When Being a Witch Wasn’t Trendy: Reclaiming My Truth as a Healer and Clair-Somatic Woman

I remember being a child,
seeing the glow around people —
the energy that pulsed ,
like a silent song I could hear.

I thought everyone saw it.
I thought it was normal.
Like the sky being blue, or the ocean’s endless rhythm.

I remember mentioning it once,
how people glowed, how the air shifted with their feelings.
And the room changed.
The laughter came.
The whispers:
“witch,” “freak,” “weirdo.”

I remember feeling the weight of those words,
and slowly learning to hide what I saw.

I still saw the glow —
the subtle dance of energy most couldn’t name or feel.
I just stopped naming it.
I stopped explaining.
I let the energy speak for itself.
Because even then, I knew what I carried was real.
And I didn’t need to be believed to keep knowing.

The Word "Witch" and Its Wounds

The word witch carries a history far deeper than childhood taunts.
It is a word heavy with centuries of distortion,
a label once whispered to warn,
to condemn,
to erase.

Long before it was twisted into fear,
witch meant wise one.
It spoke of women and femmes who lived in rhythm with the Earth,
who listened to the wind,
who walked barefoot with the seasons and bled with the moon.
They were herbalists, midwives, bone keepers, dream walkers.
They spoke with the plants and sang to the water.
They knew how to tend life — and how to hold death.

Witches were the original scientists of the sacred.
They carried knowledge not found in books, but in bodies —
in the hush of intuition, in the quiet of soil, in the dreams that came before dawn.
They were the keepers of ancestral medicine,
the ones who remembered the codes of regeneration,
who knew how to bring babies into the world
and how to guide souls back to the stars.

They were the bone holders, the water bearers,
the ones who knew when the wind shifted before the trees did.
Their knowing didn’t come from outside authority —
it came from within.

And that — that inner authority —
was what made them dangerous
to systems built on control.

The rise of patriarchal religion and empire feared what could not be governed.
So the witch was turned into a threat.
A scapegoat.
A monster.

What had once been sacred became heresy.
What had once been medicine became madness.
The cauldron became sinister. The herbs became poison.
The wise woman became the enemy.

Stories were rewritten.
Power was severed from the body.
Women were taught to fear their own knowing.

And so came the burnings.
The drownings.
The silent erasures.
Whole bloodlines of medicine silenced by shame and suspicion.

To be called a witch meant you were powerful.
To be a witch meant you might not survive.

And yet — we did.

We survived in whispers and rituals,
in kitchen herbs and lullabies,
in the way our hands remembered how to touch the Earth.

The memory of the witch did not die.
It went underground.
It moved through dreams and stories,
waiting for the time when we would remember
that being in right relationship with life
is not a crime — it is a calling.

The Clair-Somatic Path: Feeling Truth Through the Body

Some of us came into the world reading frequency before we read words.
We felt truth in the subtle hum beneath conversations,
the shift in temperature when something unsaid entered the room,
the way the body whispered what language tried to hide.

This way of knowing — through sensation, resonance, energy — is called many things now.
But for me, it has always been simply the way I was made.
Clair-somatic.
An ancient intelligence pulsing through a child's skin.

I didn’t feel energy to impress people. I felt it because I couldn’t not feel it. Because something in me sought coherence — the resonance between what’s said and what’s real. I could sense when a smile didn’t match the frequency beneath it. I followed the subtle undercurrents not out of fear, but out of a relentless devotion to truth. To stay oriented in a world that often spun stories louder than it lived them.

And while some ridiculed this sensitivity —
calling it weird, too much,
naming me “witch” to shame or silence —
many of those same people came to me in quiet moments,
asking what I felt,
asking what I saw.

They trusted my knowing when it served them.
They feared it when it didn't.

This is often the way with embodied truth.
It disrupts what is convenient.
It can’t be tamed.
It speaks in currents rather than conclusions.

But the Earth never mocked me.
She mirrored me. The tides taught me how to listen.
The volcanoes, how to release.The wind, how to carry only what’s mine.

Over time, I’ve come to understand this path not as a burden,
but as a bridge.A sacred capacity to attune to what is real,
even — especially — when others forget.

Clair-somatic intelligence is ceremony in motion.
It is the altar of the body remembering how to feel.

It is not a gift to be hidden,
but a truth to be lived.

And for many of us, it is this very way of knowing that once got us called “witch.”

Reclaiming the Word “Witch” — Reclaiming Our Power

For years, I tried to hide this part of myself —
to make it small and safe for others.
To tuck it beneath palatable language, spiritual euphemisms, or silence altogether.
But I have come to embrace it fully.

To reclaim the word witch not as a curse,
but as a title of strength, wisdom, and connection.
Not for performance, not for trend,
but as a quiet, fierce owning of who I am.

And I am not alone in this.

Across the world, women and femmes are remembering:
We were the herbalists, the doulas, the midwives, the energy weavers, the bone holders.
We were the ones who listened to the land, who followed the moon,
who dreamed before we spoke —
whose knowing was felt through the body,
not proven through permission.

And it was that knowing — that inner authority —
that made us dangerous to systems built on control.

So the word witch was twisted —
turned into a threat,
a reason to punish, ridicule, or erase.

But now, the tide is turning.

This reclamation is more than personal.
It is ancestral. It is political.
It is collective medicine.

To reclaim the word witch today
is to say: I no longer apologize for my intuition.
I will not shrink to fit your comfort.
I will not pretend not to see what I see, know what I know, feel what I feel.
I will not dim the very light that makes me a lighthouse for others.

Being different was once a risk we couldn’t afford.
Now, it is the very source of our power.

And while the world has only recently started to romanticize the word witch,
for many of us, this has always been our truth —
buried perhaps but never extinguished.

To be a witch today is to walk in resilience and reverence.
To hold the Earth close.
To live in right relationship with the unseen.
To remember — fiercely and softly — who we really are.

Practice: Seeing the Glow — Remembering Your Light

If you, too, are remembering your own ways of knowing —
your inner witch, healer, or energetic self —
here’s a gentle practice to reconnect with your glow.

This is an invitation to see your energy again,
to remember what children often know before they’re told not to.

✧ Simple Glow-Seeing Practice ✧

1. Find a calm, dimly lit space
   Sit or stand near a neutral-colored wall.
   Soft evening light or candlelight works beautifully.

2. Stretch your hand out in front of you
   Let your palm face the wall, fingers slightly spread.
   Relax your eyes — not focusing on the hand, but just around it.

3. Soften your gaze
   Breathe slowly. Blink as little as possible.
   Let the edges of your fingers blur slightly.

4. Wait for the shimmer
   Over time, you may begin to notice a faint outline, a shimmer, or a field of light.
   It may appear as a glow, a haze, a color, or a transparent mist.

5. Feel into it
   Don’t force it. Let the energy show itself in its own way.
   You might feel a tingling, warmth, or subtle current.
   That’s your glow. That’s you.

With time, this becomes easier.
Your perception sharpens as your permission deepens.
We remember by doing.

Your glow has always been there —
not just to be seen,
but to be honored.

This is how we reclaim what was once forbidden.
By remembering what was always ours.
By daring to see again.
By owning the light we were never meant to forget.

With fierce grace,
Louise Botterill
Temple Keeper • Energetic Alchemist • Founder of Free Range Life