This is an attunement I received while living in Ireland from my guides which led to many site-activations with swan energy. At the time, I did not realise that it was also to be used for personal transformation, and although I received the energies all at once, as a small gold headband with three swans arranged around it, I only became familiar with each one over time.

In Celtic lore, especially in Ireland, the swan is seen as a messenger between the worlds—a creature that moves between the realms of spirit, water, land and sky. It is often associated with transformation and with purity. In the Otherworld, swans appear in Irish tales as beings who carry divine messages, or guide seekers across magical thresholds. In stories such as the Children of Lir, the swan symbolises endurance and serves as a bridge to deeper spiritual truths.

My favourite childhood story was one told by Hans Christian Anderson called The Wild Swans. It tells the story of a girl who rescues her eleven brothers from a spell cast on them by their new stepmother, who is also a witch. Naturally! Having had a step-mother, I can concur, which is probably why this story resonated so much. (To her credit, my step mother, who was also Danish, did apologise many years later).

The part of the story that felt powerful to me was where the girl had to weave eleven tunics from nettles before a certain time, and place one on each of her brothers. If she did this, they would return to human form. No matter how much the nettles stung her, and they did, she continued her weaving until, when the time was nearly up, she had completed ten and a half tunics. She managed to dress her brothers, but the youngest, with his half-finished tunic, was left with one swan’s wing when time ran out.

As usual, I did not recognise how much this story would become part of my future life. Yet, swans were always present during my childhood, swimming on the River Barrow beside which I grew up – my father took many films of them sitting on the eel weir or swimming gracefully through the arches of the bridge.

Now, in my ‘present’, they have become so much more. For over half my life I have been healing my emotions, my beliefs. I just never understood that on this path of an earth healer who works with serpent energies that that healing was so vital to the task.

Because our thoughts and emotions affect the collective consciousness we need to understand ourselves and how we relate to the world and to other people around us. The changes we make in ourselves, as we continue to heal, affect that field of the collective. The more people who heal themselves, the more others can heal. This is especially important when we are working with the field of the Mother/ Gaia. We work to bring through, and to anchor her thoughtforms. If we cannot tell the difference between what is hers and what is ours then how are we do that?

The swans, as energies, represent both the feminine, and the masculine, plus the deeper healing that comes when both are fully anchored in our being. Positioned on the left side of the crown, the female swan anchors energetically into the base chakra. She swims in the emotional waters there, plucking the nutritious green food that grows on the river bottom. This food represents the nourishment that is available within your emotional body.

This lesson was brought home to me recently when I was having a conversation with someone about not getting stuck in the negative stuff of our past. She said that it was better not to focus too much on the negative but instead to work on the positive. And she was right. But sometimes we need to understand what is fueling the present before we can change it.

I found myself telling her that when we are healing our baggage we often need to talk it out. As we do that the higher part of our consciousness, symbolised by the female swan, listens to what we say and is able to then pick up the patterns in the unconscious that are perpetuating the emotional/mental situation we find ourselves in. She sees it from a higher perspective, and like plucking the river weed from the watery unconscious, she pulls it from the psyche recognising what needs to be changed.

To give a personal example of this process and how the female swan works, I was talking to my friend about an issue I am currently experiencing, an issue I am trying to heal. While I was trying to verbalise what I was experiencing, I saw it from the higher part of myself, and recognised how the flow of the original experience and all its resultant emotions and beliefs, were holding me back. The flows in my unconscious were easy to see, flowing, like river weed, from that old experience into my present. I had created my current reality based on those old experiences.

The female swan is the part that recognises those flows. She is the higher self swimming on the water, not submerged in it. She does not drown in the negativity but can pull the issues up to look at them without being in them. In this process, we are actively working, not drowning in victimhood. This process of healing is important when you understand that we create our own reality. We do not always see that, however. It is difficult to accept that our current challenges are based on past events. But once we do, it changes everything.

Seeing how our current behaviour stems from beliefs we formed in the past, the cob, the male swan energy, makes his appearance. His protective masculine mind (not male, just masculine in energy), sees what needs to change, it sees solutions. If we are behaving in a way that is based on old experiences, and if we want to change our reality so that it is more in line with what we truly want, then we have to change our actions. We have to recognise that we don’t have to stay experiencing the same. We can create new actions that will change how we react.

It takes courage to make these changes. It is not easy to step into new ways of doing things, and often we have to take things step by step. We make small changes, changes we can manage. We do them in a way that protects our newfound understanding. That gives us back our power without disempowering the other person or people but that begins the process of creating our new reality. We don’t make them as a reaction or as an impulse, but in a measured way. We think ahead, we decide what steps we need to take that will allow us to make the changes we need.

All along the way, the female swan of our higher understanding helps us to ‘see’ what is holding us back. And the cob helps us to move forward, protecting the changes we are making but giving us the self-determination to keep going.

The male swan, anchored in the solar plexus, is the protective energy of the psyche up to the astral layer of the energy-field. Have you ever seen a swan busking? He fluffs up his feathers and opens his wings wide to make himself bigger. He charges across the water towards a threat to his mate, and his cygnets, hissing and threatening. He allows no other creatures to harm his babies. In a human sense, these cygnets represent the newly anchored self-beliefs, which may still be fragile. You have done so much work on building yourself up that you also need to protect those creations and beliefs from others who might want you to stay the same as you were. He protects what is important to you.

Energetically, he swims around you in the astral layer of your field to protect you from the projections of others or from their emotional manipulations. He teaches you to recognise when someone is ‘hooking’ into you, energetically. It takes time to learn to work with both energies, but it is a lifelong skill because you will continue to work with them as long as you are alive. They are part of you, and part of your healing journey.

The third swan, which is seen flying straight down into your field, means the psyche is now strong enough to deal with issues you may not been ready to deal with before. These may be traumas from this life, or a previous life, ones you decided before birth that you were finally ready to clear. These are issues that cause dissociation, a panic reaction to strong emotional issues that are too painful to face. The descending swan softens the impact of such issues and allows the energies that you have kept in safer parts of the psyche to enter in such a way that you can deal with them. You are ready for such work now. You have learned the process of working with two previous swan energies and have made space in your psyche for the new material; the male and female swan energies have prepared the way. You understand the process of emotional healing and you have learned to protect your energetic boundaries, and now this swan can guide you into deeper healing.

Once you receive this attunement the swans activate when you need them to. Not when you ‘think’ you need them to, but because they are now part of your energetic matrix they know when you need certain aspects of them to be present. In the meantime, they work in your energy-field, like software running in the background, helping to heal you.

If you are a healer, of any kind, you can also use the symbols to heal others. They are very useful for people at any stage of their healing journey. And as with all healing, receiving healing/therapy is invaluable when you are working at any level of your emotional journey.