When I was growing up, I’m not sure my mother realized she was raising a fellow woman. At times it felt she was more focused on preserving the tiny ballerina twirling across her linoleum— an extension of her own grasp at innocence— than a human preparing to become an adult.

And I don’t fault her for this.

But I do look back on my childhood and wish, at times, there had been a fairy godmother to take my hand and whisper nuggets of wisdom into my ear.

She would help me prepare to be the woman I’d need to be, rather than preserve the girl I no longer was.

But luckily, with age and experience came a necessary and hard-fought wisdom earned entirely on merit. No fairy dust required.

And now I can look back upon my girlhood, or maybe even speak to another’s, and share the pearls of wisdom I gathered a little late, but gratefully, with my own two hands.

Here are 5 things I would tell my younger self:

You will constantly need to reclaim your body.

From the moment you’re born into this world, other people will begin to claim your body as their own.

They will pierce your ears and poke at your sides. They will highlight the inches between your thighs and craft laws to limit your agency. People will gossip about your weight, and hair color, and posture.

They will critique your teeth and tell stories about who you shared your body with, whether or not it’s true. You’ll be judged for parts of yourself that you can’t control and projected upon for the things you can.

And you will constantly have to remind yourself that your body is your own. You will reclaim your flesh again and again— from age, from the magazines, from your mother, from the girls on the school yard, and the office, and the beach.

From the men who think they own you.

From the people who legislate to ensure they do.

And it will be a life-long exercise in reminding yourself that you belong to no one. Your body is your own. No one is entitled to their pound of flesh

You will grieve the women in your life far more than the men.

The world will teach you heart break only comes in the shape of romance. You will read epics of love lost and stolen. You’ll hear of ships that were launched, duels that were had, and madness that overtook the unsuspecting lover.

But they’ll fail to show you the many other shades of love. The one colored for your sister and shaped like the best friend you made at summer camp. They won’t illustrate the shadow of your broken friend group or the mentor who showed you her teeth.

Within every woman is a deep desire for sisterhood. We instinctively seek community to fill ourselves with the magic of womanhood. It’s as if we were born with lanterns, looking for a circle to share our wisdom with.

And when these breaks in sisterhood occur, they will be the deepest grievances of your life. You may cry from a broken heart or suffer the loss of a prominent man, but no pain shall plague you as deeply as the loss of the women in your life.

They don’t train us for this.

There’s no 10-step glow up after the loss of your best friend. We can’t numb the shattered circle with a pint of ice cream. A set of baby bangs won’t dull the sting of betrayal from another woman you had placed trust in.

It is an entirely distinct and sacred suffering.

I wouldn’t wish it on you, but know when it comes, that your tears are not in vain, fore there is nothing so painful as a broken sisterhood.

People will minimize anything remotely feminine. Don’t let that stop you.

Whether through patriarchy, ignorance, or just plain meanness, society is often programmed to diminish anything even remotely feminine.

That is, of course, unless it’s being done by a man.

Your music choices, your fashion sense, the storylines you’d prefer to watch, and the books you’d like to read will all become fodder for the small and insufferable.

They will call it childish, unrefined, and superficial. People will say it’s elementary, or easy, or unearned. Your interests and your special skills will be mocked as antique and infantile all at once, merely because you are the one undertaking them.

It’s an odd thing to assume art, sports, careers, conversations, and crafts performed by the majority of women are simple and unimportant.

And if you’re not careful, they will convince you, too, that your tastes are mere consolation for the inability to be a man. And you will begin to label other women as basic and insufficient.

You’ll call them pick-me’s, and posers, and princesses; determined to exert yourself as “not like the others,” while denying yourself the intimacy of commonality and community. Especially where it’s authentic.

When we embrace womanhood as a verb, reaching into every sector of life, and imbuing it with its wisdom and mystery, we grow gleeful in our embrace of it and each other.

We can celebrate the things we mutually love and the principles we mutually uphold.

Don’t allow the world to condition you to believe that something wasn’t worth doing, simply because it was a woman who did it.

Get in the habit of recentering yourself.

As a girl, you will constantly be reminded to think of others. You will be praised for putting yourself last, for speaking most quietly, and for ignoring your needs to serve others.

Of course there will be no formal celebration for these acts of gracious servitude. No promotions or party hats. In fact, over time, people will entirely forget that you’re making a choice to center the needs and happiness of others.

You will forget, as well.

And before long, you and everyone you know will come to assume and expect this blind loyalty. It will be as if it was the divine order all along while you slowly wither into a shell of yourself, forgetting all you dreamed, or desired, or detested for your life.

So you need to get use to recentering yourself.

All the time.

Forever.

You will have to climb an invisible ladder within yourself and reposition your dreams as the Sun in your solar system. And you’ll have to do this again and again.

You’ll do it when you say “yes” when you really mean “no.”

You’ll do it when someone asks for more than they can reciprocate.

You’ll do it when you feel lost and far away from yourself.

You will be offered more opportunities than you’d want to practice prioritizing your own needs, and wishes, and wants. But it’s a lesson you’ll need to keep learning. It’s a power you need reminding of.

It’s your life. And you’ll never live it fully in service of another.

At some point, you’ll have to acknowledge that you’re no longer a little girl.

This is a tough one.

A key cultural element to womanhood is girlhood. And being infantilized through legislation, public discourse, cultural and behavioral trends is a cage built around us with the intention of illustrating how we should behave.

This behavior is meant to ensure us safety, public approval, and at times, even aid. Even when it doesn’t.

Our feigned helplessness bolsters a system built of dominance. And doesn’t stop us from being dominated or controlled.

And while the infantilization of ourselves must provide some psychological relief from carrying the profound weight of performance and expectation we’ve held since infancy, it denies us the satisfaction of completing our initiation into adulthood.

To become the women we’re destined to be, we must release the girl within from her servitude. She, too, must be allowed to grow up. She must be put her maiden hood to rest and become the Warrior, or the Mother, the Artist, and the Priestess.

She must be allowed to evolve.

Because we must acknowledge that we are no longer little girls. We are the women on the front lines. And the back alleys. We’re in the market and between the pages. We’re behind the curtain and in the center of the stage.

We are no longer children, but the strings of time itself. And we must take our rightful place in our own lives.

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I live in a world of dreamers. Ever since I was young I’ve been surrounded by people who willed themselves into better lives.

Whether through magic, mental reprogramming, or sheer stubbornness, I’ve always seen real life examples of people transforming themselves for the better.

But to be a dreamer is to also be a fool.

And for every dreamer I know, I’ve also met someone who believed they could do something extraordinary, but never actually got around it.

I’ve seen these faux dreamers stumble over every excuse as to why they hadn’t started or finished

something. I’ve listened to their lofty goals and desires. Nodded along to their intricately crafted self-concepts born of glitter and grandeur.

I’ve seen them onto a shred of potential as time slowly slips away from them, vowing to one day make their great mark on the world.

And I think: When does claiming a title or identity stop becoming motivational and start becoming a lie?

There are always versions of ourselves that we use to be, or currently are, or could be in the future.

And while potential never truly has an expiration date, how long can we hold onto or claim an identity we aren’t actually cultivating?

And are we doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring the reality of who we are to be comforted by an illusion of borrowed identity?

Recently I came across a post that sparked this consideration. It read: Psst. You are still a poet, even if you never pick up your pen again.

And, as a dreamer myself, I was surprised when my initial reaction was: No.

No? No?

But Lauren— is an acorn not always an oak, I thought to myself. Does a story not need curing, like a rich guanciale? Is potential not the sister of hope, the last vestige of humanity?

What is the purpose of the soul if not to eternally reach forward towards the greater than, whatever it may be?

And yet this contradiction within me refused to cease.

Acorns don’t become oaks unless planted.

A story untold frees no soul.

Potential is merely a promise unfulfilled.

How can the soul find greater if it refuses to reach past the lesser than?

It’s surprising to uncover a truth within yourself.

And sometimes those truths are unflattering.

Maybe you could be a great writer, but you sit there ink-less and idle, finding every excuse to shove your stories back into your mouth.

Or perhaps you’re destined to be a great chef, or lover, or teacher— but you avoid the kitchen, and intimacy, and the piercing eyes of your pupils, hiding in the corner of your life, as you cling to a title and identity unearned.

And as a dreamer, myself, I know the great comfort these identities lend to us.

They become a guiding light. They lift us out of our own misery and mediocrity, activating something within us that feels both ancient and infantile.

We become rerooted and reborn every time we indulge in them.

But too often do they become a crutch to the journey that lies ahead. We get high on the idea of who we could become without ever putting the wheels in motion.

It becomes safer to imagine ourselves draped in glory than drench ourselves in the sweat of pursuit. Which is ironic, because more often than not, once we actually begin the process of our great becoming we tend to think, “Well this isn’t so bad.”

And I wonder what great pain are we avoiding through these delays that the satisfaction of accomplishment couldn’t overcome?

And how much grace should we extend ourselves before we must forfeit an identity we’ve claimed without merit?

When does the dreamer become the fool? When does the heart of the man begin to dishonor the soul of the artist?

Are we so afraid of disappointment that we refuse to acknowledge when we are letting ourselves down? And how quickly do we betray the very potential we rested our laurels upon!

How deviously we snicker at the time left in the hourglass.

Where is the honor in pretending to be something we refuse to embody or invest it? Maybe it’s shame that keeps us in chains, binding us to inaction. Or maybe we just enjoy the illusion of potential, because it never asks us to wrestle with our own shortcomings.

We get to live in Dreamland without ever having to bring Heaven upon the Earth, as we float around like fallen angels in the haze of our misdirected potential.

But we don’t have to.

Are you a poet if you never pick up your pen?

No. I don’t actually think so.

But imagine who you could be if you did.

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Yesterday, the online tarot community woke up to the news that Alex Reads Tarot—a wildly popular TikTok creator with nearly one million followers—had decided to step away from her platform.

She hadn’t been exposed or cancelled. She’d hadn’t scammed anyone. She didn’t launch into an anti-occult crusade or crash out on a livestream.

She simply shared that, after more than a year of privately wrestling with her faith and professional direction, she felt called to step away from her platform and from tarot to explore a new path.

And a relationship with Jesus.

Then the internet crucified her for it.

In her announcement, Alex Reads Tarot (now Alex the Ordinary) explained that she’d spent more than a year wrestling with questions about her faith, her work, and whether she still felt called to publicly serve as a tarot reader.

After a long period of discernment, she decided to remove years of tarot readings, close her services, and step away from the platform she’d spent years building.

The reaction was fucking immediate.

Threads, TikTok, Reddit, and comment sections filled with accusations that she’d manipulated her audience, lied about her beliefs, abandoned her community, and invalidated years of her own work.

“But Hayley Williams put her in a song!”

And many assumed she would inevitably become another spiritual creator who eventually condemns tarot altogether. Or turn MAGA. Or tumble down the Alt-Right pipeline, like a Slip n’ Slide.

I mean, the accusations were incredible.

Some of that concern isn’t entirely unreasonable.

The online spiritual community has seen several well-known readers convert to Christianity only to later denounce tarot, witchcraft, and the communities that first supported them. Those experiences have understandably left people cautious.

But discernment requires us to evaluate the person standing in front of us—not project someone else’s ending onto their story.

Because Alex didn’t pull a Doreen Virtue.

She didn’t denounce tarot. She didn’t tell her audience they’d been deceived or begin preaching that everyone should follow her path.

She also never said she was specially leaving her platform for Jesus or Christianity.

She simply explained that, after a long period of personal searching, she no longer felt aligned with continuing this work and wanted to navigate that exploration privately.

Whether you agree with that decision is almost beside the point.

Because this isn’t really an essay about whether Alex is right or wrong.

It’s about what our reaction to her reveals about us.

She’s, by no means, the first creator to step down from making spiritual or content.

So why is our reaction to it so fierce?

The Hidden Contract Between Creators and Their Audience

One criticism surfaced over and over again: Alex admitted she’d been questioning her faith for about a year while she continued offering readings.

Therefore, people argued, every reading she’d given during that time was unethical.

And I just don’t buy that.

How many of us have stayed in jobs while quietly questioning whether they were still the right fit? How many of us have spent months—even years—trying to decide whether a relationship was experiencing a rough patch or had simply run its course?

Does eventually leaving a job mean every late night you worked was performative? Does the end of a relationship erase every genuine expression of love that came before it?

Of course not.

Questioning your direction doesn’t suddenly make your work fraudulent.

Sometimes the most responsible thing a person can do is wrestle with uncertainty before making a life-changing decision.

If anything, I think waiting a year before dismantling a business, deleting years of content, and walking away from nearly a million followers demonstrates restraint.

It suggests someone understood the gravity of the decision and refused to make it impulsively.

A skill the comment section has yet to master.

The assumption that uncertainty automatically invalidates every contribution you’ve made feels unfairly impossible to live by.

If that were the standard, very few of us could honestly say we’ve ever earned a paycheck with complete existential certainty.

What strikes me even more, though, is the contradiction.

People insist Alex should never have continued posting while she was questioning her future. Simultaneously, they’re angry that she removed the very content they now claim she never should have made.

She’s supposedly a fraud whose messages shouldn’t exist anymore, yet people also feel entitled to permanent access to those messages.

How the fuck did you pull that off?

The truth is, I don’t think this conversation is really about integrity.

I think it’s about ownership.

A surprising number of people seem to believe that once a creator accumulates an audience, they lose the right to change. Their platform becomes public property. Their gifts become communal resources. And their future becomes subject to audience approval.

But creators don’t belong to their followers.

We don’t own the oracle.

We Don't Own the Oracle

The internet keeps asking whether Alex abandoned the spiritual community.

I found myself wondering whether the spiritual community abandoned its own values first.

We speak constantly about discernment, personal sovereignty, and following the path that feels most authentic. We encourage people to question inherited beliefs, examine their convictions, and trust their own relationship with the divine. Yet when someone’s search for truth leads them somewhere we wouldn’t choose for ourselves, those principles suddenly become negotiable.

One of the quietest forms of intolerance is insisting that someone else’s spiritual journey must end where ours does.

And the more I sat with this hypocrisy, the more I realized I wasn’t really thinking about Alex anymore. I was thinking about what it means to genuinely believe in spiritual freedom.

Because freedom is easy to celebrate when someone arrives where we hoped they would.

As I continued reading the never-ending discourse, I realized something else was bothering me.

Everyone loved Alex while she was serving them.

Maybe this struck such a nerve because I’m a feminist. Because I also sit somewhere between the crossroads of Hecate and Jesus.

And because I’ve spent years moving up and down the spectrum of faith myself.

I’ve watched people leave churches, return to churches, discover paganism, abandon paganism, become atheists, become mystics, and change their minds more times than I can count.

That’s what human beings do.

We evolve.

It is our right.

Somewhere along the way, many of us stopped treating spiritual creators like people with evolving inner lives and started treating them like resources.

They became the place— not a person—we visited whenever we needed reassurance. Another collective reading. Another channeled message. Another answer to a question we were afraid to sit with ourselves.

Without really noticing it, we stopped seeing the person, glimpsing only the oracle at our disposal.

And this pattern feels painfully familiar and misogynistic.

We celebrate authenticity until authenticity means a woman sets a boundary. We champion empowerment until empowerment leads someone somewhere that we wouldn’t personally choose.

For a community that speaks constantly about discernment, sovereignty, and personal responsibility, it’s remarkable how quickly we stripped Alex’s audience of all three.

Some argued she’d harmed her followers by leaving. Others suggested she owed continued access to her readings because people relied on them.

But isn’t the entire point of spiritual practice to cultivate your own relationship with the divine?

You can pull your own damn cards.

You can pray your own prayers.

You can meditate, journal, question, doubt, and seek.

No spiritual teacher—whether they’re a tarot reader, pastor, astrologer, medium, or monk—is meant to become a permanent substitute for your own inner authority.

And why are we championing this dependency on women’s unpaid labor, anyway?

Perhaps the most ironic part of all is that the modern spiritual community often prides itself on being more open-minded, more tolerant, and more progressive than organized religion.

Yet when someone peacefully leaves the community without attacking anyone, the response has been astonishingly punitive.

We’re accustomed to making unreasonable demands of women. And slandering them when they don’t submit.

So naturally, people felt entitled to an explanation. Entitled to their wild conspiracy theories. Entitled to continued access to her work, even while criticizing its very existence.

They felt entitled to decide whether her reasons for leaving were legitimate as they pushed her out the door, while also trying to force her back through it.

Even the criticism has become contradictory.

Some argued she never should have continued posting while questioning her own faith journey. Others are furious that she’d removed those same readings after deciding to leave.

Was she suppose to eternally exist in a space of absolute spiritual clarity, while championing those in never-ending confusion, without ever being allowed to question her own path?

Where do we submit our permits for spiritual curiosity, exactly? Do we need stamps?

I mean, the expectations of a singular woman are impossible to satisfy, here, but they mirror the larger expectations placed on us all.

But this is what happens when we stop relating to people as people. Women as human. Spiritualists as sovereign.

And once again this demonstrates that this drama has never really been about Alex. It’s been about using her as a tool in our own journeys. And now that we can’t? We’re using her as a tool in our gossip.

I didn’t realize tarot readers weren’t allowed to retire.

Apparently, once you’ve built a platform around spirituality, you’ve signed an invisible lifetime contract.

You’re expected to keep channeling, keep interpreting, keep offering guidance, and keep making yourself spiritually available—whether or not the work still feels aligned.

Forever.

Because what you want doesn’t actually matter.

You work for us, after all.

Spiritual work is valuable, but the people doing it remain human. Their gifts don’t erase their autonomy. Their audience doesn’t own their future. And the fact that someone once helped us navigate our spiritual lives doesn’t obligate them to continue doing so for the rest of theirs.

We can’t celebrate the gift, then abuse to vessel that carries it.

We may be accustomed and conditioned to siphon women of their resources and magic without a single thought towards their own wellness, desire, or longevity, but we shouldn’t.

And I just don’t think that’s a great demonstration of community or the profound spiritual progressiveness we like to pat ourselves on the back for.

It feels more like digital possession. Oracles trapped in cages like spinning ballerinas.

But no one is entitled to another person’s spiritual labor. We don’t have to dance for you. Period.

And perhaps that’s the real lesson here.

Not that a tarot reader found Jesus, but that we still haven’t learned how to let women change, or leave, or revoke access without punishing them or demanding they justify themselves first.

Because if we truly believed in discernment, autonomy, and spiritual sovereignty, then those principles have to apply even when someone chooses a path we wouldn’t.

Otherwise, they were never principles at all. They were simply conditions for belonging. A silent contract the reader never agreed to sign

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Girlfolk is a weekly publication catered to feminism, mysticism, and pop-culture. Lauren Bee is a writer and intuitive based out of New Jersey.

If you’d like to collaborate with her or book a personal reading, you can email her at HiGirlFolk@Gmail.com or follow her on socials @womenreadtarot and @girlfolk.

Witchcraft has always been the pursuit of agency. Hidden in the back of the cupboard, tucked between the broomsticks and eye of newt, there has always been a young woman searching for empowerment, belonging, and transformation.

While some children dreamt of becoming rock stars and astronauts, I was born into a generation of girls searching for greatness at the bottom of a cauldron.

And the pop culture of the ‘90s and early 2000s delivered the roadmap straight to us.

We were born in the midst of a magical renaissance: Practical Magic, The Craft, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch; The Witches of Eastwick, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Hocus Pocus. Not to mention the countless made-for-TV movies and series that followed.

All of them helped us craft whimsical worldviews that stretched beyond the limitations of our tiny realities.

Our lessons in feminine empowerment didn’t come from TED Talks—they came from Blockbuster.

And somewhere between training wheels and training bras, we absorbed the lessons of these characters and built altars to their archetypes in our hearts.

They shaped us like cotton in a poppet, and we’ve been dancing under full moons ever since.

Few films influenced the wise and witchy women we’d grow into more than Practical Magic.

The Power of Practical Magic

It’s been nearly thirty years since Practical Magic was released in 1998, and we’re still putting the lime in the coconut and planting rosemary by our garden gates.

There’s something special in this story.

Within it are lessons in sisterhood, motherhood, feminine power, and the lineage of magical women. We explore love, loss, domestic abuse, grief, and healing. We witness the consequences of magical interference and emotional avoidance, alongside the realities of social condemnation and misunderstanding.

It’s a lot of meaning to pack into a film that essentially flopped at the box office.

But over the decades, women have meticulously picked apart its lessons, digesting their wisdom at exactly the moments we needed them.

It’s part of why we return to it at least three times a year.

But my favorite lesson—and, in my opinion, the film’s most impactful scene—comes in Act III.

The Phone Tree Dilemma

For most of the film, we watch the Owens sisters evade law enforcement, ghosts, and the prying eyes of their aunts.

But there’s one thing they can’t avoid:

The phone tree.

The phone tree represents more than a neighborhood call chain. It symbolizes the Owens women’s disconnection from community, belonging, and even themselves.

Trees have long symbolized roots, family, protection, and the connection between worlds.

By never fully embracing either their true identities or the ones assigned to them, the sisters remain on the outskirts of belonging and intimacy.

Sally acknowledges her power but never fully embraces it. Magic becomes a fractured piece of her identity.

Gillian, believing her magic doesn’t measure up to Sally’s, compensates by leveraging her charm, beauty, and sexuality.

Both sisters experience a splintering of self—partially numb, partially trapped in a complicated relationship with their own history.

And as a result, so do Sally’s daughters.

While the aunts encourage the girls to embrace their magic and eccentricities, their mother teaches them to suppress their instincts and hide who they are.

This leaves them at odds with themselves and the world around them, never quite knowing who they’re supposed to be.

Just like their mother.

Gillian, in contrast, abandons herself and her family in pursuit of love and temptation.

Where Sally runs from the pain of connection, Gillian runs straight toward it.

Her self-rejection isn’t internalized like Sally’s. Instead, it manifests through escapism and thrill-seeking.

Sometimes the Death Watch Beetle is a road trip west.

The Broken Branch

But the sisters are merely products of their generational conditioning.

Their story mirrors a much older wound, one established through their ancestor and matriarch, Maria Owens.

In the seventeenth century, rumors of Maria’s magical abilities and evidence of her sexual independence made her a target of abuse and ostracization by her Puritan neighbors.

Though she survives a failed execution, she is cursed to suffer a different kind of death: exile.

Widowhood.

Single motherhood.

And the rejection of one’s innate need for love.

The family curse she enacts is not only about protection—it becomes the embodiment of rejection: rejection of community, rejection of love, and rejection of self.

In many ways, the Owens family is founded upon banishment.

And it is banishment that ultimately brings them back together.

Ashes to Ashes: Returning to the Coven

In Act III, it becomes clear that Gillian requires a greater intervention than the Owens women can muster on their own.

They must call upon the coven.

In seeking to bridge the gap between their true identities and the people who have misunderstood them, the phone tree becomes a symbol of reintegration.

Sally must come out of the broom closet.

By publicly identifying herself as a witch, she confirms what others have long suspected, but she also dissolves much of their fear.

She not only accepts her personal truth but embraces it and begins to embody it as a source of power and pride.

This is where the curse first begins to crack.

Her acceptance starts dissolving the self-rejection woven throughout generations of Owens women—and maybe throughout your own family line, too.

By seeking connection and support, she allows the townswomen an opportunity to break their own curses of fear, judgment, and ignorance.

Now they can find the little witch within themselves.

This is community healing.

Gifting the Next Generation

As the women gather their brooms, herbs, and potions, there’s one particular scene that always stands out to me.

While preparing for the ritual, Sally—now fully embracing her magic—joins her daughters at the mantel to light the candles.

She leans in softly and breathes life into the flames. Her daughters watch in awe as they witness this ignition and immediately begin trying to awaken the same magic within themselves.

And this moment is so profound because it succinctly captures the resurgence of women’s magic and autonomy.

It illustrates the power of reconnection—with community, with our roots, with ourselves, and perhaps most importantly, with the next generation.

Sally hasn’t simply healed the past and empowered the present.

She has altered the future.

The candle, a folk symbol of connection between body and spirit, represents more than lighting a wick. It represents turning the lights back on within the heart.

And by modeling that power for her daughters, the family mantel becomes an altar once again.

The girls now have permission—from both their community and their family line—to finally accept themselves.

They have been ignited by their mother’s torch.

It is their Ace of Wands.

Sally finally emerges as the High Priestess.

And the community is now a coven once more.

Witchcraft has always been the pursuit of agency.

And women’s magic has never truly lived inside candles, herbs, or spellbooks.

It lives in connection.

In our willingness to embrace and celebrate the magic in one another, as well as ourselves.

That is what breaks the curses placed upon us by an ignorant world.

So the next time you plant a little rosemary by your garden gate, be sure to plant some for your sister, too.

You never know how badly she might need it.

Rosemary by the Garden Gate:

An Integrative Practice

At its heart, Practical Magic is not a story about witches, but belonging. The family curse is merely the symptom of the deeper wound of disconnection. When Sally answers the phone tree, she does more than simply ask for help. She allows herself to belong. And in doing so, she gives others permission to do the same.

As you reflect on this story, consider where your own magic may be waiting for reintegration.

Pull cards for the prompts below, journal on them, or simply sit with the questions.

1. The Family Curse

What inherited belief, fear, or story am I carrying that no longer belongs to me?

2. The Broom Closet

What part of myself am I still hiding from others?

3. The Phone Tree

Where am I being asked to seek support, connection, or community?

4. The Coven

Who helps me remember who I really am?

5. The Candle

What gift, talent, or truth is ready to be reignited within me?

6. The Rosemary

What small act of care can I offer myself—or another woman—this week?

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Remember: Women’s magic has never lived in candles, herbs, or spellbooks alone.

It lives in connection. And sometimes the most powerful spell is simply allowing yourself to be seen.

Girlfolk is a weekly publication catered to feminism, mysticism, and pop-culture. Lauren Bee is a writer and intuitive based out of New Jersey.

If you’d like to collaborate with her or book a personal reading, you can reach out at Lauren-Bee.com, email her at Lauren@Lauren-Be.com, or follow her on socials @womenreadtarot and @girlfolk.

My fiancé and I have been practicing our first dance.

Come September, we’ll be dressed to the nines, surrounded by our friends and family, twirling across the dance floor to signify our first steps into married life.

And we couldn’t be more nervous.

In between our song choices, clumsy steps, and deciding when I should be dipped or dunked, we had a realization: We feel embarrassed.

Embarrassed of tripping over ourselves. Afraid of looking silly in front of our family. Nervous we won’t “do it right” or undermine the formality of the day.

And standing there, on the living room carpet with the most beautiful man I’ve ever known, I had a second realization:

Love makes fools of us all.

The Language of Love

We sing songs about love. We watch films about homecomings and heartbreaks. We read novels recounting the struggles of passion and loss, steeping ourselves in the journey's of others, hoping to make sense of our own. We look for a mirror to our own longing between screens, and pages, and reality shows.

We crave a language for our desire. A pattern. A blueprint.

Because every heart seeks a metronome. We need someone or something to pulse alongside us, enhancing the melody. We are but moths seeking a flame.

This is how it’s always been.

And love comes in many forms.

Love can meet us in a romance, or a canvas, or the sudden awareness of self. We find it tucked inside of Bibles and cauldrons; hidden behind the Full Moon. It can wave at us from behind our children’s eyes, or in a tattered photo of our mother, or in the embrace of an old friend.

But love can never meet us in places of performance or perfection.

It doesn’t matter how many sculpt classes we attend or clever bios we write for our homepages; Love isn’t a product of the body or brain— it is born of the soul.

We can perfect our slick backs, comebacks, and social resumes all we like, but in the end, love— in its truest form— is simply an exercise in exposure.

To truly be seen, you must be truly revealed.

Embarrassment as the Precursor to Embrace

Human beings crave organization and protection. We like to put ourselves in boxes, draw out boundary lines, and create the conditions for success to occur.

We painstakingly curate our feeds, and homes, and backstories hoping to preserve an image or identity we want to emit for others to absorb. We want to control the narrative.

But love is a wild thing, constantly breaking the rules we set for it.

And love is perfect in this wildness, because it finds us in the moments we’re unlacquered. Love is the snort at the end of a laugh and the spinach in our teeth. It’s the ugly cry dripping from our nostrils at the end of a harrowing confession. It’s built from sweaty palms, and smelly socks, and dinners made with too much salt.

Because love is the ultimate redeemer.

It doesn’t care about our fantasies of perfection, nor is it moved by our performances. It wants to see us naked and unencumbered, dancing clumsily to the beat of our drums and signing loudly out of tune.

But only if the melody is true. It has to be the canto hondo— the deep song.

So embarrassment must be the precursor to embrace, because it is only in the honest exposure of ourselves can we be truly known by another.

Love wants to see the ugly baby picture, and the bad poem, and the vein in our forehead. It wants to take us on the dance floor to step on our toes. It wants to burp in our face accidentally and write something that makes us cry. Love wants to know when we’re afraid.

And if we spend our lives avoiding embarrassment, we’ll also spend it missing opportunities to be truly known and embraced for exactly who we are.

We’ll miss out on the art we’re meant to make, the conversations meant to crack us open, and the bonds we’re destined to build. We’ll miss the reassurance that perfection is not a prerequisite for our acceptance or success.

The good stuff— and I mean, the best things in life— are never truly free. They cost us all the things we hate to surrender: our pride, our curated identities, our fear of being perceived.

But connection isn’t built on illusions of grandeur; it’s built upon our shared humanity. Our mutual desire to be undressed and revealed. For our scars to be kissed. For our stories to be known and heard without judgment.

Love is a naked thing.

And when it comes to balance the scales between our fear and our fate, we must be brave enough to let that love shine through the dark side of our Moon— nooks and crannies be damned.

Because half the art is in the splatters, anyway. And all the love is in the wild.

So wish me luck on the dance floor. My toes will need it, but my heart will not.

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Girlfolk is a weekly publication catered to feminism, mysticism, and pop-culture. Lauren Bee is a writer and intuitive based out of New Jersey.

If you’d like to collaborate with her or book a personal reading, you can reach out at Lauren-Bee.com or follow her on socials @womenreadtarot and @girlfolk.

The spiritual community has a bad habit: Arrogance.

Recently, I came across a long Thread of a reader describing an experience with two recent clients.

Both had thwarted their messages, insisting they were inaccurate and off-base from their experience. The clients felt the advice didn’t align with their personal truths and asked the reader for a second-look.

The reader declined.

They explained that these client’s dissatisfaction with their sessions was caused by two things:

1. A lesson in discomfort.

The reader asserted that ‘Spirit’ had put these clients in their path to teach them how to withstand discomfort and avoid people-pleasing tendencies.

1. A lesson in tough love.

The reader claimed that ‘Spirit’ had “told them” these clients couldn’t face or accept the truth about themselves. The reader was diverted my charged to “trigger” them as a catalyst to their longterm healing.

And here’s the thing:

As people, we generally don’t like to be told about ourselves. We like to pointed out and have our flaws exposed. We’re absolutely prone to lie to ourselves or avoid hard truths.

But that isn’t only true of clients— it’s true of the readers themselves.

When Attunement Becomes Absolute Certainty:

Once upon a time, I booked a session with a very popular tarot reader. She had a massive following on TikTok, had dozens of enthusiastic referrals, and an army of followers singing her praises.

What could go wrong?

I excitedly clicked on for our session. I saw her face appear in the tiny Zoom window and I was beaming with anticipation of what guidance might come through.

I was— as always— trying to grow my book of clients and expand my community’s reach.

See I, too, am a tarot reader with dozens of great reviews, but I’ve always had a hard time positioning myself in the market.

I can never really find where I fit and thrive.

And that’s why I was here.

Almost immediately the reader picked up a “fear of visibility.” And she he wasn’t wrong. I was feeling a bit anxious about being “seen” and I was excited to explore the nuances of this, because it was a real complication for me at the time.

But before we could get into the specifics, the reader spilled into a long monologue about confidence and how I needed to improve my self-esteem.

It was a flood of “you need to learn to love yourself” and “don’t be afraid to go for what you want” prescriptions for an ailment that did it exist.

I wasn’t lacking in confidence or self-love.

I didn’t feel unworthy of success.

I was actively being stalked at the time.

And I mean— penises in my inbox, I know where you live, “is something tapping my phone” type of stalking.

I didn’t need girl power.

I needed a restraining order!

I was in the midst of a genuine security crisis and she was telling me to meditate on my inner joy.

She picked up the right signal, but never bothered to explore the context around it and thus began prescribing remedies that simply weren’t applicable.

The Blame Game:

Now, I wanted to be clear that I adored that reader. She made great content. I really respected her as a practitioner and again- she did pick up the right initial signal.

But when I tried to explain to her that I wasn’t insecure; I actually felt very confident in my work and abilities, she assumed I wasn’t “ready to hear the truth.”

She brushed me off as an avoidant.

She was so sure of herself and the infallibility of her intuition, it never occurred to her that she might be wrong or slightly off-base. It didn’t cross her mind that she might be missing some nuance or important context.

And what was worse— even after I’d spoken up, she didn’t feel the need to dive a little deeper. She’d already made her mind up about me and that was that.

She caught the right hook, but followed her own line and sunk us both.

She minimized me to someone unwillingly to do their shadow work.

And I never booked with her again.

Arrogance is Not a Replacement for Accuracy:

I share this story with you for a few reasons.

1. It still annoys me.

2. I am deeply empathetic of the pressure and scrutiny modern psychics face.

3. I am embarrassed by how crudely, arrogantly, and ignorantly so many of my peers behave.

And as a reader I’m always quick to notice the patterns forming in our communal spaces and shared conversations.

Beginners fret over accuracy, self-trust, and imposter syndrome. Newly minted readers fuss about exposure and dissolving spiritual stereotypes. All while the old guard complains about the newbies and their lack of knowledge and discipline.

We’ve all got our little crosses (or pentagrams) to carry, I suppose.

But no tendency, no pattern, and no belief in our community is so diabolically dangerous as arrogance.

The Fear of Fallibility:

Arrogance seeps in quicker than most of us would like to admit. And we see this Main Character Syndrome spread across our communities like a locust.

We go from quivering over our cards, riddled with uncertainty to proclaiming our messages with absolute certainty.

In 3 years times, we evolve from complete idiots to the Oracle of Delphi, channeling with 100% accuracy and confidence that cannot be challenged.

Maybe it’s the You Go Girl-ification of spiritual work, but it genuinely really concerns me.

No one is 100% accurate.

No reader is infalliable.

Not every message is prophecy.

And there’s a bad habit in this community of automatically blaming the client when our messages don’t entirely align with their truth.

How dare they question our authority— all while

we undermine them as authorities on their own lives.

Yes, they come for our assistance, but we don’t own their narratives. We are not the authors, but simply the loudspeaker in which they can hear themselves more clearly.

We cannot call them avoidant, while refusing to examine ourselves for even the slightest moment.

Because sometimes— just sometimes, we’re the ones misaligned or mishearing or misinterpreting the message.

We’re not immune to projections or bias.

We’re not impervious to triggers or annoyance.

We get tired and hungry and cranky.

We can fuck up.

We can read it wrong.

Spiritual work is not an exact science.

It’s an interpretive art.

And if the subject of that art— the client— doesn’t feel as though we’ve truly captured their likeness, then who are we to argue?

We interpret the energy.

But the sitter is the final judge.

And when we fail to possess the humility to recognize the potential of our own fallibility, we become dangerous.

Dangerous to the clients who entrust us with their vulnerability. We become liabilities unto ourselves. We become spiritual autocrats who cannot be challenged or corrected.

We turn an exchange rooted in connection and compassion into something punitive and hierarchical.

We become the clients blockage.

I won’t ever know what happened to those clients I mentioned earlier. Or the reader.

In truth, I hope they never cross paths again.

But a bigger hope I carry in my heart is that we, as a community, don’t allow ourselves to become so hardened by scrutiny that we pressure ourselves into swords instead of diamonds.

I pray we don’t force ourselves to perform at impossible standards only attainable by completely disregarding the experiences of the people who hire and engage with us.

My dearest wish is that we begin to see ourselves as artists, not authors, and allow ourselves the freedom to be fallible, corrected, and teachable.

So our work can feel more like magic and less like management.

Girlfolk is a weekly publication catered to feminism, mysticism, and pop-culture. Lauren Bee is a writer and intuitive based out of New Jersey.

If you’d like to collaborate with her or book a personal reading, you can reach out at Lauren-Bee.com or follow her on socials @womenreadtarot and @girlfolk.

When is it time to break up with your friends?

There are few things more sacred than sisterhood. As girls we bond over Ouija boards and boy bands. We grow forward into our first kisses, first periods, and first jobs. Our parent’s divorce. The dream for the future.

We exchange every harrowing detail of our emerging womanhood, weaving them like thread in a shared tapestry.

And eventually we come to share the deeper and darker parts of life with each other: Marriages and miscarriages. Graduations and grand adventures. The death of our parents and the birth of our children, our business, and the next version ourselves.

We invoke and embark upon the feminine mysteries with one another like a sacred rite. We journey through life together— as a coven. As soulmates.

But what do you do when your sister has lost herself to the dizzying spiral of life? Whether it’s a toxic relationship, chronic self-centeredness, or some horrifying pipeline; where does Girl Power end and Girl Enabling begin?

We’ve all been there: Your good friend is trapped in a bad relationship and no matter how poorly she’s treated or feeling— no matter how hard you try to reason with her, she just won’t leave.

Or maybe it’s a ghost from the past. A pain. A trauma. A legitimate wound. But it’s been bleeding for years and your friend is hopelessly trapped in the past and refusing to seek help. She might drag herself to the altar of victimhood like an oracle at prayer and no one can coerce her out.

I once had a friend who was in her ‘Main Character’ energy so long she forgot my birthday. She wouldn’t show up to baptisms or graduations. She’d forget to ask people how they were doing.

And every conversation centered around one of her many, many micro-dramas. It was exhausting being friends with someone who lived on a one-way street. And many of her friends, myself included, grew tired of feeling like an audience member in the show of her life.

And we had to take an intermission.

Because sisterhood is communal. It flows and exchanges energy. We hold mirrors and microphones up to one another. We listen intently with love and consideration. We seek to honor and understand each other.

And we have a duty to our sisters— our own kind of Hippocratic Oath— to do no harm.

When our behavior, our patterns, and our unregulated pain start spilling out on those around us, we have to grab a mop and start soaking up the mess.

People can hold space for us, honor our recovery process, and show us grace. But when our behavior starts to negatively impact, or reflect, or influence them— it’s fair to suggest they might step away from us to preserve themselves.

Because being in community with one another can absolutely be inconvenient, but it should never be detrimental to our well-being.

I think a few examples of this break with sisterhood can be found in media and pop culture.

Back in 2017, I was 26 and finishing up the last season of Girls on HBO. In one of the final episodes, one character, Shoshana, essentially breaks up with the rest of the girls.

She tells the they’ve been flippant and selfish, always behaving like children. She expresses her frustration with always feeling neglected and unappreciated in their relationship. They’ve never truly prioritized her and sentimentality is not enough to keep this relationship afloat.

She tells them that she’s got new friends now— friends that match her maturity and investment.

She’s going somewhere in life. She’s moving forward to the next stage. And they’re still stuck in college.

It’s an unexpected and harsh reality check, but not one done without love. The girl had just hit her limit. This sisterhood has traveled as far as it could and now she’s returning the pants.

We peep this sentiment beginning to rise up in another character, Lexi Howard, in the latest season of Euphoria.

She’s trying to build a serious career and establish herself as an adult. Meanwhile, her sister and her high school friends are dealing drugs, becoming madams and undertaking entertainment roles she finds at odds with the image she’s trying to curate for herself.

Both Shoshana and Lexi feel harmed or threatened by their sister’s reckless behavior. And they make it known.

Now, a woman is absolutely entitled to live life on her own terms. I want to make that perfectly clear.

But how long should a friend stand idle through never-ending crises or toxic cycles before they’re allowed to walk away?

What if their belief system or behavior begins to drastically oppose our own? When does non-judgement become a co-sign?

Where is the line between support and enabling?

Especially when we’re at the risk of losing our own security or well-being. How much are we meant to sacrifice for those who cannot even sacrifice for their own betterment?

We seek this deeply complex question playing out in pop culture through the Taylor Frankie Paul and Mikayla Matthew’s drama. Both Secret Lives of Mormon Wives stars have been in a back-and-forth paragraph war over what constitutes a good friend versus an enabler.

We’ve seen this Shakespearean break in sisterhood occur in the 90’s, too, between Gwyneth Paltrow and Winona Ryder.

Apparently Paltrow was so hungry for a role in Shakespeare in Love- a role originally intended for Ryder— that she stole the script from her friend’s home, auditioned behind her back, and eventually secured the spot.

Sometimes it’s our own ruthless ambition that shatters the coven. Our pursuit of destiny, no matter the cost to those around us.

Sometimes it our loyalty to the people who hurt us or the behaviors that bring out our absolute worst.

Maybe we’re not mature enough for reciprocity.

Maybe we can’t look past our own pain to see the person standing right in front of us.

Maybe we don’t understand the cost and loss of friendship. Yet.

The I know the break with sisterhood is rarely caused by a lack of love. It’s almost always unintentional. And it never ceases to shatter everyone involved.

Because sisterhood is sacred. Woven into our DNA. Our magic reaches out to link with another; becoming more powerful and embodied together. Both more human and divine for being in each other’s presence.

But sometimes, our sisters are lost at sea and no lighthouse can steer them to shore. Like Odysseus, they must travel through the waves, learning lessons at each new island that we are simply not equipped to teach them.

So we love them from afar.

Maybe we send a birthday card or like an Instagram post. Maybe we cut contact altogether.

But we still love them from afar.

I am preparing to unzip myself.

Body, mind, and soul.

I don’t know when I became such a flimsy shell of myself; curled in the corner like an old pair of socks. But I can smell the funk of discontent upon my skin, reeking with mediocrity and self-pity.

No, no. It is time I crawled off of this floor and back onto my feet. They say that life is for living, but here I am performing the monologues of some imaginary woman born out of pleasantries and wishful thinking.

But I am tired of being pleasant.

And demure.

I want to be wild. To unleash something greater from within and run through the thicket with it between my teeth. To watch the blood pour from my mouth as evidence of a life deeply lived.

A life pursued.

A destiny claimed.

I need to feel like I’ve really taken a bite out of something meaningful. Something beyond my performance. That I’ve sunk my teeth into the flesh of possibility.

But I greatly fear this animal inside of me. What if she consumes the tender and gentle loves of my heart nestled neatly beside the weaknesses she seeks to devour?

What if she makes me cruel?

What if she runs off the very things I hold dear?

What if she is a wildfire— destructive and wholly uncontrollable in her pursuit. In her hunger.

And so I sit here starving— crumpled in the corner like tube socks; Out of fashion and crusty for all the wrong reasons. There are no miles beneath these feet. Only promises.

Promises I’ll never be able to keep unless I can get off of this floor and back into the wild.

So I must prepare to unzip myself and reveal my claws for all to see, praying they only carve through the clouds and not the silver linings which have kept me thus far.

But I must unleash the animal within if I am ever to pick up on the scent of destiny and hunt it down. And I must before the horizon comes to take me home.

Things were going terribly

As if all the world had collapsed beneath my feet

So I carried my flesh into the deep wood

And laid it bare upon the Earth

Watching infinity peek between tree tops

My mouth felt dry and salty

Like the beach during low tide

And when I parted my lips to speak

My cries felt like tumbleweeds

Scratching my tongue between yelps

And I returned to this hidden place

Sun after Sun, Moon after Moon

Basking in my sacred loneliness

Screaming unto the Void with abandon

Until one day the Void spoke back

I saw a hand reach down

Combing the trees through it’s fingers

Carving our clouds with it’s nails

All in an effort to reach me

So I reached back

It was a light

An essence

The very nature of Life itself

It was a spark, filling me with hope

Giving me a feeling I had something to fight for

It was a ladder to climb

And so I did

Ring by ring

And eventually I climbed so high

I thought it obvious I could grow wings and fly

And so I did

For a while

I soared and I soared

Until wind broke

And I started to descend

But then I began to flap my wings

And I grew strong

But not stronger than gravity

And I crash landed into a puff of dust

The smoke burning into my lungs

And though I tried with all my might

I could not take flight again

So I began to climb once more

But this time there was no light to reach down

And offer it’s hands

It was I who reached up

Grasping for it

Locking fingers with the air

Flesh against flesh

Bone against bone

And I kept reaching

But over time my wings grew dry and brittle

Cracking and chipping off at the blades

But something strange began to happen

My legs grew strong

If could not fly, perhaps I’ll scale the mountain instead

And when I looked upon the vast horizon

It was then I knew

That I was the voice in the Void

All along

The spiritual community has a mean girl problem.

Clique culture has long dominated women’s spaces. Whether we’re in voting booths, boardrooms, or slumber parties, we have always found ways to create barriers to entry for one another. Like children stomping clumsily in their mother’s high heels, we rehearse the hegemony we inherited from our forefathers—often most enthusiastically in spaces where we think no one is watching.

And there is no greater arena to exert one’s power than the darkened corners of the digital occult.

Like many others, I came tumbling out of the broom closet in my mid-twenties searching for a community of witchy women to bond with. I dreamt of long nights poured over tarot cards, tracking the phases of the Moon, and swapping stories about our favorite goddesses. I imagined covens built on mutual curiosity, and devotion, and care.

But it rarely takes long for these little circles to turn corrosive.

Before long, covens fracture. Conversations sour. What begins as shared fascination slowly curdles into bad-faith debates, subtle hierarchies, and the occasional full-blown cosmic catfight.

So many of us tiptoe into these spiritual spaces in search of sacred sisterhood—only to leave with a taste in our mouths more bitter than the herbs in an uncrossing.

When I heard about Spiritual Warfare, I didn’t know they meant the comment section.

Spiritual Mean Girl: Hostility in Women’s Spaces

Witchy women are the original cool girls.

Subverting the dominant culture, they have learned to take power into their own hands, write their own rules, and charge through life by alchemizing the very essence of it. This power—to heal, to individualize, and to decide for themselves—has cultivated a kind of confidence that many women have long been denied.

This create an especially independent, criticism-adverse, and opinionated woman. One with a keen intellect and sharp tongue, usually forged in the fires sent to prevent her self-expression. These women aren’t only spiritual— they become exceedingly powerful leaders.

But with great power comes great responsibility, and women’s relationship to their own power— and each other—has always been something of a labyrinth.

For most of our lives, we move through systems structured by the patriarchy—workplaces, academic institutions, and public spaces where the terms of authority have already been decided for us. In these environments, women are often expected to soften themselves, to accommodate, to support rather than dominate.

Spiritual spaces, however, operate differently.

They are among the rare arenas where women often become the majority. Here we become the teachers, the guides, the gatekeepers, and the priestesses.

But the problem with being the Head Bitch in Charge is that someone inevitably has to play the foot. And women, having fought so hard to establish their own power, often struggle to share it with one another—usually because we are still operating from internal hierarchies rather than circles.

It’s a classic trope: girl joins coven, coven turns on girl.
New girl joins the friend group, the friend group isolates her from everyone else… right before casting her out into the cold.

Popularity contests.
Loyalty tests.
Hiding bras in the freezer at a slumber party.

When the usual guardians of power disappear and we’re left to our own devices, something else inevitably rises to the surface: Our shadow.

And women who have been conditioned to serve and support others can find their instincts twisting into something more controlling and unexpected: overly-mothering one another, policing each other’s paths, or constructing elaborate rules about what is and is not “correct” behavior.

Just hen-pecking each other to hell in the name of sisterhood.

And while the spiritual community likes to pride itself on being a place of healing and awakening, but it can just as easily become a stage where unresolved power dynamics play themselves out—and we consistently underestimate this reality.

The systems of patriarchy and religion that we loudly renounced remain the quiet playbook energizing the spaces we created to escape them.

A rose by any other name, as they say.

In theory, we pretend these rules are meant to “protect the community” and preserve the sanctity of “the craft.”

But in practice, they often function as little more than spiritual turf wars. And once turf wars begin, the next step is inevitable: someone decides it’s their job to enforce the rules.

Keyboard Covens: How Self-Policing has Become the New Protection Ritual.

The spiritual community has developed a strange obsession with policing itself.

On the surface, we like to frame this as care. We tell ourselves we’re protecting newcomers from harm, safeguarding sacred traditions, or keeping grifters out. But beneath the language of community care lies something far less noble.

Control.

For generations, society has trained us—especially women—to modify our behavior in order to remain acceptable, safe, and respectable. We learn quickly which opinions are too loud, which ambitions are too unorthodox, and which desires make others uncomfortable.

The social order survives by quietly shaping us into more agreeable versions of ourselves. This doesn’t change just because we added in a Pentagram.

And without realizing it, we begin to replicate that same conditioning inside our own communities.

Guidance slowly morphs into a checklist.
Honest correction becomes harsh criticism.
Discernment become suspicion and assumption.

Soon enough, everyone is watching everyone else.

We debate endlessly about who is and isn’t a “real” reader. Who has the right to practice. Who is qualified to teach. Who is allowed to charge for their work. Who is credible enough to share their insights in the first place.

And at some point the conversation stops being about integrity and becomes a crusade over authority, legitimacy, and power: who can and who can’t, who’s in and who’s out.

And where does it end?

If every practitioner must clear an never-ending series of moral and spiritual checkpoints before they’re allowed to participate, the result is not a healthier community.

It’s a quieter one.
It’s a smaller one.
It’s a more fearful one.

We’re not just crushing up eggshells anymore. We’re fucking walking on them.

At that point, we may as well be laying hands on one another in the basement of a local church. Throw the witch in the river to see if she sinks.

In our attempt to protect the community from a handful of bad actors, we begin constructing so many barriers to entry that we suffocate the very thing we claim to love. And each other.

And so quickly we forget our own humble beginnings—the half-baked tarot readings, the misunderstood mythologies, the cultural context missing from our ridiculously impassioned debates.

We are quick to deny others the grace that once allowed us space to grow. We forget to consider where we still have room to learn, as well. We’re too quick to pull the ladder up behind us, leaving everyone else to fight it out in the comment section while we sit comfortably in our ivory towers of self-importance.

But the problem with towers is that they eventually come down.

And when we’ve spent all our time criticizing each other or ignoring the conversations shaping the next generation—we miss the warning signs that change is already underway.

And before long, we become the dinosaurs.

We’ll miss the opportunity to become the matriarchs we admired, turning ourselves into yet another machine for the next generation to rage against.

We are demonstrating what leadership, power, community, and magic is meant to look like for these young girls coming up behind us. And we might be doing a shit job of it.

The Purpose of Power: The Responsibility of Power.

Community is not necessarily a collection of people who agree with one another. In many ways, it’s our competing perspectives that make us smarter and more aware. We don’t need to be an army or a hive mind. A little butting of heads is normal in the making of progress—but how much advancement are we making by arguing in comment sections about who gets to call themselves a witch, or whether alcohol is low-vibrational?

I mean, is this really the best we have to offer the world?

We claim to be lightworkers, priestesses, devotees. We’re some of the few women able to publicly call themselves witches without fear for our lives. We can openly earn income from our magic, be incorporated within secular society, and be something more than a Halloween costume.

In many cases, we’re the most independent, self-empowered, spiritually competent women our families have seen in generations. We’ve finally come out of the broom closet and the back of the apothecary—not just to the forefront, but into the spotlight.

And we’re treating each other like stupid bitches over tarot cards and manifestation techniques? It just cannot be!

Here’s a joke I once heard on The Newsroom:

Moses and Jesus are playing golf.

Moses steps up to the tee—it’s a beautiful shot, 250 yards straight down the middle of the fairway. Jesus hooks the ball into the trees. The sky darkens. Thunder cracks. Rain pours. A stream rises among the trees.

The golf ball floats into the mouth of a fish. A bird carries the fish and ball over the green and drops it in the cup for a hole-in-one.

Jesus grins, and Moses says:
“Look—do you want to play golf, or do you want to fuck around?”

I don’t know about you, but I want to play some goddamn golf.

I want to focus my energy on supporting the next generation of tarot readers. I want to create work that is philosophical, feminist, experimental as hell. I want to rewrite the keywords, the spreads, the ways we experience the deck.

I want to host women’s circles and promote goddess worship, because women deserve tools, systems, and practices that reflect their beauty and magic. Our stories deserve to be heard.

What do you want to do? Create? Pass knowledge to the next generation?

Because if we’re only here to grandstand in comment sections and snark at each other, we may as well shove a golf ball in a goldfish and call it a hole-in-one.

We have enough work to do in the real world without wasting energy on micro-drama. If we can find common causes that are productive and progressive—personal liberation, religious freedom, supporting women-dominated spaces—we can finally focus on more meaningful work.

We can create circles instead of towers.
We can start listening instead of policing.
We can keep growing instead of stalling out.

Then we can make more than posts. We can actually make some change.

Girlfolk is a column dedicated to the enduring magic of women. Lauren Bee is NJ-based essayist and poet, exploring spirituality, pop culture, and fairytales in earnest pursuit of folk heroines and the medicine their stories can lend us.

She offers intuitive tarot readings found at Lauren-Bee.com.

Follow her on social media @girlfolkco and @womenreadtarot

Sometimes I grow bored of my own mythology.

The story of my becoming is an interesting one, I’ll admit. A Pisces born in a small coastal town named Neptune. A baby sick with leukemia makes a miraculous recovery. The child of a single-mother who never got to live out her dreams becomes a first-class entertainer, winning trophies and demolishing competitions. The first published poet in her family by age 12. The injured dancer takes to wheelchair at 13, but remarkably relearns to walk within a year.

The descendant of Great Italian Priestesses and Celtic Druidesses— the first in 3 generations to complete her initiations and receive the fullness of her ancestral gifts. The oracle who’s read for thousands of women across nearly every continent.

I’m a woman who’s overcome sickness, injury, assault, betrayal and the N.J. turnpike.

I mean, by all accounts, I’m really fucking impressive.

But all of these tiny milestones and pieces of folklore feel suffocating at times. Like I’m constantly meant to be overcoming one hurdle after another, in never-ending pursuit of the greatness those before me had prophesied.

And I’m tired.

I’m so well-known for everything I’ve overcome. For everything I can do there isn’t always room for who I really am outside of that sometimes.

Yes, I know a lot about tarot. Yes, I can speak to the Gods. Yes, I can interpret almost any symbol, or dream, or curate a spell to protect your house. Or reach into your past life. Or teach your workshops. And yes, I feel everything. I can see more than I should. And I can explain it all back to you in the simplest way possible.

But there’s this frustration I feel lately— like the truth of my story, abilities, and talents have become this twisted mythology, denying me access to my own humanity. I’m so accustomed to being impressive and knowledgeable and helpful that these virtues I sincerely felt called to share have begun to feel expected and performative.

And so I resist showing up. I don’t post. I don’t share. I don’t speak.

And that feels like sabotage; regressive and undermining of my own talents and potential and expression. And I feel frustrated, because I want to be successful and show up authentically. I want to share. I want to connect.

But what do you do when your authentic truth starts to feel like a caricature?

Have I always been a clown?

At the same time, I think: Oh boo-hoo, Lauren. So, you’re good at stuff. Poor you.

Do you think you’re the only woman, or artist, or oracle who felt boxed in by their identity? NO. Absolutely not. So, stop complaining, show up, and stop using boredom as an excuse to create unnecessary difficulty in your life.

Maybe my malaise is a privilege. A symptom of ingratitude. An unnecessary identity crisis subtly masking a larger mediocrity lurking beneath my surface. Because if I was really so impressive, wouldn’t I be happier in my now moment? Or creating something that I found impressive?

Maybe the only thing I’ve truly accomplished or demonstrated is the ability to survive. Overcoming is all I have. My folklore isn’t untrue— it’s just uninteresting after repeating it so many times, like an old war story from your Grandpa.

Maybe I don’t want to be magical anymore.

Or maybe I’m just ready to make a new type of magic in my life.

Something that feels impressive and interesting to me, too.

Because I’m bored of my own mythology.

And I want to become something more than a collection of sad stories.

There’s a particular kind of disorientation that comes when the path you’ve been walking suddenly... isn’t there anymore. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just the quiet realization that the road you thought would rise up to meet you has vanished beneath your feet.

The faith you had in ‘the process’ begins to sour and any semblance of a Divine plan starts to chip like old paint in a haunted house. The angels who were supposed to bear you up? Apparently on coffee break. And you’re left to pick up the pieces alone, striking your foot against every stone.

This is Divine Abandonment—the 'why hast thou forsaken me?' meets 'are you there God, it's me Margaret' moment. It’s not a dark night of the soul or a test of faith. Just the slow realization that the covenant you thought you had was more like a childhood promise: a handshake sealed with spit that evaporates the moment you need it most.

So what do you do when the divine stops showing up for you?

Most spiritual traditions have an answer: you deepen your faith. You put on your big girl panties and trust the process. You assume the sacred lesson—accepting that your job is to serve faithfully even when you feel abandoned, or lonely, or confused.

You must learn to give without expecting return. To understand that silence is a test of your devotion. And last but not least? Surrender.

It’s not like you can call HR.

And I know this feeling intimately.

I’ve been a spiritual worker for years—channeling, reading, holding space. The work comes naturally. It helps people. My reviews are fantastic. But lately, when I need support from the same Divine Source I serve? Silence. The reciprocity I thought was foundational to this work has... vanished.

I’m being asked to show up, keep serving, keep channeling—while my own needs go unmet. In a lot of ways I feel called, but not covered, and it’s really starting to wear on me.

Lately I’ve been wrestling with a question I don’t hear other mystics ask aloud: Can I keep doing this? Should I? Does Heaven have a 1-800 number I can call?

So I did what I always do: I went looking for a Wild Mother.

Someone who’d faced this choice before. Someone who’d been asked to serve the divine even when abandoned by it—and who chose herself instead.

I found Demeter. And honestly? Her story pissed me off in the best way.

The Myth of Demeter

Here’s what happened: Persephone, Demeter’s daughter, is out picking flowers when the ground literally splits open and Hades drags her down to the underworld. Just—gone. Amateur florist one second, vanished the next.

Demeter loses her mind. She searches for nine days straight, no food, no sleep, demanding answers from every god she can find. They all look away. Cowards. Finally Helios, the sun god who sees everything, tells her the truth she already knew in her gut.

Hades took Persephone. And Zeus—the king of the gods, the one with actual power to stop this—gave permission.

Not only did Zeus fail to protect her, he green-lit the whole thing.

So Demeter goes to Zeus. Begs him to fix it. Bring her back, she says. You let this happen, now undo it.

Zeus shrugs. The deal’s done. A gentleman’s agreement, if you will.

Persephone belongs to Hades now. He tells Demeter to accept it, move on, keep being the goddess of harvest like a good ol’ girl, and let the men handle the politics of Olympus.

And this is where the plot thickens.

Demeter could have done what many of us are taught to do: shut up and pray. She could have deepened her faith. Trusted the divine plan. Assumed this was some sacred lesson about pruning or sacrifice or purification.

Instead, she said: Fuck that.

If Zeus won’t help her, she won’t help him. Or anyone else.

Demeter is the goddess of the harvest—of fertility, abundance, growth. The entire world depends on her gifts. Crops grow because she wills it. Seasons turn because she allows it. She is, quite literally, the source of life on earth.

And now she's taking it all back.

The earth freezes. Nothing grows. The fields turn barren and humans begin to starve. The gods stop receiving offerings and sacrifices because there’s no grain, no wine, no livestock. Olympus goes quiet.

She isn’t throwing a tantrum. This isn’t her rage room. This is a strategic refusal to participate in a system that dishonors her.

Demeter doesn’t burn the world down—she just stops nurturing it. She sits in her grief and her fury and says: I’m not going to keep giving while receiving nothing in return. I will not mother a world that won’t protect my daughter. You want the harvest? Negotiate.

And Zeus? Zeus has no choice.

The system can’t function without her. Humans are dying, gods are losing power, the whole cosmic order is collapsing. So he sends Hermes down to the underworld to broker a deal.

The compromise: Persephone will spend six months above ground with Demeter, six months below with Hades. It’s not perfect—Demeter doesn’t get her daughter back completely. But she gets her back on terms she can stomach.

But winter enters the world permanently. The earth freezes every year when Persephone descends. There are costs to Demeter’s withdrawal, and she doesn’t undo them. She could. But she doesn’t.

The price of compromise is felt by both sides.

Because it wasn’t just about getting Persephone back. It was about clarifying the terms of the relationship: Demeter was a valued member of Olympus and she should be treated as such. Her story really is a feminist masterpiece, if you ask me.

And here's the thing: this pattern repeats. Over and over.

The shift—from nurturer to negotiator—follows a very specific archetypal pattern. And understanding it changes everything about how we navigate Divine Abandonment and Authority in our own lives.

FROM MOTHER TO MONARCH: EXPLORING THE ARC OF THE QUEEN

Inside every Mother is a Monarch. And no one understands the journey from bathtime to battlefield better than award-winning author, K.M. Weiland.

The Queen Arc is her name for what happens in the second act of life after we’ve evolved past the lessons of the Maiden (figuring out who the hell you are) and through the emotional trials of the Hero (moving beyond limitations, slaying the dragon within, and earning your place in society).

Individuation is so last season and we’ve moved onto more meaningful work like raising families, building community, and finding productive work for ourselves. We're the nurturers now. After all the chaos of youth, we finally have purpose, connection, meaning. We’re established and it feels really good.

When the Throne Is Empty

Here’s the thing: Queen is happy in her little domain. She has her work and her children. Things are moving along quite nicely and she’s enjoying her tenure as the Supreme Mother.

But here comes the growing pains: An intruder introduces enters the story.

The Queen Arc begins when everything the Queen has built comes under threat. Her kingdom—literal or metaphorical—is invaded. Her family is in danger. The people she’s devoted her life to protecting need help.

It’s like there’s a crazed bull in her China Shop and someone has to do something.

Don’t they?

So she does what any reasonable person would do: she goes to the authority. The King. The one with actual power to fix this.

And he fails her.

Upon arrival, she finds the King is incompetent (Weiland calls this the Puppet—well-meaning but useless) or he’s entirely complicit (the Tyrant—he enabled the threat in the first place).

Zeus manages to be both at once, which is almost impressive. He gave Hades permission to abduct Persephone—a true Tyrant. Then, when Demeter begs him to undo it, he refuses—that's Puppet behavior, too weak or too indifferent to act when it’s most necessary.

The throne isn’t actually empty. It’s just occupied by someone who might as well not be there.

And this is the Queen’s crisis moment. Because she realizes: no one is coming to save her. The system she trusted is broken or corrupt. The authority she believed in is either absent or actively harmful.

She can keep appealing to a throne that won’t respond or she can become the leader her family needs.

What woman hasn’t had to make this choice?

When Love Isn’t Enough

Here's the thing about Queens: they're really fucking good at loving. They've built their entire identity around care, protection, nurture. They've devoted themselves to their children (literal or symbolic) so completely that the line between "I love you" and "I am responsible for your entire existence" has blurred into nothing.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls this the Too-Good Mother complex.

K.M. Weiland calls this the Lie vs. the Truth

The Queen can convince herself, “If I just love hard enough, I can make it all better. If I sacrifice enough, I can keep everyone safe.”

It’s the lie of the over-functioning mother. The burnt-out caregiver. The spiritual worker who believes that if she just prays harder and serves more faithfully, the divine will finally show up for her too.

Our love becomes our means of control. And that control pretends to be protection.

But it’s not. Not for others. And not for ourselves.

Weiland puts it like this: “The Hero learns that Love creates meaning. But the Queen must learn that Love isn’t enough. There must also be Order.”

Demeter loved Persephone with everything she had. She searched for nine days and nights without rest. She grieved so deeply the Earth itself felt it. But none of that love brought Persephone back. Devotion didn’t work. Grief didn’t work. Sheer maternal will didn’t work.

What worked was Demeter imposing ORDER on a chaotic, unjust system.

She stopped trying to love her way to a solution and started strategically withdrawing her cooperation until the gods had no choice but to negotiate on her terms.

She had to become the authority she was seeking.

What woman hasn’t had to make this choice?

From Enveloping to Enabling

The shift from Queen to King and Mother to Monarch is the shift from protection through envelopment to protection through enabling.

The Queen starts out trying to envelop. She wants her children close. She wants to keep them safe by keeping them hers. And part of her—the part she doesn’t want to admit—likes being needed. Likes being indispensable. Likes the intimacy of total dependence.

But that’s a trap. For her, and for them.

If she won’t release them, they can’t individuate. They can’t become full adults. They stay children forever, never able to advance past their own Maidenhood. And she stays locked in a role that will eventually suffocate her.

But King’s enable. They create structure and set terms. The Queen must begin to demand reciprocity, because she knows that real love requires letting go.

Here’s what no one tells you about the Queen Arc: the Queen doesn’t necessarily want to become King.

She likes nurturing. She’s good at it. The Domestic World she’s built is her happy place. She’s earned it. After years of proving herself, she finally gets to rest in purpose.

Becoming King feels like exile. It’s lonelier. It requires a different kind of power—less enveloping, more commanding. Less intimate, more strategic.

And it means letting her children leave.

Demeter had to make this shift, too. And so do we.

The resolution of her story wasn’t just getting Persephone back. It was accepting that Persephone (and what she represents to us) has changed, too.

She is now Queen of the Underworld—powerful, autonomous, no longer a child who needed rescuing.

If the Queen can't accept this shift—if she clings too tightly, refuses to release, or tries to maintain control through manipulation or guilt—she slides into the shadow archetypes. K.M. Weiland describes these as the Snow Queen (cold, fearful, controlling) or the Sorceress (possessive, using love as a weapon).

Demeter could have done this. She could have refused the compromise. Demanded Persephone return fully. Tried to trap her daughter in eternal childhood so she’d never lose her again.

But she didn’t.

She accepted the split. Six months above, six months below. She embraced the winter—permanent, irreversible, and a cost she chose. She accepted that Persephone would spend half her life in a world Demeter couldn’t enter or control.

Because that’s real love requires the willingness to let the people you love become fully themselves, even if that means they grow beyond you.

Why This Matters Now

Demeter’s story isn’t just an ancient myth. It’s an archetypal blueprint that shows up everywhere once we start looking for it.

In women who walk away from careers that exploit them. In mothers who stop over-functioning for families that take them for granted. In spiritual workers who withdraw their gifts when the divine stops reciprocating.

In any relationship where love has become one-sided and someone finally says: I just can’t do this anymore.

Because the pattern is the same. The authority fails. Our love fails. Withdrawal becomes our only path to negotiation. And in that withdrawal— there’s a special kind of power that most of us are taught never to claim. I know I wasn’t.

Because we’re taught that good mothers, good women, good servants of any kind just keep giving. And giving. And giving…

That our job is to love unconditionally, serve faithfully, nurture endlessly—even when we’re running on empty.

But the Queen Arc says: fuck that.

Because sometimes the most sacred thing you can do is stop.

Girlfolk is a column dedicated to the enduring magic of women. Lauren Bee is NJ-based essayist and poet, exploring spirituality, pop culture, and fairytales in earnest pursuit of folk heroines and the medicine their stories can lend us.

She offers intuitive tarot readings found at Lauren-Bee.com.

Follow her on social media @girlfolkco and @womenreadtarot

It takes a special capacity to live your life steeped inside the cup of the heart. Some women float along the treetops, crawling up the mountainsides. Others nestle themselves deep into the belly of the Earth, curling upwards and outwards like sacred roots. There are even still the women who burn bright and hot, lighting and clearing the way for new life to ignite.

But not me.

I am the Queen of Cups.

My domain is of salt and sea. I make my home in tiny teacups and the labors of the Moon. My magic works its way into the heart, the echo of memory, and the blessings and grief of overbearing emotion.

All the world is a chalice to me— ever stirring, always sipping the contents of life. I am built to take it all in. My language is one of feeling, and tasting, and savoring. Sometimes bitterly and sometimes sweetly, but no matter the flavor, I am absorbing it all; churning it within my riptides.

Like many sirens, I grew tall in a world that made my magic small. They told me I was too sensitive, and sentimental, always making a big deal of small matters. But there is no small matter to someone who feels everything.

The hesitation behind an invitation, the small uncertainty behind a proclamation of truth, the secret stuck between your teeth. It’s a vibration— a whirlpool, and I can feel the pulling of these currents the same way the Queen of Pentacles can sense a stampede forming just around the bend.

And this hyper-receptivity helps me separate the muscle from the blood, peering into unknown spaces within the soul, and finding ways to channel the flood to the dry places within. This is how I clean out the wound. This is how I refill the cup.

It is my special alchemy.

And I am provided no tools for this magic. The Queens of the Undertow never are.

When one is introduced to a riptide, you learn quickly that you cannot swim against it. You must paddle alongside. Waiting. Watching. Learning to float. Sometimes the current must carry you and you have no choice but to embrace the direction of the overbearing tide. You must expand your internal capacity to carry the sea in your belly. It is the only way to grow gills.

Grief. Rage. Seduction. Pain. Hope. Faith. Loss. Memory. Fear. Deflation. Exuberance. Enhancement. Joy. Desire.

They’re tiny waves and large currents, invisibly pulling the strings of life, though no one wants to admit it. But when I step foot upon the dock, I can feel myself become the Trident, plucking the strands of the soul back into melody, like brackish water.

At times I feel like a magnet, calling in droplets from the Air, the Earth, and the sizzling embers. They collect inside me like morning dew and pull me deeper into the tide. And I swim along this current, circulating the cold waters below back towards the warm surface, exposing them to light.

And this constant churning, refreshing, and salinating of the soul has given me a tremendous capacity for poetry, for grief, and for love.

The world is one giant, sentimental berry and it’s blush is on my lips. My eyes fill and wash away the superficial, like a tidal wave revealing the true heart of things. My inner world can’t help but fill up and pour out for you, again and again.

For me. For you.

Some might call us empaths. Or lover girls. Or the chronically emotional.

They might see us as childish, aloof, or hysterical.

But we’re not. And if you’re a Queen of Cups, as well, please know that you will unintentionally terrify people. You will scare them with your compassion and intimidate them with your intuition. They can feel you peering into their heart, stripping the layers of their soul like an onion.

And it can’t be helped but to sting their eyes a little.

Because it’s hard to allow yourself be seen. To be embraced and understood. Revealed, but not rejected. To be acknowledged a whole person and a whole spirit, despite the many attempts to characterize yourself into a more palatable personality.

As the Queen of Cups, you will wash away all facade and leave the soul bare. Yours and theirs. And it’s a beautiful magic to possess. Decadent and intoxicating. Powerful and vulnerable, all at the same time.

You can take life inside of you when most people are trying to spit it out.

And if you can learn to embrace your depth, shells and all, you will most certainly become unstoppable, constantly savoring the life that most hide from. And every day will taste sweeter for it.

Girlfolk is a column dedicated to the enduring magic of women. Lauren Bee is NJ-based essayist and poet, exploring spirituality, pop culture, and fairytales in earnest pursuit of folk heroines and the medicine their stories can lend us.

She offers intuitive tarot readings found at Lauren-Bee.com.

Follow her on social media @girlfolkco and @womenreadtarot

“You are born with one mother, but if you are lucky you will have more than one. And among them all, you will find most of what you need.”
— Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves

I am out with lanterns looking for wild mothers.

It’s a concept first introduced to me when I read Women Who Run with the Wolves for the first time in the summer of 2024. My own mother had just died, my small tarot business was floundering, and I was grasping for guidance and inspiration in equal parts.

Women Who Run with the Wolves is basically considered gospel for any woman looking to break out of her conditioning and author Clarissa Pinkola Estés serves as our wise sage through the thicket.

She leads us through stories of psychic initiation, Weird and Wild Women, and intuition as survival. There’s a reason it’s so popular— it’s really fucking good.

And to say that book changed my life is an understatement; it changed me. It appeared like a guardian angel at the exact right time to lead me through the forest of grief; and I’ve been shoving it onto people’s bookshelves ever since.

But one particular part chapter really echoed a feeling I’d had all my life, but was never able to articulate: the search for wild mothers.

The Unmothered Mother

In Chapter 6: Finding One’s Pack: Belonging as Blessing, Clarissa takes us through a classic fairy tale, The Ugly Duckling, as a journey of familial separation and the reclamation of self. Here we learn to find our true pack by uncovering our true selves; and coming to understand why we never felt at home in the first place.

“What if you, being a swan, had to pretend you were a mouse? What if you had to pretend to be gray and furry and tiny?… What if you tried to talk like a mouse, but instead out came a honk every time? Wouldn’t you be the most miserable creature in the world?

“The answer is an unequivocal yes. So why, if this is all so and too true, do women keep trying to bend and fold themselves into shapes that are not theirs? I must say, from years of clinical observations of this problem, that most of the time it is not because of deep-seat masochism or a malignant dedication to self-destruction or anything of that nature. More often it is because the woman simply doesn’t know any better.

She is unmothered.”

My mother was unmothered. Put in foster care as a toddler after my grandmother’s psychotic break; then shuffled between strangers, before returning back to her family, which was almost as abusive as the system she just escaped— Denise never really stood a chance.

She was never nurtured or celebrated, nor were her unique strengths fostered or harnessed in any meaningful way. From her first breath, my mother truly had to fight for survival in the psychic jungle of her foremothers.

And so did I.

The Daughters of the Unmothered

See, my mother never taught me how to tie my shoes— my sister did that. Nor did she teach me how to wash my hair, or brush my teeth, or keep my knees closed when I sat down.

My sister did that, too.

Unfortunately for Alex (but luckily for me), she is never beating the Eldest Daughter Syndrome allegations. But on behalf of little sisters everywhere, I can never— ever — say thank you enough.

And so, like any young daughter of an Unmothered Mother, I looked for alternative mothers everywhere. I found them in babysitters and English teachers; the ballet instructor who screamed at me in French, and the characters in my books.

I found Miss Honey’s, Cinderellas, and the girls from the Craft. They’d be tucked away in Secret Gardens and fairy tales and talk-show interviews, but I’d find them. Everywhere. Anywhere.

I so desperately wanted someone to show me what womanhood was suppose to look like and prescribe the steps. I needed to know what else was possible and what life could look like on the other side of being unmothered, too.

It’s a deep psychic craving for initiation, mentorship, and sisterhood. To discover one is truly a swan, just a few flaps and mishaps away from finding one’s pack. To truly belong.

Girlfolk: A Newsletter About Sisterhood, Archetypes & Wild Mothers

Folk: (n) people generally; a certain kind, class, or group; (adj): originating or traditional with the common people, typically reflecting their lifestyle.

Girls, young and old, pass down information constantly — about bodies, work, relationships, survival, pleasure, grief. We mentor each other in dressing rooms and comment sections, in classrooms and bathrooms, in parking lots and kitchens.

We become each other’s wild mothers.

So I created Girlfolk, a newsletter for the girl in us all, to seek out these weird and wild mothers in every place I can find— and share them with you.

It’s a space to explore feminine archetypes, grief, sisterhood, pop culture as initiation, and the stories that teach us how to be women — or how to become ourselves.

If you are searching for wild mothers, too, you’re not alone.

I’ll be here with you.

10 Galentine’s Day Movies About Magic, Sisterhood, & Becoming Wild Women

This year Friday the 13th— a sacred day for witchy women and Galantine’s Day falls in the same weekend. We literally couldn’t have manifested it any better if we tried.

Here’s a list of cult-classic girl movies streaming free on YouTube that explore friendship, rivalry, magic, and beauty. Watch them with your girlfriends, your partner, or your dog (pictured below):

Selena (1997): Family pressure, pursuing stardom, crazed fans, and betrayal at the hands of the ones you love most. There’s a little Selena is us all.

Mean Girls (2004): Get in loser, we’re reliving the horrors of surviving the hierarchy of high school and learning that there’s no such thing as an ugly duckling.

Teen Witch (1989): If you missed your Hogwarts letter at 11, don’t worry because you automatically become a witch at 16. Love spells, spandex, and enough hairspray to seal a window shut. What could go wrong?

Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996): Friday the 13th weekend wouldn’t be complete without a second installment of witchcraft. This time add a black cat, two meddling aunts, and being the new kid in town to the cauldron.

Beauty Shop (2005): New Jersey’s finest, Queen Latifah takes us on a roller coaster of motherhood, sisterhood, and entrepreneurship— with a little time to fall in love. Oh and there’s Kevin Bacon.

The Beautician and the Beast (1997): While we’re talking about cosmetology, we can’t leave out Fran Drescher in her very own fairytale- if that fairy tale had Aqua Net and a startling lack of democracy.

Mystic Pizza (1988): Imagine you, your sister, and your bff are working at a pizza shop in between age-gap romances, college admissions, class disparities, and young marriage; all while playing the best game of pool anyone’s ever seen.

Seventeen Again (2000): The entire Mowry clan gets together to teach us that true love never dies, big sisters are torture, and sometimes little brothers save the day (after almost ruining it).

Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999): Denise Richards, Kirstie Alley, and Kirsten Dunst team up for a dangerously-good beauty pageant set in the middle of an episode of Fargo.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (1985): A cult-classic staring Sarah Jessica Parker (pre-Cosmos) and Helen Hunt (pre-tornados) in a fight for the most powerful force of all: dance.

Honorable Mentions: (More Cult-Classic Girl Movies)

These didn’t make the official list, but if you’re determined to close the blinds and binge watch the weekend away, here’s a few more solid choices:

1. Heartbreakers (2001)

2. She’s Out of Control (1989)

3. Mermaids (1990)

4. Pretty in Pink (1986)

5. She’s the Man (2006)

6. Clueless (1995)

7. Uptown Girls (2003)

8. Death Becomes Her (1992)

9. She-Devil (1989)

10. The Olsen Catalog: YouTube currently has It Takes Two, Passport to Paris, Billboard Dad, and a New York Minute.

Girlfolk is a column dedicated to the enduring magic of women. Lauren Bee is NJ-based essayist and poet, exploring spirituality, pop culture, and fairytales in earnest pursuit of folk heroines and the medicine their stories can lend us.

She offers intuitive tarot readings found at Lauren-Bee.com.

Follow her on social media @girl.folk.co and @womenreadtarot

Life has a funny way of sending you signs when you’re about to leap frog into something bigger. It’s like a great lily pad has been dropped from the heavens and onto the waters of your mind, creating tiny ripples of awareness, though you know not where they’ll carry you.

It’s a strange process to be sure— psychological, spiritual, and deeply complex, ushering you into the labyrinth of the soul to see what can be stirred up, tadpoles and all.

But no matter how harrowing, the journey through the rabbit hole is almost always the same.

First the floor falls out from beneath you. Like

Alice tumbling through the rabbit hole, the world loses all sense of shape. You don’t know up from down, your head from your feet, and it’s impossible to find your center. At best you can hope for a little cake at the bottom, but even the sweets still raise suspicion.

Familiarity is the cornerstone of identity. When destiny has decided to push you through its womb, you immediately feel the contractions. What worked no longer functions and the person you thought you’d become now appears strange and foreign in the mirror. Doors close almost mockingly and any semblance of a plan is gobbled up as quickly as that strange cake.

Your appetite grows for a flavor you’ve never tasted and you can find no way to satisfy it. Your intuition— your one guiding light— has a blinker out and it feels like you’re standing in the middle of the cosmos during rush hour; but you’re the only one not moving.

It’s a cosmic cockblock of the worst design.

And the only thing you can do is relax.

Here comes the jabberwocky. Now that you’re nice and vulnerable, like a wet kitten in the street, you must face your next obstacle: every asshole within a ten-mile radius.

I know that you’re tired, scared, and confused. It feels like the Universe has gone radio silent and you don’t even recognize yourself anymore. You don’t know if you’re coming or going, and Lord, if there’s even a future ahead of you anymore, but don’t worry, because here comes Tod to top it off.

When you’re at your weakest, lost in the forest of time, some asshole— no every asshole you can imagine comes out of the woodwork. And the comment section. And the line at the bank.

They come to poke and prod at you, sneering and quipping cruelly. And I hope you don’t have any long-standing triggers, because here they come to put their dirty fingers all over them. It’s an intentional fuck you from creation, making sure you really see how dark and grimy the world can be, right before it plucks you up and places you in greener pastures

It is here you will learn to find your courage: to walk away, to self-advocate, to cuss someone out, or finally determine who you don’t want to be.

It is in there darkness that you find your light.

In their cowardice, you find your principles.

In their cheating, you find your honor.

And each time they rage against your shield, your sword sharpens and your mind clarifies. Your feet move quicker and you begin to pivot like brisk wind. You release, you lunge, you cut, and you even let yourself cry a little.

You scream into the ether “No more!” and thrust your sword into the hard earth, splitting the world in two.

Now you’re straddling timelines and your hardest task to date: choosing one.

You’re not the Alice you were before. You’ve been changed; weathered by time and testing. You know you cannot go back to the life you knew before. It was designed by someone foolish and unknown to you now.

But there’s still a leap to be made.

The time has come for you to forge a new dream, a new identity, and new concept of creation. The universe takes on a new shape now; and so do you. But none of this can be done without two key ingredients: honesty and courage.

You’ve learned to accept when things are bad; I mean, really bad. And you’ve learned to stand up to your bullies, large and small. But can you stand before a future that looks far better than you think is reasonably possible and dare to reach for

it anyway? Can you face the ugliest parts of yourself and somehow allow them to be loved, deserving of grace and acceptance?

Here you must admit to yourself what you really want, no matter how big or common or foolish it may seem. Maybe you want to be a stay-at-home mother, freed from the shackles of ambition. Perhaps you want to make a living from your niche hobby. Or fly to the moon. Or join the circus.

Or land a book deal from your Substack essays (ahem)

The destination is not quite as important as an honest recognition within yourself about where you want to call home. You have to stop disqualifying yourself from this reality and challenge the resistance making you feel like you can’t have it, especially when others do.

You have to admit that you want the thing you want.

And you have to be brave enough to let yourself have it. To decide that you won’t ruin it for yourself if it starts to happen. That you won’t run away from it, or kick it, or give it to someone else.

You have to make a promise— not to me, or your audience, or God— but to yourself that this is your one precious life and you’re not going to spend another moment of it living out someone else’s broken dream, even if that someone was you.

You must dare to dream again

Sometimes life fucks with us as foreplay. Because, in truth, we’re fucking with ourselves and our potential. We live in these alternate universes where neither we nor our timelines are quite the right Alice.

It needs to push us through the rabbit hole and have tea with the crazy man who lives in the folds of our minds to help us realize we want to become sailors. Or dancers. Or mothers. Or doctors.

That we simply want to become.

So it fucks with us, if only to help us open up and curl our toes at the idea of more, or dare I say, wonder.

Girlfolk is a column dedicated to the enduring magic of women. Lauren Bee is NJ-based essayist and poet, exploring spirituality, pop culture, and fairytales in earnest pursuit of folk heroines and the medicine their tales can lend us.

She offers personal intuitive tarot readings found at Lauren-Bee.com. Follow her on social media @girl.folk.co or through her feminist tarot channel @womenreadtarot

It smells like mold in here. And paint thinner. And dust.

I’m not sure what time it is.

Actually, I can’t tell time at all, now that I think of it. They said I’ll learn that next year, so for now I’ll have to go by the rumbling in my stomach.

Surely it has to be snack time.

If I could just climb those two little steps in the corner of the room, I could knock on the door and ask if the other kids are up from their nap.

The trouble is I can’t hop down from this gurney by myself. It’s too tall and I’m too little.

Well, maybe I could, but my shoes are slippery, so I’d probably slip and fall.

She always puts me in these slippery shoes.

I can see the frills of my socks bumping against my ankles and the patent leather of my shoes. My stomach growls again.

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It’s cold in here. It’s always cold in here.

They put me on this metal slab, like the ones they use to wheel dead people through the hospital and down into the morgue. This garage feels a lot like a morgue—not that I’ve ever been in one.

But so much has already died in here, so I feel a bit like a corpse already; like one of my dolls—beautiful and lifeless.

They make me lay in here during nap time. Everyone else is two steps up; through the kitchen and around the corner; sleeping in the living room with spare blankets and pillows.

One of my friends even brings her stuffed animal to nap with, but I’m not allowed such comforts.

They never told me why.

But I can still see a tiny light sneaking through a window. It’s obscured by a dirty curtain, trimmed grossly with mismatching thread, but it’s a light nonetheless. In a way it’s like my stuffed animal, keeping me warm amidst the cruel frost of this room.

We take what tiny mercies we can find in the garage.

I did try to leave a few times. I want you to know that.

I asked if I could stay with the other children.
I asked if I could have a blanket.
I asked if I could stay quietly in the kitchen, but the Mrs. Of the House would always say no.

No, Lauren, you can’t.

It’s a phrase I’ve gotten used to hearing.

So I lay here on this metal slab, day after day, week after week, awaiting the monster in the garage.

I’m pretty sure I’m here to keep him company, because he’s always in here too. Waiting for me. Tucked behind that corner on the right.

I can never see his face, because he always wears a mask. And claws. Parts stolen from a cheap Halloween costume, I’m sure. Probably from some horror movie that premiered way past my bedtime.

I bet you could buy one at the local Kmart; become the monster anytime you want.

Every day it was the same. The rubber claws inching around the corner. The growling from the shadows. My eyes fixated on the light from the window.

I’m not sure if it was fear or panic, but the more he growled, the sleepier I felt. The closer he stepped, the more my eyes felt like bowling balls.

Sometimes the milk tastes funny.

One time I screamed so loud I thought I’d shatter the dirty glass in the window. The door to the kitchen swung open violently to reveal the Mrs. Of the House, scowling and scolding.

I tried to tell her about the monster.
I pointed and pleaded.

But she just closed the garage door behind her.

That was the last time I screamed.

Eventually I’d wake up. Not quite right, but not quite dead, either.

The Mrs. Of the House would open the garage door like the Gates of Heaven and pull me down from the cold metal I had made my bed.

She’d follow me up the two little stairs and offer me some crackers or juice.

It’s grape today. Welch’s.

The kids would run around the corner and ask me where I’d been, was I ready to play, why I looked so tired, the sugar-induced dreams they had during nap-time.

And I’d feel like Alice through the Rabbit Hole, though it’d be years before I could actually read the tale for myself.

Eventually my mother would come to collect me and I’d try to tell her about the monster and the cold metal gurney. I’d tell her about the milk and the claws and how my legs were always cold.

And she’d tell me how I was just a good storyteller.

You’ve got such an active imagination, Lauren.
Maybe one day you’ll be a writer.

So here I am writing—to you.
Whoever you are.
Wherever you may be.

I finally grew out of the garage.

But I’m still hoping I grow into myself one day.

And I still hate grape juice.

Girlfolk is a column dedicated to the enduring magic of women. Lauren Bee is NJ-based essayist and poet, exploring spirituality, pop culture, and fairytales in earnest pursuit of modern folk heroines and the medicine their tales can lend us.

She offers personal intuitive tarot readings found at Lauren-Bee.com. Follow her on social media @girl.folk.co or through her feminist tarot channel @womenreadtarot.co

Dearest Gentle Reader,

It seems One Ms. Shonda Rhimes and Co. have conspired to warm our winter britches with their newest installment of Bridgerton drama to wake the sleepy ton. And while Her Majesty the Queen usually delights in choosing her Diamond of the Season, it appears an even greater gem has stolen the hearts of many.

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Violet Bridgerton, the Dowager Viscountess, proud Mama, and loyal friend has recently decided to take on a new identity: MILF.

After spending nearly a decade as a widow and devoted single-mother, viewers have watched Violet pour her energy into her children’s future happiness, while often forgetting about her own.

This chronic self-neglect is a most serious condition, dear reader, and one that seems to afflict women, almost universally.

After personal loss, childbirth, familial responsibility, and the unbearable pressure of social expectation, a woman’s light often grows dim. Her petals turn inward, her stem unwatered.

She begins to exist in a type of stasis; a limbo of limerence with what was or could be, but never quite able to feel the warmth of desire rest upon her cheek.

But women, like soil after a hard frost, might one day find a light pulsing beneath their surface. It’s as if life itself begs her to open to its embrace once more, inviting a thawing to occur.

In Season 4 of Bridgerton, we seen this frost begin to melt, softening Violet to the idea of Spring.

There’s No F*cking in Baseball

Seduction is often thought to be a young woman’s game. Tenderness, sensuality, and the trembling of fingers and thighs are left to the young and clumsy. While she’s young and pretty and fertile, a woman is seen through the eyes of hunger.

She is ever the siren, calling forth her sailors in the night, beckoning them to her bed or forbidding them from entry. The world is drunk with desire and she is their mistress, ever present.

But the game of life, like baseball, has many innings and endless opportunities to ‘strike out’ in the contest of conquest. Because when the reality of life; the ugliness of it, the pain of it, the stretching and the screaming and the wrinkling of it takes hold— you cease to be the whole, living, throbbing woman you once were.

You’re demoted to a relic of good times gone— a ‘Remember When.’ You become a statue of warning to those unmarred by age, or tragedy, or burden.

Your days of flushed cheeks and aching desires have given way and you’re forced into the corner as a dry and brittle Crone, long before the crows come to meet you.

Is Death Not Also A Lover?

For most of my life, people have called me Sunshine. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, others have always seen me as their little ray amongst the clouds. But when my mother died, my UV index dropped dangerously low to those around me.

It felt as though I was in an endless winter, and while the world seemed frozen at a stand-still, I could still feel the coals burning from within.

Being face-to-face with death, or the grotesque, or or the cruel gives one a unique thirst for connection, I think. Death is so intricately interwoven with life, that you cannot taste one without developing an appetite for the other.

Our hands may be frozen, but our hearts are not— blood still pumps in our veins. We’re just waiting for Spring to thaw us out. Permission to advance upon desire once more.

And I know many women who have lost themselves to motherhood, widowhood, broken dreams, and the cruel detours of fate. And to the world, these women are like stars; timeless and beautiful in their grief, recognized only after their fire has seemingly burnt out.

Busy women. Mature women. Complicated women. Far too wise to be caught up in something as foolish as a crush, or lust, or desire. Surely she has a lunchbox to fix or a cross to carry. She’s traded her vulnerability for endurance, and she’s expected to tick on without the concerns or appetites of her younger years.

But inside every woman is a wolf.

And it must be fed.

The Second Cumming of Violet Bridgerton

Violet Bridgerton, like her sisters throughout time, is a woman marred by loss, endless child rearing, and the grueling demands of society. But beneath duty and honor lives a woman churning with unrecognized desire.

We see this percolation of desire and rebellion over the course of several seasons and marriage marts. In Season 1, she sneaks fruit from a table— a classic symbol of desire— during tea with the Queen. Daphne exclaims “Mama!” But Violet reminds her that “no one is looking at me, dear.”

Here she acknowledges her own invisibility as an older widowed woman, but her instinct is still to reach for pleasure, even if just a nibble.

In Season 2, she shares with her grief with her eldest son: "Edmund is the air that I breathed. And now, there is no air." This is a woman of immense passion. Consumed by love and grief in equal parts.

She’s grown this man’s love inside of her eight times, nurturing his spirit alongside her own, pushing their love into an enduring legacy.

She urges Anthony to seek true love, refusing to allow fear or loss to dictate his future. On the outside, she is counseling her son, but internally, she is reminding herself.

And Season 3 introduces the gardener fated to aid in Violet’s unfurling: Lord Marcus Anderson, the dashing brother of her dearest friend, Lady Danbury.

Sparks fly and intrigue ignites between them during a ball at Bridgerton house when he innocently bends down to retrieve her silver glove— a classic symbol of sensuality.

Gloves obscure identity. They hide the flesh, prevent exposure, and keep things clean. They’re a symbol of elegance, but also chastity.

To remove one’s glove and touch the tender flesh of another; to make contact; to feel the warmth of another’s pulse is a delicious foreshadow of Season 4 and a reminder that sometimes fate intervenes to drop love into our life.

Violet is now known. Felt. Seen.

She is no longer invisible.

Her petals are starting to open, awaiting the rain.

Tea for Two: The Enduring Nature of Pleasure

Season 4 opens with a ball, as usual, but this time we’re witnessing Violet’s blossoming in real time. Her gowns are flowing, her hair is billowing and unrestricted, and she seems to hold a secret in her eyes.

The decadence of desire has captured her, even before she’s had a real taste of it. You can feel her anticipation growing, her mind wandering to the world of delicious possibilities that await her on the other side of adventure.

First she exposed her hand, but now she must expose her heart. Sharing her fears and desires with Lord Anderson is the first of many layers shed.

She wants to be seen and known and touched.

To feel the Sun from both sides once more.

To feel heat on the other side of the bed.

But first she must melt the ice.

Violet had to cross the bridge of the Crone, pushing through the veil of insecurity, reinitiating herself as a woman pulsing with passion and hunger.

Is she brave enough to allow the wolf to howl?

Are you?

It’s far too easy to find ways to disqualify ourselves from love and pleasure. The belly hangs. The crow’s feet caw. Texture and Time seem to wear on us, inside and out. What once felt second nature feels foreign and foolish. We become strangers to the animal within.

But pleasure is the art of endurance, of patience, and of presence. You cannot be trapped in the past or fixated on the width of your thighs. You must be here, now, reading to suck the marrow from life while you still have taste buds.

You cannot push away the tenderness, because vulnerability to the only way to be truly consumed— and enjoyed. You must open yourself up to be seen and be known through every corner of body and crevice of soul.

There is no release without witness.

There is no love without embrace.

There is no pleasure without endurance.

Violet teaches us that love can exist after grief. That our confidence can return after injury, childbirth, and menopause.

She reminds us that pleasure is a birthright, not just reserved for one season, but every season of our lives.

Lady Bridgerton is a symbol the permission to make ourselves happy, the honor is seeking connection, and the bravery to allow yourself to be seen— and sipped, without apology.

We need only have the courage to howl.

Girlfolk is a column dedicated to the enduring magic of women. Lauren Bee is an essayist and poet, exploring spirituality, pop culture, and fairytales in earnest pursuit of folk heroines and the medicine their stories can lend us.

She offers personal intuitive readings found at Lauren-Bee.com. Follow her on social media @girl.folk.co or through her feminist tarot channel @womenreadtarot.co

I’ve started noticing something that I can’t unsee.

And it’s really grossing me out.

I was scrolling through my FYP (as one does) and took note of some strange guidance coming through the sacred vessels I was watching.

• One reader told us that we’d have to “learn our lesson” or “be forced” to learn it.

• Another reader told us to “quit complaining” and “stop playing the victim.”

• Another suggested we “keep quiet” and “be obedient.”

And it wasn’t just these specific readers. The more I scrolled, the more I saw it happening. The more I heard the quiet cries of violence beneath the love and light.

And it’s everywhere:

It’s in channeled messages.

It’s in tarot readings.

It’s in the language, the delivery, the tone.

At first glance, this gets framed as honesty. As spiritual toughness. As truth over comfort.

But when I slowed down and actually listened to what was being said, and how it was being said, something felt really off.

Not challenging. Not activating, but darker. Coercive. Threatening. Familiar in a way that made my body tighten. And what really stopped me was this realization: I’ve probably said versions of this before too.

Not because I’m cruel. Not because I wanted to harm anyone. Because I hadn’t examined where this language was coming from, or what it carries when it leaves my big mouth.

A switch flipped in me. And now it’s flipped in my readings.

Spiritual Authority and the Language of Force

A lot of modern spiritual content uses inevitability as a tool.

“You’ll learn the lesson one way or another.”

“The universe doesn’t care if you’re ready.”

“This is happening whether you like it or not.”

This kind of framing borrows its authority from punishment. It snarkily implies our compliance is sacred wisdom and our resistance is some moral failure, treating our discomfort as evidence of our spiritual immaturity.

Which really pisses me off.

And this rhetoric mirrors organized religion more than most intuitives want to admit. The same fear-based scaffolding, just rebranded with ambient music and bunch of angel numbers on the screen.

It also mirrors abusive dynamics.

When someone tells you that you don’t have a choice, that your body, timing, or consent is irrelevant to your growth, something essential gets stripped away. Our agency collapses. Curiosity shuts down. Shame steps into a space where empowerment was suppose to be fostered.

And there cannot be spiritual expansion where intimidation exists.

Patriarchal Parroting in Feminine Spaces

And here’s the part that really disturbs me.

Most tarot readers, intuitives, and channelers are women. Most consumers of this content are also women. And yet we’re parroting language rooted in domination and control back to one another. Why?

It’s a cockeyed patriarchal parroting dressed up like cool-girl gnosis and I honestly feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

The constant and unconscious repetition of this masculine-coded self-help rhetoric that values force, urgency, and conquest above process, receptivity, and pacing is so anti-feminist.

And there’s a quiet disdain baked into a lot of these messages. A contempt for our slowness. A frustration with our grief. An impatience with our cyclical movements.

Women’s processes are slower. Nonlinear. Rhythmic. They involve pause, return, and integration. And I’m sorry if my luteal phase is interfering with your cosmic lock-in moment, but I’m gonna need a minute before I like, comment, and subscribe.

When we frame these shared realities as resistance or self-sabotage, it doesn’t feel empowering. We’re not being shaken awake here. We’re just policing women’s natural embodiment process.

Burnout, Boredom, and Spiritual Aggression

I don’t think most readers intend harm.

I think many are burned out. Bored with the messages they keep receiving. Angry at themselves, angry at their collective, God, the universe, at stagnation.

That frustration leaks through. It turns sharp. Punitive.

It becomes moralizing.

“Tough love” begins to feel more like verbal reprimand and instead of holding complexity and curiosity, we shortcut to shock. Instead of nuance, we escalate the language. Instead of reverence for the ungraspable mystery of divinity, we perform absolute certainty for the FYP.

And when you position yourself as a channel for divine will, that aggression gains a lot of weight. It doesn’t just land as opinion for those who resonate. It presents itself as goddamn cosmic decree.

And that’s fucking dangerous.

What the Hell Are We Channeling?

Now this is the question I can’t get past.

If our messages sound controlling, punitive, and humiliating, what does that say about the God, Spirit, or Universe we believe we’re channeling?

Do we think the divine threatens people into growth? Do we believe spirit strips choice away as punishment? Do we imagine wisdom as something enforced through fear?

If that’s the case, then we really need to pause and ask what we’re actually tuning into.

Because a universe that requires coercion to evolve consciousness sounds less like love and more like domination theology with a light dusting of patchouli.

Intuition Without Violence

Being intuitive doesn’t mean bypassing darkness. It doesn’t mean pretending everything is gentle or comfortable.

We are meant to hold challenge. We are meant to speak honestly about grief, rupture, endings, and accountability.

But challenge does not require threat. Truth does not require humiliation. Growth does not require fear.

Our language matters because our bodies listen.

Is this how we would speak to a younger sister we loved?

If our spaces are meant to be holistic, empowering, and healing, then we have a responsibility to examine the emotional force of our words.

Especially when speaking to women.

Especially when claiming spiritual authority.

When there are no elders to mold the next generation, the loudest voices become our teachers. And they rarely model care.

And this isn’t about censorship. It’s about actually being conscious creators in practice and not just on fucking Instagram.

And I’m not writing this from a pedestal, either. I’m writing it from inside the reckoning. From the moment where you realize you fucked up; you’ve been repeating something that no longer aligns with what you believe about love, divinity, or sisterhood. And so you name it instead of numbing it.

Because we can do better.

We deserve to do better by each other.

Because intuition without compassion is nothing more than a psychic bullet. And magic without care always turns violent, even on the FYP.

In Closing: Because Girl, I’m Tired

I don’t think the answer is softer readings or sanitized truth. I think it’s more conscious language. More pause. More willingness to examine where our tone comes from before we hand it over as divine authority and pat ourselves on the back.

As intuitives, readers, and spiritual creators, we are not just translating symbols. We are modeling power. We are showing people what guidance sounds like, what authority feels like, and how the sacred trickles through the human nervous system one message at a time.

And many of the people listening to these messages are young women. Girls forming their relationship to intuition, agency, and self-trust. Whether we mean to or not, we are becoming their big psychic sisters, and cousins, and friends.

They are learning how growth is supposed to feel by watching how we speak.

If our words sound shaming, threatening, or coercive, that doesn’t make us more honest. It makes us unexamined. And kind of an asshole.

This isn’t a crash out. It’s a crash in.

An invitation to slow down before we speak.

To deconstruct what we inherited.

To ask better questions about what we’re channeling and why it sounds the way it does.

Because if intuition is meant to reconnect people to their power, then our language should never require fear to do its work.

Lauren Bee is an intuitive practitioner and writer offering private readings and reflective spiritual work. She also creates educational content centered on discernment and embodied intuition. Learn more at lauren-bee.com or contact her at lauren@lauren-bee.com.

Before the clock struck midnight on the New Year, psychics and astrologers had already compiled scrolls of predictions for the months ahead.

The planets will dance.
Pop culture scandals will ensue.
Political betrayal will continue.
And something mysterious looms around Taylor Swift—as usual.

The Witch Hotline™ has never been so busy.

But this year, I’m feeling frisky—and a little left out. I have a few predictions of my own. This time, they’re not about the stars or the headlines.

They’re about the spiritual community itself.

1. Cultural Cosmology Will Replace Pop Astrology

The occult community is growing rapidly, and many neophytes are quietly suffering from the Tokification of spiritual practice. They’ve raided the vending machine of pop astrology and witch-tip goodies—and now they’re hungry for something more substantial. More personal.

2026 is a 1/10 year. It doesn’t seek depth as much as definition. It is the pioneer—the initial spark of invention and expansion.

One is the number of division and direction. It points at the infinity of zero and says: “I am” and “This is not.”

My prediction: people will become less interested in popular astrology systems—like Western and Vedic astrology—and more inclined to embrace their own cultural cosmology and planetary frameworks.

We’ll see a rise in Runic astrology, Celtic astrology, the Chinese Zodiac, African geomancy systems, and Indigenous cosmologies. And I don’t just see casual interest—I see people fully shifting systems altogether.

This is a subconscious push toward a personal spiritual monoculture. I see practitioners seeking a coherent and consistent framework that rejoins them with their roots. Structure and belonging.

I believe we’ll see eclectic practice will begin to fall out of fashion. People won’t be combining multiple systems, creation stories, competing philosophies, or spirits and deities from multiple pantheons as often.

Instead, many practitioners will begin operating in-house—working exclusively with the spirits, lunar calendars, traditions, and cosmologies of a single cultural origin.

2. The Specialization of the Spiritual Practitioner

While we’re on the topic of individualization and spiritual practice, my second prediction is that we will see many, many readers, healers, and mystics begin to specialize.

I’m being shown a rise of practitioners offering highly-specialized services. I feel as though these practitioners have been trained and initiated to offer very specific offerings— and nothing more.

But they’re only now realizing it.

Practitioners will start narrowing their offerings and specializing their books:

One reader will exclusively do love readings—you won’t get a yearly forecast from her anymore. An energy worker will focus solely on soul contracts—don’t ask her to align your chakras. One tarot reader specializes in shadow work. Another works strictly within ancestral mediumship.

This will be a relief for practitioners who’ve felt pressured to be Swiss Army Knives—every ability sharpened for public consumption.

Being everything to everyone has overburdened mystics, watered down gifts that needed isolation and refinement, and stretched practitioners thin for the sake of visibility.

I also sense the spiritual world itself is no longer tolerant of this dilution—especially for an often unloving, gluttonous audience.

While many practitioners will leave the field entirely. Others will move content behind paywalls and offer highly specialized services at premium prices.

3. 2026: Teach a Man to Fish

My third prediction: As spiritual workers specialize, culturally concentrate, and place higher value on their labor, the focus will shift toward education.

The endless stream of channeled messages, astrology hot takes, and witchy tips will be replaced by mini-lectures, lessons, and structured learning to support The Student™.

Tarot deep dives.
Aspect workshops.
Historical breakdowns of folk traditions and cosmology.

Previously, spiritual communities uplifted the Observer—those who watched, waited, and absorbed with little intention of integrating the information they so freely obtained.

In 2026, intuitive minds will come together to say:
“We’ll show you the way—but you have to do the work.”

Publishers will thrive. Webinars, in-person classes, and interactive courses will rise. 2026 is the year of the teacher.

4. “No Woo for Me, Thanks”

While we’re on the topic of teachers, I sense an influx of non-spiritual—or non-traditional—practitioners entering the space.

In resistance to hyper-spirituality, we’ll see more agnostic readers, atheist witches, Jungian tarotists, and secular mystics.

They’ve always existed—quietly working in the margins. But as people grow more cautious of spiritual risk (psychosis, witch wars, creeping fundamentalism), many will gravitate toward spirit-free or secular-based practice.

5. Feminine Cults and the Rise of the Oracle

In contrast to the rise of woo-free spirituality, my final prediction: a rise in feminine cults, goddess worship, and devoted oracle work.

The days of an oracle channeling messages from the Hecate and Archangel Michael about the Chinese New Year are waning behind us.

Eclectic deity mashups will soon feel outdated. Combing conflicting practices and spiritual frameworks will feel like wearing white after Labor Day.

An Oracle of Hecate will be just that.
An Oracle of The Morrígan.
Of Skadi.
Of Danu.
Of Juno.

Overlapping systems, philosophies, and energetic frameworks appear to interfere with refinement. The goddesses are asking for devotion and direction—not constant detours into conflicting practices.

Likewise, Christian mystics will increasingly deliver messages solely within their own cosmology, resisting the urge to channel beyond their framework.

The aim is consistency: one energy, one philosophy, one cosmology, one evolutionary path—rooted in cultural meaning.

This re-rooting emotionally reinvests people in traditions and wisdom stripped through colonization and the commercial eclecticism of 21st-century spirituality.

Here, practitioners will meet the teachers of my third prediction, release the tension of my fourth, find alignment through specialization, and finally shed bloated systems of symbol and structure that never truly resonated.

Lauren Bee is an intuitive practitioner and writer. She offers readings, consultations, and educational work rooted in cultural cosmology and spiritual discernment. You can find her work at lauren-bee.com or contact her at lauren@lauren-bee.com.

Woman— the unconquerable.

The Hydra, the Hera, and the Hercules,

The ever persisting.

Forever blossoming in the breast of the cold world.