Why I Call Myself a Witch (and why you might want to too).
A few years ago, I claimed the title of witch for myself, publicly.
It opened up floodgates of messages from women who felt a resonance with my declaration.
If you’ve been on this journey with me for long, you’ll know that I talk about rest and boundaries and dismantling hustle culture all the time. So what has this all got to do with witchcraft and identifying as a witch? Well, everything.
Witchcraft is an avenue towards reclaiming a connection with our cyclical bodies and the cyclical earth. It is a path that each of us can follow and I believe that it is a powerful path because our bones remember it. By this, I am referring to ancestral remembering.
(I wrote a whole eBook about it that you can access here!)
Before you tune out feeling like this is too woo… do a quick search about the field of epigenetics and all the amazing things we are learning about the encoding of our ancestors’ experiences into our DNA.
Our bones remember is my way of saying our DNA remembers. Trace any genealogy backward and we all have a woman in our lineage who was a witch (healer, midwife, wise woman, priestess, etc). Don’t think so? If you trace your genealogy back for 400 years, you’d encounter 4094 parents, grandparents, and great (great, great, etc) grandparents. The likelihood that at least one among those numbers was a witch is high.
For some of us, the echo in our bones is a faint remembering, almost ephemeral. For others, it is a roaring river of deep and powerful knowing.
My mother is a healer and my maternal grandmother was as well. I am, like so many of us, not in possession of as many of the stories of my lineage as I would like, but this is enough to tell me the current runs deep. And yet, for most of my life, I was in denial of (even oblivious to) what resided in my bones. Be gentle with yourself as you begin to explore this.
So why witchcraft now? The world is shifting. Divine feminine energies are rising after being suppressed by The Patriarchy for so long. We have entered the Age of Aquarius. Witchcraft is safe(r) to talk about and to claim (at least in this part of the world) than it has been for thousands of years. Feminine creative power and intuition was once revered in human societies and we are in a time of massive change that is seeing that power and intuition climbing towards a place of reverence once again.
But this is not the kind of reverence that places the object of veneration upon a holy pedestal, untouchable, uncritiquable, unchangeable. No. This is the kind of reverence that invites beautiful questioning. A reverence that understands that the mutability and changeability in the thing that is revered is its greatest strength. A reverence that knows this energy is for everyone to experience and embody.
The divine feminine is not all-powerful (though it is raw generative power at its core). It is a knowing that there is no force, no structure, no deity, no thing that is all-powerful. There is only the interplay and complex entanglement of a multitude of powers at work in the world. The only “thing” that could be considered all-powerful is the delicate and ever-shifting balance between these myriad energies that shape our world and ourselves.
So why witchcraft from the woman who speaks primarily about rest?
The divine feminine understands intimately the need for rest, for cultivation, and for tender nurturing in between the harvests. The need for the community to care for each other and the earth. It is needed to temper the energies of The Patriarchy, that would leave us in a state of perpetual harvest until our world and ourselves crumpled in barren and exhausted depletion.
Many of us have crumpled already and the world and the structures we’ve known our whole lives are crumbling too. This energy of perpetual harvest does not belong to the divine masculine. Yes, there is the energy of harvest in the masculine, but in its divine expression, it knows how to walk in balance with the divine feminine. It knows how to soften and surrender to her wisdom when appropriate. It is The Patriarchy that ignores any power outside of itself and wounds all who come into contact with it (every last one all of us).
And witchcraft is one avenue for reclaiming our right to rest, to live in reciprocity with all the human and more-than-human world, and for women to remember their innate wisdom and worth in a society that has stripped that of them for centuries.
Carmen Spagnola writes, in her book The Spirited Kitchen: “If resisting oppression, reclaiming my body as my own, praying to my ancestor tree, fighting for collective liberation, and organizing around a culture of care and dignity for all makes me a witch… my friend, I am that” (p.17).
And my friend… I am that.
THIS is why witchcraft for myself.
THIS is why witchraft is calling to so many.
THIS is why I choose to help guide others onto the path.
THIS is why the work is so important.
THIS is why the work is to rest.
THIS is why I created Unleash Your Inner Witch, a 12-week journey designed to guide you home to your body and the earth. Discover a living, breathing spiritual practice you can call your own, a deeper connection with your intuition and spirit guides, the courage and confidence to go after what you truly want in this life, and so much more.
