Be Your Own Magic: 9 Steps to Spiritual Sovereignty

written for the seeker in us all

Levitation moment on the Eagle Creek Trail, captured by my husband

**Dear Ones--This post was written as a letter to my younger self. I like to revisit it periodically whenever my spiritual journey feels fraught or confusing. May it support anyone who is seeking joy, root and independence on the path.*

1. Practice daily, practice first. Anything done with intention is ritual, and the best rituals are those you will actually do. Learn what makes ritual effective, begin to root into ritual intention and attention throughout your daily life.

My morning writing practice.

2. Listen. What are you being called to do in each day? This is the purpose of practice, opening yourself to spiritual communion with the living breathing world. Listening is easier when you are connected.

One of my spiritual mantras.

3. Connect. With the living earth where you live, with the animate world, with your ancestors, the elements, plants, animals, birds. In animist cultures everything is imbued with life force, with living energy and in communication with you. Connecting daily with the real living world is essential to magical receptivity.

Tree friend.

4. Heal. Your unmet needs and personal wounds can be a driving force for initiatory transformation, or they can twist your magic into longing for spiritual authority and public approval. Fearless assessment of your motives is part of spiritual alignment. Without this you will keep paying for education that promises to make you a "priestess" a "shaman" a "witch" a "spiritual leader". While there are legit courses of study that will empower your spirituality by giving you a learning community, pragmatic support and historical context for some of your lineage work, most are inexpensive or free and do not promise titles or certifications. Because there is no such thing as a "certified witch" and priestess is a term created by patriarchy (I just learned this, so no judgment on the path, just know that no one can tell you what you are magically but you.) The need for titles and acknowledgement usually comes from wounding, and capitalism thrives on/IS the witch wound.

5. Be of Service. This earth needs everyone's magic, ancestral repair and spiritual sovereignty demands service—volunteer, offer, make access possible for others, tend the essential—food systems, water systems, wild places, community. The purpose of connective, animate magic is in offering.

6. Find your people, share the path. Yours is your own and theirs is their own but you weave and make together a communion complete. The more openly wyrd you are the more they will see you. The more you hide your magic the harder it is to find your kin. Hiding is the oldest defense, centuries of pain become an ancestral roadmap, written in fear and stained with real blood. Remember, beloved, disappearance is another kind of death. Lean in, be true, let good things find you.

7. Setbacks are not failures. The difficulties you encounter are purposeful. Physical pain initiates you, chronic illness sets boundaries, invites embodiment, removes you from the systems you blindly follow and refuse to see. Embrace difficulty, open to the change that is becoming who you are. When the myth cycle turns, get curious. Listen, what is being spoken between the cells of your remaking?

8. There is no one way, there is only the way. Errors are part of the path. Stop trying. Walk instead a path of truth. You will make mistakes, and you will follow false ways and you will change your mind and learn tools and skills of discernment and renew again and again in the blessing of the real--your own lived art, home and place, devotion, family and nonhuman kin. Perfection is a modern myth, spirituality is lived and adaptive.

9. There are rich lifeways both ancient and enduring waiting for your attention. Learn all you can from your ancestral lineages--languages, art, practices, poetry, pre-history, myth, story, wild foods, agrarian cycles, cultivation, handcrafts, solar/lunar rhythms, charms, spells, folklore. And learn all you can from the place where you are, your bioregion. You will feel heartbroken, by history and story, you will long for places you have never been, people you have never known in this life, communities shattered by greed and war. You will feel like you don’t belong anywhere, but you do. Everyone belongs to the earth, everyone has offerings to make and assistance to share in the service of healing. When you feel the pull of pain or the illusion of separateness, step back into the earth. Say a word in an ancient tongue of your ancestors, make food they would know and take it outside to pray. Then make your life devotion to what is sacred, to what sustains. ᚨᛚᚢ

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