EP 91: Sedna Sea Goddess of the North

I’m coming to you from the wild beauty of Vancouver Island, where the ocean’s song has been holding me through a tender chapter of my own healing.

This week, I’m introducing you to Sedna, the Pacific Northwest Water Goddess from Inuit tradition. She is an energy I felt in the cold Pacific waters near my home before I even knew her story. A beautiful and compassionate force who knows what it is to turn pain into power.

I share more of my story in today’s episode….my struggles with PTSD, and rebuilding after an abusive marriage. Water Magic has been a big part of my healing; the salt air, the steady pulse of the tide, and working with goddesses like Sedna have helped me find my way back to myself. This episode is about the unbreakable resilience of women, the magic we carry in our bones, and the way we rise again and again.

Transcript

 Good morning my Coven. Well, it's morning for me. You know, I often record in the morning, dip in my coffee, relaxing. I'm actually on vacation, so you'll notice that I don't have my regular equipment. My voice is gonna sound different. I'm gonna do some work post recording to try to get it more like we usually sound, but considering it's pretty good, I've got a tiny little mic.

I'm on the far side of Vancouver Island in NBC where I live in a little place called Tino. It's a pretty magical, beautiful place. I'm out here getting some much needed time in the water and surfing and just loving it, and I need. I thought I would share some of that with you. I've been doing a lot of writing.

Before I get into our episode today, we're gonna do a Goddess episode today. I do have a bit of housekeeping, so housekeeping number one. I've already said, please forgive me for the quality of this recording. I'd rather connect with you than have a perfect record. Housekeeping number two. I am doing an event.

Let me grab the date for that. I know it's in the fall. Okay, here it is. We will be gathering September 21st to 27th. This is an online Equinox celebration. It's with the beautiful Tara, Diana, and spirit essence. There's going to be so many amazing practitioners sharing their message, sharing their magic, and you know how I feel about when powerful women come together, we create change.

We beat with the drum of creation. So when we come together, magic happens. Join us. Bath in the glow of everything we have going on. It's gonna be amazing. I'm excited. I'm really excited for it. I've started a substack, my friends, if you're not on that platform, maybe check it out. It's full of writers. If you are on that platform, it's under the witching half hour or so.

I'm putting a lot of my writing there. I'm putting a lot of my real time reflections there. I've been in this transition place where I. I'm just not writing my love letter to you the way I used to. So I'm trying this platform as a way to keep connected. I will still be dropping stuff in our Facebook group.

The Facebook group is witching half hour or so, earbud, coven. There's always Instagram. I'm pretty active there. Please reach out. Let's connect. Let's build community together. I am doing full moon circles with my girlfriend, Natalie, my witch sister. You've met her on here in them. Ask a witch episodes.

We'll be posting that. So if you're in the lower mainland, those are in-person gatherings. Okay. Our episode today, I wanna talk to you about goddesses. I've been focusing on goddesses this season, and the one I wanna talk to you about is our Pacific Northwest Water Goddess. She's an Inuit goddess. I really feel like where I am in my healing journey is because of this goddess and the work I have done in the water in the Pacific Northwest.

So let me tell you a little bit about this and set the stage for you. Some of you know that I have complex situational PTSD. That means that I am high anxiety, I have panic attacks. My whole world can be derailed pretty fast. It's all because of an abusive marriage I was in. Okay. This is my healing journey.

This is why I share so much with you in our love letter and the new substack I'm putting out because I wanna speak to the women out there and the people out there who are healing, who are going through big stuff. I'm not talking from a place of spiritual bypassing. I'm always talking to you from a place of on the ground, healing, going through it, feeling my way through it.

And I really know that these methods of witchcraft, these old ways of the wise woman living in flow, turning inward using our ability to heal ourselves. Using shamanic techniques. This is where I've gained huge amounts of healing and rejuvenation to my soul. It's how I've been able to carry on and support my children and have the life I have.

I've worked directly with goddesses in meditation, in ceremonial magic, doing healing work. I've worked with shamans, I've had work done with me. I've worked with therapists too, like I'm not saying that. Traditional therapy doesn't have its place. It does in my personal path. I think it's the traditional therapy I had in my twenties and thirties that gave me the tools of self-reflection and listening to my inner voice that I need for the D healing work I'm doing now.

Anyway, different goddesses have helped me with dispar aspects of my healing and the rebuilding of my life. One of the ones who is lesser known and has played a huge part, and she was working with me and I could feel her energy even before I knew who she was. And her name is Sedna. She is a Pacific Northern goddess from the First Nations people of Canada.

There is not a lot of information on her, so I am going to link her Wiki page. I'm also gonna tell you what I learned about her working with her, how I came to be embraced by this energy, what I've learned. And it feels really important to tell you her story. And it also feels synchronic. 'cause I'm out here into Eno in her waters.

So I think a lot of you know that I'm active and I hike and, and I paddleboard and I surf. So. Turning to nature and turning to the water was one of the things I did in the early days of my healing. Even before I knew I had PTSD, I would go to nature, the therapist I was working with would recognize that being outside is really grounding and good, and, and that's proven, like there's all kinds of papers around that.

There's all kind of information about how being outdoors and being in nature is grounding and good for us. I believe it's because we connect with the flow and the energy and our, in our human being and grounded when we're in nature, it's easier to hear our inner voice when you take the hum of the city away, and I really believe that the nature spirits, the forest spirits support us in our healing.

When I was seeking solace and connection, one of the things I started doing was paddle boarding. So I would be out in the ocean. I could feel this loving presence of nature, right? I could feel it. And at the time I was full of a lot of anger. I was full of a lot of grief. I was going through the releasing process of my hopes and dreams around what my marriage would be, and I was very much afraid of the path before me.

And I would go out on the water and I would dig in with my paddle, and I would. Work it out in a sweat and eventually I would stop and sit in the beautiful barard inlet and just take in the beauty of the ocean. And I'd never felt alone out there. I could feel a presence. I could feel this water goddess.

And when I'd research water goddesses, and there's a lot out there, you know about Yame, who's amazing, really beautiful. There is ocean who I connect with. The goddess so soon, but all of those goddesses are these warm, gentle, nurturing mother goddesses. They're from the warm waters, and that wasn't what I was feeling out in the Pacific.

The Pacific is dark and cold and gray even in the summer. She's pretty cold out there in Canada, but so deep and full of compassion. So I started working with this energy knowing it was a water goddess, knowing that it's not the water goddesses that I am familiar with, that you see in other pantheons, and I just kept working with it.

I would sing to her when I was on my paddle board. I would give her offerings of flowers and I would cry. I would bring a journal in my bag and I would like sit on my paddleboard and I would cry and write and process. Then I'd shove it all back away in my dry bag, and I would go for a swim and feel the embrace, and it was like the tears that I was crying would mix with the ocean.

So working with the energy, I started to search for who this goddess was, and it took some time and eventually I found a legend of cna. She's in First Nations Goddess, and I started reading about her. I immediately got that resonating feeling that. She was the goddess I was working with, and you must remember that our Canadian First Nations and our Northern First Nations, our Inuit people, they have an oral tradition.

So when you look at her, there's a couple different stories around who she is and how she came to be the goddess of the sea and her origin story. There's nuances about it. It did connect though. There's a deep theme in each one. Link a few pages, but I'll just kind of summarize what I feel really resonated with me and the part that stuck with me.

So in most of the stories of Edna, she is a young girl and she's to be married and she doesn't want to marry the person that has been chosen for her to marry, and she kicks up a fuss. She's got a will and a mind, and she doesn't want to. And she's being told she must, in some of the legends, she marries a dog so that she doesn't have to marry the man chosen for her.

Either way, she ends up in a canoe with her father, and he's very angry with her because she will not do as she has been told to do, and she will not marry this man. So he throws her into the water, and as she's swimming back to the canoe and grabbing onto the canoe. He slowly chops each one of her fingers off until she can no longer hold on, and she falls down into the dark water and there's an underworld representative here.

There's like a, a death and rebirth theme where she's on the floor of the ocean and consumed by grief and sadness and betrayal out of that deep pain. The loss of her fingers, she transforms and she takes all of her finger pieces, and from them she creates the abundance of the ocean. She creates the seals and she creates the fish.

She creates all the life in the ocean. So she is a mother of all life, and we wanna remember how important fishing was and how important collecting things like from the sea would've been to the Northern Pacific. First people. The sea was their lifeblood. Similar to the buffalo on the prairies. The sea was everything, and she birthed it all.

She transformed her suffering. Not only did she transform her suffering, but she also took that abundance and gave it back to the people. She supported the people out of her pain. She created beauty out of her grief. She created life. Through working with Sedna, I have learned so much self-compassion. I have learned so much about transforming whatever you have into goodness.

I've learned about rebuilding. Once I got that grief piece out and all the crying I did beside the water, in the water, on the water, it's transforming my PTSD. So I'm out on the coast this week, like I said, and I'm in the water. I've been surfing every day, surrounded by the goddess, surrounded by sna, letting go of things.

I've been in transition, you know, and I'm choosing to create through it. The podcast is shifting a bit. This is more personal than we've gotten before. I think I feel like sharing with you all because I want any of you out there who are struggling to know that you can transform your pain and your grief into beautiful things.

There are so many goddesses, there's so many creation stories. There's so many stories of women. Overcoming. There's so many stories of, of women transforming from mortals into goddesses through the underworld, through a passage, through darkness. So to any of you right now in your darkness, I want you to know that you're transforming.

This is your opportunity, and there's goddesses out there ready to help you. I truly believe that the reason we have so many of these stories. Because women have been healing and growing through hardship. It's part of the human condition, and that means we have what we need to get through it. So I send you all the love and vibes of the water.

This is a short pod this week, this moon, but I've been busy doing the healing work in the trenches this summer, doing the transforming work. So I haven't been doing the research or getting guests together because all I can do is sit here with my coffee and record. So this is what I have to offer to you today, an introduction to the Goddess sna, and the idea that whatever you're being pulled to, to heal, it's probably perfect for you.

Keep listening to your inner voice. Keep moving through it 'cause you're not really alone. We're moving through it together.