naturalist ☆ witch

• magic is poetry in action • atheopagan, eclectic chaos witch • 29, bi, neurodivergent. • insta @witchy.ellie

[naturalistwitch]

☆ POST MASTERLIST ☆

About me and my practice

Atheist witchcraft • Yes, it's possible to be an atheist witch, and here is how • An atheopagan witch's wheel of the year •

Mental health, discernment & spirituality • Ways spirituality can help your mental health • Ways spirituality can harm your mental health • Things I wish somebody told me as a baby witch • How to keep your practice grounded • Is it my intuition or something else? •

Magic tips • How to incorporate art into your witchy practice • Braid magic • Personal Botany • Magpie magic witch bottle •

Personal rituals & celebrations • Ritual of recognizing and moving beyond past ruin and of rebirth •

[samwisethewitch]

Cults? In my life? It’s more likely than you think.

In my last post, I talked about how the Law of Attraction and Christian prosperity gospel both use the same thought control techniques as cults. I’ve received several public and private replies to that post: some expressing contempt for “sheeple” who can be lead astray by cults, and others who say my post made them scared that they might be part of a cult without knowing it.

I want to address both of those types of replies in this post. I want to talk about what a cult really looks like, and how you can know if you’re dealing with one.

If you type the word “cult” into Google Images, it will bring up lots of photos of people with long hair, wearing all white, with their hands raised in an expression of ecstasy.

Most modern cults do not look anything like this.

Modern cultists look a lot like everyone else. One of the primary goals of most cults is recruitment, and it’s hard to get people to join your cause if they think you and your group are all Kool-Aid-drinking weirdos. The cults that last are the ones that manage to convince people that they’re just like everyone else — a little weird maybe, but certainly not dangerous.

In the book The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, author Jeff Guinn says, “In years to come, Jim Jones would frequently be compared to murderous demagogues such as Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. These comparisons completely misinterpret, and historically misrepresent, the initial appeal of Jim Jones to members of Peoples Temple. Jones attracted followers by appealing to their better instincts.”

You might not know Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple by name, but you’ve probably heard their story. They’re the Kool-Aid drinkers I mentioned earlier. Jones and over 900 of his followers, including children, committed mass suicide by drinking Flavor Aid mixed with cyanide.

In a way, the cartoonish image of cults in popular media has helped real-life cults to stay under the radar and slip through people’s defenses.

In her book Recovering Agency: Lifting the Veil of Mormon Mind Control, Luna Lindsey says: “These groups use a legion of persuasive techniques in unison, techniques that strip away the personality to build up a new group pseudopersonality. New members know very little about the group’s purpose, and most expectations remain unrevealed. People become deeply involved, sacrificing vast amounts of time and money, and investing emotionally, spiritually, psychologically, and socially.”

Let’s address some more common myths about cults:

Myth #1: All cults are Satanic or occult in nature. This mostly comes from conservative Christians, who may believe that all non-Christian religions are inherently cultish in nature and are in league with the Devil. This is not the case — most non-Christians don’t even believe in the Devil, much less want to sign away their souls to him. Many cults use Christian theology to recruit members, and some of these groups (Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) have become popular enough to be recognized as legitimate religions. Most cults have nothing to do with magic or the occult.

Myth #2: All cults are religious. This is also false. While some cults do use religion to recruit members or push an agenda, many cults have no religious or spiritual element. Political cults are those founded around a specific political ideology. Author and cult researcher Janja Lalich is a former member of an American political cult founded on the principles of Marxism. There are also “cults of personality” built around political figures and celebrities, such as Adolf Hitler, Chairman Mao, and Donald Trump. In these cases, the cult is built around hero worship of the leader — it doesn’t really matter what the leader believes or does.

Myth #3: All cults are small fringe groups. Cults can be any size. Some cults have only a handful of members — it’s even possible for parents to use thought control techniques on their children, essentially creating a cult that consists of a single family.  There are some cults that have millions of members (see previous note about Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses).

Myth #4: All cults live on isolated compounds away from mainstream society. While it is true that all cults isolate their members from the outside world, very few modern cults use physical isolation. Many cults employ social isolation, which makes members feel separate from mainstream society. Some cults do this by encouraging their followers to be “In the world but not of the world,” or encouraging them to keep themselves “pure.”

Myth #5: Only stupid, gullible, and/or mentally ill people join cults. Actually, according to Luna Lindsey, the average cult member is of above-average intelligence. As cult expert Steven Hassan points out, “Cults intentionally recruit ‘valuable’ people—they go after those who are intelligent, caring, and motivated. Most cults do not want to be burdened by unintelligent people with serious emotional or physical problems.” The idea that only stupid or gullible people fall for thought control is very dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that “it could never happen to me.” This actually prevents intelligent people from thinking critically about the information they’re consuming and the groups they’re associating with, which makes them easier targets for cult recruitment.

So, now that we have a better idea of what a cult actually looks like, how do you know if you or someone you know is in one?

A good rule of thumb is to compare the group’s actions and teachings to Steven Hassan’s BITE Model. Steven Hassan is an expert on cult psychology, and most cult researchers stand by this model. From Hassan’s website, freedomofmind.com: “Based on research and theory by Robert Jay Lifton, Margaret Singer, Edgar Schein, Louis Jolyon West, and others who studied brainwashing in Maoist China as well as cognitive dissonance theory by Leon Festinger, Steven Hassan developed the BITE Model to describe the specific methods that cults use to recruit and maintain control over people. ‘BITE’ stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control.”

Behavior Control may include…

Telling you how to behave, and enforcing behavior with rewards and punishments. (Rewards may be nonphysical concepts like “salvation” or “enlightenment,” or social rewards like group acceptance or an elevated status within the group. Punishments may also be nonphysical, like “damnation,” or may be social punishments like judgement from peers or removal from the group.)

Dictating where and with whom you live. (This includes pressure to move closer to other group members, even if you will be living separately.)

Controlling or restricting your sexuality. (Includes enforcing chastity or abstinence and/or coercion into non-consensual sex acts.)

Controlling your clothing or hairstyle. (Even if no one explicitly tells you, you may feel subtle pressure to look like the rest of the group.)

Restricting leisure time and activities. (This includes both demanding participation in frequent group activities and telling you how you should spend your free time.)

Requiring you to seek permission for major decisions. (Again, even if you don’t “need” permission, you may feel pressure to make decisions that will be accepted by the group.)

And more.

Information Control may include…

Withholding or distorting information. (This may manifest as levels of initiation, with only the “inner circle” or upper initiates being taught certain information.)

Forbidding members from speaking with ex-members or other critics.

Discouraging members from trusting any source of information that isn’t approved by the group’s leadership.

Forbidding members from sharing certain details of the group’s beliefs or practice with outsiders.

Using propaganda. (This includes “feel good” media that exists only to enforce the group’s message.)

Using information gained in confession or private conversation against you.

Gaslighting to make members doubt their own memory. (“I never said that,” “You’re remembering that wrong,” “You’re confused,” etc.)

Requiring you to report your thoughts, feelings, and activities to group leaders or superiors.

Encouraging you to spy on other group members and report their “misconduct.”

And more.

Thought Control may include…

Black and White, Us vs. Them, or Good vs. Evil thinking.

Requiring you to change part of your identity or take on a new name. (This includes only using last names, as well as titles like “Brother,” “Sister,” and “Elder.”)

Using loaded languages and cliches to stop complex thought. (This is the difference between calling someone a “former member” and calling the same person an “apostate” or “covenant breaker.”)

Inducing hypnotic or trance states including prayer, meditation, singing hymns, etc.

Using thought-stopping techniques to prevent critical thinking. (“If you ever find yourself doubting, say a prayer to distract yourself!”)

Allowing only positive thoughts or speech.

Rejecting rational analysis and criticism both from members and from those outside the group.

And more.

Emotional Control may include…

Inducing irrational fears and phobias, especially in connection with leaving the group. (This includes fear of damnation, fear of losing personal value, fear of persecution, etc.)

Labeling some emotions as evil, worldly, sinful, low-vibrational, or wrong.

Teaching techniques to keep yourself from feeling certain emotions like anger or sadness.

Promoting feelings of guilt, shame, and unworthiness. (This is often done by holding group members to impossible standards, such as being spiritually “pure” or being 100% happy all the time.)

Showering members and new recruits with positive attention — this is called “love bombing.” (This can be anything from expensive gifts to sexual favors to simply being really nice to newcomers.)

Shunning members who disobey orders or disbelieve the group’s teachings.

Teaching members that there is no happiness, peace, comfort, etc. outside of the group.

And more.

If a group ticks most or all of the boxes in any one of these categories, you need to do some serious thinking about whether or not that group is good for your mental health. If a group is doing all four of these, you’re definitely dealing with a cult and need to get out as soon as possible.

These techniques can also be used by individual people in one-on-one relationships. A relationship or friendship where someone tries to control your behavior, thoughts, or emotions is not healthy and, again, you need to get out as soon as possible.

Obviously, not all of these things are inherently bad. Meditation and prayer can be helpful on their own, and being nice to new people is common courtesy. The problem is when these acts become part of a bigger pattern, which enforces someone else’s control over your life.

A group that tries to tell you how to think or who to be is bad for your mental health, your personal relationships, and your sense of self. When in doubt, do what you think is best for you — and always be suspicious of people or groups who refuse to be criticized.

[traegorn]

Pseudoscience

[theskepticalwitch]

You’re not an Empath. Yes, you.

Alrighty, I know what some of you are thinking. “What do you mean I’m not an Empath?? I literally FEEL other people’s emotions!”

To that I would say, so do most people. 

Almost every human has empathy, which is theorized to come from mirror neurons, aka neurons that allow us to learn through imitation, which in theory means imitating what we see others feeling.

Unless you have a mental health disorder, neurological disorder, or trauma with emotions, most if not all people can feel other’s emotions.

You are empathic, certainly. But it’s not a phenomenon, it’s not something that has no explanation (or only a spiritual explanation). 

The term Empath was coined in a science fiction book back in the 1950s. It’s a science fiction word that has been brought to the Occult/Spiritual circle in modern times. 

So, even if we were to play along with the term Empath, it wouldn’t at all be something that is rare. Most people would be considered Empaths, and it wouldn’t make someone psychic or “special”. Either we need to call it what it is, which is having empathy (and some people can be more affected by empathy than others, you can have hyper-empathy) or we stop treating it like it’s some psychic phenomena that only a few special people have. 

Either way, I’m sick of hearing everyone claiming to be an Empath in the psychic sense just because they feel sad when other people are sad.

[khangi]

What Native people say about the use of sage: you can use sage, but you cannot smudge as nothing you are doing (waving sage around) is actually smudging. Smudging is a ceremony and you are, we promise, not smudging. Please buy sage from either us, or someone who sources the sage from us. White sage may not be considered endangered by the US government but corperate sourcing is making it difficult for us to source sage for our own religious purposes. Let alone to sell it.

What white people hear: never use sage ever, don’t ever buy it, don’t own it, don’t even look at it.

Look, y’all. There’s a couple of facets to my talk today.

1) Yes! You can buy sage! You really, truly can! Buy it from either native sellers (go to a powwow! Eat our food, buy our stuff, watch some dancing!) Or buy it from a seller who sources the sage from native people. Pick one. And no, buying it from 5 Below doesn’t count.

2) you CANNOT smudge. This isn’t just you “shouldn’t”— this is a YOU ARE INCAPABLE OF SMUDGING. Waving a sage stick around your doorways IS NOT SMUDGING. It is smoke clensing. Smudging, depending on the tradition and tribe, could easily have dancing and drums involved. You, as a white person, do not have the cultural BACKGROUND to even know how it works. At all. Period.

3) please, for FUCKS SAKE, stop making posts here on tumblr where you tell other white people about cultural appropriation and what they can and cannot do. Please stop, your license has been revoked because none of you bother to get the facts right. We native people are FULLY CAPABLE OF DOING IT OURSELVES. Consider instead: a) reblogging our posts where we talk about it! We’re here! We have made posts!! b) Making a post that states what we said and then LINKS BACK TO US. Screenshot with a link if you must. Stop centering your own voices in these conversations. You are already centered in everything, stop centering yourselves in a native space.

I’m tired of this nonsense, y’all.

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk ™

——

Help Support a Native artist?

Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/jnwampler

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[spacemancharisma]

I am dying for tiktok witches to give me all the details on the governments secret coven of spellcasters employed to make sure that white people burning fruit can’t hurt any politicians with their psychic beams

[the-library-alcove]

When you make the center of something "not X," then X is still the center of that thing.

Saw this line from @vaspider, and while I didn't want to derail the topic of the post, this is perhaps the best, succinct summation of the issue that a lot of Atheists, specifically Exvangelical Anti-Theists, have. Rather than going, "Okay, I'm an an atheist and that's just me" they are still defining their entire worldview in opposition to the Christianity they were raised in and around. It is still the center of their world and defines them in how they interact with everyone else.

[vaspider]

YUP. YES. CORRECT.

[aqueerkettleofish]

The Pagan Community had this problem for a long time; some called it "Post-Religious Stress Syndrome" (not to be confused with Religious Trauma Disorder, which is an actual diagnosis), and it worked out to the Pagan Community absolutely railing against anything that the Christian Church did, including things like "ask for donations". Clergy were expected to pay for everything out of their own pocket while constantly being attacked for the fact that they dared try to exercise authority. Sometimes even the concept of any kind of leadership at all would get thrown out, and if you've never watched a group of 20-30 pagans try to plan a ritual for 50-100 pagans using the consensus model, where everyone who showed up got to vote, then lemme tell ya, you're missing some quality entertainment. (Spoiler: the ritual never happened, a three-sided witch war was started, and nobody. learned. anything.)

[satisfactiions]

[aqua-regia009]

• Abyss • In Flore by slutfocate

[amandaherzman]

[nevver]

Tarot, Nicolas Bruno

[headspace-hotel]

What changed for me was that I stopped seeing the sacred as elusive and fragile, suited only to carefully maintained habitats.

The Christian viewpoint of sex as a sacred thing means it is weighted with devastating meaning; it carries the impact of losing something forever, of altering oneself permanently for good or for ruin. From this point of view, sex is a good thing, a holy thing, but if not done in the right way, with the right person, at the right time, its holiness shatters. It is because it is sacred that experiencing it imperfectly is so bad and profane (and so easy to do).

i have had many friends with a Christian upbringing who think this way. Their expectations about sex are often very unrealistically high, and at the same time, I feel that they deserve to feel more comfortable with their mental concept of sex.

but this post isn’t about sex, not really; it’s about good things and sacred things and holy things and how we’re taught that they are so easy to break. the body is a temple, therefore implicitly profane when treated wrongly, when adorned wrongly, when shared without the proper rites.

why do we think that sacredness, especially the kind of sacredness that relates to the body, is so easily destroyed? the body is remarkable for its resilience, its capacity to care for the spirit that lives in it and to close wounds and to carry scars. I think a scarred body is sacred. I think a tattoo that has no particular special meaning is sacred.

if we believe in the sacredness of life, perhaps we should believe in the endless, tenacious resilience and adaptability of the sacred.

I still think that sex is sacred. I think that handmade blankets are sacred, that meals cooked by people who love you are sacred, that messages scribbled on desks are sacred, and that dandelions growing out of cracks in the sidewalk are sacred too. I think all of our misshapen attempts to love are sacred.

The fact is that no set of moral rules about sex has ever been able to create love, or even preserve it. this is what led me to these thoughts—purity culture wishes to “preserve the sanctity of” sex, but abuse, controlling relationships, sexual trauma, those terrible things are not treated with the same solemnity. Sex before marriage is a deep, corrupting transgression, but it seems no fundamentalist man who has sexually coerced his wife or criticized her body has felt the chill of wild fear from realizing you have desecrated something holy.

and if we thought about this differently, we would realize how it could be, perhaps should be. that a man tearing down his lover’s self esteem or trying to exercise control over her body does not just “fall short” of his obligation to her, he profanes her. When invited into intimacy with her, he is stepping onto holy ground, and when he hurts or coerces her, he is spitting in God’s face.

but no. the thinking of purity culture treats the sanctity of sex as something that must be created under precise circumstances, a specific act that must be done Correctly, rather than a consequence of something deeply sacrosanct about loving and closeness or maybe even about bodies or touch or being alive and experiencing.

it got me thinking about what are the common qualities of things I think are sacred? They are all very ephemeral, very hard to describe. Someone said on this website that tearing apart a loaf of warm bread with your hands is sacred, and I agree. I think certain acts feel like holy rituals not because they are repeated regularly, done in a certain way, or connected to religion, but because they are clear, vivid reminders of being alive in a world where you care and are cared for.

I don’t think ritual should mean symbolism and detachment. I think ritual is an act of maintenance. The maintenance of love or something loved.

What is that quote about how love has to be made and remade every day? It’s like that. I think ritual, love, and bread are very interconnected. Bread was one of Jesus’s favorite metaphors. This is one of those things that makes it difficult to completely turn my back on the Christian faith. It has been corrupted completely in the modern church, but Christian rituals originate mostly as basic acts of care.

Of course we’ve lost a lot of things. One thing we’ve lost—and we probably didn’t notice what we were losing—is the sensuality of ritual, like how communion typically no longer involves tearing apart a warm loaf of bread and instead tiny cups of wine and individualized crackers. We’ve also lost the ability to truly contemplate that Communion is supposed to be eating the flesh of God, who is feeding himself to us. There is no good way to make that feel impersonal and detached and not-intimate. As an artist I never found much inspiration in comparing cannibalism to sex, but I find it resonant to do something worse, which is to compare Communion to both of those things. “Isn’t it weird that Christians are basically cannibalizing God” is actually quite a bit closer to the point than probably anything evangelicals have said about it, because it is in fact very weird. You are eating God, but you are tearing him apart in your hands and he is warm.

The symbolism is not abstract and ephemeral. Eating is an act of love toward the body. An act of being alive in an animal, mammal sort of way. In this light the fundamentalist Christian attitude toward sex comes into a difficult clash with the rest of the basic components of the faith. Under purity culture, remaining “pure” before marriage, “keeping” sex sacred, involves a psychologically damaging level of detachment from the physical wants and needs of the body—not only can you not have sex, you can barely permit yourself to think about it, or to explore and get to know your own body.

This is very particularly harmful toward women, of course, for whom deep-seated anxiety and lack of knowledge about one’s own body is likely to make sex un-enjoyable at best and painful at worst. But when you tell teenagers that they cannot masturbate, you are telling them that their lover must figure out what forms of touch are pleasurable before they themselves can. Not only is this just depressingly inefficient, and vaguely traumatizing in its implications, it is so much the opposite of what intimacy is that the words to explain it barely exist.

Purity culture, in accepting exclusivity as the primary characteristic of “sacred” sexuality, cannot escape seeing bodies as property and sex as territorial, related to ownership. Though it would deny that “your body is meant for sexual intimacy with one person under one circumstance” implies ownership, it shows intimacy outside of that person and circumstance as denying them something.

Sex and sexual pleasure is referred to with language that implies it is a resource. The language of “sharing” or “giving away” intimacy, or of “saving” it, is complete nonsense when you try to apply it to anything else. How can you “save” or “give away” being hugged by your friends, or staying up late with them laughing?

I once sat with a friend in a Waffle House at 10pm, when the place was totally empty and we could talk freely with the lady behind the counter. And this is, interestingly enough, one of those experiences that I identify as “sacred” but can’t explain why. Waffles are sweet and dense and soaked in butter, and the world outside is icy and dark, and the lady behind the counter sends me home with an extra tall cup of orange juice, for free.

Have I “spent” that experience, like currency, by experiencing it? Have I lost something by having had it, in the same way that someone “loses” their virginity, supposedly? I know for sure that whatever is gone now that the experience is over was something I never “had” in the first place, and none of us was “giving” anything to anyone else (even though I was given the orange juice)—again, because what part of it did any of us firmly own?

When something is sacred, even if you’re very clearly doing something for someone else, it is something you or you both or you all are simply there for, like being caught outside in a thunderstorm.

Teaching that an orgasm not given to you by your future life-partner is somehow stolen from them really denigrates the orgasm. And teaching that enjoying (or really, knowing anything about) your body on your own is denying something from your future life partner is nonsense.

“Virginity” is an idea with a very gendered history, typically, a woman “loses” her virginity” to a man, not the other way around. It is, of course, a nonsense concept; there are jokes about what happens to a person’s virginity when it is “lost,” but the jokes actually raise very good questions. If the person you are having sex with “takes” your virginity, that should mean they now have it, and the total number of virginities in the world never increases or decreases relative to population. But instead, they just disappear. Not only is it sexist, it’s vaguely reminiscent of the stock market.

The whole idea of the desire to have a say or involvement in your partner’s entire experience of pleasure and intimate love is frankly revolting to me now. If I viewed my partner as tainted because I was not the first to have sex with him, I would have to believe that whatever he can share with me is somehow finite. I would have to view that intimacy as a linear transaction. I would have to view sexual intimacy as a quantity of thing rather than an experience, and the feelings my lover’s body can feel as basically possessions.

How could I claim exclusive ownership of my future lover’s pleasure, their enjoyment and understanding of their physical body, their experience of love, their desire for love? Why the hell would I want to do that? Recognizing that they are a whole person means realizing I can’t “have” or “possess” any of them. That would—ironically enough—be treating my lover as an object.

The conclusion is this: the viewpoint of sex that supposedly preserves its sacredness does the opposite by treating it as a limited, transactional quantity contained within specific acts, and as something that is valuable based on its technical adherence to rules.

Sex is supposed to say something about our relationship with God, a living symbol of how God loves humans, is what they will say—but I can think of nothing more damning than trying to imagine what idea of God someone would get if all they had was the way Christians talk about sex.

They would conclude that there isn’t very much of God to go around, and that God is only interested in a handful of people who do everything right. God is fragile as spun glass and to even approach him should be frightening, should make you question your worthiness, because you might shatter the only connection with God you will ever have into a million pieces if you touch him wrong.

I do not believe that. I have no answers, only questions, but my major break away from the mainstream Christian faith must have come when I saw sacredness as existing in things that grow back and things that scar and heal and things that bloom again, rather than in things that break once.

Love is not something that breaks once. You are not something that breaks once. You are a dandelion in sidewalk cracks that will relentlessly grow back, and so is the love that is out there, coming to us ineffably in the shape of orgasms, waffles, and thunderstorms and leaving us changed, but not less.

[leafinthebreeze-deactivated2026]

What Is Spiritual Bypassing?

Spiritual bypassing describes a tendency to use spiritual explanations to avoid complex psychological issues. The term was first coined during the early 1980s by a transpersonal psychotherapist named John Welwood in his book Toward a Psychology of Awakening. According to Welwood, spiritual bypassing can be defined as a "tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks."

As a therapist and Buddhist teacher, Welwood began to notice that people (including himself) often wielded spirituality as a shield or type of defense mechanism. Rather than working through hard emotions or confronting unresolved issues, people would simply dismiss them with spiritual explanations.

While it can be a way to protect the self from harm or to promote harmony between people, it doesn't actually resolve the issue. Instead, it merely glosses over a problem, leaving it to fester without any true resolution.

While spirituality can be a force that helps enhance an individual’s well-being, engaging in spiritual bypassing as a way to avoid complicated feelings or issues can ultimately stifle growth.

Signs

Spiritual bypassing is a way of hiding behind spirituality or spiritual practices. It prevents people from acknowledging what they are feeling and distances them from both themselves and others. Some examples of spiritual bypassing include:

Avoiding feelings of anger

Believing in your own spiritual superiority as a way to hide from insecurities

Believing that traumatic events must serve as “learning experiences” or that there is a silver lining behind every negative experience

Believing that spiritual practices such as meditation or prayer are always positive

Extremely high, often unattainable, idealism

Feelings of detachment

Focusing only on spirituality and ignoring the present

Only focusing on the positive or being overly optimistic (toxic positivity)

Projecting your own negative feelings onto others

Pretending that things are fine when they are clearly not

Thinking that people can overcome their problems through positive thinking

Thinking that you must “rise above” your emotions

Using defense mechanisms such as denial and repression

Spiritual bypassing is a superficial way of glossing over problems in a way that might make us feel better in the short term, but ultimately solves nothing and just leaves the problem to linger on.

Examples

Spiritual bypassing can sometimes be difficult to spot because it is often very subtle. However, looking at examples can help make this phenomenon more apparent:

Following the death of a loved one, people tell surviving relatives that the deceased is “in a better place” and that it was “all part of God’s plan.”

A woman is angry and upset about something that someone else has done. When she tries to share her feelings, her friends tell her to stop being so negative.

A relative regularly crosses boundaries and behaves in ways that are hurtful to other family members. Rather than confront this behavior, those who have been harmed feel that they need to repress their anger and remain overly tolerant.

Spiritual bypassing is also often used to dismiss the very real concerns of people who are dealing with problems. People who are faced with discrimination are often advised to simply be “nice,” “civil,” or “patient” when dealing with blatant abuse. It suggests that people can rely on individual positive thinking to overcome complex social issues.

Recognizing Spiritual Bypassing

If you say these things, you might be engaging in spiritual bypassing:

"Everything happens for a reason."

"You create your own happiness."

"It was for the best."

"It was a blessing in disguise."

"Good vibes only!"

“Thoughts and prayers!”

Before resorting to platitudes, ask yourself who the comment is really helping. Is it really giving someone comfort or insight, or is it just a way of dismissing a difficult situation so that you can feel better?

Causes

Spiritual bypassing acts as a form of defense mechanism. It protects us from things that seem too painful to deal with, but this protection comes at a cost. Ignoring or avoiding the issue can make stress worse in the long-term and make the problem more difficult to solve later on. While avoidance is a primary motivator behind this type of behavior, there are other factors that play a role in shaping it.

Wellness culture, which often perpetuates ideas of toxic positivity and permanent optimism, is sometimes a driving force behind spiritual bypassing. It teaches people that they cannot be well or healthy unless they are able to rise above any negativity. The problem with this is that negative emotions are normal and often a sign that something needs to change. Ignoring these signs can lead to worse problems down the road.

An individualistic culture that promotes the idea that people must aim for self-actualization in order to achieve true happiness also contributes to a tendency to avoid difficult or painful emotions. Rather than trying to solve problems in the environment that lead to pain, individualism teaches people that they alone are responsible for their destiny.

Impacts

Spiritual bypassing isn't always a bad thing. In times of severe distress, it can be a way to temporarily relieve frustration or anxiety. However, researchers suggest that it can be damaging when used as a long-term strategy to suppress problems.

Spiritual bypassing can have a number of negative effects. It can affect individual well-being as well as relationships with others. Some of the potential negative consequences include:

Anxiety

Blind allegiance to leaders

Codependency

Control problems

Disregard for personal responsibility

Emotional confusion

Excessive tolerance of unacceptable or inappropriate behavior

Feelings of shame

Spiritual narcissism

Spiritual narcissism involves using spiritual practices as a way to increase self-importance. It often involves using spirituality to build the individual up, while also wielding it as a weapon to tear others down.

Denying Difficult Emotions

People often engage in spiritual bypassing when they think that they should not be feeling what they are feeling. Negative emotions can be overwhelming at times. Feeling of anger, jealousy, disgust, annoyance, and rage can be distressing, and people may find themselves feeling ashamed or guilty for feeling or thinking such things.

Rather than deal with the negative feelings—and any resulting reactions to those feelings—spiritual bypassing becomes a tool for avoidance.

Just as you shouldn’t try to suppress your own negative emotions in order to avoid discomfort, you should also avoid the desire to save other people from emotions or situations that make you uncomfortable. Trying to save or shield others—either from their circumstances or their own poor choices—can also become a form of spiritual bypassing.

Dismissing Other People’s Emotions

Spiritual bypassing can be a tool to dismiss what others are feeling. At times, spiritual bypassing can be used as a tool to gaslight others into staying silent about things that have harmed them.

Rather than being allowed to express their pain, people who have been harmed are told by others that they are being a negative person. This tendency uses spirituality to reframe events in a way that lets people off the hook for the harm they may have caused.

Avoiding Responsibility

Spiritual bypassing also reduces the discomfort that people may feel as a result of cognitive dissonance. People feel uncomfortable when they hold two conflicting beliefs or when they behave in ways that are not in accordance with their beliefs.

For example, if you believe yourself to be a good person, you might struggle to take responsibility for hurtful things that you have done. Admitting that you have harmed someone else through your actions not only causes feelings of guilt—it also conflicts with your desire to see yourself in a positive light. In this way, spiritual bypassing becomes a way to shift the blame back onto the other person while absolving yourself of any responsibility.

Judging Others

Judging other people for expressing justifiable anger is a form of spiritual bypassing. Anger is a normal emotion and a perfectly reasonable reaction to many events and situations. It means that there is something wrong and that action needs to be taken to fix a situation or mend a relationship. Authentic spirituality doesn't suppress valid emotions just because they're uncomfortable.

It’s okay to feel difficult emotions like anger, jealousy, and disappointment. The key is to deal with those emotions in healthy ways.

Justifying Suffering

Another example of spiritual bypassing is using supposedly spiritual actions to justify not taking action. Examples of this include saying things such as "it's that way for a reason," "it's as nature/God intended," or "it is what it is." It lets people off the hook for taking any responsibility, because according to such explanations, these things are natural, unchangeable, or divinely caused.

Such explanations make it easy to just accept things as they are and not focus on the steps that we can take to make a difference. Some situations may be outside of our control or we might face obstacles that make change difficult, but it is important to acknowledge and accept the responsibility for what we can do to make a situation better.

Bypassing also becomes a form of victim-blaming, especially in cases where people are experiencing the negative effects of various kinds of trauma. Telling people that they should just stop being negative in order to avoid exhaustion, anxiety, depression, and other physical and psychological manifestations of stress is essentially telling them that they are to blame for their own pain and suffering.

How It Hampers Growth

While spiritual bypassing may be less harmful than some other coping mechanisms, it can still lead to negative outcomes that hurt an individual’s ability to grow as a person and fulfill their potential. It can stifle emotional development and even stand in the way of fully realized spirituality.

Spiritual bypassing can also sometimes involve participating in "spiritual" activities in order to feel superior or to get around having to take any meaningful action. Instead of talking about a conflict, you'll meditate. Instead of participating in your community, you'll visit a temple. Instead of confronting your discomfort, you'll recite a prayer. The problem does not lie in engaging in these spiritual practices. The problem is that you're using them as a shield to make yourself feel better—not for truly spiritual reasons. 

This is why spiritual bypassing can sometimes be so subtle and difficult to spot both in yourself and others. Meditation can be a helpful way to deal with stress that will help you cope with conflict. Visiting meaningful places can help give you a connection to your community. Praying can give you a sense of peace or comfort when confronting an uncomfortable truth.

The difference lies in the intentions behind those actions. Are they a way of making yourself feel spiritually superior to others? Then they are likely functioning largely as a spiritual bypass preventing true growth.

Healthy expressions of spirituality help you grow as a person while bypassing creates a barrier between you and authentic growth.

Tips and Tricks

Spiritual bypassing may act as a way to protect the self from things that we find threatening, but it neglects an important truth. We cannot pick and choose which emotions we experience. Life cannot be good thoughts, feelings, and emotions alone. In order to experience the highs, we must also endure the lows.

Some things that you can do to try to confront a tendency to spiritual bypass include:

Avoid labeling emotions as good or bad. While some emotions may be negative or unpleasant, they serve a purpose. Emotional experiences are not wrong or taboo, and feeling these emotions does not make you a bad person. Try viewing your emotions with acceptance and remember that all emotional states are only temporary.

Remember that negative thoughts and feelings serve a purpose. The goal of life is not to avoid having such thoughts, it is to use those thoughts to propel positive actions. Simply putting on rose-colored sunglasses and ignoring a problem does not solve it.

Remember that uncomfortable feelings are often a sign that there’s something wrong and something needs to change. If you are always trying to reduce discomfort by simply avoiding it, the situations that are causing you distress will stay the same. Look at these uncomfortable emotions as an opportunity for transformation rather than a burden to avoid.

While spiritual bypassing makes it difficult to acknowledge valid feelings, it is important to remember that spirituality itself can be a positive force in your life. Research suggests that spirituality can often have a number of physical and mental health benefits.3 People often turn to spirituality to restore hope, cope with distress, to find support, and to find meaning in life.

Studies have shown, for example, that people who engage in spiritual practices are less prone to depression, cope better with stress, experience better overall health, and have better psychological well-being.

Don't be too hard on yourself for mistakes. Growth is a process and it's easy to fall into old habits, especially when you are trying to cope with something difficult. Spirituality can be a positive force in your life and many spiritual practices can be excellent stress management tools. By actively avoiding spiritual bypassing, you can make spirituality a practice that will help you live a more harmonious and fulfilling life.

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-spiritual-bypassing-5081640

[lavenderlundi]

As a witch and medical student I strongly disagree

[cosmicandcellular]

As a witch and cellular biology student I also STRONGLY disagree (besides I legit thought it was a pantry)

[deactivated-blog]

As a witch and healthcare worker, I also STRONGLY disagree. I have seen this type of thinking do a lot more damage then good.

Supplement, don’t replace.

[lhylice]

Also if you are on meds please for the love of not, say, going into lactic acidosis and dying, CHECK TO SEE WHAT HERBS ARE SAFE TO TAKE WITH YOUR MEDS.

[therestlesswitch]

As a witch and folk herbalist I strongly disagree.

While I do use herbs medicinally, they should in no way be used to the exclusion or disregard of modern allopathic medicine. Integrative medicine is important!

Also, it’s not just which herbs are safe for the meds your in, but also which herbs are safe for you specific body. Not everyone should be drinking hibiscus tea, even if they aren’t on blood pressure meds, for example.

As my blog motto has become, Just because something is Natural doesn’t mean it’s Safe (or healthy.)

[willowofthehearth]

Oh good, restless witch typed it all up so I didn’t have to, lol.

(I swear we twin on our opinions of herbs, medicine, essential oils, etc lol)

[aresstan]

Hot take but you can’t learn about paganism without also learning about white supremacy and how it uses pagan religions to push hate group agendas all over the world today. If you don’t learn about the connections between the two and how it operates, your ignorance enables white supremacists to keep on doing it and using it to recruit others. People in our community who do nothing and stay silent are literally a part of the problem, there is no opting out whatsoever. Divorcing the two makes the issue repeat itself over and over and over again.

It’s not hard to include this in your research and stay aware. It’s the bare minimum.

[growing-yet-into-magic]

hi! I’ve been getting more serious with my practice recently and I was wondering what resources/tips/blogs helped you the most when you were starting out or first getting deeper into witchcraft

thank you so much and hope you gave a nice day/night!

Hey, Anon! :D

Well, I have some advice, a short book list, and a few excuses. The problem with creating book recommendations for anonymous asks, is that-- and no offense, anon-- I don’t know you. It makes it a lot harder to personalize the books I recommend to you when I don’t know your likes, dislikes, hard NOs and absolute YESs! (It’s why librarians make small talk with you. How else can we know what you want?)

For instance, when I started leaving my “only looking up spells and never making any” phase, I was Wiccan, which a lot of Witches on tumblr don’t enjoy catering to. The books I were reading included more formal Wiccan and Wiccan-style witchcraft books, such as Circle of the Cosmic Muse, Janet Thompson’s Of Witches and the later Magical Hearth, besides the already interesting Deborah Blake collection. I then moved into the weirdest copy of Aradia, which is pretty directly related to Wicca’s creation as well as Italian witchcraft, as well as Doreen Valiente’s books. I even read Scire’s fiction book. The famous one. It was okay. He didn’t write any compelling characters. Spiral Dance and Drawing Down the Moon are still on my bookshelf. I SWEAR I will get to them but for now they are set dressing.This is all excluding the tome upon tome of Kemetic culture and philosophy I was hauling in my backpack everywhere.

See? Unless you’re in my situation, such as a relatively new Wiccan convert or deeply into the history of Witchcraft in the U.S. , this list doesn’t mean a lot to you.

My recommendation is to simply go deeper into what you are already interested in. Hellenic Pagan? Look into more scholar-based anthropology texts on the culture and religious background. Kitchen witch? Play around with food theory and the process of growing your locally sourced ingredients, and maybe see about taking herbalist courses. Interested in the occult side of things? Fire up archive.org and read some rare magical tomes. There will be a lot of blogs that can recommend you more specific lists as to the basics, backgrounds, and essentials, but it’s time you get down to the nitty gritty of what appeals to you, in the process of getting good at it.

So! More generic advice and book lists:

Follow someone whose craft is not like yours! They will have perspectives that invite you to open up your own. This piece of advice let me really explore more sides of the craft that I would have otherwise avoided, just because it was unfamiliar to me. Familiarity let me confront them more honestly later down the line.

Read! Reading is good for you. If you get tired of it, set it aside and try to read it on the bus or something later on. I enjoy reading at work when I am not supposed to. Ironic.

Go to local events! You don’t have to like the people you meet with, as long as it allows you to meet new people. It reaches the same point as the first piece of advice. Hey, it’s worth at least trying once!

Prune down your toolkit! Some of the things you might have bought or bought into at the beginning of your craft you may not want to use anymore. It’s okay to let that stuff go...or even gift it to a new witch you know.

Understand your ancestors. Every bloodline has perspectives to explore. Learn more about where you came, and how you came to be, and you will learn more about yourself. And, of course, not all ancestors are blood-related. Adopted ancestors and the heads of movements that tie into your sense of personhood also apply.

Edit your Grimoire! Are you still using everything you put in there? Confess-- was there smudging in there? Go in with an eraser. It’s time to clean house.

Get a library card! Book are boring and expensive! Get your library to buy them for you! It’s free!

Go to therapy. It’s therapy.

If you cannot go to therapy, try downloading those therapy worksheets you can find online for free. This is part of “learning about yourself” and “shadow work” that everyone keeps hyping up.

Now. I think that learning from the book is best, because it is easy to go back to when you have to, and is written down in case you forget something. I love books. My book list of general second-step witchcraft recommendations are as follows:

Grovedaughter Witchery by Bree NicGarran! A lot of people recommended it as book #1, but I always thought it made a great book #2. I think it would be a bit overwhelming for a new witch, but it makes a great source of advice for witches looking to expand outwards.

Traditional Wicca by Thorn Mooney. Sure, the likelihood that you’re Wiccan, anon, is pretty low, but I don’t think that this book is necessarily...for Wiccans? Sure it has Wicca in the title, but what it actually is is a tome on how to interact with and apply to a formal spiritual coven or organization. It’s a great primer on the culture of secretive societies and how to spot a good one from a bad one from a mile away.

The Study of Witchcraft by Deborah Lipp is subtitled “Advanced Wicca”, but, again, it’s one of those cases where it’s more about Witchcraft than Wicca but the authors are Wiccan so they conflate the two, and... Listen, this book is a book list in and of itself. There’s some fluff you can ignore, but the book itself is a great resource for advice on looking for older witchcraft books and the history of witchcraft. I recommend it, especially if you’re in the US.

The History of Witchcraft or any book like it-- scholarly, competent, and neutral to witchcraft culture on the whole! The history of witchcraft is nuanced and interesting and often antisemetic on top of being deeply, deeply racist! Read up!

And HERE is @breelandwalker‘s public domain witch book dropbox info! Free is good. Free is very good.

As for blogs...

A lot of the blogs I used to like have Vanished Into the Ether or otherwise Joined the Exodus After the Porn Ban or have just Stopped Posting, but I can recommend @upthewitchypunx @breelandwalker @afrocentric-divination @ancestralmedicinemagic @north-of-annwn @whichwitchami @hillbillyoracle @lazywitchling @thewitchofthenorsetrilogy @therestlesswitch @tarotio @thetwistedrope @mudanglife @madamehearthwitch...

There are numerous other blogs I want to include, but haven’t the memory to remember their names, haven’t logged on in years, etc, but this is at least a starting list. I try to follow a diverse amount of religion/witchcraft/occult blogs, but if you read my follow list, 90% of the blogs say “have not posted in 278 days” etc.

Go big, go hard, or go home. Witchcraft isn’t for the weak of heart; it’s for the grouchy and grumpy. Just listen to us argue some time! ;)

Blessings!

tips?

[upthewitchypunx]

Hello! I really enjoy your suggestion to follow people who have a different practice than you own. That's a great tip. I follow a lot of different kinds of traditions and knowing the basics, and sometimes the specifcs, of the paths of others makes me understand my own practice better.

[traegorn]

Hey can you elaborate on how feeling other people's emotions is a trauma response? Because that's me and I feel seen but I want to understand it more.

So there are studies that show that childhood trauma leads to elevated empathy as an adult, but it's not just that. When we reflect especially on the suppressed boundaries issue (another trauma response), folks with bad boundaries are more likely to describe themselves as "empaths" because they take on other's feelings as their own through emotional mirroring.

Now there are reasons other than trauma that people can have these things, but that's the most common reason in my experience. In any case, there's nothing mystical about it at all.