Welcome to Scorpio season, everyone. How is it treating you so far? I’ll tell you this: I woke up from a dead sleep at like 2am on Saturday, the first day of Scorpio season and could not get my ass back to sleep. And I’ve concluded that this is just how Scorpio season arrives. It comes in like a wrecking ball.
And I’m not trashing Scorpio. Not in the slightest. My mother is a Scorpio, my rising sign is Scorpio, my Venus, Mars, Mercury and Pluto are all in Scorpio. My 12th house is in Scorpio. I’m basically an honorary Scorpio. But it ain’t easy. Scorpio is intense and it’s very transformative and it can really be jarring. But there’s a reason and a method to the madness of every astrological season, and the purpose is not to fight against it, but to figure out where we’ve been stagnant and resistant and how to use this energy to evolve.
If there’s one thing Scorpio won’t tolerate, it’s stagnation. We can’t stop the transformation, but we can control the direction it takes and the damage it does. We are also at the beginning of eclipse season. This past Tuesday, there was a partial solar eclipse during the New Moon, and then exactly two weeks later on November 8th, there’s going to be a total lunar eclipse the night of the Full Moon, aka a Blood Moon. So it’s exciting times, a lot of energy, a lot of potential.
So we are going to talk about auras and chakras today, and this is another topic that was a suggestion and once again I did not write down who it was that suggested it. So I do apologize, I’m really trying to be more organized about that. But before we get into that, I had a question in my inbox from an Insightful Witch and she writes:
Aloha Eli,
I listened to your podcast yesterday and let me say it was very enlightening and I just want to thank you. Here is my question: I’m a baby witch but not new to magic, and I struggle with plants and herb usage. What I find fascinating is how you just seem to know what herbs and plants are used for what.
For example, the witch that wanted help with her health journey some of the herbs you mentioned were basil, allspice, and dill, apple seeds you said they are for discipline. So tell me how did you learn this? Does it come from just knowing? Is there a book? a website, a list somewhere so that I can know and learn what these herbs and plants are used for in “our realm” of things.
I want to do spells & spell jars but I want to know which herbs & plants to use in my spells. It is hard to go and ask for a book of herbs and what they are used for because all I get are books on the medical uses of them but not what I’m looking for. It is easy to look and see what crystals and stones are for but I’m having a hard time with this. I don’t want to have to ask someone all the time. I want to find it myself and create my own. Can you point me in the direction I need? And I’m sure I’m not the only newbie that would like to know the answer to this question.
So, as I told this witch, I have been doing this so long that sometimes it does feel like I just “know” which herbs to use, but the truth is, I have a couple books that I’ve read so much that I’ve just been memorized a lot of the most common magical uses for plants and herbs. My favorite book to recommend for this is called Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs. It’s well-researched, it describes each plant’s magical correspondences, and it also includes some ritual uses for each plant.
I do also use some books about traditional herbology for specific healing magic as well. For example, if I need to create a spell for healing an infection of some kind, I would include garlic for its antibacterial and antibiotic properties. This information is a bit easier to find, as this witch mentioned. Most books about herbs and plants are focused on traditional herbalism. But among these, I like a book called Healing Herbs by Tina Sams. It not only covers how to use some of the most common medicinal herbs, but it’s full of recipes for tinctures, teas, salves, syrups, balms and ointments. I love it and in fact, I just made some comfrey salve this past weekend with my 18 year-old. It’s such a great medicine for healing cuts, scrapes, abrasions, and mild burns.
So that’s something to bear in mind; if you do know a plant’s medicinal uses, that’s going to also crossover to its magical properties as well. Comfrey is such a soothing and healing medicinal herb, and it functions the same way magically. It does have some other magical correspondences like money magic, and astral magic, but if you don’t have access to the magical correspondences of plants, you can rest assured that if you know how to use a plant medicinally, you can definitely apply those characteristics to your spellwork.
Herb and plant magick is my jam. I love using herbs and plants in my work and intentionally in my cooking as well. So I was happy to get that question. That’s just valuable knowledge to have.
And now, let’s talk about auras. First, what are they? Well, auras are, very simply, our energy fields. And everything has an aura of some kind, just on like, an atomic level. All matter has some kind of an energy field, that’s basic science. But living things have a greater energy field. Plants have auras, animals have auras, people have auras. We radiate this energy to varying degrees.
And there are different ways that we experience and sense people’s auras. Regardless of whether or not you’re able to see other people’s auras, and we will talk about how to learn to see them in a minute, but most of the time, we feel these energy fields. If you’ve ever felt someone watching you and you look up to see that, I’ll be damned, someone is watching you. What you likely perceived was the touch of their energy interacting with yours. You sensed a foreign energy interacting with your own. But on an even more fundamental level than that, we feel people’s energies all the time.
Some people have big, bold auras. I’m sure you know people, and maybe you’re one of them, who lights up a room just by entering it. They show up and it’s like, suddenly the party starts. These people have an energy, a vibe, an aura about them that affects others really strongly. Some people affect the energy of a room in a very negative way.
If you’ve ever known someone, or maybe you’ve just heard the expression when someone is very negative and awful to be around, we say they suck the air out of the room. And this is because they also have a very powerful aura, but the energy of their aura is negative, gloomy, angry, cynical, pessimistic. When we say we need to protect our energy, we’re talking about protecting our aura.
These energy fields also radiate a unique frequency. If you’ve ever met someone and it seemed like you just clicked from the get, right off the bat, it’s probably because your energies, your auras, are on very similar frequencies and it’s easy to feel comfortable with that person very quickly. Conversely, if you’ve ever met someone and you just did not mesh with them at all. Like, you could not figure them out, they just weren’t on the same wavelength as you are, even if they didn’t really do anything weird or offside, you just did not vibe with them, it’s likely that their aura is just on a completely different frequency.
Another thing about auras to bear in mind is that they fluctuate. Throughout our lives, our auras do not remain perfectly stable or static. Their color, the size, the shape of our aura, will change and this isn’t a bad thing. This is normal. Depending on the phase in our life, depending on what’s happening to us or around us, depending on our mental state. There are a lot of factors that affect our aura. Not just throughout our lives, but even throughout a day.
For the most part, at the beginning of a day, your aura is going to be at its most vibrant. But throughout the course of the day, our energy wanes a little bit. It’s also going to be affected by the auras of those people around us. If you’re a person who thrives on the energy of other people, who really loves being around people, this isn’t going to be such a big factor, but for others, being around the energies of so many other people is very taxing. It takes a lot out of us.
So there are a lot of ways that we experience one another’s auras that go beyond seeing them. And I might argue that seeing auras isn’t even that important. We aren’t all that affected by seeing someone else’s aura. It’s the way that their aura and their energies interact with our own that is the much bigger deal. This is what we need to be mindful of when we are interacting with other people, when we feel ourselves reacting to other people’s energies and their energetic frequencies, this is when we can become affected for better and often for worse.
This is what peer pressure is about and why it’s such a big deal for young people. When we are young, we aren’t as aware of our own auras and energies and we aren’t generally as protective of our own boundaries. So when we encounter someone who has a very forceful and vibrant aura, it can more easily infiltrate our own energetic frequency. And if it’s a group of our peers who are all resonating together at a similar frequency, forget it. Our own little fledgling auras are just overrun. It’s a lot easier for our frequency to change to match the group than it is for us as individuals to affect the frequency of the group.
And the less aware and in tune with our auras we are, the more likely we are to find ourselves changing to match those around us even as adults. And this is especially something to be concerned about for empaths. If you are an empath, if you are very empathic, you are naturally more attuned to other people’s energies, moods, and emotions. This isn’t because you’re weak, it’s just because you’re more sensitive to the auras of those around you.
But it does mean that you’ll need to go to greater lengths to protect your own energy and your own aura. You’re going to have to make sure that even though you’re experiencing this foreign energy from the people around you, that you’re not absorbing it and internalizing it. There is a lot of energetic debris that gets stuck on us when we interact with others and it’s important to make sure that we shake that shit off. And we’re going to talk about that too. It’s arguably the most important thing we can do for ourselves.
But first, because I know people really just want to learn how to see auras, we’ll go ahead and talk about that. Now I am not here to bullshit you. This takes a lot of practice and it is one of those things that, if it doesn’t come naturally to you, don’t sweat it. Keep practicing, and remember that it’s not the only way to experience the aura.
There are a lot of exercises for learning to see the aura and you can google them or check youtube for videos on the subject, but the most effective way for me personally is to look at something that’s set against a plain, solid-colored background. White is the obvious one, because you can just look at something against a white wall. But start with something that’s alive. Your pet or your own hand are probably going to be the most convenient to start with. And you’re just going to look at whatever it is, your hand for this example, and you’re going to sort of soften your gaze.
I hope that makes sense. You’re looking at your hand, but you’re not staring hard at it, it’s sort of like the way you gaze at something when you’re daydreaming. Like you can be staring right at it but you’re not focused on what you’re looking at whatsoever. This exercise should not strain your eyes at all. You’re basically staring through it, your focus is soft. Eventually, and it does take time, as I said, you’re going to begin to perceive a halo of color around your hand. The more you do this, the easier it will become to see that halo of color and the faster you will be able to perceive it.
If you have a lazy pet that sleeps a lot, you can do this with them as well. Just look at their lil sleeping bodies on the tile floor or on the rug.
You can also do this outside with trees. This was a tip I picked up in a book ages ago, but it works. So if you’re outside and the sky is clear, you can perform this soft-focus gaze at the tree tops and begin to see their halos against the blue of the sky. I don’t want people to write to me and be like, this is just the afterimage that you get from the rods and cones in your eyes being fatigued and overexerted or whatever. I know what you’re saying, but that’s different. Eventually once you know what you’re looking for and you’re practiced at recognizing it quickly, you won’t have to have a plain background.
You’ll be able to see at least the indication of an aura around a person no matter what’s in the background. There may be one solid color around a person, but it’s more likely to be a gradient of colors. There are differing opinions about what colors mean, but that’s a little more subjective. First of all, colors look different to different people and secondly, these are very diaphanous colors. They’re radiant, they’re translucent. They’re not like crayola colors. And believe me, once you start to see the auras of people that you know well, you’re going to recognize what those colors mean. The lovely, kind people you know are going to have similar color patterns, and the selfish assholes you know will also have similar color patterns.
You may also see little translucent sparkles around people sometimes. This isn’t something, at least in my limited experience, that I see a whole lot, but it is cool, and it does seem to be something that I perceive around very creative, very vibrant people.
Another way to interact with auras is to learn to feel them. And I mean to physically feel them. This is another exercise that you can do alone or with your pet, because they’re so patient with us. This is something we should already have a bit of experience with because it’s the same kind of thing that we do when we charge candles or sigils or what have you. We sort of call the energies of our bodies to our hands and then expel it through our palms. We can do this by holding our hands out in front of us with our palms facing each other maybe six inches apart, and work to create a small ball of energy between our hands.
Close your eyes if it helps your focus but you should be able to feel a tangible energy. It feels like a spongy sort of heat for me, but it feels different for different people. Once you can get that ball of energy, make it bigger. Pull your palms apart a little and let it expand, press them closer together and compress it. Work with this energy so that you can reliably feel it and manipulate it. This is something you can do while you’re watching TV, while you’re on the treadmill, while you’re sitting in traffic. This isn’t something that you can only do when you’re sitting in silent meditation at your altar.
To get your pet involved, see if they can feel the ball of energy you’ve created. Make sure they’re not paying attention to you, obviously, or it doesn’t count. So if you’ve got your cat or your dog friend laying in your lap or next to you on the couch, create that ball of energy in your hand, and then see how close you have to get to your pet’s back before they can feel it. You may be able to get to within 6-10 inches of your pet and they’re going to react. They’re going to feel it.
And these are fun tricks, but it’s relevant to being able to sense our physical aura so that we can feel more easily when it’s healthy and robust or when it’s weak and compromised.
But let’s get to the more important part of this information, which is how to protect and how to strengthen our auric field. Now, we aren’t always in a good place mentally or emotionally, and sometimes bad things happen and that has an effect on us and our energies. This is part of the human experience and we can’t prevent every bad thing that happens to us. But for the most part, in our regular daily lives, there’s a lot we can do to protect ourselves. Especially when we’re going to be in an environment that we know will drain us, or leave us feeling the funk of other people’s energetic debris.
Obviously, diet and exercise play an enormous role in this. But what people forget to account for is rest. We have got to get more rest. I know this is hard in Scorpio season, but we’ve gotta prioritize it. It doesn’t matter how clean your diet is or how often you engage in physical activity if you’re not allowing yourself to rest. You cannot function properly if you aren’t giving yourself time to rest. I don’t know why the hell we fight it. If my phone is on 5%, I’m shutting it down and rushing it to the charger, I’m not trying to push it beyond what it’s actually capable of. You’ve got to treat yourself at least as well as you treat your phone. So, rest.
You’re simply not going to have the energy it takes to actively deflect the energies of other people. And let’s talk about those people. Sometimes we come across people who just completely and thoroughly drain us. Maybe they know what they’re doing, but oftentimes, all they do know is that when they’re done talking to you, they feel better.
Well no shit they feel better, they’ve just siphoned off your very life force. When confronted with those people, the best thing you can do is realize what’s happening. This makes it a lot easier to actively protect your aura while deflecting theirs. If this is someone you know well, you’ll be ready to go on the offense as soon as you see them. But if this is a stranger or a casual acquaintance, it’s harder to recognize. Because our default response to new people is to try and let those walls down, and try to get to know them, try to be sympathetic.
And there’s nothing wrong with that, we just have to be mindful that we’re not working so hard to understand and get in sync with this person and inadvertently allow them to start infiltrating our auric field. To do this, we have to just keep checking in with ourselves during these conversations and ask if the feelings we are feeling are our own, or if they’re being projected onto us by this person we’re talking to. It’s easy to get so involved in a conversation that we kind of lose track of that separation. At least it is for me, I have to constantly remind myself not to get too intertwined with other people when I’m talking to them.
Unless we’re very close and the whole purpose of this conversation is for them to sort of unload and talk things out, that’s different. But when you’re talking to those people who are not your friends, or who do not engage in any kind of back-and-forth conversation, it’s all one-sided, and I know you’ve probably already got someone in mind, who just sucks the life out of you when you talk. And if you’re in customer service of any kind, lord have mercy.
Another thing we need to recognize is the energy exchange that happens during sex. I am not about enforcing outdated moralistic ideas about casual sex, but I am saying just be aware of how that can affect us and make us feel if we’re not vigilant and diligent about making sure that we deflect that foreign energy and make sure that it doesn’t interfere with our own frequencies. We’ve got to protect our auras in these situations.
So a great way to do this is to get yourself a protective stone and a stone that radiates its own energy. We will set intentions for it to help to bolster and protect our aura when we’re out and about and carry it with us. Jewelry is great for this purpose, and good stones for this include clear quartz and selenite. Charge them frequently, every full moon is a good time frame and it’s easy to remember to do it. And carry them with you when you know you’re going to be in social situations with new people or with those people who you already know are energy vampires.
We can also use smoke to cleanse our auras after we’ve been exposed to these people and these situations. Another excellent method is to get in the shower and allow the element of water to wash it all away. The point is to be intentional in clearing all of this foreign auric energy off of ourselves.
Now, if we’re already bogged down by other people’s negativity, or if we already feel like our auras are not as vibrant or as strong as they ought to be, the best way to recharge and rehabilitate them is to spend time in the sun. If there’s been a lot of emotional stress, a lot of physical stress, a lot of outside influences affecting our auric energies, if the in-laws are in town, I mean it, going outside and letting the sun shine directly on us is the fastest and most effective way to regenerate.
Fresh air, sunlight, grounding in nature, all of this is going to recharge those batteries much better than cocooning in a comforter in our dark bedrooms watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer and believe me, no one is more disappointed by that than I am. But it’s the truth. We have to take the fitness of our auras seriously. I find that I’m so much more susceptible to illness, injury, depression, unwanted spiritual attachments, I am less likely to enforce my own boundaries if my aura is already depleted.
And I haven’t even touched on chakras today. I’ve got so much I didn’t get to yet. But I’ll keep that on the menu and we will visit that topic another time, because it’s important. But not today. Today I just got a little long winded. But you know what, this is important stuff. We speak in such general, vague terms about energies and protection magick, but this is what it comes down to and this is what we are protecting. It’s our very life force, truly.
So do these exercises, or find some others online that you prefer, and work with your aura. Stretch it out, flex its muscles, really get to know what it feels like and how it moves, when it’s strong and healthy and when it’s not so strong, and how it responds to different stimuli. Because this is how we learn to recognize when it’s being compromised. If we don’t pay attention to how it feels when it’s in good shape, we won’t notice when it’s being mistreated.
So thank you very much for joining me today, have a spooky Halloween and a transcendent Samhain, and we’ll talk again next week. Write me at eli@middleagedwitch.com, or find me on social media at @middleagedwitch. My name is Eli Ro, and this has been the Middle-Aged Witch podcast.
