Grail Energy /Shamanic Healer & Writer

                              With Recent Focus on Greenland

                                     Advanced Practitioner of

                                    Reiki Healing   

                                          nitarenfrew@yahoo.com   

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  The program can be viewed in its entirety by clicking the you tube link below:

       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC-JPXBzGd8  - NITA RENFREW    

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July 13, 2008

MY JOURNEY TO GREENLAND
Nita M. Renfrew

To my friends:
As many of you know, in the fall of 2006 an Eskimo/Kalaallit spirit from Greenland began appearing to me and led me on a wild, wild, wild journey. She answered to the name of “Aanaa,” which means “Grandmother”, or “Elder,” in Greenlandic. Since this coincided with my meeting Eskimo shaman Angaangaq, or “Uncle,” as many of you know him, I assumed it was his mother, and indeed, he asserted that this was so (and continued to do so even in Kangerlussuaq), urging me to follow her instructions no matter how strange they might seem. (I will not at present go into what all this entailed, but some of you, who have accompanied me on the process for over a year, have been able to follow it step by step.)
Eventually, Aanaa’s instructions led me on a journey to Greenland in the physical world in late June of this year. Aanaa told me the icecap melting is Mother Earth’s water breaking just prior to giving birth to the New World, that the Greenland icecap is the epicenter for this birth process.
I was to go there to align with Mother Earth’s process and bring the Grail energy (the Divine Feminine: the ancestral energy with which I work) to help ease the Great Mother’s birth pains in order for us to make the transformation necessary to move up in consciousness rather than be left behind or perish. (I might add that, all along, I asked her, why me? Her answer always was that I would know the answer when I was there.) Aanaa said I would experience the Grail energies there in a way that they did not exist elsewhere, that the Grail tradition that had been lost in the West, had beeen preserved there for over 10,000 years.
After many, many setbacks, finally, on June 23, I arrived in Nuuk (Greenland’s capital). I stayed at the home of a well-known Kalaallit woman healer whom Aanaa had led me to communicate with by email over a year earlier: Manguaq Berthelsen. In 2001, Manguaq was asked by a government recently formed to clear the space in the government building prior to assembling there. The bishop of Greenland, upon learning this, proceeded to demand that the official who had asked for this space clearing be removed from his number-two post as government Administrator, and denounced the whole affair as witchcraft. Manguaq was publicly labeled a witch by one of the priests. The entire government fell. (A number of mainstream press articles can be googled on the Internet regarding this.)
Greenland, by the way,  is a territory of Denmark, with a parliamentary government for limited self-rule. Early on, in the process of colonization in the 18th century, the Danes began to do away systematically with the local Eskimo/Kalaallit traditions, making them illegal, using the Lutheran Church, the state church, no less, presided over by a bishop appointed by the Danish king, to do so. To my amazement, I found that it continues to be illegal, as it was until recently in the U.S. for Native Americans, for the Kalaallit to perform any traditional ceremonies.
The first thing I did upon arriving in Greenland was visit Bishop Sofia Petersen, representing myself as a fellow energy healer of Manguaq’s, to explain to the bishop that energy healing and space clearing are not witchcraft, that they are widespread and accepted practices in the U.S. and the world at large. I asked her to consider reconciling her differences with Manguaq, given that the consequences of having been made an outcast by the foremost institutional spiritual leader (in an official government capacity), in a country of some 70,000 inhabitants, three quarters of whom are Kalaallit, can be far-reaching. (For example, Manguaq’s daughter Else, who is also a well-known healer, was unable to find a job for two years.) I stressed the point that as Christians we must know that Jesus’s way was one of love and forgiveness, and that he hung out with the outcasts, never condemning them. And Jesus was a healer.
The next thing that happened in Nuuk was that when Else and Manguaq and I, together, tuned energetically into my Aanaa, whom they had known for some time had indeed led me to them (part of the longer story), the consensus was that Aanaa (it turned out that Uncle’s/Angaangaq’s mother was Manguaq’s aunt) was far more than that one person, and not simply Angaangaq’s mother at all, though it seemed she had allowed us to believe that in the beginning, perhaps in order to make things less confusing. 
In fact, shortly after the momentous Full Moon-Spring Equinox in March, when a major spiritual shift had taken place in me, I had begun to realize that the Aanaa who was guiding me was a great great spirit who far superseded any one person’s spirit, and when I had asked her who she really was, she had answered, the “Spirit of Greenland.” Manguaq and Else felt she was the combined Aanaa spirits of Greenland.
Else then looked at my hands, saying something in Greenlandic to Manguaq, and shuddered. “I believe it was your deeper self you led you here,” she proceeded, and urged me to go to the National Museum the following day to see the mummies. She shuddered again, and looked at me strangely. “It’s your hands,” she continued in her halting English, “they are the same as the mummy’s hands, and your face, the way you are… Go see!”
Indeed when I visited the mummies the following day with Manguaq (there were four of them—three women and a baby—dating from ca. 1475, found in a cave in the north, near Umanaq), I stood there entranced, all the feelings of recognition flowing through me, and then I burst into sobbing.  One of them was me, lying there in a reclining position as I often do, my legs slightly bent and pulled up, toes pointed, head to the side, my hands with the long thin fingers crossed over my chest.
Another was my mother Helma, who only recently transitioned from this world. We had been put out in the cold to die, or “move on” as it is referred to in the Eskimo/Inuit world; presumably this was undertaken voluntarily when people were no longer children, usually when they were too sick or weak, or too old, to keep up, or when there was not enough food. Sometimes, however, they were put out simply to get rid of them… 
On Friday, June 27, with this knowledge, I flew to Kangerlussuaq to meet with Angaangaq/Uncle. In January, Aanaa had instructed me to email him asking for his assistance in my trip to Greenland. We had not been in communication for nine months. He emailed back within a few hours inviting me to come with my friends to his camp at Kangerlussuaq on Friday, June 27, to help him prepare the site for a Fire and Ice conference in the summer of 2009, to bring back the sacred fire to Greenland after thousands of years when the ice had come and no more trees grew, according to an ancient prophecy, as he put it. I had been preparing to visit Greenland with two friends for the Full-Moon Spring Equinox in March, according to earlier instructions from Aanaa, and we all understood now that this was a sign to change the trip to June. Neither of my two friends, who had prepared for months, were able to come on this date, and I soon would understand why.
We drove for 45 minutes to the great valley where the camp would be set up, and as we rounded a bend in the mountains, before us, a scene right out of Jean Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear unfolded below, taking my breath away. There lay an enormous tundra valley studded by clear blue lakes, and the glacier at the Eastern end. I and a friend who had joined me the last minute, were left alone with our baggage on a hilltop in the middle of the magnificent valley, near the firepit, built last summer and awaiting the sacred fire ceremony next year. The rest of the group, mostly local Kalaallit, we were told, would come in a few hours.
At the airport in Iceland on the way there, I had fallen on the stairs and sprained my left wrist badly (x-rays showed no broken bones). Pondering why this had happened, I had understood that it was a sign for me to release all attempts to control my right brain, the intuitive side, and go with whatever happened. So now I did just that: I was moved to descend the hill to the firepit and do the first of my Grail ceremonies that Aanaa had asked for. As I started down, westward, a great dark eagle flew from the north across the pale blue sky. I saw it cross in front of the pale white horned Moon in mid-Heaven. The New Moon would come in a few days, July 2; this was the only time the moon was visible in the sky while I was there. I took out my little Snow Drum, as she calls herself, who had come all the way from New York City for this, and she sang with all her might to the Moon and to the glacier in the East, “Semarsuaq”—“Big Ice”—as she has
 been known for aeons to the Kalaallit. I lay an apple out for the Mother, and tiny blue and white flowers I found growing on the path.
When we finished the ceremony, we walked to the top of the rock hill again, while two eagles circled above. (A couple of days later, I found an eagle feather and a hawk feather in close proximity on the tundra.) Angaangaq arrived soon with the three Kalaallit volunteers and the Canadian woman who was a graduate of his three-year Wisdom Keeper program and coordinator for the conference, who was there only for the weekend. We set up camp with the tents. Five more local volunteers arrived a few days later. The summer’s task was to gather rocks from the riverbed next to the glacier, to build a three-meter-high inuksuk, or traditional mound of rocks overlooking the cermonial site, and four sweat lodges for next summer’s Fire and Ice conference.
On Sunday, Angaagaq announced that we would ritually walk the ancient Path of the Grandmothers, which wound up the side of the southern mountain to a high valley where only recently (after thousands of years) trees had begun to grow, to about 4 or 5 feet. He said he needed to time the walk in anticipation of the grandmothers from the Council of Thirteen Grandmothers who would come next summer to walk this path and gather firewood to bring back for the lighting of the fire in the sacred firepit at the start of the conference.  As the senior “Elder’ or “Aanaa” in the group (age 65), I, Nita, would represent these grandmothers in our walk.
We set out toward the “sacred mountain” of the south, up a narrow caribou path that, as Angaangaq explained, had been used by both animals and humans for thousands of years. It took me, the aanaa, at aanaa-pace, an hour to reach the top. From there, we made our way west through a rocky valley to the trees, a kind of willow that was now growing to four or five feet tall for the first time in thousands of years, due to the warming of the climate, for another hour.
On the rocky hill slope, two falcons came to us, and took turns diving and remaining suspended in the air for minutes at a time directly in front of me, seemingly immobile before my eyes, with the pale bright sun in the background. It was like a transfiguration of some kind, with the falcons stopping directly above and in front of me, wings outstretched with head pointing up and bifurcated tail downward, then diving into the current directly toward me, but remaining suspended there in the dive for a few more minutes, then upright again for more minutes. (This had a special meaning for me: it was the Christ symbol, arms outstretched on the cross, being transfigured.) I felt the energies of flying pierce me over and over as they dove toward me again and again, never reaching me physically (a mother teaching her child to ride the wind). It was sheer ecstasy. Angaangaq called me back from my trance state, saying we had to finish timing the grandmothers walk.
 Reluctantly, I continued on the steep, rock-strewn path. It took another hour to reach the valley of the trees, a total of two hours.
On the way back from the high valley, I stood on a mountain peak and looked down to the place where the Big Ice was calving with thundering groans. I felt the terrible great pain. The first morning there (it is light 24 hours a day at that time of year), I had sat before the others were up, in front of Semarsuaq and meditated, open to any messages. First, she told me I should know that, many centuries ago, it was Angaangaq who had put me, and the one who was my mother in this life, out on the ice to die. She did not elaborate. Jolted to the bone by this information, still, I had not expected what I received next. I felt only the tremendous, agonizing pain of birth-giving that the Mother was enduring. It would not be an easy birth for the New World to come. A pain and suffering far more intense than I could ever imagine wracked the bones of the Earth at that place—Greenland. The pain of all our ravaging of the Earth, I suspected. I felt spiritually
 chilled to the bone as I watched the Big Ice slowly melt, heaving and groaning like thunder. After a while, I asked her what her message was for me, and she answered simply, “If you cannot reconcile the differences among yourselves, how can you expect to affect a change in the larger picture?” She would say nothing more, and I knew she was right. That left not much hope for us.
In this case, Angaangaq and myself, two supposedly spiritual people were not able to be in harmony. There had been another elder at the airport when I arrived, Lars, a Kalaallit sailor who had come from Sisimiut to help build the site for the conference. We had waited for hours for Angaangaq to show up at the airport, and Lars had begun to drink a beer shortly before Angaangaq arrived. When Angaangaq had arrived, he had looked disapproving and said to me and my friend in English, “I cannot have this. Help me to deal with it in a firm and dignified way.” That evening, however, Angaagaq kept referring to Lars as “my elder,’ with the greatest deference.
We all spent the night in a hotel there, and the following day, when we were on our way to the valley, I asked where Lars was, and Angaangaq announced that he had given instructions to the hotel that when Lars turned up he was to be told the mayor’s office was not paying for his hotel room, and to tell him to return to Sisimiut. Angaangaq referred to Lars now, not as “my elder,” but as “that old man who should know better.” I protested, saying that I kept hearing about how we in the West did not show respect for our elders the way the Native Americans did, and he was doing the same thing. I asked where the love and compassion were in his heart, that he preached about all the time with his teaching of “melting the ice in the heart of man.” “I have only compassion and love in my heart,” he answered angrily. “Don’t ever say that to me again!” I  pointed out to him that the day before, Lars had been “my elder,” and today he was
 “that old man.” Perhaps, I suggested, Lars needed help. In any case, since there was no alcohol at the campsite, this would no longer have been a problem. “I don’t have time for that,” Angaangaq insisted, and “that’s the end of the matter.”
Things had been icy between us ever since. Little did I know that I would be the next respected “elder” on the other end of the stick.
Later that morning, I looked toward the glacier, and saw on the cliff below her, my name written in large capital letters: N, I, T, A. It seemed perfectly natural at the time. Every day, in the late morning, my name would appear for a few hours when the sun hit in a certain way. At one point, one of the Kalaallit women asked me how I spelled my name, and I pointed to the cliff, saying, “That way.” She burst out giggling, saying haltingly, “N, I, T, A. right?”
We continued over the next few days to gather rocks at the riverbed flowing in front of the glacier. The stones were magnificent: red, blue, pale green, pink, yellow, marbelized, black sparkling, and so on, lying on a bed of sand sparkling like diamond dust. (Diamonds were in fact discovered a ways south of there a few years back.)
In between working in the rock piles, Angaangaq took the three Westerners to see the remains of a village on the great lake where he said his grandmother had grown up. He said he often sat there wondering which of the houses his grandmother had inhabited. He showed us where the ceremonial grounds for the shamanic ceremonies had been held. Earlier, he had showed us two graves marked by stone enclosures that he said were his ancestors’, that he had rebuilt. He explained that his grandmother had conducted ceremonies from each of the sacred mountains in the four cardinal directions. She had once stood on the top of a mountain looking to the south and said something to the effect of, “Things are not good in the South.”
In emails to me Angaangaq had promised to show me where his grandmother had performed her ceremonies so that I could conduct my Grail ceremonies there. Now, he said we would conduct my Grail ceremonies at the north mountain-peak site for the New Moon. We did not speak of where the July 18, Grail Full-Moon ceremony would take place.
The day before the New Moon ceremony, however, I overheard him say to someone else that we would not be going to that mountain because there was no time. I asked him, and he said that was right, there would be no Grail ceremony, and walked away. I said I would do the ceremony on my own, but he tried to keep me from doing the ceremony at all, even though he knew I had gone there for that sole purpose, saying that he would bear the responsibility for any consequences. That brightly-lit night, alone, I went up on a small hill to a large stone with the silver chalice I had brought for this purpose. I filled it with water, and offered candy, flowers, tobacco, feathers and some of my mother’s ashes, to honor Mother Earth’s breaking of the water prior to giving birth, and to align with the birth process. My little drum sang for two hours in the chill wind that blew from the glacier 24 hours a day, till my fingers were stiff with the cold.
As I called on the Divine Feminine which is the Grail energy, and all loving female spirits in the area, human, animal and mineral, to come forth and help Mother Earth in giving birth to a New World, I knew that my special sisters (and some brothers) were performing ceremonies in Ecuador and in the U.S. to call up the Divine Feminine in the world. The air around me filled with life as the spirits of the land came from all around to support the Mother, “mamita” in Ecuador. I felt the current of love from my friends and from the land’s spirits. I also knew then why I had beeen guided to Panama and Ecuador prior to coming to Greenland. I used the seed rattle that my sister in Ecuador, Susana the midwife, had given me for this purpose. I sent out the energy from my womb, the old heart in her tradition, to meet hers, from above the Arctic Circle to a place south of the Equator. The silver chalice came from a beloved grandmother in Panama. It stood on a
 circle of white alpaca that came from the Andes to the south.
The water in the chalice was from the glacier—breaking water of birth.
After the ceremony, I asked for a special sign from the Mother, and though I waited, all remained silent, holy, still and calm.
That bright night, my sleep was long and deep.
The following day I heard Angaangaq say to someone that in his meditation that morning, after many years, he had been able to see the ancestors for the first time, as pale pink silhouettes in the west, “thousands of pink silhouettes.”
Later, as we walked to the rock deposit, I sought to walk with Angaangaq, and said how I thought we should seek to reconcile our differences, and I told him what the Mother had said to me about affecting the world situation if we could not reconcile the differences between us.
He answered me, “You have carried out the task you came to do, and now it is time for you to move on. I need you to leave.” As he said “move on,” I felt a chill. He continued, “You were chosen out of millions to be the first grandmother to walk the grandmothers walk after 20,000 years. You should feel honored. Now it is time for you to move on. You have done what you came here to do.”
“I came for the Grail ceremonies, at Aanaa’s instructions,” I stated, and I still have the one on the 18th, the Full Moon. You have known that since January.”
No, it was to walk the grandmothers’ walk that you came, he insisted, and, be honored.
That night, for the first time anyone could remember, the wind that blew from the icecap was warm, not cold.
The following day, after breakfast, Angaangaq called me aside, and we walked to the rocky hill I had been left on the first day there. We sat on two rocks side by side. He explained, I know you came for the Grail ceremonies, but I cannot have other energies here. I have to control the energies, and there is no room for any other than mine. I need you to leave now. He added, however, that I was the only one of many people who had kept the promise to come and help him build the site, and also that I was the only one who understood the importance of being here, but nevertheless, that I had to go. He said the high cost of the trip and any penalties for leaving early were my problem, and walked away.
Far away as we were from the airport, it took me another few days to get a plane back to Nuuk, than another few days to Iceland and New York.
In Nuuk, once again at Manguaq’s home, I told her how I had found so much suffering in the ice, and I had not expected that. “Yes,” she said, “I too have felt the suffering. The ice is weak and has lost its identity and it is suffering. Before, when the ice was male and strong, it was happy. Now it is suffering.”
I described to Manguaq what her cousin Angaangaq had told us about the traditions his grandmother, also her grandmother, had passed on to him. She smiled quietly, then said about her and Angaangaq’s grandmother, “My grandmother was a very ordinary person, very shy… She never did any ceremonies… My grandmother was never in Kangerlussuaq.”

I arrived at my apartment on Friday, July 11, in the afternoon, having spent the entire plane trip pondering my journey to Greenland, wondering what to make of it, trying to pull the pieces together. I went to Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum, to see the Turner show, which reminded me of the scenes with the falcons… In Central Park, I visited with a duck and her eight ducklings, resting on a bank of the reservoir.  I spoke to the spirits at Chalice Hill, where I perform my Grail ceremonies, thanking them for bringing me back safely. I sat on a great rock that had the markings of the glacier in New York millions of years ago. And I knew that I was as close to nature and Mother Earth as I had ever been on the tundra above the Arctic Circle.
Later that evening, at home, it suddenly struck me that I felt whole again for the first time since my mother had left me the previous fall. That terrible, terrible empty feeling inside me, of feeling like an orphan, with no one in the world but myself to really care for me, had left.
It seemed perfectly natural now, that the Full-Moon ceremony on July 18 would be held in Central Park, and was perhaps meant to be held there all along. After all, now I had a direct connection to Semarsuaq, Big Ice, and didn’t need to be there physically to connect. I realized I had opened the portal to the ice on the New Moon, but I would only enter that ice portal with the Full Moon.
I still had one big question about my trip when I was back in New York… Aanaa had told me that I would experience the Grail energies in Greenland, that did not exist anywhere else. I had expected to experience something truly sublime  and wonderful and uplifting and exalting in the energies before the icecap, but I had found the energy, rather, to be succint and self-contained, like the oldest rocks in the world around Nuuk, that did not speak easily, certainly nothing mind-blowing or transporting. And it was the energy of extreme suffering and pain.

Then, on Saturday, in New York, as the day wore on, it gradually dawned on me that I had indeed experienced the Grail energies in a way that I never could have done anywhere else in the world. It was the Grail suffering! Mother Earth suffering as her water broke, literally in the form of ice. How painful that would be for a human mother, for her water to break, the amniotic fluid in the form of ice, frozen pieces dislodging from her womb, the seat of her creative powers, traveling downward and out between her legs, out into the world, preceding the baby she had gestated for many months, the baby she was giving birth to—a frozen baby. No, I realized, we had to do all we could to make sure Mother Earth’s baby would not also be frozen, like the water.
What a message I had been charged with… But I realized that if I had been given this message, it was because we humans needed to know the extent of the Mother’s suffering, and then, we could still do something to change things, to melt the ice in the Earth’s womb, the “shungo,” her old heart. The Divine Feminine, the Grail, needed to be warmed with love and caring, and brought back as an equal partner with the male, in her true splendor.
That was what it was all about.