Category: personal spirituality

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 witchcraft7 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.

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Chinese Shamanism Meets Taoism: The Hidden Link in 3,000 Years of Magic and Mysticism

On By benebellIn divination, feng shui, free download, Fu talismans, grimoire, I Ching, I Ching The Oracle (book), Magical in the Mundane, personal spirituality, Tao of Craft (book), Taoism, traditional witchcraft7 Comments

Course Description

Let’s time travel and step into the mystical lineage of the Neolithic Wu 巫 shamans that laid the foundation for Taoist mysticism. This free public video lecture explores the birth of Taoist magic and the enduring legacy of Wu shamanism. We’ll decode Taoist occultism as it is practiced today to reveal the hidden history of how shamanism shaped the mystical practices of East Asia, preserving and refining early shamanistic techniques into a structured magical system, giving rise to Taoist mysticism.

Taoism is the enduring legacy of the Wu 巫, and how their oft-forgotten roots and history have shaped the modern practices of spirit mediums, Asian modalities of witchcraft, and Taoist ritual magic today. We’ll bridge the gap between the ancient traditions we’ve inherited from the Yellow River cradle of civilization and modern mystical practices, presented in a way rarely explored in the English language.

This is Taoist witchcraft decoded, in reclamation of the Wu 巫’s shamanic practices of the Tao 道.

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Buddhist Perspective on Death and Rebirth

On By benebellIn conferences, personal spirituality2 Comments

This video lecture is on what happens when we die, from a Mahayana Buddhist perspective. We also cover East Asian funerary customs, Buddhist beliefs and practices.

I wanted the video talk itself to be more philosophical and to provide a concept overview.

However, one of my key objectives for putting this out there publicly is to help Diasporic Asians who feel culturally removed from traditional Buddhist practices, but who then find themselves in a situation where they must provide a Buddhist funeral or engage in practices to help honor the departing or departed Buddhist elder.

When you’re in the midst of grief, you don’t want an exploratory ruminating video on concept; you want a checklist. You just need somebody to tell you what to do because you don’t have the mental bandwidth to think. So in that spirit, here is a checklist:

Buddhist Last Rites

PDF  |  DOCX

It goes without saying that the above-linked downloadable checklist is a loose guide of general recommendations only. Always prioritize family tradition, your culture’s specific Buddhist traditions, and what makes the most sense for you.

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Is AI Validating Psychic Ability?

On By benebellIn cartomancy, divination, Magical in the Mundane, opinion, personal spirituality, traditional witchcraft13 Comments
This is here because blog posts need to be accompanied by images, as you very well know. I typed into ChatGPT the following prompt: “Create an image that is an artistic expression of the [__one-word summary of main occupation, e.g., author, attorney, artist, etc.__] [__name__] based on the published works they’re most known for, public persona and platform, and publicly accessible information about this individual.” This prompt might generate text only, in which case your next prompt will be “Create an image that is an artistic expression of [__name__] based on the foregoing analysis and assessment.” Left image is what ChatGPT produced when I used my legal name and profession of attorney; right image is what it produced for the author Benebell Wen.

Long before AI came on the scene, I had already been wondering if maybe psychic ability in humans wasn’t as woo as we thought, and really, it’s just a rare few people’s brains being able to process “big data” they were somehow downloading from a collective unconscious, spot patterns, and synthesize that data in a way that now appears to the average person as predictive or supernatural.

These algorithms that seem to know exactly what we want to see, who we are, our preferences, core identity, innermost wants and values mirror what people often say about psychics and mediums– “She [the psychic] knows me better than I know myself!”

I believe clairvoyance, clairsentience, and claircognizance are simply functions we have yet to fully understand in a clear, practical way. But really at the heart of it, it’s just cognitive science and pattern recognition, much like what powers AI.

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Explaining the Essence Protector Talismans

On By benebellIn conferences, Fu talismans, personal spirituality, Tao of Craft (book)9 Comments

If you got here through the QR code on the box of Fu talismans at ConVocation 2025 that promised to explain what the talismans were, hello! Since this will be a publicly accessible blog post, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, hello, too — this is just going to be notes to de-mystify a Thing that I’m going to be distributing during two of my lectures.

Here’s what the full sheets look like, outer casing and interior where the actual empowered Fu 符 is. Because of the way it’s going to be folded, you’ll note that the left outer casing view has the Ba Gua printed upside down per that view, but once folded into the final talisman, it’ll be right side up aligned with the interior Fu 符. Same with the 64 stylized sigils (explained below) for medicine, healing, and healer.

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