The WItches' House
A Place where History meets Healing...
The Witches' House stands at an important crossroads where the past meets present and future, and where science meets spirituality. It's a place where we see how our evolutionary history weaves its way through traumatised ancestral lineages forming unconscious patterns of survival patterns that continue to play out in our modern-day lives.
In order to heal, grow and raise our consciousness, we must reckon with our history so as not to repeat its mistakes. Ancestral work is bubbling up into western mainstream consciousness right now because as we deepen into our personal healing journey's we hit a point where we realise we are missing something. We also become aware of a sense of carrying things that feel bigger than us or do not seem to belong to us. And we are right!
Ancestral work is ancient and yet, with the recent discoveries of epigenetics and evidence of inherited trauma, it is also new. When we come back into connection with our Ancestors, we open to a vast realm of healing and potential.
We have descended from lineages of violence, brutality, displacement, colonialism, torture, slavery and oppression. We are the descendants of people traumatised by experiences of abandonment, powerlessness, isolation, war, persecution, poverty, loss and the reality of impossible choices. People who lived out survival strategies based on fear and separation, which over time have become deeply rooted into the psyche of humanity itself and continue to play out through the collective unconscious.
Today we stand with the knowledge and understanding to see that these survival strategies, necessary for our Ancestors, are for us, not simply out-dated, but are in fact life-destructive. Today we have the inner awareness to know that our inherited patterning of separation, from ourselves, from each other and from the land, are making us sick and are causing untold planetary destruction.
And we have a choice; to struggle on towards our own demise, or to bravely go within, to face into what we are carrying and to do the work to clear what no longer serves us.
And it's not just about the wounds; our Ancestors offer us gifts too. Ancestral work offers us the opportunity to reclaim long-forgotten powers from the past whilst enabling us to step forward into a more loving, joyful, harmonious future. Without ancestral work, we cannot evolve into the true power and potential of our full Selves and unity consciousness. Our ancestors offer a vital branch to the tree of life, or more accurately, the roots which sustain us and from which we grow.
Etched into our historical timeline we find 300 years of Witch Hunt hysteria. Whilst violence and brutality was not new to our ancestors of 1450-1750; the so-called "Burning Times" was a phenomenon with devastating consequences to the very psyche of our shared humanity. The Burning Times created a wound in the collective unconscious that we still haven't recovered from; a trauma wound of separation from all that sustains life itself.
It is a collective wound and as such, requires collective healing; our coming together in circle to clear the inherited rage, grief and terror, and rewire ourselves back into healthy connection.
This is brave work, and it's also beautiful! It's generally transformative! It calls out our shadows and requires us to feel all the feels! We go deep and we go together. We come through it feeling changed and ready to take the next big step into our sovereignty. As the destructive, patriarchal systems of domination and control now crumble, it is up to us! We stand at a pivotal moment in our evolution and are being called to dig deep.
The Witches' House is a place for this work to happen, a heart-felt contribution to the reshaping of our collective future and a space for collaborative exploration into shifting out of a fear-based paradigm into one of love.
Hello I'm Cali...welcome!
Cali White
Therapist, Ancestral Healing Practitioner, Group Facilitator
I was never really into the whole "witchy thing" and would never have considered myself a witch, but when the ancestral witches came knocking at my door back in 2017, I had no choice but to open it.
Having spent 13 years selling my soul to the corporate devil, burnout took my life in a new direction and for the last 20 years I've immersed myself in the world of healing and spiritual seeking. Psychotherapy training, rites of passage work and women's circles really helped me heal so much of my broken inner world but it wasn't until I passed through the portal of peri-menopause that I would find what felt like the missing piece of my inner jigsaw - ANCESTORS!
For 18 months I followed their calling, embarking on an ancestral healing practitioner training, and deepening my connection with them through ritual, ceremony and shamanic-based journeying. It was during these journeys that the "witches" started visiting me. Not the devil-worshipping old hags I'd been taught them to be, they were ordinary people simply struggling to survive.
This led me to an exploration of the European Witch-hunts in which I discovered the brutal reality of the so-called Burning Times, and the profound psychological impact they had on our ancestors living in the 16th and 17th centuries. Map onto that the epigenetic understanding of generational trauma carried down through potentially 20 generations, and I saw clearly how the experiences of our ancestors continue to affect us today some 300 years later.
Following a call to share this little-known history lesson with more women, I travelled around the UK and Ireland on a 13 moon pilgrimage. Each new moon I gathered with women in ceremonies to honour our ancestors from those times and to heal the inherited wounds of the witch-hunt trauma legacy.
It was a magical year of healing, learning and connection and led to a collective creative project with 32 other women which culminated in a month-long exhibition called I AM WITCH - Tales from the Roundhouse in Lancaster, UK. A creative expression of our inner experiences of healing the wounds of separation, I could never have predicted the overwhelming positive response from the 2500 visitors who came!
And so it seemed the "witches" were guiding my life and I had no choice but to follow it. I took my teaching online and co-created The Witches' Revival in August 2023; a four day festival of healing in remembrance of The Pendle Witches on the anniversary of the Lancaster Witch Trials in 1612.
The Witches' House is born from all of these experiences and as the next step in what feels like a mission to contribute to women's healing and empowerment needed at this time. I have a big vision and I'm stepping out of my comfort zone but I know I can trust my ancestral guidance and support to help me.
The Ancestors told me really loudly that, "a collective wound requires collective healing" and so it's my intention to build something through collaboration with other women in addition to offering my own work. Collaboration between women can bring up all the wounds of betrayal and mistrust and I carry my fair share! So here I am doing my own work too. As I grow The Witches' House over the coming months I'll be bringing in "Guest Teachers" - other women deeply immersed in the world of the witch whose work deserves a platform. Supporting each other is vital to healing the ancestral wounds of separation and I'm committed to doing my part.
I'm so grateful you're here. I hope you find something helpful for your own inner journey and I hope our paths may cross at some point down the road. x