Witching Ourselves Well
How we can use craft and care for healing
I’ve probably read this poem by Angel Nafis seven times this week, especially these lines:
Woo Woo. Jozie got her man’s EKGs tatted
on her ring finger. 3 years since he crossed
and you best believe she correct when she
talk about him in the present-tense. Gerloni
keeps a frothy pot of black eyed peas boiling
on News Years day. Marlee staves off the yeast
with a garlic clove in her puss. You can’t tell us
shit. We always down for the miracle.
My friends and I gathered last week to mull some cider and wine, snack together, and read each other’s tarot. We lit some candles, put on some Solange, and traded tips about the herbs and crystals in our collections.
We know that these cards, candles, herbs, and stones can’t save us alone. That’s why we believe in them.
There is resistance in the powerful reclamation of invalidated practices, diminished rituals, and long-forgotten knowledges. My witch clique—my coven—is the first set of people to know about bad things at work, oncoming illness, and trips to therapy or the doctor’s office. Our group text is a place for trading stories and wisdom, ranting and strategizing.
My extended circle of witches is full of folks who bring all sorts of healing practices into my life. Reiki, tinctures, meta-meditation, teas… you name it, they’ve got it. They’re a sort of extended apothecary, a network bolstered by the presence of iPhones and Facebook.
This past Sunday, I took myself to yoga, then went to a Halloween-themed punk craft fair, where a friend of mine was selling her homemade bath and body goods. She offered to do an energy clearing for me, as she’s level 1 reiki trained. She lit sage ceremoniously, circling me and laying hands ever-so-softly in-between my shoulder blades. Crouching, she let the smoke of the sage waft in the direction of my ankles, tracing an invisible path up my body, anointing the space I occupied. Walking away, I felt cleansed. Later that day, I went to a healing brunch hosted by my neighbor. We sat on cushions and talked about our favorite tinctures, and someone who I had just met shared their meta-meditation practice with everyone. We practiced together, sitting in a circle, silent and still, sending loving-kindness intentions to our many invisible circles.
Earlier this year, my IUD fell out. It was painful, dramatic, and disappointing to experience the loss of something that I had hoped would control some really horrible menstrual symptoms (potentially undiagnosed endometriosis). To my disappointment, my experience returning to the doctor’s office the next day was impersonal and disheartening—I experienced the healthcare providers at my doctor’s office as flippant and wholly unconcerned with my experience. When women and black people’s pain is not taken seriously by doctors, why would I expect any different? I got home from work several days later to discover a package from friends, complete with a new crystal, some stickers, a radical patch, some sage, and a handmade booklet of poems. With help from the gifts sent by friends, I was better able to cope with the stress of managing my reproductive health and feeling ignored by healthcare providers.
This is exactly why I believe in taking healing into our own hands. I am calmed by rituals that ask me to place my intentions toward healing and feeling better. I am inspired by tarot readings that give me a new perspective on the challenges I face. I am uplifted by the scrubs, tinctures, Reiki clearings, and witchy knowledge bestowed upon me by friends. These are the resources I need to recharge and thrive. I rely on the medical hegemony to keep me well, but I am also invested in imagining healing outside of that paradigm.
Health justice/liberation health means providing access to the healing methods and materials of ancestors, those practices which were forgotten after our healers were silenced or written off by mainstream medicine. Through our witchy practices, my friends and I are moving toward liberation, supplementing our own care and wellbeing with the things that feel good and right to us, utilizing our intuitions to build up the resources we need to get well and stay well.
Mainstream medicine in America was founded upon racist ideals that practitioners continue to enact. Additionally, non-male patients are continually disregarded or dismissed by providers. That’s not to mention the incredibly limited and perilous access to affordable healthcare in our country at the moment (yes, Reductress is a parody website. Yes, they speak the truth sometimes). It’s no wonder that witchcraft and alternative modes of caring are on the rise for young people like me.
When the system is built to fail you, it’s perfectly reasonable to look elsewhere for attention and care.
Self-care and community care have become buzzwords in our world, but they don’t need to be. We can recognize the benefit of touch, of quiet attention, of care. These are not new concepts—in fact, they’re ancient. Midwives, pastoral counselors, Reiki practitioners, massage therapists, yoga instructors, herbalists…these and so many other professions are devoted to caring, often with a critical eye toward the masculinist, white-supremacist authoritarian stance of medicine. This is not to say that mainstream medicine does not serve us—it does, as it should. It is to say that mainstream medicine is often complemented with the things we feel we need in our bodies and our hearts.
My squad is woo woo because we care about ourselves in ways that the medical industrial complex cannot. We feel healed after reiki and tarot, we wake up and take our herbal baths, we sip our tea and light our candles. Waiting for and witnessing tiny miracles.
Brianna is a young twentysomething with a passion for social work, social justice, intersectionality, and witchcraft. She’s honing her tarot skills, growing her herbal knowledge, and self-educating about crystals, focusing her craft on the practice of writing as self-healing. She is particularly interested in self-care and collective care through witchcraft. Her work has been published at Black Girl Dangerous, The Tempest, and The Establishment. For more, check out her website. To support her work, please visit her Patreon or buy her a coffee.
