In Order To Have You Do A Reading For Me Do I Need To Pay (sorry If It’s A Dumb Question)

Sometimes I feel randomly inspired to make something witchy without a purpose or a goal in mind. I just slap a bunch of stuff together and craft a little doodad and it makes me feel like a point-and-click adventure game protagonist combining items in their inventory to solve puzzles

Besides card reading, do you shadow work? I may have some issues and I really don't want anyone to be aware of it...

I'm afraid not. Shadow work is really something you do on your own and at your own pace. It's a long and hard journey of self discovery and awareness that takes you into the depths of who you are.

I can only suggest you look up some shadow work prompts regarding your situation specifically and start from there.

I hope it all goes well for you 🔮

I got a reading by @planetbabysitter

It was absolutely amazing! Her reading style is beautiful, intuitive and so detailed, she touched on personal things I have been instinctively holding close to my chest that played a huge part in my life and even my identity. I didn't know someone else could understand me like that but she absolutely did and her reading reflected that perfectly.

It helped me navigate these feelings I had been suppressing for so long and understand myself on a deeper level, encouraging me to see things from a fresh perspective.

She gave me the clarity and guidance I couldn't find on my own and I highly recommend getting a reading from her, it's so worth it

Aura/Energy Color Meanings

This list is based off of resources I have found as well as my personal experiences.

As with all correspondences, this is a place to start from, not the end-all be-all of color meanings.

This list generally assumes that brighter colors are healthier and more positive, while duller colors are negative and less positive. Use your intuition to determine the true role a color plays.

Interpreting Colors

OVERLAYS If one color is covering another, this can indicate outer appearance, how others perceive them, or a blockage that is preventing the inner color from shining.

COMBINATIONS If one color is mixed with another in stripes, lines, or spots, the person presents both qualities in equal or similar measure.

MIXING If two or more colors appear to blend together, this can indicate strong balance and intermingling of personal energies.

SOLID If a person primarily presents only one color with no overlays, they are honestly projecting their inner energies.

The Colors

BRIGHT RED A healthy ego. Strong passion. Highly grounded. A survivalist’s spirit, highly realistic. Can indicate a powerful, competitive, energetic person. Indicates confidence. Strong personal power. Related to warriors, battle, and love. Someone who is used to being noticed.

DULL RED If you read the red energies in a negative light, it may indicate an obsession with the physical world, an obsession with the ego, anger, and a poor control of emotions and temperament.

ORANGE Confidence, good health, and vitality. An excited person highly connected with the physical world around them. Productive, sociable, courageous. Someone who makes a good friend. Joy, sunshine, enthusiasm. Happiness, creativity. Strong orange colors indicate good emotional expression.

DULL ORANGE Imbalance; pride, vanity, deceit, mistrust. Low level of ambition, potentially repressed emotion.

SHADES OF ORANGE Red-orange; combined with Red values such as passion and sexual desire. Yellow-orange; More joyful and exuberant. Can denote a scientific mind. Pale orange; Disconnected from physicality and the five senses.

YELLOW Awakening, optimism, easy-going. A sunny person, who is open and makes friends easily. Inspired and intelligent. Good levels of energy. Cheerfulness, mental activity. A person in positive spiritual development, developing wisdom, gaining new ideas, and mental clarity.

DULL YELLOW Over-thinking, highly critical of the self or others. Muddied energies. Fatigue from stress or trying to learn everything at once. Excessive caution.

SHADES OF YELLOW Light yellow: Strong spiritual growth, intellect, freshness, joy, and springtime qualities. Strong positive nature.

GREEN The color of nature. Represents growth and balance. Especially shows someone highly connected with nature. Shows strong Universal love. Compassion and a desire to be a help to others. A color of balance and harmony. A willingness to change and transform. Fertility, creativity, freshness. A restful, healing color.

DULL GREEN Negative ambition, greed, or jealousy. A negative connection with nature. Possessiveness, a fear of being unloved. Sensitive to criticism and lacking personal responsibility.

SHADES OF GREEN Yellow-green; Strong communication, heartfelt emotions, and improved creativity. Emerald green; Very strong connection with nature, good prosperity. May indicate a healer, especially an herbal or natural healer.

BLUE A color of relaxation, peace, and calmness. Indicates a steady and balanced nature. Someone who is deeply relaxed. Caring, loving, and sensitive energies. Easily able to speak the truth; confident authority. A strong sense of purpose, spiritually connected.

DULL BLUE Fear of speaking the truth, fear of the future, fear of expression. Disliking the unknown. Not preferring spiritual activity.

SHADES OF BLUE Light blue; Very strong healing energies, may indicate a healer or someone with natural healing talent. Speaks the truth easily and well. Confident. Tranquility, softness. Royal blue; Deep spiritual connection, understands the mysteries of life. Knowledge, power, integrity, seriousness. Indigo; Deep feeling, intuition, and sensitivity.

VIOLET Deep, two-way spiritual connection. Someone dedicated to their spirituality or the spirit world. Someone with great spiritual potential. Indicates psychic and magical power. A potential for, or an abundance of, strong psychic abilities. Ambition and mystery.

DULL VIOLET Neglecting the spiritual and spirit world. Spiritual greed.

SHADES OF VIOLET Lavender; softness, growing, spiritual immaturity. Seen in those with great spiritual potential. Vision, imagination, daydreaming. Deep violet; Possibly disconnected from reality due to major spiritual connections.

BROWN A rich, ruddy brown can indicate an honest and trustworthy nature. Someone well grounded. Someone who has what they need in life and is at peace with what they have. A good friend, giving and generous.

DULL BROWN Indicates a great deal of negativity, jealousy, greed, and insecurity.

SHADES OF BROWN Earthy tones;  Highly connected with nature.

WHITE Angelic or divine associations, indicating a source of good and pure energies that are manifest in this person’s life. Can reflect or hold other energies. Indicates a person pure and good of heart. A divinely protected person.

DULL WHITE Possible illness. Abusing the gifts the universe gives you. Misguided.

GRAY Can denote a spiritual awakening as the color may be ‘unset’.

DULL GRAY Blockages, unhealthy and negative energies. Unwellness.

BLACK Captures and transforms energy. May be related to psychic vampirism. Related to mystery and death. An unforgiving nature.

SILVER Spiritual and psychic abundance. A spiritual awakening. A gifted person. Nurturing and inventive with new ideas.

GOLD A divinely inspired person. May indicate a strong healing nature. Someone who is advancing and evolving spiritually. Very strong connections to enlightenment. Inner peace, divine guidance, spiritual thinking.

PASTELS A bright, young soul. Many aspects are still in development. Great future potential. A strong sensitivity. A need for serenity and protection.

RAINBOW Can indicate a healer, someone with evolved spiritual gifts, or a spiritually gifted person.

Troubleshooting Your Tarot Deck

I read a bunch of people for unnecessarily cleansing their decks but didn’t actually provide any alternatives! So I wanted to describe some of the ways I troubleshoot my tarot decks. Please, please, please feel free to add on.

Sleep on it. Literally. My favorite way of working through some wonky readings is to sleep with my deck under my pillow. I like to do it for 3 nights but you can really go as long as you want. You may have some pretty crazy dreams, but I like to think that means it’s working.

Change things up. If you’re dealing with repetitive answers, change how you approach it. Whether that means changing your spread, your question, your shuffling technique or a secret fourth thing.

Put the bitch down. I have found that doing readings too often can muddle them together (well, I’ve had trouble with reading for myself too frequently. Multiple people in a day is fine, but draining). Taking a break of even just a couple days can make all the difference.

Make an offering. Your tarot deck has a spirit too! Appreciate what it does for you and give it a gift. It could be a symbolic offering, like food, alcohol or some incense, or a new case to live in.

Give it a recharge. It might be acting funky because it’s tapped out. Use whichever is your preferred charging method. I like moonlight and sunlight (ironically, they are also cleansing methods, but it’s all about intention at that point).

Ask it what’s up. If you ask your deck why it’s acting out, it may just tell you what’s going on. Maybe it wants one of the other solutions, maybe it wants something else.

If none of those things work, then I’ll cleanse my deck. Sometimes it’s as simple as a smoke cleansing, sometimes it is reorder the deck and let it sit in salt for a week, it just depends on the situation.

the more i look into it, the more i'm understanding the "ignore correspondences" way of working.

if you look into any crystal or herb's correspondence, "protection" nearly always appears. not all crystals and herbs can be for protection, surely?

that's because people make up their own correspondences for things, and different people choose different crystals and herbs for protection, causing correspondences to clash a lot.

for example, i've seen amethyst listed as a protection crystal a lot. although there is a lot of history behind that correspondence, it does not resonate with me. i prefer to use amethyst for aiding with divinatory work, enhancing psychic senses, and sometimes to help with anxiety. i use other crystals for protection, such as obsidian and hematite.

so, there you go. if you see correspondences you don't like, go make up your own. nothing can stop you creating a path of your own.

Putting the craft in witchcraft by making a hole in a coin to make a charm but the coin is refusing to let me make any progress other than a little dent, bending three nails in defiance

tarot card reading except i just make "ooo" "ah" and "wow" sounds the whole time instead of telling you what the cards mean

hello!! if you don’t mind me asking, how do you undo a spell?

If you were the caster and you have spell remnants (the thread that was knotted, the wax of the candle that was burned, etc.):

Bring the spell remnant back into Magical Space (whatever space, mindset, or rituals you require in order for your mundane actions to become magical).

Perform Undoing actions on the spell remnants. Cut or untie a knot, melt or pulverize wax, mix ashes with magically nullifying substances such as salt and iron, etc.

While performing Undoing actions, also give clear linguistic Instructions on what you expect to happen. These instructions may be spoken, thought, signed, written, read, or be imposed upon your Magical Space in any way you prefer.

Tie your instructions to your physical actions, such as:

This spell is undone as this cord is cut, the magic binds no longer

This spell is melted and reduced as I melt and reduce this wax; the magic dwindles into nothing

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; my spell is consumed by this iron rust - the magic no longer functions

I highly recommend using clear and direct sentences to the effect of "I am undoing this spell and I don't want the magic to work any more" (for those who only use present-tense intents: "this spell is undone, the magic has stopped working."

Dispose of the remnants in a permanent way.

If you were the caster and you do not have spell remnants:

Consecrate a new object (new thread to be knotted, new candle, new piece of paper) to represent the old spell. Ideally, this object will be chosen or modified to resemble the vibes of the old spell as closely as possible.

Any consecration ritual will do. The goal is to give a new physical body to your old spell; you are making an "poppet" of the spell.

Once the new physical object has become synonymous with the old spell, perform the Undoing and Instruction method that was described above.

(New candles should probably be snapped in half or burned upside down; burning them normally is more likely to empower the old spell).

If you were not the caster:

The "poppet" method above will tend to work if you know what you're doing with things. However, one of these might be more reliable:

Method One: Bless a thread with binding, limiting energies (Saturn is ideal) and trap the unwanted spell by tying it in a knot. Then burn the thread, ideally while Instructing what is supposed to happen.

Method Two: Carve the end of a taper candle so that the wick is visible on the bottom. Treat this bottom as your new "active" end, and draw correspondences from the new active end, downwards.

Coat the candle with a pepper-infused oil, score the surface lengthwise with iron nails, or otherwise mark the candle with destructive and banishing correspondences.

While doing this, Instruct the candle that its job is to banish, burn away, and destroy the unwanted spell. Light the candle. (A temporary holder may be obtained for the awkward shape by filling a deep dish with sand, soil, or salt).

Notes and Bits (Beyond 101):

It is generally wise to construct all spells with "kill codes" in case you need to undo them. This is essentially a special sort of intent that you build into the spell which undoes the spell on your command.

To avoid intrusive thought anxiety, it is almost always best to have this "code" require a specific set of physical actions, such as writing "Spell Cast on [date], be undone and begone" seven times over on a piece of paper.

Undoing a spell does not teleport you back in time to before it was ever cast. Imagine a valley with a river. A spell is cast that dams up the river. The entire ecosystem of the valley changes because the river was stopped.

Later on we can dismantle the dam and let the water flow again. But the valley will not "magically" go back to what it used to be. The spell may be undone but there will also still be significant changes already affected on this valley.

Record keeping is one of your best allies in knowing how to undo your own spells. The more you know about your spell (or anyone else's), the easier it is for you to undo or counter.

Once a spell is undone, you may still have more work to do. Suppose someone hexes me. Even if I undo the hex, my house may still be filled with nasty energy and I can still have anxiety. I will have to do a good self-cleansing and home-clearing before the effects are fully erased. Undoing a spell is not the same thing as cleaning up after it.

In sticky situations, you may also want to cast additional spells to protect against the effects of the unwanted spell.

The cemetery as a place of power in my practice

Magic is often centered around location, especially places of power. Finding them, or making them. We do it when we follow the directions in old grimoires to go to crypts or wild places. As well as when we construct circles and sacred spaces in our homes or ritual spaces. We are setting aside a hallowed area for our work, a place to build force. A place of power. Some people find this place out in the forest, on the beach, in a church, their own personal temple, or other various locations. I found my place in a cemetery.

A few years into college I began getting more into ceremonial style magic, and the construction of a ritual space became a prominent part of that. I tried out various styles of circle casting, from calling the corners to demonic conjurations for the directions. As I was learning to cast a circle I often found myself without enough space to operate in my dorm. At home in my bedroom I could do a make-shift set up, but here at school and after when I had roommates space was VERY tight. So I began working almost entirely outside. I'd go to wooded places, beaches, parks at night and various other spots near my school to practice. 

After college I moved in with an old partner and happened to have an unmonitored cemetery near by. So this became my go to spot for practicing my witchcraft and any ritual work I had planned. Unknowingly I had created a habit of casting my circle in the same spot in the same way over weeks for various magical needs that arose. This connection with the land built up to the point where I felt a call and response in my environment. The spirits of the cemetery started to take notice of me and the work I was doing in their space, and eventually took active interest. It was at this moment that the way I saw the cemetery changed, it had become a place of power for me. I felt safe there at night now and didn't even pay attention when that switch in my brain happened. 

My draw to this cemetery was purely circumstantial, and it being a good available working place for my craft. My practice has blossomed here, as most of my spirit court has come out of my work done on those grounds. As I reflect, you'd think based on my craft now that I had some kinda obsession with the dead, but that was never really the initial drive. I'd say that affinity has grown from this relationship with this location. Which I think in turn lends itself back to the cemetery becoming a focal point of me consistently.

I've done some much circle casting and ritual work in that space that I no longer feel it's necessary there when I'm working at night. The space is liminal and separate enough without the pomp and circumstance of ritual that I can just begin the work that needs doing and get on my way. Keeping me from having to be out longer than I have too, avoiding any unwanted eyes. 

Many things lend themself to doing magic in a cemetery. There's it's obvious connection with the underworld and the dead being a place we bury our deceased, but I also see my local cemetery as a place of living since many animals and plants call it home. It's large enough that I've seen coyotes, eagles, fireflys, and other little critters there, as well as variety of plant life. There are also the mourners and the workers in this graveyard who are characters of this space too. So I use this cemetery as an access point/nexus, through which i can connect with the land and it's spirits. I use the graveyard as as a point of communion, with the spirit of my city and other realms. 

Another facet that gives power to my work is the emotional energy that pools in graveyards. Grief is a powerful experience that brings forth many emotions, and this cemetery holds children, veterans, and founding members of my town. So the psychic weight in this place can be heavy, loaded, and complicated. Which is something a skilled practitioner can draw on. I've also found that spirits from this graveyard love to feed on grand displays of emotion, joyous or sorrowful. So often I'll capitalize on that and use this was an emotional outlet that nourishes my spirits. Plus no one thinks twice of someone having a good cry in a cemetery.

Through my time in this space I've built in a intimate connection with it as an access point for Spirit. Making it more than just a place of power for simply being a cemetery, it is truly a holy place set aside from others in my practice.