Navigating Eclipse Seasons: A Witch's Guide to Thriving

Lysandra: 00:00:01

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I'm your host Lysandra Wildwitch, and I'm excited to talk to you today about the eclipse.

We will discuss the ins and outs of the eclipse, including what the eclipse is from a scientific standpoint, how it feels energetically and what to do with that energy because the eclipse has gotten a bad reputation, but it's really quite a powerful force if you understand it. After this episode is over, you'll be able to prepare for the next eclipse season coming your way and have a clear path through to the other side.

Alright, so how is everyone doing after this last eclipse season? For real? Speaking as someone who loves eclipse energy, it feels like coming home, like breathing.

It's my energy being able to really align and integrate with what's going on, cosmically speaking. From that perspective, this one was still a little different.

This energy moved through things like it was nothing, like it was just a force and you either got out of the way or you wrote it and kind of let it take you where it would it's destruction for the purpose of creation and fulfillment.

My love affair with eclipse energy makes me a rarity it seems, as it's hard to find someone willing to talk about it from a purely witchy perspective that doesn't carry all of the bad rep it's gotten with it, at least outside of astrological circles.

When I was trying to look into resources available for the average witch going through an eclipse season, it wasn't really easy to find anything all that helpful.

The final eclipse season of: 2024

The blog at Naturally Modern Life also cautioned against doing any manifestation work or charging stones, and instead suggested rituals for letting go and cleansing. But one of my favorite descriptors of the eclipse energy for people who haven't quite learned how to write it comes from the Demystify Magic podcast.

om the last eclipse season of: 2024

If there wasn't so much devastation caused by those forces, they would be nothing but awe inspiring.

So I put this episode together in hopes that I can help you find some stability in the aftermath of this eclipse season.

Because just because eclipse season is over and the energy is fading, it doesn't mean we're clear of it entirely.

So let's talk about what the eclipse is first and foremost, according to NASA - and let's be honest, if we're going to trust anyone about what's physically happening out in the cosmos, it'll be NASA or some other equivalent agency - a solar eclipse is when the Moon comes between the Earth and the sun so perfectly it blocks the sun from our view.

The Earth and Moon then swap positions for a lunar eclipse, so the Earth aligns up so perfectly between the sun and the moon that it casts a shadow across the Moon's visible surface, oftentimes turning it red due to how easy it is for the warmer colors to make it through the Earth's atmosphere to our eyes.

Mind you, these two events often can happen within a few weeks of each other, but total solar eclipses are much rarer to experience than their lunar counterparts, due to solar eclipses only being visible in an area approximately 300 miles wide.

So given this rather straightforward understanding we have of what's happening, why do eclipses still have such a bad reputation?

Well, as demonstrated by the AODA warning last year, superstitions and traditions carried over from cultures and times when we didn't know any better, and that still seemed to be rather heavily encoded into our more primal unconscious psyche. In the Folklife magazine from the Smithsonian Institute, NASA astronomer Michelle Thaler is quoted as saying, "all of your instincts all of a sudden start to freak out... something's going wrong. There's this deep basic panic that sets in as the whole world changes in a way that it's not supposed to."

It also documents several sources referring to the eclipse as being caused by things of a monstrous stature. The Chiqutoan Manasi people personified the sun and the moon and believed eclipses were caused by celestial serpents attacking them.

The Apapocúva-Guaraní viewed it as a bat and celestial jaguar, to quote, "gnawing at the sun or moon."

There's even reference to the Mythology of All Races where it stated that the moon at an eclipse resembled a demon, or that a sorcerer could actually bind the sun and the moon or to, quote, "deprive them of their light."

Even as recently as the: 1940

And not without good reason. Eclipse energy can cause some chaotic events, though not the specific events or in the manner often attributed to them.

Solar eclipses may be about blockages, while lunar eclipse be about things shadowed and hidden, but both are about alignment.

So when that energy comes into play and we're holding on too tightly to anything that's not aligned with who or where we're meant to be that this particular eclipse rules, we're in for a seriously wild ride.

You'll see barriers start to disintegrate, and if you're not aware of what barriers are in your way, or even that there are barriers in the way, it could look a lot like things are straight up falling apart, and that could be terrifying and honestly easy to get lost in.

If you don't bring some awareness to these things in your life leading up to an eclipse, you'll prolong however long it takes for you to move past them, because then the barrier needing to be taken down becomes you, and that's not a great place to be. Similarly, during a lunar eclipse, you need to make sure you're aware of what you've been hiding from.

The things that you unnecessarily fear the most about yourself are going to be the monsters under your bed coming out to play again, not a place you want to end up stuck at.

So the more work you can do to prepare yourself, stay grounded while being in the middle of it and work through what the eclipse brings up for you afterwards, the quicker it'll be over and the better off you'll be in the long run. Thankfully, the tilt of the moon keeps them from happening monthly, but they can still occur anywhere from four to seven times a year.

And if you're not prepared to deal with that kind of energy that consistently, it can wear you down and fuck with your headspace if you're not careful. That was a lot of information to process, so we'll take a quick break to grab some coffee and be right back.

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So how do we prepare for the eclipse so we can make that energy work for us?

There's several ways, but I'm just going to start off here with a little bit of a brain dump.

Since we're already past this point for this current eclipse season, this is mostly going to be to be able to refer back to as we move forward towards next eclipse season.

We either use divination or some other form of communication with our spiritual team to be able to set the proper expectations, or we just let go of expectations entirely. We can look at the nature of the universe and understand that chaos is a requirement of alignment.

We can look at the blood red moon or the darkened sky and see the reflection of our own shadows in the world around us, and how even nature deems its own shadows worthy of being highlighted on a regular basis. We can use that understanding to empower our own shadowed energies into our witchcraft- be it from being queer, neurodivergent, disabled, or a combination of the three.

You can also use the energy to empower that same shadowed energy into alignment. If you're ready to do the work the eclipse will prompt you to do.

The eclipse will clear space and open a path, but you have to decide what that space gets filled with and what that path will look like when all is said and done. If you don't, pretty much anything can come in and fill it, and then you're kind of back where you started.

It will force old stagnant energies to move, and if you've ever witnessed a catastrophic dam failure, it can look something like that. If you're not prepared to let some of the pressure out, or if there's too much pressure that's been built up for you to be able to let out in time.

But the main point with all that is that room needs to be cleared and the path needs to be made.

If it's not, if you don't let the eclipse move the things out of your way that you need moved out of your way, and then try and fill that space with your new bright, bold and beautiful future, there's just not going to be room for it because you'll still be holding on to too much shit that doesn't work for that future.

So do some divination or communication with your spiritual team and higher knowing about what to prepare for and start working on your healthier coping mechanisms. Do some shadow work. Understand that celestial conjunctions like this happen all the time in astrology.

It just so happens that when the sun, moon and Earth get involved, they get rather obvious and in your face about it.

Astrology is another way that you can try and figure out what to expect for an eclipse or after.

I don't know enough about it really to be able to do that in the moment, or how far back I should look to see what influences are culminating.

But for someone with enough of an understanding, looking at where the sun or moon falls during an eclipse and how that relates to them astrologically could be a strong indication indicator of what to expect.

The little that I know didn't give me much direction for that, so I can only assume I wasn't looking at where the energies were actually sitting when they were initiated.

There was a lot about energy, yes, but there really didn't seem to be much about home and hearth, which is where most of my time and energy was being spent that weekend. The partial solar eclipse that just passed had the sun and moon both in Aries, and Aries is in my moon.

So it seems more like the lunar eclipse was just preparing me for the partial solar eclipse using a handful of ruling factors from the lunar eclipse in order to do it. So if you're enough of an astrology buff to make sense of what the sky is doing and when you need to look, astrology can be a useful tool.

But for people like me who would kind of have to go down the rabbit hole to figure it out, our energies may be best invested in other approaches. Unless astrology is a rabbit hole that we're actually wanting to go down, I personally am far more comfortable with forms of divination.

You can use whatever divination method you're comfortable with.

If you're not comfortable divining with astrology, like me, there are several other ways you can divine what's to come, or if your best option is just to let go and write things out. My personal favorite is cartomancy, specifically the Tarot.

I do use Oracle decks from time to time as well, but for the purpose of an eclipse I'd want to use a deck specific to cosmic events or the specific energetic "weather" happening at the time of the eclipse season, and I don't really have many of those. Honestly though, you could use whatever kind of cartomancy works best for how your brain processes information.

You can use everything from a physical deck of playing cards to a virtual deck on a virtual tabletop of some kind. You can use dice for divination.

Again, physical or digital. Random number generators, shuffle your musical platform playlist, look at coffee grounds or tea leaves, or go look at the clouds in the sky or bird droppings on the ground. Whatever is convenient and that you can interpret.

That's the only thing that matters about a divination tool, that it's easily accessible, one you can trust and one you can interpret.

And whether you already have established relationships with your spiritual allies or not, you can still establish connections with them and communicate with them now. Spiritual allies can come in many forms. Regular spiritual guides, ancestors.

They can come in by way of the natural world through animal spirits, plant, elemental, mineral spirits. I love working with crystal allies, especially as of late. I also work with a handful of divine allies, as I mentioned in the first episode.

Persephone has been rather my ride or die for the last few years, and Loki has kind of set himself up as our family patron, which I think is rather fitting for all of our eclipse loving energy in here.

More lately I've had taps on the shoulder from Cernunnos and possibly Aries as well, though whether that's just more due to the work I've been doing to help my teen explore their connection with him, or because he wants one independently with me is still an unknown.

There are several ways to communicate with your spiritual allies, and in the upcoming episodes we'll explore some of those ways, in addition to going more into divination, connecting with your intuition, and other helpful practices to get you established well before the next eclipse season rolls around.

There are a handful of practices I consider vital from the days and weeks before the eclipse season, through it, and in unraveling the aftermath.

These are also practices I consider to be important for a strong, powerful practice in general, so I'll touch on them briefly and then expand on them a little later in this episode, and then even further in a later episode.

The first is shadow work.

As eclipses bring out things usually quite hidden, doing shadow work gives us an opportunity to begin facing those things about ourselves in a manner and time frame of our choosing. In theory, reducing the intensity of our exposure during the eclipse season.

At the very least, we need to open those doors so that when the eclipse energy comes rolling through, they don't get blown off the hinges.

And shadow work aside, journaling is a good practice to have, and it doesn't need to be the traditional pen to paper journaling, but we'll get more into that later.

And if you are set on doing magic during the eclipse, there's a few different ways you can go about it.

First, you could just do it, but do it with preparation. I don't mean getting your candles, herbs, or incense or anything else ready, though obviously you want to prepare for a ritual or magic any way you normally would -

but rather the preparation you make for the eclipse season itself. Your divining, your spirit team, your intuition, or journaling whatever methods you use to prepare and get whatever messages are coming and do it understanding that unless you are able to heavily fortify your magic against outside influence, which if you have magic you want to do intentionally during an eclipse, I don't imagine that's the case, then the magic is going to be heavily influenced by that eclipse energy.

In my case, before I do ritual magic, I ground by pulling from both the sky and the land and finding balance in the center.

But that means that the very energy I use to perform my magic is going to be that of the eclipse energy. So any ritual I plan with the intent of doing during the eclipse has to take that into account.

One thing I've learned over the years about doing magic during the eclipse is really having to let go of how the outcome will manifest. You may be doing a ritual for abundance.

Well, that could end up being anything from an abundance of people wanting to hang out to an abundance of funds.

If you specify, say, abundance of funds, then you could end up with a lot of overtime or an unexpected inheritance that you may or may not want, and then have to go through the hassle of probate and then possibly plan on taxes for. Or it could just be a simple windfall.

The specific outcome can be hard to predict whenever you do ritual in general, but those chances of reaching your goals in an unexpected manner definitely increase with such fluid energy, because water will always follow the path of least resistance.

And even when you are as specific as you possibly can be, if there's too much resistance or no path for that energy to take to reach the outcome you want, it could still stagnate or overflow.

This is the primary reason I would caution extreme care if you actively perform magic during the eclipse season because you'll get where you want to be, but the path there may not be one you're all that comfortable taking.

Conversely, if you look at it like fire, well, fire does tend to follow where there's the most fuel, the most to burn. So take that for what you will.

Especially since getting into alignment does kind of require getting out of our comfort zone.

If you want to perform magic but you worry about your energy levels or about being too directly linked to the energy of the magic while eclipse season is in full swing, there is another option. And quite frankly this is a wonderful option no matter when you want to perform magic, if there's a particular time you want that energy to be released at but you're concerned about the energy or want to separate yourself a little more from what you're doing.

This suggestion comes from the Demystify Magic episode I mentioned earlier and will also be linked in the show notes.

One of the hosts does magic and kind of funnels it I guess, or channels it into a candle. For eclipse season she uses a seven or 14 day candle.

If you're worried about leaving a candle burning 24-7 during eclipse season but don't want to have candle left over at the end, you can probably just substitute a series of chime or even tea light candles and burn for say 15 minutes to an hour a day.

And if you are in a spot where you are not able to burn candles or it's not allowed or whatever the reasoning or issue may be LED candles are a thing and I do not see them as being any different than a regular candle. As long as you have the mentality that what you are doing is working with a candle.

And when it comes time to do the more mundane preparation, it's basically make notes to yourself. Whatever comes to you from divination, spiritual allies, crystal allies, animal allies.

Wherever your messages come from, leave them in places you frequent, make them affirmations, reminders, whatever you have 'cessed that you need to get through the season and make sure they are where you actually are going to see them.

If you commute to work, leave one where you put your keys, tape one to your monitor at work, write it out on your bathroom mirror in lipstick, on your laptop, as a bookmark in your favorite book.

Places where you will be consistently and constantly reminded what this eclipse will be for, what it will do, and above all that you've got this.

If you need inspiration, the posts over @rewildingforwomen on Instagram leading up to and through an eclipse season run the gamut from things like "eclipse season is that friend who goes through your closet saying 'keep toss, set it on fire.' but with your entire life"

to "this Virgo eclipse isn't just giving 'perfectionist goddess having a meltdown' vibes, it's 'Earth Priestess remembering her medicine energy'"

And in addition to future episodes where I'll be going into more details about how to utilize witchcraft practices and then you can apply them to getting through and preparing for eclipse seasons, I've also got plans to teach a whole class or workshop on it from a witch's perspective and experience sometime before next eclipse season here in September.

I'll be making an announcement with more details once they've been finalized in terms of when, where and how you can participate or gain access to the class material.

All right, again, a lot of information to process, but I mean it's eclipse season, so gonna give you a moment to breathe, process, grab a drink, hydrate and we'll be back in a moment.

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The reason why I said this eclipse season was a little different is because even with my tarot and oracle, even with my intuition and my spiritual allies and my crystals, even with my love of eclipse season, sometimes our normal tricks and tools and ways of preparing just don't really give us much direction.

I was not prepared for what this eclipse season brought me, so the best thing that I could do was just open myself to the energy and go where it led me.

When it's time to start moving away from the eclipse energy and deal with the aftermath that it manifested for you, it'll be time to let go of what was lost. There's always going to be more shadow work to be done once an eclipse season ends regardless of how much you did in preparation

If there's grief to be felt, feel it. If there's pain, righteous rage, fierce joy, or a need for some seriously steadfast boundary setting, lean into it.

Ground the lessons that eclipse season taught you into your life, but make sure you're looking at them through the lens of what won't blind you. Because just like looking at the sun, even during a solar eclipse can and will still burn you.

Sometimes looking too directly at events that happened during that energy can scorch and scar for years to come.

Shift your perspective through your own energetic emotional or mental eclipse glasses so that you can see the beauty of what transpired without it burning you irrevocably.

Journaling, what I hold to be one of the most sacred practices within witchcraft, is honestly the simplest and easiest way to process what has happened during an eclipse. When we don't get the words or feelings out in one form or another, it acts like a clog in a drain.

All this shit got stirred up over the course of two to three weeks, but now it's got nowhere to go, no way to get out.

But contrary to popular belief and opinion, journaling does not have to be done pen to paper, though that is arguably still the best approach for most people.

But we're not most people, are we?

So some other ways to explore journaling are through things as simple as speaking aloud, either in therapy, to someone you trust, or alone.

And if you want to keep a record but aren't the type to write it or type it out, you can do voice memos.

Artwork. Sketch, doodle, write a story, write a song, paint, hell - create a Dungeons and Dragons adventure reflecting the themes of the eclipse season for you. Whatever gets the gunk out and feels good to you without traumatizing others in the process can never be the wrong approach.

Bearing in mind since I mentioned D&D that there's frequent jokes about D&D characters existing in order to be traumatized - just make sure you're traumatizing the characters while being mindful that you don't traumatize the players.

Keeping in contact with your allies in all forms is just as important in the aftermath of an eclipse as it is before and during.

Having the outside perspective of a person, a spirit, or an energy can help you develop and maintain that protective lens while you are processing and reintegrating back into the more usual way of things while still being able to reflect on and internalize the lessons of the eclipse.

If you are satisfied in your methods of meditation, then meditate. If you feel comfortable channeling, then do so in whatever method you feel moved.

My spiritual allies these days are mostly of the divine and crystal variety, and I've gotten to be pretty good at identifying when one of them is yelling at me. So I'll carry stones with me or wear them. I'll sit with as few distractions as possible.

I'll free write, but I'll focus my attention on my Divine and Crystal Allies for their messages, while still keeping an ear out for anything else that may come my way.

I'll still use my Tarot or my Crystal Oracle deck to divine with these allies, though sometimes my Divine allies also like to yank my Spotify playlist from me if I'm not paying enough attention. But that's what it all comes down to when you're trying to connect to your allies and your inner wisdom. Just pay attention.

That's all you really need to be doing.

And divination isn't just a good tool for staying in contact with your spiritual and energetic allies, but for getting back in touch with your own inner self. Eclipse season has a tendency to yank the rug out from under us, no matter how well prepared we are or how grounded we feel we've stayed throughout.

I left off grounding until now for a very specific reason, because you can be too grounded and it's easier to be so during an eclipse season than any other time. Really.

If you are as grounded as you normally are during an eclipse season and you get that wild like tornado type energy coming through, it's going to hit you harder than when energy's a little bit calmer, okay?

So before, and during the eclipse season, you want to be a little more open, a little more connected to the everything, because that's what's going to help your instinct and intuition guide you through its inevitable twists and turns.

On the flip side, depending on your grounding method, it could also leave you more open to the influence of the eclipse energy beyond what you need.

But grounding afterwards at least should be a very intentional process where you focus your grounding on internalizing the lessons learned and experience gained during the eclipse in a manner that's most useful and beneficial to you and your movement forward.

And you know, I got the bulk of this episode complete before this current eclipse season ended.

I think we were maybe one or two days out from the solar eclipse when I finished recording what I was able to plan for.

So what happened after that?

I understood something in a way that I can't go back from now. It's something I understood before.

There's a lot of self loathing in this world, a lot of hate that people have for themselves that they project onto other people because it's too painful for them to face it. Yet that understanding was always rather easy to forget.

So anytime it came back to me it was a "sigh. I really should be doing better about remembering that"

Forgetting was more of an aggravation than anything else. But I understand that now in a way that was more painful, to experience in a way that's personal.

It's one of the very few concessions that I can say I give myself that I don't automatically and habitually give to other people. And if you come from a people pleasing background the way that I do, you know how huge having those kinds of things can be.

But I also know how fucking hard I had to work to start giving myself these concessions. And that's the realization of where the self hatred all comes from.

Such a huge part of the population of our world has been traumatized in ways that have, so far, permanently altered their perceptions of themselves, the world around them and their behavior about it all.

And they've - we've - been so traumatized collectively that's just become such the normal way of things for us so that when we encounter something other, we literally just can't trust it. So we just keep lashing out.

We keep being hateful because the person being true and compassionate with us, we just lack the ability to comprehend that someone can just be genuinely kind. And because we can't think about the things that led us to that space, we find something else, something other to blame it on.

Be it the color of their skin, their gender, their expression, anything about their personality, their anything that's "safe" for us to pinpoint as the reason they can't possibly be a good person deserving of respect and dignity.

Because if there's any part of ourselves that we believe isn't worthy and we don't let ourselves admit that, we're going to find cause for it in damn near anyone we meet who's even remotely different from us. Because if we aren't worthy as ourselves, then they definitely aren't either.

of the solar eclipse of March: 2025

I hope you've enjoyed today's episode on eclipse season and that with the information provided, you'll find yourself able to better prepare and weather the storm that is the next one to come. Remember, all of these skills improve with practice.

So start working to find what works for you now so that when the next eclipse season comes, you won't be caught unaware.

And as we move forward from this eclipse season, I just want to express my joy and excitement and my gratitude at you, my listeners and my community.

The support I've received from those near and dear to ones I only know at a distance and beyond to complete strangers has been truly eye opening.

Every follower and every download I see makes me realize that something has been touched and I fully believe will one day be able to come into full bloom.

Catch up on between episode content over on Instagram @shadowsandblooms and on Facebook at Hearth Of Shadows and Blooms.

Or use the email or contact form linked in the Show Notes to submit your thoughts, suggestions or questions.

And as always, if you want to support the podcast, rate, comment and share so that the message of inclusive and accessible witchcraft can continue to grow.

Be on the lookout for the next episode in two weeks, where I'll do my first episode on a specific witchcraft practice grounding and dip our toes into the upcoming Festival of Beltane for those who like having time to prepare.

And until then, don't forget to keep making your magic yours and fuck what anyone else has to say about it.