Bright Forest, photograph by Richard Loader
Bartgrinn's voice is written like this.
Nerida's words are written this way.
Were you living in Britain? Present-day Britain?
In the north.
Cold place!
Not all the time!
[Laughing] Hardy people.
Were you living in the mountains or the lowlands?
Hills.
Hills? Far from the sea?
Not far enough away to not be able to smell it.
We had to go down the hill and up another hill to see it, which was a bit of an effort at times. But the place itself isn’t that big.
True.
You might have been Celtic people — the original inhabitants of Britain (by my understanding).
We had a different understanding of that.
Oh, tell me more.
I was moving around a bit. I went where my skills and services were required or appreciated.
Mhmm. As a healer?
Yes.
Working with energy?
Energy, herbs, all sorts of potions, through touch and distribution of energy.
So I could build up some energy, then touch some other beings to transfer parts of it: could be another person, but could be a sheep or a cow as well.
Did people keep sheep and cows for meat and milk at that time?
You just went and got them when you needed them.
It wasn’t really a time when people were farming, as they did later.
Mhmm. But perhaps there was no need for that —
No.
— because there was plenty.
There was enough.
So you built up energy in yourself and then by touch you could give strength, or move energy that was stuck, in other beings.
Or add energy. Sometimes remove energy.
If you had to remove excess energy —
I had to build up energy first to protect myself.
Right. And then it drained through you to the earth?
Yes. Or to a rock or a tree. So I had to pass it on to a rock or pass it on to a tree to get rid of it.
Yes. Did you have to ask the rock or the tree permission to do so? Or did you just make an assessment as to whether that rock or tree was strong enough?
I am able to see energy, so I could find the right tree or rock. Or sometimes a river, to kind of, wash it off and let it go, so it could go somewhere else with the flow of the water.
Energy could be stored within a tree. Ancient trees photo by Richard Loader.
Sometimes I took weak energy and passed it on to a tree, so it could grow within the tree.
And later, if you needed some energy, you could get it back from there.
[Softly] Wonderful.
You might think that sounds strange —
— but that’s how it was done in that time.
It wasn’t that difficult. If you could see the energy and knew what to do with it, it was easy. But not everybody could do it. So people were grateful.
Yes. And they looked after you, for the work you did.
Yes. Sometimes I stayed there for a while, became part of the family or the village or whatever group it was.
So I wasn’t particularly part of a certain tribe.
You traveled between tribes easily.
I just went where my services were required.
Because I could see the energy, I knew where I was needed. It wasn’t me that was needed, it was my skills.
Yes. It doesn’t sound so strange to me, what you did, because I’ve met people from this place, the old people from here, who had similar skills, or have similar skills — on my path to being able to come and meet you, I think.
It is a very precious skill to have. I am pleased to hear that it is still around in some areas.
It takes very special skills to do this kind of work or healing or support, whatever you call it.
It is a solution for many things. It mostly works much quicker than the kind of medicines or poisons that people use now.
That’s right and more effectively —
— because it applies only to that part of the energy where it needs some filling up, removing, patching up or just to make the energy flow again as it’s supposed to.
Instead of poisoning the whole body to heal a tiny bit somewhere in the body.
And then you use this kind of medicine that, on a molecular basis, is not what people think it is — because this whole system has changed.
So they poison other parts in the body.
It makes no sense to me, to poison a part of the body to heal another part of the body.
It is wrong. Everybody should be able to understand that. It’s not that difficult to see.
Unfortunately, most of the things that are passed on are from that wrong system.
It certainly is dominating many parts of the world at the moment.
It shouldn’t.
[Pause]
I’m in a difficult situation personally —
How come?
Because the work that I get money to do is that kind of medicine.
But you use other things as well.
Most of the people in this profession don’t.
And there, as I told you before, there are some things that are good about it. It’s just not all of it. There are some things, if they get too ‘rotten’, that have to be removed. But one has to make sure that the energy starts flowing again after that.
So there are some good things about it.
But the energy is primary. The energy has to be able to lead the material.
Yes. Sometimes there are some, we would call it, mechanical blockages, that we can’t make the energy flow through. So making the energy flow around it can make it better, but it can’t be healed completely.
You might need to remove that mechanical blockage, whatever it’s called (could be a piece of bone somewhere, you know).
Or, I had people bitten by animals and part of the saliva of that animal attacked the tissue, so we had to cut that tissue out. And after that, make sure the energy flows again.
So you did surgical procedures, as well?
It wasn’t called surgery, but I did.
Did you use herbs to soothe the person so that they were not too frightened or feeling too much pain when you cut them?
Rosehips in the snow. Photo by John Price.
I did.
I used some other things as well, like chanting, which put them in a state of euphoric trance, so they wouldn’t feel that pain.
Or I use things that people now call hypnosis. I just made them concentrate on some things so that their spirit could go somewhere else while I did some things that were necessary. And then spirit could come back afterwards.
Well, we had issues. Sometimes the spirit refused to come back.
Uhuh. And the person died.
Of course.
But it was most often the case that this person would have died anyway, so all I could do was give it a try.
Sometimes, or plenty of times, I was very successful in applying my skills. But sometimes that spirit just had to go.
Yes. And were you a person who could help the spirit leave calmly and harmoniously and help to heal the family and friends behind? Was that another aspect of your skill?
People back then had a different understanding of life; of development of the spirit; of growing energy and expanding energies.
But I could help.
It was generally understood that spirit leaves the body as spirit needs to and will return as it needs to?
Yes. People had a different attitude, so to say. It made applying my skills easier and because it made it easier, I had higher success rates.
Of course. People cooperate in their healing. They have to, or it doesn’t work.
Well, they did believe in the things I was doing.
And I could manipulate, so to say, their energy.
So that would make it easier for me and it would make it easier for the person themselves.
Of course, there were people that were scared. Because it is a very sophisticated skill to be able to change one’s energy.