Witchy Wellbeing is accessible self-care for magical babes. It focuses on intuition strengthening, community, and rituals with a mystical and modern approach.

There’s no right or wrong way to do it, it’s totally unique to you, the only requirement is listening to your own inner guidance. By tapping into your intuition with the help of the tools and practices that call to you, you learn to care for yourself the witchy way. It includes:

Self-reflection & acceptance

Tarot, learning your personal astrology, and journaling are great places to start. These tools can put us in touch with who we are at our core, help us access our intuition, and help process difficult emotions or situations.

Read more: Learn Tarot for yourself.

Ritual

A ritual doesn’t have to be something we do every day (although it can be), but rather something deliberate we do with the intention of connecting to ourselves. Gratitude practice, creating a morning routine, New Moon intention setting, making coffee, taking a bath, altar building, or cooking dinner, can all be transformed into a ritual with intention. Rituals can look very simple, but have the ability to ground us in the present moment and recenter.

Connection

Honoring a connection to something bigger (The Universe, Nature, Goddess, God) and each other is powerful. We can go deeper with this by meditating regularly, asking our intuition for guidance, and interacting with our communities.

Nature

Connecting to Mama Earth and the rhythms of the year can change the way you see your place in it. Eating seasonally, getting outside regularly, celebrating transitions, and using nature as a teacher and guide will show you how to work with your own rhythms and energy more effectively. It’s also about treating the Earth with respect and being an advocate for reducing waste and making a cleaner planet in small, everyday ways. This can include exploring natural skincare, herbal medicine, composting, reducing plastic use, and more.

Freedom

Autonomy and believing in your power as an individual is important to your wellbeing and ability to help others. You get to decide what changes you’d like to make in your life, to heal yourself, to leave a victim mindset behind. You can make your own rules and standards for what success looks like. Once you feel confident in your own power, you can help others who need your support and advocacy. It’s a personal revolution that can make waves far beyond ourselves if we do it together.

Joyful movement & nourishment

Through breath, walking, dancing, and whatever else feels good to you. If it feels like you’re honoring your body while you’re doing it, you’re on the right track. Eating lots of plants, functional herbs and spices, and intuitive eating. It can be how we eat, too — like honoring our bodies with slower and more sensual meals.

Owning your shadow & privilege

The shadow is the parts of ourselves that we have rejected or are ashamed of because we think they equal rejection. We all have shadow, it just looks different from person to person, but we all would prefer to ignore it. But something special happens when you acknowledge and own it — it stops having power over you and the way you live your life. Privilege is often a part of our shadow, but needs its own separate acknowledgement, especially in the role that it plays in the oppression of others. As a cis white woman, I have a lot of privilege that I benefit from in ways that are unfair. I lived my life for a long time unaware of my privilege, then ashamed of it the more I learned. Part of my witchy wellbeing journey is to learn how I can use it to support and amplify the voices of others with less privilege than I do.

Self-care

All of the above aspects are part of deep, spiritual and emotional self-care. But don’t forget about the cozy, comfy, comforting aspects of taking care of yourself. These are important and only you know what works best for you.

But may I suggest: Fresh air, cozy blankets and sweatpants, favorite tv shows, laughing, baths, guacamole, cookies, reading mysteries, crying, taking naps, journaling.

Receive the Witchy Wellbeing Letter at the Full Moon each month.

My Story

As someone who’s worked in the food and wellness world for nearly a decade, I’ve found sources of strength and self-compassion in cooking and exercise. But once I felt good physically, I realized there was so much more to wellness than a good meal and hopping on the treadmill.

That’s where self-care met magic for me — herbal infusions for calming and mood boosting, tarot cards to tune into my intuition, moon rituals for setting aligned intentions, breath work for releasing stuck energy. It’s a mix of these practices rounded out by grounding meals and moving in ways I enjoy that make up my holistic wellbeing practice.

Claiming my own magic has been a huge mindset shift into seeing what I’m really capable of. I now view myself as an active participant in my life, not a victim. An intuitive person, not a painfully shy introvert. A source of infinite creativity, not a woman blindly searching for her “thing”. Someone worth accepting and loving, not perfecting. Which is all pretty freaking nourishing.

Why Witchy?

Helping others find strength and possibility through their own intuition is a teach a woman to fish situation. I share tools and practices that have helped me make the intense but rewarding work of healing feel fun, exciting, and accessible.

Approaching wellbeing the witchy way is about finding the personal balance of body, mind, and spirit that’s unique to you by tapping into your intuition.

It’s a woo-woo and grounded combination of intention setting, tarot, meditation, astrology, movement, lunar living, intuitive eating, and yeah, crystals if you want ’em! Because the mystical feels fun and exciting, which we all crave more of in our lives. 

It’s about choosing yourself. Choosing to reject old stories holding you back, choosing to do what’s best for you, choosing to believe in the mystical, choosing to embrace every facet of yourself (even the gnarly ones you’ve tried to hide for so long). It’s about choosing to trust your intuition and yourself implicitly.

I believe that when we take responsibility for our own well-being in this holistic way, we can get clear on what we really want, feel the way we actually want to feel, and change shit up on a global level.

We can also call upon The Elements to approach our witchy self-care practice. The Elements are Earth, Air, Fire and Water, and when combined can have a powerful impact on us.

Earth: Food, Nature & The Body

Our bodies are the Earth in microcosm. We can see our ebbs and flows mirrored back to us in nature.

From food to trees, tonics and sunshine, food and the seasons impact our energy and how we feel in our bodies. Witchy Wellbeing puts an emphasis on connecting to nature by the flowing with the wheel of the year.

Eating seasonally — that is, food that’s growing near where you live at certain times of year — is a great way to do this in our daily lives. We can also seasonally eat by making dishes that provide the balance our body craves during each season — like warming soups and stews in winter and juicy cooling fruits in summer.

I use food as the main example of how we can ground ourselves, cause it puts us in touch with our bodies in a very simple way. You can observe: Are you slowing down to taste and enjoy your food? Are you paying attention to your body’s natural rhythms (and the rhythms of the planet) and eating when and what feels good to you and your body?

Connecting to the earth can, of course, happen in many other ways too, like getting outside on grass, sand, or dirt; gardening; or just sitting and soaking in some sun.

Air: Mental Health & Calming the Mind

Through personal practices like meditation, hypnosis, breath work, plant medicine, and journaling — we’re can shift our energy to find a new level of peace and strength. Going deeper with ourselves to find stillness away from anxiety, stress, and shame can be tough but rewarding work. It often involves getting to the root of the problem, instead of talking about it in circles. When we realize we have the ability to dig deep and accept the things that we once felt ashamed about, we find genuine authenticity and release.

Witchy Wellbeing can and should be done in tandem with therapy and medications, too. Practices and lifestyle shifts are simply adding to our support toolkit, helping us show up in the world as our true selves. Having an outlet for expression and people you can talk to is a key component.

Plants like herbs, adaptogens, and CBD can help us calm the nervous system on both a daily basis and when we’re working through a particularly tough deep dive or negative thought pattern.

Fire: Movement & Action

Movement has the ability to change our mental state quickly — I think of it as mood alchemy. Stretching, walking, dancing, or just breathing intentionally — whatever movement feels right to you in the moment is the best kind.

Once you start moving the energy through your body, everything else starts to flow — inspiration, motivation, creativity, and emotions. Stagnant energy is the enemy, so movement of all kinds is essential.

Fire is also about sparks. The spark of ideas or intuitive hits about what to do. I love this piece on the power of “pings” and the importance of following these pings/sparks by taking action. It can lead to more magic than we thought possible.

Whether you’re moving out of self-care or taking action inspired by an intuitive hit, these movements are crucial to our wellbeing and growth.

Water: Intuition & Emotional Health

By using tools like tarot, journaling, meditation, and energy work we can tap into our own intuition. Intuition is the wisdom that already exists in us, but we may have trouble hearing it. These tools help us tune in and listen to our core self and connect us to something bigger.

These practices can also help us process difficult emotions, triggers, and situations. The more we feel our feelings, the more we begin to process and release them. These tools can help us tune into the moment and the emotion so we can start to work with it, not against it.

Do you have your own Witchy Wellbeing practice? I’d love to hear about it and possibly feature you on the site. Please email me at leah@leahvanderveldt.com.

To book a tarot reading, go to leahvanderveldt.com.

Get my Witchy Wellbeing Letter at each Full Moon

xoLeah