In response to a friend maligning and fear mongering around witches, I would like to come out and say that I am a Witch.

Witches are people who have accessed their inner power and use it to affect outer circumstances. That is it. They can be of any religion, any character, any person who you meet on the street.

I am part of groups and online covens that list tens of thousands of members all of whom hold normal, regular positions in society as well. In every group of people there can be people with bad actions or intentions. Certainly there are at least 10% of Christians who use the tools of God to harm rather than uplift, and so is the number of witches who practice in evil ways the same.

The majority of Witches, well over 90% that I’ve encountered, are justice oriented, moral, and connected with God in some form. In fact many of us connect with God through our work even if we don’t call it that. There are Christian people who say that to do so is to trust the devil in sheep’s clothing to believe that what we are doing is related to God at all. And I will state that anyone who says God can only exist in one place, such as the church and only through the church’s authority, is actually doing the work of the devil, unfortunately. To separate, divide, and disempower. So much so that the killing of hundreds of thousands of women was justified under this thinking, as was the quelling of women’s inner fire, power, wisdom, and contribution to society through fear which allowed for the flourishing of the unchecked patriarchal society we live in today. A society that within the last hundred or so years has destroyed itself and created widespread misery, things the devil and evil feeds on.

So to say, that kind of compartmentalized and control-based thinking is dangerous. I find my God through my body, I find my God in the trees, I find my God in dreams and divination among a Universe eons older than the Christian church or any church or even human kind. I trust in the forces of life and I do not need to snuff them out to see my sense of control and power rise. I do not grasp my power at the hands of the vulnerable. I am in flow with the forces of life, the forces of Good that are in actuality neutral.

I am a witch and I use it for good. I am a witch and I declare that all people who have heard their inner voice speak and have listened to it are too. For this is what witchcraft is all about– internal, spiritual empowerment that is our Divine birth right to make manifest through our miraculous physical bodies. How we choose to do that is as varied and unchecked as every individual human on this planet, and maybe that is what is so fearful about it.

Through witchcraft, anyone can do anything, through witchcraft, anyone can be powerful. But I will say at this point in time in the recovery of our kind and our practice, which is also the recovery of the feminine spirit, the people who have found the path of witchcraft have been beaten into kindness, we have had pain strung through our veins like bloodcells and we know the other side of that equation is evil. We do not want to become what hurt us, we want to heal what hurts us and what at the depths of humanity on an energetic level, that will manifest regardless of whether we practice or not, is hurting everyone. We work to mitigate that pain in our own lives and the lives of others.

Witches are healers, witches are seers, witches are feelers and that is what makes us so dangerous to systems of oppression and to the forces of evil. Because the Truth lives in your body, it lives in your feelings, in your intuition, and your dreams. It may be buried under miles of conditioning and disconnection but it still speaks. So the next time you hear someone malign a witch, or even disregard our power, I want you to think about the motivation and fear behind those statements. The next time you think this isn’t real and these self proclaimed witches are delusional, which is the more common sentiment rather than malice, I want you to think why you have been led to think that when so many of us who have experienced the depths of life have been led directly here and initiated as such.

I don’t like this discarding kind of thinking personally because I see it as keeping the feminist movement of inner reclamation down. It makes women’s power seem trivial and insane. It convinces us not to believe in ourselves in our inborn power because it isn’t routed through a vetted, patriarchal, profitable institution, because we ourselves own it.

I don’t like this kind of thinking because it was used to murder and oppress women for centuries essentially snuffing out our biological and generational experience of our power and gaslighting us against it so that we don’t even recognize it when we see it, so that we don’t recognize the abuse to our person as it is happening and become complicit in it.

I don’t like this kind of thinking because I know there are millions of witches out there all meant to wake up to their own unique, divinely ordained way and that in a society that oppresses as much as it does anything else, they will never realize their power or their potential to change the world on the collective level as well as in the physical with their divine, aligned innate power.

I don’t like this thinking cause it has convinced women to go out instead of in. To look for acceptance, permission, advice, to mistrust ourselves and our gut and our intuition which is THE MOST powerful thing about us.

Women: look inside and see what happens. Trust what happens inside, stand by it, validate it and go out on a ledge and try it in the world, listen to what your Soul is speaking and you may be surprised. You may find you are a witch. It may seem radical but its only cause we live in a world that maligns us to control us. Be the change, it starts with you, but as you’ve never been taught, that change starts by listening inside you.