How I Learned to Love Daily Practice Again: Back to the Basics

I get up at 4am most days and on my calendar is an alert: Daily Practice.

My computer beeps, my phone beeps, and the Catholic guilt that’s etched into my soul nudges at me.

Get up. Get coffee. Do your daily practice.

No really. Do it.

Maybe tomorrow.

And since there have been too many ‘maybe tomorrow’s, I realized I needed to change things up and go back to what I know better than anything else.

Get Rid of Old Offerings and Witchy Swag

I can’t write for long periods of time when my desk is a mess. And I can’t do my best magick when my mind is a mess.

So, I started by cleaning off my altars. And I went through the many boxes of witchy stuff — pictures, old candles that were meant to do…something, nature bits, notes, beads, stones, etc.

I didn’t go all ‘Marie Kondo’ on things, but I did think about whether the bits were things that still held importance for me. Were they still waiting for their time and place? Or were they things I didn’t need to hold onto anymore?

Out went some old tarot decks. Out went some old paper things that I didn’t remember owning in the first place. I burned some nature bits.

I made others into potions.

I burned all the candles down. (Well, mostly.) I took away any dusty offerings, no matter how pretty. I added to the windowsills and removed old jars with contents that were starting to shift to sour.

Promise to Do Just One Thing, and Make That Thing Easy

I am also a person who wants to do things right — and someone whose heart is sometimes bigger than her schedule. I want to do 10 things for my daily practice every day.

I admit it now: I can’t.

Well, I can’t do it consistently.

I can do a few that take up the space of 20 minutes. Maybe more if they’re short or part of a training I’m doing.

But I need to limit things or else the second I slip, I slip for days. Weeks.

So I chose a gratitude practice. Before I even get out of bed, I name how grateful I am to have another day. I name how grateful I am to have the opportunity to experience new things, to serve the godds, to step on the Earth.

One thing.

And once I do the one thing, I do the rest. After all, starting in a state of gratitude for potential and possibility makes it harder to list off the excuses I might normally use.

Add Magick to the Mundane

I don’t think you necessarily need to buy anything for magick (except books!), but I personally needed something new and concrete to spice things up.

My Hex the Patriarchy mug.

I’ve been drinking my coffee out of that. And I may not spend hours thinking about what that might look like, but I do call back the intention that my very presence has meaning. I call into myself the very possibility that everything I do will have an impact.

(And I remind myself of the impact I want to create.)

Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

There isn’t any innovative about cleaning or taking smaller steps. But it’s also not basic. It’s foundational, necessary, maybe even required to sustain yourself.

Sometimes, daily practice is less about the way that I relate to my magick or my godds, and more about the way I relate to myself. How I remember myself, my power, and my impact.

Because, for me anyway, there is magick in everything. Whether you have a daily practice or you have a moment where you remember your magick — all of that is great.

You can come back to yourself, to your being, to the presence that is so easily swept up in everything that happens during the day.

Just five minutes of devotion. Just five minutes of quiet or chanting or staring at a candle or talking to a godd or moving your body or reading a page from a book or singing as loud as you can or repeating the Charge of the Goddess or making kala.

Whatever. Whenever. Sometimes. All the time. Repeat or not.

All of that is enough.

All of you is enough.

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(And what do you do? Let’s share some best (daily) practices.)