I see auras. And also, I pay no attention to them. For most of my life I presumed it was a defect with my eyesight or brain or both — which by the way, that’s most likely it.
That said, medical explanations don’t take away from the spiritual implications, at least not for me. Ocular migraines and severe astigmatism are both known to cause a person to see a halo-like glow around people. Chronic dry eyes and corneal irregularities compounding ocular migraines and astigmatism can then make the glow appear to bear color.
Synesthesia can also be another culprit for what we think of as seeing auras. Your senses get cross-wired, so you see color when you hear sounds, hear musical notes when you see colors, and feel notes and numbers on a musical scale in different bones; likewise, someone’s presence — which we can all sense, it’s the “vibes” you get off a person — can get color-coded, and that’s the aura color a synthesthete might see.
Having not just one or some but all of the aforementioned conditions is probably why, medically speaking, this is what I see when I look at people:
Trying to use colored pencils to show what auras look like to me…
Note: I wrote this after two generous glasses of port on an empty stomach…
Every so often, someone calls my translation of the I Ching or my work-in-progress on the Tao Te Ching “New Age.” They’ll say it dismissively, as if they’ve discredited the authenticity of my work, and the legitimacy of my scholarship. Funnier yet, not one has been able to competently articulate how and why my work is more “New Age” than its counterparts. For some reason, my interpretation is automatically assumed to be wrong if it departs from what some old white guy from the 50s wrote about these Chinese texts, and we give the old white guy, taking a Christianized outsider perspective, miles and miles of grace.
When pressed, their explanation collapses onto itself in circular reasoning. “It just sounds New Agey.” Or “Well it’s because she’s an occultist so she can’t possibly be unbiased, neutral, objective, and scholarly.” They’ll say it doesn’t sound like “ancient Chinese wisdom.” And that expectation is problematic.
Recently I came across this video essay by a fellow community content creator on YouTube who had some candid critiques of authors, influencers, and content creators from our mutual community. She shared frustrations about seeing a growing disconnect between those who create content and those who consume content, i.e., the audience that supports an author or content creator.
She had a lot of very legit criticism of the present day online creator ecosystem. Bots and AI-generated responses, monetizing parasocial relationships in a way that feels exploitative, the end of peer to peer communications and the rise of transactional relationships, alienating many socioeconomic classes with paywalls, and having assistants manage community spaces rather than the big-name content creator themselves engaging in those community spaces — I hear you. All valid points speaking truth to power. Also, her concerns speak to something deeper– the loneliness and disconnection many of us feel online these days. Where has that sense of fellowship gone?
Though as someone who also writes, publishes, and maintains an online presence, I have some strong feelings about these points, particularly around community engagement and the unrealistic expectations that get imposed on authors and content creators.
I’d like to unpack some of those critiques, not just from that one YouTuber or from that particular video essay, but because what she said reflects a majority view currently held against content creators when they’re not being responsive in their comments section. I want to offer my perspective. But this isn’t a response to that video, no. These are just my reflections on the realities of engagement, from a content creator’s perspective, inspired by the points she raised in that video.
A few weeks ago I announced that we were retiring the annual Metaphysician’s Day Planner offering, after nine consecutive years of making them, each one custom-made to order with your birth chart and that year’s solar return chart. Plus the companion Metaphysician’s Guide that comes with the year ahead’s astrological forecasts, auspicious dates, inauspicious dates, and the dates to notable astrological or astronomical events.
Although we won’t be selling and making them anymore, we also didn’t want to leave you in a lurch, especially since we acknowledge that many of you have come to rely on it year after year. First, thank you so, so very much for your support over so many years. That’s amazing! Second, thank you for your understanding, patience, and sympathies that it’s just no longer feasible for us to be doing this, as our process is entirely manual and “old school” in this new world of everything getting generated instantly by digital automation.
I converted the handwritten notes from pages 25 – 33, and integrating notes from other pages in that notebook into the following cleaned-up and expanded handout:
The PDF file will be easier to work with. However, for those who want to cut and paste or edit the contents in the handout to create something more custom-tailored to your own needs and purposes, feel free to do so from the DOCX file.
I’ve written about my self-taught art journey during the pandemic here. I found a bunch of MFA art program syllabuses online and aggregated them together into my own curriculum, then scoured the interwebs for online courses, video lectures, tutorials, books, blogs, anything and everything I could get my hands on to learn composition and the core principles of art making.
It reads as if after you’ve produced a work of art, you’re supposed to run through the checklist of items for review page after page in this handbook and self-audit how well you did in each of the categories. Yes and no.
It’s funny, whenever I endeavor to unpack something into its parts to analyze, people accuse me of being too analytical at the cost of creativity and intuition.
But if you observe me in the everyday, you’d think me a hypocrite, because in life, I very much operate off intuition rather than pure, cold logic. I go off my feelings way more than I go off rational deduction.
Yet rational analysis is the necessary checks and balances to your supposed intuition. Your intuition can get tainted by bias. So you have to be hyper self-aware and mindful.
While I would be the first to agree that you do not need a checklist to determine and define what is or is not great art, there is some value to deconstructing why we consider certain pieces “great art” and others not.
And if you can deconstruct that, can you then use it as elements to construct “great art”? I don’t know, but why not try? Even if you fail, you’re going to learn valuable lessons from that failure, so I welcome it, don’t you?
If anything, this sort of guided checklist helps you to more likely spot areas for improvement in your craft.
Anyway, that’s how this handbook got started, and you’ll see that the contents are extracted from that art study journal from 2021, which I kept as reference throughout 2020 while I was working on the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot. I converted the content into, well, a bunch of concrete, tangible points for consideration when critiquing your own art.
It’s not like every single one of the points in this handbook will be 100% applicable to you. It’s more about using it as a general reference, to help you navigate self-assessment of your craft.
Here’s the MS Word doc version for those who want to cut and paste around, and change it up to make it personalized:
The content within this handbook is free for you to use, share, adapt, and build upon in any way that serves you, be that for personal or commercial purposes. Whether you distribute the PDF or DOCX as-is, remix it into your own content, my goal is for this to reach those who will benefit from it. So do whatever you Will with it.
I guess I’ll start with the ending spoiler: this was not for me. Yet if keto was a cult (sometimes I think it is), the Hubby says he’d join in a heartbeat (he jokes, but you get what he’s saying). The Hubby now swears by keto.
Everything about having to be on a ketogenic diet fundamentally runs against my impulses, inclinations, my intuition, my preferred lifestyle, my joie de vivre, like this was 30 days of stripping away the meaning of life from me.
Also, at the tail end of this blog post I’ll share some woo thoughts on keto, and what I felt like was the impact of a ketogenic diet on those who are psychic or hyper-intuitive.
Keto-Compliant Huli Huli Chicken over Green Beans in Garlic Sauce
Balancing out the text reviewing my 30 days of keto will be keto food pics. I’ll also share a pdf download of 30 days of keto dinners. On weekends I meal-prepped for weekday breakfasts and lunches, i.e., fridge fully stocked with soft-boiled eggs, various seasoned ingredients to easily build salads, foods cut and at the ready for easy charcuterie boards.
30 Days Keto: Meal Plan Print-Out
In case you’re curious, here’s a print-out of what we ate for 30 days:
To any keto purists reading this, yes, our meal planning included several vegetables considered “not keto-friendly,” but are nutrient-packed. I found that I had to integrate “not keto-friendly” vegetables into our meal planning to avoid vitamin deficiencies.
The problem with the keto diet (if I may…) is the high risk of nutrient deficiencies, and if you eat “dirty keto” (more on that later), then you’re probably taking in way too much sodium, way too much bad fats, etc. If you aren’t hyper-aware of what exactly you’re eating just to stay keto, you’re putting yourself at a much higher risk for elevated cholesterol, liver stress, kidney stones, and if you already have digestive issues and lack of gut microbiome diversity, you’re gonna exacerbate those conditions if you’re not super-careful on keto.
Before we continue, in case it’s not overtly obvious to you already, I’m not a nutrition scientist, I’m not an anything at all that would remotely qualify me to talk about dieting or ketogenesis. This is just a lay person cooking food in a lay people kinda way and sharing my lay person opinions on something I know nothing about (but experienced for 30 days).
Local Northern California white surgeon roe (aka cheap caviar)
Oh, and one more thing about that print-out of meal prep. Cuisine-wise, it’s primarily East Asian, but California (specifically Bay Area) influenced, as “farm to table” as practicable, local and seasonal. If that’s not your palate, then the print-out is going to be quite useless to you. =P
Master strategic communication, executive presence, and people skills with “Speak with Power, Lead with Trust.” This powerful workbook offers tactical drills, emotional intelligence training, and leadership communication strategies to help you build trust, influence, and authority in any professional environment.
I would rather not share this publicly, except geez do I wish someone had spared me so many failures and missteps simply by sharing something like this with me earlier, back when I was just starting out in my career, and life.
When you come from an immigrant family…
From a lower socioeconomic background and then suddenly for your career leap into an environment where everyone comes from so much more privilege and status than you ever knew…
When you’re a person of color and what goes for communication and people skills in your culture is not at all the same as what goes for communication and people skills in this society…
When you’re the only woman in a male-dominated industry…
When you’re neurodivergent and an introvert…
…when any of these situations are familiar to you, often a big obstacle that holds you back from the level of success you would otherwise enjoy is this: you’re terrible at corporate-friendly communication and people skills.
I know I am.
In my head I think I’m smiling, warm, affable, speaking clearly, slowly, and concisely, in a structured organized manner…
…in reality I’m looking nervous, shifty, I’m rambling off on tangents, I’m info-dumping on you, and I can’t seem to get to the point.
Because I never had a workbook like this, my growth and improvement rate was slooooow. Like how many times did many, many people have to tell me I speak way too fast and am rambling and info-dumping before I made any effort to speak slower and enunciate better. How often did I cross my arms and slouch and avoid eye contact at important social gatherings and as a result made terrible first impressions with a load of very important people. Either I over-share or I under-share, and can never seem to “strategically share to present micro-vulnerability as a signal of authenticity.” (Like, did you even know that is a thing someone has methodically and intentionally thought through??)
This is a free downloadable workbook based on strategic communication skills development and pattern-rewiring for executive leadership presence, with pretty easy-to-follow actionable techniques, skill development, and practice exercises to improve your people skills, your “executive presence,” and just all around be better at communicating to others.
I was invited as a Guest of Honor Headliner to speak at this year’s ConVocation, and this is my recap of the event, as it was also my very first time (1) attending ConVocation and (2) attending a pagan event in the Midwest. ConVocation is a pagan conference that has been going strong in the Upper Midwest since 1995, and truly what sets it apart is how community-oriented it is.
Photo via Barb Milburn Stenger of Celtic Readings (celticreadings.com)
My write-up is coming out a bit later than planned, as I had initially hoped to include some of the official event photos from David Loken-Rozian‘s 2025 ConVocation album onto his Flickr. Since the album isn’t available yet, I’ve decided to go ahead and post this recap, so apologies for lack of people pics. I don’t know why I always forget to take photos of people at events; I have a dozen photos of snow and trees, food, rocks, and clouds, but none of people. Argh.
I had such a great experience recording the first chapter of my audiobook that I had to share, and memorialize in a blog post. My publisher North Atlantic Books arranged for me to record at Live Oak Studio in Berkeley, a truly fantastic place. This is for the third book, I Ching, The Oracle.
To be standing where music legends and NYT bestselling authors once stood! ::faints::
Now I kinda wish I had the backbone to ask if I could take some photos of the engineer’s setup, you know, that station in front of the glassed-in studio space with all the colorful levers and buttons. =) But it seemed like his space and I didn’t want to intrude. So, womp, womp, sad face, no impressive sound-engineer’s-giant-keyboard pics for my social media. (Do blogs even count as social media anymore?)
This was my first time in a recording studio,* and certainly my first time recording my voice narrating my own book. I left the experience with a lot of admiration for professional voice actors and audiobook narrators. Like the voice actor we chose for narrating the I Ching audiobook — he sounds like one of those National Geographic or History channel voiceover guys! It’s a skill, and maybe dare say even a talent.
*Technically, I’ve been in a recording studio before, with an entire symphony, as one violinist in a sea of violinists in the violin section of said symphony. But for sure this was my first time in a recording studio for totally-me reasons.
Just because you wrote the Thing doesn’t mean you can competently read the Thing aloud, especially since I would not call my writing style “conversational.” So when you read it aloud and your writing style departs from your personal “conversational” style of speaking, it comes across as awkward.
Fortunately, the sound engineer was fantastic. He coached me really well, telling me when I was speaking 10% too fast and needed to slow down, when my energy wasn’t matching my last paragraph, and flagging words that had just the most subtle stumble, or even when I was getting a bit too loud with my breathing (lol). I have confirmed that audiobook narration is not necessarily the best profession for you if you have asthma (I have asthma).
This audiobook recording experience left me with the unequivocal acknowledgement that I write very long run-on sentences. The sound engineer had to stop and teach me how to breathe. If you come to a really long sentence, even if it doesn’t have punctuation, put in breath marks as if it did have periods, otherwise you’ll run out of breath, as I did when I was reading my own damn book.
More fun tips I’ve learned: Apparently, eat a crisp apple before you start recording voice narration. I don’t know if that’s just folklore or if it’s scientifically legit, but a lot of voice actors swear by it, and believe it’s a thing. It’s supposed to help your voice be at its tip-top condition.
And don’t wear “loud” clothes while you’re recording. So for instance James was wearing a nylon jacket and sporty pants or something that goes swish swish every time he moved even a little, so he wasn’t allowed in the recording booth. Fortunately I’m a nerd who reads all the homework assignment materials ahead of time, so I knew to wear “soft, quiet” clothes.
To be a competent voice actor, you almost have to over enunciate words. So many of us lay people don’t realize that we mumble when we speak. There were several instances when the sound engineer stopped me and offered guidance on how to over-enunciate, because I was jumbling my words and it wasn’t as crisp as it could or should be.
For I Ching, The Oracle, I’ll be doing the voice narration for Chapter 1, the Introduction only. A pro audiobook narrator, Wyntner Woody, will be narrating the rest of it, speaking both the classical Chinese text of the Zhouyi and the English translation and annotations.
The Hubby (a native Beijingnese speaker) and I listened and re-listened– and re-listened– to the finalist list of audition reels. We debated, we re-listened, we looked up each one of their bios… which is to say we put a lot of heavy thought into who to choose. There were many different and competing factors for consideration, hence the debating and long deliberation time as we wracked our brains over who to go with.
For the audition, each voice actor recorded about a page or two from one of the introductory expository chapters and then recorded Hexagram 1, both the classical Chinese and the English. We (and particularly Hubby, because he’s the native standard Chinese speaker; the Mandarin I speak is not standard) ultimately went with Wyntner because of his more precise standard Chinese pronunciation.
Why didn’t I want to narrate the entirety of my own book? This is the analogy I give. Since I grew up listening to southern Taiwanese people (deep south) whose primary tongue is Minnan/Hokkien speaking Mandarin Chinese, my Mandarin pronunciation is not “standard Chinese.” If I had narrated my own I Ching book, it would be akin to listening to someone narrate Shakespeare with a heavy southern drawl. If you’re looking to voice Shakespeare, you’re looking for a particular way of pronunciation, right? Same here.
That and time constraints. I think the total was going to be something like 20 hours of straight narration, which means lord knows how many hours buffered around those core 20 to get those final 20 hours right.
Due to my full-time job, I would only be able to work weekends, and then you would have to coordinate with the studio’s schedule and available time slots. So ultimately it did not make sense for me to narrate my own book, and for the publisher to hire a pro.
Oh by the way, I learned that reading aloud 9,000 words equals about 1 hour of studio time. So the way they estimate how much studio time to book is based on word count. It’s not an exact accurate science, but ballpark more or less, 9,000 words is 1 hour of recorded audio.
Hubby, wearing “loud” clothes, and therefore banned from the recording booth.
Plus, James (the hubby) is more of an audiobook listener than I am, and he says that any time he sees that the book is narrated by the author, he skips it and won’t listen, because it has been his experience, as a consumer of audiobooks, that the author’s narration tends to be a bit too amateur to listen comfortably to for dozens of hours on end, and that you really do need a pro to do it. Voice acting is totally a skill. Not just anybody can or should be narrating audiobooks.
There are other interesting issues that come up with bilingual (even multilingual) narration. So, for example, Wyntner pronounces “I Ching” as you would in Mandarin Chinese, per pin yin, even when it’s in the context of an English sentence, whereas when the context is English, I just pronounce “I Ching” and even “yin and yang” the way a typical American would pronounce those words.
But then in other instances, mid-sentence while speaking English I’ll hop over and pronounce it as you would in Chinese. Wyntner is super consistent with his stylistic approach, whereas I, a lay speaker, am very inconsistent. Sometimes I pronounce “Tao Te Ching” the way you would in Chinese, per pin yin, and then other times, without explanation or rationale, I’ll pronounce it the way average Americans might pronounce it.
It’s a phenomenon you’ll observe — native Chinese speakers and non-Chinese expat/foreign speakers speaking Chinese will switch pronunciation midstream in English, and try to pronounce Chinese words as you would per pin yin, but Asian Americans do not. Asian Americans pronounce in the Chinese way when speaking Chinese, and then pronounce it the white people way when speaking English.
For example, when James pronounces his own Chinese surname in English, he’ll kind of give it a proper Chinese pronunciation to it. Whereas when I pronounce my own Chinese surname in English, I’ll just pronounce it the way white people might pronounce it, and don’t bother giving the proper pronunciation. But obv. will pronounce it the “right” way when I’m speaking Chinese. Or how you’ll hear Wyntner pronounce yang as “yahng,” with the soft-A like “ah,” which is correct, whereas I just go with the Americanized hard-A “yayng,” like “yay,” which is incorrect but has become normalized.
In any case, Hubby and I are both super glad we went with Wyntner, and we cannot wait for the final result to be out in the world!
James is currently proofing Wyntner’s narrations, listening to the entire audiobook, and he reports that my book is actually very, very interesting! =) Yay! James says that my I Ching book is so interesting to listen to that he even paused between sections to go look stuff up and read more on the history! I’ve earned myself a new fan, in the form of Hubby! =D [I mean, it’s not like he read a single page of Holistic Tarot or The Tao of Craft, so this is ah-mazing!]
As for the I Ching audiobook, it is going to be significantly different from the printed book, for many reasons. One, the audiobook omits all the exercises (basically the whole “grimoire” part of the book), the entire divination how-to section (so the audiobook has nothing in there that teaches you how to do the divination procedure, whereas the printed book dedicates a big whopping chapter to all the ways), and any passages that reference tables, charts, or images had to go, or be rewritten so that you’re not making references to phantom visuals.
The I Ching audiobook’s purpose, as I see it, is to hear the classical Chinese recitations of the hexagram verses side by side with the English translation and then my annotations. The chapters that cover the history, mythology, and cultural lore of the I Ching also makes sense as an audiobook. But the more practical hands-on elements, I feel, need to be either in printed book form, with the written instructions plus illustrative images, or as a video tutorial.
Also, the audiobook does not include any of the end notes. In a few select instances, Wyntner recommended that he include a few additional statements to integrate some of what I wrote in the end notes, as he felt the explanatory material in the end notes would help provide clarity to the text, and we agreed.
I rewrote a lot of the annotations and commentaries to the Zhouyi translations (the actual I Ching text) so it would read better as an audiobook. Also, I totally rewrote the Introduction that I narrated. About half of it stayed the same as the printed version of the Intro, but then about half of it is net new. Even two hours before heading to the recording studio I was still on my computer rewriting passages!
In any event, unlike the challenges, obstacles, and frustrations I encountered during the publisher-author collaboration phase of the print book for I Ching, I really, genuinely enjoyed my experience during the publisher-author collaboration phase for the audio book version.
benebell wen 