There are some elements to this work which can feel physically strange, such as energy-tubes emerging from the lower Tan Tien, the centre behind your navel, and moving into vortices or rivers. To my mind’s eye, the tube looks like a fireman’s hose and its purpose is to either fill up the energy centre with fluid energy, so you can bring it someplace else. It’s a way of moving water-energy about, connecting rivers and lakes to each other.

When this happens, it will create a pulling sensation in the belly, and you will either see, or feel, an umbilical hose emerge fromt hat point and move into the water. It then sucks in water, like an elephant’s trunk, until that centre is full. The energy is then carried in the belly until it is ready to be deposited someplace else. It can often feel quite bloating, as you carry this energy in your body.

This umbilical hose has a consciousness all of its own and can activate at any time. Even while in a car, train or plane. As you pass a body of water, the fire-hose umbilical cord will emerge and move quickly into the water while you are passing. More often than not, if it happens while you are a passenger in a car, you might find yourself stuck in a traffic jam, and the hose will emerge, take up water while you sit waiting, and then be finished by the time the jam clears. I sometimes think obstacles were created just for that purpose! You never know with this work…

During the times this has happened with me, when I am full of water, I have no clue for where it is destined – until I get there. I just have to trust it. Sometimes, along with the water, small diamond energies also flow into my centre via the tube, which also stay in my centre until they are required elsewhere. And that ‘anywhere’ could literally be anywhere.

On one occassion, way back before I lived in Luxor, I had to deposit the water energy of the River Itchen, in Hampshire, into a place in Luxor. The river itchen is a river a few of us have been activating and bringing back to its energetic fertility for years. I had taken up this water and then had promptly forgotten about it. I had also done the same in Ireland, pulling in water, and in parts of the UK.

Chris and I were staying for three weeks in a flat but the swimming pool had not yet been built. Instead what was destined to be the pool, was a vegetable garden, becasue no peace of valuable land would go unworked and there was always time to grow onions, tomatoes, and rocket, etc. Our flat was on the third floor so we could see the Nile from there, and look down over this walled garden. This is my journal entry for that time:

“I was sitting on the balcony, having our usual million cups of tea, when I stood up and looked over the rail. I felt the familiar pulling sensation of my stomach wanting to connect to the ground. This had happened the first day we arrived here too. The swimming pool has still not been built and Jamal is growing vegetables in the space. I felt the pulling sensation in my navel and my umbilical unwound like a hose and moved down to connect with the ground. Then all the water I had accumulated from the rivers and wells in Ireland and England flowed through it and filled the space with a pool of water. Then it wound itself back up into my navel. Process complete. I wondered what was going to happen with all that water I had absorbed!”

As it turned out that was the exact spot where they eventually built the pool but we never got to enjoy it. But, because of that time in the flat, I met someone else I would work with in Luxor, which gave me the opportunity to heal many deep-seated traumas and do some amazing energy work there. I was transferring energy from the west to the east, a process which I, and others, are still doing.

On a later occasion, I was with my friend Eartha, another Gaia Method healer who I have done a lot of work with. She lives in Dorset, around Corfe Castle, one of my most favourite places in England. Dorset and its sacred places come under her guardianship. On that occassion, we were spending the weekend in her teepee and she took me to a place which she does energywork regularly: a beautiful ancient trackway beneath Nine Barrows Down. This is the journal entry for that time:

“…we wandered back but we continued down Eartha’s priestess path until we came to a sand pit. I was explaining to Eartha how we can access ancient energy here because the time layers are exposed, and we went to stand by the sandbank. While I was talking I felt the odd sensation of my umbilical cord moving out like a hose and moving deep into the earth to some ancient water source. My umbilical hose is now about 6 inches in diameter and is golden. It pulled up lots of liquid from deep in the earth and I had to stand there until it was complete. This entire area is ‘priestessy’ for Eartha, and it feels very ancient, more Atlantean really! She was having to pull energy into her field which looked like green and then gold like wings. When we were finished the gold hose came up and at the opening of it there was now a facetted ruby egg. When my umbilical coiled itself back the ruby stayed at the end and inserted itself into my centre. It feels like it needs to go somewhere else, to be planted like I planted the water in the Flat. “

(When I speak of Atlantis I am speaking of the time when the continents were joined in one larger landmass, millions of years ago. I am not speaking of the Atlantis of Plato.)

This umbilical cord also connects to other people when they need healing or replenishment and seems to activate from that other part of us that knows what it is doing. Often I feel like a witness to what happens, when I do energywork, but it is the accumulation of all of my soul training which is being used and me, as Ann, doesn’t often understand what the energy part of me is doing until much later; I just have to trust it. Other energy-work healers say the same thing!

On a visit to Cornwall with Chris in 2006, we found that many ancient settlement sites were also set up to fulfil the same function:

“Our next visit was Carn Euny, an Iron Age settlement site. It was a terrific place and the fougou was amazing. My first impression, before entering, was a layer of fear which had been added later. It might have been to keep people out, a little like a powerful magus using it for his own purpose rather than as its original intention. As I walked into the fougou itself I instantly saw a group of council elders/druids and it felt like a kiva. A place of power originally intended as a place of law and ritual, the hub or centre of the community.

Originally there was nothing ‘precious’ about the fougou, it was just seen for what is was, the navel of the community, and given its due respect. It was an accepted part of the community. People lived around it, got on with their lives around it. It was part of their everyday lives. The fougou entrance symbolised the umbilical cord, the source of nourishment for the community. They were well-fed and taken care of and had a good community spirit, like the Hopi Indians. From this place you can see the sea and it feels like a beautiful place, a perfect place to live.

I sat on stone slab and closed my eyes. An Arabic woman dressed in black appeared and in her arms she held a naked boy-child, sickly and thin. She placed the boy on the ground in front of me and stood back, silently asking me to heal her sick child. Initially I wasn’t sure what to do and then I saw my umbilical cord move down into the earth beneath me, feeding the settlement with the energy I’ve been carrying from Men an Tol since yesterday! I didn’t even know I’d been carrying it but they had said something about a download but I didn’t realise what they meant, until now! No wonder I felt so bloated.

Anyway, when this process of ‘feeding’ had finished my cord was retracted and I saw the energy of a tribal runner sending communication to other settlements, letting them know that the Mother’s energy has returned at last, the lines are flowing once again. There was great excitement and it felt really good.”

As it turned out, this was about my work in Egypt, which at that time, I did not know I would be doing. But all my work there was to open the lines of the Mother’s energy. But it was also an anchoring of the energy in carn Euny, which mirrored what I would do in Egypt.

Working with the ‘umbilical’ cord seems to be a natural part of Planetary Healing. Once, while at a workshop in Wales with Jhadten Jewell I was speaking to another healer and I was trying to explain to her what happens with the umbilical energies. She said that that was part of Vortex Healing. I had never heard of Vortex healing, but it would be interesting to see if it is the same thing.

Another way the umbilical cord can be experienced is while working with trees. You may find yourself suddenly feeling an emotional connection with a tree but this time, instead of you extending the umbilical cord, the tree will feed you through an umbilical cord. It feeds you with its sap or with the water that runs up through the trunk to the upper branches. The upper branches are where the consciousness of the tree resides and once you have been fed by a tree in this way, as though you have been given a tree infusion, you begin to identify other tree beings and start to process events and life as if you yourself were a tree. You start to recognise other sentient trees. The tree is like a mother-tree, feeding you as she feeds the young trees in her care.

Just as a baby in the womb is fed fluids through the umbilical cord from the mother’s blood, blood which nouishes the baby and helps it to grow, so too does the enrgetic umbilical cord pass energetically nourishing fluids through it. In this way, you become both the feeder and the fed.