Field Notes on the Meaning of Yin
This first, introductory piece sets the stage for better understanding and relating with the Yin principle in Daoist theory and practice. It will help you see that Yin is not simply rest or collapse, but a distinct way that magic, spirit, and matter move. It also opens a three-part blog series:
Across the series, I explore how depletion, exhaustion, and winter alter our relationship to spirit work and map the actual behaviours of Yin in the world. Below are my field notes gathered from mediumship, ritual practice, working with the I Ching, and the lived mechanics of Yin governance: how she moves, how she influences, and what she requires. Rather than a definition, what follows is the sensorial, relational, and often hidden architecture of Yin magic.
What does Zìrán (自然) mean? & How does it relate to animacy?
Zìrán (自然), literally “self‑so” or “what is so of itself,” is one of Daoism’s core principles. It’s made of two characters—zì (自), “self,” and rán (然), “so” or “thus”, and points to the idea that everything has its own innate way of being.
Zìrán, also translated into English from Mandarin as ‘natural’, describes how things unfold when left to their own accord: rivers carve their courses, plants reach for light, birds migrate without a map. There’s no forced drive or contrivance; each phenomenon simply follows its inner nature.
Where wú‑wéi (無爲) teaches “deliberate action through non‑action”, zìrán shows us what that looks like in practice: behaving as the world behaves, moving with its rhythms instead of against them. It’s magic without applied force; power born of alignment rather than manipulation.
The Meaning of Wu Wei (無為)
Wu Wei is often translated as “non-action” or “effortless action,” Wu Wei (無為) is far more subtle and alive than these terms suggest. In the Dao De Jing and Zhuangzi, it’s not about passivity or withdrawal, but about deep attunement, moving in accordance of the seasons, cycles, arcs, and other patterns rather than imposing upon it.
I’m particularly interested in how Wu Wei shows up in witchcraft, particularly spellworkings that utilizes the Yin aspect. This is also essential in understanding how to cast spells in a way that feels sustainable for the practitioner and the materia magica.
Wu Wei isn’t the absence of doing. It’s action that arises from alignment with nature, with timing, with spirits. Sometimes this means waiting. Other times it means striking at the precise moment, with clarity and grace. It’s a practice of discernment, restraint, and responsiveness that is rooted in trust so one does not waste energy resisting what is already in motion.
It’s not always comfortable. Wu Wei asks us to release control, to trust emergence over agenda. It challenges our conditioning around productivity, certainty, and force, in fact, Wu Wei challenges white supremacy and the Empire in every way. It unravels and leverages the binaries: active/passive, speaking/silent, intervention/withdrawal and invites presence, timing, and relational awareness. As I shared in my blog post on witchcraft and extraction, if we haven't done the deep work, it's almost guaranteed we will approach activist magic with the same extractive mechanisms we are resisting.
How to Protect My Energy (Especially Now)
There are times when protecting your energy means choosing silence over sharing, or stillness over movement, even when everything around you suggests the opposite. Energy protection means being able to register your own nervous system before you respond to someone else’s. This isn’t always easy. Many of us have been trained in attunement as a form of survival, conditioned to read the room, then shape ourselves accordingly. (As a trusted psychic and occultist, offering shamanic readings / psychic readings online, I find it’s especially easy to fall into patterns of over-attuning and have had to work on consistent energetic hygiene).
Protecting your energy from others, spiritually or psychically, asks you to unlearn that as the default. Or at least to recognize when it’s happening, and then to choose in the present moment if that is what you would like to keep doing.
That said, energetic protection is NOT cliqueness, being hardened, or invulnerable, sealing yourself off from the world. I’ve found that it’s more about noticing how easily you can disappear inside someone else’s needs, how quickly your system can contort out of a desire to meet what hasn’t even been asked for explicitly. If you tend to overextend, or mirror back what’s expected before you’ve even checked in with yourself, then it’s likely your energy has already left the room before your body has. This is vitally important to have awareness on, because when auric and physical body are operating from a place of separation or disassociation, there will invariably be an energy leak or an energy leaching. In extreme cases, when aura and 3D body are not in tandem, it can even invite unwell spirits to latch. Here is the thing: protecting your energy is a direct form of protection from spirits that harm.
There’s a certain politeness that’s mistaken for care. A kind of over-giving that looks generous on the surface but runs on depletion underneath. If you’ve been that person, you’re probably exhausted. You’re probably reading this hoping for permission to do less. You have it.