My first piece of channelled fiction came two years after an epic initiation in Cairo, beside the Great Pyramid in the Giza Plateau. I had gone to attend a workshop there which involved a week’s worth of meditating and daily energetic initiations. It was intense. It was June. The air was so hot that simply breathing burned my throat. But I knew it was where I was meant to be. If you had told me that ten years later I would be living further down the Nile, where the temperatures reach over 50 degrees centigrade in summer and I would be incapable of doing anything but sweat, I would have thought you were crazy.
But that is where I eventually ended up.
A year after that first visit to Egypt, my summer was so horrible at home that the only way I could cope was to go out into the woods, which are a mile outside my city. I would go for long walks, sometimes not returning until after dark. Looking back, I can see how this was necessary, and planned. Because that is where I first discovered the energy lines in the earth and how the ancestral places that were built on them had a purpose.
I also discovered that I was able to work with these lines and could awaken dormant sacred sites.
At that time, I had been working for nearly seven years in archaeology. The previous seven years I had trained as a psychodynamic counsellor. The years in archaeology, where I worked in post-excavation and had completed three years of a part-time degree, taught me how to read the landscape. I learned how to recognise evidence of human habitation and how to read the layers of time in the ground.
For seven years prior to that, I spent three years training as a counsellor. I worked in a rape crisis centre and as a victim support volunteer. The training I received taught me about emotional layers, which proved vital when it came to studying the layers of human history. As a result of this training, I discovered I was able to read the layers of human emotion within the occupation layers in the landscape.
(All people live and love and die, and those energies remain in the layers of earth where they live; they remain in the stones of the houses they build, or in objects they love).
During those fourteen years, I was also training in Reiki and other forms of healing, and in mediumship. It proved to be a challenge learning to balance energy-work with the dynamics of unconscious emotional motivations and repressed feelings. Add to that the mental reasoning and the theory necessary to understand why we feel that way. It was like learning to drive a manual car; I had to shift gears while also working the steering wheel and pedals. (I’m not even going to start to tell you how terrifying that particular experience was!)
Back then, I didn’t understand why I was doing so many different things. At the time I thought it was symptomatic of my own personal failure to stick at anything, a dysfunction that needed uncovering and healing. But once I began to do the energy work in the landscape, it slowly became clear why the training on spiritual, emotional, mental and physical levels was so important
Those years had given me a solid foundation. I had to be grounded. I had to do research. I couldn’t fly off in flights of New Age fancy. It was important that I understood the history and background of a place. And my training in energy-work, and my experiences in Soul Work, taught me how to see what many others could not. Namely, the echoes of past humanity, their beliefs and their way of life; a way of life that physical artefacts and excavations are unable to see.
After a year of working intensely with ancient burial sites, stone circles and other, less well-known places, I received the first chapter of a book about two young men in ancient Britain. I had already been writing what I heard in my head for many years but channelled fiction was different. The former channelling concerned private guidance, or information on sites I needed to visit. Sometimes I was given the history of pockets of humanity that explained what I had experienced at sites I’d already worked on, but the channelled fiction took a different form from that which I’d been used to.
As a channeller, you have to write down exactly what you hear, word for word. Nothing can be changed. Even though channelled writing comes through your mind, and uses your own language, it is noticeably different to your own thoughts. It is as if you are listening to mental dictation and, like a secretary taking shorthand, all that is required of you is to write it down. The information comes into your mind in the form of sentences. These sentences can be accompanied by information, energetic or symbolic, that wholistically explains what you are receiving.
The characters are three-dimensional and you are aware of their character as if they are real people. All you are doing in writing them down is describing them. Their history is accessible; their emotions and their thoughts, are all present. You can see how they are dressed, what they are eating, and who they are talking to at any given moment. It is like watching a movie and you are explaining what you see.
When I receive channelling, I am usually doing something mundane, like washing the dishes, brushing my teeth, or cooking. I hear a sentence in my head and if I ignore it, it will keep repeating itself, like a looped tape, until I get pen and paper and begin to transcribe. It is not like automatic writing, which I did try to learn but was hopeless at, and I am not taken over by some unseen entity, rather I hear the words floating in my mind.
Once I start writing, as soon as I have finished the first sentence the next one comes in, then the next and the next until I have completed a few A4 pages. While I am writing I am in the scene and can feel everything the character is feeling and experiencing. It is like a package of energy in the form of a cube and I am aware of all the faces of that cube at once. There is a definite beginning, middle and end and I can feel the difference between the three.
Sometimes, I am in no humour to sit down and write. I might be otherwise engaged. I can resist for a while but eventually, I have to sit and write. It can be frustrating, and downright irritating, like having a bossy manager, but I know it has to be done. What they want me to write is important, and although I know that I don’t know why, or what its purpose is, yet.
That purpose was to come much, much later.
Next week I will continue to explain how I developed. My hope is that some of what I write will help you to accept your own writing process, especially if it doesn’t fit with other people’s processes. It can be hard to explain where your ‘stuff’ comes from. Plus, this form of writing is in itself a healing process and I will go into that too in later posts.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy my offering and if you want a more detailed version of this post please visit:
If you are interested in the Earthwork I do, visit:
Have a great week!
Ann