How The Practices Of 5 Mystic Women Can Transform Your V-Day

It’s been a brutal trip around the sun since we last paused to collectively celebrate Eros and Cupid. And this February 14, many of us will find ourselves alone in our homes—once again. But this Valentine’s day does not have to amplify the strains of loneliness and isolation we’ve all endured over the past year. I, for one, will not be focusing my love energies externally. Instead, I plan to spend the day tapping my inner Aphrodite and all the self-love she exudes. This will help transmute the poison implanted in me over the past year into the power to help transform the world. As with any journey, it’s good to have a guide—a (s)hero or three—who paved a way into the muddy, mystic depths of themselves. Below I’ve offered five tips gleaned from five powerful American feminist mystic leaders, past and present. You can read more about their lives and movements in my book An American Covenant, out now from Topple books. But for now, here are a few practical take a ways from their lives lived in the liminal:

1. Create a force-field of self-affirmation

The Love Witch

It was said that when Marie Laveau, the 19th century Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, wanted to project forces of light and creation, she wore blue. When turning to the spirit realm’s more destructive side—to say curse an abusive man or the white-supremacist powers that be—she opted for brown. She employed purple candles when invoking power, magic, and the dead. Pink conjured love.

You too can paint your own energetic backdrop. Decide what each color represents to you—then dress, light candles, choose food and/or temporary decor accordingly. If red is power, wear red when power is what you want to embody. If yellow is friendship, light a yellow candle when you want to cultivate connection and mutual support.

2. Seek stillness

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In 1857, when she was just 17, Spiritualist trance medium Cora L.V. Scott became one of the most famous women in America. Standing before packed auditoriums, she channeled messages about abolition, spiritual autonomy, and female equality direct from the spirits. However, before she hit the stage to inspire the masses with her golden words, she sat alone with herself and let the spirits take her then show her her divine worth.

Find a time to sit in stillness, stop checking your phone, stop tracking your 35 different streams of obligation, meditate for 5, 10, 25 minutes. Then open your eyes and begin writing whatever drifts up into your mind. Some call it spirit writing, some just journaling. Regardless, it’s a great way to unearth the wisdom and love of self percolating down in the deep.

3. Melt the boxes that limit you

Stevie Nicks Spin GIF By Alex Bedder / Via giphy.com

Lack of self-love often stems from buying into the boxes and labels that confine us. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who co-founded the mystic Theosophical Society in the late 19th century, preferred the more androgynous monikers HPB or “divine hermaphrodite.” In short, she never met a box—gendered or otherwise— whose boundaries she couldn’t blur.

This Valentine’s Day, channel your inner HPB and burn those boxes down. If it helps, do it literally. Write down every label or box you feel applies to you—positive, negative or in between—on a small square piece of paper. Light a candle, set each piece of paper aflame, then drop it into a firesafe container. If your done with it, let it burn out. If you like it or want to reclaim it, inhale the smoke. Because you contain the label, not vice versa.

4. Transform your daily routine into a ritual

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In the early 1970s, Z Budapest founded Dianic Wiccan, the first explicitly feminist witchcraft tradition in the U.S. Dianic theology and rituals seek to sanctify the milestones in a woman’s life and also the beauty in the mundane.

Every meal is an offering of love and bounty to yourself and anyone you’re sharing it with. Treat preparing and consuming it as such. Connecting with those in your home, or even on your overused Zoom, too can feel holy—if you create ritual containers that make everyone stop, breath and fully listen. For example, I’m part of a collective of artist-witches called THIRD SPACE. At the start of every Zoom gathering, we do a short group meditation then check-in on everything from the state of our personal artistic practices to how we feel about the state of the world.

5. Tap the Love

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On the Presidential primary debate stage, Marianne Williamson struck a chord that manifested a thousand memes when she talked of “dark psychic forces” running amok in America. But she’s been preaching how the power of Love can defeat that Fear force and create a better world my whole life.

In this time of Fear and isolation, one way to help channel a better future is to cultivate the Love Force within. Or as Marianne put it in 1992, “Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we have learned here. The spiritual journey is the relinquishment—or unlearning—of fear and the acceptance of love back into our hearts.” How? You can try Marianne’s guiding tome The Course in Miracles. You can read a book. You can employ a gratitude practice. Personally, I like to meditate while focusing on a pulsing warm golden light within—and then attempt to carry that force with me into the cold.