Mumbles & Things

View Original

Four Important Witchcraft Practices

You’re in the right place if you want to…

  • learn about cleansing and how this removes unhelpful energy from your space

  • understand the benefits of meditation in a witchcraft practice

  • know about divination and how to use tools to access your own divine wisdom

  • learn about visualization and how it helps to clarify what your desires looks and feels like so that you can attract it through your magical work.

See this content in the original post

Subscribe here to be notified about new episodes.


Cleansing Your Sacred Space

You’ll want to periodically cleanse your sacred space both physically and energetically. This is a never-ending process of evaluating the material objects, circumstances, and relationships in your life, and deciding to release and let go of what no longer serves you to welcome only what is helpful to you.

PHYSICAL CLEANSING

Keep the purpose—or intention—of your sacred space in mind as you review each physical object. Ask yourself, Does this thing serve the purpose of this space?

If it does, clean it and set it aside so you can return it after cleaning physically and energetically. If it does not serve the purpose of the space, clean it and move it to a more appropriate home where it can better serve its purpose. If it is usable but no longer serves you, bless it and give it away. Otherwise, dispose of it.

Go through every drawer, closet, pantry, cupboard, shelf, under bed, basket, pocket, purse, and wallet in your sacred space.

Related: How to Create Your Ideal Meditation Space

It can seem overwhelming to imagine reviewing every single thing in your sacred space, especially if you plan to make your entire home sacred. It’s okay to take some time to complete this process. Start with the most important area and move outward in stages.
You will begin to feel the energy shift as soon as you begin this process. By moving things around, you awaken them to their highest potential.

Be sure to clean the grime, dirt, dust, pet hair, and dander, away throughout this process. Use only all-natural cleaners. There are many commercially available options or you can make your own using a base ingredient like vinegar, baking soda, and/or borax. Add the power of essential oils to create fresh, pleasing scents and an extra boost of magical energy.

Related: DIY Enchanted Natural Cleaners

As you dust, sweep, mop, vacuum and wipe, keep the intention of your sacred space in mind. 

ENERGETIC CLEANSING

When you are finished with your physical cleansing you will need to clean and purify the energy. There are several methods to clean energetically including using smoke, sound, and crystals.

  • FIRE - Use smoke from sage, palo santo or incense. Visualize the smoke dissolving anything that is polluting your sacred space. Focus on the corners of your designated sacred space. Start with the northeast corner and move clockwise around the room. If you intend for your entire home to be a sacred space, do this for every room starting with the northeast corner of the house and moving clockwise.

    Candle magic is a great way to remove negativity from a space. Simply set your intention clearly before lighting the candle. Alternatively, write the intention on a slip of paper and burn it to ash in the candle flame (once the paper it alight, set it in a fireproof bowl or cauldron).

    Be cautious with open-flames and smoke cleansing. Do not leave a fire unattended, open a window for increased ventilation, and make sure the flames are entirely extinguished when you are finished.

  • SOUND - Use sound from chimes, singing bowls, bells or drums to increase the energetic vibrations in any space and cleanse it of harmful or unhelpful energy. Set your intention, then use the your sound instrument in a steady rhythm. Move around the room to grow the vibrations.

  • CRYSTALS - Crystals emit natural vibrations that can balance and harmonize with the world around you. Create a grid of crystals such as Selenite, Clear Quartz or Amethyst around the sacred space to protect it from energy that won’t help you and to amplify and contain your personal energy.
 
    Once you have completed the physical and energetic cleaning, return the items that you have decided to keep. 

See this gallery in the original post

Meditation for Witchcraft

Meditation is an integral part of witchcraft and practicing magic because it is through intentional thought and focused desire that you communicate with the universe (or your higher power). Other methods include, ritual, spellwork and your everyday thoughts and speech.

Meditation is a practice in which an individual trains the mind and induces a mode of consciousness to realize some benefit. There are many varied activities and practices which fall under the umbrella of meditation.

Related: Introduction to Meditation

Almost every culture in the world has some form of meditation associated with it. No matter the style, they are generally designed to promote contacting spiritual guides, experiencing relaxation, building internal energy, receiving psychic visions, getting closer to the divine, seeing past lives, taking astral journeys, and more.

The goal of meditation is to focus and quiet your mind, eventually reaching a higher level of awareness and inner calm. You can meditate anywhere and at any time. No matter what’s going on around you, you can access a sense of tranquility and peace. When you are in this state your magic becomes more powerful and effective. 

Related: Three Strategies for Raising Your Vibration

With so many ways to experience meditation and to access the other realms of being, there's no reason not to start today.

I’ve created a worksheet that is designed to help you start your habit and stick with it. It is a grid of thirty squares where you can visually track a habit you are trying to develop. Doing the same thing every day for thirty days, is scientifically proven to change your behavior from an interest to a habit.

To download the worksheet, click the button below and enter your email address so I can send it directly to your inbox.

See this content in the original post

It’s really easy to use the worksheet, and there are instructions in the PDF. The main thing is that you track your goal visually. Basically, you’ll set your goal, in this case to meditate for a set amount of time each day, and come up with symbols or colors that represent whether you did or did not accomplish the goal for the day.

The reason I like this method is because it shows your potential. By this, I mean that you recognize that you are human, and because of this you will probably miss days here and there.

What often happens when we set goals to establish new habits is that we start off strong and then as soon as we miss one day we very rarely get back into it. But, if you have a visual, you can see that that one missed day is insignificant when compared to the days that you did the thing. AND you can see all the potential you have in the future to fill in spaces with the symbol or color for yes. So, you keep going.

Related: How to Make More Time for Magic


Divination to Access Your Spirit Self

Divination is another witchcraft practice. It’s certainly not exclusive to witchcraft but it is something many or maybe even most witches engage in. In fact, There’s a reason many people enter the world of witchcraft through things like Tarot, astrology, or scrying. The ability to uncover hidden aspects of a situation, or see potential future outcomes of a choice is very useful for witchcraft.

And that’s really what Divination is. Most people think divination is only about fortune telling and seeing the future, and those are certainly aspects of divination. Fortune telling and seeing the future fall under the umbrella of divination. But divination is simply the practice of seeking knowledge through interacting with the divine. 

Related: Divination Blog Posts

So, let’s talk about what the divine is, because many of us are influenced by the major world religions, even if we don’t follow them ourselves. I have seen a misunderstanding that divine only means the external forces beyond the physical realm: God, angels, spirits. But the divine is everything that exists.

According to the Principle of Mentalism, which we discussed in an earlier post, we are all connected in one divine mind. Therefore the Divine is not only something external: the divine is you and me and everyone. The divine is nature and the universe and everything that is physical and spiritual and mental. 

I’m going to go on a tangent but I think this is where the fights about who’s right and who’s wrong stem from. You see, as humans we don’t actually understand anything. We’ve developed belief systems, theories, religions and philosophies over the course of our existence on earth, but we’re all describing the same thing. We use different words because we have different languages and experiences and things get lost in translation and how we communicate our meaning.

Some may say God, others say Allah, or the Universe, or Spirit, or Mother Earth and Father Sky, or the God and Goddess, some may use abstract concepts like Love, or Truth. But it’s all the same thing. A greater force that connects us.

Someone might say a prayer and someone else might call that a blessing or a spell or an intention. But those are the same things: an action or statement in which we ask for what we want for ourselves, or our loved ones, or the greater population, or the planet, or the animals.

So, I guess what I’m saying is that the divine is information or knowledge and we are each uniquely divine. So, what is divination?

Now, in the major religions, direct access to the divine or God is more or less funneled through a pastor, or a rabi, or imam. This religious leader helps to translate the messages of the divine and shares them with the followers.

Divination is a practice of skipping that person in the middle, taking spirituality into your own hands and developing a belief system based on your own experiences with the divine. 

That’s not to say that religious and spiritual leaders and teachers aren’t valuable. Of course they are. We can learn from them as they share their experience and wisdom. We can also learn from our own experiences and this combination creates layers and a deeper spiritual understanding.

Using divination, you can check in with the divine, including your own higher self or intuition. Practically any question that you have can be answered with a tool for divination. Like the Tarot, astrology, runes, scrying, bibliomancy, tea leaf reading, pendulums, oracle cards, psychic senses, there are countless tools and methods.

Visualize with All Your Senses

Okay, so let’s move on to the final witchcraft practice I want to share with you today: Visualization. Visualization is the practice of creating a mental picture of your desires. And to be honest, the word visualization is not the best for describing this process. Visualization implies that this is only a visual process, only involving your sense of sight. It’s more than just seeing what you want in your mind’s eye. 

Related: Three Core Methods for the Law of Attraction

In fact, this practice is much more powerful when you incorporate all of your senses as you imagine the scene. What does your life look like when you have your desire? What does it smell like? What does it taste like? What does it sound like? And what does it feel like?

Use each of your physical senses when imagining the circumstance of your desire and feel the way it feels to have achieved your dreams.

Additionally, it’s common for people to visualize what they want, and feelings of lack creep in because you don’t have it yet. So pay attention to the feelings you are experiencing and train yourself to transform any feelings of not having what you want into feelings of excitement about the potential for you.

Homework

As a reminder, download your 30-day meditation tracker above so that you can begin tracking your magical habits. You can use it for helping you develop any habit—magical or mundane—but, I highly encourage you to download it and try it for building a new magical habit (like one of those discussed above) into your routine.

Summary

In this post, we talked about four core witchcraft practices. We learned about cleansing and how this removes unhelpful energy from your space. Then, we looked into the benefits of meditation in a witchcraft practice. We also talked about divination and how to use tools to access your own divine wisdom. Finally, we learned about visualization and how it helps to clarify what your desires looks and feels like so that you can attract it through your magical work.


Join us in the Talk Witchcraft Facebook group to chat about this episode with other witchy folks.

See this content in the original post

Wait, don’t go yet!

Thanks for hanging out with me today. If you’ve enjoyed this post of Talk Witchcraft, I invite you to check out mumblesacademy.com.

Mumbles Academy is the place to be for intuitive souls at any stage on their WitchPath. Whether you are a Wildling at the very beginning of witchcraft journey and looking for a safe learning environment, a Creator who is already committed to their practice and wants to develop their witchcraft skills even more, or a Sage who full of wisdom already and is ready to share that with others, Mumbles Academy was designed for you.

With monthly masterclasses and live Q&As, an extensive archive of courses and training, and a supportive community to help you along the way with encouragement and advice, Mumbles Academy is the perfect place for you to be as you as you continue on your WitchPath.

Now it’s your turn!

Comment which witchcraft practice you are committing to practice more often if not daily.