Reviews

Book Review – Happy Witch by Mandi Em

Book Review

Happy Witch

by Mandi Em

Publisher: Adams Media

223 Pages

Published: October 11, 2022

 

 

Calm the Chaos and Find Your Joy.

What would you do if you could use your magic to infuse joy into your daily life? That’s exactly the premise behind Happy Witch, magical ways to conjure up your best life filled with childlike joy. Focusing on different ways of Being to create a life that’s Thriving is how this book aims at teaching us how to be Happy Witches. Be Free, Be Wild, Be Playful, Be Still, Be Connected, and Be Soulful are how the Chapters of the book are structured. The introduction starts with a quick overview the book’s chapters; and the basics of Witchcraft, covering Energy Work, Cleansing and Opening Magical Spaces, Grounding and Centering, Spellcrafting, Manifesting, Meditation, Ritual, and Shadow Work. Finally encouraging you to use witchcraft as tool not just for healing, but for crafting a more joyful, inspired life.

The first chapter is Be Free, and it covers laying the groundwork to magically empower your mindset. First by defining what happiness looks like for you, and how your own belief system could be stopping you from embracing your happiness by making you think it’s “off limits.” We get a Ritual to Define Your Happy following the discussion. Then we look at rules and how that can act as invisible cages restricting our expression of happiness, with a Ritual to Bust Out of Your Cage. We then look at how we can become an energetic match for joy, how using the Universal Laws (ie – Law of Attraction) can be used to manifest a shift in your emotional states and overall wellness by shifting your own personal energetics to match what you’re trying to call into your life. This time instead of a Ritual we get a Meditation for Matching Joy, to help us become an energetic match for joy. It’s also very important to banish those things that don’t serve you, and hider your attempts at happiness, so we get a Banishing and Rebirth Body Scrub recipe to help with that work of “getting rid of the bad.” We’re also given a tool to help us get out of our heads with the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique, which is used to overcome anxieties. The chapter covers some other topics, with rituals, spells, and meditations to help with each aspect of awakening your inner power.

Be Wild is the chapter focused on the value of nourishing our connection with nature, self, and spirit. Like the last chapter we see a breakdown of different aspects of this practice, with Skygazing, Mindful Awareness, Creating with Nature, Connecting with the Earth, Connecting with our Wild-Selves, and Playing with Nature being very important steps to reconnect with the Natural World. Again, we are given Rituals, Spells, and Meditations to help us with our Crafting.

The Be Playful Chapter focuses on brining the divine medicine of play into your life, so life is more pleasurable and free. We’re encouraged to engage in dance for manifestation, scheduling time to indulge in things that bring us joy, indulging our inner child, getting lost in daydreams, being unapologetically ourselves, bask in the sensory experience of our lives, creating for the simple joy of creating, and making our lives a performance art piece of authentic expression and joy.

After the lessons in play, we get lessons to Be Still in Chapter 4. It’s important to pause, sit with our feelings, take time to rest and do nothing, savor the moment we’re in, tap into a frequency of mindfulness, taking time to dive into our shadows to find our light, surrendering our expectations and learning to trust divine timing in our lives, and allowing ourselves to find the balance between light and dark in our lives.

We then move on to lessons how to Be Connected via our relationships. The most important relationship, that colors all our relationships with others, is the relationship with ourselves. This chapter focuses on healing that relationship with yourself, so you can connect with other people in a better way. How? We must romance ourselves, clean up our personal “trash talk” about others by cutting off idle gossip and drama, building self-trust, honoring our unique strangeness and separateness, being able to have boundaries without being too hard, and being able to freely share your love with others. Lets not forget about seeing people as they truly are, instead of what we want them to be, including ourselves.

The final chapter is here to help us Be Soulful, to practice being the magic we want to see in the world as spiritually connected people. The lessons in this chapter cover staying in our magic and keeping our power, treating our homes as sacred spaces, embracing our inner mystics, calling in the lives we want, cultivate hope and expecting miracles, opening up to Spirit, letting our Light Shine, and nurturing our magical spiritual selves.

Final Thoughts

This self-help book for witches is an amazing piece of work; it encourages us to find happiness and joy without veering into the realm of “Toxic Positivity,” by acknowledging that life is full of ups and downs. Those ups and downs are part of the journey to true happiness and joy, because they help us see who we really are after all the programing and masks society forces us to conform to get stripped away. The thing that really makes this book worthwhile is the amazing amount of rituals, spells, mediations, and exercises found packed into each chapter; they really give us a blueprint towards finding our own inner happiness by really seeing ourselves in all our messy glory. You really owe it to yourselves to get this book and try these amazing pieces of witchcraft!

Find Joy My Witches!

 

About the Author

Mandi Em is a humorist, author, and chaotic wellness witch. She’s the author of Witchcraft Therapy, and she shares funny, approachable self-help guidance on her blog and social channels for Healing for Hot Messes and resources for nonreligious witches over at The Secular Witch. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, HuffPost, SheKnows, Refinery29, McSweeneys, and more. She and her husband are born-again hippies raising their three children in beautiful Vernon, BC, in Canada.

 

Happy Witch on Amazon

 

 

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About the Author:

Jonathan Dailey

Jonathan has been reading Tarot for over 33+ years. He has had many teachers, and has experienced many Spiritual Truths. He even had the honor of teaching a Beginner’s Tarot Reading class!

He has swam with Manta Rays, Sea Turtles, and Whales in Hawaii; ran barefoot in the jungle with the Ticos of Costa Rica; danced the Naraya with the Shoshone; Prayed at Buddhist Temples in Thailand, China, and Japan; wandered the green hills of Ireland, studied Acupuncture in China; and has had many more adventures!

Jonathan’s love of the Tarot started when he was in Summer Camp (in New Jersey of all places) and was privileged to take a class with a Magus who taught the group not only the Tarot, but also crystals, Runes, pendulums, energy work, spell casting, Past Life Regressions, and many other “New Age” practices. That class was one of the catalysts for Jonathan’s own Spiritual Awakening to his many past lives, and his Higher Purpose.

Jonathan is an Acupuncturist who has created his own style of acupuncture aided past life regressions using gold needles. Jonathan is a Certified Health Coach. He has lost count of how many readings he’s given, and decks he’s collected, over the last 3 decades. Find more from Jonathan on YouTube.