Refining Your Spell Casting Ability: Prune to Bloom
How Editing, Discernment, and Release Elevate Your Magical Practice
The practice of spellcasting has deep roots in resourcefulness, creativity, and rearrangement — from the gathering of plant materia and minerals, to calling on the directions and elements, to witnessing (or granting breath to) “objects” with their own distinctive animacy, including the selection and chanting of words or imprinting symbols— are most often about moving spirits, calling them forward, hindering them or pushing them back, influencing events, imprinting them into objects.
In this way, spells are ultimately about movement: arranging or juxtaposing to imagine possibilities, to tell a different story, to level out the playing field, to make edits to a world that lacks fairness and equity. A magic practitioner hears or sees the voices of strings of a tapestry, and then is in service of weaving it—in collaboration with Nature’s animacy. The work is in identifying what may need repairing or rearranging to ensure life, whether if it is about survival (healing and protection spells as examples), a reprieve from difficult things, or a chance for a freer, more beautiful life.
Spells offer a sense of comfort and stability. Yet, in our fast-paced culture, we seldom allow ourselves the pause needed to look beyond our immediate reality. We often hesitate to question our own truths (a witch with no self-awareness or willingness to be corrected is the most dangerous) or grant ourselves the permission to change our minds.
For this reason, while magick can expand us and stabilize, I’m equally grateful that spells can aid in the necessary work of editing and releasing. Because life can sometimes show more flattering angles we have not yet seen before, if we’re willing to let it, if we’re willing to do the hard work of pruning so we can grow.
Editing is a skill that is required in many vocations, and I would argue it’s especially needed for anyone who claims they are tired, overworked, too busy, and craving more meaning or tenderness.
Editing requires absolute clarity. Then, with restraint, an eye full of care, measuring twice, and with sharpness, cutting away the dead stuff or the extraneous away as an act of compassion (because a dull cut would hurt more) and as a commitment to a garden that can breathe and receive sunlight, and bloom the sweetest of roses.
I’ve come to understand that “prune to bloom” is my definition of “editing” or “to edit”, a word that seems to have appointed itself as my personal word for 2025.
In the context of a witch or magic practitioner, the role of being an editor is also an indispensable part of the craft. Spells may require specific techniques for a particular outcome or fruit you’re tending to. Editing can look like ensuring the language of a spell is precise, clear, and aligned with the desired intention. It can also involve removing unnecessary or conflicting elements to create a more focused working. The editing done within shadow work can identify fears and self sabotaging, catching and releasing them. Contrary to “anything goes modern spirituality”, effectual spells are not about just throwing in a bunch of herbs in a jar and hoping for the best. No matter what, effective spells require intentional vision, and an element of release. The witch must be willing to surrender, to allow ideas to come to maturity, to prioritize what matters, and ruthlessly examine what that may be. To edit in spell work is to know to say no more often than saying yes, with gratitude and curiosity. An editor’s mind within witchcraft is having the discernment to know that a hex (including a return to sender spell) or a counter spell is less about revenge and more about rebalancing. Editing is Yin work, and Yang evoked with precision and without ego. It means the sorceress is ruthless in compassion, is disciplined and eagle-eyed, and calls in the allies to attract, protect, defend, uncross, hinder, or destroy.
If editing feels like a word that denotes subtraction and restriction, it’s actually a proceess that leads to freedom. Another way of approaching editing is simply increasing Yin, and by doing so the path forward is seen with crystalline clarity. My new series, Crafting the Arcane: Magickal Spells That Work, is a yearlong, in-depth instructional and hands-on exploration of light and dark spellcasting, where throughout the e-gatherings, magic will be approached with the necessary skill of editing, where we move and move with the animate world. A follow-up to the occult series The Mystery Mentorship (now a self-study programme), Crafting the Arcane begins on February 19, 2025.
Speaking unpopular truths requires editing.
Making more space in your life requires editing.
Having more capacity to create more requires editing.
Calling on the beloved dead requires editing.
Conjuring spirits to assist your workings requires editing.
Gaining the auspices of dark goddesses requires editing.
Rejecting shit requires editing.
Embracing the seasons requires editing.
Radical pleasure requires editing.
Deepening your magical craft requires editing.
On January 29, 2025, we will be stepping into the year of the Wood Snake, where on January 26, 2025, I am offering a live-stream event that shares the lunar year’s forecast as well as inviting the auspices of the custodial animal. This cosmic serpent is considered a Yin animal, and will naturally be influencing us to make choices that will support more intuition, creativity, reckoning, shapeshifting, and yes, editing. Snake’s call is for a life with more blooms, and sometimes, it’s by pruning, to make way for more of what’s essential and affirming.
May you all be met with untold blooms.
Happy 2025.
Following the spirits,
Mimi
Animist spirit intermediary and educator in occult studies