‘I have a hive of wild honeybees in my garden, I called them in on my song…that’s what I like to think, maybe they just came because they could smell the lemon balm, or maybe they knew that I needed them, anyway, they came of their own choice. They let me take care of them and to share just a little of their honey. I feel blessed.’
Clare Viner
My Approach
Story came to me first, via an academic route.
I studied literature and drama to degree level and later went on to write a book. This was a collection of folktales from the Blackdown and Quantocks hills in Somerset and Devon where I live. Several of the tales I completely reinterpreted, some I translated from Somerset dialect ( recorded in an out of print book) and some I wrote myself from place names and hunches.The stories came about following a series of Story walks that I led around the hills. The book felt like a conversation with the landscape, the stories rose up in me. In the same way, when I’m working with individuals, images and stories rise up.
For the last thirty years I have been dreaming, researching and spending time with the honeybee.
This tiny creature has so much to teach us about community, medicine, how to survive and how to thrive. Fifteen years after the honeybee first caught my attention ( and many lessons later) she guided me to a little known body of Western Shamanic teaching, www.sacredtrust.org. This work has helped in so many ways. It has helped me to understand more about deep listening and to trust my intuition. Key to the work is the Distaff line, the line of female ancestors, which goes back and back into prehistory. There is loving support there for all of us, yet our modern world encourages a disconnect, a cutting, a wound. This takes time, skill and medicine to heal.
I bring to my work the things that have helped me in my own healing journey; these are tools to reconnect.
Maybe this is why I love reflexology, because there is an actual physical connection. This seems to be one of the steps, though not always the first one.
It wasn’t until I immersed myself in Shamanic studies at The Sacred Trust, Dorset that I began to encounter the notion of Seership.
The Seer is the one who sees. I realised that I have always seen little fragments of stories in both places and people, ever since I was a child. If I give time to this seeing it grows. This, I am now coming to understand, is the development of seership. I seek to bring my seership to storytelling, reflexology and shamanic work. I’ve been doing storytelling as an oral tradition and healing work for the last twenty years.
Other things that have helped me to reconnect have been creative kinesiology, in which I am fully trained.
This involves muscle testing or dowsing to ‘track’ the issue and the best subtle medicine. This training brought Chinese traditions to my awareness. I also work with animal medicine cards, goddess cards, wild wood tarot cards and orchid healing essences.
And so back in a circle to the physical!
The placing of hands on feet, applying a firm pressure; the physical world that we are all a part of; the trees, the natural landscapes and other human beings have all healed me immeasurably. This is why I am now seeking to bring my work outside whenever possible and to gather communities of people to share this work and build relationships. In one to one work, it is my understanding that my relationship with clients is an important part of the work. Healing happens in the spaces between.
With this in mind I’m also seeking to develop dream work, pilgrimages and blessing ceremonies.