Curious Mind Grapes
Curious Mind Grapes is a podcast where we explore all the strange, wondrous, interconnected things in life. In each episode, sometimes with guests, we explore topics like psychology, health, energy medicine, science, pop culture, and so much more.
Curious Mind Grapes
Ancient Sites and Insights: A Spiritual Awakening in Scotland
Imagine standing among ancient stone circles, feeling an energy so palpable it reminds you of a Reiki treatment. Join us as Christine recounts her profound experiences visiting the sacred sites on and around the Isle of Mull, including the mesmerizing Loch Buie standing stones. You'll learn about the beauty and mystery these places hold and how they left a lasting physical and emotional impact on Christine.
We'll touch on themes of identity and the transformative power of travel, supported by concepts like encoded memory and past lives, with nods to the University of Virginia and noted psychiatrists Brian Weiss and Carl Jung. Plus, we share some compelling YA fictional book recommendations set in historical Scotland, perfect for anyone interested in getting a glimpse of the life of a traditional healer in the 14th Century. Don’t miss this episode filled with personal growth, spiritual insights, and the timeless allure of Scotland’s mystical landscapes!
Churches, abbeys and chapels, History: Iona’s timeless haven, https://thehazeltree.co.uk/2012/02/09/ionas-timeless-haven/
Voices Over the Water, a film by Guy Perotta and Jane Ferguson https://voicesoverthewater.com/
University of Virginia School of Medicine, Division of Perceptual Studies (including past lives), https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/
Juniper, Monica Furlong https://bookshop.org/p/books/juniper-monica-furlong/13010276
Wise Child, Monica Furlong https://bookshop.org/p/books/wise-child-monica-furlong/13010270?ean=9781635618136
Slavery in the West Highlands and Islands of Scotland https://www.communitylandscotland.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Report-ANNEX-2020-Plantation-slavery.pdf
Note on this episode's cover image: The Trinity Knot, an ancient Celtic symbol, used in the cover art image, represents birth, death, rebirth (the cycle of life).
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Feel free to share your questions or episode requests. Thank you for listening!
welcome to curious mind grapes with your hosts mary and christine so welcome back from being away for a while, and I can't wait to hear about your adventures in scotland. It's well, you've described it very briefly. To me it sounds very mysterious, so I'd love to hear more.
Christine:Yeah yeah, um, well, I I was telling you that I was not feeling well and it really took a lot out of me and it I I don't usually get sick for more than like a day or so and I was really tired and worn out. And one of the things that this trip had a lot of was going to very sacred ancient places and my Reiki master I actually asked her for a Reiki session, so I was getting distance work done. When I was there and she said are you giving yourself enough time after you go to these places to assimilate it and rest and decompress it and rest and decompress, Because even when it's positive, she's like when I go to really sacred places like that, if I don't give myself a little break afterwards, I tend to get sick like a head cold or something.
Mary:Interesting. Did she say why that happens to her?
Christine:I don't know. She said when the energy is really strong, it just if you don't give yourself enough time. It's like your system is trying, maybe trying to do too much. It probably just overloads it, so that I don't know if she's trying to say that it made her sick or just made her more susceptible because you're traveling and you're susceptible to maybe what's going around with your group or your people.
Mary:So what secret places did you visit?
Christine:I went to the Isle of Mull that was where we primarily were, and I started in Glasgow. We took a three hour train ride through the countryside highlands it was gorgeous Landed at Oban I never said it right and then took another hour long ferry over to Mull. That in itself was amazing. You feel like you're on the top of the world as you're crossing the water and you just see all these big mountainous hills in the distance. But Mull itself has a lot of sacred sites and then we took day trips off of Mull to see a few places.
Mary:So you had Isle of Mull as your home base and then you went out to other islands which ones kind of stood out or which other places that you visited kind of stood out.
Christine:The Isle of Mull had a lot of sacred sites on it itself. There's a place called I not gonna say it right lock lock buoy. It's these standing stones and they are. There's like nine granite stones and they're really old. They're from like I don't anywhere from like 1500 to 3000 bce like, and it was amazing it was in field. First of all, there's rhododendrons everywhere I think they're actually an invasive species but there's all these giant pink cotton ball looking things everywhere, the big hills, and then you have this field. And I will tell you, as we approached the field, I was like, oh, I'll probably feel something. We were still kind of far away, we were just looking at it and as I crossed the border into the field, all of a sudden my whole body felt like I was getting a Reiki treatment. Now that very swirly relaxed feeling you get, and it was profound. It was not my, I mean, I really could feel it.
Christine:Other people I was with did not have that feeling, but we all got different sensations. And it was interesting because one woman said, you know, I was really expecting something major, like how come I didn't feel like I was getting Reiki and I said, well, I think we all experienced what we were ready to experience. Like you have to remember, I actually practiced it as a practitioner and had been receiving regular Reiki for years. So that's how my body, I think, experienced it. It was ready to feel that energy in that way, but it was very, it felt very warm and positive. And it's funny, someone asked me like why are the stones there? And we asked our guide who was with us and she said they don't really know exactly why that group was there, but they think it was to help gather travelers that were moving across the land.
Mary:But gather them? In what sense?
Christine:um, you know, as you're walking across, it would kind of let you know, like this is where you are and this is where you can go.
Mary:That's how she explained it almost like a crossroads I've heard a different explanation for those ancient structures, which who knows if it's true, but it kind of makes sense to me that, just like our like, you were talking about Reiki and energy and acupuncture. Just like our bodies, people who are attuned to such things in ancient cultures believe there is energy running around the earth like meridians, just like in the human body, and that these standing stones are almost like acupuncture needles and that they were concentrating energy in particular spots, which makes sense. And that would explain why you felt something. And I can't imagine that they would go to such lengths to create these circular, very precisely circular pictures that are aligned with um, the seasons and different planetary events, just to be like you are here sign. It just doesn't make sense.
Christine:Yeah, I mean, I, I wish I had written down her exact words, but and then you know, obviously a lot of people think it has to do with a line of sight during like particular times of the year. But it makes more sense to me. And perhaps it looked like people were using it as a gathering place to move through, but they were gathering there because of the energy. I mean, I, I could feel it, it was, it was dramatic, obvious, it wasn't subtle at all, but it was also warm and really empowering. It wasn't scary.
Mary:Nice, nice.
Christine:Yeah, but the Isle of Mull is an interesting place. It's very beautiful like that, but it's also sort of hauntingly beautiful Isle of Mull, not Mole.
Mary:I thought you said Mole before. Oh, m-u-l-l Isle of Mull as in Martin Mull.
Christine:Yeah, yes, it was named after him. It's interesting so that there's it's large, so one side it almost has like a moon landscape. It looks very plain, but it's all these large mountains, but they're green and they sort of look velvety. And then other parts have more like scrub and it's more coastal, looking like scrubby kind of brushes or bushes, and it's very coastal. These beautiful beaches that are, you know, there's no one there, you just have it to yourself. Very coastal, these beautiful beaches that are, you know, there's no one there, you just have it to yourself.
Christine:Beauty is really subtle. So you think you're just looking at rocks and a beach and you get up close and there's these incredible pink and yellow flowers and but we were learning a lot. We had a local, a local guide, driving us around and what's interesting is that these bare mountains that just sort of looked like velvety green used to be covered in trees and they were taken down by the logging industry and you could see these stands of pine trees and he was saying those are the ones that aren't supposed to be here. They're cutting them down and they're planting new ones. And then when we drove in closer towards the areas where they weren't supposed to be there. It was really kind of weird, because the trees were in these perfect rows two feet apart, and it was what looked green on top, was completely dead underneath and like haunting desolate it was. Yeah, so the island has a complicated history and they're trying to bring it back to its natural beauty.
Mary:Yeah Well, in Ireland and Scotland, which were kind of the colonies of England during the Industrial Revolution and the wars, England used all of the timber from both places to fuel their industry and their war machines and just devastated the islands.
Christine:Yeah, I mean, as we drove past these little pockets of these pine trees, it felt sad to me, like these poor trees were growing but they weren't really living.
Mary:Right, they weren't meant for there. They're not yeah.
Christine:Mm-hmm. We stayed in this area where there were a couple of houses and we were, and it was on this farm, sort of like a farmland, and it was again really quiet, no one else around, really beautiful. It was right next to the edge of a lock and you know, there were chickens running around and these guinea hens and you could just you're just surrounded by nature and to me that's like perfect. I thought I was just going to feel so relaxed and at ease and it was pretty sunny most days. It was cool, it was refreshing. I just felt like I couldn't get grounded. It was interesting and I felt like the energy of the area was strange. It just you could tell that a lot had happened there and in fact I sent a picture of the view I had of the lock and all the grounds to somebody who is pretty intuitive and she never says stuff like this to me. But she looked at the picture and I expected a text back that said oh, how beautiful, lucky you. And she just wrote back a lot of people died there. And I said you mean like in Scotland or right here in front of where I'm looking? And she said both. She said I think you should do some clearing. There's a lot of energy there and I thought, oh, that kind of explains why I had a hard time, took me longer to get grounded.
Christine:So I did a little experiment. I sent that picture to my group of people who I take mediumship and psychic classes with and I just hey, give me a read on this picture. I'm not going to tell you anything about it and everybody, it was again a very. It looked completely deserted. It looked void of all human. You know, no humans were there and everyone wrote back. There used to be a lot of people living there. I can see them in huts, like maybe they were enslaved. It wasn't good. There were a lot of people there. There's sadness. Everyone got the same thing.
Mary:Enslaved. That's interesting. Yeah, I thought about Scottish history the Vikings weren't nice, that's true. Yes, that's true. And then I know the clearing of the highlands was really awful.
Christine:That was not on the islands as far as I know, but maybe it went out as far as the islands and people who were wealthy living on some of those islands were wealthy because of the slave trade that was going all the way to the Americas.
Mary:It was really interesting, still beautiful, still amazing, but people could sense the history there there are things people do to clear the land, to, to kind of I don't know, just uh, yeah, cleanse the energy and I don't want to sound like I'm bad talking, but mull is beautiful, the people there are amazing and there were many areas where we went to see um Duarte Castle.
Christine:That was amazing. The view was stunning. I didn't have any weird feelings but there were these little pockets of like. For someone who can sense that and feel that. It was a denseness, it was a heaviness that I couldn't quite explain, but everyone was sensing it in their own way. That I couldn't quite explain, but everyone was sensing it in their own way. We did go to Iona Iona from where we were on Mull the side. It was like we were spitting distance from Iona. We just took this tiny little ferry over to get to it and it was. It had a different vibe. It did feel lighter, more sparkly. It's just so beautiful the sheep that are everywhere. So we met up with a retreat group that had been there all week with John Newell.
Mary:Lucky you yeah.
Christine:And we ended up spending about a half a day with his group and him taking us around the island and it was really. We'd stop at different places and he would read poetry and give us prompts for mindfulness as we walked in silence. So at one point we met at this crossroads and he gave us the history of the crossroads and asked us to meditate on the crossroads in our life. It was a little more involved in that. I read this beautiful poem. It was really cool, but it had more of a lightness to it, even though one of the most notorious like Viking massacres occurred there, like one of the first ones. So there was an abbey and there was a convent and you know, things were destroyed, people were killed, but they rebuilt the abbey. They did not rebuild the convent, so the convent's in ruins, but that's where we started. It was really beautiful.
Mary:It is. I have been there and I felt such an affinity for that space and, yeah, I just almost could sense the nuns baking bread and making jam, like there was an aliveness to it, even though it was just ruins. Yeah, and from what I was told, so it sounds a little different. I know the vikings had been through there and all sorts of different folks, but, um, I was told that it was one of the king henry's who um came through because those were catholic.
Christine:I guess during the reformation he had smashed everything I mean maybe it happened more than once, probably I'm googling it to see if I'm. I guess during the Reformation he had smashed everything. I mean maybe it happened more than once, Probably I'm Googling it to see if I'm making it suffered numerous attacks, starting in 795.
Mary:Okay, there you go. Yeah, it was a recent one because they did rebuild it each time, and then, after that one, it wasn't until the 20th century that george mcleod and others came in and started right church.
Christine:The massacre of the martyrs on iona was the rate of 806, 806 uh, ad or ce, and where fleets of vikings the Abbey. So yeah, but the Iona was beautiful and one of the coolest things that we did is we walked. Well, it was a very arduous walk. It was. I felt like a mountain goat climbing through these hills, but it was wonderful.
Christine:And we made it up to this hill and we looked down and you look down into this valley and you just see this sparkling bay and you walk down and there's these beautiful, smooth stones everywhere and what we did there was we found a stone that represented what we wanted to let go of and give away. But he said, he said the ocean was the ocean. It was like God's forgetfulness not forgiveness but forgetfulness and I was really touched by that, the idea that you could put it in, and it was just forgotten.
Christine:And then you took another stone with you to represent where you were moving in the future. So as I was looking at the stones, I was just sort of asking, show me a stone for Mary. And then my eyes landed on a stone, so I picked one up for you. And I was surprised by what I picked up, because I wouldn't be what I would have, necessarily, if I'd used my intellect to try to pick a stone for you. So I'll be curious to see what you think of it.
Mary:Thank you so much.
Christine:Mary Stone. But it was. It was really. It was amazing and people even went back a second day they skipped other things just because you could. You could feel the energy on that island.
Mary:Yeah, so nurturing.
Christine:Yeah. So the places were just. I mean, the beauty was so overwhelming at times. I mean it just every day was just. I mean it's a cliche, but it was a feast like for your eyes, it really was amazing.
Mary:That little plug for a friend's new documentary that came out is on PBS all of June and now it's available to stream, I think, on Netflix and on DVD, if people use DVDs anymore and it's called Voices Over the Water and it's about Spanish expats and they filmed a lot of it in New York but as well as Scotland, so there's some beautiful filming. They talk about some of the history, the rougher history, yeah. The resilience and that strong identity that people have, yeah.
Christine:Scotland is not for the faint of heart. Like it's, it can be a harsh terrain too. Um, a couple of my friends went on a hike one afternoon supposed to be just like an easy hike, and she came back to the house just covered, like completely drenched. She was walking and she thought she was following the person in front of her and then she did I guess the peat you know get these sinkholes. And just right down she went, like right up to her waist. Goodness, like yeah, you really had to be wearing waterproof all the time. You had to have boots on all the time.
Mary:It just, you know, you had to be prepared for things yeah, yeah yeah yeah, so tell me a little bit more about some of the spiritual experiences that you had.
Christine:I don't know if this answers your question, but I think what I would say they're transformative. I think this trip was hard. I really loved it. I can't wait to go back. Hard, I really loved it. I can't wait to go back.
Christine:But it was a very challenging trip for a number of reasons. Just getting to Scotland took a whole day. Getting to the island took a whole another day of just traveling, being there. You had to have your wits about you being on that boat, getting over to Staffa and feeling like I was going to go overboard for a whole hour and just being able to make it through those things and come out on the other side. I think when you go through that, it shows you a strength that you have inside of you that may not realize you had. Yeah, I don't know. See, I have trouble. I have trouble even explaining what it felt like to be there.
Christine:And I did have. I did have an experience and this is what I'm not sure about sharing. I did have an experience where I felt like I had been there before. I don't know if I was connecting to just like I'm really. I'm actually learning now that I have more Scottish history in my family than I thought I did originally. I thought it was more Irish and then I went back and looked when I got home and realized it was a lot more Scottish. I don't know if I was picking up on that or if it was past life stuff, but I just had an eerie sense, on this one beach in particular, that I had been there before, like I could sense it. I could sense who I was, where I was, what was happening. I could sense being on the beach. I had this sense of being left behind on a beach and I could feel this person there, feel this person there. I could see her in this green dress that I had never seen before and it was like it was a dark green and it was sort of triangular shaped, the sleeves were trying, it was very plain and it had a little embroidery here.
Christine:And I just Googled like I don't know, medieval dresses, scotland. I didn't know what I was looking at and every time I found a picture that looked just like it. It kept saying Viking dress, viking dress. And I pictured myself on this beach and I knew that there had been a boat that had sailed away and I had chosen to stay and that I had ended up living with people who were not my people and when I did a little more of the research, that really happened. A lot Like these families and communities would take in women and children who, for whatever reason, didn't have theirs with them and this was really interesting.
Christine:I was doing a little like meditation on it, trying to remember like what I saw, and I kept seeing myself holding this I don't know eight inch diameter, 10 inch diameter, rusty ring. It looked like a really thin donut, but like rust colored and metal, and I knew it had something to do with the ship and the beach. I had no idea what it was, so I started Googling like rust colored rings and I found pictures that looked exactly like what I had seen and they're called mooring rings If you Google mooring rings. And what was interesting to me is when I was talking with my group, I kept telling them I feel so ungrounded and I literally was saying I feel untethered and unmoored and I don't know why I keep saying that I feel like I'm unmoored, I feel loose and unattached to things and it's very discombobulating.
Christine:When I found that dress and those pictures online and I knew that they were from the same I really had no knowledge of this before I went over and yeah, I think it was. I don't know what I was connecting to, but it was very strange and mystical and powerful. And it wasn't until I sort of made the connection of what I was seeing. Finally, in the last day, I kind of put it all together and then I started to feel grounded.
Mary:finally, on the last day I kind of put it all together and then I started to feel grounded. Okay, I was going to ask like usually when you have that kind of experience, there's something in your life right now that you need to address. And I was going to ask so, besides being untethered and moored, have you seen any other kind of long-term effects results from that?
Christine:Yeah, without going into too much detail about the other people, there was a group that I was associated with, that perfectly nice people that I was sort of lumped in with, but they weren't really my people. So it was that same idea, but they were taking care of me, they were good to me and I could exist with them, but they weren't really my people. And that was the same feeling I had. I think. Another thing that's about to happen in my life that, again, I don't want to say too much about, I'm about to enter into another group of people and I'm going to have to sort of hold my ground. And even within the group I was traveling with amazing people where we had, we had connection points, but they weren't like exact matches, like puzzle pieces, where I was like, oh, these are exactly wonderful people, I love these people. But I could see what there were differences and there were times where I felt like I kind of had to hold my ground and be me.
Mary:Yeah, that's that's so important. Yeah, yeah, thank you for sharing that. Oh well, we can go into more depth later, but there's um part of the psychiatry department at University of Virginia has been doing studies on past life past lives for the past 30 something years and they have a bit of empirical evidence. So not to mention all the other ancient traditions that have it as part of this is like scientific evidence. So just a little aside.
Christine:Yeah Well, I'm tapping into something I mean. To me it feels like a past life, I don't know, a collective, unconscious, my history, I mean. Whatever it is, there's something there.
Mary:We do have encoded memory in our genes. Yes, all of the above, none of the above. It could be anything. Yes, it could be all of those things or none of them.
Christine:Yeah, yeah, just just the things that come down from your ancestors into your yeah, like you said, encoded into your genes. But I don't know if it's important to know what it was. I think, like you said, when you have that experience it's connected. Every time I've had that experience it is connecting to something that's happening currently or something that I'm grappling with. It's coming up again and I know we both, like, have read Brian Weiss and Carl Jung.
Mary:I mean, it's all that same idea that there is this information out there. When we're in a place where we can receive it, it kind of doesn't matter what. It is resonating with you now and it's actually helping you to get to work on something that you currently need to work on.
Christine:Yeah, it's funny when I, when I kept seeing her on the beach, she was in that wonder woman power stance too, you know, with the hands on the hips and the legs like in, like a triangle.
Mary:I think you would enjoy reading there. They're probably not young adult, maybe even children's books, but there are two of them that I know of. There's Juniper and Wise Child, and they both take place in Scotland just around the time that the Inquisition starting to camp down on traditional healers and things and beautiful descriptions of the islands, and the main character is a woman who is an herbalist and healer and standing for what she believes in, despite the pressures coming from the church and kind of trying to clamp down on her type of practitioner who's actually like in those days she would have been the closest thing to the family practitioner in a village. Yeah, and they're really beautiful. They're from the perspective or they focus on this woman, juniper, and then um, a young girl that she takes on as an apprentice and the other one, wise child I wrote that down.
Christine:I'm gonna have to look into that. Yeah, they're beautiful. Um, yeah, so the experience was, um, yeah, I think it's funny.
Christine:I for we've talked about this for a long time I've wanted to go I guess, scotland or Ireland, I kept thinking and having more spiritual experience. And there's nothing wrong with the shop, eat, museum kind of trips you know, lay on a beach, those are good too. Yes, although I will say by the end of this trip I was ready to just shop, eat and lay on a beach, which is fine. So when I heard about this trip and I knew it was going to be a combination of getting to see things that I'd never seen sacred sites I've heard about being with people that are interested in having conversations about, like, well, what does it mean to have a soul? You know, like you don't get that on your usual like Trafalgar, 50 people on a bus trip and the fact that we were going to be with people that live there locally who could really get us around easily to these places, it just seemed like the perfect combination and I knew as soon as I heard it that I was going.
Christine:And there were a couple of times when it got really hard where I thought, when it got really hard where I thought, I just really want to get on a plane right now and go home Like I'm I'm I'm at day 11 now and I'm exhausted and um, but I knew I was supposed to be there, um, and I knew I was supposed to experience something. Well, it's funny, I kept thinking I was. This is really cheesy. I kept thinking I was going to meet somebody there. I don't mean like meet, like romantic, although possible and I did. I met wonderful people there. I met people that I'm still in touch with, but I think I met that person that I saw in the vision that's what I was going to say.
Mary:I met me Very important or her, or whoever she was.
Christine:That's who I met, and she had been waiting, waiting for me to get there.
Mary:That's really beautiful.
Christine:Thanks for listening to Curious Mind Graves. Check out our show notes for more information about the topics we discussed today.
