Podcast 54: The Flow: Honoring Water as Sacred Teacher

This week, Linda and Sally explore one of the most essential and overlooked forces in our lives: water.

In this soulful, story-rich episode, the Crones wade into the sacred, emotional, and energetic aspects of water—how it shapes the land, nurtures our bodies, holds memory, and even responds to intention. Drawing from science (Dr. Masaru Emoto’s water crystal studies), personal ritual, and ancestral traditions, they share reflections, stories, and a powerful water blessing practice you can try at home.

You’ll hear about sacred wells, dolphin encounters, moon rituals, and ceremonies that balance masculine and feminine energies in young people—all rooted in our deep connection with water. Plus, you’ll learn how to charge your own water with loving intention and experience the difference for yourself.

If you're feeling thirsty for connection, transformation, or just a little magic—this episode is for you.

Highlights:

• Reverence for water in spiritual and daily life
• A guided water blessing technique
• Childhood and adult water ceremonies
• Emotional resonance of water and its healing potential
• Reflections on the role of water in building relationship and community

Don’t forget to share your own water stories with us—we’d love to hear how you honor the flow in your life.

Visit twocronesandamicrophone.com to sign up for our newsletter and get more wisdom practices in your inbox.

Referenced Practitioners & Teachers

 Oh Shinnah Fast Wolf: A medicine woman of Apache, Mohawk, and Scottish descent, Oh Shinnah (also written Oh Shinnáh Fast Wolf) was a respected spiritual teacher who shared teachings on ceremony, energy work, and earth-based traditions.

Dr. Masaru Emoto: Japanese researcher and author of The Hidden Messages in Water. He famously photographed water crystals after exposing water to words, music, and prayer, suggesting that water responds to human emotion and intent.

Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki: British author, and one-time director of the Servants of the Light school. Known for her work in Western esoteric traditions and energy practices.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Two Crones and a Microphone. I am Linda, and I'm Sally.

Betty is on a well-deserved pause from our podcast and will return soon. We are cultural midwives. Our podcast is about shared wisdom through storytelling and research from us as experienced Crohn's and friends. We offer experiences and spiritual practices for body, mind, emotion, and spirit to meaningfully connect with our beautiful earth under our feet and all around us, to walk your talk and act from your heart's desire instead of fear.

We at Two Crones are in the flow of change ourselves right now. We'll be announcing more about that on a different podcast. So here we are, welcoming you to what we're lovingly calling the flow. Yes, our deep dive into one of the elements that sustains us.

Today, we're exploring something we interact with every day but really rarely truly stop to appreciate, and that's water., most of us take access to water for granted. We turn on the shower, we run the dishwasher, you know, we jp into a pool if we're lucky enough to have one, knowing we'll have plenty of clean, fresh water at our disposal. Meanwhile, we grble when we need to grab an brella because it's raining outside. In our time today, we just want to honor water and its many aspects in whatever time we have to discuss that before we come to the end of our podcast. So welcome, welcome.

So, water covers most of the earth. It's a powerful, constantly changing force. Its creativity is such that it takes the form of whatever you pour it into. It's amazing. Water can erode the earth; it can nurture plants. We're in springtime here in the Midwest, and you know, we're getting downpours of water. Some water is pretty overwhelming right now, but we trust that eventually a balance will be reached here. Water is for the animals, for every being on the earth. Without water, we would perish. It's a fact.

Interestingly, water, when it's frozen, can erode landscapes. Think about the glaciers with a slow, steady force. Water is a nurturer, like a mother, can also be a killer with tsunami waves and fierce storms, part of its painting palette. So she, I'll call her “she” for now, she's ancient and has always inspired fear and beauty, creativity and chaos, healing and transformation. That's a lot to put in one bucket, pun intended. Sirens and mermaids are part of the mystery of water.

Guess what? We are all part mermaid or merman. We are up to 79 to 80% water in our bodies, and we can actively work with our cellular water in order to create change. We're going to tell you how later. I know I'm excited about hearing that, and I personally love water. So do I. I loved living in Hawaii and doing all the amazing things that you can do with water in Hawaii, right? Swimming, surfing, sailing, riding the tides, playing in the little pools, water on the beach, you know, collecting whatever it is that you want to collect when you're at the waters. So that's the beings, the beings that live in the waters that are so present there are just amazing, just amazing. I'd love to hear more stories about that, Sally.

There is, right as the fish nibble at your toes, but I had the lucky opportunity to just be swimming in the water in Florida, actually swimming with the dolphins who happen to be in the water or or right, the giant sea turtles, very, very cool. Personally, I love water. It's one of my favorite, favorite places to be. But you know, the tides and herbalism, they're all connected to water. Magical working is done best when the tides are high and the moon is full or new. And from a practical aspect, we know the influence—I say practical because research kind of contraindicates that sometimes, right? When the moon is full, you know, it changes our behavior here on this planet. Yes, it does.

Do you think it affects the water in our bodies? I wonder. Who knows? Well, there are there are some people who certainly do believe that. So because you know, water is so deeply connected to our o our emotions, right? Yes, with our dreams, with the astral, right? And we talk about that a lot, you know, working with those energies and doing that, whether it's through Oh’ Shinnah’s tradition or some of the other traditions that we've learned, right? In dreams and in the astral, we can create what we desire, which can be an empowering thought or it can be an intimidating thought. We can create what we desire. Hmm, something to think about, right?

So the water aspects of the mother change constantly, like the sea, the rivers, the lakes, the springs, and evaporate and reform in and reform over other areas. Water can be found in wells. There are sacred wells all over this planet. Thank you. Yeah, we could talk about what it means to be sacred, like what makes something a sacred well. That's right. But you know, there are people that travel from all over the world to Ireland to go to Brigid's Well. Exactly right. And she is both a healer and a poet and a smith, and she makes that she's the goddess of those wells, and it's because they are said to have healing effects. And I can begin to see this because we're going to talk in a couple of minutes about  a really famous author, Masaro Ioto, Japanese now crossed scientist who looked at how water can vibrationally only hold an intent. If you infuse water with love, it ends up changing the essence of the water, and he was able to actually photograph water crystals that demonstrated that. We'll show you a little of that too. But I think Bridges well has been imbued with healing and love, and whether it's occurred, I don't know how it's occurred, but I think it's true. Yeah, I know. Oh, I love that.

When you think about that, it's incredibly empowering. I think  we do know, right, that water sustains us and that even though the wells might be deep or the water table might be deep in places like the desert, we do know that the water is still there underlying and  deep within the earth. So some of this content, right, comes from the work of Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki as well as Oh’ Shinnah. Thank you for citing her. She's an amazing teacher. She is, you know, one of the things that we're going to focus on in this podcast is sacred meanings of water. Water holds and magnifies the vibration we add to it. So the same way as a gong, if you hit the gong, it reverberates with a sound when struck, water will magnify a song or spoken phrase or energetic intent when it is sent to the water.

So what's that mean? That means that if you and I did this personally because I had this really fun exchange with a reservoir in Connecticut at one point in time, I was crossing this reservoir as a nice big bridge and beautiful reservoir, just still and reflecting there, and it was the middle of the afternoon. I had the sudden impression I needed to roll down the window. I looked out, I said, "Wow, you look beautiful." I was addressing the water, it's okay, and then I said, "Oh, oh, because the water said to me, if you imbue us with a sound or a word, we will magnify it and we will send it downstream." I went, "Game on." Okay, and so I held out my hand at the open window and just said, "Love."

[Music]

And I felt the charge take on the water, and I suddenly knew that I had had a really valid transmission there from the water itself. The water is willing to spread that. And so from then on out, this is one of my teaching practices, and it's not alone with me; it just was my inspiration in that moment that led me there. But really, you can share it too. You can put love, peace, joy, anything that makes sense to you can be imbued, sung, spoken, or hummed, even thought, but I think it's nice to open our mouths too, and it can be held in that water. And in fact, we're going to teach you a water blessing technique as our wisdom practice. I love that. I love that. I think, you know, just spending time with water, yes, wherever you can have that time to spend time with water, whether it's in your bathtub, washing dishes, yes, or actually traveling to a lake or a stream or a pond or it doesn't matter, it could be your swimming pool, right? That's right. And just thinking about the water that is part of our body as well as the water that we're interacting with can be really powerful.

I know that Linda and Betty and I learned ceremonies from Oh' Shinnah  around water, lots of different ceremonies around water actually, but for young children, they're blessed in the waters. And even though, you know, her people came from the mountainous and desert regions of this part of the country, people would travel to the Atlantic waters because the Atlantic waters are considered to be masculine in her tradition of the energies, even though waters essentially are feminine, they're considered to be more masculine waters. 

And at the age of seven, children, both boys and girls, have a ceremony that's done at the Atlantic waters that harmonizes them with those waters. And then you know, we have a jar of water for each of our sons did this ceremony  that comes from those waters that they carry with them. And then those waters are blended pre- puberty, right around early early puberty or pre puberty, so 12, 13 years old,  children then travel to the Pacific waters, the waters of the mother, the feminine waters, and they bring those waters from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and they're released into the Pacific actually. And the symbolism of that is to balance the masculine and the feminine aspects of ourselves.

And we don't think about that often, but part of what those ceremonies do together is to harmonize those energies within the child as they're becoming a young adult. And so there is certainly much more to it than that. I think, you know, for purposes of what we're talking about here and and just for time, a lot of traditions have ceremonies that are similar, whether they're done at waters or at oceans or, you know, however that's done. But that notion of bringing balance between the masculine and the feminine and using the waters that are here on our planet to do that, I think is something unique that we don't always think about. So Sally, I love that you're sharing that. It was one of my favorite water ceremonies. I remember attending one in an Atlantic ceremony, and this was for an adult, and so there's an exception to that, which is if you're in a cycle of seven, let's say you're 35 years old, something that's multipliable by seven, then  you can go ahead and do that type of ceremony for yourself. So that's very cool, and it was a beautiful, beautiful ceremony. And those of us that attended each gave a flower with a wish for that person that had just been through the blessing ceremony. It was so gorgeous and so meaningful and simple just to build a relationship with that body of water. Yeah, yeah.

And so one of the things we might do is invite you all to think about how you might do something with water yourself that would be meaningful for you. And whether it's, you know, I think people consciously do this, like entering into a Catholic church, yes, people take that consecrated water, and they use it to bless themselves. So that's right. Every I think every tradition has its way of doing something very similar. So how might you do that? Great question. It's an invitation there. And if you do decide to do something or you already do something, share it with us because remember, one of our pillars is to create community, to to share things that people do because the more we know about each other, the easier it is to get along with each other on this great big planet. Thank you.

I completely agree, and water is a great leveler. It is  one of those things that is connected and recycled and will eventually always reconnect with itself. All all water eventually recycles itself, and I think that's a great lesson for us as well from water. So we talked about this a little bit, but approach water with an offering. It might be a song or a phrase or just placing your hands over the water and saying, "Thank you for everything you do with and for and as part of us in our life. We would not be here without you." And that listen for a response. I know this might sound a little mysterious, but I mean it factually. Stay open and listen for a response with your inner ear because that is an important piece too. The idea behind all our wisdom practices is that you begin to build a relationship outside of what we might been have been taught in our cultural norms. But the relationship is there, it's real. We're on the planet, so why not make friends with the water? Why not? Well enough on that. No, I love I love that, Linda.

Well, I want to invite you to think about the entire earth and her sacred waters as a sentient being supporting us in every single way, day and night. She represents the creative powers of nature and the sea. And  you know, we mentioned Dr. Masaru Emoto's work. His New York Times bestselling book is called The Hidden Messages in Water. I'm holding this up for those of you who might be lucky enough to look at this on our YouTube channel, Two Crones and a Microphone, and you see this beautiful picture here on the cover, and it looks almost like a frozen snowflake. 

And so what he did is he found a specific method in order to capture what he called water crystals, and he would take pictures of them, and it was a very short photography  you know, template that he used, but he was able to actually capture changes in water from the time it was pulled from a source, let's say it's our tap, right? The tap water was pulled, he would take a picture then and he'd capture it. And then the vibrational piece is real. He would then expose either through song or spoken word or simply writing the word, let's say love, on a piece of paper, taping it to a water bottle and waiting a few minutes, and all of a sudden the characteristic of that water crystal would change. 

Here is a picture, and I'm sure you can't see it as nicely as you could in the book, but this is water that was exposed to the words love and gratitude. Look at that beautifully formed crystal. Look at how gorgeous that is. It's a 1 2 3 4 5 six-sided crystal. It has a sparkling six-sided center. It's iridescent. It's absolutely beautiful. And love and gratitude, beauty, these are all things that  and then you know, sometimes he would go to various famous spots that were known for their blessed water. And I just happened to have tagged Lord's spring water from Lords in France. Now Sally and I were both lucky enough to go on a trip there among other places that we visited, and that water is special. It is really as Dr. Emoto says, the water in Lord Spring and France appears similar to the crystal formed from water shown the word angel. Why am I not surprised? 

Did you know that in Lourdes ,France prayers are made 24/7? It is a 24/7 repository of ongoing prayers for world peace, for love, for healing, for all the things that we hope for. And it's on the top here is this little Lord's France crystal, and doesn't that look charming? I mean, it has a sort of effervescence to it, bubbling out in various ways, kind of angelic. We never know exactly what an angel might be up to, just saying. Sometimes it's a little bit whimsical, and sometimes it's quite deep, and I love the notion of looking at the crystals in the water. Thank you., even just looking at water and all the many colors. Thank you. Looking at water that's up in the mountains that might be sensual water or looking at, you know, different waters have different colors and different personalities and different feels to them. And so then when you think about it in the the broad sense, when you're looking down at maybe this beautiful aqua lake that's glacial water some somewhere up in the mountains, yes, versus  you know, down to the tiny tiny crystal form that he was able to identify, it's pretty incredible actually. It's phenomenal.

We have so much more to say about water. We're going to share with you some spiritual bathing practices in another podcast about water. And knowing us, we'll have at least one more podcast worth of information and stories and different things that we'd like to share. But now we're heading toward our wisdom practice, and this is about blessing water. 

So I'm going to invite you, for those of you on the YouTube channel, you can see this, but I will describe it step by step here. In this cup, I have about 2 inches of water, clear water that was from my tap. I'm going to set the cup down so you can see what I'm doing and have a notebook and pen nearby. 

Ground yourself in center. If you have any questions about that, look at our podcasts nber one and two. Listen in. We are going to learn how to charge this water, and that's you can think of it as a programming, right? 

Charge the water with our loving intention and energy. And so I want you to just think about love is a good a good place to start, right? Think about love, feel your heart open, ground yourself, center, make sure you're feeling in your body. I want you to rub your hands together as if you're going to warm them if they're chilly outside. What this does is this begins to gather your energy and activate it. You have energy centers in your palm, their secondary chakras, and then pull that energy towards your two palms facing each other. I find it to be a kind of a bouncy energy, but everyone's a little different on this front. 

You're going to hold your hands over the water cup, and I'm going to peek out from under my hands here and just think or say or sing or whatever, inhale and exhale love. And you hold your hands over that water until it begins to feel a little bouncy, a little bit full, I would call it. 

Some people experience this as a slight magnetic feeling.  Sometimes there's a pulse that occurs there. Sally, do you have other ideas about how to know when it's full? It's done?

Well, I kind of use the same ways you do, Linda, but sometimes I just have the sense that it's enough. Exactly. So you use your intuition, right? Okay, you know, this feels like it's done.

Yeah, yeah. So we're going to charge this water with love, and once it feels full, the way I finish it off is Oh’ Shinnah’s. I make three circles above the water and just clockwise, and then I take my hands and separate them. Then I want to invite you to actually drink this water and notice how it feels as it goes down in your body.

Now to me, that feels, tastes sweeter and smoother somehow. I have done this hundreds of times, and I've taught so many people this process, and every single time someone notices a change. They never ever say, nah, nothing. I mean, it could happen, I guess, but for everyone that I've spoken with and taught, it's been a transformational moment. So we want to invite you to use this tiny little micro wisdom practice on your given day, and we'd like you to bless your water or beverages because you can bless your tea, you can bless your coffee, you can bless anything really, your food. We've gone through that before, but the water is really special. So I want to invite you to be conscious and just notice your responses.

I'm going to jump in. Good. Because what happens if you're one of the people that go, "Nah, nothing happened." Great question. Maybe you are right. Yeah. , I'm going to suggest that it's not because something didn't happen, but it might be  and this was true for me. I needed to either relax enough to listen to my intuition that something was happening. Yeah, to  take some time to just practice what we're talking about because it may not be the first time that you it's like, yeah, nothing happened. Yeah, nothing happened. You do it, I don't know, eight or nine times, and all of a sudden you go, "Oh, I do feel the bounciness now." And maybe it does feel a little bit smoother when I drink that water or feel a little cleaner or a little fresher, or I just have a sense that it's feeling more nourishing to me. So in other words, don't just do one and done, and and if it's a good experience, you go, "Okay, one and done, it was a great experience, but I'm never going to do it again." anyways or or you do it and you feel like nothing happens to just give yourself the opportunity to work with that energy.

Beautiful, thank you. Until you follow your journaling, if you really are writing even just a word or drawing a picture because maybe you get an image from this experience. That's right. And it's like, I don't know, it doesn't taste any different, but maybe I hear like a little tinkling bell. That's right. That I didn't experience before when I was working with this. Every once in a while, I hear a little tinkling light chimey sound. I work with water. If I'm doing a meditation with water, I'm working with water. So maybe it's a sound you hear, maybe it's a feeling you feel, maybe it's a color, maybe it's just a sense that's coming in when you're doing this  that it is somehow different and that you're beginning to respond to that energetic resonance resonance, not resonance resonance that's changing when you work with the water. 

But in my own experience, I have to practice a lot sometimes when I do new new things. It's there, but if I dropped it on the first ground because I didn't think it was there, I would have missed out on some pretty amazing opportunities that I've had myself with water. I love that you brought that up. Sometimes it is a slow and steady process, right? Thank you. That's that's really great, and I love that you hear bells too.

Yeah, sometimes it's like little chimes, you know.

Well, believe it or not, we've come to the end of this podcast. We look forward to  sharing more stories with you. And Sally, would you like to do our four pillars? I sure can do that. , I was thinking, you know, we'll come back to stories about how you honor water in ways that you can conserve water because of the time, we're going to have to come back to that. But you know, you'll remember our four pillars for this podcast, our touchstone, who is Oh’ Shinnah and the way she lived her life and the teachings that she brought to us, our own collective wisdom, right? Because we had to take those teachings and embody them so that it becomes our collective wisdom besides our professional careers and other things and you know, the interesting guests that we interview. 

So if you haven't had a chance to listen to our most recent interview with Nicole Zanzerella, we say go back and listen. She's an amazing young queen, not yet a crone. And you, are community, our responses that we hear from you, we want to bring them back onto the show and share them. So things that you come up with, whether you get things from the newsletter, if you've signed up for the newsletter, whether it's a blog, a response that you have to one of our social media posts, remember one of our goals is to create community and support in this world. It's really important. It is important to us. It's really important.

Well, you know, you can look at our twocronhronamicrophone.com website. We do have some classes, and we have Instagram and Facebook posts and our YouTube site. We're so excited about that because then we get to see each other, and you get to see us as we're doing this. But  we always want to hear about whatever your favorite podcast or wisdom practice is. And if you would please spread the word, again, community, we love it and you, and we appreciate you listening. We really do. 

And so if you feel the same way, please, you know, spread the word about this episode or any other episode that really reaches you with friends, family, and others. And our podcast is available on all the main podcast platforms, and we'd love for you to leave a review or comment on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and  soon we may have other venues. We'll let you know as soon as we make that official. So Sally, would you like to talk about our newsletter that's gaining a lot of ground?

Yeah, you know, we mentioned in other podcasts that we would be sharing some of our favorite herbal suppliers, and you know, spring is starting to come. So check out our blog site because we did indeed post that for you all to see. And the most recent April newsletter  that went out for the trees budding moon because this is the tree's bud. Yes, they're not doing yet where I am, but I understand in other parts of the country they are.  We did talk a lot about herbs. If we go back to that go bag podcast, we said in the next newsletter, we really fleshed that out more and put in writing some of the things that we talked about on the podcast. 

And so that is with other things in our newsletter for April. So make sure you go online at https://www.twocronesandamicrophone.com and sign up for the newsletter in order to get that when it comes out. We might move it to twice a month. Right now it's still monthly, but you know, we get a lot of feedback from you guys. We may find that there's more things we want to say and send it out more often. Yeah, thank you because you do a beautiful job writing that. We contribute, but it's mostly you, and we really appreciate your interesting stories and your information and the inspiration it brings. Yeah.

So remember to stay tuned. Our next planned interview will be with a local herbalist who's going to help us to strategize for spring planning because we'll move into that soon.

I'll look forward to that one. That'll be fun. And look on our social media as we sort of send out more teasers about what that'll be like, but we're planning that for the end of April to help you get ready for spring planting. Excellent. Good timing. Now you know this, but we aim to give you ways to be kind to yourself and to others. Also shout out to Manurva Died.com. Manurva is the Roman goddess of civilization and strategy and minervaed.com has been around for decades, and there we're starting to do classes and all kinds of things. And of course, I also teach an online goddesses the living land class that you might be interested in that's featured on Manurva. And  we're just really pleased to begin to bring all these pieces together under the Two Crones mantle. 

As always, our podcast is dedicated to sharing techniques to aid you in navigating the muddy waters of our time, giving you ways to be kind to yourself and others. Again, another shout out to Betty who's on a well-deserved pause for this two Crones podcast. She'll be back, don't worry. Remember, find your glimmer, and as I always like to say, kadish day, remember all is made beautiful, and have a delightful rest of your day. Thank you so much for joining us, and you know, let us know how your experiences with water go. You might have a water story you want to share and say, please share that online. Lovely. Thank you for that invitation. We hope you respond and have a wonderful day. Be well. Bye-bye.