Category: personal spirituality

Essential Oils: My (Hopefully) Holistic Perspective

On By benebellIn grimoire, Magical in the Mundane, opinion, personal spirituality24 Comments
Two of my current go-to blends. “Anti-Itch Oil” consisting of tea tree oil, eucalyptus, and lavender really does (at least for hubby and me, and all the friends and family I give this to) alleviate minor itching and bug bites. It also clears my sinuses, and helps with congestion. The blend of frankincense, rosemary, and peppermint smells like petrichor! That after-rain scent! This one’s a great massage oil to soothe tense muscles, carpal tunnel, and I also use it as a hair and scalp treatment oil.

Essential oils get a really bad rep these days, and for good reason. Beyond the scams and pyramid schemes, its contemporary New Age associations with “this can cure cancer” claims and people replacing evidence-based healthcare with fragrance blends is why people are – and should be – skeptical.

Not only is there insufficient scientific and medical research to conclusively make claims, but often it’s misused, or people are uninformed about how to use plant extract essences. They definitely can cause skin irritation, allergic reactions, and in extreme cases of misuse, adversely interfere with your body’s regular functions (this is why those who are pregnant, trying to get pregnant, and young developing children need to heighten their discernment around use of essential oils). Some concentrated plant essences can also interact adversely with prescription medications.

Then of course there are the sweeping claims in the realm of magical thinking. This oil blend will bring you luck in love and romance, or this will exorcise demons, or this will help you to manifest wealth. This oil is for glamour magic. That oil is a cure-all.

The historical origins of the term “snake oil” is synchronistically telling here, actually. When Chinese laborers immigrated to the United States to work on the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1800s, they used a traditional Chinese medicine containing actual snake oil. Per TCM, fat extracted from non-venomous water snakes rendered into an oil, mixed with ginger and camphor extracts was a legitimate medicinal remedy for joint pain and muscle inflammation, which the railroad workers would use. Americans then capitalized on that idea by selling fake snake oil as a magical, mystical ancient Chinese remedy for all ailments. Hence the term “snake oil” came to mean a fraudulent health hype, when actually, the original source material wasn’t fraudulent at all.

Similarly, there are bona fide legitimate uses for essential oils, but capitalistic bad faith sellers of fake stuff give essential oils a bad name. Sadly.

Continue reading “Essential Oils: My (Hopefully) Holistic Perspective” →

Overview of Western Art Movements: Art History Timeline (Handout Download)

On By benebellIn create your own deck, free download, Magical in the Mundane, personal, personal spirituality1 Comment

Back in 2021 after completing SKT the Third, I shared a scan of my personal art study notes here, “Download My Art Study Journal.”

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:

Download Handout

Art History Timeline

PDF

DOCX

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.

Continue reading “Overview of Western Art Movements: Art History Timeline (Handout Download)” →

Critiquing Your Own Art (Handbook)

On By benebellIn create your own deck, free download, Magical in the Mundane, personal, personal spirituality8 Comments

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.

You can also download my art study journal here, which is what this handbook, a free download, is based on.

Critiquing Your Own Art

PDF Download

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:

Critiquing Your Own Art

DOCX Download

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.

Tarot for the Magically Inclined by Jack Chanek

On By benebellIn book review, personal spirituality, tarot, tarot community, tarot exercises, traditional witchcraft1 Comment

This is a wonderful sequel to Jack Chanek’s Tarot for Real Life, a down-to-earth primer that de-mystifies the tarot, whereas here in Tarot for the Magically Inclined: Spells and Spirits to Stack the Deck in Your Favor, we delve straight into the mysteries of the tarot.

Continue reading “Tarot for the Magically Inclined by Jack Chanek” →

The Great Nine-Day Matsu Pilgrimage

On By benebellIn film review, Magical in the Mundane, personal spirituality3 Comments

This video does a remarkable job illuminating one of the most important community (island-wide, and so national) celebrations in Taiwan. You follow a group of first-time participants on the pilgrimage and learn about the festival’s history, the lore and mythology of Mazu (older generations spell it Matsu), and her spiritual, communal, and political significance.

It’s from one of my favorite YouTube channels @TaiwanExplained, produced by TaiwanPlus, an English-language news and entertainment platform educating the international community on all things Taiwan.

The video covers a nine-day pilgrimage, though some devotees do a seven-day pilgrimage. It starts with three statues featuring the triple aspects of the goddess Matsu 三媽, carried in a traditional sedan chair, from the Matsu Temple in Taichung, to go on a 60-mile pilgrimage by foot toward the Fongtian Temple in Chiayi. Devotees stop at many temples along the way, and join in various types of local festivities at each stop.

For the mystic-oriented, it’s a week of sleep deprivation, overload to your physical senses, just walking through a constant haze of incense smoke, firecrackers, a lot of dancing and celebration, drinking, and socializing with complete strangers that, within a very short period of time become like family. It also, in effect, becomes one of the largest outdoor gatherings of spirit-mediums, diviners, psychics, and channelers you’ll experience.

Continue reading “The Great Nine-Day Matsu Pilgrimage” →

Strategic Communications and People Skills Workbook

On By benebellIn free download, personal, personal spirituality21 Comments
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.
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.

Improving Emotional Intelligence (EQ). What is Strategic Empathy.

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??)

Speech Cadence Skills

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.

Continue reading “Strategic Communications and People Skills Workbook” →

MBTi Archetypes for Tarot and Animal Lovers: The Oneful Tarot by Maggie Man Sin Lee, Ph.D.

On By benebellIn deck review, free download, personal spirituality, Sightsee the Tarot, tarot, tarot community, tarot exercises, tarot symbolism2 Comments

The Oneful Tarot is inspired by MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) personality archetypes and using the tarot to recognize our personality patterns. It was created by Dr. Maggie Man Sin Lee, a Hong Kong-based academic researcher, caregiver advocate, naturopath, and corporate wellness consultant, and brought vividly to life by illustrator Chinkal Pareek.

NOTE: If you’d like to download my personal notes on the MBTi personality profiles for the tarot court cards, which I use as reference in tandem when working with the Oneful Tarot, scroll down to the end of the deck review.

Continue reading “MBTi Archetypes for Tarot and Animal Lovers: The Oneful Tarot by Maggie Man Sin Lee, Ph.D.” →

Asking Smarter Questions in Divination

On By benebellIn cartomancy, divination, Holistic Tarot (book), I Ching, I Ching The Oracle (book), Learn the Tarot, personal spirituality, professional tarot, Sightsee the Tarot, tarot, tarot community, tarot exercises6 Comments
Botanical Dreams Oracle by Lynn Araujo and Catrin Welz-Stein

I partook in this thought leadership workshop and learned about the five categories of questions to ask for more effective, strategic decision-making. Being me and having the interests I do, of course I immediately connected these learnings to tarot, I Ching, and in general divinatory readings.

Teachers in nearly every divinatory tradition or system talk at length about the importance of how you ask and frame questions for divination. The quality of answers you receive — be that in strategic leadership, personal development, or divination – is directly influenced by the clarity, precision, and intention behind the questions you’re asking.

Apothecary Spirits Oracle by Eric Maille, Michael Anthony, and Thomas Witholt

A well-framed question acts like a lens. It brings your focus to what truly matters, and in the case of readings, hones the focus narrowly on what it is you most want or need to know. The better your question, the more noise will get filtered out of the reading result, enhancing meaningful insight.

Thinking about how to frame questions through the principles of these five categories is really helpful, I think. Hence, this share.

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Building Your Identity Capital: Personal Spirituality Edition

On By benebellIn cartomancy, divination, free download, I Ching, Magical in the Mundane, personal spirituality, Sightsee the Tarot, tarot, tarot community, tarot exercises10 Comments

In an executive leadership workshop I attended, I learned about identity capital and how people leaders need to help their teams cultivate identity capital. It’s a concept popularized in The Defining Decade by Meg Jay, which in short summary is the collection of professional and personal assets that define why you’re great. This is subdivided into four categories: (1) skills and credentials, (2) social networks, (3) life experiences, and (4) personal qualities.

Identity capital is what sets you apart in your marketplace or industry. It attracts more opportunities, builds your credibility, and empowers you to be more persuasive. Even when headhunters don’t consciously realize it, they’re looking for candidates with identity capital in abundance. Those who stand out in competitive environments are the ones who are rich with these assets.

I found the workshop useful, so I want to share what I learned. And of course I thought, how fun would it be to combine those professional development learnings with divination as a tool for self-reflection.

Below is a free downloadable Identity Capital Workbook.

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On Preventive [Spiritual] Care: Nine Precepts of the Healer

On By benebellIn free download, I Ching, Magical in the Mundane, personal spirituality, Tao of Craft (book), Taoism, traditional witchcraft8 Comments

There’s this section in Chapter 9 of The Spiritual Axis (Ling Shu) from the classical medical treatise Inner Canons of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi Neijing), which in canonical versions is often designated as Verse 27 that I love for many reasons.

Nine universally applicable precepts of healing can be extracted from Verse 27. The way they’re worded, you can interpret them through different lenses and they still hold true. The verse functions as axiomatic to acupuncture, and to both the ancient and the modern healthcare provider.

You can read it through the lens of how to ensure physical health, and also how to ensure mental, emotional health, and — as to the primary scope of work I operate in — to spiritual health.

If you’re looking at it as a road map for your own healing journey, it works. If you’re a healer of any stripe, these are nine clinical axioms for guiding patient care. You can look at these nine precepts as applied medical wisdom, or heuristics for clinical decision-making. They work as key tenets for helping a practitioner refine their diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.

And finally, in my view, these nine precepts can be instrumental to helping anyone set the foundation of their personal spiritual practice. It’s designed in such a way that you can account simultaneously for mundane physical health and hygiene tenets and for basic considerations in ritual or ceremonial magic.

Continue reading “On Preventive [Spiritual] Care: Nine Precepts of the Healer” →