What To Do When You Feel Small…

Go big. Unfurl and take up all the space you can, like a seed cracking open and spreading ragged roots into the earth and green tendrils to the sky. Be loud like the morning finch — he may be tiny, but he has a voice that can reach the heavens and a golden chest filled with sunlight. 

Don’t be afraid of what your song can do.

And when you are no longer scared of a pair of air-filled lungs and the spell they breath to life, go bigger than that.

Spread your arms wide and hold the Universe close. Find your story in the constellations that map our histories — what was, what is, what will be. Surely, your fate is written somewhere between the Big and Little Dippers. You have to become a giant if you want to reach those pin-pricks of light. They may have the answers you need, so you must risk expansiveness.

But that’s the catch: Sometimes your body has forgotten how to stretch.

What do you do then?

If you don’t know how to go big, go even smaller than you feel, so far inside yourself that you forget the outside world and instead make your home inside a four-chambered heart — don’t leave until you remember what it means to be a living, breathing being. Find yourself in the thump-thump of muscle and wet walls squeezing you tight.

When you feel even smaller than that, talk to the smallest thing you know. I asked a ladybug once how she felt about being no bigger than a sunflower seed. She just opened her polka-dotted wings and took flight. I knew what she was saying. She might be small, but she is red and fierce, and everyone knows who she is when she lands on their fingertips. You’d think she was being snippy, but I knew she was just stating a fact. Not that she cared much, either, if she were mistaken for a button or a bead. Her hard-shelled wings protected her from the inhumanity of indifference.

I talked to an elephant once, too, just to understand what it meant to be big. He didn’t seem to know he was a giant of an animal. By elephant standards, he was medium-sized, and, well, he didn’t spend much time thinking about those things when he could fill his mind with peanuts and hay and stories everyone else forgot. 

Those lost memories were so powerful, he told me, so much larger than him that it didn’t much matter what size he was. I told him he might think he wasn’t much to look at, but he sure had big, beautiful ears, and he blushed at that. I knew he wouldn’t forget me, the same way I knew I’d always remember the time I made an elephant’s cheeks go red. 

In fact, that average elephant with his gloriously large ears got me thinking about all the things I’d overlooked, all the things I’d never taken the time to listen to. So I spent some time with forgotten things and, though my ears are no bigger than tulip heads, I let them take in the whispers and quiet songs of the things we fail to notice as we go about life.

Take the plant called borage. An uncharitable name for a starflower. Does she care? Does it stop her from blooming violet and yellow flowers and making the earth around her sing with life? The bees don’t forget her, even if others can’t name her by sight. The hummingbird can’t get enough of her nectar, and so she makes more and more for him, eager to feel his tongue against her petals. There is beauty in the forgotten. Such freedom in being overlooked. So many things you can say and do when you learn the art of invisibility. Without it, she would have never known the hummingbird’s kiss.

So long as you know how to find yourself, she tells me, that is all that matters. So long as you give your attention to those who deserve it. Where do you think all her nectar comes from? The bees and the hummingbird fill her with pollen and the sky showers her in sunlight. It is their secret dance and it is enough that only they share it.

To everyone else, she is just another plant. To them? Divinity. 

She plucks one of her violet flowers from her green, furry body and presses it against my tongue. I am grateful for her story and suddenly feel full and sweet. I wondered if this is how she feels when the bees settle in her center.

That night, I dreamt I found the constellation with my story written across it. It was like looking into the bottom of a star-speckled well or the inside of an apple. That’s all I can tell you — the rest is between me and the stars. And the violet flower coating the roof of my mouth. 

Secrets, I’m learning, those private, quiet things, can be quite delicious. 

One day, I stopped talking. Stopped asking questions. Stopped wondering how to quit feeling small and even gave up trying to change my size altogether. Instead, I let the silence fill up the space around me. I let the world around me grow large and full and technicolor.

I watched two black cats sprawled across a windowsill, tails lazily flicking back and forth. Noticed how they took up all the space they wanted, just like the silence. They would not consider themselves small. They would not stuff themselves into bad-luck labels, even if they did like stuffing themselves into boxes. They, like all sensible creatures, favor big hearts over small minds. They know you are lucky to bask in their presence. 

And, somehow, they are right.

Now, I no longer think of myself as small. I am not confined by this skin or the pain others might press upon it. I am breath and heartbeat and the red blush of a ladybug’s kiss on my fingertip. I am the conversation with an elephant. The starflower in my mouth. The cats watching me write. I am not small, though I take up little space.

I am all the ways I touched the world just by being myself. 

I am one word after another, spilling from my mouth, my pen, my heart. 

I am the words I cannot speak. 

I am the stories that have made me feel small, and I am the stories I will write to remember that I am big. I am the spaces — they get bigger and longer each time I feed them — when I forget to think about my place in the world and simply listen to the morning finch. 

That bird.

He knows how to give me wings. He knows how to fill my chest with sunlight. I put down my pen and open the window above my writing desk to let his birdsong wash over me.  In the end, this is all that matters:

His brilliant voice.

The big sky above us.

This small moment.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational collection of musings touching on life’s simple pleasures, everyday fantasy, and absolutely delectable recipes that will guarantee to stir the kitchen witch in you.  If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is the everyday, subscribe here.

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Beltane Spells

On May first, I wove ribbons in my hair and danced in the meadow until the buzzing in my heart matched the buzzing of the bees.  On the sixth, I ate tender strawberries and enjoyed the feel of each tiny seed slipping down my throat. On the twelfth, I planted lemon balm because I am forever in need of soothing and sunshine.  I somehow never quite trust soft gentle things when they pad into my life like a cat ready to luxuriate in my attention—but I’m learning.

Even the tarot gives me sunshine. Again and again, it asks me to let the light in.  I wish it would tell me how because the only way I know is to surround myself with sunflowers and jazz records and radishes so red they look like they could stain my fingers with their exuberance.

Then today I tried to capture the scent of lilacs as they fade and give way to summer—knowing full well I will have to wait until another turn of the wheel to savor their ephemeral perfume fresh from the bud.  But that doesn’t stop me from bottling what I can of their essence so that when I am bottled up I can uncap that violet vial, breath in, and remember that I am a spring evening—full of softness and invitation to those willing to linger in solitude under the moonlight.

I am as wild as a dandelion head, made up of wishes that will fearlessly find their place in the world, not the stiff thoughts that fill my mind when I try to mend the things that keep falling apart—Orpheus was right. Nothing good ever comes from looking back.

Instead, I wash myself in lilac perfume to remember that the world is full of soft and sweet things and that I needn’t always smell of sweat and tears.  I let my bare feet kiss wet grass. And I take the last lilac buds to weave with the ribbons in my hair so that even my dance is a magenta promise of something more.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

How to Cultivate a Witchy Garden

It’s that time of year when I’m dying to get my hands dirty.  I’ve been collecting seeds all winter and have started prepping my garden space by turning the soil, cleaning up the debris that protected it over the colder months, and thinking about where I’ll put my plants. I’m dizzy with the promise of a summer in my magical garden space where my biggest concern is harvesting and drying my medicinal herbs fast enough—the hard years of pandemic teaching forgotten under the sun’s nurturing gaze and the pliant soil beneath my feet.

This is a feeling that is always with me, even in the winter, warming my soul when it’s too cold to be outside.  You see, I grew up in a magical garden.  My mother was the original kitchen witch who grew so many herbs and plants in our backyard that stepping out there was like entering this secret garden of enchanted things—it still is!  

I remember when I learned that the licorice and lavender and lemon verbena she planted had medicinal properties and that you could steep them to make delicious and healing tisanes. I was obsessed with collecting these plants, brewing with them, and drying them to store in cool jars I’d collected over the years.  Yeah…I think it’s pretty clear that I was always kind of witchy!

Even when I left home, I made it a point to bring a little bit of that garden magic with me wherever I went. Sometimes it was just a few plants on a windowsill in my grad school apartment.  Other times, it was a magnificent patio garden, complete with vermicompost, where I grew all sorts of culinary and medicinal herbs.  Or it was an open space where I could sneak away to plant early spring leeks and onions or the Pinterest board where I pinned everything I wanted in my dream garden, the place I’d cultivate when I lived in my forever home (yes, it will closely resemble the house in the movie, Practical Magic, naturally). 

Plant magic is so much a part of my being, especially as a bruja, that I’ve come to think of my garden as an enchanting space for conjuring.  I have a natural affinity for plants and have often sought solace in their company when the outer world gets to be too much (truly, plants and cats are much more sensible than humans, at least that’s what my familiar says, and I tend to agree with him). 

Sometimes, though, it might seem like a daunting task to create a witchy garden full of medicinal herbs and magical plants.  Where do you start?  How do you maintain it?  What plants do you use?  The most important thing to creating a magical garden is your intention—that desire for a more magical life—and taking enjoyment in learning as you go.  

So, if, like me, you’re looking to be witchier than ever this year, here are a few tips, in no particular order, to cultivating a witchy garden.  It goes without saying, however, that any witchy tips you get here are general guidelines—see what resonates with you and then make your own magic as you develop your relationship to the space you’re working with and the plants that speak to you. 

Don’t get too manictured! I quietly cringe at the perfectly manicured gardens in magazines.  I can practically hear the plants screaming to be free! A garden should be a sanctuary where you let your hair down, walk barefoot, and forget about the world for a bit.  Where you plants can thrive and grow wontonly.  Sure, tend your garden, but don’t turn it into the environmental equivalent of those airbrushed models on a magazine cover—they’re not real and should not be images of beauty we aspire to. Instead, embrace the wild messiness of growing things.  It’s good for the soul.

Remember that all plants are magic. Who didn’t spend afternoons as a child gathering roots and twigs and leaves and stirring them up to make potions and mudpies? It’s as if we all instinctively knew there was something magical to these living breathing things. (If you are one of those rare and strange creatures who never did that…I feel sorry for you.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy that kind of fun now—go get your hands dirty and collect plants that call to you!).  As you go about cultivating your garden, learn about the flowers, herbs, and produce your plant. They all have lovely magical, medicinal, and, yes, even mundane histories.  Each of them has stories and there’s something powerful to learn more about them. You’ll be surprised how much of their stories

Talk to your plants…and don’t be surprised if they talk back. Oftentimes, the plants we are most attracted to have the medicine we need.   For example, one year, I was deeply drawn to Juniper, the seeds, the leaves, and the sharp smell of its essential oils.  I later learned that Juniper is a deeply healing plant that is specifically known for taking negative energy and turning it into light.  As it happens, that was the exact magic I needed as I was healing from some toxic situations and learning to find my own happiness again.  And, yeah, you should check on your plants and talk with them as you tend them.  My mornings aren’t complete without a cup of coffee in the garden and a good chat with growing things before I draw the tarot.

Leave those weeds for the birds and the bees. Okay, I know that we don’t want a garden that’s overgrown with weeds but some are seriously important! This goes back to not being too manicured.  The garden is a living ecosystem so leave those dandelions to help our pollinators, just as wildflowers attract birds who help keep pests in line. Some plants that are so aggressive they become like weeds (I’m talking to you, mint!), so do what you have to do to make sure you keep your unwanted plants in check but allow your garden to be a joyful wild ecosystem that isn’t hemmed in by hospital-like tidiness. The wildlife and your mind will thank you!

Embrace composting. There is nothing more magical than taking scraps and other discards and turning them into pure gold.  It’s positively alchemical! Composting is a fairly easy thing to learn how to do and one of the cheapest and most eco-friendly ways to nourish your plants--seriously, ditch the chemical fertilizers and other junk that’s bad for the environment.  I also like to think of all the energetic junk I’m composting for future fertile soil as I feed my vermicompost or turn the heap.  It makes me feel like no experience, piece of writing, or feeling is wasted.  Even if it’s something I have to let go of, it has done its part to help nourish my inner garden.  It’s very cathartic!  

Know your local ecosystem.  I love my local medicinal plants like globemallow and yerba mansa, not to mention the drought-hardy Hollyhocks.  Part of cultivating a witchy garden is knowing the land around you and the plants and animals that thrive there.  When you garden in harmony with the environment around you, you produce better yields, have happier plants and wildlife, and embrace your inner wildflower. 

I suppose if there’s one last bit of advice to give you as you cultivate your witchy garden, it’s to listen to your intuition. Plant the plants that make you happy. Design your space in a way that soothes the soul. Go slow. Enjoy the sacred simple pleasure of time spent with growing things. And always, always make a little time each day to get your hands dirty.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Witchier Than Ever...

When I first started this blog, oh, almost ten years ago, I got in the habit of starting each year with a new year’s resolution, something to meditate on for the year. I did everything from slow living, radical self-care, and thinking about living more sustainably.  After a while, many of these things became an integral part of my life. Then the pandemic happened and I felt a decreased desire to focus too hard on another goal, even if it was rooted in my desire for cultivating a more magical life.

There’s nothing wrong with making resolutions—in fact, I rather like the idea of choosing something to gently meditate on throughout the year. It’s like my daily tarot card reading. It’s nice to have something to help you get clarity on what you want to manifest in your life or help you explore your inner world.  Intention setting is one of the most mundane forms of magic-making and all the more powerful for its simplicity. 

That said, when I took a pandemic-inspired step back, I realized that I’d gotten better (despite a few bumps in the road), at integrating things like self-care and energetic awareness into my daily life.  Part of it came from years of practice.  The other part, from writing Practically Pagan ~ An Alternative Guide to Magical Living.  Writing that book helped me return to the fundamentals of magical living, ways of being that are intuitive and seamlessly integrated into our daily lives.  Writing has always been one of the most powerful forms of spell-crafting for me.

In the process, I got rid of the things cluttering up my life: complicated exercise regimes, things that made me feel bad about myself, the constant need to apologize or over-explain things, saying yes to too many demands, self-doubts, and anxieties that lead to bad habits in an effort to self-soothe.  I got rid of people, too. I have no room for pandemic-deniers and performative allies in my life, and joyful hex bigots out of my space.

In their place, I created more space for unexpected magic. I cultivated my relationship to the tarot and to seeds—soul seeds and turnip seeds, aggressively joyful hollyhock seeds and the seeds of dreams I hope to nourish in the coming year.  I gave into my inner kitchen witch and bought a pizza stone—then rigorously tested the best ways to make a pizza (wink wink).  I stopped reading books that bored me and binge-read series that brought me joy.  I trusted my intuition more even when it seemed to go counter to the surface of things.   I lit beeswax candles and made time for cat cuddles at the end of the day.  I learned the gentle art of divine receptivity.

I grew things. I made things. I dreamed about a lot of things.  And I conjured some things, too.  I listened.  At times I spoke.  I let my body—the ripples of pleasure and coils of tension—tell me what I did and didn’t need in my life.  Mostly I embraced my deeply introverted need for solitude and the healing revelations that can only come with time spent in silence. 

In other words, I allowed myself to embrace my full witchiness.  In my own way and via my own path.  The past few years have been hard in so many ways that I’ve had to make a conscious effort not to harden my heart or shut down as I pour all my energy into trying to maintain important boundaries.  Don’t get me wrong, boundaries are essential!  And I do keep my heart safe from the people who would abuse my kindness and empathy.  But my inner-bruja has also helped me remember that I ferociously maintain those boundaries so that I can have the space and safety to nourish joy, Eros energy, and sacred simple pleasures. 

Sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is to trust in our ability to keep ourselves safe from the proverbial demons of the world so that we may hold space for the divine.  It is no small thing to allow our energy to flow, welcome in divine receptivity, and make room for unexpected magic. 

So this year? My new year’s resolution is to be witchier than ever. 

What magic are you hoping to conjure this new year?

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Keep It Simple

When I started Enchantment Learning & Living what feels like a lifetime ago, I did so with the intention of exploring a central truth: true magic is in the everyday. That’s the tagline of much of my creative work and the backbone of my own brujeria practice.

Spiritual Gatekeeping

I wanted to get away from the idea of complex spell-work and esoteric occultism that often felt like gatekeeping to what should be an organic fluid practice. Like the church insisting they are the conduit through which God, or the numinous, speaks, these more complicated approaches to the craft can imply that people can only connect to that mystic energy within themselves and without if they perform intricate rituals. We must have an Instagram-worthy altar, a collection of large, expensive crystals, and an herbal apothecary filled with hard-to-find often dangerous herbs.

Don’t get me wrong. We all have our ways of conjuring, our rituals, and spells, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You can even enjoy that Instagram-worthy set-up! The trouble occurs when we get so lost in the performance of our witchiness, yield to consumerism that tells us we can’t be magical unless we have that ultra-expensive [fill in the blank magical tool]. It’s easy to get lost in the ritual and theater of the occult, so much so that we can forget the purpose behind our spiritual practice: to reconnect to self, the universe, to others in a meaningful and life-affirming way.

This is also a way to keep people out of elitist witch circles—if you can commodify spirituality, you can choose who can and can’t have access to these energies via simple economics and cultural appropriation, which is a byproduct of this commodification. More simply, it sells the idea that you are not enough on your own to manifest what you need to, which is simply untrue.

Spiritual Bypassing & Performative Conjuring

We also run the risk of spiritual bypassing when our practice is so focused on the pomp and circumstance of witchy business. We fall into the trap of “love and light” and good feelings only, suppressing the bad so we don’t have to do the hard shadow work to truly heal. We can, in essence, get so lost in the spectacle of the occult that we successfully avoid whatever it is we need to deal with.

And it’s not just witches that do this. I’ve seen this in the yoga community, where people misuse a powerful practice to numb, rather than heal. Buearocracies roll out their anti-racism agendas that amount to nothing more than a publicity stunt—it’s easy to feel like they’re doing the hard work when a shiny new poster says they are. Actual social justice is much harder and takes more work, hence it’s easy to fall back on feel-good performativity than it is to wade into the waters of genuine activism.

The real work—spiritual, social justice, relational—happens when we show up and aren’t afraid to get messy, uncomfortable, and grounded. And, yes, sometimes those spells, rituals, and social media posts help with that—as long as people don’t stop there. That’s why one of my witchy principles is that magic is a hard, gritty thing. You have to show up and do the work every day. It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t always feel good, but if you keep at it…good stuff starts happening.

Keep It Simple

So…what do we do, knowing all of this? Easy. We keep it simple. My upcoming book, Practically Pagan ~ An Alternative Guide to Magical Living, takes a practical approach to magical living. You don’t any money to perform these proverbial spells and rituals. You don’t need fancy tools or a scholarly background in the occult. You don’t even need a lot of time. All you need is a desire to conjure more magic in your life.

Put even more simply, this book and my personal practice are all about knowing that there is magic in the mundane. As the book blurb says, “It’s a less mumbling 'double double toil and trouble' over a cauldron and trouble and a more cooking a delicious soup in a beloved cast iron pot. It’s simple. It’s mundane. It’s magic!”

You won’t find love spells or hexes in this book, but you will find simple practices rooted in self-care and energetic awareness designed to help you live a more magical life. Perhaps this is what makes this book “an alternative guide” because it side-steps the hocus pocus people expect from witchy books and gets real about the hard work it takes to conjure a more magical life.

It’s a simple concept but difficult to put into practice. I’ve been marinating on this concept more recently as reviews of my latest book are rolling in. It’s a striking contrast as the reviews can be broken into two camps: the people who are upset that they didn’t get a grimoire filled with complicated spellwork and the people who utterly and completely appreciate a more practical—alternative—guide to magical living rooted in basic energetic and mystic principles with examples and tips for how those practices play out in real life.

The magic is in the repetition, the overlap between cultivating radical self-care and developing a pleasure magic practice. These things work together to form a powerful, magical whole. And yeah, on the surface that might seem boring to practitioners who want more sparkle and flair to their witchy practice, but—and I say this with a profound love of glitter and shiny things—sometimes all that sparkle is distracting you from the very real work of sweeping up a dirty floor and thinking twice about welcoming in people who always track in mud, literally and figuratively.

Oh, and that soup in your beloved cast-iron pot? That’s a comfort spell. Pointing out, as I often do in this book, that it’s harder for women of color to acknowledge that they are allowed to do less and enjoy themselves? That’s a protection spell and boundary-setting spell. It might seem like overkill to those who haven’t had to constantly assert their right to wellness and a balanced life. But to us? The repetition is part of the conjuring and an invitation to fellow people with marginalized identities to claim our right to joy, pleasure, and the magic of everyday life. No complicated spells required.

So as you go about your daily life this week, pay attention to the energy you bring to your work, your play, your relationships. Treat every action as a conjuring, every cup of tea as a potion, every word that slips from your lips as a spell. Then see where the magic takes you.

And remember, as I always say, true magic is in the everyday.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Divine Receptivity

This summer I did perhaps the most radical and terrifying thing I’ve done in a long time: I gave myself space.  I did less—much less than I’ve been used to doing.  I let my feelings and desires dictate my actions.  If I didn’t like the way something felt, I didn’t do it.  If it brought me joy, I did more of it.  I was strict about this too, being careful to establish boundaries in areas where I’d allowed myself to become boundary-less, resisting the temptation to do more just to maintain the status quo.  Then I let myself explore the world not from the perspective of a professor or writer or even a bruja, but as the Page of Cups in the tarot.

I let go of expectations of what this second pandemic summer should look like or how my life should be unfolding.  Instead, I relearned what it means to look at the world with unblemished wonder and excitement, like the Page of Cups peering into a goblet only to find a little fish—the symbol of soul and inspiration. As the Page of Cups explores her world, she reconnects to self, to soul, to a more creative and regenerative way of being simply by tapping into her innate joyful curiosity about the world around her. I call this exploratory feeling Divine Receptivity or the art of opening yourself to the wonders of the universe.  

To be clear, that’s not the same thing as being open to everything—boundaries are important! This is especially true if you’re always in the habit of trying to feel safe, struggling to maintain healthy boundaries or both. I mean, I’m one of the few BIPOC faculty at two higher learning institutions and am only now coming to terms with the fact that so much of my energy goes into guarding against all manner of things designed to make me feel less-than or that exploit my labor.  And it’s important to establish those boundaries early and often so that I can have a better work-life balance.  But I’m also learning that I've extended that same guarded energy into my day-in, day-out life outside of higher ed, which isn’t all that healthy.

Openness is something I’ve had to relearn. Divine Receptivity is about realizing that you can be receptive to enjoyable things that are just for you and for no other purpose than that they are pleasurable. You don’t have to share them on social media or, terrible as this sounds, include others if it doesn’t bring you joy. I’ve realized, especially in this past year, that I’ve done a lot in my professional life to make others feel comfortable, but that, perhaps, it is not always my job to put people at ease or overextend myself to avoid conflict, particularly when that only enables systemic inequality.

What about my needs? My wellness?  My desire to be a human being outside of my career, much as I enjoy both teaching and writing?  Enter Divine Receptivity in which I allow myself the space and freedom to let go of burdens that are not mine to carry and open my energy to the soft, sweet possibilities of life.  I’ve relearned the fact that I don’t have to be a task-oriented worker-bee all the time.  I’m allowed to flow, I’m allowed to do less, I’m allowed to be open to experiences and things I haven’t been quite able to imagine yet.  I’m allowed to create space for new possibilities and time to simply let my mind wander.

Strangely, I’ve found that it’s a lot of work relearning how to do this. I’ve had to work through the guilt that can crop up when I’m enjoying myself—surely I should be working! Or the unexpected emotions that surface as I clear through blockages. Divine Receptivity is, in part, about allowing ourselves to safely feel what we need to feel, knowing that the universe is watching over us.  Synchronous happenings and signs will guide us to a deeper understanding of ourselves and a more joyous approach to everyday life.

So when I start feeling like should get back on that dizzying merry-go-round of fast living, I take a deep breath, let those thoughts settle, and think about the quiet wonders I’ve been able to enjoy this summer, wonders I haven’t always created space for in the past.  Like last night, I sat on my patio and watched the sun set.  It stained the Sandia mountains a lusty orange and the clouds behind it a blushing pink.  My familiar sat in my lap.  We soaked in the soft hush of the evening and let the desert air wash over us.  

This morning, I watched the birds—finches, doves, sparrows, swallows—flit and swoop and flirt their way through their breakfasts as I weeded my garden.  I let the gentle music of growing things soften my heart and soothe my soul.  In that moment, I was whole.

For the first time in a long time, I’m relearning what truly makes me happy, thanks to Divine Receptivity.  What new ways of being will you open yourself up to?

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational collection of musings touching on life’s simple pleasures, everyday enchantments, and delectable recipes that will guarantee to stir the kitchen witch in you.  If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is the everyday, subscribe here.

Want even more inspiration to make your dream life a reality?  Follow me on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.  Thanks for following!

Easing into Post-Pandemic Life

I’ve gotten into a delightful habit this summer of writing on my patio.  It’s a lovely little spot that I’ve turned into a potted herb garden, complete with a vermicompost bin, hand-painted patio furniture, and a beautiful view of a courtyard oasis.  Today, the finches sing around me, the hint of rain is in the air, and my familiar sits in my lap, content to birdwatch and nap.

This is one way I’m learning to feel safe beyond the perimeter of my apartment, silly as it sounds.  I’m getting used to not needing a mask to go out there, getting used to fresh air, and generally getting used to the idea that I can be more mobile now that I’m vaccinated.  Something as simple as using my patio far more frequently than I did last summer, at the height of the pandemic, is something that helps me slowly reorient to how things will be moving forward.

A few weeks after starting this ritual, I made my first masked foray back to my favorite local co-op. Honestly? I could have cried at how wonderful it was to slowly peruse grocery shelves knowing that everyone there was vaccinated and still taking the pandemic seriously.  It was a far cry from frantic shopping and the empty shelves from this time last year.  

I was shocked, in fact, at the profound quiet joy I took in visiting beloved spaces, from the store, to the garden center, to my local diner once I finally worked up the courage to pick up some takeout. I don’t think I realized how much I missed certain things while surviving the past year.  

As an introvert and empath, I’m a natural homebody and much of my energy this past year went into focusing on the comforts of home while keeping my community safe, a true privilege I know.  But I’m now realizing that I didn’t completely let myself feel how much I missed various things because it would have been too painful to process in the midst of an already difficult year.  Instead, I channeled all my energy into living a cottagecore hobbit life and using it as an opportunity to get real about what I wanted my life to be like moving forward.

As with so many other people, I now find myself struggling to reorient myself to our new reality.  This past year has been such a strange mix of seeing a number of groups not taking the pandemic seriously on the one hand, and, on the other, hearing daily of others sufferingly greatly from it.  The thought of running a simple errand felt terrifying for the longest time.  And yet, I knew I couldn’t stay forever in my cozy sanctuary, however tempting.

Post-Vaccine Inertia 

I’m not the only person navigating what some have called the post-vaccine inertia or feel that mask-wearing should still be something that is normalized moving forward, especially in this next year.  It’s impossible to think that we can easily slip into a normal routine without questions of safety and stability running through our minds.  And yet, there’s also a sense of hope and quiet appreciation for the things we’ve taken for granted, like the simple act of chatting with strangers in a cafe or just feeling safe being around other people.

In fact, many people are speculating that this will be the summer of love, which I wholeheartedly endorse (as long as people are doing so safely, of course!).  If this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that our fundamental humanity, our need to connect with others and enjoy intimate relationships of all kinds, is one of the most sacred and beautiful aspects of life.  I, for one, have realized that I want to be less about work and more about my personal life moving forward.  The things we accomplish in life mean nothing if we don’t have kindred spirits to share them with.  

As I mull all this over, I find myself wondering about the future:

• Where have I been and where am I going?

• What do I want to bring into the future with me?

• What do I want to leave behind?

• Who do I want to welcome into my life?

I suppose these are the kind of questions we all ask after experiencing a trauma. 

Moving Forward 

I don’t have the all answers to the above questions, but I’m slowly getting there.  And I certainly don’t know how to best ease into post-pandemic life, though I’m trying my hardest there, too.  How do we move on without forgetting or dismissing the pain of the last year?  How do we create room for joy and expansion in the face of sorrow?  More questions I continue to marinate on.   Here are a few things I’ve discovered, however, in my own journey into a better way of living:

It’s not over yet. Don’t feel like you have to rush back to what was normal in the past. There’s no such thing, anymore.  What’s more, the pandemic isn’t over yet, so it’s okay to proceed with caution. 

Go slow and listen to the energy.  Speaking of proceeding with caution, it’s okay to go slow as you figure out what feels safe and healthy for you moving forward.  I’ve tried to return to some places and the vibe just feels weird on unsafe, so I don’t go back.  It’s either not my space anymore or it’s not safe for me to be there right now.  Other times, it’s felt like reconnecting with dear loved ones—those are the communities I feel safe returning to.

Know your boundaries. I’ve a lot of friends who have contacted me to hang out.  Honestly?  I’m not there yet.  It feels too strange to meet up with a group of people, albeit a small group.  I’m still trying to figure out how to feel safe doing simple daily activities, let alone adding more people—read: variables—into my life.  Most people understand this, as they’re figuring out what works for them too.  Those that don’t…do you really want that kind of energy in your life?  Just sayin’.

Find joy where you have it.  This year hasn’t been easy and we’re not out of the woods yet.  We don’t know how the variants will affect things or how long it will take for the pandemic to fully end (my guess is likely another year).  Still, that doesn’t mean that you can’t find joy in the process of relearning your communities and getting real about what you want to manifest moving forward in your life.  

So much has changed in this past year.  It’s important to hold space for that and know that this liminal time is all about conjuring a deeper way of connecting with self and others.  As you ease into post-pandemic life, focus on what brings you the most joy, stability, and sense of well-being—and be content with the process of learning what those things mean to you moving forward. That’s all any of us can do!

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational collection of musings touching on life’s simple pleasures, everyday enchantments, and delectable recipes that will guarantee to stir the kitchen witch in you.  If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is the everyday, subscribe here.

Want even more inspiration to make your dream life a reality?  Follow me on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.  Thanks for following!

Lessons in Slow Living

This time last year, I was getting serious about slowing down and getting grounded after the publication of my first book and as I started to wrap up a series of large curriculum development projects in my professorial life. I was proud of everything I did but also realized I couldn’t sustain that workload, nor could I sustain the intense extroverted energy that I’d been putting out into the world to accomplish those things. I am, at heart, an introvert, after all, and if I don’t have my quiet, my solitude, and my unstructured time, I can’t nourish my soul.

Little did I know that a pandemic would sweep across the globe, hitting my city in mid-March. We went on immediate lockdown for six weeks and everything went into moving my students online and doing what I could to support my community during this unprecedented time. It was messy, hard work, as it was for everyone. Still is, really.

But there was also stillness. Six-week of lockdown—home. Quiet. I couldn’t drive around or wasn’t running between multiple campuses. I also recognize my privilege and it is with profound gratitude that the colleges I work at immediately moved to remote learning and that I could safely work from home when so many suffered from unemployment, contagion, and more. The past year has become a time where the issues and problems of our regular lives were pushed to the forefront. I could no longer ignore my feelings of burnout, and, like so many others, the pandemic became a time where I had to get real about what I wanted in my life and what I didn’t.

The biggest lesson I learned during this time is that I used busyness—unnecessary professorial projects, draining social activities, and trying to push myself back into more traditional academic scholarship—as a way of hiding. If I was too busy, I didn’t have room to feel certain things or think seriously about if I wanted to do any of this. But when I was forced to be physically still due to the pandemic, I was also forced to face some hard truths about how I was living and why I felt the need to slow down in the first place.

So I slowed down. I let myself feel what I needed to feel and took a good hard look at my life. Then I got rid of anything that was weighing me down. I realized that many of my teaching projects weren’t equitable, as I gave out far more to projects than I was being compensated for. So I stopped giving energy to these energetic sink-holes, vowing to only take on projects in which I was compensated for my time, expertise, and labor. Then I turned to many of my social outlets, including some bookclubs I ran. As it turned out, many of those things were all fine and good until life got complicated. So I put an end to those too, even though it hurt a little.

The last thing I looked at was the many writing projects I was exploring, from pursuing scholarly work again, to critical essays, and other modes of expression. As it turns out, I’m a bit of a slut for words. I love stories I. love talking about them and analyzing them and learning about the historical and cultural moments that produced them. But what I love more than any of that is writing them. So that’s where I’m directing my focus now. After ten years of (mostly) healing from graduate school and the trauma of academia, I’m focusing on my first love: storytelling. I’ll still be writing about everyday magic and all things brujeria. In fact, my second book, Practically Pagan ~ An Alternative Guide to Magical Living, will be out this fall. But I’m also more seriously committed to moving more deeply into the realm of fiction…look for more stories like Hungry Business in the near future.

All in all, this year of slow living has helped me return to my core belief in everyday magic. I’m less about burning the midnight oil and more about being in bed early so I have time to read before settling in for a night of deep dreaming. I’m about having time in the morning to savor a cup of coffee on my patio and an hour in the afternoon to take a walk or tend my garden. And I’m about allowing myself the time and space I need to process how much the world has changed in one short year.

Now, when I feel the desire to take on a new project or add one more thing to my already full plate I ask myself the following questions:

Is it sustainable? That is, is this something that I can do long-term when life gets tough? Or is it only something I can maintain when I’m operating at 100% and there are no plot twists coming my way? If I can’t picture myself tending these things after a rough week, then the truth is I don’t have the energy to tend them when things are good.

Is it enjoyable? Does this activity fundamentally bring me joy? Or am I driven by my ego or toxic social norms to do it? There’s a lot I took on, in retrospect, because I was trying to prove myself or conform to a world that doesn’t believe in magic. Other stuff I explored because I was always trying to heal the traumatizing experience that was graduate school or reclaim my untainted enjoyment of scholarship. Now, I recognize that I don’t need to keep scratching at those old wounds or force myself to be anything other than I am. Instead, I simply follow the joy.

Is it nourishing? This last question is all about understanding what fills up our souls and provides a bone-deep sense of health and healing. If something makes me feel ragged or anxious, I don’t do it. Period. I’ve looked at my workload and done what I can to make online learning manageable and nourishing for both me and my students. I take time in my week to practice self-care. I allow myself to turn my thoughts inward and ignore the hysterical energy that too-often contaminates the air, much like COVID. I allow myself to seek refuge in stories that nourish me and help me discover better ways of being.

I hope, dear readers, that you’ve been able to find some wisdom during this difficult time, too. I look forward to journeying deeper into the realm of everything magic with you this year!

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational collection of musings touching on life’s simple pleasures, everyday fantasy, and absolutely delectable recipes that will guarantee to stir the kitchen witch in you.  If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is the everyday, subscribe here.

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Brujeria

So I spend a lot of time talking with fellow witchy folk, pagans, practitioners of nature spirituality, and the plain old curious, about how we define things like witchcraft. I talk to my college students about this too, as we analyze and deconstruct representations of witchcraft in classic literature, pop culture, and other media.
Like being mestiza, being a bruja means different things to many different practitioners.

As with all communities, witches are not a monolith. There are Wiccans and pagans, natural witches and practitioners whose craft developed out of popular culture representations of powerful women. Then there are those who practice culturally specific forms of their spirituality. It takes all types. Some go deep down the rabbit hole of esoteric occultism, other just hoard too many mason jars and acknowledge the divinity in every living being. Likewise, there are those whom mainstream culture would consider witches, but identify more as folk conjurers. I could go on about all the nuances here but for the sake of brevity (this is only a blog post, after all), I’ll keep it focused on what practicing Brujeria means to me.

First, I specifically use the term bruja here and not witch (although I use that too) because I want to make it clear that my cultural identity as mestiza is an important part of my magical practice. I can’t separate one from the other. And while there are many things I do that are in alignment with general witchy practices (like hoarding all those mason jars), there are some aspects of my bruja identity that are singular to the mestiza culture and my relationship to it (again, we’re not a monolith so I’m not speaking for all mestizx or brujx here).

At the end of the day, being a bruja for me is about celebrating my interconnectedness with the earth, the spirit realm, and those who want to live more soulfully. It’s about reclaiming my right to joy and acknowledging that there is more to this life than we can readily see with the naked eye. It’s about healing generational and ancestral trauma and developing narratives beyond systemic oppression. And it’s about recognizing that I have the power—the magic—to shape my own story. I am a writer as well as a bruja, after all, so I know that there is power in words, that stories are healing spells, and that book magic is the most powerful form of conjuring.

Social Justice & Brujeria

I can’t talk about being a bruja without talking about social justice. The term bruja or witch has been used throughout history to suppress marginalized identities. In New Mexico, Spanish colonizers, aided by the Catholic church, applied the term to shamans, curanderas (folk healers), Indigenous people, midwives…the list goes on and on. Basically, if someone represented a threat to the church, meaning they had access to knowledge beyond the scope of the colonizers, then they were villainized. It was a classic case of silencing any and all voices that challenged authority or posed a threat to white Catholic patriarchy. This lead to white-washing history and ongoing cultural erasure, assimilation, and appropriation. Anyone whose family has been in New Mexico long before it was an official state is a product of that history of colonization. We have two choices when it comes to grappling with that history: We can perpetuate the trauma or we can push back against lateral and systemic oppression.

Enter the bruja. She is an archetype that reclaims the once negative term witch and finds power in her otherness. Brujeria is about taking our power back and honoring our divine right to joy, pleasure, hope, happiness. We refuse to perpetuate those histories of trauma and break the cycle by crafting our own healing journeys that go beyond performing our culture or our violent history for mass consumption. We make marginalized identities more visible and pushing back against white supremacy, toxic patriarchy, and anything that tries to limit our joy. We center the mestizx identity. We reclaim what we can of our folk magic roots and mixed-race heritage, and forge ahead with new stories, new ways of being. Integral to those new stories are a celebration of inclusion, sustainability, equity, and radical self-care. How we go about all this might look a little different for every bruja, but it’s something we all do.

Natural Spirituality & Everyday Magic

Here’s where my bruja practice might different from other witchy practitioners. I’m all about what I call divine receptivity. rather than traditional spell-crafting (the kind of stuff you see in witchy pop culture representations), divine receptivity asks you to reconnect with yourself and the universe, listening to the life signs and synchronicities that will guide you throughout your day. So I’m not trying to force a specific outcome, but rather living more in tune with nature and my own natural rhythms. I set intentions and I work hard to manifest them—but I also listen when the universe tells me something is not meant to be mine. I let go of what I think I should have or what my life should look like and trust the signs that always lead me to something even more abundant and daring than I ever could have dreamed up on my own.

And yeah, there’s some spell work in there too, in the form of tea blending, body butter making, and stew stirring. Every mundane act is a form of intentional conjuring to me as I relearn my profound capacity for joy and fulfillment. I practice what I can of curanderismo. I talk long walks in nature. I read by lamplight. I write and deal the tarot. I plant healing herbs in my garden and cook delicious meals. I enjoy good company and nourishing conversations. All that is magic to me.

Natural spirituality is also about respecting my internal life, my autonomy, and my right to privacy. Healing from colonization is, in part, recognizing that I do not have to share culturally-specific parts of my practice with anyone outside of it. I do not have to perform for a white gaze or always make my magic available to those who want in. There are some things you can share with the world, and some things are just for you. Like any good bruja knows, it is essential to protect your magic and not feeling like you have to give it away. Again, this goes back to the social justice aspect of my craft: I am not required to deplete or exploit my natural resources in order to aid those unwilling to do the hard work of healing for themselves.

Pleasure Magic & the Divine Feminine

Here’s where things get really juicy. Once you’ve come to terms with generation trauma and disrupted the cycle, once you’ve opened yourself to divine receptivity, the world of pleasure magic opens up to you. This is all about sex positivity, body positivity, joy positivity. I know joy positivity might sound redundant, but I’ll tell you a little dark secret about experiencing joy as a marginalized identity: it often leads to guilt. Did you earn that doctorate degree you’ve been working night and day for the past few years? Guilt! Did you get offered that highly competitive job at an inclusive and progressive college based on the years you spent developing your CV for just that? The shame! Oh, you wrote a multi-awarding winning book on ordinary magic? Tragedy! Have a hot date with someone who’s awesome and makes you feel good? Slut!

Except all those things are actually quite wonderful. But what happens is that every time you change the narrative about women of color in this case from oppressed and struggling, to successful and empowered, you feel pangs of guilt and shame. It’s called internalized oppression. And it’s a bitch. There’s also quite a bit of social shaming involved here (aka lateral oppression). People might say you’re getting a little too cocky or that god has blessed you or worse, you got where you are because of affirmative action. In all cases, those statements either intentionally or intentionally disempower you and make you feel as if you don’t deserve the accomplishments you’ve worked hard for. Let’s face it, an empowered woman of color is a threat to the social norm. Throw in some lingering Catholic guilt and pretty soon you start finding ways to make yourself suffer.

That’s where pleasure magic and the divine feminine come in. They push back against internalized oppression. Pleasure magic is the daily invocation of all things sensual and joyful, from the sacred simple pleasure of an afternoon cup of tea to the titillating delights of a good romance novel or the profound ecstasies of an intimate relationship. Of course, we look to the goddess within, the divine feminine in all of us, regardless of our gender orientation, for guidance here. She allows us to value our emotions and instincts, to feel what we need to feel for healing and insight.

Invoking the divine feminine about reclaiming our right to joy and rejecting anything that tries to control how we should feel about our bodies, our sexuality, our accomplishments (our external life), or our magical practice (our internal life). Pleasure magic is all about autonomy—joyfully and rigorously asserting your right to explore and express yourself as you choose free from the pressures to perform your culture, perpetuate oppression, or diminish yourself in order to be more socially acceptable.

In claiming the title of bruja, I reclaim my autonomy. I conjure new narratives for myself and my community. I celebrate and advocate for inclusivity in all that I do. I revel in my pleasure magic practice. And I do not apologize for loudly, joyfully taking up space.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Being Mestiza

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from readers about what I mean when I say I’m mestiza. That fact is always one of the first pieces of information in all my author bio and that’s intentional. Although the term has been around for a long time, I specifically use the definition from Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which focuses on developing a new mestiza consciousness. For those that aren’t familiar with the term, mestiza or mestizaje means a person of mix-raced decent.

Being mestiza is different for everyone—everyone’s mix is a little different and, in many cases, few of us know everything about the mix that is our cultural background. This is because we are, in one way or another, products of colonization. And as a result of colonization, histories of the colonized sometimes get lost, erased, or suppressed. So it is important to remember that, like the wider Hispanic and Latinx communities, the mestizaje community is not a monolith. Our mixed heritage and our relationship to it are as complex and diverse as our backgrounds.

Identifying as mestiza then is a way of acknowledging the history of violence in our veins and undoing rigid cultural purity norms. We eschew conversations about who is the whitest or brownest. The purest Spanish or the most Indigenous. Celebrating our mixed-race heritage is one of the many ways we work to dismantle lateral oppression and white supremacy. It’s also a way of reclaiming the rich cultural practices that the colonizers tried to stamp out or villainize. Much of the legacy of witchcraft in New Mexico is one of the Spanish church villainizing—dare I say crucifying?—anything and anyone they didn’t understand or couldn’t control, which included many cultural practices outside the purview of the church.

I want to make it clear, before I go on, that I don’t speak for all mestizas as I write this. Again, each experience is unique, no mix is the same, just as our relationship to our mixed heritage is complex and individual. I’m likewise making some broad brushstrokes here, as this is a complex conversation that many communities have been having since colonization. So keep in mind that I’m only addressing some aspects of the very rich conversation as it relates to my personal experience, my writing, and my brujeria practice.

And I’m doing all this in the relatively small space of a blog when many have written books and dedicated entire careers to discussing this very topic. All by way of saying, what I’m writing here today is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to being mestiza. I’m also acknowledging here that explorations of my relationship to my cultural background will be ongoing and that, even as I write this, there will inevitably be things I won’t get right, nuances I gloss over, and complex conversations that aren’t fully unpacked. But to my mind, what is important is having the conversation. Articulating what this identity means to me right now, however incomplete. Part of pushing back against white supremacy is letting go of the need to be perfect, have all the answers, and produce a flawless text. My mestiza identity is about exploring my messy heritage and my messy relationship to it. Nothing is clean-cut about this history, so there will be no clean-cut conversations or answers.

New Mexican Mestizaje Consciousness

I often speak with my students about being mixed-race and how that is an integral part of my identity as a bruja. I identify specifically as mestiza, not Chicana, Spanish, Hispanic, or Latina. I never get offended when people do put me under those labels, as I know the conversation of being mestiza is pretty culturally specific, as is the difference between Spanish, Hispanic, and Latino labels and the history of colonization behind those terms.

In all honesty, all those terms are problematic and all those terms have different meanings depending on where you are in the world. For example, for native New Mexicans, Hispanic was the common term used when I was growing up. Nationally, we get lumped into the term Latinx since we are brown and Spanish speakers. Honestly? All those terms make me uncomfortable because I don't feel like they adequately express my mixed heritage. I likewise don’t judge those who wouldn’t know the nuances of those various terms because they are outside the cultural conversation. I mean, there are plenty of social and cultural conversations in which I’m an outsider, so I always appreciate it when someone kindly educates me when I get something wrong or if I’m simply unaware of it!

Embracing my mestiza roots, however, is a way for me to acknowledge that I am a product of histories of violence—and that I’m ready to move beyond them. New Mexico has a bloody history of Spanish conquistadors exploiting and violating Indigenous communities and, later, erasing them completely in an effort to sanitize and white-wash our history. Yet the legacy of the Spanish conquistadors is heavily romanticized while Native American cultures are silenced, appropriated, and exploited. What often gets left out in this highly sanitized version of our state history is that we have the blood of the colonizers and the colonized in our veins, the curanderas (folk healers and mystics), natural witches, and shamans—as well as the Catholic church. We are European. We are Ingenious. Some of us are also Latinx. Or a mix of other cultures. We all look different. We are always othered bodies because we cannot be easily categorized.

Therein lies our power. We are inherently transgressive because we don’t comfortably fit into the racial and ethnic stereotypes white patriarchy wants us to occupy. The evidence of this is something I always carry with me. I have a European last name. My skin is bronze but, in certain contexts, I can pass as white. So much of my existence inevitably challenges people’s preconceived notions of what it means to be a woman of color. I’m from a Spanish speak heritage but my speaking skills have deteriorated from adequate to mediocre. I would like to one day be fluent and try to practice more regularly. But my ability to speak the language (or not) does not make me more or less Latinx. I love Latin dance but I don’t practice the Catholic faith—something often heavily romanticized by people outside of our culture…but more on that in the next section. In each case, my very existence challenges traditional assumptions about what it means to be a woman of color and separates my relationship to my heritage from mainstream culture’s stereotypes about who I am.

I likewise honor my ancestral roots while also coming to terms with the fact that I can’t reach back for them. Some of us can reclaim other parts of our heritage, reclaim what’s been lost in a way that heals individuals and communities. For others, histories have been lost, so there is no way to fully recover what has been erased. Then there are those, like myself, who can’t look back. You’d be surprised by the ghosts and ancestral hauntings that get stirred up when you dig up family history. And, contrary to popular belief, not all ancestors are benevolent, a hard fact you have to learn when you’re a product of colonization. So I’ve closed the door to the past, though it sometimes calls to me. Instead, I’ve decided to look forward.

Mestizaje Bruja Activism

Here’s what I can reclaim: joy, pleasure, autonomy, and wholeness. That’s where bruja activism comes in.

For a start, bruja activism is about anti-racism. Claiming our mestiza roots pushes back against blood quantum, a colonial concept that pits Indigenous communities against one another in the battle for resources. Likewise, I acknowledge my ancestry and honor the histories I’ve learned, but I don’t pretend to know anything about rez life and don’t appropriate Indigenous experiences that aren’t mine. Again, there are a lot of different ways to explore and connect to our heritage.

We also resist the white-washing of our communities that celebrate only the European aspects of our heritage while ignoring or diminishing the value of the Latinx and Ingenious cultures that also make up who we are. But more importantly, it reminds us that, while we are all products of colonization in one way or another, we have the power to become more than those histories of violence and oppression. All of this is a rejection of white supremacy and the lateral oppression it feeds as communities of color try to regulate who is the most Latinx, the most Ingenious, the most Spanish, the most whatever, thus perpetuating systemic racism.

Instead, we take our power back. We reclaim what we can of our known Indigenous and Latinx traditions (so long as it doesn’t bring up old ghosts and traumas). We acknowledge that there are powerful magics in our bloodlines even if we can’t fully reclaim them or know their origin. It is enough to know they are there. We forge new paths. We push back against cultural norms of what mestizaje should look like. Again: we are not a monolith. Not easily categorized or labeled, and so, harder to control.

Mestizaje brujeria is also about rejecting traditional religion, at least for me. There’s no denying that the Catholic church historically suppressed women and other minorities—and continues to. From the Spanish witchhunts to the exploitation and violation of female bodies, the church is no friend of the mestiza. That history of religious trauma is something we still carry with us. I cannot romanticize Catholicism like so many outside our culture (and, yes, within it) can because I cannot separate its cultural and historical value from the traumas it has inflicted on women of color in particular. I’m also not here to police other mestizas’ relationship to the Catholic church. Again, our relationship to all aspects of our cultural roots is deeply personal and complex. What is medicine for some is poison to another. I only resist being told how I should feel about my own relationship to my heritage, especially by those who want to appropriate it or romanticize it without experiencing the burden of that history in their veins. That easily becomes another form of colonization, after all.

My path is one of reclaiming curanderisma, natural spirituality, and natural sexuality freed from the chains of colonization, religion, and white patriarchy. The power of mestizaje is the power of shaping our own narrative. When we are so often confined to stories about the past, histories of trauma, and oppression, we forget that we are also stories of resilience, strength, and transformation. Abundance and hope. Love and healing. Through brujeria, I allow myself to explore my unfolding story outside of preconceived narratives rooted in historical oppression. I am allowed to know my body, myself, my soul beyond the mainstream (white) culture’s gaze. I am allowed to be whole, autonomous. And I am allowed to be the one who decides what that means and looks like for me.

I’m not entirely sure I’ve got it all figured out, either. In fact, I think it would be dangerous to assume so. But what I can say is that there is no separating my writer identity from being mestizaje, just as there is no separating my bruja identity from it. They are all one. Every word, story, insight that I commit to paper is all part of working through generational and ancestral trauma, conjuring a way of being beyond those legacies, and daring to see narratives of hope and healing in our futures. Having this conversation, working through the ambiguities and nuances, are all part of the magic. Putting these thoughts in writing on my blog…that’s part of the magic too.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

5 Things I Learned about the Tarot from Tarot Tuesdays

A little over two years ago, I began to study the tarot more seriously. I’d gotten my first deck a few years before in a spark of divine synchronicity. I’d been thinking about purchasing a tarot deck and learning more about it. I hadn’t told anyone about it though. It was more of a fleeting thought. Then, for my birthday a week or so later, I received my first deck from my parents. They said they read about it and it made them think of me—it was a feeling that wouldn’t go away. Clearly, the universe was telling me that studying the tarot was a good idea and was making sure I started on the right foot.

That first deck of mine was the female-POC centric Motherpeace tarot and it remains my favorite deck because it decenters patriarchy and whiteness with rounded cards that explore the Divine Feminine. It’s the one I keep for my personal, private use. A few years later, my older sister got me the Steampunk tarot. It’s the one I use when I need to feel limitless in my imagination and innovation, like any Steampunk heroine worth her salt. And this past winter, my younger sister gifted me a Spanish tarot deck, a lovely acknowledgment of my esoteric studies and our mestisaje roots—oh, and my perpetual desire to get better at my Spanish which sometimes falls by the wayside. I love all these tarot decks, each one speaking to me when and as I need their specific magic.

The deck I use for my writing and public bruja life, however, is the classic Rider-Waite tarot. I bought the Radiant edition from my local herb store because the bright colors appealed to my senses and my love of bold, loud things. I chose this deck specifically for my #TarotTuesdays project in which I would write a 78-word story based on #synchronicity and one of the cards in the 78-card tarot deck and post it on social media each week-ish. I chose this deck for the project because it is one of the oldest and most iconic of decks, and, historically, the foundation for many other decks.

Each week, I would think about whatever it was I was going through. I’d let my feelings wash over me, allow situations to flit in and out of my mind as they would while I shuffled the deck. When it felt right, I’d pull a card. I’d spend the next few days researching and learning about the card and pairing that knowledge with the personal experiences I was going through along with a heavy dollop of free-association. It was a beautiful journey that allowed me to explore the tarot and my relationship to the mystic world. I’m far from being an expert but, after writing stories inspired by those cards for the past two or so years, I think I have a solid foundation for deepening my knowledge of the tarot.

Here are the major things I learned from my Tarot Tuesdays project:

1. The more you deepen your bond to the cards, the more clarity you have in your readings. The tarot is its own energetic entity, which means you have to get to know it before you can ask it questions. Think of this as relationship building. Spend time with the cards—just shuffling, pursuing them, holding them in your hands. Even letting them sit in a stack on your writing desk is a good way to establish a bond. I know—this might sound a little too woo-woo for some, but you’re reading a witchy blog about tarot, so…talking about relationship building with your tarot deck shouldn’t be entirely unexpected. The big thing is that if you take the time to get to know your deck, the more you’ll get a sense of how you personally read the cards and what wisdom they have to offer you. If you don’t take your time with them, they won’t speak to you or the message will be muddled. Which leads me to my next lesson learned:

2. Each deck has its own energy. Think about how I just described my tarot collection earlier in this post. Each deck has its own kind of magic and its own wisdom to offer. It’s important to know that going in so that you can choose the right deck for the kind of reading you’re looking for. If you aren’t sure what that is, choose the deck that calls to you on an instinctive level—that’s the medicine you need. You also need to have a healthy respect for these divination energies. Don’t be flip when handling your deck or treat tarot reading as a party trick. That’s a good way to piss off the cards and make them stop speaking to you. As with all things mystic or supernatural, it’s a good idea to go in with a healthy respect for the unknown and the unseen. Dabbling or toying with those energies is never a good idea.

3. All cards are designed to help you and offer hope—even the ”bad” cards. The fives are notoriously bad cards, signaling chaos, reversals, and upending the status quo. Similarly, any card in reverse traditionally has more negative connotations—except for the fives reversed, because they are contrary in nature. Here’s the thing, though, reversals, disruptions, and chaos are all part of life and, when embraced and explored, offer hope and healing. Sometimes you need to upend the status quo! Or maybe you’re feeling stuck and these cards point out what it is that is keeping you from moving forward. They aren’t punishments or judgments (and if you feel that way when you get one of these cards, it’s likely you’re still working through toxic puritanical or religious norms…or maybe that’s just me). They’re more like insights and revelations. It’s important to remember that when you go about your tarot reading so that you don’t get stuck in the old superstitious readings of yore which can be a little more doom and gloom with these not-really-so-bad cards. Which reminds me…

4. Sometimes the scariest looking cards have the most hopeful wisdom to offer. We’ve all see the scary movie that shows the damsel in distress pulling the Death card or the Devil card right before things get full-on gothic. Or you have cards like the Ten of Swords, in which a figure is literally impaled by ten swords through the back and lies dead on the ground. It’s hard to think positively about such a brutal image, but, in fact, it’s asking you to face the thing you are most afraid of—the figure turned its back on their problems and tried to run, rather than face what the need to face. These scarier cards are like a good gothic tale. They want you to face the thing in the shadows, confront it so that you can move forward. They just use scary imagery to shake you out of complacency so you can hear their message. I’ve actually come to see them as incredible hopeful cards!

5. Everyone has a unique way of reading the cards. While there are some constants in most tarot readings, like the symbolism behind the major and minor acrana, it’s up to the diviner to interpret the nuances of it. You will develop your own personal way of reading the cards as you get to know the tarot more and nourish your bond with it. Around the first-year mark of my #TarotTuesdays project, I realized I was developing my own voice and my own take on the cards. I would get information from sources like Biddy Tarot, Wildly Tarot, and Modern Tarot and then let their wisdom sit with me. Naturally, my own take involved a dash of hope, a sprinkle of joy, a heaping serving of brujeria, and more than a little everyday magic.

Like I said earlier, I’m still not a tarot expert by any measure, but I think I’ve got a solid foundation to continue my tarot journey. I’d like to learn more about the individual symbolism of each card, the differences between the major and minor arcana, and maybe get to a point where I don’t have to consult my sources when I do a reading. But that, too, is part of the joy of depending your relationship to the tarot…the more time you spend with it, the more you learn, and the more wisdom it reveals to you. It just wants to know you are willing to put in the time.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

To Allow

A noun. To give permission. To give the necessary time and opportunity for.

An ugly thing when we don’t give it to ourselves. A sweet thing, a chocolate truffle of a thing, when we sneak it between our lips to know how voluptuous life can be. And a daring thing when bestowed on another, like an offering or a promise to see what might unfold between willing hearts and an open road. Mostly though it is a thing just outside my grasp.

I can’t always tell what it is. I can only track it by its footprints.

Like when I banished the box of ghosts I’d hidden in my closet. It’s not my responsibility to carry them with me everywhere I go. I am allowed to move on from my past and the things from the beyond that are happiest when I’m in Purgatory. Or the time I jumped off the merry-go-round because I wanted to feel solid earth against the soles of my feet. I’m allowed to stop running in circles, going nowhere fast. I’m tired of being dizzy and clinging to toy chariots. I taste it in when I wrap my lips around the word “no” and feel the heady rush of the time I’ve freed up for myself, the obligations I’ve released in favor of protecting my solitude.

I’m beginning to figure out what it feels like to allow.

Sometimes I even find it in the things I’ve given away. The too-tight dress. The ugly thought. The buttoned-up book from the person who wished I were, well, a little more buttoned up. I’m allowed to be loud in who I am, even when my soul is found in the hush of a spring morning and the quiet of my garden, hair loose around my shoulders, feet bare, eager to kiss the soil with their heels and toes.

I’m allowed to feel joy even when the world isn’t always a joyful place. It has taken me so long to find the sunshine within my ribcage that I refuse to lose it now. It is my seed that I coaxed into blooming. And what wonderful flora it has made! What wonderful medicine it will become when the flowers fade and dry and are ready to be plucked and stored in one of my many bottles and pots. My home apothecary is made up of many a preserved feeling so that when it rains, I can dip into my jar of sunshine and remember that stormy weather is a fleeting thing.

Here’s what else I allow myself:

A quiet place. Space. A blank page to see what happens next.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Everyday Magic for Difficult Times: Journey Into Self with Radical Self-Care & Slow Living

I started the year with one goal in mind: to live more slowly. I’d been feeling that I’d been moving too fast, zooming from here to there, and caught in a cycle of overworking. I wanted more space for quiet. More time to reconnect with myself and those I love. Space to detox from my busy addiction. Little did I know that two short months later, I would be practicing social distancing due to the pandemic. It certainly slowed me down!

It was a strange and eerie transition, even without moving my teaching life completely online, educating students about why they should be taking this situation seriously and how to best stay safe and help their community (wash their hands, stay home). Then there was checking in on family in Italy and New York, along with friends in Seattle to make sure they were safe and well. And missing family here that I couldn’t visit regularly, though we live so close to one another. I won’t even get into grocery shopping—once a ritual that was so soothing for me! (Luckily, I can have groceries and local produce delivered to my doorstep, thanks to our incredible farmers.) Between the understandable frenzy of the outside world and my own worries about our changing reality, I found myself, like so many others, adrift in a sea of confusion and uncertainty.

Suffice it to say that when all the dust of the transition settled, I found I needed to get grounded and return to everyday magic. Yes, magic. And it has been no easy task. I quickly realized that I could be just as loud and busy at home as I was in my regular routine. My mind raced. I was constantly plugged into my online classes—when I wasn’t glued to my newsfeed. Clearly, I needed to shift my attention from the craziness out in the world toward nature and the quiet mysticism that has always guided me through difficult times.

Return to Slow Living

My first step back to everyday magic was to let go of things I couldn’t control (the outside world) and be proactive about the things I could (teaching, social distancing, helping my community, my own well-being). Then I took a deep breath and turned off the news. Stepped away from my phone. Didn’t even turn on the TV. Instead, I put on an old Bill Evans record, cooked a simple dinner, and read a book by cozy lamplight while cuddling my familiar, Smoke.

For the first time in ten days, I slept long and deep, and, perhaps more importantly, I dreamed deeply. Those dreams were like a soothing balm on my ragged and tired soul. I’d reconnected to my magic again. This experience taught me that what I needed to do during this time of social distancing (or New Mexico’s new stay at home orders) was to focus on my connection to self, to nature, to the mystic world.

Of course, later I realized that what helped me relax and reconnect with my inner life was slow living. I turned off electronics. I let go of my need to stay busy. I simply enjoyed a quiet night at home and pressed paused on my racing mind. Slow living wasn’t just a soothing luxury then, it was absolutely essential to my overall well-being and mind, body, spirit connection. It is only with that connection that I could remain a grounding, hopeful force. Only then could my magic flow and be a bright and steady light to counter the darkness.

Return to Radical Self-Care

Slowing down also showed me how I’d been neglecting my self-care needs. It’s hard to feel like you can take care of yourself when you’re so fixated on making sure everyone else is okay or worrying about anything and everything. But that’s no way to live, especially in times of crisis. I began to understand that keeping myself healthy was an important part of helping others. It meant my immune system was in top form, which meant I was less likely to get sick and risk passing stuff on to others. It meant I was better at helping my students with the move online and that I was learning how to be more sensitive to myself and my needs.

I started off slowly. I paid attention to my energy levels. If I was tired, I didn’t push past that limit. I stopped expecting myself to keep a normal, action-packed routine. Instead, I settled into a quieter, slower pace. I prioritized yoga, house cleaning, patio gardening, and, when I felt it, walking. Evenings were for enjoying make a healthy dinner and decompressing. Then I made sure to get a full night’s sleep.

I also made a point of searching for good news in the midst of all the bad: communities coming together to support one another. Officials, like the New Mexico governor taking the safety and welfare of her people seriously with decisive action to curb the spread of the virus. The earth healing now that we collectively have had to curb our mindless consumerist habits and fast-paced lifestyle that contributes to climate change. Better still, we see that we can work together to protect mother earth, just like we are working together to deal with our current situation. The land is healing itself and we are healing our relationship to the land.

Reconnecting to radical self-care, then, reminded me that we have so much power and agency when it comes to dealing with this global crisis. Working together (albeit separately in our own homes) we do our part to conjure a solution to our current situation.

Journey Into Self

My energy opened up when I found my way back to slow living and radical self-care. I was calmer, more grounded. I begin to think of this time as an opportunity to turn inward and tend my internal life, something few of us often have a chance to do in the hustle and bustle of daily life. Now, it is as if life is forcing us to take that time—more time with our families, more time with ourselves, more time focusing on what really matters. Even now, I find myself thinking about things that even a month ago I was worrying over that now seem so small and insignificant. I’ve had to come to terms with the energy I’ve wasted on nonsense things!

Now, my focus is on a healthy and safe family, gratitude for my communities working together to help one another through this time, and the slow and steady conjuring of everyday magic. So if you find yourself struggling during this difficult time, as so many of us are for so many reasons, take heart and find your way back to the grounding power of the everyday mysticism with these simple tips:

Be gentle with yourself and others. So your first attempt at slow living didn’t go so well or you’re struggling to practice radical self-care. That’s okay. It’s a journey with many ups and downs. Go easy on yourself. You’re doing your best. And be gentle to those around you, too. We’re all in this together.

Feel what you need to feel…then let it go. Everyday magic isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s about creating space to safely feel what you need to feel, process what you need to process, and then allow yourself to move on. Don’t hold onto every hard emotion or passing anxiety. Take a deep breath. Let it go. Remember that you are allowed to feel joy at this time and seek refuge in your sacred simple pleasures.

Give yourself permission to be unproductive. I find myself writing a lot during this time but that’s because writing is a huge part of my self-care practice, helping me to stay grounded. I find refuge in cooking and cleaning to experience the catharsis of a good cleansing spell. Hope in gardening and crafting. But that doesn’t mean I’m working all the time! And if these things don’t soothe you, don’t do them. It’s easy to bring our addiction to busy home with us and use to avoid feeling what we need to feel. Don’t do that. Just create space to breathe. This is doubly true for those of you working from home and taking care of children. You’re doing so much already! It doesn’t all have to be perfect or insanely productive. What matters is that you and your family are home and safe. Enjoy your time together.

Remember that social distancing doesn’t mean social isolation. We are social creatures. Don’t deny yourself the comfort of connecting with others. As hermetic as my life seems now (okay, always!) I’ve found that in reality, I have so many relationships I’m grateful for. My family, first and foremost, but also my teaching community and students, who have all done an incredible job to help one another get through the term online. My writing and reading groups have been a huge part of my self-care practice as we discuss the magic of stories and check in on one another regularly. Then there’s my witchy community that is working to conjure a little more joy and calm in the world (more on that soon). In short, for a seemingly anti-social introvert, I’ve found that I’ve got an awful lot of love in my life. I appreciate being able to stay connected with these people thanks to the wonderful world of the internet. Take advantage of modern technology to connect with your tribe.

Be informed—but step away! I check the news once in the morning and then that’s it. Any more than that and I go down a rabbit hole of negative news and anxiety that’s not helping anyone or anything. I want to stay informed but then I focus on what needs immediate tending: my family, my home, my teaching, my writing. I’m also fond of taking social media breaks and screen-free time. Staying connected is good, but not so much that you begin to mindlessly scroll. Give yourself permission to stop following posts that are feeding into hysteria and follow only those with credible news, helpful information, and good vibes.

Treat this as an opportunity to turn inward. How often do we get the chance to work on our emotional and spiritual health? How often do we keep going when what we really need to do is reconnect with ourselves on a deeper level? This is a great time to reevaluate what really matters in our lives and let go of old patterns of living. Sink into your sanctuary. Allow yourself to unapologetically take care of yourself and your loved ones. Subtle but profound wisdom will come from small synchronicities and natural magic conjured from a quiter routine.

Reconnect with Nature. During all of this, spring has quietly swept through my city. Trees are blossoming. The morning birds sing me awake. My herb garden gets more fragrant with each passing day. Take all this in and celebrate the hope it inspires. Spring comes even after the hardest winter.

When all this is in the past, I won’t return to what Normal Life was before. I don’t think any of us will—or can. Instead, let’s make it better: slower, more thoughtful, kinder. Filled with love. And with more than a little everyday magic.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

The Bodice Ripper Cocktail: Or, a Toast to Romance Novels

Confession: I love trashy novels covers. Old pulp covers and fuschia-tinted romances. I mean the over-the-top ones with Fabio-heroes with half-open shirts and long hair more luscious than my own. The ones with heroines in the throws of passion so intense their very clothes seem to melt off them. If there’s a pirate ship in the back, a carriage (which has no doubt seen a lot of action), or some obscenely large manor in the background, then I’m done for. Dragons flying in the distance? Be still my heart!

Here’s the thing, though. It wasn’t until fairly recently that I started to voraciously read these books. Sure, I’d picked up a few slim Harlequins and thumbed through the scandal-ridden pages of mid-century pulp. I’d even read a few Nora Roberts books. But most of my romance novel reading happened within the confines of my dissertation work on The Courtship Novel.

You know the one: The Jane Austen-Personal-is-Political-Subversive-Feminist-Slice-of-Life stuff. I found my home in reading these stories by, for, and about women negotiating a patriarchal world without the financial resources to give everything the finger. I was a lowly grad student, dependent on my professors’ approval for my future success, all of which hung on earning my doctorate. I wasn’t grand enough to be a George Sand and flaunt social rule, simply because I wasn’t a rich noblewoman.

No, I was confined to the social constraints of mere working mortals. I also lacked the desire to throw caution to the wind and run away to live the life of a vagabond writer like Mary Shelley. I like my family, probably because they are a deal less gothic than Shelley’s. And I’m pretty domestic, resembling a hobbit more than a reckless heroine, one who goes on adventures here and there with the sure and comforting knowledge that there is always Bag End to return to with all its books, and flowers, and good food.

So there I was, a mestiza from the desert southwest, roughly fifteen years ago now, reading 18th- and 19th-century British courtship novels. In them, I found young women like me, both pushing against social norms and wanting to find their home in them, eager to live a life that was luscious and full in a world that seemed determined to fence me in. My complicated relationship to my own mixed-raced cultural heritage—a product of colonization and a history of violence—left me in search of stories with happy endings for women like me. I found my answers, at least in part, in these domestic tales by, for, and about women.

I wrote about Mary Wollstonecraft and the transgressive nature of the Female Intellectual, along with the interpenetrative nature of sexual and intellectual stimulation. I explored my own complicated relationship to my sexual and intellectual identity as a brown woman in the white city of Seattle, grappling with the realities that my body would always be politicized, sexualized, and scrutinized no matter what I did. That I would often be highly visible when I most wanted to be invisible. And I discovered that I could use the liminal space I occupied as an empowering sphere in which I could redefine what it means to be a successful woman of color. I wrote very smart things about all this too. And used big words and serious expressions so that others knew that what I said was smart and that I was to be taken Very Seriously.

All the while, in secret, I collected books with saucy covers and devoured trashy novels of all genres every chance I could get. I gobbled up urban fantasy, sword and sorcery, paranormal, steampunk, cozy mysteries… literally anything and everything that would let me escape the hell that is graduate school, at least temporarily.

Then something strange happened. I found I had very little interest in stories that didn’t have some sort of love plot, however tangential. I mean, as someone studying the history of western sex and gender ideologies and their choke-hold on modern life (regardless of your cultural orientation), I understood the importance of having female-centered stories that weren’t about love and that didn’t end in marriage…but I just didn’t care.

I wanted romance. The kind that made you fall in love with life and fell like you were the heroine of your own story. Stories that reminded me that I was blood and bone and feelings. Not just a brain. I was desperate to remember what it felt like to be in love with life and reveled in having a space where emotions and instincts were valued.

I could let down my guard in these stories. I didn’t have to worry about being a hysterical brown woman every time I had An Emotion. These stories taught me that my feelings (so often suppressed or contained) were telling me something important and that I needed to listen to them. They told me that my desire to love and enjoy my body was separate from the white gaze that hyper-sexualized me. They allowed me to separate my desire for romance from the social pressures to Hurry Up and Find a Mate Already. And they reminded me that I didn’t just have to sacrifice my personal life in order to be successful in my professional one, or vice versa. That was a lie mainstream culture told to keep minority bodies down. These books, in short, became my proverbial conduct manuals for the kind of life I wanted to craft for myself once I earned my doctorate.

Plus they were fun! At a time when I felt like I had to keep a firm grip on every thought, emotion, or action in order to be taken seriously, these books were an escape. I could go from being a struggling Dom at the University of Washington to a willing Sub within the covers of these books and enjoy every minute of it. (I would later learn that this was a big part of the appeal fo these books for working women in the 80s and beyond.) In short, these books with strong romantic threads and the over-the-top covers helped me tap into my inner hedonist and the playful Eros energy that so easily got clogged in the uptight world of academia.

The Art of the HEA

So I finished graduate school. I got a full-time job—actually my DREAM job at my local community college. Then I started blogging, mostly in an attempt to figure out what happiness looked like for me now that I actually had the time and space to devote to crafting a more balanced life. I had a steady income in the city I wanted to put roots down in (Albuquerque—my hometown). I had time to write just for me. I could take better care of myself, emotionally, mentally, and physically.

I was so grateful to be back in a land where it was normal to be a brown person and cultural diversity was the norm. Plus weekends with actual free time became a thing for me, as were evenings that started around 5 instead of 9 or 10. So I blogged, exploring what happiness looked like for me. The blog became an award-winning book, a lifestyle and an ongoing self-care practice that helped me tap into the magic of everyday life. To be clear: these were all things I’d fantasized about for years and now they were coming true. Without being entirely conscious of it, I was already in the midst of building my own Happily Ever After (HEA).

It wasn’t until my Year of Radical Self-Care, in which I consciously and deeply explored how to best listen to my needs day-in and day-out, that I discovered the joys of the modern romance novel. I’d been designing a course for my local university’s Honors College on romance in popular culture and felt I couldn’t possibly address that topic thoroughly without looking at the romance novel. I’d read a lot about it. I had a whole history of courtship novels to inform me. I picked up books here and there and continued to read romance-adjacent stories. But each time I tried to dive into the genre, I got completely overwhelmed by options. I was sure there was a lot of good stuff out there, along with the bad and just so-so, but I just didn’t know where to look. So designing that course became a way for me to finally and properly explore the world of the modern romance novel.

That’s when I found Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and I haven’t looked back since. It told me everything I needed to know, offering up a whole cornucopia of books in a variety of sub-genres with graded reviews. Remember all those romance-adjacent books I’d been reading? Turns out many of them were all pretty much plain old romances! Steampunk romances, paranormal romances, fantasy romances, romantic suspense, Gothic romances…I could go on but you get the idea.

Looking back, it’s no surprise that I finally drove into the world of romance novels during my year of radical self-care. They were soothing. They made me feel good. They lifted my spirits and helped me release stress. But most of all, they made me feel empowered. Reading books by women of color, especially, made me appreciate myself and my accomplishments more, as well as give me the confidence to continue developing an identity outside of my professional life.

I felt sexy, beautiful, bold and powerful—things I didn’t always feel at work when it seemed I had to curb my feminity to be taken seriously or be constantly angry to assert healthy boundaries (it should be no secret that minority women work twice as hard to prove themselves, compared to their white male counterparts). But romance novels taught me that I didn’t just have to be about the struggle. That I was allowed to have joy.

Now this blog is getting way longer than I intended and it has taken me much longer to write because, once I started, I found that I had a lot to say (a whole book’s worth it sometimes feels!). So I’ll start wrapping things up by saying this: I realized that my journey in reading and writing about courtship novels, blogging about everyday magic, and immerse myself in the romance genre, have all been because I was struggling to find narratives in which people of color and othered bodies are allowed to find happiness, joy, and pleasure. That those things were nothing to be guilty or ashamed about (trust me—when you reach a certain level of success, it is easy to start feeling like you have to apologize for it). In these books I began to discover that happiness wasn’t in limited supply and pleasure wasn’t something that could only be enjoyed in small, furtive sips.

Speaking of sips, I think it’s high time I get around to the whole reason I started writing this blog: The Bodice Ripper Cocktail. This of this as my tribute to all that is sacred and delicious in the pleasure of a good trashy novel. And, yes, not all romances are created equal. There are plenty of narratives that reinforce white ableist patriarchy or outdated sex and gender norms. But on the whole, I think the genre from the 18th century to now, is inherently social-justice based. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t trial and error as we explore healthier narratives, moments in which it feeds back into the patriarchy it is trying to subvert, or the fact that we have to grapple with the historical moments in which a book is produced.

Take the old school bodice ripper, after which this cocktail is named. There’s plenty of non-consensual stuff happening between the pages of those books. But, in a world in which women didn’t yet have sexual identities independent from the male gaze in the eyes of mainstream society and the fear of the autonomous female body was centuries old, it makes a certain sense that these issues would be explored within the “safe framework” of male control. Like the courtship novel of the 18th century that had to end in marriage, the bodice ripper fo the mid-20th century had to include aggressive male-driven sexual action in order to exist safely within the framework it was trying to subvert. It doesn’t mean that those narratives are okay, just that they represent the early stages of a genre trying (and not always succeeding at) changing the way we think about gender, sex, agency, and HEAs. Heady stuff, huh?

Still, the Bodice Ripper and all that came before and after it is worthy of celebration. If you want to begin your own journey into the realm of the romance novel, check out some of the books in photo below and indulge in some of these fantastic podcasts, in addition to Smart Bitche Trashy Books, that wonderfully frame the genre, its issues, its joys, and the wonderful range of books you can explore within it: Heaving Bosoms Podcast, Shelflove Podcast, RomBkPod, and Book Riot’s When in Romance. You can also check out my HEAs All Day book club if you want to learn even more about romance novels as social justice narratives.

The Cocktail Recipe

Okay, so I know it is a tall order to make one drink to encompass all that is romance since the genre is so wide and eclectic. We’ve got the sweet and cozy romances, reminiscent of a cup of hot cocoa, the sleek and modern martini variety, and the NSFW kind, akin to all those sugary drinks with dirty names, and anything and everything in between.

For the purposes of this cocktail, however, I decided to honor the spirit of the bodice ripper and all those trashy book covers I’ve coveted for all these years. I wanted my drink to be one part liquid courage, one part wanton abandon, with a dash of heat (or more if you are so inclined!). I needed to be bracing and a little sweet. And yeah, there should be cherries involved, if we’re sticking to the Old School variety of these novels, wink wink.

My drink is a riff on the sidecar. I swapped the brandy for Effen cherry liquor, which lends a lush vanilla cherry base. To keep the drink from being cloying, I used a citrus-peel forward orange liquor (see link below) and lemons juice. The plot twist is a few dashes of chili pepper bitters because you can’t have a bodice ripper without some heat! If you don’t have cherry vodka or just want to be like the modern romance novel and abandon the cherry-focal point, regular vodka will do.

This drink embodies the spirit of a genre that has inspired me to be fearless in my acceptance of pleasure and to open myself to the deliciousness of life. You’ll also notice that the books in the image positively OVERWHELM the drink. That’s because I was trying to make things, well, overwhelmingly bodice-ripper-y or perhaps heaving-bosom-y. In other words, for you romance novices, I wanted to show how the books overwhelmed the drink, much in the same way the emotions and sexuality overpower the people in these stories enough to rip a bodice or two…or, better put, cause a heroine to burst out of hers. If this sort of logic doesn’t make sense, drink this cocktail and read it again. All will become clear.

Oh, and if you saw Pride & Prejudice in my photo and don’t understand why I would consider it a bodice ripper than you’re reading it wrong. Again, drink this cocktail and revisit this classic courtship novel. All will become clear.

Ingredients:

2 oz Effen cherry vodka

3/4 oz freshly squeezed lemon juice

3/4 oz orange liquor, preferably one with an orange peel-forward flavor

2-10 drops smoked chili bitters depending on how HOT you want it!

ice

optional lemon peel or cherry for garnish

Combine ingredients in a shaker and shake vigorously for a minute. Pour into martini glass. Serves one, so double the recipe and invite your personal Fabio over. Pairs well with steamy reads, long walks on the beach, and insta-love.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

A Year of Slow Living

Last year, I committed to a year of sacred simple pleasures. I cultivated joy. I indulged in the little things that delighted me. I embraced the sacredness of pleasure. During my year of buying, using, and wasting less, I did just what it sounds like: I became ultra-mindful of my consumerist habits and focused on cultivating a greener lifestyle. If these past two years committing to both these things—consuming less and enjoying sacred simple pleasures—have taught me anything, it’s that the only way I can make meaningful changes in my life is if I slow down.

So much of my bad consumerist habits stemmed from being overworked, overscheduled, and in need of major soothing. I turned to retail therapy and stress shopping in an attempt to heal myself when what I really needed was to be more proactive about cutting stress and toxicity out of my life. The same goes for opening up to pleasure in all its forms. I had to create time and space to allow my capacity for enjoyment to strengthen and grow. I simply couldn’t explore what sacred simple pleasures were to me when I was too busy to have the energy to playfully explore my relationship to pleasure.

Both these experiences made me decide to commit to a year of slow living in order to continue cultivating a balanced life in harmony with self and nature. Slow living can mean a lot of things but, in essence, it’s about cutting out unnecessary things that clutter up your life and doing activities with purpose and pleasure. Rather than rushing around from commitment to commitment, you focus on the handful that you need or want to do. You take time for yourself and make every routine a ritual. So basically what I already do, with extra attention to examining and letting go of old habits that have me falling back into unnecessarily over-committing my time and energy to people, places, and things. I want to create space, in essence, for more everyday magic.

I have a few guidelines to help me focus on slow living (I won’t say rules because, well, that feels a little too restrictive for me!). They’re pretty simple but, as I’ve found over the past two years, pretty reliable ways of making sure I’m not moving too fast.

1. Enjoy more quiet time. It sounds funny, but towards the end of last year, I found myself fantasizing about quiet time. No music. No news. No loud conversations. Just me and my cat and the soft hum of our daily routine. The whistling kettle. The gentle clack of knitting needles making a blanket out of nothing but a strand of yarn and a few simple loops. The soft woosh of beeswax candles being lit. This intense desire for quiet made me realize how much noise I surrounded myself with each day and how important it was to unplug from it. I needed this quiet, in short, in order to hear myself.

2. Make more homemade meals. It’s no secret that I love cooking. And while I’ve lately come to enjoy the pleasures of the occasional take out meal, I find that slowing down for long enough to cook dinner during the week goes a long way to help me decompress and get grounded. I also get super excited at the grocery store thinking about what delicious, simple things I can make from the seasonal produce.

3. Carve out more unstructured time to play. In the past when I wanted to get out or doing something outside of my teaching life, I’d commit to a bunch of activities each week and pencil in all sorts of extracurriculars. It was fun at first….and then I’d inevitably get burned out on extroverted fun, usually mid-semester when my workload increased. I finally realized that part of the burnout was because I wasn’t always listening to what I felt like doing in the moment. Now, I’m learning to see what the day brings. I might have a few ideas of what I’d like to do over the week, but I don’t commit to anything unless I feel really excited about it. This has created such a relaxed, flexible way for me to explore my “playtime” without a strict structure that takes the fun out of things.

4. Prioritize reading time… I’ve seriously gotten into audiobooks over the past few years thanks to a friend (you know who you are!), and I absolutely love them. They are integral to my self-care and relaxation, especially during the heavy grading periods when my eyes hurt from too much computer time, but I need the comfort of a good book. Still, I miss the joys of an old fashioned paperback or ebook to sink into. There’s a magic to see the words on the page and slowly disappearing into a new world. Thanks to my HEAs All Day Books Club and my Occult Detective Book Club on Goodreads, I think I’ll be able to commit more time to reading. I’m shooting for 30 minutes each night before bed and am reworking my nightly routine so I can do it without falling asleep five minutes after I open my book, ha!

5. …and time in nature. It might be an urban hike, an afternoon reading in the park, or simply tending my potted herb garden, but I need time outdoors. I am a better person when I’ve had time to listen to the whispering of the trees and the idle chatter of birds. I’m even better when I’ve got dirt-stained hands and rosemary-perfumed skin. It reminds me that I am more than my accomplishments or the next thing on my to-do list.

6. Tune into my breath. It’s a funny thing, breathing. We do it unconsciously. Without thought or connection to our bodies. But I’ve found that when I stop and tune into my breathing patterns, I become more aware of the tension or feelings I might be holding onto. Sometimes in an effort to get through a packed day, for example, I find myself breathing short, shallow breathes which isn’t good for our nervous system or overall well-being. Pausing to slow our breathing—I’m talking deep belly breaths—helps soothe the sympathetic nervous system (that thing in control of our fight-or-flight responses). I also find that it has helped me stay better connected to myself and let of things that might be causing energetic stagnation or stressing my body.

What ways do plan to slow down and enjoy life?

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

5 Things I Learned From My Year of Cultivating Sacred Simple Pleasures

Last year, I committed to a year of sacred simple pleasures. I cultivated joy. I indulged in the little things that delighted me. I embraced the sacredness of pleasure. Sounds fun, right? And it was…once I got past the hangups I unwittingly nourished over the years. You know the ones: I should be working. This is all just silly stuff. It’s a guilty pleasure. I don’t have time for this. Other people enjoy this so I should too. I couldn’t just enjoy something without these ugly thoughts cropping up. In short, as I started this journey into the sacredness of pleasure, I realized that I had a complicated relationship with pleasure.

I like to blame this on puritan culture and run-of-the-mill religion that makes us feel guilty for enjoying anything that feels good. I also had to come to terms with the fact that, as a successful woman of color, I often came up against feelings of guilt or impostor syndrome that told me I wasn’t allowed to enjoy myself. Sick, right? It’s the epitome of everyday gothic when your inner saboteur comes out because the idea of bliss is a scary thing to hold onto. You begin to hold yourself back before others can do it all in some vague attempt to keep yourself safe from whatever the world wants to throw at you, the transgressive bruja that is living proof that minorities can not just survive, but thrive. Honestly, I’m like a walking threat to puritan values and toxic patriarchy!

Once I cleared through all that muck, however, I was able to indulge in the sacredness of simple pleasures. I learned a lot about myself as I explored what was truly pleasurable to me and what wasn’t. It was like a year of relearning what it means to experience joy, from the small quiet joy of brewing a pot of tea, to the loud silly joy of playing hide and seek with my niece. I learned how to give myself permission to not work, to rest. I made room for things and experiences that had no value other than that they made me smile. And I learned that I had to completely upend the notion of pleasure before I could experience its sacredness. This revelation can be boiled down to five truths I learned from my year of cultivating sacred simple pleasures.

1. What I thought would be pleasurable often wasn’t. Okay, calling on the sympathy of all introverts here, I’m embarrassed to admit that when I first started the year, my idea of pleasures conjured up more extroverted activities. Going out with friends, dancing all night, filling up my weekends with out-there stuff. And while some of that was fun (I enjoy a night on the dance floor as much as the next woman), I found that much of it felt like I was performing.

   I could never quite recharge and found myself starting the work week with an empty battery and no energy to enjoy my cozy daily routines. I realized when I stepped back to look at things, that I was relying on what the extroverted world said I should be enjoying, versus what I was actually enjoying. Mainstream culture’s notion of pleasure is not my notion of pleasure….aside from the occasional turn about the dance floor.

2. Quiet is delicious. So there I was a few months into the year, having to completely reframe my approach to pleasure. It wasn’t a loud, splashy thing. It wasn’t about being surrounded by people or chasing experiences. It was about listening to myself and my needs. And yeah, sometimes that meant being surrounded by people and chasing a new experience. But more often than not it was about giving myself permission to be quiet.

   In the quiet, I found that I was able to unplug from this fast-paced world and tune into myself. I experienced surprising revelations that I wouldn’t have otherwise discovered if I’d continued on my path of loud, fast, busy. I reconnected with old parts of myself that I’d thought long gone. They’d only been in deep hibernation. My creativity and intuition blossomed under the soothing blam of quiet. I connected more deeply to life’s natural rhythms and, as a result, found greater peace in my daily goings-on.

3. Slowing down is an essential part of enjoying life. With quiet comes a slower pace. It takes time to settle in and indulge in something. Simple pleasures can’t be rushed. I’d begun to see that having a full to-do list or social calendar kept me from actually enjoying myself. It often left me disconnected from self and soul. In fact, I found that busy, busy is a great way to avoid yourself and the things you need to work through.

   I pretty quickly had to come to grips with the fact that, despite my best efforts, I can still be prone to overworking. But when I made a conscious effort to do less, I was rewarded with the time and space to clear out fo stagnant energy, outmoded ways of being, and the yuck I’d internalized from a world that isn’t comfortable with magical women of color. I replaced them with things that made me feel beautiful, stories that made me hopeful, and experiences that proved just how powerful pleasure can be.

4. Pleasure stirs up all sorts of unexpected emotions. Here’s the thing about enjoyment. When you create space for it in your life, you also make room for other emotions that bubble up as you begin to relax and open yourself to the softer, gentler things in life. Sadness, when you begin to realize that you’ve unconsciously denied yourself certain pleasures. Shock, when you realize how armored you’ve kept yourself—healthy boundaries are VERY important, but it’s equally important to remember to stay open to the good stuff. Guilt when you’re enjoying yourself a little too much…but there’s no such thing as too much, so then you feel anger at how you’ve let those pesky puritanical norms snake their way into your brain and make you doubt your own joy.

   See what I mean? I’ve got a complicated relationship to pleasure, or rather, the way society tries to manage and contain it and, sometimes, to crush it. This year taught me that I’ve had to consciously nourish and protect my sacred simple pleasures. The world is afraid of joy and, if I’m out of tune with myself, I can become afraid of it too. It’s the divine feminine incarnate and, like all powerful energies, can be at once healing, joyful, and terrifying.

5. Homey domestic comforts are the ultimate sacred simple pleasures. Seriously. Coming home to cat-cuddles. The smell of beeswax candles perfuming my home with their honeyed scent. The whistle of the tea kettle. These things bring me so much comfort and joy. I even found myself rediscovering old pleasures, like sewing and knitting, during this time. All of these homey tasks helped me to unplug from a long work-week, ground my energies, and fill my life with beauty.

   I began to more consciously craft the kind of life I wanted for myself. Full of luscious herbs in my garden and a pot full of stew in the kitchen. More books than I can ever read in my library and a bed piled high with knitted blankets large enough for two to cuddle under. I got rid of things that didn’t bring me joy in order to create space for my pleasure in my life and home. This simple domesticity brought me back to my core belief that true magic is in the everyday.

The thing about pleasure is that it’s pretty darn contagious. In fact, you could say that pleasure begets pleasure. It’s pretty wanton that way. If there’s one final takeaway I got from my year of cultivating sacred simple pleasures, it’s that the more you open yourself up to enjoying the little things in life, the more pleasure you start finding in the bigger things too. It is an act of everyday conjuring to invite this heady, hedonistic energy into all aspects of your life. My year of meditating on these simple pleasures might be over, but the cultivation of them is ongoing. After all, life is more delicious when you welcome in the divine feminine power of pleasure.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

The Ghosts We Carry...& How to Banish Them

Have you ever noticed how in haunted house stories or an occult detective tale, there’s always an object that keeps a spirit anchored to a place? It could be a keepsake from when the ghost was a living being or a terrible artifact use to summon darker entities. Sometimes it’s a whole room or house, the energy of the people who have lived in it soaking into the very walls. Other times it’s the memory of a horrific incident that has bled into the earth.

In order to banish the ghost, of course, we have to destroy the object—set it on fire, break it, or, to be less dramatic, let it go or move on from it. Move out of the haunted house. Contain the dark occult artifact that can’t be destroyed so that no one will find it (until the inevitable sequel, of course….this is dramatic fiction after all!). These stories remind us, in one way or another, that the things we carry with us absorb the energy of our experiences. And that, sometimes, the only way we can move forward is to let those objects go. Otherwise, we keep that old energy—sometimes toxic energy—around and get stuck, finding ourselves in a time loop of the same draining experiences that first tainted the objects in question.

The Ghosts We Carry

Take, for instance, the story of The Sad Birthday Dress. It goes like this: There once was a woman who wanted to feel beautiful. All day long she was asked to be nothing but a talking head. But this woman knew she had a heart and hips and a juicy center. So she bought herself a dress to remind herself that she could be a whole person and not just a shriveled head sitting in someone’s cabinet of curiosities. And what a dress it was! It was stunning, with finely spun organic lilac cotton and loud bouncy yellow and white polka dots that told her that she was allowed to have color in her life—that she was allowed to be of color, no need to pass as another kind of pale specter. The skirt was flouncy and feminine and begged to be flipped up for illicit romance or at least a lively dance.

It was the perfect birthday dress. So she did what any woman who wanted to feel alive did—she wore it out and ate cake and drank champagne and danced until the weight of the pale city bore down on her and her loud pretty dress didn’t make her feel pretty anymore. Just sad. Unspeakably so. Because, she realized, this dress didn’t make her feel pretty. It only reminded her that she lived in a place that didn’t want her to be a flesh and blood woman. A city that was uncomfortable with her long wild hair and her rounded hips and the way the bodice of her dress clung to her breasts. She knew shame in that dress. And a sadness that welled up inside her until it became heartbreak. That heartbreak spread from her body and into the dress as surely as the bubbly drink had spread through her body only moments before.

The woman learned a hard lesson that night: A dress couldn’t fix a city that treated her like a brown stain on a white shirt. And cake couldn’t disguise the fact that there was no sweetness for her there. Only loneliness and a bone-deep cold. The solution was to leave in search of warmer hands and beating hearts.

Eventually, the dress came off. But the heartbreak stayed. And every time the woman tried to wear her I Am Beautiful Dress, she inevitably took it off and rehung in her closet, until one day she stopped trying to wear it all together. It moved to the back of her closet, limp and half-forgotten, like a mediocre date or half-baked wish. It was no longer her I Am Beautiful Dress. It was stained with the experience of that night, which is how it became The Sad Birthday Dress.

Years later, when the woman had figured how to be a breathing, living woman and not someone else’s curiosity, she pulled the dress from her closet and her heart broke all over again. She knew there was no reclaiming the original power of the beautiful bouncy fabric. Of cake and champagne and moonlight. In the dress, she saw the pain of her past welling up inside of her. Its presence was like a ghost reminding her of all the broken things she could never fix. Of the hopeless realization that the thing she wanted—thought she wanted—wasn’t for her and, in fact, had never existed at all. She had been chasing phantoms and, in the process, almost become one herself.

So she packed it up and gave it away in the hopes that it might become what it was meant to be—that I Am Beautiful Dress—for someone else who was ready to pay the price to reclaim that joy in the way she hadn’t been when she had first purchased it. The weight of that terrible time lifted from her shoulders and the energy in her home felt lighter.

Now the woman has a closet full of I Am Beautiful Dresses. They are loud. And they sparkle. And they have hems ready to be tossed above the knee for dancing and more dancing and things that would make you blush for me to write. And they all radiate joy. All because she let go of the thing that was holding her back. All because she chose to feel the pain of the past and let it go. All because she chose to be a loud woman with a beating heart in a sun-kissed land and not a phantom shade.

Banishing Ghosts

Lovely little story, isn’t it? And it’s all true. I once had an I Am Beautiful Dress that became The Sad Birthday Dress. And when I gave it away, I was giving myself permission to be more than that sad story. I could learn from my past and create space for joy in my present. The truth is, we all have a proverbial Sad Birthday Dress or something that was once a profound piece of armor in our lives that became stained by experience. Other times, we change—becoming someone that certain objects no longer feel attached to, can no longer nourish. And in order to keep growing, transforming, evolving, we must let them go. If we don’t, what once was beautiful or nourishing becomes toxic. The spirit that won’t move on becomes the ghost that terrorizes the living.

Having recently completed a massive house cleansing—saying goodbye to old ghosts and old selves—I found myself thinking about one of my pieces from Everyday Enchantments, “Letting Go of Past Lives, “ about the things you hold on to even when you are ready to let go of the person you used to be. It can be scary to let go of the past because, as stagnant as it can make us, it’s also familiar and comforting. That’s why we hold on to so much unnecessary stuff. It keeps us feeling safe—but it also keeps us stuck. In the end, it’s better to let go and know that you are creating space for new, positive vibes to enter your life (but not necessarily more stuff!).

The first part of banishing ghosts or old selves? Let go of the objects they are attached to. Say goodbye to things that don’t bring you joy or that you haven’t used in over a year. Be conscious of the energy you want in your home and life. Then be ruthless about protecting it—get rid of anything that doesn’t contribute to your overall sense of well-being. Ghosts hide behind sentiment and guilt to keep you trapped under their spell. Low-level spirits are a lot like low-level people: They want you to feel as trapped and miserable as they are, so they’ll do anything to stay in your life. Best to see them for what they are and move on.

The second part of ghostbusting? Let go of the troubling energy you’ve been holding onto psychically. That last one will take a little more time, but letting go of the object that keeps constellating that energy will go a long way to dispersing its psychic impact. Give yourself permission to heal and move on from sad or seemingly unfinished histories.

The rest will follow.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Cultivating Routines as Rituals

I write a lot about the power of routine as ritual, or taking our day-in, day-out practices and turning them into meaningful, intentional activities that enhance the overall quality of our lives. But what does that really mean? And how to we turn these rote activities into sacred practices? First, we have to understand the difference between routine and ritual.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, routine is defined as “a sequence of actions regularly followed.”  Pretty straight forward.  It’s the stuff we do regularly without fail, whether they are good for us (waking up early to exercise before work) or bad (always hitting the vending machine at three in the afternoon).  Some are more mundane: pay the rent at the first of the month, take your six-month visit to the dentist, get an oil and lube for your car. 

We are so used to these things as basic parts of adult life that we never really think too hard about them, unless something is out of joint (not sure how you will pay your rent, a sketchy dentists, weird nosies coming from your car’s engine).  Hell, our routines are so ingrained, we often zone out while caring from them.  Have you ever driven home from work via the same rout you take every day and have no memory of the drive?  That’s you on autopilot.  Your routine is so second-nature you disconnect from the actual activity you’re doing.

The second definition  of routine is equally telling.  It defines it as “a set sequence in a performance such as a dance or comedy act.”  So routine is not just a basic repetitive schedule, but something we perform, consciously or unconsciously.  It’s all about how important we want people to see us.  Running from one thing to the next practically shouts that we are so busy, so interesting, so important!  It also broadcasts our values.  Do you value squeezing in one more thing at work over finishing a few minutes early and leisurely heading home to enjoy some self-care?  To you pack your weekends with activities and experiences, or do you create time to dally?  Each decision shapes how we see ourselves and how others see us. 

But these definitions of routine only take is so far.  Only far enough to get us thinking about how we see ourselves and how we want others to see us, in fact.  But what about what we want to feel, experience, and enjoy?

That’s where ritual comes it. 

Ritual is about consciously, mindfully tending to our daily tasks, taking comfort in the familiarity and pleasure in how they ground and nurture us.  We welcome in the healthy and the good and actively eliminate the life-diminishing and bad.  

In order to do that, however, we have to change how we look at our day-in, day-out.  It’s not a place we need to escape from (who hasn’t fantasized about running away to a distant land when life gets complicated or dreary?).  It’s not a collection of minutes that fills our head until the real fun—a weekend, celebration, or happy event—can happen.  It’s about finding joy in the life we create for ourselves one small, deliberate act at a time.  I’m reminded of the Ten of Cups in the tarot here—the homey gratitude card that asks you to step back and appreciate all the simple magic of your life that you’ve worked hard to create. 

The first step to unplugging from rote activities—aka mindless routine—is to find enjoyment in the things we often perceive as One More Thing To Do.  Celebrate chores, rather than dread them by turning them into rituals that help you unplug from your workday and reconnect with yourself.  So I have to turn my compost—good.  Dirt in my fingernails grounds me and feeding the worms connects me to nature.  So I don't know what to cook for dinner—I 'll start with sautéing an onion and let my farm fresh ingredients speak to me.  Taking the extra time to cook a healthy meal allows me to nourish my whole being and enjoy the sensuousness of sautéing vegetables.  It allows me to slow down and reconnect to the deliciousness that is life.  Throw in a jazz record and a glass of wine, and you've got the makings of a divine evening.  

Now, doesn’t that sound lovely?

Each and every task becomes a devotional act to the energy I want to welcome into my life and an expression for gratitude for the abundance I have painstakingly cultivated.  A celebration of my hard work and a deliberate conjuring of more good energy. 

What routines will you transform into sacred rituals?

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

5 Things I Learned from the Center for the Contemplative Mind in Society Summer Session

I can’t believe it has been close to a month since I had the privilege of attending the Center for the Contemplative Mind in Society’s summer session on contemplative learning (special thanks to a friend from graduate school for recommending it to me—may she be showered with many karma points and synchronous wonders!). This center, C-Mind for short, is all about cultivating “an education that promotes the exploration of meaning, purpose and values and seeks to serve our common human future.” So what does this mean? It means developing contemplative practices that allow us to explore and find solutions to social and environmental justice issues, while also valuing our need as educators and students to lead a balanced life that celebrates not just intellectual or concrete accomplishments, but our emotional and physical wellbeing. Cool stuff!

At this point, you might be wondering what contemplative practice means. According to The Contemplative Mind in Society, contemplative practices “cultivate a critical, first-person focus, sometimes with direct experience as the object, while at other times concentrating on complex ideas or situations. Incorporated into daily life, they act as a reminder to connect to what we find most meaningful.”  This encompasses a whole bunch of experiences, from mediation and mindfulness to dancing and deep listening (check out their tree to see all the wonderful things that fall into the category of contemplative practice). It can include everyday rituals or simply making a point to be active and present while you make dinner. Sound familiar? It should.

Contemplative practices are easily another term for everyday magic!

It was clear the moment I set foot on Smith College, where the sessions were held, that these were my kind of people. There was seriously SO MUCH WISDOM I took in over that week, including the importance of collecting what I call soul seeds for future harvest. A fellow C-Minder who regularly attends this summer session described this week as gathering seeds that will sprout throughout the year. We were to gather them throughout this week and allow them to manifest in our lives in their own way and their own time over the coming year. All in all, I was able to narrow down what I learned from this magical week into five life lessons that I look forward to meditating on this coming year.

1. Contemplative practices are a natural part of daily life. When we think of this sort of practice, we can sometimes make it more complicated than it actually is—mediating two hours a day, learning complicated yoga poses, and going off in search of enlightenment all over the world. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with any of these things. I’ve certainly done all of them at one time or another! But it’s important to remember that we carry the tools for cultivating a more meaningful life within us and that we can connect to them in everything we do, however simple or routine. In fact, the routine of it—aka the intentional ritual—is where the magic happens.

   So many people discussed their contemplative practices in terms of things that helped them relax, focus, and otherwise tune into life. For many, those things were as simple as playing with their pets, taking a walk, or enjoying a cup of tea. I was surprised to learn, then, that so much of what I already do is, in fact, contemplative practice: cooking, dancing, playing with my new kitten, having meaningful conversations with others—and actively listening and being listened to in return. These simple activities have felt richer now that I appreciate them for the daily contemplative practices that they are.

2. There is no woke, only awakening. Okay, let’s be real—in the realm of academia and other liberal spaces, it can sometimes be tempting to prove how woke, or socially conscious, you are. Then comes the shaming of others who are not as woke as thee. I’m not talking about people who are intentionally prejudiced, but those who, for lack of knowledge or exposure to certain ideas or experiences, aren’t as aware of ways in which they can be more sensitive to themselves and others. Calling them out for their error only serves to perpetuate shame-based learning, instead of creating space to explore how we can all be more inclusive and celebrate what rich, diverse communities we occupy.

   Social and environmental justice is about more than just trying to prove how much we know or how woke we are compared to others—it’s about widening the conversation so that we can all learn from one another. And if it’s REAL real talk here, we all have to acknowledge that we’ve been on both sides of this: the woke and the less woke. I personally have appreciated when someone has kindly educated me about things I’ve needed to be more woke about. Plus, the dark side of feeling too secure in your wokeness is that you stop being open to learning new things, as you must always be the one who knows the most. I’d rather be in a constant state of awakening!

3. Contemplative practices are about hold space to grapple and engage with difficult issues so that we can find solutions. Like everyday magic, the contemplative mind doesn’t shy away from difficult topics or situations, but rather uses various practices to create space and explore these issues with the aim of finding a positive solution. And unlike the many stereotypes of mindfulness or yoga, where you simply bliss out and ignore important issues, contemplative practices encourage us to safely grapple with what we need to—personally and socially—so that we move forward in healthy, productive ways.

   This was a particularly important lesson to me because mainstream culture teaches us two ways of coping with difficult topics: denial or despair. There is no in-between. This can be difficult for people who do, in fact, think there are real, achievable solutions to various problems and aren’t afraid to do the messy work it requires to transform self and communities. Which leads me to number four…

4. Learning to fly is ugly, messy work, but flying is beautiful. I’m butchering the quote here but I think the essence of it remains intact. We thrive on success narratives, which isn’t a bad thing. It can become toxic, however, when we get nice, clean narratives about famous or high-achieving so-and-sos that make it seem like their professional journey was clearly paved road dotted by interesting anecdotes and one accomplishment after the other. Do you see the problem? It feels unrealistic. Intimidating, when it should be inspiring.

   This is because these narratives leave out all the ugly bits. Every failure. Every missed step. Every turn and twist in the road that upended The Plan. So when people inevitably confront these things in their own lives, they feel like they’re failing because it doesn’t match the tidy success narrative they’ve been taught. In reality, they aren’t failing. They’re just learning to fly. So enjoy the mess—it’s where the best stories come from after all. And when you do fly, enjoy the hard-earned beauty of it.

5. Receptivity is its own kind of power. This year as I explore the power of sacred simple pleasures, I find myself struggling to embrace more passive energy. It makes total sense now that I think about it. In order to establish myself professionally, I’ve had to focus on building a solid CV and go after concrete accomplishments. Nothing wrong with that. We all have to do that in one way or another to earn our bread and butter and continue growing in our fields. But when we become so conditioned to be extroverted achievers that we struggle with more passive ways of engaging with the world…then it becomes a problem.

   These summer sessions taught me the importance of openness, vulnerability, and receptivity, as well as ways to safely open yourself up to less goal-oriented forms of relating, thinking, or acting. The biggest thing I saw was how fruitful receptivity could be. Several times in our small group breakout sessions, we had a firm plan…that quickly went out the window as the agenda for the day developed organically out of our combined energies and discussions. If we hadn’t have been open to change, we wouldn’t have had such an important and impactful time together.

   I have A LOT of fire energy in me, so part of me thrives on my extroverted professional life (a pretty big part!). Yet this time away also taught me how much I can push for more and expect too much of myself because those old devils Impostor Syndrome and Presumed Incompetence, which push many minority high achievers to keep reaching for the next gold star just to prove their value. Toxic much? You bet. But when I let go of what I have come to call Gold Star Syndrome, I can appreciate all my hard work and accomplishments, while also allowing myself to explore more flexible, creative ways of engaging with the world both in and out of the classroom. I can also reframe what success looks like: a happy, healthy, whole person, not just an accomplished professional.

I hold these seeds, and many more, as I would the acorns scattered around Smith College (pictured below), and look forward to the future harvest of the magic they hold.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!

Cultivating the Joy of Sacred Simple Pleasures

This year's resolution was to indulge in more sacred simple pleasures, those things that make every day magical and remind us that pleasure is an integral part of life, love, and happiness.  Why? Because pleasure is significantly undervalued in our society. Because pleasure tells us a lot about ourselves--our values and priorities. Because it is okay to let go of toxic things in favor of radical joy.

Sounds delicious, right? And it is…when I have been able to celebrate this hedonism without censure or guilt. Or better still, when I can know what actually is pleasurable versus what I think should be pleasurable. Let’s just say I’ve learned a thing or two about my relationship to pleasure now that I’m roughly halfway through my year of focusing on it. You might think that because I write about everyday magic that I’ve got things all figured out. Well, I don’t! In fact never have I realized this more than in my efforts to cultivate sacred simple pleasures.

When I first started this exploration of sacred simple pleasure in January, I was coming off of a big year for me: my first book was published and had won the first of what would become many awards. I had won a major teaching award, too, and accomplished many other wonderful things in my career. All good things, but I found myself looking for balanced come the new year. All those accomplishments took serious fire energy, years of conjuring and concentration, before they came to fruition. I now needed to turn my time and attention to the gentler things in life: unstructured time, everyday joys, more passive experiences. In short, I needed to create space for possibility in my life.

It was hard at first. For as much as I write about the divine feminine and the softer energies in our lives, I realized just how much masculine energy I had. I was used to being assertive, aggressive in my pursuit of what I wanted. But the cultivation of sacred simple pleasures was entirely different. For one thing, the energy was much more passive than I was used too. I had to cultivate openness, receptivity which in itself felt intensely vulnerable. I was a novice in many respects here when I was used to being an expert. For another, I learned quickly that more people, more activities, more out-there energy didn’t necessarily invoke the sacredness of simple pleasures. In fact, it was the opposite: I was tired, anxious, and in need of some serious quiet time.

Through these two misconceptions about simple pleasures—that they are loud, performative things and that I can access with the same masculine energy I applied to my professional life—I quickly learned that I had to change my relationship to pleasure. Simple pleasures, for me, were found in quiet innocuous things: morning walks, sipping iced tea on my patio, a schedule-free Sunday, the magic of a good book.

They didn’t cost money or company to bring me pleasure.

A lot of different emotions have come up in the process—not all of them pleasant—as I come to terms with the fact that I have denied myself certain pleasures or suppressed parts of myself in order to fit into mainstream extroverted culture. There is joy in these epiphanies too, however bittersweet. They allow me to acknowledge past limitations so I can move forward unshackled.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that phrase too: to allow. It’s been popping up all over the place. What am I allowed energetically, emotionally, physically? Or put more accurately, what have I allowed myself to enjoy? The painful epiphany that emerged from these questions was that I haven’t allowed myself to enjoy certain things without even realizing that I’ve drawn a line in the sand. It’s a subtle thing—telling yourself you have to work instead of watching the sunset, letting stress taint your thoughts because you can’t possibly be this happy, being stingy with your fun because there’s so many other things you should be doing. Hell, I didn’t even know I was doing it half the time until I started making a conscious effort to create space for non-goal oriented pleasure this year.

Much of this comes from the cultural shame surrounding pleasure. If it feels good, mainstream religion tells us, it must be bad. Or think of the Puritanical roots of white American. If it’s enjoyable, it’s certainly the sowing seeds of sin. Worst of all, I’ve realized that the fear of pleasure is a fear of happiness. We spend so much time worrying about wether or not we will get our HEA (Happily Ever After) or finally Arrive that we never stop to think about how much those things terrify us. We wonder, secretly, if we are capable of holding so much joy.

So how do we tap into sacred simple pleasures with the myriad of feelings they unleash? Simple. Dive in. Without thought or questions. Unfettered by the fear of our own infinite potential for happiness. Be sinful. Shamelessly enjoy the small pleasures you have denied yourself in your own unconscious attempt to put a limit on happiness. Welcome in bigger pleasures too.

We’re allowed infinite pleasures, infinite happiness.

Find just one little thing you enjoy and revel in it. The magic will follow.

Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you.  If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter for regular doses of enchantment.  Want even more inspiration?  Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.  Here’s to a magical life!