Searches for “witch” are up 551% this year!
Women aren’t looking for a costume — they’re looking for their power back!
And, spiritual AI searches are up over 300%!
I’m not shocked. Are you?
In a world that has us more connected to our screens than to nature and each other, it’s my sense that our inner higher selves are remembering what connection, magic, and sacred space feels like, and we are thirsty for it.
But, is being Witchy the answer?
It could be a starting point for some (and I’m NOT speaking to black magic!), but will Pop Culture Witchiness truly satisfy our deep thirst?
Is real medicine being buried underneath a trend that’s currently getting flattened into an aesthetic?
People burned out on hustle culture are reaching for ancient wisdom, even through imperfect modern channels.
Looking at the reasons behind the burnout of Women in Leadership gives us a clue that sourcing our power is the deeper reason at play.
Instead of hustle, we are seeking:
Deeper support
A greater sense of wellbeing and energy
Freedom to support and heal ourselves and our loved ones
Greater clarity and access to our gifts
A sense of purpose that fuels us
A reclamation of our true voice.
These are just a few of the reasons, and fun potions won’t don’t the trick, unfortunately. They can feel more meaningful than succumbing to a pint of ice cream when we’re depleted, but the thrill ends quickly.
Our grandmothers had a way of magically quieting the hustle, the pain, the disenchantment of all things—through love, attention, deep care, and, yes, potions, that came from a profound place of wisdom, from the elements, passed down through the ages (even if they didn’t know it!).
Now, I’m not here to knock the intriguing and fun spells and potions. I, too, was a curious and mystical child who believed in magic.
I can recall, as a child, pretending to be He-Man. I put on a “special” ring, stood outside on my grandmother’s porch with my fist to the sky, and with all my might yelled: “I have the power!” I swear I waited for something out of this world to happen! It never did, but that didn’t stop me from doing it over and over again. My mind was a playground, and I loved playing in it!
Let me be SUPER clear… I’ve never stopped believing in magic, but how I define and source the magic doesn’t give power to something outside of me.
What I’ve learned through years of reading cards, throwing runes, and standing in ceremony is this: none of those tools have ever held the power. Not once. They’re mirrors. They’re doorways. They’re a language my soul uses to talk to itself when the noise of the world gets too loud to hear it any other way.
The runes don’t know your future. The cards don’t have an opinion about your life. What they do is slow you down enough to hear what you already know. That’s the difference between a spell and sourced wisdom — a spell asks something outside you to move on your behalf. Sourced wisdom asks you to remember you were never powerless to begin with.
This is where the ancient systems start to matter more than the aesthetic.
Long before “manifesting” was a caption, the Five Elements were being used as a map for exactly this kind of remembering — Water for the vision and intuition trying to surface, Wood for the growth wanting direction, Fire for what’s asking to be expressed and seen, Earth for what needs to be stabilized and held, Metal for what’s ready to be refined or released. This isn’t aesthetic. It’s timing intelligence. It’s how our grandmothers knew when to plant and when to rest without ever calling it a “framework” — they just called it listening.
And Shamanism, at its root, isn’t about summoning anything external either. It’s a journey inward — down and through — to retrieve the parts of you that got left behind in the performing, the proving, the hustling. Every tradition that’s survived thousands of years has some version of this same instruction: the medicine you’re looking for was never lost. It’s buried under conditioning.
Part of what gets remembered on that journey is balance — the marriage of your masculine and feminine energies, not as gendered roles but as internal forces. The masculine in you that can structure, act, and discern. The feminine in you that can receive, flow, and feel. Most of the burnout we’re calling “hustle culture” is really one of these being asked to run the whole show alone. Real power isn’t choosing one. It’s letting them finally work together.
And underneath all of it — underneath the elements, the journeying, the balance — is the truth every mystical tradition eventually points back to: you are not separate from the divine. You are an expression of it. A spark, not a satellite.
I think about that kid on my grandmother’s porch a lot. Fist to the sky, yelling “I have the power!” — waiting for the ring to do something. It never did. But I wasn’t wrong. I just had the source backwards. The power was never in the ring.
It was in the “I”.
That’s the whole secret, really. Not a spell. Not a subscription to the right aesthetic (although fun, for sure!). Just the slow, sometimes inconvenient work of remembering that the spark was never missing — it was buried under everything you were taught to be instead.
Here’s what I won’t pretend, though: I didn’t remember alone. None of us do, not really. Every tradition that has ever carried this kind of medicine — the shamans, the priestesses, the grandmothers on porches like mine — carried it in circle. Not because the work can’t start in solitude, but because it rarely finishes there. There’s a reason isolation is where old patterns go to survive, and sisterhood is where they finally have nowhere left to hide.
This is part of why I’ve opened The Priestess Circle™ — a 10-month initiatory journey I’m co-facilitating for women who feel this pull and are ready to stop circling the runway. It walks the same territory we’ve just moved through together: Remembering, Releasing, Reclaiming, Embodying, Emerging. Not as a concept. As a lived, held, witnessed process — in ceremony, in sisterhood, with women who will see you rebuild your relationship to your own power in real time.
It’s not for everyone reading this. It’s for the woman who felt something in her chest a few paragraphs ago and hasn’t been able to explain it away since.
If that’s you, trust it. I’d love to chat with you.
Schedule a clarity call about The Priestess Circle →
Aho… Monique
Amazing! 👏🏻👏🏻