The earliest memories I have uncovered so far take me back to 27,000 years ago where, as a man, I was living at the edge of a glacier where I eventually lost my life to a bear who didn’t like sharing her cave with me.

In this life, I am an Irish woman, although my DNA suggests other, older roots: Celtic, Viking, even a bit of Asian and 1% Native American peoples. How that got there, I don’t know. But, I feel Irish. My name is Ann Murphy and although I was born in Sydney, Australia, I grew up in the town of Graiguenemanagh by the river Barrow, surrounded by trees, history and ghosts.

As a child, I lived in the past, exploring the ruins of the Cistercian monastery which my town had grown up around. My relatives, the O’Learys, were antiquarians and rebuilt the church, carving the stonework so well archaeologists thought they were original carvings.

The other side of my family owned many businesses in Graig which made life tricky, being a daughter of one of the wealthy families in an otherwise poor town. Although I had our ‘gang’ of friends, I never really knew where I belonged and my friend’s lives seemed more desirable than my own. We did ‘kid’ things, ran about in the woods; made tea over a fire in our woodland den, swam in the river during the summer. My great-grandfather grew the trees in the woods we played in, mainly beech, on a slope running down to the river Barrow. In May, bluebells carpeted the ground beneath them, the season being a little later than the southern England Spring.

There were parts of that wood that felt more energetic to me than other parts. There is a rock formation called the Devil’s Eyebrow, made of granite, that juts out over the grassy river’s edge and when I stood on this exposed rock, my skin tingled. I didn’t take much notice of this as a child, thinking it was natural, but when I returned to the woods twenty years ago and stood on the granite, I remembered – and understood. I had been picking up the energies of the igneous, quartz-filled rock. Something I still do. It is my favourite earth energy and always gives me tingles.

That was also where I used to communicate with the elementals, something I had been doing naturally but had not been aware of the significance. During that same trip back, they appeared again and reminded me of the times we had communicated together which was a lovely surprise.

I lived in a world of imagination, with the long-dead monks who had built the monastery, the wonderful energies of trees; the river Barrow; the old stories we grew up hearing, and believing – until in my tenth year, my reality changed completely. We moved to Dublin, my parents separated within a year and life was never the same again.

My life’s trajectory changed and I experienced the tougher aspects of life and the darker side of people. But although these times were hard, they were also formative, in a different way. To grow and understand issues for my future work, I needed to see both sides of life, the light and the dark and to know that there is a light – somewhere. My later journey was to heal that darkness, a journey that continues…

Part of the darkness was to experience abuse, on many levels, and to feel what separation from Mother felt like. Then, when I was sixteen, my younger sister died. Looking back on that period, I understand that her death put me on a path that led eventually to the development of the Gaia Method Earthways. Her death caused me to question where she had gone and that question led, years later, to finding out. But it took another fifteen years, after becoming a single parent, living with a violent man and eventually leaving him, and Ireland, to come to safety in England, before that phase of my life began.

My family had moved to Winchester in 1982, but I stayed in Ireland, not feeling like I was wanted. I arrived in Winchester ten years later in 1991. My sister Nympha, and I, took a tarot course with Rosemary Prince, which then became a mediumistic development circle. Three years later, I had my first Reiki attunement from a friend who did the most beautiful attunement I have ever experienced.

That attunement made a huge difference and changed the course of my life once more. As a result of that attunement, I was aware of a river of energetic support underpinning everything. I no longer felt like flotsam and jetsam floating around the universe, with no anchor or help. Where before my life seemed out of my control, now it had a purpose.

My sister and I enrolled in a counselling course, which took a year to complete, and I went further with it, getting a qualification in Pyschodynamic counselling. I worked as a Victim Support volunteer for a couple of years; as a Relate counselling admin, and then in a Rape Crisis centre offering support and counselling to victims to rape and abuse. I did seven years of this, working with clients, and training in different areas of counselling practice, until one day, while doing the washing up, my guides told me to stop counselling; that I needed to undergo a different training now. I had learned to read the patterns of energy, to be sensitive to undercurrents of emotion and importantly, to create new patterns for my own life.

However, it took me a year to accept this new path, which turned out to be seven years of archaeological training. I didn’t realize it then, but this training taught me to recognise and read the landscape, to recognise the signs of ancient sacred sites and habitations, and to pick up the energies of the past.

Seven years later, my direction changed again.

In the meantime, during all this training, I also studied everything about Initiation, ascension and channelling. I did Rebirthing, and received so many attunements into energy systems, I can barely remember them all. I trained in a group, with a fabulous healer, who was trained in the work of Alice Bailey and he introduced me to the Arcane School. I learned Esoteric Healing which introduced me to healing with energy Triangles; I studied and worked with the Seth Material, for years, and also did Magnified healing. I meditated every day for most of that period and healed as much as I could.

Learning to be a counsellor, while working with energy, reincarnation and the psychic world was a challenge, but I developed trust in my knowledge and I learned to discern spiritual reality from fantasy. In 2000, I did an ascension workshop in Egypt – Pleiadian Lightwork – which completely blew me away. It was an intense week of meditations and initiations and by the end of the week, I felt so connected to my Soul that I felt completely myself – my Higher Self, that is. That slowly diminished however as I integrated the energies, and my old, personality fears returned.

Back in the UK, I came crashing down to earth. Everything I had previously believed came up for review and I found myself empty and rudderless. Again.

But there was a good reason for that. I was shifting my energy focus from up, to in.

Around that time, I began to have Between Lives regression sessions with Andy Tomlinson. I wanted to know who I was, and what my purpose was. That was another expansion into the reason why I had incarnated and it forever changed my life. Having connected to my Soul, or my entity, in such a direct way, my life took on a different focus. I learned, that as Souls, we choose our future lives on earth. We choose our parents, we choose the circumstances of our lives and we choose the challenges. There are certain things we want to learn, or that we wish to grow out of, to overcome. Qualities we want to grow, or habits we wish to outgrow. We choose who we will have relationships with, and why. All is planned ahead. All we have to do, once we are incarnated, is to remember the plan.

We don’t always achieve that.

Having connected to my Soul’s reality, I now found myself making choices on earth as if I was my Soul, which, of course, I am. But those choices seemed crazy to other people, who wondered why I was putting myself in such difficult situations. I put myself in them to heal what they reflect, like a holographic image of something not yet healed. While I was rewriting this page and thinking about how I could explain this aspect, I received a newsletter from another healer called Rose Guayaba who put it beautifully: “When you’re committed to co-creating your life with your intuitive guidance, sometimes it lovingly delivers uncomfortable assignments in the name of growth”. Although, in my experience, ‘uncomfortable’ is an understatement.

It was after a seventh-level initiation in Pleiadian Lightwork, that I found I could no longer go ‘up’. My energy focus had shifted to ‘earth’ and I learned how to work with the earth’s energy field and the collective unconscious. During this time, I began to receive the Gaia Method Earthways symbols, mainly through connection with Tree-Dryads, the world of elementals and ancestral beings. They still teach me. It has taken thirty years to reach this stage in my earth healing, and personal healing, and I have been passing attunements for nearly thirty years. Every attunement is an adventure into consciousness and teaches me something new. The learning never ends.

My sincere wish now, after all the learning, is that you find your journey through Gaia just as much of an adventure as I do.

If you are interested in learning more about how the Gaia Method Earthways came about click here.

 

The High Crosses of Duiske Abbey

Giza image by Marcelo Castro.