I suppose it had to start somewhere, but finding its beginning is a challenge. Did it begin when I was born, before I was born, or did it creep up on me slowly? For years, since 1993, I had been doing healing and attunements and activations, all of which led eventually to being ready to receive the Gaia Method system of healing. Without these disciplines and expansions, it never would have come about in the first place.

I had my first Usui Reiki attunement from a friend, Corrinne, who passed the most amazing attunements, back in 1994, but I was introduced to Reiki by a good friend named Ani, who had only recently been attuned herself. This was in the UK, three years after I had left Ireland in very traumatic circumstances, with four small children in tow, and £200 pounds in my pocket.

After a chaotic, and dysfunctional three years, I finally found my path, with the help of my friends and my sister Nympha. We did counselling courses together and Tarot classes with Rosemary Prince. Reiki, psychic development and psychodynamic counselling became my foundation stones. I became a Psychodynamic counsellor, worked as a volunteer rape crisis counsellor and trained in many different Reiki modalities, becoming a ‘Master’ in some of them. I did workshops with Jhadten Jewell, which were amazing, did Magnified Healing and Flower of Life workshops, and received Violet Flame attunements. I also trained in Esoteric Healing, and studied Pleiadian Lightwork which led, in 2001, to a life-changing Ascension workshop in Egypt, by the pyramids of Giza, with Anrita Melchizedek.

Throughout that time, I had also been in an intense healing process; healing myself of abusive experiences from my early childhood, doing much work in co-dependency within my relationships, and doing parenting courses to help me with my children. I hadn’t had great parent modelling. After that, I fulfilled a childhood ambition and trained in Archaeology for seven years.

Going to Egypt was an amazing experience, and it set the stage for the following phase of healing which began the year after. Arriving back in the UK, I was filled with energy and confidence. I no longer felt like ‘Ann Murphy’, I was something bigger, greater, more in the higher awareness of my eternal Soul.

It was not to last. 

The following year, I did the Seventh, and last, Ascension initiation with Anrita and had an experience I did not understand. Instead of my consciousness moving upward, as I had been doing since I began healing, I connected with a very large stone beneath my feet. It fully grounded me into the earth’s solid energy and once I got back, my ‘upward’ expansion and movement crashed completely. I no longer believed in all things metaphysical, at least I stopped believing in the things the New Age told us were vital to our development, such as crystals, etc. I was working in a New Age shop, called The Speaking Tree, in Winchester, and everything I believed in evaporated. I felt like I was going through a huge void. Nothing mattered anymore.

I had discovered Dr. Michael Newton’s books a few years earlier. He created a process whereby one could connect, through deep trance, to the place we go to after death. When I read his books the only place you could access a session was in the U.S. but a few years later, there was a Life Between Life Practitioner only an hour’s drive away. I booked an appointment and drove to Dorset to see Andy Tomlinson.

That session changed my view on everything, and connected me to my Soul, and to who I was, in a way which has never left me. It opened me to my immortal self. It made me realise that everything we experience has a reason, and that reason might not be what we think it is. I had to look at everything with a fresh pair of eyes while still looking with the eyes of my personality.

That summer was so stressful the only way I could feel all right was to drive out to Farley Mount Woods, with Skunk Anansie playing on the cassette player, full blast. I walked through the woods until dark, not caring about the rapists who frequented the place. I dared them to come and harm me. Places I normally avoided, I was no longer fearful of.

This ability to look fear straight in the eyes was to become a very important part of my work.

Every day, I went somewhere. I could not bear to be home, but my guides started hinting that I should do some of the Lightbody work I had learned from Anrita in the woods. I had no idea what I was supposed to do, but I followed my intuition and one day, found myself at a Bronze Age burial mound in the woods.

That was the start of it all. I found I could ‘see’ lines of light entering the mound, and I understood exactly what I had to do. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. It was as if part of me had done this work before, or that another part of me was the one doing the work and I was simply observing, although I could feel the energy in my body and I had to do the physical part of it. Either way, I spent most of the summer wandering the woods and local areas, doing this energy-work and I loved it.

One day, a year later, while working in The Speaking Tree, and running meditation groups, a man called Chris walked in. While doing the 6th Ascension Initiation with Anrita in Giza, during the most powerful meditation I had so far experienced, I was shown the name CHRIS written in big letters in the sky. When Chris walked into the shop, I could see the Egyptian winged disc above his head. I invited him to come to a meditation group I was running in my house. That was the beginning of our work together.

I attuned him to Reiki, and he did other Reiki modalities too, Flower of Life workshops, and work with Jhadten. We spent a lot of time exploring ancient settlements and doing energy-work all over the British Isles and Ireland, slowly learning more about the work we were being called to do. It was on one of those days, out in Selbourne Woods, in Hampshire, that I received the first Gaia Method Earthways symbol, and its meaning.

Selbourne Hill.

On top of the hill, made famous by Rev. Gilbert White, an old beech tree, gnarled and ancient, grows in a hollow in the earth. The tree itself feels like a faery tree and when we first found her, I intuitively called her the Old lady of the Woods, because that is what she felt like, a female tree guarding the hill and common.

We approached the tree but both Chris and I perceived a portal energy, which we had to walk through. This was the first of many initiatic portals. After I had walked through, and now stood beside the tree, I was given a symbol. It was placed in my central light channel and I was told that it was ‘The Gift of Sovereignty’. It appeared that I could attune people with this energy but I was told ‘Do not imitate others, create your own’. The symbol was shown to me as a person being presented with a folded cloak. I saw the symbol superimposed on the image, the image giving me the information about what it meant. This became the norm when receiving symbols of energy. It helped me to understand the function of the symbol.

Along with this energy attunement, I also received channelling, which told me to keep the system pure as too many systems had been changed by people over the years so it no longer matched its original intention and energy. I had no idea what they were talking about. What system? I kept hearing the name ‘Gaia’, and thought that maybe it was yet another Reiki system. Gaia Reiki maybe? I immediately rejected the idea because there were so many Reiki systems already, I did not want to add another.

We spent all day working on this hill, including a large dew pond on the other side of the hill. As we walked towards it, I heard this rather large energy say “Welcome. Today you will each receive the passing on of the sceptres of guardianship”. They gave me the impression that I embodied the Lady who holds the Grail energies as Chris embodied the Grail Knight, serving and protecting. This was the role we would both carry out and still do.

I was being given the frequencies of The Knights Templars, the true Templars, and told to love the Mother through the Earth, to love every blade of grass, and every crawling thing, because they all came from her. Energetically, I was given a sword with crystals on the hilt and then a crystal sceptre. I did not realise it then, but these symbols were also part of the system. As I was being handed the sceptre, a voice said that I was being given the Grail Sceptre. This meant, although I did not understand until many years after, that this was my responsibility to hold the Grail energies, or Divine Feminine energies, on behalf of the Mother. At least the frequencies that were mine to hold. Many others hold theirs.

I did not understand the energy of the Knight’s Templar at the time, but now, eighteen years after this first meeting, and about to embark on my third crusade, it makes so much more sense. Except this crusade is about healing the past, anchoring new templates of being, and creating new energetic pathways of light in yet another country where I have a debt to pay.

The second symbol I was given by another tree, this time in Itchen Woods, Hampshire. I was with Melody, the owner of the Holistic shop and Therapy centre, I was working in as a therapist. Melody came from a Wiccan background, but we had found common ground in our work with the earth and had come to explore the woods together. At one point, we found ourselves being pulled by a very energetic young Dryad in a Beech tree that was so excited to see us it would have been doing somersaults if it hadn’t been rooted to the ground. It was like a young man who hadn’t seen anyone in a long time and here were visitors at last!  Although, in hindsight, it was more likely to do with the fact that we were there in service to the earth and about to be gifted with something wonderful, something we were not expecting!

I sat at the base of the tree and tuned in and again was given a symbol. The energy merged with my physical body and was a butterfly with the symbol superimposed on it. The Dryad explained what it did and told me that the system was not just for women but that men could benefit from it too. But, as it wasn’t a system yet, I still had no idea what he was talking about. The symbol was called ‘Emergence’ and it was:

“The guarantee of a bright new future, once you emerge as the person you are destined to be. Only time, patience and constant growth can bring this transformation into your life. You are born with a blueprint, a plan for your life. Using this symbol can help you heal everything that stands in the way of becoming who you originally intended to become.”

The third symbol was not received at a tree, but at a little Knight’s Templar Church dedicated to St. John the Baptist. It was the energy of a sword, and as it merged with my body, I could see the symbol superimposed on it again. The sword was pointing downwards so that the crossbars were at my shoulders.  One of the most important things in this system is the ability to cut away beliefs which serve to disempower us. This sword energy is a masculine energy, just as the Sovereignty symbol is feminine. The sword gives us the ability to use our minds properly. To cut through old limiting beliefs, both in ourselves and in the collective unconscious. It also gives us the strength to push through cultural beliefs which are diametrically opposed to the Balancing of Male and Female energies.

This time too, I received channelling around this energetic symbol:

“Further Information on The Sword.

There are two levels to the Sword, the mental, and the spiritual. The mental takes into account the thought process, and includes the power to act. It also includes the mental ‘nature’, that which is connected to the Human Mind En Masse (Collective unconscious).

At the spiritual level, it is used as a ‘weapon of self-destruction’. By this, we mean that it gives the bearer the ability to achieve change on multiple levels of being allowing him to ‘do away with’ obsolete mental energies and harmful negative thoughtforms.

In its primary use, it gives ‘Reason’, the ability to ‘temper’ oneself and to act with care.

Its secondary use involves the action of the heart, in union with the Soul. It is an ‘all-round’ instrument of positive change.”

That seemed to be it for the symbols for a while, but a year later, on Dartmoor, where we spent a lot of time, the second level came in. This was very different, much more energetic than the first level, and involved Ancestral sites this time, not trees.

The sacred places and habitation sites on Dartmoor were still very accessible, energetically. Probably because there have not been other settlements built over them, as happens in towns and cities making the energies of these ancient sites relatively pure. It was at one of these places, a Bronze Age stone circle called Yellowmead, near Sheep’s Tor in Devon, that I received the main part of the second level. It was a remote and beautiful place and had taken us quite a long time to walk there. At one point, crossing some small streams, I heard my guides telling me to collect some of the water for an essence. I had never made an essence before so again, did not know how that was going to happen.

Arriving at the circle, our first impression was that it was the remains of a burial cairn, surrounded by three concentric circles. Tuning in, we received the impression that each ‘band’ had a different ‘spin speed’, a different wavelength. When all the wavebands spun at the same speed it powered up, like a battery.

One of the things we discovered, was that these sites were all connected, acting like a computer Motherboard, each component having a different function, but all working together to create balance in the land. The people buried in the cairns, mounds and cists, were people with a particular spiritual status, often of high birth and connected to the Earth as guardian, a role they continued in death. All sacred sites had guardians, both living and dead, to maintain the functioning of the area. (This particular function is slowly returning as people instinctively feel a burning need to protect a site they feel connected to).

Once Chris and I had tuned in, which allowed our energies to meld with the site, my guides gave me some information and then told me to place the bottle of water, which we had collected earlier, into the centre of the circle. All we had to do was tune in and watch. A grid was then placed around my energy field by a lady in a white dress with a white flower headdress on her hair. She began making adjustments to it, so the grid would harmonise with mine. She told me it was a Venus grid and part of the second level.

“This can be transferred at the second level,” she told me, ‘by visualising the Venus grid around the recipient’s body being shared from yours. You can then activate it and power it up. In using this function, the recipient allows a certain amount of ‘love’ energy to be transferred to their energy-field. This in turn stimulates the sending out of the same energy by them, healing the atmosphere and energy fields around them.”

“In carrying this energy, you become one of the many devotees of the Goddess. Your every action and thought leads to unification with the Divine Feminine consciousness, so that, eventually, you can join in Holy Union with the Divine Masculine energy of the Sun and Sea, both masculine energies within the overall feminine divine energy Matrix. Awareness of your own part in the cosmic evolution of earth is bestowed on all who carry this matrix within their fields, and who strive to work within the earthly realms of the Goddess in ‘form’.

Her sites, her children, her creations, are all in need of her succour and love and those who give their lives to this work are rewarded, many times over, with love and honour. Those who carry this energy can assist in the conscious evolution of the planet and her people, and they are the divine repositories of ancient knowledge, following in the footsteps of the Ancient Ones, those priests and priestesses who gave their lives in service to the planet and all her people. Do this willingly and lovingly and your lives will change, to become one of love and abundance, as the Goddess loves all, leaving no soul untouched.”

A little while later, I received another symbol. This was for this level and connects the person receiving it to a source of consciousness outside themselves, such as tree wisdom, universal wisdom, sea energies, etc. At this point, in Gough’s Cavern in Cheddar Gorge, I was given the name, and the attunement process. It what is known as the Cathedral, I was told to call the system – now that I knew it was one – The Gaia Method. I was disappointed. What a prosaic name. Surely a system of healing should have something that sounded more mystical? How naive I was.

However, I did have to change the name slightly. Around fifteen years later, I discovered a Dutch healer was now calling her healing system The Gaia Method too. Her system had gone through a series of renamings until she settled on The Gaia Method. I wrote and told her that I was the owner of the name but she insisted that the Universe should decide who should own it. It was a Solomon moment. Although my guides told me to call the system The Gaia Method, could I change it a little? Tweak it? Two healers having the same name was causing confusion because people looking for me were finding a woman instead who taught sexual de-armouring.

So I tweaked the name. It was only a name, after all, and my guides should have seen it coming!

The system became The Gaia Method Earthways.