The Witch Wound: Why It Hasn't Felt Safe to Be Seen

[You can listen to this as a podcast or read below. In the podcast, I share more than in the writing below, so I encourage you to listen. Scroll down for music and a poem relating to this topic of the Witch Wound. There’s also some images I generated with Midjourney.]I once set up a room in my house especially for seeing clients. I got the business cards printed. I built a website. I’d done all the training. And then I saw one person. One. And I could never bring myself to see anyone again. I had this innate and unexplainable fear of working as a healer or being an intuitive.It wasn’t because I didn’t believe in the work. I’d been drawn to healing since I was very young. I was reading Louise Hay in my early teens – Heal Your Body (and I still have the little blue companion book that lists all the ailments and their probable causes).From my late teens and early twenties and on from there, I trained in modality after modality. Pranic healing. Reiki. I trained as a death doula, and a birth doula.When I trained in EFT, I travelled down to Melbourne, did all of it, came home, and I used it every single day on myself. I believed in it completely. I just couldn’t bring myself to share it with anyone else.And it happened again and again. I’d train in something, pour my time and energy into learning, I’d get right to the edge of stepping into it and working with people, and then something would pull me back.You wouldn’t believe how many domain names I have purchased over the years for various healing businesses I wanted to start.For a long time, I thought there was something wrong with me. I couldn’t understand how my love of healing could not be translated into working with people. It was really confusing.I have since come to realize that perhaps I am carrying what’s known as a Witch Wound. I know this sounds very out there and very woo. And if you don’t believe in past lives like I do, then bear with me as I explore this with you.In this lifetime, I don’t identify as a “witch” but the things I am interested in are witch-life – the moon cycle, manifesting, healing, natural remedies, intuition. And I feel like women across the ages have been punished for their gifts in these areas.I don’t think you have to identify or call yourself a witch to be impacted by the Witch Wound.Join a growing community of midlife women who are done playing small and ready to express their soul’s music.From my understanding, the witch wound is the inherited, bone-deep fear of being persecuted for our gifts. For our power, being too much, too outspoken, standing up for what is right.For centuries, women who were those things were punished for it. The women burned and drowned and hanged as witches were so often just women who stood out. Healers. Midwives. Women who knew things. Women who wouldn’t comply.And the theory, which I feel in my body as true, is that the fear of being seen and punished for our power got passed down through the generations. And it still runs in us. It can make us hide our gifts out of fear.I can see the Witch Wound like a thread running through my own life in a few different ways, and you might recognize some of them in yours.I knew that I had a fear of persecution because as a young child, I was terrified that I would go to jail for a crime I didn’t commit. This was such real fear for me. As a little girl, I was often falsely accused of things I hadn’t done, including by my brothers, so I learned early that I could be innocent and still be punished.Being blamed for something I didn’t do was a real and present danger. It taught my young nervous system that being singled out is unsafe. That visibility itself can get you punished, whether you did anything wrong or not.All those times I trained as a healer and I was about to work with people, I felt like I was like I was standing in concrete and couldn’t step forward.For years, I was perplexed by the polarity of loving training in healing modalities and so scared to use those modalities. There was a part of me that I couldn’t control that believed that being a visible, powerful healer was dangerous.And historically, it was. Healers were exactly the women who got persecuted. So, every time I got close to fully claiming that role, some ancient part of me hit the brakes to keep me safe. My subconscious was trying to keep me safe and protect me from danger, even when my mind couldn’t fully understand it.So many of us built our businesses following the bro marketing playbook. The aggressive tactics. The fake scarcity. The manipulation. The push, push, push. And a lot of us did it for years even though it made our skin crawl, because we were told that was how you succeed, and we didn’t feel safe doing it our own way.We may have betrayed our own knowing because we watched how others became successful. And if you’re like me, you now want to build our business your own way. Marketing from trust instead of pressure. Aiming for win-win instead of just win. And building a relationship with our clients who you genuinely care about. I love the women I work with and that’s important to me.So, if you’ve ever done what I did, trained for the thing and never launched it, written the book and never published it, had the gift and kept it hidden, started and stopped and started and stopped, you are not alone.You were not a failure. You were unconsciously protecting yourself from danger. There is nothing wrong with you. There is something very old moving through you, and it was trying to help keep you safe.Thankfully, this wound can be worked with. It can be cleared. For me it is happening in layers, as most of us know when we peel the healing onion – one layer at a time, with a few tears.As you may know, I love to create music. My very first album was around Witch Wound and I called it The Sacred Ones. It explores how women have been told to hide their gifts, how we have been controlled and persecuted for being healers and intuitive.Interestingly, when I went to publish this album, it kept getting rejected for no reason and that’s why it wasn’t the first album I released, and it’s only on a couple of platforms due to being rejected. I haven’t had that issue with any of my albums.I listened The Sacred Ones album over and over again when I first created it. It fed my soul. I felt like I could reclaim my power.I then worked with a healer called Linda Nevin who worked with me specifically on the Witch Wounds.I don’t think I would be doing this podcast if I had not worked on my Witch Wounds with Linda or created the Sacred Ones album. My fear around being a healer was so fierce, that even now, I have moments of it lingering in the background trying to hold me back from speaking my truth.Part of the process for me was naming and claiming how women have been treated, the persecution, the fear, the silencing, of having to do deep healing work in secret. And then claiming how genuinely precious these healing gifts are. Knowing how much the world needs them. And acknowledging how much this fear of persecution has cost us.In a previous episode I talked about how I was at an event where we had to write down our biggest fear. Shockingly, nearly everyone wrote the same thing. The whole room of three hundred amazing women were afraid of being seen. That’s how afraid we are, and I do believe it could come from the persecution of women over the generations.As for me, I am not sure I am fully healed of this or if I am picking up on the collective fear, but through working with Linda and creating and listening to my album, The Sacred Ones, I feel bolder and less afraid. I still feel the fear sometimes like a soft whisper, but I am not letting that fear hold me back.This podcast, Fully Expressed, this is me walking straight into the wound. Putting myself out here, very vulnerably at times, where I could be judged.I’m doing it while I’m still afraid. I’ve just decided that hiding my gifts costs me more than the risk of sharing them.That’s what I think courage really is – doing what we are called to do despite the fear. The wound is still here in the psyche of the collective and a small shadow of it within me, but I am sharing myself in spite of it.And interestingly, we’re living through a time where so many of the old structures are falling down. The hard, rigid, purely masculine ways of doing things are cracking, and you can feel it everywhere.In Human Design they talk about us leaving the era of planning, the last four hundred years of building big collective structures, and moving into a new era, the era of the individual, where we come back to our own intuition and our own authority.It’s why we’re watching so many gurus fall off their pedestals. We’re done outsourcing our knowing. What the world needs now is more of the feminine way of being and doing. More healing. More people listening to their intuition. And caring for others.Interestingly, my life’s work in Human Design is the Right Angle Cross of Planning – what this means is that I have the gifts of the old era and as we move into the new era, we don’t want to destroy all the good things that we need like democracy (though we need a better more honest version), sanitation and sewage (we definitely don’t want this to go away), and the best of modern medicine.In the new era though, it’s about following your own intuition and doing things your way. Which I love. And I think we can all benefit from honoring our intuition more.When we hide our gifts, we are depriving the world of our light and our ability to have an impact on the lives of others and the planet as a whole. The world needs these gifts, and it needs them now, at the very moment we’ve been most afraid to offer them.So, you can’t wait until you feel 100% safe, confident or healed to share your gifts. I think the courage comes first, and the safety is built by doing the thing, one brave, terrified step at a time.Not long ago I worked with a woman who came to me carrying so much grief about this. She had real gifts, and she was so afraid to be visible, so afraid to let herself love and value what she carried. And underneath it was this deep sadness, a grief for all the years she’d spent hiding.We did the work together to clear that fear, to let her claim her gifts without the old terror attached. And watching her come back into herself, watching her stop apologizing for her own light, is why I do what I do.If you recognize yourself in any of this, if you’ve got gifts you keep hiding and you’re ready to stop, I work with women one to one using PSYCH-K to clear exactly these visibility wounds, the beliefs that tell us it isn’t safe to be seen. It’s gentle, and it goes right to the root, to the place where the old fear lives. If this resonates with you, I invite you to reach out and we can have a conversation about how we can work with you.Please know that you have gifts that the world needs right now. The fear that it wasn’t safe to share them is a wound so many of us carry.What if it was safe to fully express your gifts, your knowing, your expertise, and your wisdom?If this spoke to you, here’s how we go deeper together. Subscribe to Fully Expressed, it’s free, to get every new article and episode straight to your inbox. This is where I keep writing through all of it, week by week.And if you’re ready to stop hiding your own gifts, come and join as a paid Collective member. You get a monthly Futurecasting session, where we drop in together and write ourselves into the future we actually want. And you get to join me for the Creators’ Cuppa, where you get to pick my brain on your work, your visibility, and whatever you’re building or bringing into the world.I want to leave you with the words of Marianne Williamson“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?You are a child of God.Your playing small does not serve the world.There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that otherpeople won’t feel insecure around you.We were born to make manifest the glory ofGod that is within us.It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.And as we let our own light shine,we unconsciously give other peoplepermission to do the same.As we are liberated from our own fear,Our presence automatically liberates others.”Marianne Williamson wrote that in 1992, and women have been passing it to each other ever since, because it talks to something we feel to be true.Our deepest fear was never really that we are inadequate or not enough. It’s that we are powerful. And for so many of us, across so many lifetimes, being powerful is the exact thing that got us punished. So of course we played it small. Playing small kept us alive.As you can see, the world is a mess right now.So now, we have the opportunity to stop shrinking to stay safe, and start shining because the world needs our light.Who are you not to be your gifts, your knowing, your medicine?The world doesn’t need one more woman playing small.It needs you and me to be fully expressed.PoemHere’s a poem relevant to what we’ve talked about today. I felt teary when I read this as it resonated so deeply with me.The Women Who Learned to HideWe learned to make ourselves smaller.To swallow the knowing before it reached our lips.To feel the answer rise within us and call it imagination.To place our hands upon the hurting and pretend we did not know what they could do.We learned to dim the light before anyone else could see it.Because once, being seen was dangerous.Once, a woman who knew too much, felt too much, healed too well, spoke too loudly, stood too firmly in herself could pay dearly for it.So we learned.We learned to hide the herbs, hide the wisdom, hide the knowing.We learned to whisper what we once might have spoken.And somewhere along the way, hiding became so familiar we forgot we were doing it.We called it doubt.We called it procrastination.We called ourselves inconsistent, afraid, not ready.But perhaps beneath all of that was something much older.A memory that said:Do not let them see you.Do not show them what you know.Do not become too powerful.It isn’t safe.And still...the gifts remained.Quietly waiting.The knowing never left.The hands still remembered.The voice was still there beneath the silence.And now I wonder how much the world has lost while we were hiding.How many healers never healed.How many writers never wrote.How many women stood at the edge of their own becoming and stepped backwards.How much wisdom went with them to the grave.I don’t want to do that anymore.I don’t want fear to decide what I give to this world.I don’t need to be fearless.I don’t need every wound healed.I only need to stop abandoning what I know is mine to give.So if my voice shakes, let it shake.If being seen frightens me, let me be seen afraid.If some ancient part of me whispers,Hide...I will hear her.I will understand why.And then I will step forward anyway.Because there are gifts inside us that were never meant to disappear with us.There is wisdom the world has waited long enough to hear.And perhaps this is how the wound begins to heal.Not by forgetting the women who had to hide.But by becoming the women who no longer do.The Sacred Ones AlbumInterestingly, this album was really hard to publish compared with my other albums. It kept getting rejected (Witch Wound in action maybe?).You can listen here on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/album/59Uc4FypRs5CI5ai9Jbi9z?si=IzDUqwC4Tf6izWuEnPtZ5AHere’s have the courage to live Fully Expressed!Love,Ayesha xoxJoin the Fully Expressed Collective on Substack:https://fullyexpressedwithayesha.substack.com/subscribe Get full access to Fully Expressed with Ayesha Hilton at fullyexpressedwithayesha.substack.com/subscribe