LESSONS IN MAGICK: Guard Your Flame

August 3, 2026•Lessons in Magick, Musings of a Modern Mystic

There has been a lot happening in the Witch and greater Occult communities.

Even beyond these spaces, if I’m being honest.

There are so many intersections, adjacent communities, overlapping conversations, and places where all of this bleeds into one another.

I digress.

This isn’t about one particular event.

And it certainly isn’t about any particular person.

It’s simply a friendly reminder of a few things I think some folks have lost sight of:

1. Protection Magick is necessary Magick.

Make sure you have a solid plan.

Offensive. Defensive. Preventative.

Know the difference.
Know what you’re doing.
Know why you’re doing it.

And for the love of all things Holy and Unholy, don’t wait until you’re already in the fire to figure out how you’re going to protect yourself from it.

2. Mental health is Spiritual health.

Maintain proper Spiritual hygiene.

Take care of your mind.
Take care of your psyche.

Hydrate.
Eat well.
Move your body.

Take your medications.
Take your supplements.
Meditate.
Go to therapy.
Rest.
Get outside.

Do the mundane things that keep your vessel functioning.

Your mind is part of your temple, too.

You cannot continually neglect the human being while trying to tend the Spirit.

3. Flow like water through a stream, but stand like stone beneath the current.

Create your own opinions.

Build a foundation beneath them strong enough that nothing, and no one, can simply shake you from it.

But remain willing to change.

Be willing to listen.
Be willing to encounter an opposing idea without immediately treating it as an attack.

There is an extraordinary amount of rage bait, manipulation, misinformation, disinformation, Spiritual projection, and psychological noise circulating right now.

Whether you call it psyops, propaganda, Spiritual warfare, algorithms, or simply the internet doing what the internet does best, be mindful.

Be mindful of what you consume.
Be mindful of what you amplify.
Be mindful of what you allow into your psyche.

Because energy is power.

So ask yourself:

Are you giving yours away freely?

4. Discernment in all things.

This one should speak for itself. I say it often enough.

Question everything.

Seek until you find an answer.
Then seek some more.

And more.
And more.

Use your intuition.
Use logic.
Use facts.
Use evidence.
Use your lived experience.

And yes,
use Spirit.

But don’t abandon one form of knowing simply because another feels more comfortable.

Intuition without discernment can become projection.

Logic without intuition can become rigidity.

Faith without questioning can become dogma.

You need all of your faculties.

Use them.

5. To thine own self be true.

This might be the most important one.

We live in a world of (as aforementioned) algorithms, echo chambers, outrage cycles, manufactured consensus, and endless noise.

Everyone has an opinion.

Everyone has a platform.

Everyone has an answer.

And somewhere underneath all of that noise is your own voice.

You must learn how to hear it.

Because for many of the things we question, we already know the answer.

We’ve simply forgotten how to listen.

More importantly, we must become brave enough to trust ourselves.

To take the leap.

Even when it doesn’t make sense.

Especially when it doesn’t make sense.

Follow your path.
Follow your beat.
Follow your flame.

You do not need permission to become who you are.

You do not need consensus to know what you know.

You do not need the crowd to validate the path beneath your feet.

For you are the fire.

Lux in Tenebris Lucet

The Fire Beaneath the Bones

July 27, 2026•Musings of a Modern Mystic, Shadow Work

Suffering
is not
a requirement
for life.

Nor is it
the price
of Spiritual evolution.

It is simply

one destination

along a road

few would choose,
yet many
will someday
walk.

The Plutonian Healer
does not seek
the Underworld.

She simply knows
what to do
once she arrives.

She descends.

Again.
And again.

Not because
she is broken.

Not because
Spirit delights
in suffering.

But because
there are medicines
that only grow
beneath the earth.

The world teaches us
to fear
the darkness.

The Plutonian
knows better.

She enters
the belly
of the Underworld
with empty hands
and returns
carrying fire.

She learns
that grief
isn’t punishment.

Rage
isn’t failure.

Loss
isn’t the end.

They are Crossroads.

Every death
asks a question.

Every ending
demands
another name.

The Plutonian Healer
does not emerge
without scars.

She emerges
speaking
the language
of those
still trapped
below.

She remembers
the pathways.

The hidden doors.

The monsters
that were never monsters —
only abandoned
pieces
of herself
waiting
to be loved
without illusion.

This is why
people find her
when life
falls apart.

She does not
flinch
at ruin.

She recognizes it.

She has built
Altars
from ash.

Gardens
from graves.

She has learned
that compost
and resurrection
have always shared
the same soil.

Do not mistake
her tenderness
for innocence.

She has dined
with Death.

Sat beside
Grief.

Held hands
with Madness.
Walked home
with Shadow.

And still,
she chose
Life.

Not the polished,
performative version.

The wild one.

The blood-soaked,
root-bound,
earth-scented
miracle
of becoming.

Because the Plutonian Healer
knows
what few Healers ever will.

The Underworld
was never
her prison.

It was
her apprenticeship.

Lux in Tenebris

Jaclyn Cherie

The Forgotten Daughter

July 23, 2026•Shadow Work

Left behind.

Never chosen.

Parentified
and infantilized
in the same breath.

Too young
to have a voice.

Old enough
to carry everyone’s pain.

Tell me
how does a child
become both
the family therapist
and still be treated
as though
she knows nothing?

How do you become
the one
everyone leans on,
yet no one
thinks to hold?

I learned early
that love
could be earned.

That usefulness
was safer
than need.

That if I became
indispensable enough,
perhaps…

someone
would finally
choose me.

So I became
the bridge.

The peacemaker.

The keeper
of impossible silences.

The daughter
who swallowed storms
so no one else
had to taste
the rain.

No one noticed
that every flood
left me drowning.

The forgotten daughter
doesn’t scream.

She studies.
She adapts.
She watches every room
like prey
studying predators.

She learns
which version
of herself
will keep
everyone comfortable.

Until one day
she wakes
unable to remember
which version
was ever
her own.

People mistake
the forgotten daughter
for resilient.

As though survival
wasn’t simply
the only language
she was ever taught.

They praise
her strength.

Never asking
who she had to become
to deserve
those words.

But forgotten
does not mean
unworthy.

It means
someone else
failed
to remember.

I was never
too much.

Too sensitive.
Too difficult.
Too intense.

I was simply
growing
inside a home
that had forgotten
how to see me.

Perhaps they never knew how.

There comes a moment
when forgotten daughters
stop waiting
to be found.

We descend

Not into despair

into ourselves.

Into the dark places
where abandoned children
become Wise Women.

Where grief
is no longer
a prison,
but a forge.

The world calls us
forgotten.

Spirit
calls us
initiated.

Because those
who are never chosen
learn
the oldest lesson
of all.

To choose themselves.

Again.
And again.
And again.

Until the echo
of abandonment

becomes

a declaration.

I was never forgotten.

I was hidden.

Hidden
where no one else
could name me

until I remembered
my own.

They called me

the forgotten daughter.

As though forgetting
was ever
my name.

I crossed
the threshold.

I entered
the fire.

I buried

the child

who begged

to be chosen.

And the Woman
who emerged

did not ask

to be remembered.

She remembered

her own name.

Jaclyn Cherie

Blood Remembers

July 21, 2026•Musings of a Modern Mystic, Shadow Work

Her presence triggers me.

It cuts deep.

Memories flooding
that old ache
I keep convincing myself
has finally gone quiet.

Then she walks into the room

and suddenly
I am every age
I have ever been.

She is my home.

My safe place.

My refuge from the storm.

She is also
the storm itself.

She is both

curse

and cure.

Burn

and balm.

How can one Woman
be the place
I run toward
and the place
I have spent
my life
trying to outrun?

This is the inheritance
of Mothers and Daughters.

We are stitched together
long before
either of us
learns
how to speak.

Bound
by blood.
By bone.
By memory.

By the unspoken language
of Women
who carry one another’s
grief
inside their own bodies.

I see her.

Not just
the Mother.

The little girl
she buried
to become one.

I see
the fear
she swallowed.

The dreams
she folded away.

The love
she never learned
how to give
without it first
passing through
her own wounds.

And because I see her
I ache.

Not because
it excuses
what hurt me.

That she hurt me.

But because
love becomes
far more complicated
when you can trace
the wound
back through
the Women
who carried it
before either of you
were born.

People want
simple stories.

A villain.
A victim.
Someone to blame.

But life
rarely offers us
that simplicity.

Sometimes
the Woman
who broke you
is also
the Woman
who held you
when the rest
of the world did not.

Sometimes
the safest place
you’ve ever known
is also
where your deepest wounds
were first named.

This is the impossible
geometry
of Mothers
and Daughters.

The centuries-old question:

Who hurt whom more?
Mother?
Or child?

Perhaps
that is the wrong question.

Perhaps
the better one is:

Who was hurting first?

Who carried
a grief
so Ancient
it forgot
which generation
it belonged to?

I do not know
where she ends
and I begin.

Perhaps
that is the tragedy.

Perhaps
that is also
the miracle.

Because even
when I rage,
even
when I retreat,
even
when her presence
awakens every scar
I have fought
to heal
I still know
she is bound to me.

And I to her.

Not by obligation.

Not by guilt.

But by something
older than language.

Older than memory.

A cord
neither of us tied.

A love
neither of us
has always known
how to carry.

So I will not ask
who wounded whom more.

I will ask instead

How do we become
the first Women
in our bloodline
to love each other
without bleeding
quite so much?

The Woman Who Broke The Spell

July 19, 2026•Musings of a Modern Mystic, Shadow Work

Some wounds are generational.

They connect us
through unspoken bonds
of blood,
bone,
and memory.

They are inherited
like old recipes,
family heirlooms,
and names carved into weathered gravestones.

Except no one speaks
of these inheritances.

Only the silence.

Only the tightening jaw.

Only the little girl
who learns to apologize
before she knows
what she has done wrong.

Only the mother
who loved
the best she could
with hands that were never taught
how to hold themselves.

I used to believe
the mother wound
was born
inside one Woman.

I know better now.

It is older than her.

Older than her mother.

Older than the grandmother
whose laughter
was swallowed
by survival.

It travels.
From womb to womb.

From daughter to daughter.

A ghost
wearing
different faces.

We inherit
the unfinished grief
of Women
who were told
their hunger
was dangerous.

Their anger
unbecoming.

Their voices
too loud.

Their bodies
belonged
to everyone
but themselves.

Until one Woman…

says:

No.

Not because she hates
the Women who came before.

Because she loves
the Women
who will come after.

Do you know
what it costs
to break a generational curse?

Everything.

You become
the family disappointment.

The difficult one.

The Woman
who asks forbidden questions.

Who names
what everyone else
has learned
to survive by denying.

You mourn
people
who are still alive.

You bury
versions of yourself
that were built
only to keep
the peace.

You become
the fire alarm
inside a house
that has grown comfortable
with smoke.

And no one
thanks the alarm.

Not at first.

Breaking the curse
is not beautiful.

It is ugly.

It is blistered hands
pulling roots
that have wrapped themselves
around your spine.

It is learning
that forgiveness
does not always
mean reconciliation.

It is discovering
that compassion
does not require
your continued sacrifice.

It is standing
at the edge
of your bloodline
and saying:

It ends here.

Not because
I am stronger
than my mothers.

But because
their prayers
finally found
a body
willing
to answer them.

Perhaps
I was never born
to carry
this pain forever.

Perhaps
I was born
to become
the threshold.

The Woman
who looked
an Ancient wound
in the eyes
and refused
to pass it
to the next generation.

This is how
the spell is broken.

Not with perfect love.

Not without grief.

But with one battered hand
reaching backward
to bless the Women
who could not escape
while the other
reaches forward
to children,
to daughters,
to sons,
to every future soul
I will never meet,
unburdened.

Because I chose
to carry the wound
only long enough
to teach it
how to become
an ending.

Jaclyn Cherie

To The Woman Who Survived

July 16, 2026•Activism, Priestess & Goddess, Rebellion

Beloved,

I know there are days when the ghosts return.

Days when memory arrives uninvited,
dragging shadows behind it.

Days when your body remembers
what your mind had long since tucked away
inside Sacred vaults of survival.

And on those days,
I hope you remember this:
You were never the violence.

Not then.
Not now.
Not ever.

What happened to you
passed through your life like a storm,
but it did not become your Soul.

There are those who would measure you
by what was taken.

I measure you
by what remained.

And what remained
was extraordinary.

Is extraordinary.

You remained.

The heart still beating.
The lungs still drawing breath.
The Spirit still refusing to surrender its song.

You do not need to earn your healing.
You do not need to justify your grief.
You do not need to explain why some wounds ache louder than others.

You are allowed to be tender.
You are allowed to be angry.
You are allowed to be both in the same holy breath.

The world may call your scars damage.

I call them evidence.

Evidence that you walked through fire
and somehow carried the flame home.
Evidence that darkness met you
and failed to make you its own.
Evidence that even shattered things
can become Sacred.

So when the memories come,
when sorrow presses its hand against your chest,
when the old ache whispers its familiar lies,
place your hand over your heart.

Feel the rhythm beneath your palm.

Thump, thump
Thump, thump

That is not weakness.
That is not brokenness.
That is your life.

Still choosing itself.
Still choosing itself.
Still choosing itself.

Thump, thump
Thump, thump

And that,
dear Woman,
is a miracle.

You are a miracle.

Jaclyn Cherie

The Nephilim Rising
Girl God Books

All Rights Reserved.

My poem from the upcoming release, Spells for Survivors: Returning to the Holy Her

Pre-order at:

https://www.thegirlgod.com/spells_for_survivors.php

WAR CRY OF THE SURVIVOR

July 16, 2026•Activism, Musings of a Modern Mystic, Priestess & Goddess, Rebellion, Shadow Work

They told me to heal quietly.
To make my pain palatable.
To speak in soft tones and careful language.
To forgive before the wound had stopped bleeding.

To be gracious.
To be grateful.
To be anything but angry.

But anger was the first honest thing I had felt.
It arrived like a wildfire through dead timber.
Like a Goddess with blood on Her hands and justice in Her eyes.
Like a howl clawing its way from the deepest part of me.

You called me victim.
I became witness.
You called me broken.
I became weapon.
You called me ruined.
I became revelation.

What happened to me was real.
The terror was real.
The violation was real.
The grief was real.

And so is my rage.

My rage is not a flaw.
It is the part of me that knows I deserved better.

The part that refused to die.
The part that stood guard over the ashes and
whispered:

“No more.”

No more silence.
No more shrinking.
No more carrying shame that was never mine.

I return every ounce of it.
Every lie.
Every burden.
Every poisoned seed.

Take it back.
It belongs to you.

I am done carrying the weight of another’s violence.
I am done apologizing for surviving.
I am done making myself smaller so others can remain comfortable.

I am not what was done to me.

I am what survived.
I am the fire that remained.
The blade that did not break.

The voice that rose from the wreckage.

And when I speak now,

it is not with trembling.

It is with thunder.

Jaclyn Cherie

The Nephilim Rising
Girl God Books

All Rights Reserved.

My second poem from the upcoming release, Spells for Survivors: Returning to the Holy Her

Pre-order at:

https://www.thegirlgod.com/spells_for_survivors.php

Do Not Give Them Your Fear

July 16, 2026•Activism, Musings of a Modern Mystic, Rebellion

I have a million other things to be doing right now.

Yet Spirit has reached into the quiet,
wrapped its unseen hand around my wrist,
and whispered…

Write, child.

Because someone is forgetting.

Someone is standing at the Crossroads,
convinced that fear is the only language left.

It is not.

So hear me.

Not as a Prophet.
Not as a Saint.
Not as someone untouched by darkness.

Hear me as one who has walked through it.

Who has swallowed ash and breathed fire.
Who has slept beside grief.
Who has learned that monsters are not always found in forests, dark corners or beneath the bed
sometimes they wear familiar faces,
sometimes they echo inside our own minds.

Hear me as one who knows that Shadow
is not the enemy.

Fear wants you to kneel.

Despair wants you to forget your own name.
Silence wants you to mistake survival
for surrender.

Do. Not.

Do not give them your fear.

Do not feed the machine with your Spirit.
Do not offer your terror as tribute.
Do not become the architect of your own cage.

Your fear is Sacred fire.

Guard it.
Transform it.
Temper it until it becomes resolve.

To every Witch who has ever hidden their Altar.
To every Soul whose existence has been treated as an inconvenience.
To every Seeker.
Every exile.
Every strange child who learned too early that the world does not always welcome those who refuse to fit neatly inside its smallest boxes.

I see you.
I have always seen you.

The road beneath your feet has never been easy.

It was never meant to be.

We descend because wisdom waits below.
We speak with ghosts because they remember what Empires forgot.

We carry bones, herbs, Cards, prayers, scars, and stories because every generation leaves breadcrumbs for the next.

We are not born from comfort.
We are born from remembering.

Remember who you are.

Remember those who stood before you when the fires burned hotter than they do today.

Remember those who whispered prayers beneath their breath when speaking aloud carried consequences.

Remember those who buried their books,
hid their symbols,
passed Sacred names from trembling lips to willing ears,
believing someone,
someday,
would continue the work.

You are that someone.
And so am I.

Darkness has always existed.

So have we.

The night has never belonged solely to those who wield power.

It belongs to the owl.
The wolf.
The Ancestors.
The dreamers.
The Witches who know that every seed first breaks open beneath the Earth before it ever reaches the light.

We are children of thresholds.
Liminal Spaces.
Students of endings, and beginnings.
Keepers of impossible hope. Not the fragile kind that pretends suffering isn’t real, but the fierce kind that looks directly into the Abyss and refuses to become it. We study it.

No one is coming to save us.

Perhaps that has always been our greatest strength.
Because we remember how to gather.

How to tend the Flame.
How to bind one another’s wounds.
How to laugh in the face of uncertainty.
How to sing while surrounded by ruins.

That is Magick.
That is Alchemy.
Not escaping the darkness.
But becoming so familiar with it
that it no longer tells you who you are.
You are united as One.

So let them have their fear.

Let them build kingdoms from it if they must.
We will build something older.
Something that cannot be legislated away.
Something that cannot be silenced.
Something rooted in memory,
in courage,
in Spirit,
and in the wild, untamable heart that still beats beneath every scar we carry.

Stand.
Breathe.
Remember.
Then walk forward.
Not because you are unafraid.
But because fear was never meant to be your Master.

Do not give them your fear.

Not today.
Not tomorrow.
Not ever.

Remember who you are.

The Temple They Could Not Take

July 16, 2026•Musings of a Modern Mystic, Priestess & Goddess, Shadow Work

They called it necessary.

Clinical.
Routine.

As though language could bleach the blood
from memory.

As though white coats
were incapable of carrying empire
beneath pressed collars.

In 2008,
they cut the seat of my power
without my consent,
because somewhere,
buried beneath textbooks,
protocols,
and signatures,
a Woman
was, is, still considered
an acceptable experiment.

Laws made against my body.

Decisions made for me.

Hands that never learned
the difference
between healing
and permission.

By 2012,
my Womb was gone.

A room in my Temple
emptied by strangers
who would never have to haunt
its silence.

And afterward…

I ran.

Not because I was weak.

Because prey learns
the shape of pursuit
long before predators
learn mercy.

I ran from hospitals.

From fluorescent lights.

From waiting rooms
that smelled of antiseptic
and forgotten prayers.

I ran from every echo
that reminded me
what it feels like
to have your body translated
into paperwork.

But there comes a day
when the hunted
stops measuring the distance
behind her
and remembers
the fire ahead.

Listen closely.

They mistook my scars
for evidence of defeat.

How little they understood
the language of Witches.

These are not wounds.

They are sigils scorn into my skin.

My sacred scars.

Each one
an initiation.
Each one
a threshold crossed
without a map.

I no longer ask
why I was made
to walk through fire.

I ask instead:

What was forged there
that could not have been born
any other way?

They took some organs.

They did not take
my abilty to Create.

They mistook flesh
for power.

But power has never lived
inside a single chamber
of the body.

It lives
in the voice
that returns.

In the Soul
that refuses
to become
what violence imagined.

It lives
in every Woman
who gathers herself
from the places
she was told
she would never bloom again.

Do not pity me.
Stand beside me.
See these scars
for what they have become.

Not disfigurement.

Consecration.

Not absence.

Alchemy.

Not the ending
of a story
but the crossing
of a threshold.

I am no less Sacred
because my Temple
was altered.

If anything,
I know now
that sanctity
has never depended
upon untouched stone.

It depends
upon the flame
that still burns
inside the Sanctuary.

And mine,

Mine has learned
to consume
every name
they ever tried
to give me.

I am no one’s experiment.

I am the Woman
who survived
the hands
that mistook themselves
for gods.

I am the scar
that became scripture.

The threshold
that became a road.

The fire
that remembered
its own name

and burned it
into eternity
until even the stars
learned how to pronounce it.

Lessons in Magick: When Giants Fall

November 4, 2025•Lessons in Magick, Rebellion

Death does not occur one, singular time in our lives.

Sure. There is a death that is a finale, there is no coming back from.

None of us can escape that physical, biological ending.

Well, I mean, you know what I mean.

Reincarnation beliefs and such aside.

There are multiple tiny deaths we experience throughout life.

And, sadly, no, I am not referring to la petite mort.

Though I am a loud supporter that the more of THOSE you experience, the better your overall life will be.

I digress.

These tiny deaths I am referring to are not tiny at all; they are sometimes butterfly effects in our microcosm.

Other times, they are foundation cracking.

Making us reassess who we are and our values.

Then there are some minor annoyances.

Ah, one of the things in life besides death and taxes that can be guaranteed is change.

The world moves with or without you.

That’s a harsh reality, an ego death, we all must accept and go through.

You are either an active participant, or you are a passive bystander.

I prefer to be an active participant but sometimes we must, we must be bystanders.

If you are familiar with The Nap Bishop, Tricia Hersey, and her revolutionary work and book, Rest is Resistance then you might know what I am referring to.

Not only is rest an inherent right, but it is also an act of resistance.

An act of defiance in a hustle culture that judges you and defines you by how much you can produce, create, and freely give for “them” to take.

You have worth far beyond what you can give.

You have value far greater than you know.

Rest is a birthright.

“Those are nuanced statements! They’re privileged, too!”

Are they, though?

Make yourself extremely uncomfortable and ask, are they?

Read Tricia’s work and then circle back to me.

https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/

The last sense of normalcy, and I use the word loosely, that I experienced, along with many others, was in 2019.

I was at the height of my success. I was in the process of a book deal. I had everything I had ever wanted and dreamed right at my fingertips.

Then, 2020 hit and the world changed.

The world as we knew it had, was forever changed.

In my opinion, that was one of the larger butterfly effects in recent memory.

It altered all our lives whether we recognize the changes or not.

I have fought for nearly six years against nature, the Universe, and their Laws:

I have refused to die.

I have refused to allow certain parts of myself, my path, and my brand that no longer align with who I am and where I am at, go.

Resistance when embodied can seep into our everyday lives.

When we fight against a system, not a person but a system, dare I say an entity that wants everything from you, and we do not bend, flow, change quickly, then we will suffer a fate worse than metaphorical death –

Stagnancy.

Like a ghost, we become stuck in purgatory, unable to move on, but some parts of us know we must.

We remain in chrysalis instead of going through the process of metamorphosis to gain our wings.

We keep ourselves trapped, our world small, all for the sake of comfort.

The illusion of safety.

We refuse to perform one of the most essential forms of personal Alchemy.

In that, we are denying our birthright.

We are denying our power.

We are denying our Magick.

When we resist change, we resist death.

Both are natural parts of the cycle of life.

Both are natural parts of the cycle of our lives.

I experienced burnout and I am actively trying to heal that while finding temperance in my life.

I have found it a bit ironic that in my time away (years) from the more public facing aspects of my brand that the pendulum has swung back and folks are reading blogs again, and even vlogging.

My millennial heart is here for that comeback.

I believe we are better humans when we share our stories.

I didn’t know if I was going to return to this space, or in what capacity, but it is a part of me and my path.

I created this blog nearly 14 years ago as a space free of judgment and one of radical acceptance.

Though it was quiet for a bit while I went through my trial by fire for resisting change, I am grateful I kept the flame going, if only an ember.

As a Torchbearer, I can work with an ember. It means there is still life, still something to create with, still stories to be told.

I plan on doing book reviews and focusing on tackling some of the wild disinformation I see on platforms like TikTok. I am all for Witches sharing history and knowledge but not when it’s knowledge saying Belladonna is illegal.

Yes, a creator really said that ten toes down.

Like the name of my brand + business suggests, I am a Giant, and even Giants fall.

But we also rise.

It is in our rise that we find our greatest strengths.

I hope to reconnect with my audience in this space and on Facebook again.

I do hope you’re still out there.

If not, my fire will lead you home to the Crossroads as it once did.

Lux in Tenebris Lucet