The Rawness of Witchcraft

I feel raw. I feel vulnerable. I feel exposed. This is part of being a witch, of practicing witchcraft, and it’s often overlooked. In the Reclaiming Tradition of Witchcraft we do a lot of personal work; holding the belief that as we improve ourselves, we are improving the world. And guess what? Self improvement is hard work. (It can also be fun, easy, and simple, but that’s not where I’m at in this moment.)

This summer I had the distinct pleasure of teaching at two back to back Witchcamps, which are week long intensive retreats that take place all over the world. At each of these events I co-facilitated the Reclaiming Core Class called Elements of Magic, the introduction to Reclaiming style magic. You might be thinking that teaching gets you off the hook of having to do self work or that teaching an “intro class” means it’s easy-peasy; not so much. The truth is that even when facilitating a workshop you still do the work, get impacted, and have your process.

I am in my process right now.

The past year has been really hard. Really. Hard. I’ve had my trust broken, I’ve gone through a depression, I spent many days feeling isolated and alone (even when surrounded by people). These two spiritual retreats brought all of the feelings from the past year to the surface. This is a special kind of magic and it’s not glamorous.

Real Witchcraft

We witches can spend a lot of time talking about spells, rituals, potions, and all the things that are on the surface of being a witch, the things that are seen from the outside in. There is a mystique in spells and potions, but we witches also need to be clear and honest about the other kinds of witchcraft, the self reflection kinds, the life changing from the inside out kinds. It is vital that we work on building our spiritual and emotional bodies. In order to be good magical practitioners, and stewards for the Earth, we have to strengthen those non-physical muscles as much as we need to strengthen our physical ones.

My spiritual workout right now consists of asking myself some hard questions. How do humans hold heartbreak? How do I move through this? How do you move on? How do we let go of the hurts from the past? These are the pieces of magical humanness that I am sitting with. I am holding these questions with tenderness and compassion, because for right now anyway, I have no answers.

Being Human

This is part of the pagan work, the religious work, the work of being a witch that is so hard to convey to someone new to the path. Sometimes there isn’t a clear direction or answers. Sometimes there is only the rawness and the sitting in discomfort. Occasionally we have to make friends with these wounds, listen to their stories, and integrate the pain. There are times when we just have to cry, express, emote; knowing that it won’t change a damn thing, but moving it through the body is healthy and normal and, oh-so-very human. And at the end of the day, we witches are in fact, human.

Right now this is my work, my own private spiritual practice. My spiritual practice and not a spiritual perfect.