June arrived with a different rhythm.

Many of us are sitting in what I've been calling "The In Between" on June's Triggers and Spiritual Medicine podcast episode. Ya know that sacred, often uncomfortable space between what was and what is becoming. The door behind you has closed. The one ahead hasn't fully opened yet. It is where certainty dissolves, identities shift and the future stays quiet.

Our culture wants us to skip this part. We want quick answers. Immediate healing. Constant forward motion, but nature doesn't work that way. Seeds germinate in the dark before they ever break through. The caterpillar fully dissolves before the butterfly exists. Grief, transformation, healing... they all have their own timing. They don't negotiate with our calendars.

I've been witnessing this theme everywhere lately, AND I have been personally experiencing this myself.

In much of my recent Substack writing, I've been sitting with what happens when we lose the capacity to truly hold space for ourselves and for one another. And yet... some of the deepest healing I've ever witnessed has come not from forcing an outcome, but from learning to stay with what is still unfolding.

The invitation this month is not to rush.

The Triggers And Spiritual Medicine podcast can be found on most streaming platforms or YouTube or go to https://triggersandspiritualmedicine.buzzsprout.com/

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With care,
Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author, Podcast Host of Triggers And Spiritual Medicine, Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive, Activist, Trauma & Abuse Educator, Spiritual Teacher and Guide, Jikiden Reiki Teacher, End of Life Care Guide, Crone Witch, Ceremonialist, Spiritual Medium, Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator, Plant Medicine Lover, Mother, Grandmother

Addressing Root Issues and Reclaiming Ancestral Power

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There are moments when violence breaks through the surface and refuses to be explained away.

From the killing in Belfast to the racist retaliation that followed set the stage for the fear moving through communities like smoke through a hallway.

We are in one of those moments now.

That conversation... the one that assigns blame cleanly, draws borders around who belongs and who doesn’t, and calls that analysis... is already happening everywhere. It can happen without me.

What I want to do is go deeper, because underneath what is unfolding in Ireland right now... underneath the headlines and the fear and the hardening of lines... something older is being asked about. It the midst of survival, something that has been missing for a very long time.

What Was Taken

Before the Church came to Ireland, there were other ways of understanding power.

Land was relationship. It breathed, it remembered, it chose.

Women were sovereigns, seers, keepers of fire, shapeshifters, warriors, poets, druids, midwives, and crones. They held the threshold between worlds. Their bodies were sacred. This is history that is old, documented, and encoded in the land itself.

And then the Church arrived. With it came something that would reshape Ireland at its root... slowly, thoroughly, over centuries. The systematic replacement of a feminine cosmology with a theology of obedience, silence, and shame.

The Magdalene Laundries were the logical destination of that road.

Let me be clear about what they were, because too many people still look away from historical hard truths such as this.

Beginning in the 1700s and operating continuously through 1996, the Magdalene Laundries were Church-run institutions where women and girls were confined... often without trial, consent, nor any legal process at all. They were sent there by families, priests, or the state, for the crimes of being unmarried and pregnant, of being disobedient, of being considered too pretty and too tempting, of being orphaned, of surviving sexual abuse. Once inside, they worked without pay in industrial laundries, subject to physical punishment, stripped of their names, forbidden from speaking of their children. Babies who survived were trafficked for money under the guise of adoption while telling these mothers their babies died. Those who died were buried in unmarked mass graves on the grounds.

Sinéad O’Connor spent her life trying to make Ireland hear this. In 1992, when she tore a photograph of Pope John Paul II on live television and said fight the real enemy, the world recoiled. They called her unstable. They called her blasphemous. They ended her career for it.

Yet, She was telling the truth all along.

She had survived the Church’s institutions herself. She knew what they did to girls. She was screaming it into a microphone and the world chose to hear noise instead of testimony.

She was right. She died knowing she was right. Ireland is still learning to say it plainly.

The last Magdalene Laundry closed in 1996... the same year the Spice Girls released their first single, the same year the internet was becoming household. Women survived those walls into the world we are living in right now.

This is the wound that remains open. This is the severing that has been named in fragments but never fully enough to heal.

And it connects directly to what we are watching now here in the USA, in the UK and in Ireland ... the rise of male violence, xenophobia, and fear dressed up as cultural preservation. When the feminine is exiled from a culture’s understanding of power, domination rises to fill the space. History has shown this to be true … every time without exception.

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What the Diaspora Carried Away

Here is the part that is harder to say.

The Irish diaspora... my people, many of your people... carried the colonized Ireland with them when they left. The old Ireland stayed behind in the land.

By the time the great waves of emigration happened in the 1800s, Ireland had already been colonized twice. Once by Britain. Once by Rome.

What got exported was the Ireland of the Church... the one that had already replaced feminine wisdom with feminine shame, already traded sovereignty for survival, already learned to police its own women before anyone else had to. Brigid’s sacred flame and the Morrígan’s fierce witness stayed shackled in the ground.

And so the diaspora arrived in new lands carrying a wound they didn’t know was a wound.

They worked hard. They built communities. They survived, and then... too many of them... they climbed. It is in the climbing, they forgot what it felt like to be the ones at the bottom of someone else’s boot.

The Irish-American who votes to close the border.

The one who carries Celtic knotwork on their skin and contempt for refugees in their chest.

The one who lights a candle to Saint Brigid in February and supports the systems that would have locked their own great-grandmother in a laundry for the crime of being unmarried and poor.

The one who boasts about Irish pride and then goes home to beat his wife and children into submission.

There is a particular kind of grief I feel weighted in my chest watching people enact the violence done to their own ancestors... because they never learned what their ancestors actually endured, never sat with the goddesses who remembered it, never let the land of their origin teach them what it knows about power and belonging and repair.

Forgetting is a choice, and choices have consequences. Consequences have victims.

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The Wise Ones Who Remember

They are still here as a living intelligence. They are the mirrors. They are those who calls to account. They are the ancient, embodied, and entirely unwilling to be reduced to museum pieces or tourism or aesthetic.

Let me call them in.

Cailleach... the one who will not be buried

She is the oldest. She is the pre-Christian pre-memory as most people know her.

She is the storm, winter and endurance and the deep knowing that comes only through surviving what should have killed you.

The Church could not erase her. She lives in the mountains, in the storms, in the cold that does not apologize for itself. She is what remains when everything soft and palatable has been stripped away.

She is calling to every Irish woman who was taught her power was dangerous.

It was. It is. AND Good.

She is calling to the diaspora... do you know how old you are? Do you know what survived in your blood that your forgetting has not yet managed to kill?

Ériu... land as living relationship

Ériu is Ireland. The land carries her name.

What she teaches is this:

· belonging is consented relationship.

· Reciprocity.

· The willingness to be changed by the place and the people you live among.

· It requires something from you. It asks you to show up with your whole self and stay accountable to the ground beneath your feet.

When that understanding is lost... when land becomes territory and people become categories and place becomes something to extract from rather than be in relationship with... you get what we are watching now.

Ériu asks Ireland, and the diaspora, and every settler people everywhere:

What does it mean to belong somewhere without needing to own it? Without needing to exclude someone else to prove it?

Queen Medb... sovereignty without an enemy

Medb does not wait to be granted power. She does not negotiate from a position of apology. She stands in her own worth and she tests the worth of those around her. She challenges kings and patriarchal structures without fear.

Her lesson for this moment is uncomfortable:

· Sovereignty that requires an enemy is fear dressed in a crown.

The rise of xenophobia in Ireland... the scapegoating of migrants and refugees for economic precarity that was created by entirely different forces... this is what happens when a people have been severed from a true understanding of their own power.

Right relationship with anyone else requires knowing who you are without needing someone beneath you.

Medb knew this.

Ireland is being asked to remember it.

What power lives in you that has been waiting for an enemy to justify itself? What would it do if it turned inward instead?

The Morrígan... truth at the threshold

She arrives at the moments when a society most wants to look away. She holds your face toward what is real in that uncomfortable truth.

She is a figure of clarity at the edge of consequence. She reveals what is already happening that we have agreed to leave unnamed.

So let her speak now:

The violence in Ireland is a symptom of a culture that has yet to fully reckon with what was done to its women, to its land, to its own capacity for tenderness and sovereignty. It is the fruit of the colonial wound that was never truly tended. It is what unhealed trauma does when it has nowhere to go but outward.

The Morrígan says this in service of what comes next.

She knows: you can only repair what you are willing to see.

Grace O’Malley... leadership through relationship

Grace lived in a world of colonial pressure, betrayal, and constant negotiation. Her survival depended not on purity or isolation but on her ability to build strategic relationship across difference.

She sailed to meet Queen Elizabeth I and spoke to her as an equal. She did not harden her borders. She navigated them with intelligence and nerve.

In a moment when fear is being used to justify walls and exclusions and the reduction of complex human beings into threats... Grace offers a different question:

Who do we need to understand more deeply in order to survive together?

Leadership that is rooted in connection rather than control. Imagine it.

Brigid... the fire that repairs

Brigid’s flame was kept burning at Kildare for centuries. The Church absorbed her feast day and called her a saint but could not fully contain what she carries.

She is the poet who restores language after violence.

She is the healer who moves through truth on the way to comfort, every time, because she knows there is no other path.

She is the smith, the one who works with fire and patience to reshape what has been broken into something that can hold again.

She is what comes after the Morrígan’s reckoning.

She asks: what does repair require of us that reaction never will?

Sheela na Gig... the body that would not be shamed

And then there is her. The Sheela carved into the stone walls of Irish churches. Explicit and unapologetic with legs open, displaying herself, meeting your eyes without flinching.

The Church built itself on top of her and could not fully erase her despite their efforts.

She sat above doorways for centuries. Many were removed and hidden. Some were labeled obscene. Some were buried, but she survived in stone, in walls and in the bodies of women who were told their flesh was sin and somehow, somehow, did not fully believe it.

The Magdalene Laundries were built to contain what the Sheela na Gig embodied.

The Church lost.

She is still here.

She is the reminder carved in stone that there was a time in Ireland when a woman’s body was a sacred, sovereign, generative power.

She asks for your remembering.

What was stripped from your body in the name of shame belongs to you still. It has always been yours. Do you remember what your body was before they taught you to apologize for it? Claim it.

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The Invocation

Imagine it.

A world where the daughters of the diaspora know these grandmothers, matriarchs, queens, and wild ones by name as medicine, inheritance, and as the living intelligence of what survived.

A world where Irish women claim the Morrígan’s fierce clarity and Medb’s sovereignty and the Cailleach’s endurance as birthright.

A world where the men of Ireland and the diaspora are raised in cultures that understand power as relationship rather than domination... because the women around them embody something older and truer than what the Church replaced it with.

A world where the Sheela na Gig looks down from church walls and reminds every person who passes beneath her:

Your body is your sovereignty. Your power is your inheritance. You come from something older than the story that tried to break you.

This is a call to deep remembering that is ancient, urgent, and rooted in the ground beneath your feet.

The Cailleach is the oldest grandmother. She has been waiting for us to show up.

She is still waiting.

She is patient in the way of stone and winter and the long knowing that what is true survives everything thrown against it.

Come home to what was never fully taken.

Invoke it. Embody it. Pass it forward.

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Begin Here

Start small. Start today. Begin by lighting a candle. Speak one of their names out loud who you feel most drawn to. Cailleach. Brigid. The Morrigan. Ériu. Medb. Grace. Sheela.

Say it like you mean it because you do. Because something in your body already knows who you are calling.

And then … tell me. Come into the comments and share.

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• Who are the old ones in your lineage?

• What was stripped from your grandmothers that you are ready to reclaim?

• What name landed in your chest when you read this?

This is how the remembering spreads. One woman naming what was taken. One diaspora daughter speaking the old ones back into the room. One body refusing to carry shame that was never hers to begin with.

If this land is calling you more deeply … if you feel Ireland pulling at something in you that this place just named … I go every year. I bring a very small intimate group into the landscapes, the mythology, the medicine of it. We walk where these old ones walked. We remember together on the ground where the remembering is oldest.

Come. The grandmothers are waiting.

Book a free alignment call here to see if this is for you.

Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney is based just outside of Boston, Massachusetts in the USA.

She is a published author, multi-generational multidisciplinary healer and intuitive, Jikiden Reiki teacher, spiritual medium, seer, ceremonialist, domestic abuse and trauma educator, activist, mother, and grandmother. Her work centers on addressing root issues and reclaiming ancestral power. She leads annual pilgrimages to Ireland and hosts the podcast Triggers in Spiritual Medicine

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Have you noticed yet? Children are being taken. Women are being erased from law, from medicine, from safety. The Equal Rights Amendment... the constitutional guarantee of equal rights for women... was buried not just by this administration, but by the last one too. Both parties looked at the possibility of women being legally equal human beings and said... not yet. Not ever, if we can help it. That spoke volumes that reverberates ripples through today.

According to the FBI, domestic violence homicides more than doubled between 2019 and 2024... from 1,065 to 2,339. That is MORE THAN DOUBLE the homicides of women in five years. Yet, we are asked to be polite patient good obedient little girls. We are told to trust the process, and work within a system that was never designed to protect us.

In Massachusetts... right here, in our own backyard... the Karen Read lawsuit has blown open what many of us already knew in our bodies. Text messages between former Massachusetts State Police Trooper Michael Proctor and former Canton Police Sergeant Sean Goode revealing racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic, spanning years are now part of the public record. In one exchange, responding to a car accident involving a Black motorist, Proctor wrote to Goode: “I wouldn’t rush if you’re working. Let them die.” This is the culture inside law enforcement and systems our culture was built upon. This is not one bad actor, but what was retained, protected, and hidden from the public until one woman refused to stop fighting and acquired the necessary funds to fight.

And now this...

On May 20, 2026, Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense issued a memorandum slashing the military’s list of recognized religions from over 200 faith traditions down to 31. Faith traditions such as Pagans, Wiccans, Druids, Asatru, Heathens, Shamans, Spiritualists, Humanists, Unitarian Universalists... every earth-based spiritual tradition, every minority faith outside the narrow corridor of acceptable belief... removed from protection. The military will now recognize major Christian denominations, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism. Everyone else... including the traditions many of us have built our lives and our healing practices inside of... does NOT exist as far as the United States government is concerned.

This is a declaration of intent. This is a cascade of a snowball gathering mass and speed and it is heading straight for everything we said we loved.

And where is the spiritual community?

While some are addressing the real life reality we are witnessing, and using spiritual practices and teachings to address these issues, MOST are posting sunsets or selling high end courses on abundance while underdelivering and bankrupting their students. Meanwhile lighting candles in costumes calling in the light and love while ignoring the shadow. They are reminding you that your vibration creates your reality not the systemic oppression or poverty or other life’s limitations.

I need you to hear me when I say this... that silence is not neutrality nor peace nor is it spiritual. That silence is complicity dressed in linen, smelling like palo santo, charging hundreds of dollars an hour to help you manifest your best life while the world is on fire outside the window you look at every day. Honestly, I’m done being polite about it.

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The Morrígan Was Never the Monster. They Were.

Long before Christianity arrived on Irish shores, before the priests came with their crosses and their need to own and name and condemn... SHE was already there.

The Morrígan. She who was the sovereignty warrior goddess of prophecy, shape shifter, crow, washer at the ford. She who appears at the threshold between life and death and asks you the question you have been avoiding your entire life... “are you actually living, or are you just surviving?”

She was not worshipped from a safe distance. She was met at the threshold where Kings sought her counsel before battle and foretold the outcomes of war. She held the prophecy and fate over the most powerful men of her time, and she answered to none of them.

Her home was Oweynagat... the Cave of the Cats at the center of Rathcroghan in County Roscommon Ireland. A doorway to the underworld, a birth canal to the womb of the great mother, and a place of power so old it predates recorded history. So when the church arrived, they called it the gateway to hell.

Should we be surprised? Really, of course they took something sacred and demonized it.

Because when the Church came to Ireland it could not afford for people to keep going to the cave, worshiping a woman meeting her in the dark to emerge more sovereign, whole, free. A people who knows their own sovereignty, power, and freedom cannot be controlled nor taxed into submission nor shamed into obedience. Folks cannot be made to believe that their only path to God runs through a man in a robe who answers to Rome. So, they made the Morrígan evil.

They took the goddess of sovereignty... of freedom, of fierce protective love, of the kind of truth-telling that costs you something... and they turned her into something to fear to flee or something that waits in the dark to devour you.

But here is what they could not erase, no matter how many centuries they tried... The Morrígan was never theirs to reframe.

The Morrígan was not feared because she was evil. She was feared because she was ungovernable, because she represented the sovereignty not of kings and conquerors but of all people... women, the dispossessed, the ones the empire had no use for. She showed up at the edges of battle not to glorify war but to witness it honestly. It is that kind of witness that is the most dangerous thing in the world to a system that depends on your looking away.

She is not gone. She was never gone. She is here because we called her, and asked for us to lead us. And if we are honest... because the moment called her too.

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The Luigis Are Already Here.

I am not writing this from the outside. I have lived every single thing named in this article. The violence. The courtrooms. The unlawful incarceration. The system that promised protection and delivered harm. I write this as a survivor, as a mother of three daughters of color, as a grandmother with granddaughters coming into this world... and as a healer who has spent more than thirty years sitting with others in the rubble of the same systems. I know what this costs. I know what silence costs more.

There is a particular kind of person who has been pushed past the edge of what a human being can absorb. Who has tried every channel. Filed every form. Made every phone call. Sat in every waiting room. Been told no, been told wait, been told you don’t qualify, been told that’s not how it works, been told to be patient, be reasonable, be grateful, be quiet. And then one day they are not quiet anymore.

We have been calling them Luigis... a shorthand for the moment when ordinary people decide that the systems designed to protect them have failed so completely, so deliberately, so cruelly, that something else is required that no petition, social media post or protest can fix. It is the tipping point in history with a reckoning.

I am not interested in debating the methods. I am interested in the conditions that created them right now, because I know those conditions personally. I have sat in courtrooms that protected rapists and abusers. I have been incarcerated in a federal prison in violation of my constitutional right to legal counsel. I have watched the escalation of mass shootings, sexual assaults, and homicides drastically rise because women were treated as less than where perpetrators garnered more sympathy than their victims. I have watched my daughters navigate a world that was built to diminish them. I have held other survivors in the rubble of systems that were supposed to help and instead harmed. I know what it is to exhaust every sanctioned path and find nothing waiting on the other side but more obstruction, more silence, more harm.

Yet, every time we get kicked back down and told to stay down or else, something greater than us emerges and we get back up over and over and over again.

The Luigis are not anomalies. They are symptoms of what happens when enough people are pushed far enough for long enough with nowhere left to turn and nothing left to lose.

The Morrígan knows this energy intimately. She is the goddess who appears when the battle can no longer be avoided. When the reckoning is already here whether you called it or not. She doesn’t ask if you’re ready. She asks if you’re honest enough to see what’s actually in front of you, and to rise up to the occasion.

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Why We Have to Gather. In Person. On the Land.

You cannot do this work on a screen.

I know that’s not what anyone wants to hear in 2026. I know the webinar is easier. The online course is scalable. The virtual circle reaches more people with less friction. I know all of that and I am telling you anyway... you cannot do this work on a screen.

Because this work lives in the body. It lives in the nervous system. It lives in the moment when you are standing next to another human being who has also survived something unsurvivable and you feel... not just understand, feel... that you are not alone. That has no digital equivalent because it cannot be streamed.

And ritual... real ritual, rooted ritual, ritual that actually moves something... requires a rooted presence in proper alignment with the spiritual realms. This requires the land beneath your feet, the wind and the rain and the particular quality of light in a particular place at a particular time, and your body to remember what your mind has been trained to forget.

Decolonizing our spiritual practice means returning to this. It means asking whose land we are on and what that land remembers. It means moving away from the commodified, packaged, trademarked wellness industry that took Indigenous and ancient practices, stripped them of their political and relational context, and sold them back to us as self-optimization tools. It means sitting in the discomfort of others pain without turning away.

It also means slowing down and confronting the entitlement we have been conditioned into. We are a culture of entitlement dressed as seeking. We have been taught that rites of passage can be purchased... that lineage can be accessed through a weekend workshop, a certificate, a crystal set shipped to your door. That we can take the magic and leave the persecution behind. That we can claim the medicine without honoring the full weight of what it cost the people who carried it through centuries of destruction.

But lineage does not work that way. You cannot separate the power from the pain that forged it. You cannot hold the magic of a tradition while turning away from its persecution. To truly honor a lineage means holding all of it... the burning, the silencing, the survival, and yes, the extraordinary medicine that endured anyway. It means approaching what is not ours with humility and integrity rather than appetite. It means sitting with the discomfort of not knowing, of not being ready, of needing to earn the right to stand in certain circles... and resisting the urgency that consumer culture has trained into all of us. It means doing the work before claiming the medicine.

And it goes further than our own healing. Part of what we are called to do is reparative work... not just within ourselves or our communities but to the land itself. The soil beneath our feet is still holding the persecutions, the oppressions, the erasures of the Indigenous peoples who were here before us. That grief has not gone anywhere. It lives in the earth. It lives in the water. It surfaces in us whether we name it or not.

Real decolonizing spiritual practice asks us to face that. To show up not just as seekers but as people with an obligation... to witness what happened on this land, to honor who was here, and to do the slow, humble, unglamorous work of reparation. This is not performance nor a spiritual checklist... it is an act of integrity toward the earth that holds all of us.

Burning sage is not a spiritual practice if you bought it on Amazon and you’re still silent about what’s happening to the people whose tradition it came from.

Calling in the four directions is not ceremony if you learned it in a weekend workshop and you’ve never sat with the discomfort of what it means to borrow from a tradition that has been systematically destroyed for longer than we lived on this earth.

Real practice costs something. Real practice changes you. Real practice asks you to show up not just for your own healing but for the healing of the collective... of the land, of the ancestors, of the ones who come after. That is what the Morrígan asks. That is what this moment asks.

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Come to the Land That Remembers.

Ireland did not forget her.

You can feel it the moment you arrive... something in the air, something in the green, something in the way the land holds ten thousand years of memory just beneath the surface. The old ones are still there. The sites are still there. Oweynagat is still there, still open, still asking the question.

The Morrígan is not the only powerful woman waiting there.

Queen Maeve... Meadhbh in the old tongue... walked this land before the word queen existed in English. She was chieftain, warrior, sovereign in her own right. She chose her partners. She led her own armies. She negotiated from power, not supplication. The stories that survived tried to make her vain, made her war about a bull, reduced her to rivalry and ego. But what the stories couldn’t erase was the fact that she was a woman who answered to no one, who understood sovereignty as something that lived in the body and the land simultaneously, who left her name written into the landscape of Connacht so permanently that two thousand years could not scrub it out.

And then there is Grace O’Malley... Gráinne Mhaol... the pirate queen of Connacht who sailed her own fleet, commanded her own men, buried one husband and divorced another, and when the English crown tried to dismantle everything she had built... sailed to London and negotiated directly with Elizabeth I and in Irish Gaelic. Imagine two rival queens in a room with no translator nor intermediary nor permission.

These are not myths. These are women who lived and breathed the same salt air you will breathe when we stand together on the west coast of Ireland. These three women walked the same ground and refused in ways that cost them everything and built something anyway.

When we go to Ireland we go to their land. We go to remember that this energy... the ungovernable, the sovereign, the fiercely alive... is not ancient history. It is inheritance. It is available to us right now. It always has been.

Every year I lead a small group of people to Ireland on pilgrimage. We go to the sacred sites. We do the work... the real work, the grief work, the ancestral reclamation work, the sovereignty work. We stand on the land that the Morrígan called home, that Maeve ruled, that Grace O’Malley sailed from... and we let it change us. We bring our survival stories and our rage and our tenderness and we offer them to something older and larger than our individual pain.

This is not a tour. This is not a retreat in the spa sense of the word. This is a 6 month program that begins long before we board the plane and continues long after we come home. We prepare. We go. We integrate. We are changed.

If you feel the call... if something in this article cracked something open in you, if you are tired of being spiritual in ways that cost you nothing and change nothing... I want to hear from you.

The crow is circling.

The cave is open.

The Morrígan is not waiting for us to be ready. She never did.

With care, Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author · Podcast Host of Triggers and Spiritual Medicine · Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive · Activist · Trauma & Abuse Educator · Spiritual Teacher and Guide · Jikiden Reiki Teacher · End of Life Care Guide · Crone Witch · Ceremonialist · Spiritual Medium · Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator · Plant Medicine Lover · Mother · Grandmother

Addressing Root Issues and Reclaiming Ancestral Power

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REFERENCES

Readers are encouraged to fact-check, dig deeper, and share widely.

Domestic Violence Homicide Data

• CBS News: “Millions of Americans Have Reported Being Victims of Domestic Violence” (December 2025) — cbsnews.com

• FBI Uniform Crime Reporting: “Domestic Relationships and Violent Crimes, 2020–2024” (February 11, 2026) — fbi.gov

Equal Rights Amendment

• The ERA has never been ratified as part of the U.S. Constitution. Both the Biden and Trump administrations declined to certify it despite the required number of state ratifications having been reached. Readers are encouraged to research the ERA Coalition at eracoalition.org for documented history.

DOD Religious Faith Code Elimination

• Military.com: “DOD Officially Drops 180 Faiths From Military’s Recognized Religion List” (June 4, 2026) — military.com

• The Wild Hunt: “Pentagon Cuts Religious Affiliation Codes, Dropping Pagan, Wiccan, Druid, and Asatru Designations Among Others” (June 2026) — wildhunt.org

• Religion News Service: “Department of Defense Drops More Than 100 Recognized Faith Groups” (June 4, 2026) — religionnews.com

Michael Proctor / Karen Read Lawsuit

• CBS Boston: “Karen Read Lawsuit Alleges History of Disturbing Texts Between Michael Proctor and Sean Goode” (June 2026) — cbsnews.com/boston

• Turn to 10/NBC: “Karen Read Files Lawsuit Against Massachusetts State Police and Canton Police” (June 4, 2026) — turnto10.com

Queen Maeve / Meadhbh

• Rathcroghan Visitor Centre, County Roscommon, Ireland: rathcroghan.ie

Grace O’Malley / Gráinne Mhaol

• Granuaile: Ireland’s Pirate Queen by Anne Chambers (Gill Books)

The Morrígan and Oweynagat

• Rathcroghan Visitor Centre, County Roscommon, Ireland: rathcroghan.ie

• The Morrígan: Meeting the Great Queens by Morgan Daimler (Moon Books)

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ABOUT TRIGGERS & SPIRITUAL MEDICINE PODCAST:

Real talk. Let's address the elephant in the room to the growing "sickness" in our society, address root issues and provide sustainable solutions.

We hope by addressing the intersectionality and connect the dots like a web of many of society’s challenges, we can help others understand the trauma infection that impacts all areas of life – addiction, domestic violence, racism, homelessness, sexual abuse, chronic health issues, cancer, environmental issues, climate change and more.

In this NEW collaborative program, we hope by highlighting these infected areas and what they share in common, a new perspective of solutions, healing, and resolutions can be birthed.

Each episode addresses a certain trigger while offering the spiritual medicine with at least 3 tips or actionable steps our listeners can take and implement.

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We arrived at the falls at sunrise.

The river mist carried over us in waves like a fog. Birds sang through the empty streets, and the water, ancient, indifferent, magnificent, roared on as it has for thousands of years, long before any of us arrived to witness it.

There was no one else. Oh wait, there is someone else; just a passing jogger. Otherwise, it was just us and the falls and the particular kind of silence that only exists before the world wakes up.

This place was not just witnessed with eyes glued to its magnificence, or heard like ten thousand hand drums sounding off at once. It was felt in the depths of the bones and the nervous system, in places beneath ordinary awareness, in some older, quieter part of the self. The overwhelming force and power of the water, the mist, the roar of it all, was a reminder that some things are far older and more powerful than us. I found myself singing, half in prayer, half in offering:

“Water be my teacher. Water carry me. Teach me transformation. Take me to the sea. Tell me how to break through rock. Flow around what tries to block. Water be my teacher. Water carry me.”

— Milck, Water Hymn

We spent two days there arriving on a sunny Sunday afternoon and leaving on a Tuesday morning ahead of an incoming storm. Across those days, what moved me almost as much as the falls itself was the diversity of people gathered around those waters. Sunday especially felt like a great gathering with families everywhere. Children running around, and people of every tradition finding something worth honoring in their own way. Muslims. Sikhs. Hindi families visiting from India. Tour groups of Japanese visitors. Folks from Amish country. White Americans like us, and people I recognized as Indigenous, though I couldn’t say from which nation. What we all shared in common was the falls. We were all drawn to the same water. Some arrived in awe. Some arrived in prayer. Some arrived as tourists.

This water … these falls received every one of us without discrimination. No race. No religion. No hierarchy. None of the things we humans like to attach to one another was witnessed by the water. It was a moment captured between the water and the people who came to stand before it. That is the truth of this place, before the impending spectacle tries to swallow it whole.

Ya know, that other reality exists too. Streets filled with casinos, commercialization, gadgets, flashing lights, toxic food and drink, and all the stuff they want to sell, sell, sell. So, you can buy buy, buy, and consume. This includes the tourists who cycle through for a photo op before moving on, leaving their gluttony of trash behind expecting the falls fairy realms will magically clean up after them. It is, in many ways, a kind of Vegas grafted onto one of the most sacred natural sites on this entire continent.

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And what I found most conspicuous in all of it was an absence. The absence ate through me like a flesh-eating bacterium. I sat and wondered who else there noticed it too in all noise and distractions. On both sides of the waters in both countries, the feeling was palatable.

The parks carry the names of British queens or other elitist white man. There are multiple statues of Nikola Tesla and tributes to his work with electricity generated from these very waters, which is appropriate enough. There is even a prominent bust of a man who visited once from Indonesia. He visited ONCE and a bust was erected. Think about that for a moment.

What we did NOT see? There was NOT one statue of a First Nations Chief. There was NOT one monument to the nations whose people lived, governed, and held ceremony on these lands for thousands of years. There was not one single marker naming what was done to them, what was taken, what was destroyed. Unless I missed it somewhere, there was not a single acknowledgment of who these lands belonged to before the borders arrived, before the hotels, before the hydroelectric plants, before the colonial machinery decided what and who was worth remembering. I found it abhorrent how there were NO gardens or parks, NO statues, NO history commemorated before the white man arrived. This was witnessed in BOTH the USA side and the Canadian side.

I should clarify, there were motifs, engravings as is the one featured below in this post, but NONE of what is written is honoring the First Nations peoples. It was as if their presence in the art alone honoring white inventions and engineering was to be enough, but their stories and history were silenced. The classic tokenizing of a people’s erases what the white man did to these nations.

According to Google, Indigenous peoples have lived in the Niagara Falls region for over 13,000 years. The primary First nations historically tied to the area include, the Neutral Nation (Hatiwendaronk), known in their own language as the Attawandaron (Add-a-won-da-run), before them; the six nations of the Grand River of the Iroquis or the Haudenosaunee (Ho-deh-noh-SHAH-nee) Confederacy; and the Mississaugas of the Ashininaabek people. The original peoples of this land who were displaced, erased, and forgotten through French and English colonial expansion, and their deep knowing of this place buried beneath everything that now stands in their absence. The extent of what can be learned is via The Niagara Parks Indigenous Culture or the Niagara Falls Tourism History websites, which is a step up from decades ago, but NOT enough.

To learn more about the first nations in this region, you can visit the Niagara Regional Native Centre which has been promoting Indigenous culture, leadership and community since 1972 or the Niagara Region on Indigenous Engagement which emphasizes the importance of engaging with Indigenous communities to foster a sense of belonging and shared identity through ongoing efforts to promote reconciliation and understanding.

These waters of the Niagara Falls hold memory that we have collectively chosen NOT to read, and still the water flows. That is what the falls kept returning me to. It was the duality of the beauty and the erasure. The majesty and the commodification. The ancient and the forgotten. Both truths present at once simultaneously, held in the same roar, the same mist, the same stone worn smooth over millennia.

As a white bodied cis woman from the United States, I sat with a question I could not shake. “How does a general population of good, decent people keep missing this? How do governments and the rich and powerful continue to wipe out Indigenous existence and history, and the rest of us keep walking past the empty pedestals, the unnamed parks, the missing monuments, without demanding better?”

I don’t have a clean answer, clearly.

I have only the question, and the water, and the reminder that the falls have outlasted every empire that tried to claim them.

The falls themselves felt like medicine to me. The kind of spiritual medicine I did not realize I needed. Ya know the kind that is uncontainable, unapologetic, and ancient, and the First Nations peoples understood this better than the white man who invaded the area. No casino changes what the water is. No border has ever told it where to go.

Thirty five years since I last stood here. Some things have changed entirely. The water has not.

It was our anniversary celebrating ten years together this past February and one year married this upcoming summer solstice. Maybe that is fitting, to mark a human bond in a place that so thoroughly dwarfs human time, and to be reminded that some things are far older and more powerful than us. Also, to be reminded that this is not a threat but a gift.

Water teach me transformation. Water carry me.

With care, Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author · Podcast Host of Triggers and Spiritual Medicine · Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive · Activist · Trauma & Abuse Educator · Spiritual Teacher and Guide · Jikiden Reiki Teacher · End of Life Care Guide · Crone Witch · Ceremonialist · Spiritual Medium · Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator · Plant Medicine Lover · Mother · Grandmother

Addressing Root Issues and Reclaiming Ancestral Power

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The Post

Recently I posted a request for Reiki volunteers to work with a vulnerable elderly population in a nursing home, the majority of whom live with some form of dementia.

The requirements were specific and deliberately so. Reiki 2 or higher in any traditional lineage. Level 1 in Jikiden Reiki, given its unbroken medical roots from Japan. A minimum six-month commitment, once monthly. And no online-only certifications, not because of lineage snobbery, but because online training does not provide hands-on teaching, practice, and oversight which matters enormously when the person receiving care cannot always clearly communicate what they are experiencing in their body.

These requirements were not arbitrary, and they were not gatekeeping. They were the considered standards of someone accountable for the wellbeing of elders who cannot always speak for themselves with a minimum skillset requirement.

Understanding why requires understanding something about the current landscape of Reiki training.

Over the past decade, the commercialization and commodification of Reiki certification has accelerated significantly stripping much of its Japanese Shinto and Buddhist roots. Online courses offering certification in only four hours in some cases, with no supervised contact hours and no hands-on practice, have proliferated because they are profitable. The result has been a real and documented dilution of training standards across the field. Different lineages carry different depths of practice baked into their structure. Jikiden Reiki, with its unbroken lineage and medical application roots created by Reiki’s founder, Mikao Usui’s student, Dr. Hayashi, builds substantial competency into Level 1. Other lineages, depending on how they have been transmitted and whether commercial pressures have compressed the training, vary considerably. Because of that, it is difficult to ascertain the level of quality and depth of training unless the teacher is personally known.

The three varying types of qualification structure I created was a direct response to this reality. It was calibrated to lineage because lineage determines training depth. It was designed to ensure that every volunteer working with a potentially non-verbal elder with dementia had genuine embodied competency, not a certificate purchased via an online self-paced course.

That was not spiritual elitism by any stretch, but due diligence and safety on behalf of people who cannot advocate for themselves.

Instead of being met with curiosity or appreciation, it was met with suspicion, challenge, and ultimately, character attacks. That trajectory is worth examining carefully.

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The Exchange

It started simply. A commenter asked why Usui-based Reiki was not accepted. I attempted to clarify that it absolutely was, provided the training was in person and not online. She had later admitted having misread the post, understandably. I had listed Jikiden Reiki as a separate path with different level requirements, and the formatting invited some ambiguity. That was my bad.

A genuine misunderstanding when reading text versus on a phone call, video or in person where body language and tone would have given more context. Easily resolved, right?

Except it was NOT.

What followed moved through several distinct phases. First, a gentle challenge to my tone, the capitals I used for clarity due to miscommunication, noted with a “lol.” Then a credential-establishing moment, over twenty years of practice, twelve as a Reiki master. Then a reiteration of the original misreading framed as helpfulness. Then, when I offered a “direct” and detailed clarification of all three qualification tiers with an added apology twice over for misunderstandings, a pivot away from the content entirely.

“You’re quite rude. I’m sorry you’re having a bad day. That energy is 100% not something I want to be around.”

Then the block!!!

The block and insults after the apologies and before any repair or further clarification could land.

I want to be precise about something. I had been having an excellent day. A genuinely stellar one as a matter of fact. The “diagnosis of bad energy” and a “bad day” was not just inaccurate. It was a type of projection that I feel is abusive and potentially dangerous in the spiritual communities as a whole which I speak about frequently.

Why is it dangerous? It is dangerous because it weaponizes spiritual language to gaslight, energetically assault and delivered with the confidence of spiritual authority, about a person’s interior state that the commenter had no actual access to. I speak more about this further in this article.

But more than the inaccuracy, what I keep returning to is the sequence. Because the sequence is everything.

I had apologized not once, but twice because I can understand how written words can be misread. When I apologized, I attempted to do directly, clearly and genuinely, before her closing statement was made. That apology was not acknowledged nor received before the insults began. It was completely ignored and bypassed entirely in favor of a character verdict. And then the door was closed in a way that made response impossible. That sequence of behavior is not an exit. It is a pattern, and it has a name.

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On Directness and How It Gets Misread

Before going further, I want to name something about written communication itself.

Directness in text is frequently misread, not because something is wrong with the directness, but because text strips away the vocal tone, the steadiness, the calm that accompany direct speech in person. What arrives on screen is the content, unadorned. And content without context becomes a canvas people project onto.

I was not impatient. I was calm, but direct, deliberately so, because imprecision had already caused the initial misunderstanding. Clarity was the point to correct any misunderstanding. The words capitalized were purely for functionality, and not as an emotional reaction. The corrections were measured, not reactive.

Directness and impatience are not the same thing. They can look similar in text. But conflating them is itself a form of misreading, and it is worth naming because it happens constantly to people whose natural communication register is clear and unhedged rather than cushioned and softened.

In many online spaces, and especially in spiritual communities, there is an unspoken expectation that tone will be warm, qualifications will be generous, and directness will be wrapped in enough relational softening to be rendered inoffensive. When it is not, the content of what is being said often stops mattering. The style becomes the story.

In this exchange, my style became the story. The actual substance, the careful qualification structure, the protection of vulnerable elders, the genuine clarification offered, receded entirely. What remained was a verdict about my character and my energy. That substitution of character verdict for content engagement is not a communication style difference. It is a conduct failure.

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What Spiritual Language Can Hide

The phrase that has stayed with me is this: “That energy is not something I want to be around.”

In spiritual communities, energy has become a versatile and largely unaccountable form of moral language. It allows someone to register a verdict about another person while appearing to sidestep judgment. After all, it is just energy. It is nothing personal. It is simply discernment.

But discernment and projection are NOT always easy to distinguish, and the difference matters enormously.

Genuine discernment is grounded, attuned, humble, and usually held with some tentativeness. It says something feels off here, I am not sure why, I need some space. It does not pronounce with certainty on another person’s interior state, nor does it arrive as a closing argument.

What I received was a closing argument. A confident diagnosis of my inner state, my day, my character, and my energy, delivered after an apology had been offered and ignored, sealed with a block that made response impossible. That is NOT discernment. That is spiritual language being used as a weapon. And it is a specific and recognizable pattern.

Five Signs a Spiritual Disagreement Has Crossed Into Spiritual Abuse

These are not abstract. Every one of them was present in this exchange.

1. Your apology is ignored in favor of a character verdict or verbal assault. When someone has genuinely apologized and that apology is bypassed entirely so that a judgment about their character, energy, or intentions can be delivered, the goal is no longer resolution. The goal is the verdict. Apologies require a response, even an imperfect one. Ignoring an apology to proceed with an attack is a choice, and it is worth recognizing as one.

2. Spiritual language is used to make a character attack unanswerable. “Your energy is not something I want to be around” sounds like self-protection. Yet, it functions as a character condemnation. The spiritual framing makes it almost impossible to push back on without appearing to confirm the original charge. This is precisely what makes it effective and precisely what makes it worth naming. When someone uses energetic or spiritual vocabulary to deliver an assault about your character and then makes response impossible, that is not discernment. That is a power move dressed in spiritual clothing.

3. The content of the disagreement disappears, and your character becomes the subject. In a healthy disagreement, even a heated one, the content stays present. People argue about what was said, what was meant, what actually happened. When someone pivots away from content entirely and begins speaking only about who you are, your tone, your energy, your bad day, the disagreement has been abandoned in favor of an attack and character assassination. This is a recognizable deflection pattern. It protects the person making it from having to engage with where they may have been wrong.

4. DARVO is in play. DARVO stands for Defend, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It describes what happens when someone who has made an error responds to correction by defending themselves, attacking the person who corrected them, and repositioning themselves as the actual victim of the exchange. In this conversation, a misreading of my post was corrected clearly and directly. Rather than acknowledging the misreading, the response shifted to my tone, my caps, my rudeness, my energy, my bad day. By the end, the person who admittedly misread and seeking clarity had become the aggressor. The person who made the original error had become the wounded party. That reversal was clean, swift, and accomplished entirely through spiritual language. That type of behavior is ABUSE, and in some cases can have devastating consequences on their victims.

5. Exit is weaponized to claim the last word. Blocking is a legitimate boundary. No one is owed continued access to anyone else online. AND… there is a meaningful difference between blocking someone because you need to protect yourself and blocking someone immediately after delivering a series of verbal assaults and character assassinations in a way that ensures they cannot respond. The second use of blocking is not self-protection. It is the use of an exit mechanism to guarantee the last word while eliminating any possibility of accountability or repair. When this happens publicly, on a post others can still see, the blocked person is left with a public character attack they have no ability to answer. That is not a boundary. That is a silencing tactic. BE weary of any “healer” or “spiritual teacher” who behaves in this manner.

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On Credentials and Maturity

One more thing deserves to be said plainly.

Years of practice do not confer relational maturity. A Reiki master with twelve years at that level and twenty overall in the field carries impressive credentials. Those credentials speak to dedication, to depth of practice, to investment in the work.

They do not automatically speak to conflict skills. They do not guarantee the capacity to stay present when corrected. They do not ensure the ability to acknowledge a misreading, receive an apology, or sit with discomfort long enough to find out what is actually true.

The behavior witnessed was NOT someone who by action mastered any of the five core teachings in Reiki, and someone who claims to be a “master” should be able to demonstrate that level of skill with humility not ego inflated.

And to check myself in this situation, I sit with where I can improve my own skills based on the original Reiki core teachings, because this situation is also a teacher for me as well. I will always see myself as a perpetual student and never a master. Once you claim you are a master, you have lost the teaching and inserted ego.

There is an old saying that I was taught decades ago that says: “It takes 20 years of practicing a skill every day methodically to be remotely considered a master”.

However, conflict maturity is its own practice, yet it is not if rooted in the original teachings of Reiki. Conflict maturity in itself requires the willingness to be wrong, to stay in difficulty, to let an apology land before delivering a final blow and assault. It is not conferred by lineage or years of practice or any certification, online or otherwise.

The deepest irony of this exchange is that the skills required to handle it well, presence, attunement, patience, the willingness to sit with what is uncomfortable, are the very skills the Reiki teachings and practice is supposed to cultivate. When those skills are absent in the hallways, in the comment sections, in the moments of interpersonal friction, it raises a genuine question about what is actually being practiced.

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The Broader Cost

There is one more dimension worth naming.

This exchange happened publicly, in the comments of a volunteer recruitment post for elders with dementia in a nursing home. A public challenge to my qualifications without knowing anything about my level of skill or work, followed by a public character attack, in that specific context, carries a cost beyond the personal.

Legitimate potential volunteers may have seen the exchange and been deterred just because what they witnessed was conflict despite my efforts to address what I thought was in an appropriate direct manner. People who had embodied training, genuine commitment, and real competency may have quietly decided NOT to engage. The people who pay that price are not me and not the commenter. They are the elders the post was written to serve, the ones in the end who were harmed by what happened.

When conduct in spiritual communities falls below the standard of basic relational repair, it is never only the individuals involved who bear the cost. It ripples outward, sometimes to the most vulnerable people in the room. AND to weaponize what one feels energetically without first checking themself nor the ripples they are creating is in itself spiritual abuse.

I will add, the purpose of this article is to educate, create a pause in an already triggered culture, and also serve as a reminder for myself that maybe I also need to show up better somehow too. This article is NOT intended to berede the other person but to use the interaction for education is all.

I did attempt to write them to wish them a good day and well on their Reiki journey but was unable to deliver such a message.

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A Glimpse Into My Decades of Work

Part of why this conversation stayed with me is because my perspective on safety, standards, discernment, and responsibility was never rooted in hierarchy for hierarchy’s sake. Much of my work over the years has involved education, advocacy, trauma awareness, abuse dynamics, and helping people navigate harm within both interpersonal and spiritual spaces. I have spent years supporting vulnerable populations, survivors, and communities impacted by coercion, manipulation, dysregulation, and the very real consequences that can emerge when discernment, embodiment, accountability, and ethical care are dismissed as unnecessary or “exclusive.”

Perhaps that is also part of what online interactions so often reveal: how quickly people can form conclusions about one another without context, curiosity, or deeper inquiry into the lived experiences informing someone’s perspective.

For me, this was never simply about Reiki certifications. It was about responsibility, safety, and understanding that vulnerable populations deserve grounded, embodied, emotionally regulated care especially in spiritual and healing environments that too often prioritize appearances of kindness over the deeper, more difficult work of integrity, repair, discernment, and accountability.

I am curious as to how this article landed for you or your experiences in spiritual wellness spaces that claim to be healing, and lack safety, or conflict skills.

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With care,

Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author, Podcast Host of Triggers And Spiritual Medicine, Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive, Activist, Trauma & Abuse Educator, Spiritual Teacher and Guide, Jikiden Reiki Teacher, End of Life Care Guide, Crone Witch, Ceremonialist, Spiritual Medium, Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator, Plant Medicine Lover, Mother, Grandmother

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Well… I missed my train stop and somehow ended up in Harvard Yard.

What’s strange is it only took me about 20 minutes to get here today when this trip normally takes anywhere from 45 minutes to over an hour. So instead of fighting it, I decided to walk.

And as I walked through Harvard Yard, I could feel the weight and complexity of it all.

The duality.

The contradictions.

The brilliance and opportunity intertwined with elitism, power, persecution, exploitation, silence, and the long shadow of harm woven through institutions that shaped this country.

Walking through these spaces while carrying awareness of Epi-pen-stein, Dire-showitz, jellocide, colonization, class systems, diversity yet white supremacist and all the things we’re told not to connect together… it does something to the body. The land feels it. The nervous system feels it.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I came across an old wise tree whose spirit revealed themselves to me.

It was a quiet moment and acknowledgement of all of it and a reminder from the spirit realms that what is unfolding next is supported, even if the path there is unconventional.

Sometimes missing the stop is the medicine.

Sometimes missing the stop is redirection.

I am honoring all that is, all that was, and all that shall be as I sit on a nearby bench awaiting a friend to arrive, a fellow crone about healing the land on the South Shore … wounds and harm that have never truly ended since the birth of the USA.

So much of what is ailing us was seeded here, in Boston and the South Shore, and still echoes through the land, the waters, the bodies, and the systems we move through today.

The work continues.

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For now, happy Wednesday.

It’s a beautiful sunny spring day here in New England.

Take a pause and smell the lilacs.

With care, Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author · Podcast Host of Triggers and Spiritual Medicine · Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive · Activist · Trauma & Abuse Educator · Spiritual Teacher and Guide · Jikiden Reiki Teacher · End of Life Care Guide · Crone Witch · Ceremonialist · Spiritual Medium · Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator · Plant Medicine Lover · Mother · Grandmother

Addressing Root Issues and Reclaiming Ancestral Power

I want to begin with the truth.

Mother's Day has been one of the hardest days of my year for most of my adult life. And I think it matters to say that plainly, before I say anything else.

I grew up in a domestic violence household … the daughter of a wounded mother, learning early what it meant to love someone and also fear what surrounded them. When I grew up and married my abuser, I thought I had escaped that world. I left him in 2005. What I did not know was that leaving would cost me everything I was trying to protect.

In 2007, my three daughters, ages four, seven, and ten, were taken from me. Not quietly. Not fairly. Through a deliberate, calculated act of manipulation. My abuser convinced me to lift a restraining order by claiming he couldn't pay child support. It was a chess move. The moment I did, he filed an ex parte motion built on lies and judge-shopped until he found a corrupt one. Judge Michael Livingston granted him custody. Six weeks later, Judge Livingston was removed from the bench by the FBI for corruption.

Six weeks.

A second judge upheld the decision, denied nearly every piece of contradicting evidence I presented, and then — in 2009 — recused himself, admitting bias, and ordered my abuser to abide by court orders. My abuser was subsequently found in violation of over 95% of those orders by the next judge. That judge sanctioned me. Did not reverse custody. Did not protect my children. Case law should have automatically reversed custody. It did not.

By the time it was over, I had spent over $350,000 trying to defend myself and my daughters. I lost my business. I lost my home. I lost family relationships. And I lost 17 years of my children's lives.

I only became free from the post-separation abuse, the litigation abuse, the financial abuse, and the family court abuse on October 1, 2024

Seventeen years.

My youngest was four years old when she was taken. She has grown up without her mother. So have her sisters.

But here is what I need you to understand — because this is the part that rarely gets named:

It was not just me who was severed from my daughters. It was the entire maternal side of our family. Their grandmothers. Their great-grandparents — some of whom are no longer living, meaning that relationship is now permanently gone. Their aunts. Their uncles. Their cousins. An entire world of women and family who were meant to shape them, hold them, pass down stories and wisdom and love — completely cut off from three little girls by one act of calculated abuse, enabled by a system that was supposed to protect them.

When I look at this through a spiritual lens, I see it for what it is: the severing of the maternal line. And that wound is not just personal. It is ancestral. It is generational. It is collective.

The maternal line carries something the world desperately needs — healing, wisdom, ways of knowing that pass from grandmother to mother to daughter across centuries. When that line is broken, it doesn't just wound the child. It wounds the lineage. It wounds the future. My daughters grew up without access to the healing that was their birthright. And I grew up as a daughter who needed her mother — and now my daughters have grown up needing theirs.

This is the cycle we must name if we are ever going to break it.

This Is Not My Story Alone

My story is one of hundreds of thousands.

There are approximately 100,000 contested child custody cases every year in the United States. Studies indicate that two-thirds of them likely involve domestic violence. Abusive fathers are more than twice as likely to seek sole custody than non-abusive fathers — and they win. Courts award fathers joint or sole custody 70% of the time. Even when courts find that a father has abused the children or the mother, they award him custody 13% of the time. Women are twice as likely to lose custody when they report abuse — even when that abuse is documented. No such penalty exists for fathers who make abuse claims.

When mothers do raise abuse allegations and fathers respond by claiming the mother is alienating — a defense weaponized by abusers and widely criticized by researchers and advocates — mothers' chances of losing custody nearly double.

And 88% of children placed with abusive fathers experience new episodes of abuse after their father gains custody.

The system is not broken. It is working exactly as patriarchy designed it to work.

This is getting worse, not better. Over the last decade, intimate partner homicides of women increased by 22%. Gun-related intimate partner homicides of women increased by 36%. Every month in this country, more than 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner. The FBI's most recent five-year report confirmed that the percentage of violent crimes occurring within domestic relationships is rising.

Before Epstein became a household name, mothers were screaming about this on deaf ears. Many of us were retaliated against for speaking. Many of us paid — and continue to pay — an enormous price for telling the truth in systems designed to silence us.

We are not crazy. We are not bitter. We are witnesses.

And we will not stop speaking.

The Day I Am Still Living

This Mother's Day, I woke up held.

I have a husband who sees me — fully, completely, without flinching — and loves me anyway. We had a beautiful breakfast at one of my favorite places, Niveaux Patisserie in Quincy, MA — the same place that made our wedding cake — where I got to see Chef Bobby and his wonderful husband and receive exactly the kind of warmth that reminds me the world still contains goodness. I picked up some goodies to savor later. I am heading south this afternoon to meet a dear friend for dinner before I serve tonight as guest speaker and Spirit medium at the First Spiritualist Church of Onset, MA. Service is hybrid, 6:30–8:00 PM. I hope to see you there.

And I carry my daughters with me. Always. Into every room, every service, every moment of work I do in this world.

I am also a grandmother now. A mother to those who seek out my wisdom, my stories, my presence. People who see my value — who want it — and that is its own form of grace.

I am stepping into what I understand as the sacred Crone years — the final great phase of a woman's journey. The elder in training. The keeper of hard-won knowing. The one who has walked through real fire and emerged not despite the scars but because of them. I am reminded daily that I am becoming a future ancestor. And I take that responsibility seriously.

The Crone does not perform softness she does not feel. She does not shrink to make others comfortable. She has paid too much, lost too much, and survived too much to waste a single breath on the version of herself the world finds easier to digest. She speaks. She names. She holds space. She transmits.

And every day — every single day — I pray for the door to open. I dream of the morning my daughters come knocking. Wanting a hug from their mother. Ready to begin repairing the relationship that was stolen from *both* of us. I hold that prayer like a flame. I will hold it as long as I live.

The Mother Beneath All Mothers

Tonight, at Onset, I will speak about the Great Mother.

Not only the mothers who gave us life — but the Mother beneath all mothers. The Earth herself. The sacred feminine intelligence woven into the cycles of nature, the turning of seasons, the pull of the tide.

We live in a culture that has forgotten how to be in relationship with what sustains us. We extract from the Earth the way abusers extract from the people they claim to love. We dismiss her signals. We silence her rhythms. We override the wisdom she has been offering for centuries.

And we do the same to women.

These are not unrelated patterns. The same systems that exploit the land exploit women and children. The same culture that teaches us to suppress our body's knowing teaches mothers to suppress their instincts when a court tells them their instincts are wrong. The same forces that silence the Earth silence the women who dare to name what is happening.

When the maternal line is severed — in a family, in a community, in a civilization — something essential is lost. The ancestral healing that flows through the maternal line, the stories, the wisdom, the ways of knowing passed from grandmother to daughter across generations — this is not sentiment. It is sacred architecture. And it is being dismantled, systematically, by systems that profit from disconnection.

The spiritual traditions I carry understand that we are in a time of returning. The returning of the matriarch. The reclaiming of ancestral power. The dismantling of the patriarchal structures — including corrupt family courts — that have suppressed the feminine for far too long.

Great Mother Earth is not separate from this conversation. She, too, has had enough of man's abuses. She, too, is responding — in her own time, in her own language, in the way of all things that have been pushed past their limit.

What Mothering Actually Looks Like

Not all mothering looks like raising children. Some of the fiercest mothering I have ever witnessed has come from women whose children were taken from them — women who channeled their love into advocacy, into healing, into holding other mothers through the same nightmare, into speaking truth into the void until someone finally listened.

Some people mother through healing. Through teaching. Through protecting. Through creating. Through bearing witness — through the holy, unglamorous work of sitting beside someone in their pain and saying: I believe you. I see you. You are not alone.

Every act of genuine compassion is the Great Mother moving through human hands.

To the mothers fighting the family court system right now: what you are doing is mothering. Even when your children cannot see it yet. Even when the world has decided you are the problem. You are doing the hardest, most invisible work there is — holding the thread of your love intact across years of silence, across systems designed to exhaust you into giving up. You are the heroes of a story the world does not want to tell.

To the Men Reading This

We need you.

Not as saviors. Not as performative allies. As men who are willing to hold their brothers accountable — in private, in public, at real personal cost. As men who will believe women when they speak. As men who will show up for the unglamorous, uncomfortable labor of confronting the harm done by other men, even when the person causing it looks like them.

I am grateful to witness men doing this work. Genuinely. I know it is not easy, and I am asking for more of it.

The epidemic of violence against women and children will not end without men who choose, actively and repeatedly, to be different.

May We Honor All the Mothers

The ones who raised us — in whatever imperfect, complicated, real form that love arrived.

The ones in Spirit — who have crossed the veil but remain tethered to us through love that does not end.

The ones still fighting impossible battles in impossible systems.

The grandmothers and great-grandmothers whose names we may not even know, whose survival made our survival possible.

The Crones — the elders, the truth-tellers, the women who have been called difficult and dangerous for knowing too much and refusing to pretend otherwise.

The wounded mothers, like mine, who did what they could with what they had.

And the Earth herself — ancient, patient, speaking in every storm and tide and shifting season, asking us to remember that we belong to her, that we are accountable to something larger than ourselves, that the severing of relationship always, eventually, asks to be healed.

May we remember that love continues.

Across silence. Across time. Across every system that tried to extinguish it.

It continues.

With care and fierce love,

Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author · Podcast Host, Triggers and Spiritual Medicine · Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive · Activist · Trauma & Abuse Educator · Spiritual Teacher and Guide · Jikiden Reiki Teacher · End of Life Care Guide · Crone Witch · Ceremonialist · Spiritual Medium · Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator · Plant Medicine Lover · Mother · Grandmother

Addressing Root Issues and Reclaiming Ancestral Power

Tonight's service at First Spiritualist Church of Onset, MA is hybrid. 6:30–8:00 PM. All are welcome.

Sources for statistics cited:

- Custody & abuse: Center on Gender & Justice (GWU Law); Battered Women's Justice Project; RCDVCPC.org

- Intimate partner homicide: Everytown Research (2024); FBI Domestic Relationships and Violent Crimes Report 2020–2024 (released February 2026)

- Family court contested custody: National estimates via BWJP and GWU Family Court Outcomes Study

I want to scream. I want to scream so loudly that people finally get it, that something cracks open in the collective numbness and folks actually feel what is happening around them. But I fear I am screaming into a void … that the outrage fatigue is so deep, the desensitization so complete, that even this, even all of this, lands with a nonchalant shrug.

So I am writing instead. Because I don't know what else to do.

I sat scrolling through photos from the 2026 Met Gala and felt something rise in me that wasn't admiration, inspiration, or shock.

It was disgust and grief, and underneath the grief, fury.

This year's theme made it impossible to look away. A gala centered on nudity and the removal of clothing, held in one of the most powerful rooms in the world, attended by the wealthiest and most connected people on the planet, is not a neutral aesthetic choice. It is a statement.

We own this. We own you. And we will make you celebrate it for our pleasure.

This Is Not About Fashion. It Is About Power and Control Dynamics.

We cannot talk about this moment without talking about Jeffrey Epstein.

We cannot talk about the elite class parading women's bodies as spectacle without acknowledging that the Epstein case revealed exactly how these worlds connect. Fashion. Celebrity. Finance. Politics. Philanthropy. And beneath all of it, the trafficking and exploitation of women and girls.

That network was sustained by a culture that has always treated women's bodies as currency, access, and reward.

And now, in the wake of what has been exposed, the same class of people who attended Epstein's dinners, flew on his planes, and looked the other way, or worse, are setting the aesthetic agenda. Stripped down. Offered up. Applauded for their willingness to be consumed & exploited.

That is not coincidence, but dominance dressed as fashion.

And frankly? Fuck that shit, really. Fuck the audacity these men, and the culture they built and continue to protect, get to set the terms of how women's bodies appear in the most celebrated rooms in the world, in the same breath that their crimes against women and children are still being buried? That is not fashion. That is a flex. That is power telling you exactly what it thinks of you.

I Know This World. It Is Not Theoretical.

In 1990, I was doing modeling and commercial work in NYC and Philly markets. On any grand industry scale, I was a nobody, a young woman trying to find her footing in spaces that were never designed to protect her. And even then, even at that level, the warnings came quietly and early.

Stay away from that agency. The owner is a rapist and dangerous. Don't go to that casting alone.

These were not rumors. They were survival instructions passed between women like a map of a minefield. They were whispered, urgent, and unmistakenly understood.

What struck me then, and haunts me now, is that everyone knew. The predators operating inside certain agencies weren't secrets. They were known quantities that the industry simply worked around, accommodated, protected. Young women were expected to navigate around rapists and pedophiles as a condition of entry. It was as if that were simply the cost of wanting to work. Sell your body to the highest bidder.

I was fortunate. I had people who warned me. Many did NOT.

And what the industry asked of those women, in audition rooms, in agency offices, in the transactional silence around men whose behavior was an open secret, was not so different from what I watched play out on that red carpet. Your body is the currency. Your willingness to be available is the price. Your silence is assumed.

That was 1990. The Epstein case confirmed it had been happening at every level, for decades, with the full awareness of powerful institutions that chose profit over protection.

The Industry Has Always Known. It Has Always Protected Itself.

The connection between the beauty and fashion industries and the trafficking of women and children is not a conspiracy. It is a documented, lived reality. Modeling pipelines exploited by predators. Young women lured with promises of visibility and access. Bodies commodified from girlhood. Hypersexualization normalized as the price of entry into rooms where power lives.

Some women on that carpet knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway, because that was the price. Visibility required it. Access demanded it. The alternative was exile from the only table they were ever offered.

That is not liberation. That is a very sophisticated cage.

The Culture Is Not Confused. It Is Complicit.

We are living in an era where survivors are still fighting to be believed despite millions of documented evidence released. It is where Epstein's client list remains partially sealed; trafficking networks continue operating globally; deepfake pornography, coercion, and the commodification of bodies are normalized at terrifying speeds.

And yet our most powerful cultural institutions continue to reward women most when they are the most consumable.

Women are not responsible for the violence committed against them. Clothing does not cause rape. Predators cause abuse. Systems that protect perpetrators cause continued violence.

However, culture shapes what gets normalized; what gets rewarded; what becomes profitable. And right now, culture is being shaped by people who have every reason to keep women's bodies available for men's consumption.

That is not an accident.

The Disconnect Is Not Staggering. It Is Intentional.

Watching elite institutions celebrate voyeurism while survivors of trafficking sit in shelters, while Epstein's full client list remains sealed, while girls are recruited into industries that will discard them before they understand what was taken, this is not oversight.

It is a demonstration of who holds power and what they believe they are owed.

And we should all be pissed off enough to say so out loud. No more dressing it up in careful language. No more academic framing. No more asking politely. These are predators. These are systems built to protect predators. And the Met Gala this year looked, to those of us who have lived anywhere near this reality, like a victory lap.

I left the Met Gala coverage feeling like I had witnessed a cultural mirror reflecting exactly where we are: a ruling class bold enough to make the consumption of women's bodies the theme of the night. Flagrant. Unapologetic. Daring anyone to say something.

When Will We Wake Up? The Cost of Collective Amnesia.

I keep asking myself what it will take. What will finally snap people out of it. Because we have seen the evidence. We have heard the testimonies. We have watched the documentaries, read the reports, followed the trials. And still the needle barely moves. Still the same systems operate. Still the same men are protected. Still the same women are consumed.

What will it take?

Because it is not just women's bodies being stripped, exploited, and discarded. It is the earth herself.

The same culture that has commodified women's bodies has spent centuries doing the same to the land, the water, the air, and every living system that sustains us. The same logic that says a woman's body is a resource to be extracted says the same about a river, a forest, a coastline, a community's water supply. The same hands that have always reached for ownership, control, and profit at any cost are the same hands poisoning our soil, gutting our oceans, and calling it progress.

This is not metaphor. This is the same wound.

Mother Earth has been raped. Her waters polluted. Her land seized. Her resources stripped for the profit of the few while the rest of us are handed a narrative about growth and innovation and told to be grateful.

Women's bodies. The earth's body. The logic of violation is identical. Take what you want. Extract what you can. Discard what remains. And when anyone objects, discredit them, silence them, or simply wait for the outrage to exhaust itself.

That is the collective amnesia we are living inside. Not forgetting exactly, but a kind of induced numbness. A culture so saturated with violation that we have lost the ability to be shocked by it. So flooded with noise that the signal gets lost.

I do not know what will break it open. But I know that writing this, saying this, refusing to look away, is the only thing I know how to do.

So I will keep screaming. Even into the void. Even if no one flinches.

Because some truths deserve to be spoken whether or not the world is ready to hear them.

With care,

Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author, Podcast Host of Triggers And Spiritual Medicine, Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive, Activist, Trauma & Abuse Educator, Spiritual Teacher and Guide, Jikiden Reiki Teacher, End of Life Care Guide, Crone Witch, Ceremonialist, Spiritual Medium, Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator, Plant Medicine Lover, Mother, Grandmother

Addressing Root Issues and Reclaiming Ancestral Power

Last Sunday morning, a podcaster with a large international following sent me a connection request.

Her opening message was warm and professional. She described herself as a podcaster with an “A-list following”, told me she was “vetting new guests”, and asked if “we could find fifteen minutes to talk”. "I believe there may be a fit and a need," she wrote.

We exchanged messages across the day which was supposed to be a day off. We coordinated schedules. We landed on a time.

Then, Monday afternoon, forty-seven minutes before we were supposed to speak, she sent this:

"No sorry I don't do witches too much going on in the universe."

I genuinely thought there had been a misunderstanding. I responded calmly. I explained that I am not part of a coven, that I don't identify with the sensationalized stereotypes most people project onto that word, and that my work is rooted in ancestral healing, trauma recovery, advocacy, intuition, lineage, and spiritual practice.

She replied: "Your profile said you are a Crone witch playing with dragons."

I told her it was “metaphorical language” that was archetypal and symbolic of my journey. It is the language of myth and personal reclamation. Ya know the kind women have used for centuries to describe wisdom, power, and self-knowledge that doesn't fit inside neat, approved boxes type.

Her final message to me was "I'm just not gonna fuck with you." … And there it was in plain sight. There wasn't any disagreement, discernment nor a real conversation to “vet me”.

It was a door slamming shut on the basis of three words she didn't stop to understand nor care to… just judgement.

What One Phrase Erased

What shook me wasn't the rejection. People have every right to choose who appears on their platform, and I genuinely wish her well with her work. What shook me was the speed of it. How little it took. How a piece of poetic, archetypal language could function as a trapdoor, dropping me instantly out of "person worth talking to" and into "thing to avoid."

Let me be plain about what that was: I was discriminated against. Not carelessly. Not accidentally. The moment she saw the word "witch" attached to my name, a decision was made, swiftly, completely, and without any genuine attempt to understand who I am or what my work actually is. Every credential, every decade of service, every human complexity I carry was rendered irrelevant by a label she had already decided meant something dangerous. That is not a boundary. That is not discernment. That is prejudice, the pre-judging of a person before they have been permitted to exist as one.

And it landed in my body the way discrimination always does: not just as disappointment, but as a specific kind of erasure. The message underneath the message was clear: you are not the kind of person who gets to be known here.

I sat with that feeling for a while. And then I realized: this is not new. This is old like centuries old, and it is happening again, in new forms, in a cultural moment that is growing less tolerant of ambiguity by the day.

The Word "Witch" Has Never Just Been About Witches

Historically, the accusation of witchcraft was rarely about magic. It was about power, and who was allowed to have it.

The women most likely to be accused were healers, midwives, herbalists, spiritual practitioners. Women who owned property. Women who lived alone. Women who spoke too directly, grieved too loudly, refused the wrong man, or simply knew too much. Women who were poor, elderly, disabled, or sexually autonomous. Women who existed outside the structures that powerful men and institutions needed them to inhabit.

The accusation was a mechanism of control. Name someone a witch, and everything she knew, everything she had built, every relationship she held, all of it became suspect. The label did the work so the system didn't have to explain itself.

Modern scholarship estimates tens of thousands of executions during the European witch trials, though popular culture has often cited far higher numbers. Historians continue to debate the figures. What is not debatable is the pattern: women who threatened or unsettled existing power were targeted, silenced, and publicly destroyed as a warning to others.

That warning did not evaporate when the trials ended. It settled into the cultural nervous system. And many women today still carry its residue, the deep, often unnamed fear of being too visible, too loud, too strange, too much. The instinct to make yourself smaller before someone else makes you smaller for you.

So when a professional contact recoils from symbolic language without curiosity or context, I think it's worth asking: what exactly is she reacting to? The person in front of her? Or centuries of inherited conditioning about women and power?

The Magdalene Laundries Were Not Long Ago

If this feels like ancient history, consider the Magdalene Laundries.

These institutions, run by both Catholic and Protestant religious orders across Ireland, imprisoned women deemed fallen, difficult, sexually inappropriate, or simply inconvenient. Women were isolated from society, subjected to forced labor, emotional abuse, and institutional violence. Some entered as teenagers and never left. Their children were taken. Their names were sometimes erased.

The last Magdalene Laundry in Ireland did not close in the 1600s, or the 1800s, or even the mid-twentieth century.

It closed in 1996.

When Sinéad O'Connor tore up a photograph of the Pope on live American television in 1992, the world called her unstable, hysterical, and attention-seeking. Her career was effectively ended overnight.

She was trying to tell us what was happening inside those institutions. What had happened to her. What was being done to women and children in Ireland while the rest of the world looked away.

History proved her right. She paid an enormous price for saying so before people were ready to hear it.

This is the pattern. The woman who speaks outside the approved script gets reduced, mocked, dismissed, or labeled dangerous. The label does its work. And later, sometimes much later, we acknowledge that she was telling the truth all along.

Discernment Is Not the Same as Fear

I composed my final message to the female podcaster who contacted me first (who to reiterate was given my bio, and had access to my pages prior too that she rejected) carefully, and I meant every word of it.

I told her I respected her right to choose who aligns with her platform. I told her that the assumptions made about me based on metaphorical language felt reductive and disappointing. And then I reminded her, gently I hope, of what the word "witch" has historically been used to destroy: midwives, leaders, warriors, educators, medicine people, healers. I shared that millions of women were persecuted for over four centuries, whose genocide remains one of the least discussed in mainstream historical consciousness.

I mentioned the Magdalene Laundries. I wished her well.

I don't know if she read it. I don't know if it landed. But I needed to say it, because the alternative, absorbing that dismissal in silence, felt like a small participation in the very pattern I've spent my life working against especially at a time when persecution of women has been skyrocketing at levels we haven't seen outside the Handmaid's Tale.

We are living in a moment when nuance is collapsing. When symbols, words, aesthetics, and identities are triggering immediate categorical reactions before anyone has paused to encounter the actual human being. That is dangerous territory, not just for women who use archetypal language, but for all of us trying to think carefully in an environment that increasingly rewards reaction over reflection.

Discernment asks questions. Fear shuts doors.

Discernment remains curious about what it doesn't immediately understand. Fear reduces complexity into a label it can safely reject.

There is a profound difference between a genuine boundary and an ideological reflex. And if we lose the ability to tell them apart, we lose something essential about what it means to actually know one another.

The Past Is Not Past

I explore the living legacy of the witch hunts and their ongoing influence on women's culture in an earlier episode: "How the Burning Times of Witches Influences White Women Culture Today"

Because the echoes of these histories are not safely contained in the past. They live in our institutions, our language, the reflexes we inherited and often don't examine.

And sometimes they reveal themselves in the smallest interactions, a canceled call, a few careless messages, a door closing forty-seven minutes before it was supposed to open.

The work is to keep speaking anyway. That has always been the work.

If this piece moved you, share it with someone who needs to read it. And I'd love to know in the comments: what does the word "witch" bring up for you? That reaction, whatever it is, is worth sitting with.

If this resonates with you, and you are in a season where you are seeking deeper clarity in your body, your energy, or the patterns you keep finding yourself in, you are welcome to reach out and work with me.

There is no pressure here. Only alignment.

When the right people find this work, they usually already know.

🔗 https://linktr.ee/HealingWithSpirit

Booking Here 🔗 https://HealingWithSpirit.as.me/

With care,

Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author, Podcast Host of Triggers And Spiritual Medicine, Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive, Activist, Trauma & Abuse Educator, Spiritual Teacher & Guide, Jikiden Reiki Teacher, End of Life Care Guide, Crone Witch, Ceremonialist, Spiritual Medium, Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator, Plant Medicine Lover, Mother, Grandmother

Last Monday was a sunny beautiful spring New England day. While in between a meeting and an afternoon of gardening, I took a walk with my dog in tow. The sun was warm. The sound of moving water, marshy smell of the changing tides nearby, and a rare pause in a full week ahead, I was in my element.

And in that pause, I stumbled upon the bones.

First: the wing of what appeared to be a mallard duck that was discovered afterwards nearby. It was stripped bone clean with remnants of small chew marks. The symbolic presence and evidence of life, consumption, and what remains after.

I picked up the two bones, and kept walking after curiously pondering on what transpired here. Signs like this are something I have learned to pay attention to. So, I offered a prayer asking for a message I was meant to receive and continued on my walk under the blooming old mature trees.

Further along my walk, near the water’s edge in the ocean grasses, I came across something else entirely: The head of a goose. Yuppers, just the head that was still decomposing with no body anywhere in sight.

The faint instinctive smells of coyote, fox or skunk leaving no trace of their presence besides bones and this head. They were two different discoveries, but on the same walk.

And … I don’t believe that’s coincidence.

What I’m Sitting with Right Now

We’re in a moment where the energy is not subtle. Many of us are feeling this penetrate deep into our core. So much is UNraveling and weaving in through and all around us at the same time. It is hard to keep up at times.

Uranus moved into Gemini recently. Some have felt the impact of the recent comet flyby whose dust was captured with the most recent coronal mass ejections (CME) that shook many of us. This is compounded by the recent full moon in Scorpio.

If you’ve been feeling it in your mind, your nervous system, your words, your work, you’re not imagining it. Uranus is the planet of disruption, awakening, and radical restructuring. Gemini rules the mind: how we think, communicate, learn, and make meaning. Together, this transit is rewriting the operating system of how we carry and express truth … individually and collectively.

Layered underneath all of this, Saturn and Neptune are conjunct in Aries right now — the planet of structure meeting the planet of the formless. The cosmos is literally reflecting back what so many of us are feeling: the knowing arriving before the words do.

There is also a massive clustering of planets in Aries right now, creating an almost primal pressure to rush toward answers and act. Learning to sit in the not-yet-knowing is its own radical practice in this energy. This is the impulse I’m having to consciously resist right now.

Chiron, the wounded healer, is also active right now, a reminder that the wisdom and the wound often live in the same place, and that healing rarely moves in a straight line.

This recent Scorpio full moon squared Pluto, the planet of what is buried and what must be excavated. This is not a gentle lunation. It is asking for real reckoning.

You can read my complete May energy update on Substack here. What I will say is that mental patterns are shifting. Communication is changing. The way we move truth, speak truth, and/or live truth is being disrupted at the root.

Following me so far?

Personally, I’m not experiencing this merely as a concept, but as something rooted in my body, in my work, in what I’m literally finding on the path in front of me.

As a multi-generational, multi-disciplinary healer and intuitive, meaning I carry healing lineages from my ancestral lines, I’ve learned to read what shows up in the physical world as seriously as what shows up in a session or a reading.

The land speaks. The body speaks. And right now, both are very loud.

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What the Bones Are Showing Me

Here, I’m NOT offering this as a neat interpretation. I’m sharing how I’m sitting with it, in real time in the now. So much has moved through me physically in the last week that it took me a week to edit this share and post.

The wing: Think movement, direction, expression reduced to bone.

The structure of each individual bone is still there. However, it’s no longer functioning the way it once did. It took me a while to sit with what this means, but honestly, that lands for me. There are parts of how I’ve been moving in my work… that feel complete, or at least are strengthening AND evolving. The hidden presence of predator also resonates for me. In sacred activism work, we are often moving in spaces where power, consumption, and what gets silenced are very much alive.

This does not mean what I have done before was wrong or a mistake. It means that I am no longer operating in the same way. That in itself is a lot to chew on, compost, and sit with.

And then the goose head.

After I got over my ewwwwww, I realized this is symbolically addressing thought, perception, and my identity … a less desired part of the body, I suppose, if seen as a meal. This head was absolutely not clean nor resolved like the duck wing bones, because it was still breaking down.

As I am writing, I take a big sighhhhhhhh and pause, because that lands for me too. While my movement, processing, integrating has already shifted, my thinking about it is still catching up. My body is like the speaker to my intuition, vision, and consciousness.

The other day I used the analogy when I was given the opportunity to be a part of something BIG, and I turned it down saying “my mind is saying yes. Let’s do this. We got this and my body is saying wait, I am like 10 miles behind you. Can you wait for me to catch up first?”

What I am recognizing is that, the movement in my energy, spirit and process was even ahead of my head and what happened today was confirmation of that. It also means that my body is carrying memory, impact, exhaustion, grief, trauma the mind is not recognizing. It is the wisdom of the body’s response.

The fact the body was missing from the goose actually brings in another layer of messaging.

Both discoveries together pointed to something I’ve been wrestling with personally.

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What We Don’t Talk About Enough

There is often a gap between embodiment and understanding between what we’re already doing differently and how we’re able to explain it, name it, or organize it mentally. That gap can get quite edgy and uncomfortable. It can feel like lack of clarity, or loss of direction, or even self-doubt.

But what I’m witnessing in my own process is this:

The movement can be clear before the mind is.

If You’re Feeling Disoriented Right Now

This is one of the things I most want people to understand about the current energetic climate right now. It does not just disrupt our circumstances. It disrupts our framework for understanding our circumstances.

So, if you feel like your thoughts are not keeping up with your life, that is not a personal failing. You are right on track with a transit and not necessarily a sign you’re off track.

It may be that your way of moving has already shifted, but your way of thinking about it is still decomposing. So, pause and breathe a moment, because, decomposition is not failure. It is transformation that has not finished yet. So don’t rush it.

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Where I’m Being Challenged

Many times, I can feel the urge to name it quickly. Turn it into something teachable. That is part of who I am at my core and what I came here to be. I’m a teacher, spiritual and ancestral guide and healer. I have been told too many times I am also a trailblazer, but that one has been harder to accept, I suppose.

But I also know this: if I move too quickly toward clarity, I interrupt the truth that’s still forming and integrating within me. I felt that pause quite strong over this past week choosing NOT to publish this first draft. Instead, sitting with everything.

So right now, my practice is to continue to let the thinking be unfinished while trusting the movement that is already happening, and to be ok with the thinking BE-ing UNfinished.

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Questions Worth Sitting With

What part of your thinking about yourself, your work, or your path is actively breaking down right now?

And are you trying to rush clarity before that process is complete?

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This Is What Navigating Real Shifts Actually Looks Like

Navigating this path is about BE-ing curious like a child, and not necessarily with certainty nor perfectly articulated wisdom. AND … it is definitely not the “I’ve mastered this, now let me teach you.”

How this dance may look like is walking, stumbling upon a sign, finding, feeling, and questioning. It is noticing what is already stripped down to truth, and what is still in the middle of becoming something else.

I am definitely not outside of this. I AM IN IT!

And if I’m going to speak about these shifts … if I’m going to guide others through them … then I must be willing to show you where I am in the process, not just where I’ve so called “arrived”, because that’s where real trust is built.

And honestly? That is where real transformation happens.

Spirit always has a way of letting us know when we are on track or off track or to simply say “hey don’t forget about us” or “remember you are not alone”.

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If something in this is moving through you right now and you want support — whether you’re navigating a personal threshold, a professional reinvention, or simply a season that doesn’t have a name yet — I’d love to talk.

[Book a consult here] or explore [upcoming classes and offerings] if you’re ready to go deeper.

With care,

Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

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Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney is an author, podcast host of Triggers and Spiritual Medicine, multi-generational healer and intuitive, trauma educator, spiritual teacher, Jikiden Reiki teacher, end of life care guide, and ceremonialist. She works with individuals and organizations at the intersection of healing, truth-telling, and transformation.

For the last 20 years, I have shared an energy forecast for my community, and since 2020, I have explored multiple platforms to share this information. However, this energetic forecast for May 2026, has been building with increased clarity and precision for nearly two years.

If you have been feeling the energetic intensity build over the last few weeks especially THIS week with the comet pass by, you are not alone.

Here is the May 2026 energy update as we move through Bealtaine season and toward today’s Full Moon in Scorpio …. And I want to be honest with you: this one feels real potent and significant… Significant like in an evolutionary and revolutionary manner.

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Bealtaine (pronounced Beeowl-tinna)

In my ancestral Irish pagan traditions, Bealtaine is an ancient fire festival marking the threshold into summer that is one of the four major pre-Christian festivals alongside Imbolc, Lúnasa, and Samhain. This period represents a time of fertility, protection, and transformation. It isn’t always celebrated strictly on May 1st but aligned with seasonal and astronomical timing.

That fire energy when amplified with the fire horse energy of 2026 is very much alive right now. Not just literally (though watch for that globally), but as combustible, volatile, accelerating force. You want to think protest, rapid escalation, conflict, impulsivity, burnout. Fire is the indominable spirit that purifies, and consumes what isn’t built to last. It is the element that destroys yet births creation.

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Entering May 2026 Energies

I’ve been speaking about May 2026 for nearly two years now as a major turning-point month, and I’m already feeling that intensity building. Many of you have reported

Symptoms may feel like

• extreme exhaustion

• a “can’t seem to get out of my own way” feeling

• bizarre headaches

• aches, pains that seem to be out of nowhere

• vivid or unusual dreams

• communication challenges

• emotional flooding

• nervous system activation,

• synchronicities,

• strange energetic experiences — especially surrounding the recent comet flyby.

• “heady” type issues - headaches, dizziness, sinus issues, ringing in the rings that is off the charts and more.

You are NOT imagining it.

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The Full Moon In Scorpio

The Full Moon in Scorpio doesn’t soften things. It exposes them. Ya know those shadows, secrets, suppressed emotions, power dynamics, and everything that can no longer remain hidden. This includes UNrooted UNintiated self-made teachers, UNsafe leaders, performative activism, and hollow systems rooted in whiteness and extraction. Masks will slip under this Scorpio full moon. The inconsistencies we have been witnessing will become harder to ignore. What was barely holding together may not survive this month, and that is not a tragedy. That is the medicine.

This is something I have been very vocal about on my social media platforms for a few years now … the need to face hard truths, UNpack conditioning, heal root issues. I have witnessed some rise to the occasion, and many resist. The level of resistance to face what is currently with courage and compassion have given way to immense grief in my body.

Together CAN move through this energy portal. Expect revelations collectively and personally, politically and spiritually. This is not only a USA story. This is something affecting all life worldwide on a scale we have not seen in 12,000 years.

Every one of us came here to be a part of this grand change for one reason or another. When you pause and sit with the energy, and know your why, it will make moving through this window of time with greater ease.

This portal is the great REmembering.

Uranus in Gemini Affect

With Gemini and Uranian energy in the mix, the information landscape may feel chaotic, which may include conflicting narratives, rapid news cycles, manipulation tactics, AI confusion, performative outrage, spiritual bypassing. Discernment isn’t just a spiritual practice right now. It is survival and a skill we have been working on mastering over the last 2 -3 years. So, before you react, pause. Not everything that demands your energy deserves it.

What to Expect & How to Move Through This Month

For highly sensitive or empathetic folks especially, May may feel like a full system override. Sleep disruption, vivid dreams, anxiety spikes, adrenal exhaustion, dizziness, emotional flooding, grief waves, and heightened intuition are all on the table. As you navigate these energies this month, REmember, your body is NOT broken. Your body is reading the field accurately. So, it is important to honor that process.

And please, please please … this is NOT the month to push through. The old grind fake it til you make it or the “no pain, no gain” model may backfire hard right now, physically and emotionally. Recently, I was asked to be part of something BIG and historic, and I declined. My response was simple: “My mind say yes; let’s do this. Let’s go and my body says wait, I am 10 miles behind you, I need a breather so I can catch up.” What this is basically reminding us is to choose your body’s wisdom over productivity. Rest is not laziness. It is strategy.

There will also be collective grief moving through. I know I have been feeling this on a very deep level myself. The kind of real, deep grief that surfaces even as collective awakening accelerates simultaneously. Both are true at once. Some folks are waking up to this version of reality while others are doubling down in denial, fear, rage, or control. It is crucial to hold space for both without losing yourself in either.

Timeline acceleration is real too. The other day, I actually felt as if I was split into two different realities at once. That has never happened to me before. So, for some of us, time may feel strange: compressed, disorienting, like everything is arriving at once. It many feel like sudden pivots, unexpected endings, or lessons that should have taken years landing in days.

Again, REmember, you are not behind. You are in the current. Pause and just feel the current and flow moving in through and all around you.

Think of this as the climax of the hero’s journey. This is the part of the story where everything intensifies and climaxes before transformation occurs. This is spiritual orgasm, birthing, initiation, and definitely not doom energy. How we choose to focus and center our thoughts on this will be critical collectively. The outcome is not fixed. It is shaped by the people who stay awake, stay grounded, and stay in UNwavering integrity.

A few things that will genuinely help right now:

• Sleep when your body asks. Nap without guilt.

• Hydrate. Ground. Go outside. Trees, ocean, earth, fire rituals, fresh air. Nature is medicine, and Bealtaine is asking you to return to it.

• Stay connected to safe people and practices. Rest, yes, but do not isolate. Community is part of the medicine too.

• Protect your energy carefully. Discern what you consume, who you trust, and where you place your attention.

The strongest wave feels active through early June, with some reprieve by July before another begins building.

This is not happening to you. It is happening through you — through all of us, together, across the world. Disruption is often what precedes revelation. And revelation is what makes transformation possible.

Stay grounded. Stay discerning. Stay connected.

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With love and care,
Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author, Podcast Host of Triggers And Spiritual Medicine, Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive, Activist, Trauma & Abuse Educator, Spiritual Teacher, Jikiden Reiki Teacher, End of Life Care Guide, Crone Witch, Ceremonialist, Spiritual Medium, Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator, Plant Medicine Lover, Mother, Grandmother, Spiritual Guide

Addressing Root Issues and Reclaiming Ancestral Power

Book 1:1 Sessions Here

https://linktr.ee/HealingWithSpirit

This episode invites listeners into a deeper understanding of how harm shows up in everyday life not just in extreme cases, but in language, silence, dismissal, and the normalization of harm toward women and girls.

Rather than staying at the level of awareness alone, Laura and Ukumbwa focus on what comes next: ACTION. Together they explore practical, real-world steps men, parents, and women can take today such as believing survivors, interrupting harmful behavior in the moment, supporting organizations that serve survivors, engaging with policy and legislation, and actively unlearning patterns rooted in patriarchy.

The conversation also highlights the importance of raising the next generation differently. 

That means teaching consent EARLY, modeling emotional responsibility, and challenging harmful ideas about masculinity in homes, schools, and communities.

At its core, this episode is a call to responsibility without shame, and action without delay.

If this conversation resonates with you, please like, follow, share, and subscribe so others can hear it too. 

You can find this podcast on most streaming platforms and YouTube, or listen directly at:

https://triggersandspiritualmedicine.buzzsprout.com/

Because change doesn’t start later, it starts with what you choose to do TODAY.

ABOUT TRIGGERS & SPIRITUAL MEDICINE PODCAST:

Real talk. Let's address the elephant in the room to the growing "sickness" in our society, address root issues and provide sustainable solutions.

We hope by addressing the intersectionality and connect the dots like a web of many of society’s challenges, we can help others understand the trauma infection that impacts all areas of life – addiction, domestic violence, racism, homelessness, sexual abuse, chronic health issues, cancer, environmental issues, climate change and more.

In this NEW collaborative program, we hope by highlighting these infected areas and what they share in common, a new perspective of solutions, healing, and resolutions can be birthed.

Each episode addresses a certain trigger while offering the spiritual medicine with at least 3 tips or actionable steps our listeners can take and implement.

 Please consider becoming a Patreon supporter to support our social justice initiatives https://www.patreon.com/HealingWithSpirit

I read the posts. I see the outrage. I hear the calls for change, and I agree with much of it. I cannot help to say that what I am witnessing stays at the surface, and that outrages the f*ck out of me, and you should be outraged too.

What often gets left out is the lived reality behind those words such as:

• The timeline

• The accumulation

• The bystander abuse and impact

• The cost of surviving it and then daring to speak about it

Because when you LIVE it, you learn quickly this is NOT about individual harm. It is about the culture that protects it. I know this first hand personally, and have spent the last 20 years sharing my story, getting training, learning, and helping others address and heal from trauma and abuse.

My story did not begin in adulthood. At 12 years old, I survived a sexual assault attempt that involved abduction. At 15, I lost my virginity to a rapist. At 22, I was drugged and nearly abducted by four men. I may not be here if my friend had not pulled me out of that car.

At 26, I married my abuser. I left in 2005, and what followed was not freedom in the way people like to imagine. It was 20 years of navigating family court systems and dynamics that sanctioned and prolonged abuse in ways that are rarely spoken about openly. I know now there are terms for what I experienced – litigation abuse, post separation abuse, coercive control, domestic violence by proxy. I was not fully free until October 1, 2024.

Let that land.

Decades stolen.

And for much of that time, I was silent.

It was not because I did not have a voice, but because of the culture of victim blaming and shaming and witnessing over and over and over again watching what it has cost other women was too painful. It indoctrinated me to stay a compliant silent problem for myself and others that blamed and shamed others.

It was not until the Me Too movement, when I was in my 40s, that I began to speak more openly about what I had lived through.

And even then, what I encountered was not just support. It was discomfort, distance, judgment, and silence from people who did not want to get involved. This is what people do not fully understand. The harm is not only in the abuse itself.

It is in the culture that surrounds it.

A culture where bystanders are complicit in the abuse by voting or promoting abusers, rapists, pedos into positions of power ignoring or justifying the harms perpetuated. Ya know, those people who say “that’s terrible” but do nothing or where victims are quietly questioned. Or in some cases like we witnessed in the Amber Heard case, victims are stalked, harassed, abused, doxxed online with millions of bots bought and paid for to ignite the switch which has been a growing epidemic problem. It is where those who have the courage speak up are labeled, dismissed, or pushed out.

I have experienced this personally at a child, adult, and in the family court systems. I have witnessed it professionally in spaces that claim healing, spirituality, and consciousness that speak about love and light or in social justice and advocacy groups but struggle to hold the reality of power, control, and abuse.

That contradiction in both areas of my life is not accidental. The culture of abuse is deeply rooted in systems of colonization and patriarchal power. Ya know those systems that normalize domination, protect hierarchy, reward silence, and condition people to prioritize comfort over truth.

So when we talk about accountability, we canNOT keep it surface level, or we are just bypassing the issues and become complicit to the problem.

This is not just about individual behavior. It is about the structures that enable it, and the bystander culture that sustains it, because bystanders are not neutral.

Silence is not neutral.

Every moment of looking away, minimizing, or choosing not to act reinforces the very conditions that allow harm to continue. To better understand this, our actions or inactions affect seven to ten generations to come.

After five decades of this, I am tired. I am tired not just from what I have lived through, but from what I continue to witness from the gap between what people say they value and what they are willing to stand for when it matters.

If we truly want change, then we must be willing to disrupt more than the obvious. We must stop protecting comfort. Stop questioning victims. Stop distancing ourselves from hard truths. Stop aligning with harmful dynamics because it feels safer than speaking up.

This is not theoretical for me.

This truly is LIVED for me.

And after decades of silence, survival, and navigating systems that were never designed to protect me, I am no longer willing to make this easier to ignore.

We must question our beliefs and be willing to unpack the conditioning we been brought up with and sold. We must be willing to question why we automatically blame or label the woman yet protect or excuse the conduct of the perpetrator.

When will the bystander complicity end?

Are you willing to do the work needed for future generations to come?

So, what is the plan?

What is the next step?

What are you going to DO to stop the rampant male violence?

This tired soul would love to know.

With care,
Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author, Podcast Host of Triggers And Spiritual Medicine, Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive, Activist, Trauma & Abuse Educator, Spiritual Teacher, Jikiden Reiki Teacher, End of Life Care Guide, Crone Witch, Ceremonialist, Spiritual Medium, Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator, Plant Medicine Lover, Mother, Grandmother, Spiritual Guide

Addressing Root Issues and Reclaiming Ancestral Power

Book 1:1 Sessions Here

Subscribe now

Do you hear her?

Do you hear her in the cavern of the heavens where the Moon has swallowed her own light?

Do you hear the whisper moving through the dark like breath on embers?

Her weeping, once ignored, now rising.

Do you feel her mourning?

The low tide of grief rolling through the bones of the Earth.
The quiet lament of rivers, forests, mothers.
The ache of a world that has carried too much forgetting.

Twelve thousand years of persecution.
Violence.
Silencing.

She cries out for us to remember.

In earthquakes.
In storms.
In extinctions.

And beneath the mourning there is something else.

Fire.

The old fire stoking itself awake in the womb of the Earth, our Great Mother.

Aries rises.

Not gently.

A fierce remembering.
A flame that carries no pleasantries.

The strike of flint against the bones of time.

The ram lowers its horns against the gates of stagnation.

Ignition.

And in the unseen corridors of memory, the ancient ones stir.

Do you feel them moving through your blood?

The war cry of the Irish sovereignty queens.

The ones men in power feared.

Fear them not.

The Morrígan moves like a black-winged shadow across the battlefield of history, not merely a goddess of war, but guardian of fate, land, and sovereignty reclaimed.

Grace O’Malley laughs into the teeth of empire, her ships cutting through the Atlantic like prophecy.

Queen Medb stands unapologetic upon the mountain, spear in hand, a woman who never asked permission to rule her own destiny.

Do you feel them circling the edges of this dark moon?

Because Aries carries their blood-song.

Fierce.
Untamed.
Unapologetic.

And yet we are also still within the season of the eternal flame of Brigid.

Keeper of the hearth.
Midwife of spring.
Poet whose fire births new worlds.

Do you feel the paradox?

The sacred duplexity of this moment.

The birthing and the battle.
The womb and the sword.

The Mother, sovereign keeper of life itself, is being attacked and resurrected at the same time.

Can you feel it?

The ancient pulse of matriarchal fire moving again through the veins of the Earth.

For centuries we have worn the cloak.
Layer upon layer.

Shame.
Silence.
Forgetting.

But Aries burns through suffocation.

The cloak tears.

And here we stand in the velvet darkness of the moon at a threshold older than empires.

Some say this is the closing of a twelve-thousand-year breath.

A turning of the great wheel.

The old architecture trembling.
The brittle scaffolding of domination cracking beneath the weight of its own shadow.

And in the dark a question rises like flame.

What are we weaving now?

What web is being spun through the threads of our choices?

Have we woven a web of fear?

A net of conquest and domination?

Or are we remembering the older pattern the ancestors carried, where sovereignty meant right relationship with land, with spirit, and with one another?

This new moon is not quiet.

It is a forge in the fires of time.

A cosmic anvil where courage meets intention.

An anchor cast into the deep waters of becoming.

And somewhere beyond the veil the ancestors lean close.

The Morrígan spreads her wings.
Grace steadies the helm.
Maeve lifts her crown.
Brigid tends the flame.

And the fire in our bellies, carried through generations of women who refused to disappear, begins to burn again.

Do you feel it?

The stirring.
The remembering.
The rising.

Because somewhere in the dark, beneath the silent moon, the first sparks of the next world are already catching flame.

With care,
Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author, Podcast Host of Triggers And Spiritual Medicine, Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive, Activist, Trauma & Abuse Educator, Spiritual Teacher, Jikiden Reiki Teacher, End of Life Care Guide, Crone Witch, Ceremonialist, Spiritual Medium, Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator, Plant Medicine Lover, Mother, Grandmother, Spiritual Guide

Addressing Root Issues and Reclaiming Ancestral Power

Book 1:1 Sessions Here

April 16, 2026 (c) All Rights Reserved.

The power of intuition as a diagnostic tool has been woven into my life for as long as I can remember. But it didn’t appear in isolation.

It comes from lineage.

And lineage matters more than most people realize when they are choosing someone to work with in healing spaces.

I grew up in a family deeply rooted in medicine and healing. My father and my uncle were osteopathic physicians, my mother was a nurse, and I had nurses throughout my extended family. Conversations at home were not abstract or theoretical. They were about real people, real symptoms, and what it actually means to care for someone’s health in a responsible way.

Those conversations were not only about treating illness. They were about preventative health, minimizing unnecessary medications and procedures, and learning how to keep asking the deeper question of what is actually causing someone’s suffering in the first place.

I grew up watching healing being approached with patience and curiosity instead of quick fixes.

My father in particular practiced medicine in a way that was ahead of his time. Alongside osteopathic medicine, he also worked with hypnotherapy and acupuncture and was deeply invested in holistic and integrative approaches to healing. In the 1970s he helped run an acupuncture training program in Boston and later became the first osteopathic physician on staff at South Shore Hospital.

He also worked in advocacy at a time when osteopathic physicians were heavily discriminated against and often excluded from mainstream medicine. On behalf of the Massachusetts Osteopathic Physicians Association, he sat with governors Michael Dukakis and Edward J. King to help establish legitimacy and recognition for the profession.

So I did not grow up in a single way of thinking about healing. I grew up in expansion. I grew up witnessing what it looks like to challenge systems, to broaden what is considered valid care, and to insist that people deserve more than surface level treatment.

When my father finished with his books, they often came home with me. Medical textbooks, holistic medicine texts, herbal medicine guides. I did not just look at them. I studied them. I was learning from an early age how practitioners are trained to observe patterns, connect symptoms, and listen to the body in a structured way.

Years later, I worked alongside my father in a shared practice for nearly twenty years. That became a lived education. I was no longer just reading about healing. I was in it. I was sitting with people, observing patterns unfold in real time, and learning how trauma, emotion, energy, and the body interact in complex ways.

And then there is the other side of my lineage.

On my father’s side of the family, my grandmother and my aunt both carried strong intuitive abilities. My grandmother read tea leaves. My aunt read palms. These were not abstract spiritual ideas for them. They were lived forms of perception. Yet they were also kept quiet because those abilities were not accepted within the religious culture they lived in.

On my mother’s side, my mother also carried intuitive and sensitive perception as a nurse. A way of knowing people and situations that went beyond what could be written in charts.

So I grew up at the intersection of two ways of knowing.

One rooted in clinical observation, anatomy, prevention, and root cause thinking.

The other rooted in intuitive perception, pattern recognition, and the ability to sense what is not being spoken.

For much of history, these two ways of knowing were separated. One was validated by institutions. The other was often hidden, dismissed, or only shared in private spaces.

What I came to understand over time is that healing becomes more complete when both are allowed to exist together.

This is where lineage becomes essential.

Because lineage is not just family history. It is the transmission of how we learn to see. It is how we learn to listen. It is what shapes what we trust and what we are even capable of perceiving in another human being.

Lineage determines depth.

It determines whether someone is working from memorized information or embodied experience.

It determines whether they are reacting to symptoms or listening for what is underneath them.

It determines whether they can hold complexity without rushing to simplify it.

In my work, intuition is not guesswork or performance. It is a form of diagnostic listening shaped by decades of lived experience in both clinical and intuitive environments.

It is the ability to listen to the body, the emotional field, and the deeper patterns that are asking to be seen, not as separate systems, but as one integrated experience.

This is why lineage matters.

Because in a world where healing is often reduced to quick answers and surface solutions, lineage reminds us that real understanding is cultivated. It is not instant. It is not manufactured. It is lived, practiced, and refined over time.

This is also why my training in Japan amplifies my work. My training in Japan as a lineage holder in the Jikiden Reiki lineage is so special to me too.

When you choose to work with someone, you are not only choosing their tools. You are choosing the depth of their listening.

My work is the meeting place of both of my lineages. The clinical and the intuitive. The structured and the perceptive. The seen and the unseen.

And it is from that integration that I meet people in their healing.

Not at the surface of their symptoms, but at the root of what is asking to be understood.

Closing invitation

This is also why I am intentional about the space I hold with people.

I do not see healing as something done to someone. I see it as a process of listening, uncovering, and working at the level where patterns actually begin.

My work lives at the intersection of clinical awareness, intuitive perception, and trauma informed understanding. It is shaped by decades of lived experience, training, and lineage that includes both medicine and intuitive practice.

If this resonates with you, and you are in a season where you are seeking deeper clarity in your body, your energy, or the patterns you keep finding yourself in, you are welcome to reach out and work with me.

There is no pressure here. Only alignment.

When the right people find this work, they usually already know.

🔗 https://linktr.ee/HealingWithSpirit

Booking Here 🔗 https://HealingWithSpirit.as.me/

With care,

Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author, Podcast Host of Triggers And Spiritual Medicine, Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive, Activist, Trauma & Abuse Educator, Spiritual Teacher & Guide, Jikiden Reiki Teacher, End of Life Care Guide, Crone Witch, Ceremonialist, Spiritual Medium, Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator, Plant Medicine Lover, Mother, Grandmother

Many spaces claim to be trauma-informed or healing, but when HARM is raised, they respond w/ silence, defensiveness or retaliation. This is not care nor safety.

It’s worse

At increasing levels, some of these INDUSTRIES target people w/ histories of trauma as part of their business model marketing healing while failing to hold the weight of trauma, training, responsibility, integrity or lineage.

Profit, visibility, influence take priority over real care

This is NOT just about individual healers. It's about systems that allow harm to continue:

• platforms

• institutions

• allies

• & communities that stay silent, double down or defend abusers

These patterns are familiar

They are the SAME behaviors victims face in family court ... gaslighting, silencing, deflection, retaliation, & systems protecting abusers, predators, & those in power instead of those harmed.

True healing spaces are different

They're rooted in integrity, safety, & responsibility

People & "the work" come before profit. Boundaries are honored. Harm is addressed. Accountability & responsibility is taken seriously.

A space is NOT safe because it says it is

A space is safe because it takes responsibility when safety is tested.

True healing spaces:

• Do not bypass harm in the name of love or light

• Do not silence those who ask for accountability

• Do not center charisma or visibility over care

• Do not extract from sacred or ancestral traditions w/o reverence

Discernment is not judgment. It's self-respect. We all have a role in creating spaces that are NOT just welcoming but truly safe to land in.

Healing cannot exist w/o honesty, accountability, & integrity at every level NOT just among practitioners but across the communities & systems that surround them.

Curious know how this message lands for you. Share in the comments your experience.

With care,

Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author, Podcast Host of Triggers And Spiritual Medicine, Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive, Activist, Trauma & Abuse Educator, Spiritual Teacher & Guide, Jikiden Reiki Teacher, End of Life Care Guide, Crone Witch, Ceremonialist, Spiritual Medium, Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator, Plant Medicine Lover, Mother, Grandmother

My name is Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney (formerly Laura Bonetzky-Joseph). On Summer Solstice, June 21, 2025, I was blessed to marry my best friend of 9.5 years...the man who didn’t just speak love, but walked it. This moment marked not only a personal milestone but also a deep spiritual union aligned with the turning of the seasons.

I am a multigenerational, multidisciplinary healer and intuitive, author of two books (Feisty and The Secrets To Healing), psychic medium, spiritual guide and educator, facilitator, Jikiden Reiki Teacher, sacred activist, podcast host of Triggers And Spiritual Medicine, and ceremonialist.

I’ve been walking a sacred path for over five decades and serving professionally for nearly two decades, and every step has been a lesson in reclaiming power, healing, breaking cycles, and remembering the wisdom of the ancestors and reclaiming the medicine of the wise women before us, wisdom that has too often been silenced, suppressed, or erased.

My journey began as a child, often called “Dr. Doolittle” for my connection with animals in need. By age 12, I was already published for my rescue and healing work. Those early days set the stage for a life rooted in service, intuition, and a deep bond with the unseen world.

I went on to be published in the Times Chronicle (PA), Graphic Artist Guild, and New England Business Bulletin. One front page feature highlighted my painting of John, a beloved silverback gorilla I had painted before he tragically perished in a devastating fire the following year.

Since 2006, I’ve been offering spiritually based integrative therapies with a specialty in somatic trauma healing through Healing With Spirit and later Healing Trauma Through Spirit.

My work isn’t about quick fixes. It’s about diving into the roots, whether they stem from chronic illness, end of life, ancestral lines, cultural conditioning, or life’s most challenging initiations.

My approach is multidimensional, weaving a custom journey for each individual through sessions, circles, retreats, teachings, and sacred pilgrimage.

As a Jikiden Reiki teacher trained within the traditional Japanese lineage, I carry forward teachings that emphasize integrity, cultural respect, and embodied practice.

In 2027, I will be leading another six month journey that includes an 8 day sacred pilgrimage and ceremony in Ireland in the fall of 2027. This work focuses on unpacking cultural conditioning, religious indoctrination, and persecution, while reclaiming aspects that were lost, forgotten, or stolen from us or our ancestors and remembering the medicine of the wise women before us.

What makes me different?

I don’t follow trends.

I don’t believe healing can be bought through flashy programs because everyone processes and heals differently, in their own rhythm and season.

Healing is a lifelong commitment, one I’ve apprenticed under wise elders to fully understand. My work isn’t a weekend class. It’s decades of devotion to walking my talk every single day, guided by the ancestors and the teachings carried forward by those who came before me.

I’m here to help people harness their power by addressing and healing root issues, reclaiming lost parts of themselves, reconnecting with ancestral wisdom, and aligning with Spirit.

With the energy of the Year of the fire horse in 2026, we’re being called to shed old patterns, embrace transformation, and take bold action. No more sticking our heads in the sand.

🌿 On a personal note:

I am a grandmother to two beautiful grandbabies, lover of herbal plants and plant medicines, survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence, and a proud member of the TRAC Coalition in Massachusetts advocating for policy and legislative change for survivors of domestic abuse. Much of this advocacy work is self funded and rooted in my commitment to creating safer pathways for survivors.

In 2007, due to family court sanctioned abuse, my children were legally trafficked to a documented abuser, children I have never been allowed to see again. It is a mother’s worst nightmare, but I refuse to live as a victim.

Instead, I rise as a champion for other women and survivors, clearing pathways of ancestral wounding and reclaiming the medicine of the wise women before us, so the generations that follow may walk in greater wholeness and freedom.

So that’s a glimpse of me and my journey.

With care,

Laura Bonetzky-Gaffney

Author, Podcast Host of Triggers And Spiritual Medicine, Multi-Generational Multi-Disciplinary Healer & Intuitive, Activist, Trauma & Abuse Educator, Spiritual Teacher, Jikiden Reiki Teacher, End of Life Care Guide, Crone Witch, Ceremonialist, Spiritual Medium, Ireland Pilgrimage Facilitator, Plant Medicine Lover, Mother, Grandmother, Spiritual Guide

Addressing Root Issues and Reclaiming Ancestral Power

▶️ Let me know how I can support you on your path.

If you are interested in:

⭐️ Booking a session with me

⭐️ Collaborating

⭐️ Listening to my podcast or reading my books

⭐️ Renting/sharing space in Hingham

⭐️ Website & socials

https://linktr.ee/HealingWithSpirit

ABOUT TRIGGERS & SPIRITUAL MEDICINE PODCAST:

Real talk. Let's address the elephant in the room to the growing "sickness" in our society, address root issues and provide sustainable solutions.

We hope by addressing the intersectionality and connect the dots like a web of many of society’s challenges, we can help others understand the trauma infection that impacts all areas of life – addiction, domestic violence, racism, homelessness, sexual abuse, chronic health issues, cancer, environmental issues, climate change and more.

In this NEW collaborative program, we hope by highlighting these infected areas and what they share in common, a new perspective of solutions, healing, and resolutions can be birthed.

Each episode addresses a certain trigger while offering the spiritual medicine with at least 3 tips or actionable steps our listeners can take and implement.

 Please consider becoming a Patreon supporter to support our social justice initiatives https://www.patreon.com/HealingWithSpirit

In this deeply layered conversation, Laura welcomes Rosanne Romiglio-Ashley, author, artist, and spiritual teacher who writes under the ancestral name of her great great grandmother, Marie Dion. Together they explore what it means to walk between worlds with integrity, to bridge the seen and unseen, and to reclaim the wisdom of lineage without appropriation.

Rosanne shares her journey of reconnecting with her Indigenous heritage, being called by her ancestors, and honoring her family’s survival story. She speaks openly about ancestral guidance, the responsibility that comes with spiritual gifts, and the ripple effect of healing across generations.

The conversation weaves through prayer as gratitude rather than petition, cultural conditioning around spirituality, and the courage required to live in alignment with spirit. Rosanne recounts the ten year journey of returning a sacred pipe to its rightful home in the Black Hills, an experience that became the foundation of her book What’s Sacred.

Laura and Rosanne also discuss alternative healing paths, overcoming trauma, navigating triggers, and the importance of reconnecting with one’s own cultural roots rather than appropriating another’s traditions.

They explore the concept of life review, personal accountability, and how everyday choices shape both personal and collective healing.

This episode is a call back to simplicity.

Journaling by hand.

Practicing gratitude.

Listening for ancestral whispers.

Living with integrity.

Because meaningful spiritual growth does not come from grand gestures. It comes from consistent, courageous presence.

Rosanne will be sharing more of her teachings at Healing with Spirit Studio in Hingham on March 28th, including insights from What’s Sacred and Make Your Life a Living Prayer.

This is a conversation about remembrance.

About responsibility.

About reconciliation.

About love.

And about making your life the prayer itself.

ABOUT TRIGGERS & SPIRITUAL MEDICINE PODCAST:

Real talk. Let's address the elephant in the room to the growing "sickness" in our society, address root issues and provide sustainable solutions.

We hope by addressing the intersectionality and connect the dots like a web of many of society’s challenges, we can help others understand the trauma infection that impacts all areas of life – addiction, domestic violence, racism, homelessness, sexual abuse, chronic health issues, cancer, environmental issues, climate change and more.

In this NEW collaborative program, we hope by highlighting these infected areas and what they share in common, a new perspective of solutions, healing, and resolutions can be birthed.

Each episode addresses a certain trigger while offering the spiritual medicine with at least 3 tips or actionable steps our listeners can take and implement.

 Please consider becoming a Patreon supporter to support our social justice initiatives https://www.patreon.com/HealingWithSpirit