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BLUE DRAGON MEDICINE

I Survived The Deletion

5/4/2017

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I had a spiritual awakening on October 5th, 2002.  It was right before my 27th birthday.  I didn't know then what an awakening was, I didn't know what was happening to me.  I had been depressed and I was having seizures.  I went to a Buddhist meditation class for three days, I had never meditated or thought about it, I partied and worked.  I wanted to try something different because I wanted to get better and I didn't want to take medication.
When I had the awakening everything changed.  My perceptions changed and how I experienced things.  It was such an intense bolt of energy through my body, it made me very sick, and very sensitive.  The stress of the incident forced me to stop working for a year, and so in that time I lost my home and went into debt, but I knew things that I had never known before.  I knew that I could feel energy and that it was this energy that all things were made of, that it was all connected.  I committed myself to the meditations although I was doing them alone then because a lot of days I couldn't walk to make it to the class and they kicked me out for poor attendance.
After one year I slowly integrated myself back into the workforce and tried to get my life back together.  I felt more purposeful and wanted to get out of the city.  I was living in Vancouver at the time.  I wanted to get back into horses.  It was the only thing that I knew I wanted.  
I moved to the Sunshine Coast as I felt drawn to the community there and felt that my heart was somehow rooted there, perhaps from another place in time.   One month after I moved there I was sexually assaulted by a man I had just met who offered to give me a ride home from a party.  Although by this time I had managed to do enough meditation and psychological work to stop the seizures, the shock of the awakening was something that continued to give me physical challenges, along with neurological damage already happened from 18 years of epilepsy, and the assault on top of it, it's a miracle I didn't give up.  When I was faced with the moment of being physically restrained with a knife in my face, I checked out in a way, my mind split, and I disassociated.  I spent many days sobbing and shaking on the floor not even knowing why.  I directed a lot of anger towards the community, because although I didn't realize at the time what I thought, I blamed them.  
There were times when I would observe myself as a mess on the floor, and I would say to myself; "something's not right here, Janette, you should do something about that", and would convince myself to get up to write.  Every time I picked myself up off the floor, it was only to write a poem, and then to write music to play along, and it turned into songs, which after a year I thought I should perform them, I quite liked them.  When I put them all together, I realized that they wrote a story, the story of what had happened to me, and it demonstrated how somewhere in my subconscious, the things that I had learned from having had an awakening, were speaking to me, and helping me to get through everything.
I decided to put the songs and poems together as one story, as my story.  I called it; "I Survived the Deletion", because social networking had just become popular, and so many people deleted me, because I was angry and I raged at them.  I hope those people can know on some level that it wasn't really them that I was angry at, it was the situation, it was how I coped with a lot of things that I was dealing with which at the time nobody knew about.
Over the years "I Survived the Deletion" evolved, I became more gentle and creative, and really integrated the piece as a cathartic process.
After a year and a bit of being on the Sunshine Coast, I realized that I had been disassociated in my own mind, I recognized that it was the assault, I reported it and came out to the community about it, and I fled to the Okanagan, taking with me one very special prize, my horse, Padre, whom I had been working with in Robert's Creek.  He lives with me now on my friend's beautiful ranch in Oliver, British Columbia, where I have done amazing rehabilitation and training work with horses.
Tickets for the performance of "I Survived the Deletion" on May 14th in Vancouver have started to sell.  All proceeds will go to the Old River Ranch Horse Sanctuary improvement project.  Much appreciation to those who are able to support and attend. 




I SURVIVED THE DELETION

a true story of rebellion, heartbreak,
​and spiritual awakening, written and performed by Janette Damsma

MAY 14, 2PM

Havana Theatre, 1212 Commercial Drive, Vancouver

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Padre; a mirror of me

4/15/2017

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​It was interesting working with Velvet and Padre today.  Velvet arrived a couple of weeks ago and has really done a successful job at getting Padre's hormones fired up.  Velvet is very much a queen of the throne kind of mare who likes to swing her head and swish her tale and claim her space.  She has a lot of energy with quick and sudden movements, she is trained nicely to ride english with a soft leather bitless bridle.  After working with Velvet for a the first time with no big surprises, I thought I would give Padre a whirl in the round pen and work on us galloping circles bareback.
I've had Padre for almost ten years.  He is my heart's calling and dearest friend.  We're close emotionally as much as one can be with an animal, and we've had adventures, we've been up mountains, in rivers, at ranches... basically just riding, playing around.  He did alright loping circles while I rode him, and since we always do that, I thought I would try some ground work with him, just me, him, and the lunge whip, which isn't actually used to whip the horses; it directs them, you use it to guide them like a very long extension of your arm, and they make great sounds that can really get a horse moving!
Padre did all the usual things, run, walk, trot, stop, then I thought I want him to walk towards me.  He would not walk towards me.  I even had treats.  He wanted to go see Velvet, and who wouldn't want to see a horse with a name like Velvet, and I realized that as long as I was giving Padre free choice, even though we were still in session in the round pen, he would not pay attention to me, he had no interest.  This is not good horse/person relations when you are working with a horse.  The horses can be attentive, respecting your position as teacher; a horses chances for best quality of life increase when they can respect their person and teacher while being in the realm of domestication.  Domestic horses who do not respect their person, generally are more dangerous, and when a horse is dangerous their chance of being cared for in a loving home decrease, along with their chances of doing all kinds of fun horse/human activities.
I realized that when Padre was listening to me, he was moving out of fear and obligation to the lunge whip and my movements which were driving him forward.  I wanted him to listen also when I was asking him to come to me, with no gesture of force or obligation, other than the fact that I was asking him to.   I decided to use the lunge whip to direct his body a little bit as it's long enough to reach behind him even while I am standing in front of him gesturing for him to come towards me.  He freaked, racing back and forth against the fence rails trying to get away from me and towards Velvet, while I lunged from side to side not allowing him to get out of the space with which I was able to draw boundaries with him.  He eventually stopped, I was able to get him turned around facing back towards me, and we repeated the whole process about 3 times while I was asking to myself "is he ever going to get this", and then the fourth time he just did it perfectly.  He trotted around the round pen, as I asked him to walk and then asked him to turn in towards me and walk to me, he did so with perfect attention and no hesitation.  I wasn't expecting it so suddenly perfect like that, I met him with a hug and a treat.  Padre tests me, but in the end, he always lets me win, he has never beat me at anything, and so we have the perfect balanced horse/person relationship that can be safe and limitless.  Anything I want to teach him, with focus and perseverance, I can teach him.  This exercise today helped me see how much more limited I am because of the habits I have maintained with my horse over time, and it also helped me see the endless potential.  I love my horse, and with him I want nothing less than for both of us to thrive.
Tonight when feeding the horses, I was letting Padre out to the river to graze.  We practised our exercise of having him walk towards me when I gesture for him to do so... he did, but he wanted to charge past me at the gait, and when I asked him to back up he spun around and bolted around me, and so I kept circling him and we did the walking and stopping and backing again, until he let me win, and I allowed him to walk gently past me to the grass.  I love that he will test me every time, because it shows me that he does not lose his spirit.  I love that he gets a little mad every time and kicks and bolts and protests, demonstrating his strength and what he is capable of, only to give in, reminding us both every time; the depth of understanding between us, as person with domesticated horse, the surrender of power to the greater power that IS, which allows us to live in harmony, such the rewards that come to us both from that.
I gave Velvet and Shiro hay, first asking Velvet to do a little recap of the ground work that we did in the round pen also.  She flicked her tail, she swung her head, and so I held her head in my arms, asking her to bend her head towards me as bending at the pole of the neck releases tension in a horse.  She did relax as could be observed because she dropped her eye lids and started chewing, but every time she relaxed, signalling that I could give her the space to proceed humbly to eating, she threw her head at me like "how dare you!", and she didn't let me win.
Currently, as I write this blog, Shiro is eating hay, Padre is eating grass by the river, and Velvet is tied to the fence post.  Cowboy always said; if a horse won't let you win, tie him to the fence and let him contemplate life for a while ;) 
It's so strange to me sometimes, with horses, it's a game of dominance and then respect.  It always has to be.  It's the language horses speak.  It's how they survive amongst each other in the wild, it's their nature.  I wonder sometimes what is it in me that is so attracted and attuned to this game of wild nature.  It lights me up, it gives me energy; invigorates and satisfies.
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April 15th, 2017

4/15/2017

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I SURVIVED THE DELETION

4/8/2017

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A true story of rebellion, heartbreak, and spiritual awakening, written and performed by Janette Damsma; In this musical monologue laced with enchantment, satire, and gothic undertones, an artist in search of the meaning of life conveys her personal journey of adopting the theories of Universal Law in order to break free from the grips of addictions, religious dogma and romantic obsessions. A raw talent guaranteed to touch and inspire


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Why do relationships have to be so hard sometimes?

11/6/2016

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Ask Ahleseah of the Shining Ones; Channeled by Janette

I am thrilled to announce that I will once again be publishing and broadcasting channeled messages, starting now.  It's exciting news for me because, well, channeling threatened my life and well-being to a serious degree at one time, along with religious dogma which has been an ongoing lesson for me, I feel I have finally broken through enough that I am able to start again.  I choose to channel only one guide for these translations, and that is my Spirit Guide; Ahleseah of the Shining Ones, as she has never failed me, and remains by my side diligently, with a playfulness, sense of humour, and loving support and inquisition that I relate to and admire.  Last night I moved many pictures to my desktop, categorized according to how I will use them to complete my Master's culminating project.  While I was doing the channeling, the pictures on my desktop, only those for this specific project, completely re-arranged themselves to form perfect rows and columns spread evenly to fill all of the available space on my desktop, but completely out of order.  Ahleseah has always gotten a kick out of computer games, oh how I have missed, and love how she plays.  Oh, I just realized they're not just in the available space, they're also over top of my row of most important pictures.  Nice.  ;) 
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WHY DO RELATIONSHIPS HAVE TO BE SO HARD SOMETIMES?

"Inside the spirit of the Source, there is a seed planted which activates the existence of each of us.  Within this seed there is an infinitum of information which defines the Soul Map of the individual.  Upon this map is a key, wherein lies the most valuable lesson of that individual's physical existence.  Everything that the individual experiences from that moment on, points to the key, the lesson which contains the potential of bring the individual to full enlightenment; Oneness with God.  
As human beings in physical form, you have accepted the responsibility, on a soul level, of a life with the potential of decoding this map in order to physically experience your Oneness with God.
For most of You, the lesson of greatest value is through the experience of intimate relationship.  Intimate relationship holds a mirror up for us to view in the Other the aspects of ourSelves that We need to come to terms with, accept and Love unconditionally, in order to experience the God Spark within us, which is the ultimate truth of Who and What We Are.
Upon accepting this responsibility, when you were still only a Soul, formless and infinite, You understood the challenges as purely illusory and veils of which could be seen through of moved aside in order to find that key to the God Spark, and through the lessons that take you there, you will know with absolute certainty Who and What You Are.  
Each of you possesses n internal compass that points you to the perfect person, to the perfect situation, in order for your soul to have these experiences.  Learn to follow this compass, to trust where it takes you, to know that no other person knows better than You where it is guiding you, for it is through your own emotions and intuition that the compass can be navigated.
Trust in yourself and learn from eachother.  Know that it is all for your own pure enjoyment and see the pleasure of the game in all experiences.  Perceive your interactions with others with Lightness, and find the joy in experiencing these connections.
I do believe that if you were to look deep into your experience, those relationships that you perceive as challenges, that you will find pleasure in the experience, that you will feel excited with the anticipation of The Game, exuberant even, in the challenge that is suited so specifically, and so phenomenally precise to only your individual experience and learning and capabilities.
Everywhere you look, your own Soul is sending You signs to assist you and take you to your own expansion of Being in this experience, for that is all that it's here for; The Experience.  And The Experience never ends, so you can't get it wrong, you have an infinitum of chances, as many as you need.  We are infinite energy in motion, a spirally compass of emotion, united by our own unique authenticity... There is no other like you, and in that we are all the same.  
Love Each Other.  Support Each Other.  Trust your intuition, who to talk to, when to walk towards, when to walk away, it is all within You.  Be in the moment.  That is the Way.  Detach from your thoughts and move into your instinct, and I promise you, Lovelies, that the joy in the Game of Life will be found, and your relationship to All will be Great and Profound.
In Light, 
Ahleseah of the Shining Ones" 
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What I Am

8/17/2016

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I am crystalline stardust come from the sky
Falling with light speed lasers on high
A whistling BanShee sent from the sun
To search for things lost and seal the undone

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8/17/2016

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August 14 Dream Time Healing Circle; Lizard Medicine & Tish'a B'Av

8/13/2016

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Tomorrow I will be facilitating the fourth Medicine Horse healing circle as we celebrate the dream time through Lizard Medicine on the International day of the Lizard, along with the Jewish Holiday; Tish'a B'Av.
Lizard Medicine is associated with dream time.  Through dreaming we can imagine different futures and decide which one we will choose to materialize.  
I find an interesting correlation on this day with the Jewish Holiday; Tish'a B'Av, which commemorates the falling of the first temple of Jerusalem, along with the second Temple on the same calendar date 655 years later.  Through my heritage I feel a tie to Judaism, as both my parents lived  in Holland during the Holocaust, and recall hiding Jews in their homes from Hitler's Nazis.  Though I was not born to witness this first hand, and stories shared by my family are minimal, I do believe in the energetic and cellular memory which can be genetically passed on, as my life is so shaped by the lives and experiences of my parents; their fears, their victories, their thoughts, their memories.  
The falling of the temples of Jerusalem goes far back into history, so far that one might think how can it affect me now?  Yet the chain of events creates a most powerful thread in time that has brought us to the very state of experiences we find ourselves in now.  Native American teaching has taught me through the wisdom of the late Frank Many Horses, that as far as we can see back into our history, so far are we able to affect our future through the choices that we make now.
As beings on this planet, we live with a Karmic cycle that brings us strong lessons through religion and race;  elements world wide which throughout history have brought us to a state of separation; killing and torturing each other through war, destroying sacred temples and artifacts of our fellow Man in an attempt to control the other's spirit and choices by devastating the physical means to practise one's faith in the way that they choose.
All my life I have worked through the dreamtime with personal struggles, first unconsciously and then consciously, experimenting with the malleable palate of lucid dreaming through which I have conquered demons, faced predators, and been made aware of the state of my subconscious towards certain people and events in waking time.  

Through lucid dreaming I have experienced nuclear warfare and observed whole towns in lockdown, fighting for food tokens, caged in wire fencing and large tarp shelters.  It is my hope that through dreamtime I can work to send out my own frequency signal into the collective consciousness which works to face these extreme fears as a prayer for the future of humanity.  
It's so easy for us to get lost in the life of Western Culture; spinning our wheels to make ends meet against an economy that doesn't want to give us time to stop and experience the true meaning of life; freedom, abundance, the incredible nature of our Earth Mother, the generous and extremely intelligent heart and mind of our fellow human beings.  
Through the wisdom of LIzard's dream, may we hold the visions and sculpt the energy of our actions and wishes, into a world that is peaceful and caring, safe and prosperous... may we send the fears, destruction and devastation of the past into the ethers to be transmuted back into it's original form of Absolute Truth, Unconditional Love, all that is Pure and Good.  
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I Need Help

5/9/2016

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I need help and I don't know what to do.  The level of emotional trauma that I've been dealt in my life has been too much for me to know how to handle and I feel that I'm a burden to everyone around me.  I used to have a blog and a youtube page where I posted about a lot of things that I was interested in and things that were happening to me, and I felt a lot safer there because I didn't know the people personally who were connected to me.  They were people who were drawn to what I was posting about and I developed a following quickly.  Now I feel so inhibited because most of my connections are through facebook where the majority of people are my personal friends and family, and although one would think that would feel safer, it actually feels a lot more daunting because I worry more about how I'll affect everybody and what they'll think of me.

There are a lot of things that have happened to me that a few people know about but most people don't.  I'm epileptic.  I had seizures for 18 years and I got this crazy idea one day that I was going to cure myself without medication.  I started meditating and I had a spiritual awakening that sent so much energy through my body which had so many blocks in it, it almost killed me, but I had tapped into a lot of wisdom.  Because I was so sick I couldn't work and I lied to everybody about it because I didn't know how to explain what was happening to me.  I lost my home and screwed my credit, and sold all my stuff, but I kept meditating and working on myself psychologically, and a year and a half later I had my last ever seizure.  It was a really bad one, I had been date raped the night before when I was sick, and it took me a long time to recover, but after that the seizures were no more.  
At that point I had learned a lot about psychology and moving energy.  I wanted to start rebuilding my life and working towards things that were important to me, so when my health was strong enough and I got completely off of drugs and alcohol, I moved out of the city to pursue my dream of having a horse again.  I moved to the Sunshine Coast and one month after I moved there I was stalked and raped by someone who forced himself into my home and put a knife in my face.  I had just met him that night at a party.  I somehow managed to function for the next year, but I had emotionally and mentally disassociated.  I was still dealing with lingering health issues and it was easier to deny the rape had happened... I seemed in somewhat of a trance state that year, I wasn't myself, I lashed out at a lot of people, I also made a lot of new friends and had creative breakthroughs.  I wrote a musical that just came pouring out of me... when I was too emotionally overwhelmed, which was often, I wrote.  A year later when I had too much anxiety to leave my home and was crying incessantly, I was guided to some people, native elders, who supported me, and took me to the police to report the rape.  A lot of the community turned on me when I did that as the rapist was known as a "chief" and "healer", and so I fled two weeks later without telling anyone other than my closest friends from vancouver, my mom,  and my landlord and employer.  The amazing part about that time was that in the state of being between homes and jobs, I bought my horse, and I moved with him to the Okanagan where I knew next to no one but had a couple of connections for a home and work.

I continued on with the energy work that I was doing and that's when I started my blog.  I channeled, and people flew and traveled from around Canada to meet and observe me, as I had quoted some ancient texts and I was predicting future events through the channeling that were spot on.  Things like names and places, but all to do with extra terrestrial intelligence, and I was guided to one man in particular who was doing the same kind of work, but he accused me of being a fraud, and formed a hate group against me.  They made websites about me saying I was a satanist and government agent and that I did porn, and they attached photos of me with my home address and where I worked, it was devastating.  My emotional state for dealing with the rape and ongoing health challenges was enough already, this was by far the lowest and loneliest time of my life.  It was believed by a native elder who was helping me that I was under psychic attack.  There were incidents where my heart was nearly stopping and in the hospital doctors were baffled when multiple doses of adrenaline had no affect at bringing my heart rate up.  At the time while I was in the hospital when this was happening, the man who was responsible for making the websites and leading the hate group's mother died mysteriously in her sleep.

I was still committed to the energy work and was working with birds of prey.  I healed a dying bald eagle in my hands and was guided by spirit to take a tail feather from the eagle and gift it to a man at an indigenous gathering.  He used the feather in a ceremony and after that the psychic attacks stopped and I was able to detach from the energy of the hate group, but the incident left a lot of fear in me.  I started doing ceremony with the Native people who were connected to the  man who had the tail feather, and although they were supportive of me, there was a dynamic there also where I was being looked down upon by a couple of people at those ceremonies, and at one point I was pointed out and verbally assaulted while I cried uncontrollably on the ground in a puddle of my own snot and tears in front of everybody.  The build up of emotional turmoil had reached a point of becoming almost unbearable, but I pushed through and continued with the ceremonies and was supported by those who cared for me.

I was not able to be in any kind of romantic relationship for 8 years after the rape.  I pushed men away with my emotional imbalances and although I finally did manage to date a couple of people, they weren't the right fit, but I suppose they did help me get stronger in myself.

I've continued to do artwork and have put a lot of time and money into it, but selling my paintings has been difficult in the Okanagan.  There's a gallery in New York that I've envisioned visiting for a lot of years, and for my fortieth birthday I decided to start to put effort towards that.  I connected with a man who's involved there and he was interested in me romantically, but as has been the norm, my emotional challenges have overtaken everything and it got to the point where he felt a need to become rather cold towards me, going back on most of his words and becoming passive aggressive in his insults towards me, I don't know what to make of anything that he says to me anymore, and although it's been nothing compared to things that I've endured in the past, it's triggered my survival mode and put me in a state of perpetual anxiety when I try to think or focus on my artwork and my trip to New York.

I miss that time when I was expressing myself online with my blog and my youtube channel and I had no inhibitions about what I wrote or who was reading it.  I felt more purpose driven and clear in what I was trying to communicate.  I know so much about energy healing, all I want is to be able to put that message out there, but then I get stuck on these fears from everything that has happened, and then I wonder, am I a hypocrite, that I'm trying to put a message out there about healing but I can't even get to point of feeling healed enough myself to be able to say it?  There are healers and chiefs who support me but who don't want to talk about it to people for fear of being judged for being too closely affiliated with an attractive woman.  There's a world renowned Shaman who hugged me and cried and told me he's sorry for the difficult of the energy that I carry.  I'm planning an art show in June but most days it seems impossible to stop crying long enough to get any painting done, but I try.  I've been getting fevers that seem like a flu but I sometimes wonder if I'm just too emotionally spent.  I've been doing guided meditations and sleep hypnosis for hours every day for over a month and although it seems to help in the short term, difficult feelings keep coming back.  I've paid for expensive counselling which seems to do the same.

I know so many people have had so many worse things happen than me, I don't want to make any less of that, and I don't want to sound like I'm wallowing and I don't want people to feel sorry for me.  I just want to find a way out of this hole.  I want to be able to ride my horses just because I want to, not because I need to do something to make myself feel better.  It seems everything that I do is to try to feel better.  I want to feel ok in the first place, like I used to.

I need help, but I don't know what to do.  Writing about it does feel better.  I learned the power of sharing at a group I attended in Vancouver, but it's so easy to get caught up in the facade of having a perfect life the way so many people do on social media, especially when I want people to feel that I'm there for them in a healing way, I don't like to reveal my weaknesses, but maybe sometimes that is actually the stronger way.
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Medicine Horse Healing Circle June 18

4/27/2016

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