France ~ Initiation (Part I)

Earlier this year I was surprised to feel the inner calling to return to the south of France.  I’d thought I was finished with France. I was even more surprised to feel a connection again to Mary Magdalene as I was certain I’d left all that behind, never to be re-visited.  Then the Cathars popped in too and all sorts of resonant information started collating itself in my close connections, social media, inboxes and other such places. As I said, I was very surprised to find this connection alive again because as far as I was concerned, I’d seen through all of the illusion and had no desire to get back involved with any of it again. I’d visited the area about 10 years previously and also in 2014 with a group.  Though my time there in 2014 was incredibly awesome, there were other aspects that I’d come into realisation about afterwards that lead to me withdrawing energy from the stories and people of the area.  I remember that even in 2014 I was surprised to hear from Magdalene again, as I hadn’t been feeling much of a connection for some years.  Truly, it’s a living mystery how these things come about!

In late 2013, and early 2014, I’d had two ‘callings’ from Magdalene in connection with the south of France.  As it turns out, so had my friend Deborah.  She emailed me “Magdalene is calling me, fancy going to the south of France with me?”  Deborah and I had re-connected in 2014 in Malta/Gozo after several years of little contact between us – but one thing is for certain with Deborah and me, every time we met it was extremely activating for us both.

“Magdalene’s been calling me too, so yes!” I somewhat bemusedly found myself saying. We decided to organise a retreat and blend that with private time. I felt like it must be in September. We called our retreat “Initiation” and all I can say is, it certainly was! One major factor in our retreat was to leave space for the Unknown (Divine Mother )  to come in – I was very sure of this aspect though Deborah less so, she was always happy to trust my intuitive hits.  Here’s how we put it:

“Our theme for the weekend is “Initiation”. Our intention is to invite the serpent-light power of Kundalini to awaken. We will be the crucible for Gaia’s Fire and our instructor will be Gaia Herself. And this is the exploratory part… we don’t know precisely what She will bring forth!”

Mary Magdalene by Richard Stodart

Little did we know what this was setting off for us, and that our individual and joint stories would weave unexpected and unknown paths.  In fact, I wonder at my own inexperience looking back – boy have I had initiation after initiation since then!  I have also discovered since that our story wove with that of the Cathars as well as that of Mary Magdalene.  When we discovered that there was a Cathar cave experience that the Cathar Initiates took part in we decided we simply had to include the cave expedition which several retreat participants decided to join us in too.  Because of the turns my life took that summer, I never did blog about the retreat, sites and caves we experienced so I’ll be including that later on, but for now I’m skipping ahead to the story of the 2015 retreat.

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