Self-care is, fundamentally, about bringing balance back to a life that has grown imbalanced from too many commitments or responsibilities.
Robyn L. Gobin, The Self-Care Prescription
Meditation and Energy Working
When I was younger, I was a very sensitive empath. It is actually what led me to find Wicca and Witchcraft. I was in my early to mid 20’s and it was the mid-90s. I am a totally intellectual air sign, who came from an abusive home, so I had trouble dealing with my own emotions. I got very overwhelmed by the people around me and those who would seek me out for help.
I used to always go to Ash Wednesday services when I was younger. Leland still lightly teases me about this, that most people are Christmas or Easter Catholics, but I never missed Ash Wednesday. The priest would bless me and draw a black ‘X’ (a cross) across my third eye (forehead) in ashes. It took me a very long time to realize what I was symbolically doing was closing my third eye. I did this over and over, through my teens and twenties. While I did briefly embrace my psychic abilities, in the early years of my practice, I have spent a lot of time pushing them away. Eventually, my abilities did become muted, and now, in my late 40s I am struggling to get back to my ease of practice from when I was younger.
My birthday is coming up in two weeks, so it is a good time for introspection. It is also, like any time of transition, a good chance to look at ‘where am I?’, ‘how did I get here?’, and ‘where do I want to go from here?’. An honest approach to these questions is a good basis for beginning shadow work.
I’m an introvert, so naturally, hanging out in your own head is not all there is to shadow work. Shadow work is about facing those pieces and sides of yourself that you may not want to look at, or even admit exist. It’s about bringing those things into the light, and acknowledging that they exist. It’s about facing your issues, your problems, your biases, and actually doing something about them. Yeah, that doesn’t really sound like fun. It’s not. However, it’s one of those things that you’ll be thankful for later – kind of like lancing and draining a really painful boil.
It is however, something that, hopefully, you will have someone to talk and work through with you. An experienced elder that you trust and/or a licensed therapist are great (and some would say necessary) companions on this journey, especially if you have trauma in your past, as many of us do. As someone who has faced repressed trauma and the psychological aftermath more than once, I entreat you to please have a support system in place before you begin shadow work. If you are a solitary practitioner with no spiritual or mundane support, shadow work is not a necessary component to your practice.
A simple way to begin working with the elements, is to practice invoking and banishing them. You can do this one at a time, if you want to meditate on the qualities and feel of a specific element. Or, you can call all of the elements as a part of a circle casting. I use these simple invocations as a basis for the invocations that I use in ritual, because they are easy to learn, and easy to adapt for future workings and purposes.
My calls begin with Air in the North; if your traditions are different, you can easily move them around to suit your practices. You can also easily change the qualities of each element that you wish to call upon. These calls are meant to get you in the practice of calling and releasing the elements. You can next practice on adapting these basic calls to more complicated ones.
This is always a difficult one to explain, especially over the internet, but being able to use and manipulate energy is an absolute cornerstone of powering a spell. Energy has to come from somewhere. When you light a campfire, a spark is added to wood, the wood is consumed and in return you get light, heat, energy and ashes (the remains). Spell work is a lot like that. You need to be able to apply that spark, and also to direct the resultant energy toward your goal. To do that, you need to be able to manipulate energy. That is the basis of Witchcraft and working magic.
The fire analogy is also a good one, because it can also give a sort of feedback that you are beginning to succeed. A candle flame has its own energy, but if you feed energy into it, or draw back from it, then you can often see the flame respond to you. The flame may rise super high, or it may dance or lean as you play with it. Most people practice gathering the energy in their hands and pushing it outwards, but others prefer a more ‘mental’ push.
The question is ‘How do you learn to generate, feel and direct that energy?’
Color correspondences are very good foundational knowledge. This is starting information for Candle Magic, Chakra Work, Stones, and more. You may have a slightly different perspective on some of the colors, but this gives you a place to start exploring that. What colors are your favorite? Least favorite? Why? What do these colors traditionally represent?
That being said, these are correspondences that I am comfortable with, but are influenced by my personal beliefs and my culture in North America/the US (such as money magic being green, but is also prosperity, as it is the color of new growth).
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