it every day and I invite you to join me.
Lucretia Ackfield is an author, blogger and psychic channel who helps women understand and manage their psychic gifts so they can live their purpose and create positive change. Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
People often ask me, “Why Italy?” They wonder why I return to a place where I have no relatives or ancestral connection and where I barely speak the language. I understand their perplexity. This is my sixth visit to Bella Italia and I am still unsure why I am called back.
I know, of course, that I have spent past lives in this country. My feelings of comfort here cannot be denied. My psychic sensibilities also seem heightened as I feel a knowing about places I have never visited before. Last year, an old castle on the beautiful island of Ischia draped its tentacles around me and left me with a sense of unease as I climbed an ancient path to its peak. In centuries past it housed a religious order where nuns, once dead, were left to rot in the chairs where they sat as a constant reminder to others of mortality. I felt as if I had been there before and, with such a horrible history, is it any wonder that my soul did not wish to be there again?
While that experience left me discomfited, I’ve had far more visceral and emotional reactions to this place. Many years ago, while watching a movie filmed in Genoa, I burst into uncontrollable sobbing as the main character began driving through the city streets. It made little sense as I’ve never visited the city nor have I been drawn to go. However, a wise friend described my reaction as pure longing for somewhere I once knew and I confess a deeper knowledge that I know she was right.
That same uncontrolled reaction made a second appearance earlier this year as I drove to the train station. It was like any other morning and I was on my way to an intense but rewarding job in my hometown of Brisbane. As I drove down a simple street the words, “I just want to go home” sprang unbidden from my mouth and short bout of sobbing ensued.
Although I was technically in my home – Brisbane is where I have been raised and lived most of my life – the longing I felt was for Italy. My knowing of this fact was unavoidable and incontrovertible. My soul was calling for its home on the other side of the planet.
My psychic friends point out that with a name like Lucretia (a moniker that is very Italian in its origins), my connection to this land is unsurprising.
When I ‘jokingly’ provide the ‘past lives’ reason for my repeated return, some people look at me oddly and laugh a little nervously. They think (or hope) that I’m joking. If you have not experienced past life connections or have no understanding of the concept, I no doubt seem a little crazy.
Past life connections in this life are often typified by a strong compulsion to be around particular people, places or things. They can also be marked by a strong revulsion or desire to avoid them. Other times we may feel that we already know them.
It can all be a little disconcerting and, at its most uncomfortable, can lead you to play out past life patterns that are certainly not in your best interests in this lifetime (but that is a story for another day).
For me, my greatest longing is for a place and that place is Italy. It has been this country for most of my adult life and ultimately I wish to split my time between here and my birth country of Australia. Both are my home (for different reasons).
Certainly my calling back this year has been compelling and caused me a significant amount of anxiety and stress as, repeatedly, my departure date was deferred due to finances, commitments and other circumstances. I willfully dismissed a vision I had earlier this year of a ticket marked with the date 30 September because it did not align with my desire to visit Italy during the mid-semester break. Yet strangely, the flight was ultimately 30 September (much to my annoyance and chagrin). This also aligned with advice from my Spirit Guides who said I may not get ‘there’ until September. Needless to say, I was supremely unhappy with their suggestion and fought that outcome every step of the way.
But the Universe has her own plan and it can be resisted but rarely thwarted.
As I write this post, I am perched on a brick wall outside my apartment in Assisi. I’ll be here three nights before heading to a destination as yet unknown. Intuitively I have been guided to spend two nights in Rome and three here. My channel is wide open to guidance regarding my next stop but the information hasn’t dropped in. So my next move is a ‘wait and see’.
This is not my first visit to this small hill town and it won’t be my last. I don’t feel a past life connection here; it’s more of a spiritual one. During my first trip around 13 years ago, I cried at least three times within 24 hours. It wasn’t longing back then. Instead it was a feeling of spiritual connection that I couldn’t describe. As someone who had until that point declared herself agnostic and atheist at various times, and with no catholic upbringing, it seemed unusual to have such a strong emotional response to the home of Saint Francis and a place of great pilgrimage. Yet the spirit of the place enveloped me and I experienced a great sense of peace and release.
If you were passing by right now and asked me “Why Italy?’ my answer would be as follows. “It is because I am called to be here. It is because my soul belongs here and right now, it is the place I feel is home. I have lived past lives here and there is part of this life to be lived here too. There are things I must do here; things I must create that are part of my purpose.”
Does this answer satisfy you, dear reader? If not, I apologise for I have no other response to give and certainly no more clarity to offer. Perhaps in coming days there will be answers for this visit. Explanations that make more sense to the reasoning mind. But for now, in its simplest form, the answer is that although my past lives have called me back and my future has called me forward, the destination for both is Italy.
Do you have psychic gifts and do you want to learn how to use them to live your Divine Calling? Or perhaps you want to learn how to tune into your intuition so you can make better decisions and connect to the life you truly desire? My three-month program Rock Your Inner Channel will help you tune into and harness your intuitive gifts. And don’t forget to join my private Facebook group Rock Your Inner Channel for regular insights about all things psychic.
The psychics I visited in my 20s and early 30s were often socially awkward. I would find them tucked away in semi-deserted shopping arcades shuffling their cards in small, darkened rooms with an obligatory candle or two. Sometimes they’d be working from a spare room in their home, anonymously located in a nondescript suburban street. One man did readings under his old timber house. We sat at a 1970’s Laminex table, surrounded by dusty crates, boxes and assorted junk, and an overgrown lawn.
Many of them were undoubtedly talented psychics (the man under the old house was brilliant), but there was always this air of not quite fitting in. So many of them seemed to exist on the fringes of the ‘everyday’ that most of us lived and experienced.
Of course, I didn’t appreciate that I had similar gifts until I reached my late 30s. I’d had inexplicable blips of insight before then. I would know things I couldn’t possibly know about people when they were in another city or country. But I didn’t really understand what was going on.
But in my 39th year, it felt like all my psychic lights suddenly flooded the landscape. It completely freaked me out and one of my biggest concerns was that I would have to become like those socially awkward psychics I’d met previously; the ones people always saw as ‘just a little bit strange’. Would I have to leave the old me behind? Did I have to become some kind of weird hippie chick and never wear my stilettoes again?
It’s funny the things you worry about when the Universe challenges you to think about yourself differently. Of course, as time went by, it began to make a lot more sense. I discovered there were psychics and energetically-sensitive relatives on both sides of my family. And the anxiety and tearfulness I struggled with as a teenager, and then later as an adult, made a lot more sense when you considered my heightened ability to sense the emotions of others. I just hadn’t understood what was happening. Instead I absorbed everyone else’s emotions and thought they were mine (one of the ‘perks’ of having unmanaged empathic gifts).
It’s been a few years now and I’ve learned to manage my gifts. But I won’t lie and tell you it’s been a seamless and effortless process. Unfortunately there were times when I felt like I was swimming blindfolded and might drown in the unknown. There was so much I didn’t know and for a while I didn’t have anyone to give me the guidance I needed – so my gifts frequently managed me, instead of me managing them. It wasn’t always fun.
But although there have been many weird and wacky experiences, I have realised that I don’t need to live on the fringes of society if I’m psychic. These days there are lots of people like me living very ‘normal’ lives working in corporate jobs, teaching in schools, nursing, creating art, and so on. People like me are everywhere and a lot of them aren’t weird hippie chicks (although yes, some of them are).
I’ve also realised that, like most psychics, I have my gifts for particular reasons that align with my skills and strengths. One of those reasons is so I can help young people to understand and manage their gifts so they don’t have to suffer like I did. After all, if I’d met someone when I was a teenager and they’d helped me to understand I was picking up other people’s stuff and there were ways to buffer that, well, that would have made my life a whole lot easier.
Our souls chose to be psychic or energetically sensitive or highly empathic before we were born in this lifetime. We chose to have these gifts so we could create beautiful lives, help others and make a positive impact on the planet.
And we don’t need to live on the fringes of society to do it.
