Mind, body, spirit, and how activating all three will maximize your witchcraft.
Magic requires your whole self, not just a piece of you.
It’s honestly that simple. You will get a better outcome of your spellwork when you activate your physical self, your mental self, and your spiritual self. Most new witches, or people dabbling in ritual and manifestation work, only activate the physical and spiritual side of themselves when diving into a spell. They don’t even realize just how important all aspects are.
Beauty Witch Podcast
Episode Two: Mind, body, spirit, and how activating all three will maximize your witchcraft.
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Beauty Witch Podcast
Episode Two: Mind, body, spirit, and how activating all three will maximize your witchcraft.
LISTEN HERE→
WATCH HERE→
SUBSCRIBE→
First, let’s break down a spell.
In this blog post, we’re going to use the word spell to mean any manifestation work—actual spells, rituals, visualizations, intention-setting, etc. If you use magical means to try and achieve mundane goals, you’re doing manifestation work and we’re calling it a spell right now for all intents and purposes.
So what is a spell? How do you do it? How do you know you’re doing one?
Simply, a spell is broken into four parts:
- Intention-setting
- Active and inspired work
- Manifestation & energy work
- Release & ground
This is the basic framework for every spell. You cannot have a complete spell without these four steps, in my opinion. You may do one part at a time in each ritual, like most moon magic, or you may do all four steps at once.
Or, you may even just do one part of it, and have that be it’s own ritual. But in that case, you may find you are working a ritual for a different purpose, and not to manifest. A release ritual is a good example of a ritual that isn’t necessarily manifestation work.
And even though we’re mainly talking about spells that manifest something in this blog post, the practice of activating your mind, body, and spirit is important for any kind of magic work.
So let’s break down the parts of a typical manifestation spell…
Intention-setting
The first part of a spell is the intention-setting. Before you manifest something, you have to actually want something. And that’s where your intentions come into place. When you set intentions, you are making a clear indication of exactly what you want the outcome to be. It’s important to be super clear and confident in what you want.
Intention-setting is honestly my favorite part of spellcasting. And unfortunately, I often stop at this phase, and I never manifest anything because I don’t move on with the rest of the spell steps.
Active and inspired work
Depending on your intention, the active and inspired work may be the actual spell or ritual, additional practical steps, or more spiritual steps. But you cannot manifest anything without actually working for it. Yes, I am saying that hard work matters here.
For instance: let’s say you set an intention for your dream job. Just setting the intention isn’t enough. And even just casting a spell, in this case, isn’t enough. You also need to apply for jobs that seem like your dream job, which is super mundane, right? You can think of the mundane, practical work as charging the spell.
Manifestation and energy work
This part of the spell is what a lot of people do during the full moon. It’s the super magical part. It’s creating your money honey jar. It’s connecting and communicating with ancestors and spirit guides. It’s invoking deities and the moon. It’s aligning your own energies.
The purpose of this step is to put as much of your energy into manifesting your intention as possible.
This part of the spell is sort of incorporated into all the other steps. You can build your energy up during the intention-setting step, using sound and physical movement (aka dance) to literally build your energy to put behind your intention. You can use it to align your chakras or energies to ensure you have lasting momentum during your more mundane steps (aka self-care). And for the last step in the spell process, you can use energy work to connect with earth and plant medicine to release the built-up energy from the previous steps in the process.
Release and grounding
And of course, this is the last step. This step almost has two steps within it. The first step is to give your intention away to the universe. After expending a lot of your energy to try and manifest your intention, it’s time to release and calm that energy. To go back internally and allow yourself to stretch and grow your manifestation muscles.
Releasing is all about letting the outcome of your spell go. Removing any lasting limiting beliefs and hang ups you have about the intention you are desiring. True surrender.
If you get too caught up with the outcome, you may find yourself overthinking it, and burning the spell out. So, it’s important to always finish every spell by surrendering it to the universe to complete for you.
Grounding on the other hand, is literally releasing those pent-up energies from the previous steps to ensure you aren’t carrying them around when it’s time to heal, stretch, and grow. This step is SO important, especially if you’re using other energies to help fuel your spells (like invoking energies from deities or asking for support from ancestors and guides).
Okay, so how does this have to do with your mind, body, and spirit?
You may be looking at these steps and already associating the mental, physical, or spiritual areas that make up the spell. That’s good! But the three parts of you go into all four steps as well.
Your mind
This area of yourself is probably the last one you prioritize in spellwork and let me tell you, it is SO IMPORTANT!!!!! And that’s why we’re covering it first.
The mind piece of the puzzle encompasses all things mental, obviously, but this is the hardest piece to get right. This requires you to do internal work on your belief systems, ethics, biases, and general mindset. For instance, if you cast a spell to try and make more money, but you have a lot of limiting beliefs around your personal deserving of money, then you may never manifest your intention!
This area of yourself requires a lot of work to learn how to overcome those kinds of limiting beliefs. You should also take the time to do regular journaling as well as healing work on past traumas you’ve (or your past generations) have experienced. You don’t need to “complete” this part of your journey (it’s honestly not possible), but it should be a regular part of your spiritual work.
Lastly, it’s important to set boundaries, establish your ethics, and challenge your biases before you seriously begin working on spells. This just helps to set up rules for you to follow to make your magic more possible.
Your body
Your body, and all its parts, is the one tool you always carry with you to make magic. This is your magical vessel. Your body is your most powerful asset.
This piece of yourself is so important to care for and to get comfortable with to ensure a better, more flowing magical practice. You do so much with your body, that it deserves peace, love and compassion. I mean, it literally does everything for you.
I personally believe that the body should not be left out of self-care. Many people believe that self-care is either all face masks, journaling, or mediation. Well, it’s also proper nutrition, lots of movement, and enough sleep. This has nothing to do with the size or shape of your body, but how you care for it in a way that is both healthy and aligns with who you are as a person. This looks different for everyone, but it is so important to prioritize inside and outside of your spellcraft.
Inside of your spell, you use your body by actually doing the stuff (hey, you can’t light a candle without a body). You also can use your body by being the tool to build energy (clapping and chanting for instance), to channel energy (like from ancestors, deities, the moon, etc), or to just connect to the universe through joyful movement.
Your spirit
Do I really need to go too in depth here? It seems obvious at first, doesn’t it? But really, the spiritual side needs just as much explanation as the other pieces of yourself.
I, personally, struggled with this aspect of magic for a while, even though spellcraft and magic is all about the spiritual. I thought magic and spirituality meant meditation, journaling, creating altars, enjoying crystals, etc. And while this is an aspect of spirituality for sure, this is also just the top layer. These things were tools to help me develop my spirituality (which arguably, is still pretty under-developed), but they weren’t the core of my spirituality.
This, in my experience and opinion, is a part of yourself that you will be developing your entire life. It’s the visceral, most instinctual part of yourself. It’s the life force inside of you that awakens when you’re out in the wild. It’s the piece of you that connects to other humans and animals. It’s your humanity and your soul.
When doing spellwork, it’s important to align with this part of yourself consistently to ensure you’re able to also truly connect to those spirit guides, deities, ancestors, higher self, etc.
You get the most out of your spells by activating all three parts of yourself
Of course, you may never dance in a ritual, establish ethics, or invoke a deity and still find yourself able to manifest your intentions. That’s all well and good, but your magic could go so much farther by activating all three parts of yourself in all steps of a spell to ensure you are truly maximizing your potential for manifestation.
What piece of yourself do you think is the weakest in terms of spellcraft? What are you going to do to continue working on activating all three pieces? I think my weakest piece is the body piece.
Journal prompt: What piece of yourself do you think is the weakest in terms of spellcraft? What are you going to do to continue working on activating all three pieces?
