Dowsing is employed to find hidden things – usually oil, water, gemstones, ores… It can also be used to identify stuck emotions along with possible food intolerance, mineral deficiencies or maybe the need for nutritional supplements or the unseen forces in your home or place of work – electromagnetic fields, underground water courses, place memories, environmental dangers and safety cues. The applications are endless.

A dowser is someone who has the ability to surrender their ego or let go and sometimes has other psychic abilities. Some use rods or a simple pendulum whilst others prefer tarot cards, the runes, a crystal ball … It is generally considered the dowsing implement responds to the user’s accidental or involuntary movements and unconscious thoughts.

When dowsing, I mostly use a pendulum and the runes. The pendulum makes it possible for me to dowse a human or animal, map or floor plan to gain information. Whilst the runes give me the basic details of a story, a beginning, middle and end. They help find a trapped emotive experience – your own or an ancestor’s – and tell me in which level of consciousness, or aura, it is located.

A lot of people can dowse. To gain competence in this kind of diagnostic work I studied a three-year, apprenticeship-type course in divination, healing and magic. During that time, I was taught to use the runes as my primary divinatory tool. More recently, I have completed courses in home and place healing, dowsing for health and ancestral healing.

‘Janice and I had been systematically releasing Artemis’s trapped emotions for a month or more. She had a history of grief! There was the foal taken away from her during the annual Dartmoor roundup and the owner who left her for hours alone in her stall/garage with nobody to talk to. Both events had got stuck in her subconscious. She acted them out on a regular basis.

These days her history was coming out metaphysically in her laminitis, a disease that made walking difficult. Her feet were tender and painful due to inflammation. This was caused by a sudden increase in carbohydrates in her diet or in other words, rich grass. During the spring and summer months Artemis spent most of her days in the barn eating wet hay (loses a lot of its nutritional value) musing to herself.

That morning, after all the horses had been fed, Artemis was bought up from the paddock where she had spent the night with the herd. The barn smelled of hay and horses. Lolly the stable cat was being stalked by one of Janice’s dogs, Scamp whilst her other dog, Edson played football with a hard red ball up and down the long concrete alleys and out in the yard where the horses got tied up to be groomed or for the farrier.

‘Give it a rest, Edson!’ murmured Janice between the swings of her pendulum.

Janice and I drank our cups of coffee whilst Artemis was quietly in the background although I sometimes wondered if she listened to our chatter.

It was then, Janice replied. ‘I get a yes as well. This affected emotion is definitely in column B’.

We dowsed again. Now we were looking for an uneven row number which turned out to be row one.  As we worked our way down the list of emotions my pendulum was silent or non-responsive. That is until I asked. ‘Is Artemis’s stuck emotion, heartache.’ It went wild, swung round and round in a circular motion.

This pony has a problem with her heart or small intestine! It was there in print next to our column and the word, ‘heartache’. Um… I thought, that makes sense with her history of loss, isolation and the digestion issues.

As I released the stuck emotion Artemis seemed to vibrate with a difficult energy. Have you ever felt an emotion unfold in front of you? It is shocking. Quite suddenly, her stall became filled with anguish and pain. It was as if a thick grey fog emanated from somewhere inside of her to now, envelope her body.

I felt crushed by sadness. ‘Get me out of here. Let me escape. I want to run away. HELP… me!’

Whilst that atmosphere of deep sorry and grief made Janice complain of sudden intense chest pains. ‘Am I having a heart attack? I think I might be.’

Afterwards Artemis was looser, more expressive and less constricted in the paddock. She had started to talk, to have a voice.’

Extract: Family constellation-type work with equines. Published in Jenny Chapman’s newsletter starting 3rd March 2024