"Witch" or "intuitive"?
Calling in the White wellness community
To those who have chosen complacency and status over the protection of the oppressed, there is still time to make a different choice. Listen to the guilt that plagues you. Come awake.
—Cole Arthur Riley, Black Liturgies
Dear Wanderer,
This Full Moon in Cancer I want to address the White intuitives, healers and spiritual teachers from which I have learned a great many things, and to which I have paid my time, attention, and yes, even money over the years.
White intuitives, healers and spiritual teachers have done a lot for me. Taught to dissociate, overlook and bypass our deepest selves, the intense focus on the self that these teachers bring helped me to feel, inch by inch, back into my own experience deeply. Their gentle language extended soft green tendrils of self-acceptance and connection with nature and the subtle realms toward me. It was integral to my process, I needed it, and I am grateful.
Through their work I accessed my own psychic sensibilities as well, finding that I too can have visions, talk to spirits, practice divination, journey in other realms, feel everything SO deeply. I looked up to them not only as as purveyors of the wisdom and healing I sought, but skilled public personae, creating livlihoods for themselves with their otherworldly gifts in beautiful packages—words and images, books and medicines, courses and “communities.”
But even the most heartful, honest and inspired of these personae and what they sell are deeply aspirational in nature. It is capitalism most confusing because it appears to give so much and does real work in my life. It gets entwined with my identity. That could be me, I think. Maybe this is my path.
Maybe I too can have what they have. (said America about everything)
“Intuitive” is an appealing job title because it takes characteristics that are usually seen as negative in the professional world—being highly-sensitive, dreamy, nurturing, weird—and makes them valuable in multiple senses. It gives the illusion of doing no harm. It sounds soft, feminine and non-threatening—mysterious, but worthy of protection. In essence, everything that White femininity has come to represent, wearing the mantle of healing and higher knowledge.
An intuitive can be a psychic, and herbalist, a tarot reader, an astrologer, a shamanic practitioner, a writer, a teacher. It’s an ambiguous modern title, like “life coach,” only less caffeinated and more dreamy. But there is an older word for those who commune with subtle worlds on behalf of their communities, a word that doesn’t ignore the dangerous history behind such practices: Witch.
And I finally understand which of those words I want to be.
Witchcraft became a liberatory practice the moment they started killing witches.
I understand why some who call themselves witches do so: they see their spiritual practices as liberatory, the oppressed as essential members of their communities. Witches like Juliet Diaz and Amanda Yates Garcia have been the ones to speak out against the genocides and oppression we are witnessing in real time, in the Middle East and elsewhere, and to pay the price for doing so.
Juliet Diaz, witch, mother, author and business owner, has been dropped from sponsorships, banned from platforms, lost followers and income sources because she has been speaking out relentlessly against all genocides, transforming out loud and in public in response to genocide and calling us with her:
I will never be the same. My social media accounts will never be the same. The work I do will never be the same. The way I show up in the world, to myself, to my community, to my family, to my friends, will never be the same.
The world will never be the same as it once was and I never want it to return to the way it was.
I am now weaved into the existence of the collective. Threading a new world for collective liberation. Dismantling whatever threatens that world.
I’m not the same.
Are you?
The truth is, witchcraft became a liberatory practice the moment they started killing witches. Hint: anything you do for yourself and your community when they’re killing you is a liberatory practice.
To stand with the witches is to give up the protection and reverence of the powerful. To stand with the witches is to lay down approval, acceptance, and even full personhood. To call yourself a witch is to stand with the oppressed and the hated.
To be a witch is to burn.
It’s a path of grief because your loved ones are always the ones who are dying, but my life has been defined by the death and loss already, and I want know—in my heart of hearts, my gut of guts, my womb of wombs—that my magic is my own, that I am doing the work my ancestors have assigned to me, that I am creating a new world rather than sustaining the old one.
It’s a new kind of grief to realize that my path henceforth diverges from teachers I have relied on—some for years and years. But they still have the choice to speak up and stand with the ones who need it most. They can still make that choice. I hope these words find them, and that they answer the call of collective liberation.
Asia Suler of One Willow Apothecaries taught me the transformative magic of flower essences, granted me scholarships to your courses, and regularly uplifted me with tender, magical writing. Asia, your book was a life-saving hand through a portal of hope after one of the most difficult periods in my life. I looked to you as a teacher, guide, inspiration and model for what is possible for, like, a decade.
But when collective grief and the call to action came, you stayed silent.
You wrote beautifully about grief and seasons of darkness. You even held a fundraiser for the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. But then the bombing continued. The cries kept coming. The holidays approached. And you moved on.
In the throes of grief and utter panic for people that kept dying before my eyes—almost half of them children—I felt shock, confusion and disappointment when I read your subsequent posts and emails.
“I’m a rich optimist,” you wrote, and I thought, yes you are. You have a huge following. You’ve made a fortune on teachings that came to you from indigenous sources (albeit mostly second-hand from White “experts”), but when an indigenous people being actively exterminated and forced from their land asked us to speak out on their behalf, you wouldn’t say a word.
Not. One. Word.
When other indigenous people are speaking out on their behalf, speaking against the systems off of which you benefit by selling essentially indigenous practices like shamanism and plant communication, you say nothing.
Maybe you are quietly donating money or calling your representatives. Maybe you’ve even gone to a protest or two. But by staying silent you are neglecting your most powerful tool. In so doing, you make it okay for hundreds of others—mostly White, privileged, and therefore influencial others—to stay silent as well. You leave the work, once again, to those who have less to lose because they have less.
As a White wealthy person of influence—especially spiritual influence—you cannot do ANYTHING without being political.
Highly-sensitive people, empaths and intuitives don’t get a pass from protecting the oppressed in the name of any “spiritual” practice, especially if they are White and wealthy. If anything, the most sensitive among us should be the first to stand up.
You cannot be spiritual without being political in this world. As a wealthy White person of influence—especially spiritual influence—you cannot do ANYTHING without being political.
Audre Lorde’s rejoinder: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” has become almost commonplace—at least in my world—but I encourage you, if you haven’t, to read to the end of the essay where she states:
“I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”
Because once you feel the whole world as kin, the personal is political, and so is the public. The thing about personal brands, which essentially sell an aspirational image of yourself, is that, at the end of the day, they are just that: brands.
I question the integrity of a “spiritual” business whose success in contingent upon your silence. And if your silence is in alignment with your convictions, then I refer you to the aforementioned essay.
Sarah Faith Gottesdeiner, creator of the trendy The Moon Studio, wrote in her book The Moon Book: Lunar Magic to Change Your Life, “we are her now to dismantle white supremacisy patriarchy—and we must do so together. With our mindset, our conversations, our actions, our collaborations, a new wave of soft power, change and magic is being brought forth.”
Powerful words, but I didn’t see a single direct word from you speaking out against any of the genocides we are facing. When Palestinians asked us not to shop on Black Friday you and other White intuitive business owners pushed your usual sales, touting the the benefits of buying from small businesses. But it’s not enough to ask us to shop with you instead. To starve the war machine—for just one day—and to show solidarity and raise awareness requires the collusion of those who stand to lose. It’s not too high a price to pay for the lives of innocents.
And what about faith? Do you think so little of the Universe you claim to trust that taking one day to defend the oppressed would destroy all of the abundance you’ve created for yourself and those who rely on you?
Forgive me for my soapbox, but I am here because I believe in your work, your magic and your humanity. I am here because I think we have more in common than we do differences. This is a stranger, harder world than even I thought, and I am asking you to use your magic, your voice and your privilege to help those who need it most. And I think you can do that.
Make your words truer than they ever were. Exercise the faith you practice. Utilize the skills you’ve built walking in this world as sensitive soul. Ask you guides, your ancestors and the spirits of nature. Search your deep heart, your most sacred places. See whose worth is already written there, and whose you have yet to inscribe.
I burn, therefore I am a witch.
Are you? Do you burn too?
Thank you for witnessing me Wanderer. As always, I’m so grateful to and for you. If you know anyone who could benefit from these words, please do share.
Courage, courage,
Sasha