Category: personal spirituality

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.

Continue reading “Building Your Identity Capital: Personal Spirituality Edition” →

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.

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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 witchcraft9 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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2025 Forecasts; Navigating Uncertainty & Reclaiming Power

On By benebellIn astrology, divination, holistic horoscopes, I Ching, Magical in the Mundane, opinion, personal spirituality, tarot, tarot community11 Comments

[This is a cross-post adapted from my latest newsletter share, which you can find here.]

2025 is poised to bring rapid technological advancements with artificial intelligence, an increasing need for global response to climate change, continued escalation of geopolitical conflicts, and deepening societal faultlines, with much of that all but written in the stars.

Let’s talk about general global forecasts for the year to come. We’ll cover the following:

  • Planetary Year of Saturn, then Jupiter
  • Year of Hexagram 44: Improper Meeting
  • Jupiter in Gemini & Cancer
  • Start of a New Age: Pluto in Aquarius
  • 2025 Tarot Triumph of the Year
  • Navigating Financial Uncertainty
  • Reclaiming Personal Power in Difficult Times

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2025 Metaphysician’s Day Planner and Past Life Astrology Handbook

On By benebellIn astrology, personal spirituality, promotional10 Comments

$25 Day Planner 2025 Bundle

Month-at-a-glance page spread sample

It’s that time of the year again, for the Metaphysician’s Day Planner.
You get the day planner customized with your birth chart, solar returns chart (note specific casting method), and what you’d like printed on the interior first page. 

Quarterly planning page spread sample

For 2025, the optional add-on is a Past Life Astrology Course, which comes with a hefty Handbook.

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An Overview of the Taoist Grimoire Baopuzi

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

The Baopuzi 抱樸子 (circa 300 – 343 AD) by the celebrated alchemist and polymath Ge Hong 葛洪 is a Taoist grimoire that I would posit to be the most if not one of the most influential and impactful texts on Taoist mysticism.

Scans of the text you see in this video are from here [四部備要], this copy of it archived between 1924 and 1931 as part of a national effort to preserve essential ancient Chinese texts. You can also access a digitized version of it via the Chinese Text Project, ctext.org here.

This write-up is the companion blog post to the video to provide some additional notes on the Liu Jia Secret Mantra and other fun (to me) tidbits from the Baopuzi.

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Witches Among Us by Thorn Mooney – Contemporary Witchcraft and Wicca

On By benebellIn book review, personal spirituality, tarot community, traditional witchcraft7 Comments

I’m a huge Thorn Mooney fan. I’ve been following her work since, gosh, over a decade ago when people were still uploading grainy YouTube videos of late-night ramblings about the Craft. Witches Among Us: Understanding Contemporary Witchcraft and Wicca (Llewellyn Books, Oct. 2024) is her third book.

In writing Witches Among Us, Mooney wears dual hats: that of the religious studies scholar and that of a longtime practitioner with experience in multiple traditions. In reviewing Witches Among Us, I’m wearing the hat of someone who is witch-adjacent. I do believe I am within the target readership because I am not part of the in-group of contemporary witchcraft or Wicca, and therefore I am reading this book to learn more about that group.

Continue reading “Witches Among Us by Thorn Mooney – Contemporary Witchcraft and Wicca” →