The Wiccan Wellness Book: Natural Healthcare for Mind, Body, and Spirit

By Laura Perry

Do you follow an Earth-based spiritual path? Do you want to take care of yourself and your family in the most natural way possible, respecting that fact that you are whole people, not just sets of symptoms or numbers on a lab printout? The Wiccan Wellness Book offers you practical, realistic ways to find your best state of health and well-being while respecting the interconnectedness of all life. Discover how to turn your concerns about your health into an active part of your spiritual life. Learn how to keep a Body/Mind/Spirit Journal. Consider ways to improve your surroundings at home and work for better health. Explore the many different natural healthcare methods available today. And enact rituals, alone or with friends, to focus energy on your overall well-being and that of your community and the Earth itself. Though the title includes the word Wiccan, this book is designed for everyone who feels a connection with the Earth and the environment and who wants to bring that connection and its meaning into the way they take care of their body.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laura Perry
• Release date: Sep 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463450659

Laura Perry

Laura Perry is a priestess and creator who works magic with words, paint, ink, music, textiles, and herbs. She is the founder and Temple Mom of Ariadne’s Tribe as well as a third degree Wiccan priestess, a Reiki master, and a longtime herbalist and naturopath. She has published four non-fiction books, three novels, a Minoan coloring book, and a Minoan Tarot deck as well as contributing to seven anthologies, editing two, and collaborating on a second Tarot deck. Her articles have appeared in Spiral Nature, The Magical Times, Indie Shaman, SageWoman and Pagan Dawn magazines, among others. She also works as a freelance editor, helping writers polish up their work until it shines. When she’s not busy drawing, writing, or leading rituals and workshops, you can probably find her digging in the garden or giving a living history demonstration at a local historic site.

Book preview

The Wiccan Wellness Book

Natural Healthcare for Mind, Body, and Spirit

Laura Perry

Second Edition

Copyright 2018 Laura Perry

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved.

Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

Cover design by the author.

Interior illustrations by the author.

Dedication

To Anna, who taught me how to help others heal; and to Heather, who taught me how to heal myself.

Disclaimer: In our modern society, healing and medicine are unfortunately considered to be two separate disciplines. Therefore, I am required by law to state that the material in this book is for the healing of body, mind, and spirit and is not to be construed as medical advice. The material in this book is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any disease. It is intended as a supplement to professional medical advice, not a substitute for it. For assistance with medical issues, please consult a qualified health care practitioner.

Also by Laura Perry:

Non-fiction:

Ancient Spellcraft: From the Hymns of the Hittites to the Carvings of the Celts

Labrys and Horns: An Introduction to Modern Minoan Paganism

The Minoan Coloring Book

Ariadne’s Thread: Awakening the Wonders of the Ancient Minoans in Our Modern Lives

Fiction:

The Bed

Jaguar Sky

LauraPerryAuthor.com

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Wellness and Wholeness

Thou Art Goddess; Thou Art God

Where Do You Stand?

The Wiccan Rede and the Golden Rule

The Path to Health

Writing as a Healing Tool

The Body/Mind/Spirit Journal

Writing as Healing

Exercise

Playtime

Starting with a Clean Slate

The Excuse Monster

Types of Exercise

Moving Meditation

Exercise Your Right to Health

Healthy Surroundings

Feng Shui

Home Sweet Home

Workplace Wellness

The Rhythm of Life

Methods of Natural Healthcare

Acupuncture and Acupressure

Aromatherapy

Ayurveda

Body Awareness

Chiropractic

Herbalism

Homeopathy

Massage

Naturopathy

Orthomolecular Medicine

Polarity Therapy

Reflexology

Reiki

Transpersonal Psychology

The Magical Green People

Meet the Green People

Choosing a Green Partner

Rite of Green Healing

Our Plant Spirit Friends

Rites of Wellness

Community Ritual for Healing Body, Mind, & Spirit

Sharing Miracles

Sacred Time

Balancing the Chakras

Down the Drain

Healing the Healers

The Mind Connection

Reprogram the Chatter

Nourishing Each Other

Rite of Farewell to Illness

Body Talk

Body Art

Putting It All Together

Further Reading

About the Author

Acknowledgements

This is the second edition of a book I began writing many years ago. My journey into natural modes of healthcare began with the birth of my first child, who had severe orthopedic issues along with aches and pains that conventional medicine did little to relieve. I began studying herbalism to help her, but I also turned to natural methods for my own healthcare. Then friends began asking my advice as well. So along with my responsibilities as a priestess and spirit worker within the Pagan community, I added the path of natural healthcare practitioner. Eventually, I earned an M.S. in natural health and a doctorate in naturopathy (N.D.) and became a Reiki master/teacher. This all dovetailed neatly with my Pagan spiritual path, which includes three Wiccan degrees as well as other studies, including my current role as the facilitator for Modern Minoan Paganism.

So here I am, fifteen years after the publication of the first edition of The Wiccan Wellness Book, updating it for a new generation of readers who are interested in healthcare that honors the Earth as well as their own wholeness and fullness as multi-faceted beings. A lot of people have helped me along the way, and there simply isn’t room to acknowledge them all. Please know that I appreciate each and every one of you!

I’m especially grateful to the folks at the now-defunct Clayton College of Natural Health where I earned my naturopathy degree. That was a wonderful and eye-opening education. I’m thankful for local and not-so-local friends who share my interest in natural healthcare methods, writing, and Earth-based spirituality, who have helped and inspired me through the process of writing both editions of this book. These include, in no particular order, author and master herbalist Deborah J. Martin; Kathryn Sargent, amazing Tarot reader and former editor of Aquarius magazine; Bill Warner, author and founder of Cosmos Institute of Life’s Science; my colleagues and fellow authors at Moon Books; Sheena Cundy, Wendy Steele, Ruth Aitken, and the rest of the Witch Lit crew.

And of course, I’m eternally grateful to my very patient husband and daughter who put up with a writer in the house 24/7.

Introduction

Every day, more and more people turn to natural methods of healthcare as they discover the safety and effectiveness of these approaches that fall outside the confines of conventional modern medicine. And every day, more and more people become aware of their own vital role in the web of life and their deep connection with it. This awareness extends to spiritual practices that encompass the sacredness of the Earth and the very precious life that teems on this big blue marble. You may be Wiccan, Pagan, Shamanic, or some other named tradition, or you may simply be reverent of the Earth on which we all ride without attaching a label to your spiritual path. But if you’re reading this book, there’s a pretty good chance that you recognize how the health of each one of us, both mental and physical, is inextricably linked with the health of Mother Earth.

In these times of growing awareness, health and spirituality inevitably intertwine. The tradition of holistic healthcare views people as an integral part of nature, subject to its eternal laws. We can draw on nature to strengthen our bodies as well as our minds and hearts.

This newly revised and updated edition of The Wiccan Wellness Book combines two of the most compelling subjects of today’s world: Earth-oriented spirituality and natural healthcare. People yearn for approachable, understandable information they can use to improve their health and well-being, either on their own or with the assistance of a holistically-minded healthcare practitioner. Those of us whose spirituality centers around a reverence for the Earth and the life on it feel a special responsibility to use the most natural, holistic methods of healthcare possible.

Earth-oriented spiritual traditions like Wicca and other Pagan paths stress the use of natural methods of healthcare wherever possible out of respect for the Earth and the beings with whom we share it. Yes, there are times when conventional medicine is necessary and helpful. I’m not going to try to treat a broken bone with a comfrey compress; instead, I’ll head straight for the nearest emergency room. And personally, my life has been saved more than once by properly-prescribed antibiotics. But for everyday health concerns and many chronic conditions, natural healthcare can offer inexpensive and safe relief.

Holistic healthcare focuses on prevention as its primary goal. In order to prevent illness, we have to educate everyone how to best take care of themselves in body, mind, and spirit. Within these pages you’ll find information about healthy living in all its aspects. This book not only provides you with a practical, useful selection of natural healthcare methods; it also offers a number of easy, hands-on methods for combining your spiritual practice with natural healthcare for the best possible overall well-being.

In The Wiccan Wellness Book you’ll find easy-to-understand explanations of the most popular methods of natural healthcare, including descriptions of methods you can safely use at home as well as information for those times when you need to turn to a professional. You’ll learn how to keep in tune with the cycles of your body and the Earth by keeping a body/mind/spirit health journal. Instead of dreading exercise as a necessary evil, you’ll discover that it’s possible to enjoy mindful activity as a valuable component of your spiritual practice. Sections focusing on environmental health at home and work as well as descriptions of natural healthcare methods will help you get a good grip on practical measures for optimum health. Then a collection of rituals and spells aimed at improving your physical and emotional health ties spirituality to the real world, turning good spiritual practice and good health into attainable goals. Finally, a Further Reading section offers you a jumping-off point for more exploration of the many possibilities for improving your quality of life.

I encourage you to make active use of this book as you walk the path to health and wellness. As you read, you’ll have insights and discover ideas about ways to improve your physical condition as well as your emotional and spiritual well-being. Go ahead and jot them down, either in your body/mind/spirit journal or in another notebook that you keep just for these special thoughts. Then incorporate them into your life as you can.

The emphasis in natural healthcare is on being an active participant in the journey to wholeness. You’re the only one who can walk your path, so let the information in these pages inspire you. Let this book become your partner in health. I give you permission to highlight the text, make notes in the margins, and dog-ear the pages (OK, you can’t dog-ear the pages in an e-book, but there is that bookmark feature…). This is a workbook; let it work for you.

As I wrote the original book and again as I revised and updated it for this new edition, I talked with many people about the link between spirituality and health. I asked them what they wanted and needed to connect their health with their spirituality and to find the spiritual motivation to work toward optimum wellness. I heard a lot of different points of view. Sometimes people told me things I had already thought of but more often, they introduced me to new ideas that challenged my vision of what healing really is. Through the process of writing this book and then revising and updating it, I’ve found new insights and inspiration for my own health and well-being. It’s my fervent wish that you, too, will find help and healing within these pages.

The first edition of The Wiccan Wellness Book included resources for further reading at the end of each chapter. After I received some feedback from readers, I decided to change the format for this revised edition. Now, the Further Reading section is all in one place at the end of the book. That way, it’s easier to find titles about related subjects without having to flip from chapter to chapter. Within the individual chapters, I’ve included online resources like professional organizations and consumer watchdog groups that can help you find further information on natural healthcare. These website links were all accurate at the time of publication and these are large, stable organizations. But the Internet is a volatile place, and I apologize if any of the links become untraceable at any point. Please feel free to contact me via my website (LauraPerryAuthor.com) with comments about dead links and questions about further information.

Natural healthcare encourages you to adjust to your highest possible state of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. It helps you find your connection with other human beings, nature, and the divine. Simply put, given the necessary tools, you can find your optimum state of health for your whole being, not just your body. This book offers you those tools.

Wellness and Wholeness

If I had known I was going to live this long, I would’ve taken better care of myself when I was younger. ~~ Eubie Blake

The world of natural and alternative healthcare can be bewildering, with its vast array of methods, philosophies, remedies, accessories, and practices. But natural healthcare really boils down to one basic philosophy: do as little harm as possible in order to bring healing while honoring the individual as a whole being. There’s a powerful connection among the different aspects of your being and this connection influences your health. We’ve all experienced the ways emotions can affect the body, like a stomachache or headache caused by stress, or the giddiness and amazing freedom from pain that joy can induce. Likewise, the body’s condition affects our emotions. It’s hard to be in a good mood when you hurt or have a cold but if you’re having a good day in physical terms, it’s much easier to bring up positive emotions. And of course, our physical and emotional conditions feed into our spirituality, making it alternately easier or harder to find connection with nature and the divine, depending on what our health is doing on any given day.

Health isn’t limited to just a few aspects of your life – diet or exercise, for instance. Health is about the whole you and your whole life. Truly, everything that enters your life – food, people, housing, work – is medicine. Your job in healing yourself is to make sure it’s all good medicine. The chapters in this book cover a wide range of topics. It may not be immediately obvious that they’re all related, but I promise you, they are. They all have to do with your health on every level.

So what are the components of health? What first comes to mind when someone says the word health is usually the body’s ability to overcome illness or recover from injury. Sure, the body’s physical soundness is a major component of health, but it’s only one component, perhaps the most obvious one. Beyond the visible health of bodily wellness lies the realm of mental, emotional, and spiritual health. Let’s see how the all-too-common issue of stress impacts these different realms so we can better understand the layers and connections within our health and well-being.

The term stress means different things to different people but generally speaking, it’s a response to an overwhelming, traumatic, or nerve-racking situation. In other words, we feel stress when life gets to be ‘too much.’ So how does stress impact physical health? For many people, stress generates headaches, draws the shoulders up in tension, prompts us to grind our teeth or clench our jaw, and ties the stomach in knots. On an emotional level, stress can make us far more irritable and short-tempered than usual, snapping at people or crying in situations that, under other circumstances, we might be able to handle with less trouble. In mental terms, stress wrecks short-term memory, makes it hard to concentrate on everyday tasks, and makes it more difficult to reason our way through problems so we can find solutions.

Now let’s consider how stress impacts spiritual health. Yes, spiritual health is a valid phrase because the spiritual aspect of your being is every bit as real as the mental, emotional, and physical aspects. One of the more obvious effects of stress on spiritual life is the way it influences activities like meditation that require focus and concentration. It’s possible to be so stressed that even a longtime meditator might have trouble getting into a mindful state. The fight-or-flight response that stress induces can keep you from opening up to nature and the divine in meditation or ritual, making the sacred feel more remote than usual. This can result in a nasty feedback loop in which you need contact with the divine for comfort because you’re stressed, but the stress keeps you from feeling like you’re making contact, and that feeling of distance and remoteness makes you feel yet more stressed. That’s not a good cycle to be in and it can even cause you to question your basic beliefs. Of course, the feeling of being ‘off the path’ and spiritually bereft can make you feel even more stressed, which can lead to a worsening of your physical and emotional symptoms. No matter which way it turns, this isn’t a good cycle to be in.

From the simple, everyday example of stress, it’s easy to see how the many different levels of our health are interconnected and feed back into each other. It’s necessary to include all these layers in our healing practices so we can reach the optimum level of wellness not just in the body but also in the emotions, the mind, and the spirit. In fact, in the holistic worldview, healing must first begin with the spirit; only then can it progress outward to the body.

Spirituality is a major source of stress relief and can be a great help in achieving and maintaining good health on many levels. Bear in mind that devoting time to spirituality doesn’t give you an excuse to get out of dealing with life issues like relationships, finances, and work. But spirituality does give you a powerful tool for dealing with those issues in a healthy, life-affirming way.

We live in a culture that espouses the separation of church and state, which is well and good on a governmental level. But that civic ideal often leads us to believe that our personal spirituality should somehow be separate from our everyday (we often say mundane) lives. On the contrary, spirituality needs to be an intricate part of daily life in order for it to do its job. We have to realize that the institution of religion, which needs to remain separate from the institution of government, is very different from personal spirituality, which needs to be an integral part of a healthy everyday life.

So don’t try to separate your spirituality, whatever it may be, from the rest of your life. Let it flow where it wants to. Your spiritual practice, whether it’s casual or formal, helps you heal on many levels. Sure, it helps you find a connection with whatever you find sacred, but it also strengthens your connection with your body, your thoughts, and your emotions. The link between spirituality and health is becoming so well-accepted within the mainstream medical community that many medical schools now include courses on the role of religious practice in the healing process.

Of course, spirituality has been linked with healing for millennia. It’s only in the last few centuries, with the advent of the scientific revolution, that we’ve foolishly attempted to separate out the various aspects of life and pigeonhole them, ignoring the web that connects all the layers together. Bringing spirituality back into healthcare offers a deeper viewpoint than we usually encounter in medical practices. It also gives spirituality an anchor in the physical world. It allows us to express our spirituality, our love and respect for the divine in all things, in the way we care for ourselves, our families, and our surroundings.

Formal spiritual practice (ritual, meditation, and so on) is valuable in terms of health and well-being, but consider the possibility that all of life is a spiritual practice simply because you’re a spiritual being. As Walter M. Miller, Jr. wrote in his 1960 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, You don't have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily. (This quote is often misattributed to C.S. Lewis.) As you take care of your body, feed it, clean it, and exercise it, you’re engaging in spiritual practice. As you take care of your mind, emotions, and soul by learning new things, connecting with others, and serving your community, you’re engaging in spiritual practice. What’s most healing about each of these acts is not the act itself but the realization that the act is a step on your spiritual path. It’s a step on the path simply because it’s a part of your life.

Ancient societies viewed the whole world as sacred, imbued with the power and grace of the divine. Modern cultures have taken the sacred out of the landscape and boxed it in so that many people see the sacred only inside certain buildings (synagogues, churches, mosques) and only on certain days (Sunday, for instance). Part of the purpose of this book is to help you bring the sacred back into all aspects of your life so you can exercise and eat and care for yourself in a sacred way. You can do all this with the realization that you’re a reflection of the divine on Earth.

The fact that you’re reading this book means you’ve at least considered the value of this connection. You’ve probably come to the conclusion that there’s more to healing than just taking a pill and more to health than just avoiding illness. You’re probably leaning toward a more holistic mindset about health, maybe without even realizing it.

We hear the term holistic a lot these days when people are talking about natural healthcare methods, but what does it really mean? To begin with, it refers to the concept of the whole, the interconnection of all the different aspects of a person. But there’s more to it than just that. The term holistic comes from the same root as the words whole, hale (meaning healthy), and holy. So this single word carries within it the weight of spirituality, the sacredness of the web that holds together mind, body, and spirit and connects each of us with the rest of creation.

The purpose of a holistic attitude toward health is to focus on healthcare and wellness from a particular direction: from the top down, starting with the big picture. Conventional medicine works from the bottom up. It starts with the details, like specific physical symptoms and the results of diagnostic tests, and sometimes fails to look up from the details to see the greater whole that connects and contains them. This greater whole also affects the outcome and success (or failure) of treatment. It’s one reason conventional medicine tends to be better at treating some kinds of health situations and not so good at others.

With the top-down viewpoint of holistic healthcare, you can use your spirituality (your higher self, as some people call it) to work toward healing through both your mind and your body. Ultimately, your spiritual self becomes the driving force that integrates your different aspects into a healthy whole.

A stone or a tree can embody and reveal the sacred to those who care to look, but so can the practical aspects of everyday life: food (every meal becomes a communion), exercise (the joyous expression of the sacred, active on