Being the Anxious Witch

There’s no doubt that certain ways of thinking are unhelpful and can make us miserable. Feeding thought energy into the worst case scenarios, excessive worry, panic, and so on are difficult to live with and are an energy suck. When it comes to magickal workings, it’s important to believe in what you’re doing. But what about all the witches with anxiety and anxiety disorders? What about those who have great difficulty controlling their thoughts?

There are many practices we can work with to ease anxiety and gain more control over our thoughts, such as mindfulness in the moment and meditation. Whatever we can do to minimize its hold over us, we should do. Sometimes, though, we just don’t have control over it or how it affects us.

Witches Experience Anxiety

It’s a romantic idea that being a witch means you don’t have anxiety, but it’s just not reality for many witches, myself included. I have coped with anxiety for my entire life and I find it frustratingly false to be told that magick is all mental and positive thinking. If that were the case, none of my spells would work. Ever.

I did a long term spell and many small spells to get the house that I now own and I did not have unwavering faith. There were a couple of times I considered walking away. But here I am now in my lovely home and magick played an important, pivotal role in that despite my moments of doubt, anxiety, and frustration.

Forget Positive Thinking

It is not true that thinking positive is the main component in getting results. It helps, sure, and it’s important for magickal workings to have a basic faith that everything will work out. This faith eases your mind by allowing you to let go of outcomes. But whether or not that faith frees you from anxiety is a whole other ball of wax.

In many cases, the effort to push positive thinking has the opposite effect and empowers anxious or negative thoughts. After all, if what I think is alone what causes my reality to be what it is, then my anxious thoughts outweigh my will, my desires, my actions, and the spiritual assistance I receive. That’s a hell of a weighty imbalance.

Anxiety Doesn’t Have any Real Say

Anxiety doesn’t get to have the last word of what I can and can’t have. And it shouldn’t for you, either. The only time it gets this kind of power is when it goes unchecked and leads to self-sabotage, or when we actively give it that power. We have a say in that. Having anxiety doesn’t necessitate a negative result for magickal workings.

I’ve come to accept anxiety as a part of my life experience. Sometimes it wreaks terrible havoc on my body. I recognize panic when it’s coming on and have all but perfected my techniques for de-escalating panic attacks. I will be damned if anxiety is going to stop me from being a powerful witch just because it lives in me at a greater capacity than it does for many other people.

No witch is perfect. We all have our issues. They only get the last word on our workings when we allow it to be so. You don’t have to be limited by aspects of who you are. You can do great things when you embrace all of yourself, including the aspects that are stigmatized by society and other magickal practitioners.

Featured Image via pixabay