🍁 Remembering The Witch Within

What are you noticing as the seasons' transition? I'm experiencing a desire for slowness as we turn to Fall and finding my embodied joy in this slowness, a gift after the intensity of summer.

It's been awhile since I tuned in with you, I don't share here unless I have something real to say, and today I do.

Monday is Samhain (or Halloween), an ancient Celtic feast day celebrating our ancestors and marking the turning of the wheel of the year.

It pre-dates the arrival of Christianity and reminds me that there are many other ways of thinking, feeling, and being.

There's a reclamation happening. Folks, women especially, are reclaiming their indigenous spiritual practices.

After centuries of being squeezed out of the world's main religions, amongst other traumas, women are reawakening their birthright - an ancient embodied spirituality that needs no priestly intervention. Some call these women witches, pagans, and heathens. All true, as they are all grounded in animism.

The return to animism is like taking off the corset of patriarchy and monotheism...

It feels like being able to breathe again.

What I want to say to you on this Samhain is:

You have an indigenous practice; it's in your blood and bones, waiting for you to awaken it…

If your ancestors came from Europe* your practice was one of rituals, cycles, and earth-based worship, centering spirit in all things seeing the divine as gender fluid.

Through alignment with the big energies (sun, moon, planets, seasons) and subtle energies (all nature, ley lines, the body and its cycles of sex, blood, death/birth), the spiritual practices of Old Europe were communal, not individualistic.

There was an embodied understanding that the group's well-being was intimately connected to the earth's well-being.

You could affect one by affecting the other. A micro/macro cosmology.

The earth wasn't an inanimate object to be exploited but an expression of the great mother of all. As her children, we existed within her rhythm in the sacred cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth.

Nothing is ever dead or gone, just transformed and awaiting rebirth…

As we draw closer and closer to the feast day of Samhain and the veils thin between the worlds, what part of your ancestral remembrance is waiting for you from the other side?

Nothing is ever gone, just transformed and awaiting rebirth…

Ask yourself:

🌀How would stepping into the mindset of micro/macro shift my experience in life?

🌀How could claiming the earth as God/dess/ex change how I live my life and my choices?

🌀How would seeing my body and all things imbued with spirit change my relationship with myself and the world around me?

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Reclaiming animism is profoundly life-affirming. We no longer see the divine as external but in all things, including ourselves. This is the foundation of Yoga's tantric roots, the space from which I firmly teach.

From the sacred to the mundane, there is spirit everywhere.

Our life then shifts to one of tending to the aliveness of all things, and this is a profound space of love, care, and celebration.

If you'd like to embody this reclamation, get on the email list for Ancestral Awakening. We'll be immersing ourselves in these sacred teachings not to take but to learn and embody our truth. ​

The beauty of this is that as white folks (like myself) reawaken our indigenous ways, we can stop appropriating the living indigenous traditions of marginalized groups and instead celebrate them.

How does this land for you? What edges does it push?

Wishing you a wild Samhain and Halloween.

x nuria

*Email me if you'd like resources for non-white animist practices; I have fantastic colleagues in this space.