The Mundane Magic of Self-Soothing

First published on my now defunct private Patreon community in spring 2019. It included this note: I’m exploring different ways of talking about ritual, of writing about ritual.

As y’all know I’m very anti ritual-as-recipe-with-no-reasons. As we move away from that way of framing ritual, I’m thinking a lot about story, about storytelling, about making things personal (as they always already are). I’m thinking about situatedness, about locality; I’m thinking about the body (my body) that these writings come from, the experiences that lead me here and there, and then back. So, I give you this offering as a meditation, as an invitation to think about rituals of soothing in your own life, and how your magical learnings might and can seep into practices of daily life.

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It’s three in the morning, and I can’t sleep. Or, at least, it feels like three. Or maybe four? Hmm. I peek outside and can’t decipher the exact shade of twilight. I make pretend like I’m asleep. I don’t move. I breathe deeply. A five-o-clock alarm goes off. He gets up for a moment to feed the cat. Comes back to bed. Seems asleep, but perhaps is also pretending. We have a few hours left until the real alarm. First nights are always hard.

I’m recently single. I’ve been very happily leaning into this, spending time here and there with a handful of lovely souls who truly could not be more different from each other. As things escalate, I sometimes find myself in someone else’s bed. Or, I find them in mine. These beginning moments in dating are often visceral in the way they force us to confront our relationship(s) with intimacy, proximity and closeness, and as someone with complex trauma, I find these times both deeply enjoyable and deeply challenging. 

Dating is, of course, always ritualized.

Whether we’re spending time with someone we’ve been seeing for ages, or if we’re in a clumsy dance with someone new, there’s always elements of ritual and repetition involved, mixed with splashes of surprise, curiosity, and novelty.

Some of this newness may be fun or exciting, and some may be scary.

I remember growing up with the awareness that my body being nervous about something was quite similar to what it did when it was excited; there was an importance here in awareness and reframing, and that continues for me today, still!

A common characteristic of CPTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) is vigilance – constant, and often when it is no longer necessary.

This vigilance contributes to feelings of unsafety when indeed there is no threat.

The body is agitated, nervous, anxious, nauseous, often with a racing mind. I hadn’t eaten anything strange or drank too much, but I felt like I was going to throw up, and like it would be dangerous to fully relax into the folds of an unfamiliar bed or body. I had been here in this feeling before, many times. Enough times to know that it wasn’t the other person, it wasn’t anything I ingested, it wasn’t any actual unsafety – it was just my trauma making itself known; a familiar bodily ritual.

In a recent session with my therapist, we discussed one of my core wounds from childhood – the fear that if I was unwell or sick and communicated this to others, that those others would ignore what I said, and leave me to suffer alone, as a burden, rejected. To this day I feel completely comfortable alone at all times; I know I can take care of myself. Put me in a room with someone else overnight, and I suddenly panic and feel that if I should need help or care for any reason, I will not be cared for. So, in order to not lose my mind, I often need to self-soothe in these early days of dating, until I grow to trust someone and my body relaxes without effort.

How is this relevant to ritual and witchcraft?

As magical practitioners, energy work is a crucial part of what we do, as is the ability to work with and harness energy in order to shift both our internal state and our external state.

Magic has often been defined as the art of changing consciousness at will.

So, what else, then, is my little self-soothing exercise but a form of magic, a little ritual – incredibly mundane though it may be? All spell work is done with the intention to create shift – to manifest a job, a partner, nice sex, easy money, protection, whatever it is.

And those are all much bigger physical asks than simply creating a change inside our own bodies and minds.

Or is it?

Trauma creates biological difference. Traumatized people are simply wired differently from those without trauma in our histories, and changing our internal state at will is often incredibly difficult if not impossible. Therapies are often long-lasting and conducted over long periods of time in order to gain best results.

So why not look to our magical skill set that we use in ritual in order to help shift our consciousness?

That’s what I’ve been trying to do in these situations! It’s not always easy and results aren’t always immediate, but I’ve found that they do come.

So, what did I do?

Lying there, while pretending to be asleep so as to not arouse concern, I begun to engage in similar practices that I might if I were beginning to slip into a ritual headspace.

I started by grounding myself: breathing in and out in equal doses in order to calm down my nervous system.

Often, stabilizing the breath can be incredibly helpful in creating calmness. The type of breath I find useful here involves an equal count of time spent breathing in and breathing out, and in yoga is referred to as ujjayi breath. (When writing this, I decided to do a few minutes of research just to check – and it turns out there actually is some scientific research [as well as tons of anecdotal evidence, obviously] about this type of breath’s impact on the nervous system, particularly around patients with trauma – basically, it releases tension, among other things!)

With each breath out, I envisioned my anxiety (excess energy) trickling out of my body, through the house and into the earth beneath. With each inhale, I drew up calmness.

This type of breath does sound like what you hear when you put a seashell to your ear when you do it properly, but it’s possible to also be quite quiet – so I was! (A little more on this breathing style here: https://chopra.com/articles/learn-the-ujjayi-breath-an-ancient-yogic-breathing-technique)

Throughout this breathing practice, I repeated a simple series of affirmations in my mind, based on what I thought the core fear or issue I had was.

This was something around fear of unsafety and abandonment, and so the affirmations I came up with were, “I am calm, I am safe, I am loved.” Over time, my stomach ache went away, and once I was relaxed enough to not feel nauseous, the breathing and affirmations calmed me down enough – and grounded me – so that I could finally fall asleep and catch a few hours. I also created a shield around myself and the entire room I was in. I did this by envisioning a giant white light sphere around myself, the bed, and the person I was with. Inside this shielded space I imagined all tension, fear, and anxiety trickling out, to be replaced with calmness and peace. It took a little while to solidify and for all of my agitation to dissipate, but it happened!

You might be thinking, Okay, Sabrina, what the hell – this is such a cop-out, I signed up here to learn about magic, not about how to chill out when you’re anxious. But, I’d argue back – this is all part of the point.

When we relegate/delegate witchcraft and magic to only be about spooky or special things, things we delineate as mystical, it’s easy to forget that basic energy practices 101 can be deeply helpful and applied to literally all other areas of our lives.

If magic involves changing consciousness at will, isn’t that little series of practices I engaged in late that night a successful magical act? Isn’t that immediately palpable witchcraft? 

We are living in a time where it seems like either spiritual bypassing or acquiring material goods is how contemporary witchcraft is being sold in the mainstream. I’m all for buying new stuff – and having the money to do it – and I’m all for healing trauma and learning to feel ‘well.’ But the flashier moments of witchcraft – the big wham-pow of landing a new job or finding a good man – often eclipse the smaller, simpler moments like the one I’m sharing with you now.

This is a big part of how and why witchcraft matters.

We don’t need to create a giant altar and buy fifty candles and put on our fav robe in order to be doing ritual; the only robe I ever do magic in is a bath robe. 

So, should you choose to accept it, your ritual witchy homework as the month draws to a close is to reflect deeply on your own personal rituals of soothing.

Do you have a formula? Do you involve the breath? What for you feels agitated the most: your mind, your physical body? Your emotions? What magical techniques might be appropriate in these moments? For me, since my physical body was indeed agitated, I wanted to use techniques that were also physical: intentional breath. My mind was going crazy with a bunch of thoughts, and so I replaced them with new thoughts: affirmations.

In magic it’s common to state what we desire – bluntly – and so this is the principle of spell working I used in this case. 

Grounding and shielding are also crucial energetic and spiritual techniques that I use in ritual all the time.

When thinking of little ways of ritually soothing yourself, think of how you approach ritual itself in your own magical practice.

Are you big on energy work? Shields, grounding, prayer, affirmation, cleansing? See what magic you’re able to do without any of your objects or physical tools. One beautiful thing I love about witchcraft and magic is that once we learn these skills, and increase our proficiency with them, we’ll be able to get results with our eyes closed, lying in bed next to someone, experiencing profound shift, and with them none the wiser.