Category: personal

The Holistic Tarot Rewrite for Audiobook Format

On By benebellIn book writing, Holistic Tarot (book), personal2 Comments

Phew! I finally finished by re-write of Holistic Tarot for the audiobook version! Earlier this year I shared here that I was doing an abridged and revised, updated version of my inaugural 2015 book, Holistic Tarot to be narrated as an audiobook.

I think it’s funny how writing 250,000 words back in 2012 took me one Thanksgiving holiday break to complete (not really, it’s a bit more complicated and nuanced than that), whereas editing it into a 78,000 word book took me the greater part of a whole year.

Though again, that’s reductive and not really an accurate representation. What I actually did that Thanksgiving 2012 was spend a week assembling a binder of old tarot journal notes gathered over 20 years and stitched it into a tarot fundamentals book by working on it obsessively every single minute, day to night, pulling all-nighters, for seven days straight, no breaks.

Whereas this revised, shortened version was me working on it a few hours at a time, here and there, bit by bit, and going weeks without touching it at all.

For the audiobook, I had to reduce the word count from 250K to a contractually bound “50,000 – 70,000 words and will not exceed 85,000 words.”

Some major reconstructive surgery later, this version is now — get this — 7 chapters (a septenary), featuring 21 guided tarot exercises listed in the table of contents, but actually 22 total exercises– one of them is not explicitly labeled as “Exercise #__” but precedes Exercise #21, immediately following Exercise #20. =) Just a little RWS Pictorial Key easter egg.

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Finding Our Way Home: AAPI Return to Ancestral Spiritual Traditions

On By benebellIn conferences, opinion, personal, personal spirituality1 Comment

My Afterword to the AAPI Esotericism Panel

Not too long ago Serena Saint-Sinclair hosted an AAPI Esotericism Panel where I was one of the panelists, alongside Angela Yuriko Smith, an award-winning Ryukyuan-American writer and poet, David Shi, a North Asian shamanic worker, and Yeong-Tae, a baksu (Korean shaman).

Earlier this year I posted on this blog and my Substack, “Are Asian Folk Traditions ‘Pagan’?” I also have an old post showcasing Asian voices in the tarot community. At the end of that post I reflect a bit on AAPI activism as I’ve experienced it through the decades. Just some related links in case you’re interested.

Anyway, to dovetail on the AAPI Esotericism Panel, I wanted to add an afterword to remark on this newfound popularity of Asian Americans returning to their ancestral spiritual practices. I see it on TikTok and Threads, and I see it among the local AAPI youth.

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These are a few of my favorite scents

On By benebellIn grimoire, Magical in the Mundane, personal, personal spirituality, traditional witchcraft5 Comments

For anyone interested — and also I’m documenting this for myself so I have an easy, accessible aggregation of my favorite scent recipes — I’m creating this page to house my “best of” recipes. So I’m anticipating that in the future I’ll return to this page and update it with more scent recipes.

I think it’s useful to approach everything I share here within the context of this past article I wrote, “Essential Oils: My (Hopefully) Holistic Perspective.”

Though that write-up is more about using essential oils with the intention of holistic healing, whereas here, while there’s a lot of cross-over, my main focus will be on scent.

There’s also this old post, “On Spell Oils (Cf. Anointing Oils).”

As you probably know, the quality of the essence or absolute you’re using matters a lot and can make all the difference. So two people following the same exact recipe but using different quality essences are going to get two very different results. Fruit notes tend to be more forgiving, but resins and some florals, no, you are very likely going to get what you pay for.

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Writing the Holistic Tarot Audiobook: Some Reflections

On By benebellIn book writing, Holistic Tarot (book), personal, tarot, tarot community9 Comments
Left was a photo taken with a DSLR fancy lens and then airbrushed, whereas Right was taken this morning by me via my phone, no makeup, no filter.

Recently my publisher reached out to me about doing an audiobook version of Holistic Tarot, but, you know, Holistic Tarot was like 850 pages, so an audiobook version would need to cut from a 200K+ word count down to maximum 85K. That’s like … crunch, crunch, crunch… 57.5% of the original book!

I like the idea of someone being able to put on their headphones and listen to educational content on the tarot while going about their day, multitasking. I could approach it as scripts to a podcast series, and each chapter is an episode that builds on the previous episode and leads to the next. So I said yes.

First page of Holistic Tarot (2015), written some time between 2010 and 2012.

That said, the project has turned out to be a lot harder than I initially presumed. You can’t just cut out 115,000 words from the original text with no revisions to the remaining text and have it make sense. Not to mention my printed book was graphics, table, and chart intensive, so now I have to carefully review the manuscript to make sure it’s audio-friendly.

Funnier yet are some of the self-realizations that are happening while I reread something I wrote well over a decade ago.

From my 2015 book Holistic Tarot, much of which was written between 2010 and 2012.

One, tell me why it reads like AI wrote it even though this was a decade before LLMs. Em dashes galore. Compare-contrast sentence structure (FYI, that’s academic writing; it’s kinda how those of us who get graduate degrees were trained to write, especially in legal writing. “It’s not just ___, it’s ____” is littered all over any legal brief). Or starting sentences with Moreover, Nevertheless, Notwithstanding, Whereas… I mean crap, that’s still how I write contracts.

Actually, we know why — it’s not that I sound like AI. It’s that AI was trained to sound like academic writing, and my writing style at the time was academic, and not just academic, but specifically juris doctorate academic, and those kinds of publications were a big part of what AI learned from. Funny enough, I do recall back when HT first came out, I got a lot of criticism about how the book’s style came across as too dry, pedantic, even robotic.

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Is magic and mysticism a replacement for trauma therapy?

On By benebellIn opinion, personal, personal spirituality, traditional witchcraft10 Comments

This commentary sums up my responsive thoughts to a certain heated, well, highly-engaged – we’ll call it – provocative discussion that was going on in my social network. The assertion presented was: Magick is not a replacement for therapy and definitely not a form of trauma therapy. By extension, anyone making such claims is unethical, misleading, and hurting vulnerable populations.

Just for the full context so you can catch me if I’m off, the quote was:

“Guys, Magick IS NOT a replacement for therapy and it’s DEFINITELY NOT a form of trauma therapy. Please do not listen to anyone who tells you differently. Such a claim is unethical, misleading; and even worse, hurtful to vulnerable people who seek healing. I am a licensed therapist with 20 years of mental health experience and an occultist. I hope this means something. . . . Jessica says magicians posing as ‘magick healers’ are no different than evangelical faith healers who prey on the vulnerable. She say the key is EMDR, not LBRP.”

I want to start by saying there is nothing there that I disagree with. In principle, the author of this original post is right. And also, this is the right messaging.

“Magick,” beyond Aleister Crowley’s definition of “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will,” is use of ceremonial rituals, sigils, visualization meditations, meditations in general maybe, mantra work maybe and so by extension, affirmations (?), herbalism to an extent, and various other “woo-woo” practices like candle magic, spell jars, spellwork, trying to time certain forms of workings to seasons, lunar phases, or planetary movements, and/or using divination as a form of diagnostics tool.

So what do I really think? Can such modalities that we categorize under “magick” replace trauma therapy administered by a licensed, qualified healthcare provider?

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2025 Year in Review and Reflection

On By benebellIn opinion, personal8 Comments
Random photos of my 2025 sights and experiences interspersed throughout this post…

Oopsie doopsie, this “2025 Year in Review” is coming so, so late. A bit emblematic of my 2025, though, which is anything online-related gets relegated to lowest priority. Eeps. It’s because this past year I’ve kept my work more local community oriented, and my focus more family oriented.

I find that too much gets lots in translation when it’s via social media. I notice how in person, we assume the best in people, but online, we assume the worst. In person, we delight in how similar we actually are; but social media would have you think we can never get along.

2025 has been a year that demanded discernment. Can you discern truth from falsity, what’s natural and what’s edited, what is authenticated and what is entirely AI generated. Economic fissures between the have’s and the have-not’s are widening, which in turn is stoking civil unrest, all while we ravage our environment.

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Seeing Auras; Ascribing Meaning: Sensory Experience vs. Moral Evaluation

On By benebellIn personal, personal spirituality9 Comments

Cross-posted from my newly minted Substack

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…

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When People Call My Work “New Age,” What They Really Mean

On By benebellIn opinion, personal13 Comments

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.

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Are Authors and Content Creators Obligated to Engage?

On By benebellIn opinion, personal, professional tarot, tarot community26 Comments

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.

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Create Your Own Metaphysician’s Day Planner: Downloadable Templates

On By benebellIn astrology, cartomancy, create your own deck, divination, free download, grimoire, personal, personal spirituality, promotional, tarot community, traditional witchcraft22 Comments

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 changed my mind and I am offering a “MDP Lite” version for 2026, which you can learn more about HERE. The layout design for many of the classic sections have been updated, and I will be updating some of the reference content as well.

You can still download the templates for the past day planner design and layout, however.

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