S4: E10 - The Original Mean Girls...The History of the Witch Wound

What if the reason you people please, hide your gifts, second-guess yourself or worry so much about what other people think… didn’t actually start with you?

In this powerful episode of the Witchy Woo Podcast, Kylie Anna takes you back through the history of the witch wound, exploring how fear, judgement and persecution shaped generations of women, and why so many of us still carry those echoes today. Blending historical events with her own experiences in the Akashic Records, Kylie explores the connection between the witch trials, the witch wound, the sister wound, people pleasing, self-doubt and the fear of being fully seen.

Whether you see the witch wound as soul memory, ancestral memory, collective memory or simply the stories passed from one generation to the next, this episode asks one life-changing question:

What if there was never anything wrong with you… what if you’ve simply been carrying fear that was never yours to keep?

✨ As a gift, you can also download this episode’s companion Akashic Healing Journey completely FREE. Together we’ll begin gently healing the witch wound, releasing old patterns of fear and remembering that we get to be the generation that stops handing fear to our daughters and starts handing them freedom instead.

If you’ve ever felt too much, too sensitive, too different or too scared to fully be yourself, I think this episode might just change the way you see your life forever.

🖤 Download your FREE Akashic Companion Journey here - https://kcpb.kartra.com/page/FREEGiftPrivatePodcastHealWitchWound

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Hello, hello my lovelies, and welcome back to the Witchy Wee podcast. So today's episode is going to be a little bit different to how the structure of season four has been so far. So throughout this season, we've been exploring the ways that the Witch Wind shows up in our everyday lives, and we've talked about how we stay small, how we carry everyone else's shit, how we are craving deeper connections, how we're feeling too sensitive or being told that we're too sensitive, being terrified of our own potential and never feeling as though we really fit in. And I know from the messages that I have been receiving, the gorgeous messages, which I love by the way, so please keep them coming. I know that so many of you have recognized yourselves in those conversations. But today I want to take a step back from the symptoms, if you like, for a little while and ask a bigger question of where did this actually all come from? Because if you've listened to the episode so far, you may have found yourself thinking, Well, yeah, I do people please, I do water down myself, I am frightened of being visible at times, and I have always felt different. But why? So why do so many women carry exactly the same fears? Why do so many of us apologize before we've even spoken? Why do so many women feel more comfortable making everyone else shine than allowing themselves to fully be seen? Why do we question our intuition before we question someone else's opinion? Why do we feel guilty for resting? Why do we worry about being judged by other women? And why do we sometimes feel embarrassed to admit that we're spiritual even to the people that we love the most? And perhaps the biggest question of all, why does any of this feel so familiar? And before we go any further I just want to say something really important that some of what I'm going to share today comes from recorded history, some of it comes from historical research that you can go away and look up and explore for yourself, research yourself. Some of it comes from my own experiences within the Akashic Records, you know, from patterns that I've witnessed over years of readings, and from the way that I've come to understand the witch wound through my own spiritual journey. So you don't have to believe everything that I believe, obviously. You never have to agree with me. I would 100% recommend forming your own opinion on it. My hope isn't that you'll leave this episode thinking exactly as I do, although we may have similar beliefs. My hope is simply that you leave asking bigger questions about yourself that will help you on your own personal journey because that really is where the transformation lies. It's not in someone handing you the answers, but becoming curious enough to start looking for them yourself. So I think one of the biggest misconceptions about the witch wound is that people believe it started during the witch trials. Now, of course, the witch trials were a huge contributing factor, you know, in Salem, Pendles, Scottish Wish Hunts, Matthew Hopkins of the East of England, women being burned at the stake. That's usually where our minds go to when we mention the witch wounds. But I actually think that it started much, much earlier than that. I think at the witch trials was simply the place where it became impossible to ignore. Because if we only look at the witch trials themselves, we're only looking at the final chapter of a much, much longer story. And it's a bit like reading the last page of a novel and wondering why everyone else is crying, because you've missed everything that has come before. So today I would like to take you back, not hundreds of years, but thousands of years, long before the word witch became something that a lot of people feared. Long before women were taught to hide their gifts or taught that healing is something suspicious, because there was a time when the women that we may now call witches weren't feared at all. They were completely needed, they were completely necessary, and actually they were revered for being amazing, as they were. You know, so imagine living in a tiny village thousands of years ago where there's no hospitals, there's no pharmacies, there's no ambulances, no internet, no Google, no prescriptions. If your baby's coming early, who'd you call? If your husband cuts his leg, you know, chopping wood for a fire, who knows which herbs will stop the bleeding? If your child was to have a fever, who knows what plants might help that fever? If someone in your family was to pass away, who sits with you through your grief? If you're struggling to conceive, who understands the rhythms of the body better than anyone else? If you're frightened, who listens? There was almost always somebody in that village. That wise woman, the healer, the herbalist, the midwife, the seer, the woman who knew the land and the seasons and the cycles and the plants. And she wasn't necessarily called a witch. That word often wouldn't have existed in the way that we understand it today anyway. She was just known as the woman that people went to when they needed help. And I think that's such an important distinction because we've inherited this image of witches that has been, I don't know if glamourised is the right word, but they have been made to be something they're not by the media and by things that have been handed down to us generationally. And I don't help that, I guess, sitting here in my pointy hat. I am leaning into that stereotype of the witch, but we imagine them being green and flying around on broomsticks and having a cackle and you know, having a wart and wonky teeth and all this sort of thing. But what they actually were were respected members of their community. They were deeply connected to nature, to practical healing, to birth, to death, and to the rhythms of the earth. And their knowledge wasn't considered to be unusual. It was essential for everyone who lived in that village. And I often wonder whether that's why so many women today feel drawn back to herbalism, to the moon, to rituals, to gardening, to foraging, to their intuition and working with the cycles of the seasons. Because perhaps it's because we're remembering something that's incredibly old and instinctive within us. And there's this romanticized version of the wise woman that we often see online, and you know, she's standing in the woods and she's gathering herbs and living peacefully within nature, making gorgeous remedies for the local village and spending her evenings gazing at the moon. I mean that sounds bloody perfect, if I'm honest. But whilst there would have been women who lived this gorgeous life, the reality was probably much more ordinary than that. These women weren't trying to be mystical, they were just simply surviving and being who they were. They understood plants because they had to. They had to understand which plants helped and which plants didn't because it was a case of survival, and they understood childbirth because generation after generation of women had passed that knowledge down. They knew which herbs soothed a cough, which roots eased pain, which leaves reduce swelling, and which plants could become incredibly dangerous if they were used incorrectly. And this knowledge simply came from observing and from experience and from mothers teaching their daughters and grandmothers teaching their granddaughters, and from women gathering together and sharing what worked. And I don't know about you, but there's something so beautiful about that, about knowledge being passed down from generation to generation, not just simply having a quick search of Google, not gaining our wisdom from something that's outside of us that we really know nothing about, but actually gaining our wisdom through our ancestors, and it being passed down through family lines, through villages, learned experiences and learned wisdom. And you know, knowledge wasn't hidden away inside universities, it wasn't locked behind qualifications or gatekeeped in any way, it lived within the communities, within these villages, within these beautiful women. And of course, this wasn't true everywhere in the world, and history is never kind of neat and tidy like we sometimes want it to be. Obviously, different cultures viewed healing and spirituality and women's roles in very different ways. But across many societies, women played an incredibly important part in caring for their communities, particularly when it came to birth, illness, and the passing on of knowledge. Then things began to change. And it wasn't because one person suddenly decided that they didn't like women that the power shifted gradually. Beliefs started to change and political systems changed and religious influence grew. Knowledge became centralized, and the people who hold the knowledge often become the people who hold power. And I think sometimes we imagine history moving in, you know, these huge dramatic leaps, but it usually doesn't. It's thousands of tiny decisions that kind of slowly start to reshape the world. And somewhere along the way, knowledge that had traditionally been held within communities, particularly by women, increasingly became something that institutions wanted to regulate. They wanted to oversee it, they wanted to define it. And as organized religion expanded across Europe, beliefs that had once existed alongside local traditions often came into conflict with these newer religious teachings. Practices that had been, you know, taken into everyday life for generations were sometimes reinterpreted through a very different lens, and healing became something to question. Folk practice became something that you couldn't trust, and old gods turned into false gods. Sacred places became dangerous places, and the women who carried those traditions found themselves viewed very differently than they had been before. Now I want to be really careful here because history is, of course, wonderfully complicated, and not every healer will have been accused of witchcraft, and not every accusation came from the church, and not every community rejected these women. In fact, many communities continued relying on local healers for centuries, but what we do begin to see is a gradual change in the way that certain kinds of knowledge, particularly knowledge held by women outside of formal structures, outside of the church, started to become viewed with suspicion. And once that suspicion entered the picture, fear is not very far behind. And I often think about fear because fear always has been one of the easiest ways to influence people. Leaders have been using fear for thousands of years, and if you can convince a community that something invisible is threatening them, you don't need very much evidence. You only need enough uncertainty for people to begin questioning other people. Imagine that your crops in the days gone by, imagine that your crops started to fail, your cows started to die unexpectedly, a baby became ill in the village, or a storm destroyed your harvest. Today we'd probably look for the scientific explanations of it, but hundreds of years ago people were trying to make sense of a world that they didn't fully understand. They didn't obviously have all of the knowledge, just like we don't have all of the knowledge now, but we do have slightly more than we did back in those days. And when life feels frightening, humans naturally look for reasons, and sometimes we also look for blame. And that's something we still do today. Whenever something frightening happens, our minds immediately begin searching for an explanation because uncertainty feels really uncomfortable for us. And imagine living in a world where disease wasn't understood and drought could destroy an entire community. Obviously infant mortality was really heartbreakingly common. And harsh winters would mean people just didn't survive because they couldn't keep warm enough. And fear was part of everyday life. And when fear becomes part of everyday life, people become far more vulnerable to stories that promise certainty, even if there is no evidence there to back it up. And that's one of the reasons that I think the witch trials can only really be understood within the world that they happened in, because it's so easy for us sitting comfortably hundreds of years later to think how could they possibly have believed that? But it makes me wonder if we'd have grown up in exactly the same world as they did, would we have thought any differently? And I think the answer's probably not. Would we have simply believed what everyone else around us believed too? And I think that can be quite a humbling thought when we put ourselves properly into their shoes, because we often imagine that we'd have been the brave one, you know, the one standing up for the accused. And it would be wonderful to think of ourselves in that way, the you know, as the one that did speak out, the one refusing to join in. And maybe some of us would have. I hope that some of us would have. But history teaches us that most ordinary people don't see themselves as the villain. They believe they're doing the right thing according to the world that they're living in, and I think that's why this story matters so much, because it reminds us that fear doesn't just change individuals, it changes entire communities and friendships within those communities, it changes relationships within families, and changes what people feel safe in saying out loud. And perhaps that's the first real seed of what many of us now call the witch wound. It's not just persecution, but learning that being different could be dangerous, and that standing apart from the crowd did carry consequences, and that sometimes the safest thing to do is to hide. And I think this is the part of the story that affects me personally the most. It's not necessarily the trials themselves, although of course they were absolutely horrific and heartbreaking for everyone involved, but it's what had happened long before anybody reached a courtroom. Because, you know, when we think about it, a woman didn't just wake up one morning, get accused of witchcraft, and suddenly find herself standing trial. There was an entire atmosphere that had to exist before anything got to that point, where the suspicion around predominantly women became normal and where neighbours would watch one another and where gossip carried an enormous weight. So being different was really dangerous, and speaking too confidently could make other people uncomfortable. You know, where knowing too much could make people suspicious of you, and being outspoken or unconventional or simply living outside what was considered to be normal might be enough for people to begin whispering about you. And those whispers were really powerful at that time because they didn't need the evidence, they didn't need the proof, they just needed enough people repeating them. And I've often wondered what it must be like to be one of those women, not just during the trial, but before. Because imagine waking up every morning knowing that you really could not be yourself. Where every one of your words had to be chosen really carefully, you had to wonder who was listening to you, who might, you know, misunderstand or misinterpret something that you're saying, wondering whether any herbal remedy that you had always made for people was now suddenly going to be viewed as something that was sinister and evil, and wondering whether helping somebody today might actually put you in danger tomorrow. Imagine looking at your children and thinking, I need to survive. What would you do? Would you keep speaking your truth? Or would you become quieter? Would you keep sharing your gifts, or would you decide that they were safer hidden within? Would you trust everyone? Or would you become incredibly careful about what you let close and who you let close? Because I know what I would probably do. I'd survive. And I don't say that proudly. I do say it honestly because I, you know, as I said earlier, I would hope to be that person that would stand up for others, that would stand up for change and try to create fairness. But actually, if my family were being put at risk, I would choose survival, I think, for my family. And I think a lot of us would. And we'd hide parts of ourselves, and we'd learn what's acceptable to show and what's not, and we'd become experts at just kind of blending into the background. Because survival has always been one of everyone's greatest instincts. Of course, we want to survive, and this is where my own beliefs kind of start to come in. Because when I work in the Akashic Records, one of the things that strikes me over and over again isn't the dramatic lifetimes, although, of course, they can affect us, they can affect me as the reader, they can affect the client in a number of ways because they really make you think. But sometimes it's in the silence. The women that I meet in the records so often show me lives where they just stopped. They stopped speaking, they stopped sharing, they stopped trusting, they stopped living, they continued to raise their families, they continued to do what they needed to do, but they packed away all of the deepest parts of themselves, the most gorgeous parts of themselves, because it no longer felt safe to bring them into the light. And I think that's really heartbreaking. Because whilst not every woman experienced persecution, so many Women experience self-abandonment, and it is nothing to do with being weak. It's because they were wise enough to survive and to look after their family to make sure their family survived. And that's a really different way of looking at it because sometimes we criticize ourselves for staying quiet, you know, for the people pleasing that we do, for worrying what everyone else thinks and for struggling to put ourselves first. But what if those weren't flaws? They were just incredibly intelligent survival strategies at that time. And these strategies made perfect sense at that time. But we still hold these imprints within us and they no longer serve us today. And I often imagine a woman hundreds of years ago telling her daughter don't draw attention to yourself, don't be too clever, don't let people know everything, be careful who you trust and keep your head down. Now imagine that daughter grows up and tells her daughter, and she tells her daughter, and she tells hers, and so it goes on generation after generation, whether that's through words, through behavior, through the nervous system, or as I believe, sometimes through the soul itself. The messages continue. Stay safe, don't stand out. Now I'm not saying that every anxious thought we have today comes directly from the witch trials, because humans are obviously very complex with lots of different things, and our childhood shape us, our relationship shape us, our trauma shape us, our culture shapes us, life itself shapes us. But I do think that history leaves echoes, whether that is through our ancestral lineage or whether that is through our soul's lineage, whether we have past lives where we have experienced being persecuted ourselves or the fear of being persecuted, or whether the generations before us have passed down this knowledge to try and keep us safe? The echoes are still there, still carried within families, within communities, within cultures, within nervous systems and within our soul. And I think they're still very much prevalent within a lot of us. Because otherwise, why are so many women who've never met each other saying exactly the same things over and over again? I'm scared to be visible, I don't trust other women, I worry what people think, I don't want to outshine anyone, I know I'm meant to do something bigger, but something keeps holding me back. I have heard those sentences so many times, hundreds of times, and eventually I had to stop asking what's wrong with these women. Not that I would ever ask myself that anyway, but looking from a point of view where we are going into a reading, we are trying to look at the background of somebody, but it became so obvious that this isn't an individual learning that has to take place, this isn't an individual trauma that is making women feel this way, it's what happened to us as a society because they're they're two very different questions, and that's where the healing begins. And perhaps that's why I don't see the witch wound as something that we need to fear, I see it as something that we need to understand because we will get to understand ourselves better, and the moment we understand it, we stop blaming ourselves for it. And if you've listened to this episode and found yourself thinking, oh my goodness, that's me. I don't want you to leave feeling hopeless. It's quite the opposite, because if the witch wound was learned, it can also be unlearned. And it doesn't happen overnight, it doesn't happen by pretending that it doesn't exist or by forcing yourself to suddenly become fearless, you know. But gently and compassionately and patiently, and by taking one choice at a time. Every single time you speak your truth instead of swallowing it down, you're healing the witch wound not just for yourself, but for the collective. Every time that you trust your intuition instead of asking five other people what they think first, you're healing the witch wound. Every time that you allow yourself to be seen exactly as you are, instead of presenting the version of you that you think everybody else will approve of, you're healing the witch wound. Every time you celebrate another woman's success instead of comparing yourself to her, you're healing the sister wound. Every time you choose collaboration over competition, again you're healing. Every time you wear the clothes that you love or you decorate your home in a way that makes your soul feel happy when you admit that you're fascinated by tarot and crystals and astrology, the Akashic records and all the gorgeousness, instead of worrying about what somebody else thinks or whether they think that you're weird, you're healing. Every single one of those moments sends completely different message to your mind, to your body, and to your soul. And the message that you are sending is it's safe now. I think those three words are some of the most powerful words that any woman can hear, especially from herself. To know that it's safe now. It's safe to speak, it's safe to shine, it's safe to take up space, to trust yourself, to be visible, to be joyful, to succeed, to be different, to feel safe to belong. And one of the biggest reasons that I wanted to create this podcast wasn't because I wanted to talk about witches as much as I love talking about witches and all things magical, it was because I wanted women to stop believing that there was something wrong with them. Because there isn't. So many women have spent their entire lives asking themselves what's wrong with me. When in actual fact, instead ask yourself what happened that made me believe I wasn't safe to be myself. And of course, again, there will be things in this lifetime that have contributed to that. There will be things in past lifetimes, there will be things that have been handed down through your ancestral lineage, but there is a complete difference there in those two questions. One question is encouraging shame, and the other is bringing compassion into it. One assumes that you are broken, whereas the other assumes that you've adapted, and I would much rather live in a world where women looked at themselves with curiosity instead of criticism. Where we stopped asking why am I like this with frustration and started asking it with a kindness to ourselves. Because I believe that the woman who people pleases, the woman who stays small, who is scared of her own potential, who feels that they are too sensitive, who feels as though they've never quite fitted in, they're all the same woman. And she's just been trying to survive in different ways. And perhaps that's what this entire season has really been about. It's not fixing ourselves, but it's remembering ourselves. Remembering that before the fear, before the mask, before the people pleasing and the self-doubt, there was simply a woman who knew exactly who she was. And she has never disappeared. And she's waiting for you to remember that you are never too much, never too sensitive or too loud or too ambitious or too spiritual or too different, all of the the twos. She was simply living in a world that taught her that those parts of herself weren't safe. And perhaps our job isn't to become someone new, but to show her that the world has changed. To simply say to her that she doesn't have to hide anymore. Because history is of course incredibly important, but we don't have to keep living it. We get to write what comes next. We get to become the generation that stops handing fear to our daughters and starts handing them freedom instead. And as I say that I'm getting goosebumps because I feel it so deeply within my soul. You know, we get to become the women who celebrate one another instead of trying to compete against one another, who speak up instead of shrinking, who trust ourselves instead of constantly looking outside of ourselves for someone else's permission, who remember that being different has never been the problem. And perhaps that's how the witch wound finally begins to heal. Not through one huge movement, but through millions of tiny acts of courage that are carried out by ordinary women all across the world who decide that the cycle ends with them. So thank you so much for joining me for today's episode, my lovelies. I know this one has been a little different, but I really hope that it's given you something to think about and perhaps even helped you to understand yourself through a slightly kinder lens. And as always, I have created an accompanying Akashic companion journey, and that sits alongside this episode, and it is put into our Patreon community as bonus content because sometimes our minds understand something before our souls truly believe it. And in this journey, we'll travel together into the Akashic Records to begin releasing those echoes of the witch wound, reclaiming the parts of you that have spent so long hidden, and reminding every part of your being that it's safe for you to be seen, safe for you to trust and safe for you to shine. So until the next time my lovelies, I'll speak to you soon.