From Queen to Slave, to Divine Mother Realization; A story of past life healing

Dear One, Who can describe the majesty of the human soul? Who can possibly relay in words the unfathomable beauty of the human spirit that continues to rise through pain and persecution and claim sovereign power? Indeed, no one can; yet I will do my best to share with you the story of my soul’s greatest triumph I have yet to live through in my many incarnations.

So please, relax into your easy chair, sip on a cup of nourishing tea, put your feet up by the fireside, and travel with me on a journey of lifetimes.

Many moons ago…

On the coast of the horn of Africa, I was a tribal chieftan’s wife, a beautiful young queen. My countenance shone like the sun,warmth & joy emanated from my bright face. My strong physique was regal, my heart, bright… .life was pure and good.

In our peaceful village, we lived by and with the sea…

embraced by Yemaya, the Great Mother Goddess of the water. Oh, how we moved on Her sands, under the light of the full moon.

She gave us everything; we gave Her our song, our bodies, our dance.

For hours, I would stare out to Her horizons in reverie,

Feeling Her Immense presence as a part of my heart, my very soul.

We were One with Her, Her people, Her family. Half of our lives were on land, half in her seas. Our boats and nets were plenty, we weaved and crafted, with song and joy in our hearts, each moment a celebration of life.

She was my goddess, and I was Her child. She was my life- blood, And I was Hers, I lived utterly and totally at peace in the sunlight by her nourishing waters.

Until one day it happened,

The ships appeared on the horizon-

Strange ships, like we had never seen before.

At first, there was no fear… in our innocence we simply wondered and marveled at what Yemaya was bringing us. For anything that came from Her had to be good, yes?

Aja, the ancient medicine woman knew; she had been shown in her visions what was to come. Aja’s face was lined with ancient wisdom, timelessness carved into her cheeks, crows feet illumined her light-filled eyes.. There was a quiet power, an aura of motherly kindness that emanated from the core of her being. Around her neck was a garland of whale teeth… she carried the knowledge of the whales as her medicine.

With her bare, sagging breasts and toothless grin, she was the wise grandmother incarnate… her light a guiding flame of feminine spiritual warmth for the entire village. Oh, How many times I would bring my beloved son to sit with her and hear the stories of the whales and their keepers… the whale people. Oh, How we all loved the times she would gather the children around the fire under the old story-tree… they would sit enraptured by her presence, utterly held in the vast pools of her eyes as she relayed to them the stories of the ancestors, the old legends of mystical transmission. She was adept at weaving story lines into powerful lessons for life.

Aja was medicine herself.

From the roof of her hut, there were dried herbs, bones, and other hand-made pots & tools hanging. Indeed, the hut itself smelled of herbs and concoctions she was constantly making to take care of her people… especially the women. She had helped me through two miscarriages, bore me through the grief and pain of losing a child from my young body. It was only because of her help, her wisdom and medicinal power that I was able to carry my one and only child full term… and able to birth my most beloved son into life. We all have human angels on this earth-plane; Aja was one of mine.

As was her way, she accepted the clear guidance that came with these new visions of white ghosts in ships; she knew that destiny was at hand. What was to befall the tribe could not be prevented … and how each soul would live or not through what was to come was in their own sovereign hands.

Because I was her favorite child in the village (for all the people of the village were her children), she gave me a single, explicitly fierce warning. With fire in her eyes, she said to me:

“Always remember you are a queen! Never forget you are a soul! ”

Little did I realize how she imprinted these words in my psyche in that moment so they would awaken me in my greatest time of need...

They came in the night like ghosts; by fire, by storm.

They burned, they stole, they took all that we knew to be their own.

They captured those that they could, and killed those that they couldn’t. My husband was killed, my son brutally ripped from my arms.

We were tied together and dragged to the beach. There we were collected along with other tribes they had captured to be dispersed among the ships. Most of my people I never saw again. My heart was broken, my spirit in shock.

Eventually, they beat the cries out of us, they beat us silent and starved us placid. We were taken onto the ships and chained together in the hull. In the dark, cavernous dungeon of the ship we cried helplessly, in quiet shock, horror, and devastation.

Here, dear soul, I will spare you the indignities- too many, too horrific to describe that went on in the dank hull of the ship. Needless to say, it was the underbelly of the human psyche that was embodied in these white ghosts and the hell they created and forced upon us. It was 36 hours of a spiral into the darkness of unconsciousness for me before it happened. It was then, in the hull of that ship, when my soul was in the throes of it’s darkest human experience, that the light came. During the night I had slipped ever-deeper into unconscious sleep with the inner cry... “I just want to die, I just want to die!”

Then it happened; In the same way the white ghosts had come without a warning, the light dawned inside of me, inside of the center-point of my darkness and misery without my conscious bidding.

It was as if the dawn was rising; light slowly and gently awakening, expanding throughout my inner landscape while I was still asleep. There was spaciousness… a clarity and serenity I knew to be myself, yet had not felt in – well, perhaps never before in that lifetime. In the middle of that dawning light, I felt a voice pierce through my inner realms… “Wake Up!”. I knew that voice… it was the the voice of the medicine woman, Aja!

Aja made a choice when the white ghosts invaded the village… she knew they were coming and could have gotten away- but she chose to stay. In her soul, she knew her place was with her people and that she could help them much more if she passed on to the other side, to the realm of the ancestors where they could call upon her in their songs and prayers.

So when the ghosts came they were going to leave her be- for they had no use for an old woman. But she instigated them, she taunted them, waving her arms and undulated like a wild creature with made-up curses and vexes until they tied her to a tree and burned her alive. As she died she willed herself to stay close to the earth-plane, so that she could help her people, her children from the other side in their greatest moment of spiritual need. For that was her role and she would fulfill it, with every inch of power in her soul.

And so she came to me in the moment of my greatest need; the darkest night of my soul in the hull of that ship, to awaken me from my slumber so I could find freedom. From the other side- the side of the ancestors, Aja pounded her staff on the wooden floor loudly while yelling into my consciousness,

“Wake.....Up!”

As I opened my eyes, I heard: “Remember you are a queen! Never forget you are a soul!”

As I opened my eyes, I felt and saw the light, a warmth of divine luminosity infused the hull. The heart felt-beauty was unfathomable… the grace palpable… a tangible presence of sublime light filled the space. It was the Grace of Her, my beloved Ma Yemaya, coming to call me home. I felt the light that moved through me, filling the hull and everyone in it as the light of the Great Mother's heart. I could feel the boat floating in Her oceanic Omnipresence, a part of the One Light of All that Is. This gave me ineffable comfort, and a place to rest my awareness that was just underneath yet somehow in the midst of the pain of the human experience. That One luminosity diffused all sense of suffering, separation, and even the sense of my own individual body.

Her divine voice reverberated through me… “Remember who you are… this is who you are… you are my child, and I love you”. Tears of grace streamed down my face as my heart unfolded with exaltation… She had come to me, for me; my Mother was here. My soul's dignity had returned. As I cried in this state of ecstatic communion with Her for several hours through the night, slowly it came to me from the depths of my soul's inner truth:

“Sometimes it is better to die, than to live as a slave”

I knew what I must do.

The next morning, as they came to choose a few of us to clean the upper deck, I made myself visible. I was shoved onto the deck, blinded by the light of the morning, yet I managed to stay in the presence of my soul and my inner dignity. While we mopped the deck, I breathed in the fresh, salt air as if it were divine nectar… and in that moment for me, indeed it was. As my eyes slowly adjusted, I stole momentary glimpses of my mother ocean, and felt her calling to me. She was calling me home to Her. I waited for my chance. While we were mopping behind the cabin I had a split second alone and I jumped overboard. I swam with all of my might, deep underneath the waters, so they couldn’t see me or catch me. Exhilarated with some other-wordly will, I kept going, longer than my usual breath could hold. I came up for a brief moment to catch air, looked back for just a split second, and dove under again. As I made my way farther and farther away from the boat, I was overcome by a sense of victory … I made it! I was again in my beloved mother ocean, in her freedom, in her love! I kept going and going, until I could no longer see the boat, until I knew I was alone in the waters… nothing for miles around me. It was an incredible feeling, to be out there alone, with Her, by the sheer power of my own soul’s will. I had won my freedom.

I breathed with Her, breathed my heart with the oceanic heart of Great Mother, and once again I felt the sublime state overtake me. I floated in her Immensity, carried and held in her oceanic womb for hours, until day passed into night… I was one with Her and She was one with me.

Relaxing deeper and deeper into this state, I eventually allowed myself to gracefully and gratefully go under… there was nothing to do but surrender, body, heart and soul into Her love.

My body slowly falling away, my soul peacefully passed into the light, and I.. was... Free.

-Maleda

Here's a brief synopsis of the process of Great Mother self- healing I went through:

In the healing of this lifetime, I went in as my soul into that moment in the hull, and filled and surrounded my sleeping body with my soul presence. It was in that same moment, from the perspective of the woman I was, that I felt myself gradually fill with divine light and wake in communion with the Great Mother. Time collapses and experience is mutable at this level of consciousness.

My soul had alchemized the darkest of it’s own night into spiritual gold. I had become the divine mother for myself.

The massive evolutionary learnings and shifts I received in this process are too numerous for this post, but here are a few:

- There was a dissolution of the slavery imprint; which includes the sense that someone else's opinion, consciousness, or behavior towards me could bring me down. It also includes any sense of loss of dignity due to actions of another. My soul's dignity belongs to me, no one can take that away no matter what they do to me on the external.

-Immense power to face extreme darkness without losing my soul presence; to be able to see other's actions as their own and not somehow energetically take it on (believe it is mine).

-The power of my own soul to choose death over slavery was huge... in this, I reclaimed my soul's freedom. Not only freedom from captivity, but freedom from attachment to the physical body... and to realize that I always, always have a choice at the most fundamental level.