At the height of my transformative explorations, the members of my Tribe began to introduce themselves in meditation. I was doing a lot of breath work and my physical therapist was unlocking traumas my body had suffered even before the cancer. (She was an intuitive genius, in my opinion. I owe her big.) As a result, there was a purge of old energy and a massive influx of new information for my psyche to process.

I’m a symbol reader by nature, so much of my new perspective presented itself symbolically. And so my Tribe was born.

I’d already written letters to Fear and Judge (prompted by a Liz Gilbert exercise) and I was beginning to understand them more intimately. Let’s face it. Fear and Judge are the two most primal and therefore the most obvious.

But it was Witch’s entrance I remember best. Jon Gabriel leads a meditation called Living Goddess and, one morning, Witch decided that was her. This is what I wrote in my journal afterward:

The light witch who is my living goddess sat behind me and imbued me with radiant energy. Head bowed, wings pumping, she created a storm of light that filled my body, filled my heart, filled my head and spilled out of my mouth in a series of aums.

She sent the black tree frog to sit in front of me. Like a miniature black hole, he absorbed anything negative that the light expelled. At the height of the storm, he glowed the deep electric purple of a blacklight. I could feel him eating all my fear. Then he hopped away.

He came back at the end of the storm, bright, white-gold like the light witch, and hopped into my belly. By this time the light witch was sitting in me and I could feel her wings on my back.

Now that I know her better, I am convinced I have written about Witch before as both the Toad Woman and my Jungian “golden shadow”. When I compare what I wrote about her then with what I see now, it’s even more obvious how damaged I was.

I am so glad to see her again! Still protecting and challenging me simultaneously, still my psychic sister, only this time, out in the open, inviting me to be, to shine, to shoot like a star. This time she is literally saving my life.