The Tuatha De Danaan.

The harp is one of the Gifts of the Sidhe, the guardians of the ancestral mysteries of Ireland.

The harp is a healing instrument – once it has been installed in the energy field, via energy transmission. It has multiple uses: one is for personal healing and the other is environmental. It is one of three musical instruments of the Sidhe. The other two are the Drum and the Pipe.

For years I have known it as an energy line, laid in certain places to act as a resonant healing point, or as an energy which covers large areas, but what I didn’t realise was that it was also used in the body.

After doing some sound healing with one of my daughters, I was sitting at the table listening to my father argue with the BBC 4 newscaster on his phone. My hand went to my throat and it was as if I was plucking a red harp string of an energetic harp in my body. I had been given this harp by my Tuatha De Guide many years ago.

I could see the harp clearly but wondered why I was plucking it.

Ten minutes later, I found out!

My father became a solicitor years ago and is interested in anything of a legal nature, including items on the news. He also has very negative beliefs about women. On this occasion, a news item came up which he immediately commented on, blaming the woman for something abusive that had happened to her. As soon as he said the words, I felt a ripple of energy through me, like someone had thrown a handful of gravel onto the water of a still lake. A minute later I had the strongest emotional eruption I have had in years. I burst into tears and told Dad the effect his words had on me and how difficult I found it when he blamed women for things that happened TO them. His constant verbal battering had taken its toll and I told him of something that had happened to me when I was thirteen but which I had never shared with him before. After expressing these long pent-up feelings and the distress I felt, I was emotional for days but recognised it as a healing opportunity so stayed with it and worked it through.

At the time, I didn’t quite recognise that the twanging harp string had somehow made the emotion activate – until it happened again yesterday!

This time, I had listened to a sound healing meditation by Tom Kenyon, before listening to one by Jhadten Jewell, which was very different. I listen to Jhadten’s meditation as it is connected to a recent workshop I had participated in with him, but my guides suggested I do a Tom Kenyon one first. I chose the Trilliums meditation and then did the Jhadten one.

The following day, back in Dad’s, and once again at the table, my hand went to my throat and again I plucked that red cord. Then I remembered the last time I twanged it. This time, while I was trying to explain something he had asked me about, he shut me up in a passive-aggressive way and I was triggered. No explosion this time because his words had well and truly brought the shutter down with a bang and I was stunned into silence.

The harp-string resonated, or activated through sound, the issue that needed to be brought to my attention. I realised that in plucking that red cord, I had effectively created a healing intention, something that needed to be vibrated out. Needless to say, it was not the conscious ‘me’ that had initiated this, but the Soul part of me that knew what I needed.

When I first came back to the UK, this time three years ago, while out on a walk along a prehistoric track along the South Downs, a large, well-built Celt appeared holding out a large harp to me. He asked me what string I wanted to work with. I chose the red one, or at least the ‘other me’ chose it. At the time, I thought it was for working in the landscape. It never occurred to me that it might be for personal healing.

Before I came to look after my father, and while Chris and I were doing earthwork in Micheldever Woods, the Celt again appeared behind me as I walked through the trees. It felt like he ‘had my back’ and I saw the harp in my arms. I still didn’t twig! I still assumed it was for a job of healing in the landscape, something I needed protection for. A few days ago, before I had twanged the harp string for the second time, I had gone for a walk on an old drove road near Crawley village and I felt ‘someone’ behind me. I mentally asked who it was and heard back, ‘The Guardian of your Soul’. Although grateful he was there, I was also curious, and a little nervous. What was happening that he needed to be around? After the second emotional issue with my father, however, I understood that he was there to support me, for which I am grateful.

Sound is a powerful healer and the harp-energy vibrates old stuck energies out of the body and energy-field. It can be used for personal healing and for healing the landscape. I have left little versions of this harp in sacred sites for other people to access, perhaps people who use sound as a healing modality, or to open up their voices.

The voice also uses sound, and words, to carry the vibration and intent of the speaker. The vibrational cord of the harp activates when it matches the vibration of another sound, triggering an emotional response. But the effect is one of healing rather than harm and so whatever is triggered offers an opportunity to explore the emotion which is still stored inside, allowing us to let it go – finally.

Healing is such an important part of energy-work as you are connected to the earth, and its energy field, and therefore you heal for the whole not just for yourself. The harp helps you move stuck energy out, in a way other things cannot. It is a powerful modality and a wonderful instrument of healing.

Although I cannot honestly say I am looking forward to the next time it is suddenly plucked…

The Tuatha De Danaan are a race of people traditionally known as the faery folk of Ireland. They are said to reside in burial mounds and long barrows, and deep under the earth; places which are both physical and liminal. The stories tell us that they came from islands north of Ireland and that when they came, they brought their skills and arts with them, including a belief in the Great Mother. They also brought a magical tool from each of the four great cities they had left behind and when they arrived on Ireland’s shores, they burned their boats ensuring there was no possibility of return to their own country. (see info below about Dorset Cursus).

When I first began to receive the Gaia Method Earthways system of healing my first elemental contact, after my tree experience, was with elemental Beings who called themselves the Tuatha De Danann. They appeared as very tall, slim beings who were fairylike but also human with pale skin and long hair. I think the best representation of them is in the art of Brian Froud.

At first, they watched me from a distance, staying behind trees and appearing out of the woods only to pop back in again when I tried to communicate with them. It was as if they were trying to determine whether I could be trusted, or not. Soon, however, I was assigned a guide from these beings, another gatekeeper, who gave me access into the world of the Elemental Beings, or Sidhe (pronounced shee).

The more I interacted with these beings, the more I learned. They live in a world of nature and yet our human history tells us that they were once human. My own understanding is that they were a race of beings who came to Ireland with their beliefs in the Great Mother. But with the coming of other races, namely the Celtic peoples from the Steppes, with their horses, iron weapons and warlike ways, the ways and beliefs of the people of the Goddess went ‘underground’, to preserve the knowledge of the earth and its energy grids.

Today we know them as the Sidhe. The old stories of how the Irish ‘fairy folk’ can not abide the dense vibration of Iron attests to this possibility. It is well known among the Irish that iron can kill a fairy being. The Celtic peoples brought iron-working with them, and a vastly different belief system, so for me, this story makes sense. The knowledge of Iron-working did indeed kill the softer beliefs of the Bronze Age inhabitants of Ireland and of the British Isles.

Yet, as collective energies, they still exist on other dimensional levels, at least their collective wisdom still exists. They, as the Sidhe, now choose to assist humanity, training them to use the land and its magic and to expand into other realms. They became the stuff of legend and myth, but their energies remain in the collective unconscious.

Slowly they gave me information about who they had once been.

One early piece of information was whilst working at the Dorset Cursus, an ancient Neolithic route that stretches for miles across the Dorset landscape. At one end of the cursus, there is a mound and when I stood on this mound, it felt like I was standing on an upturned boat. Then I began to receive images of people coming to Britain to escape a flood that had destroyed their homelands, thousands of years ago.

Travelling in boats, these people took their belief in the Great Mother with them, establishing an entire network of Mother-focussed settlements. I hear the ancestors clairaudiently and this is what they said: “We built them to stabilise the imbalance which had resulted from the catastrophe that caused the flooding.” As soon as I got home, I tried to find information about this flooding. It felt like it had happened somewhere in the Mediterranean. Seven thousand years ago, the Mediterranean did indeed flood. Before it was a sea it was a river delta but the melting of the ice, at the end of the ice age, broke through the land barrier between Spain and Africa creating the sea.

It had taken them time to come to England’s shores. It too was recovering after the retreating of the ice, and only hunter-gatherers, Mesolithic people, lived here, close to the sea’s edge. But these newcomers established their colonies, and their beliefs, using their knowledge to re-establish planetary balance. It took many years for the land to become workable and, thanks to their energetic assistance, England became fertile enough for the farmers to grow crops and keep animals, rather than existing off the produce of the sea, as the Mesolithic people had done.

They built Megalithic structures, just as they had around the Mediterranean; energetic complexes like giant Motherboards created on and in the landscape; a Motherboard that still exists and which we are now rediscovering.

When I was researching this event and the megalithic culture, I discovered that the people who built these structures carried the I2 haplogroup in their DNA and that they had displaced the earlier inhabitants who had a different genetic inheritance. This came as a surprise to me because the I2 haplogroup is also mine. But then I thought, perhaps that is why I can tap into this knowledge. Because they really are my ancestors. They could also be yours.

Bronze Age Round Barrow, Micheldever Woods, Winchester.

Later, that I2 haplogroup was displaced by another people of a different haplogroup: the Beaker People. Although genetic history has come to the conclusion that the beaker people ousted the megalithic builders, in my experience they also worked with the energetic network in the landscape, albeit in a slightly different way. Their beliefs were still Mother-focussed. For instance, they built burial mounds in many shapes and sizes; the person buried there becoming the guardian of that energy point. In Ireland, these places are still thought of today as places of the Sidhe (Shee). The portals, however, are in the older megalithic structures like Newgrange, Knowth and Stonehenge and the many henges around the British Isles. These remain portals into the Mother’s world, places where the forces of solar fertility meet the seed of the Mother’s creations.

In every culture, there are the Ancient Ones, the memories and knowledge held by the people who first worked with it. In Ireland, and the United Kingdom, the Tuatha De Danaan are the Wisdom Keepers, and you can access their knowledge by working with their ‘layer’ of history. It is a form of energetic archaeology.

The awareness of the earth as Mother existed for many years but with the coming of the more war-like ‘Celtic’ peoples from the Steppes, the beliefs were eroded and went underground, back into the mounds and sacred places The ‘knowledge’ of the Goddess people had to become secret, or at least less visible, to protect it. It was encoded in the myths, and stories they told each other preserving, in art and writing, the knowledge of how to keep the earth in balance.

Over time, the knowledge contained in the stories was lost, but now it is returning. All the stories and myths have a truth hidden in them, if you look hard enough. New stories are also being written; stories that hold the codes and keys to the knowledge of the ancestors and the Tuatha de Danann, the People of The Goddess. Many are remembering.

The world needs rebalancing once again which is why this knowledge is returning. Many people with ancestry in the British Isles and Ireland have this memory in their cells. It only needs reactivating to access it. Your guides are only too willing for you to ask them, and you will receive the knowledge if you really want it. It is the sincere desire to know something that opens the door to receiving.

Film of the round barrow in Micheldever Woods by Chris Bishop.