Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

My loves, welcome to this Hot Take, which is not an Astrology Hot Take but a witchy Hot Take. I mean, it’s kind of an astrology Hot Take—just watch me go.

Okay, so I get a lot of questions about whether or not you should step into being a professional witch, being a professional astrologer, or a professional Tarot reader, all this kind of stuff. And a lot of you send me questions asking me if you should quit your day job to pursue a professional life of witchiness. And I thought I would address that here in honor of a little Halloween themed which witch is which ness.

Okay. So here’s the thing, before we get into the spiritual stuff and the ethical stuff, let’s talk for a hot minute about capitalism. Now, IMO, capitalism is a bitch, but it’s HBIC, if you know what I mean. Unless you’re independently wealthy, or you are in a partnership or situation where someone else is willing and able to give you a comfortable life, whether or not you’re making money, then when you turn a creative pursuit—whether it’s in the esoteric arts like witchcraft or astrology, or it’s in the creative arts like painting or singing—when you turn it into something that needs to make you money, something that you need to kind of create a social media platform for or something, then you change it, right.

I want to just really acknowledge that over the years of my practice, what I have seen a lot is the most talented and creative and insightful people maybe don’t know how to run a business or aren’t great at charging a fee or showing up on time for appointments or responding to emails. And that if you’re going to be a professional woo woo, that is actually a big part of it.

You may imagine that my job as an astrologer or a medium or a psychic is like, wooooo; it’s all out there and very woo woo. And in some ways, sure, it is, but honestly, it’s a desk job. I’m at my computer all the time, even before COVID. And it’s a lot of administration—a lot. And I’ve seen many people who are in my field, who are not great at admin, not be able to advance, not be able to make enough money to pay for their basic needs or to be able to go beyond paying for their basic needs.

And, so, if you are considering a career—so not something where it’s like a practice where you may or may not make money, but a career shift where this is the center piece of your time and energy. It’s if you’re a person who pays taxes, it’s what you would be paying taxes on. If that’s your direction, I want to encourage you to slow down and to really consider the business side of what you want to do. Because, again, whether we’re talking about the esoteric arts or the creative arts, you are kind of obliged to honor your muse.

So for those of us who do woo and healing work, what that means is we need to be responsive to our guidance. And if your guides are like, “Okay. You’re going to learn boundaries, and the way that you’re going to learn boundaries is by having a series of experiences over the course of the next six months where your boundaries get crossed over and over again, so you find new ways, more efficient ways of handling them,” well then, that’s what you got to do.

And in the context of capitalism, in the context of business, this can be a boner. So I want to encourage you, if you’re considering a career in the woo or in the creative arts, honestly, it applies, to come up with a business plan. Having a sense of clarity about your hours of operation, the services you do and do not offer, your liability with those services, your late fee, how you collect fees, how you track and manage your finances—the money you spend for your career and also the money you earn, where you put that money, and how you accept that money—all of those things are actually pretty essential for a successful career as an astrologer, a woo, or whatever.

You may be surprised to hear me talk so pragmatically about something that is so kind of creative and esoteric and outside of the material realm, but, again, unless you’re independently wealthy, you have got to figure this shit out—truly. Because when you are driven—when one is driven by the need to make money, or a little bit differently, but connected, the drive to be powerful or to be recognized by others, when those drives are primary for you, then you’re not actually engaging in healing work because it’s hard to heal someone else when you’re staring at yourself in the mirror, honestly. Okay.

Now I’m not mad at vanity. I’m not saying vanity is all bad, but when your ambition is to be an instrument and a tool for other people’s healing, if you’re looking in the mirror—metaphorically or literally—you are not going to be able to do that for others. We have to put ourselves aside. And, so, the drive and demand of making money, the drive and demand of attaining personal power, those things can be very interruptive to actually helping other people.

It’s a meaningful reason why if you are in the early stages of your competency, of developing your skill as a witch or astrologer or whatever it is, and in that learning curve—because I am of the mind it takes a long time to actually be competent as a healer—in that learning curve, if you don’t have other sources of income, it can muddy the waters pretty quickly. When we are dealing with energy, when we are dealing with healing, as soon as you involve yourself in other people’s vulnerability, your ethics become essential—your ethics become really important.

Which brings us to the next layer of what I want to really take a moment to address. This is where the esoteric arts and the creative arts kind of part ways in terms of this conversation. In regards to the ethics of being a practicing helper or healer outside of a system, so when we talk about psychologists or therapists or whatever, they go to all this schooling, and personally, me, I think higher education is a racket a little bit, and I think it’s a really problematic institution on a million levels, honestly. But having a system in place where people are trained by certain rigor, and they are accountable to a governing body, that actually—that’s like a check and balance. Does it always work? Do I think it’s clean and clear? No. No, and no.

But practicing witches, practicing astrologers, practicing Tarot readers, we don’t have a governing body. And, for me as an astrologer, I fucking love that. For me as a psychic medium, I fucking love that. But it is deeply problematic as well, right. So this is where we must be accountable, and we must decide what accountability means. And I certainly can say as somebody who’s been in practice for 25 years, I have seen a massive shift and change to the kind of way that people jump into these fields and their competency when they first jump in.

As I’ve said before, and I will say again, good SEO is not equal to high quality. Having a lot of followers on a social media platform is not equal to being competent and having integrity, right. And it’s really tricky because when we learn things that we’re really excited about, we want to share them. And if you have a following that is engaging with what you’re sharing, it can come across like you’re an expert. But if you know you’re not an expert, if you know you’re still in the stage of student—in particular, the first seven to ten years of student—then it’s on you to have the ethic of communicating that clearly to your audience or your clients.

And it’s really important if you’re doing individual consultations with clients that you’re really clear with them about the boundaries of what you can competently offer them, what kind of container you’re holding for them, and what you’re not liable for. So that’s something you can put on a website, and that’s something that you can verbally communicate or communicate in an auto-response email. But it is really important to think about this. Partially, actually, for liability reasons, but largely because it’s in integrity for practicing the healing arts.

So a lot of it has to do with what it is that you are willing to take on, the kind of clients you intend to work with, and how important power and money is to you. If you are unwilling or unable to have an honest conversation and an ongoing conversation with yourself and your guidance around these topics, over the course of your work in whatever woo woo field you engage in, then your guides will find another way for you to deal with it, and it will be less pleasant, let me tell you. Now let’s get to the woo.

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This month ICE announced that they would be carrying out nationwide mass raids. Last week they arrested 128 people in San Francisco alone. Advocates are worried that this is just the beginning, and thousands of families might be separated from each other over the coming days and weeks. Last year ICE executed the largest raid in US history on the first day of school, leaving hundreds of kids stranded. We have to be ready for more raids. Donate to Families Belong Together to help re-unite families and protect kids from ICE’s cruelty. Go to familiesbelongtogether.org to donate now.

So here’s the thing, Mercury Retrograde governs everything related to voting. That’s planning, educating yourself, filling out paperwork, mailing things, making a plan, understanding things. It’s super annoying that the whole period leading up to election date is Mercury Retrograde. But you know what? you know I got you covered, right. Because at Zodiac The Vote, we have created “A Mercury Retrograde Voter’s Survival Guide.” That’s right. It has everything you need TLDR style to vote with confidence and even host your own COVID safe ballot parties. What is that? you may ask. I think you’re going to have to look at the voter guide to get the full 411. And, hey, while you’re there, check out the cocktail/mocktail recipe for your voting pleasure made by Rachel Budde, the lead herbalist and founder of Fat and the Moon. Basically, there’s so much stuff there, you’re just going to want to be a part of it. Zodiacthevote.com.

So many of you write into me and say, “I want to do psychic work. I want to be an astrologer. I want to be a professional witch. Is it in my birth chart?” Honestly, if you feel the call, it’s in your birth chart—don’t worry about it. You don’t need an external validation to honor your internal knowing, right. I don’t know, maybe you do. We all do. We all seek that. But let me just get ahead of that question for you. If you feel called, it’s in your chart.

Now, the real question you should be asking me, and no one ever asks me is, “Will this path bring me joy? Am I willing and able to do the self-work that needs to be done in order to be successful on this path—like personally and professionally successful on this path?” Those are the kinds of questions to be asking yourself. And if you want to be asking them to me, you know where to find me—ghostofapodcast.com.

So here’s the thing, it’s not important if it’s in your chart. And I know I’m an astrologer telling you this, but for reals. There’s a million ways we can come to the woo. Many of us come to our sensitivities through trauma, honestly, and abuse. Many of us come to our sensitivities very naturally. Many of us have the intention to cultivate a skill, and then we study and practice and cultivate that skills, and most of us have some combination of all those three things, plus, plus, plus. So it doesn’t matter where the call comes from; what matters is what you do in response to the call. I mean, that’s really for all things, but certainly for this thing.

It’s important that we don’t overidealize our self-aggrandize around the healing arts. If you are psychic or a medium, if you have the capacity to commune with the other side—quote, unquote—you better really be careful about what you call in and how you engage because the consequences will be hard for you to track and contain. Not to frighten you, but simply to make sure that you are centered and grounded in what you call in, when. Because it doesn’t have to be done all at once.

As much as possible, I am a big fan of taking your time with the cultivation of your woo skills because the container that you are capable of holding for others is only as deep as the container that you are capable of holding for yourself. And, so, if you are not actively engaged in self-healing and accountability and creating progress and mobility in your own development, then you may have a very big looking container, but that doesn’t mean that it actually holds a whole hell of a lot.

Within that, if you are engaging on a witchy path or an astrology consulting path—so I’m not just talking about personal use here; I’m talking about holding a container for others—it’s really important that you center grounding in your life. So staying connected to your body, and from your body staying connected to the earth.

A kind of old school way of being, and I’m not sure what’s super popular at this moment in your particular community or from your perspective, but it used to be that the idea was that in order to do esoteric or intuitive work, you had to abandon the body. You had to leave the body and leave the earthly plane and just fly. Unfortunately, there are some negative consequences to that, and those consequences primarily befall you.

So it’s really important, from my perspective, to remember that we are in a body for a reason. And when we do our healing work, we may do it from the balloon of our energy which is only but tethered to our body—that might be something that you do—however, to come back to your body and to fortify it is an important part of the journey because this journey happens through the body, like it or not.

So developing grounding practices is essential. And also developing practices for clearing energy, for removing other people’s energy from your system. I have dropped an episode where I talked about this. It was called psychic hygiene. It was episode 116, in case you haven’t heard it, or you need a refresher. And in it I really talk about different ways of approaching psychic hygiene. But it is important that you center that if you are consulting with people. And honestly, this goes, from my perspective, for doctors and nurses and therapists—anyone who touches other people’s bodies, anybody who gets into other people’s trauma: social workers, doulas, etc. etc.

Now within this, talking about psychic hygiene and grounding practices, we have to talk about cultural appropriation. And, so, again, there is a way that there is an evolution culturally and socially around what is appropriate and what is respectful. But I will say this really clearly. If you are using spiritual tools, or you are pulling from spiritual practices that are from a culture or lineage that is not your own, then it’s really important to slow yourself down and to consider whether or not that’s stealing or appropriating. And this gets really sticky and really complicated really quickly—very quickly. There’s so much to say about this.

So let’s talk about spiritual appropriation because a big part of what spiritual appropriation is is when you take someone else’s culture and spirituality and you position it as your own, where you take ownership of it, and you feel this great sense of entitlement to do so without doing much or any research into the origins of that culture and of that spiritual practice, and whether or not you actually have a right to engage in it, especially to make any kind of profit off of it.

When we talk about making a profit off of a spiritual practice or a spiritual tool, if it is not your culture, if it does not come from your culture, if it is not yours to sell or own, then we have a problem here. And, so, it’s really important to question the tools you’re using, to question the ways in which you’re using them. And it is especially complicated because we live in a global world, and there is great wisdom and value from learning from other cultures, being inspired by other cultures, by dialing it back and learning from people generations before us.

Where it becomes deeply problematic is when you express a sense of ownership of those things when they are not yours to own. Now that’s not the focus of this particular podcast episode; however, it is a really important thing to consider if you have a spiritual business, or you’re thinking of having a spiritual business. What are your origins? What are the origins of the practices that you’re engaging in? Is it appropriate for you to be using them and also profiting from them?

And within this, we all have room to grow; we all have room to be humble. And it’s important that we do so because if you can’t learn your lessons, if you can’t be humble, if you can’t pivot, then you shouldn’t get into the healing arts. You know what I’m saying? I feel like you do. I feel like you know what I’m saying.

This is a really frightening time. People are scared about what comes next. People are left alone with themselves, in their apartment, really questioning things and having to become more creative in self-care and in how to socialize and all these kinds of things, and this can be big business for astrologers and readers and witches. Because when people are uncertain is when they turn to the woo for help and support.

Now this is a great thing if you have a practice that’s already created. This is a great thing if you have been considering starting a business. But I can tell you as somebody who’s been doing this for two and a half decades, that people’s interest and engagement with all of the woo ebbs and flows. So let me say this, when you start engaging in healing work, whether it’s consulting with clients as an astrologer or whatever it is, you start to incur spiritual consequences. So you better make sure that you are right with yourself and that you’re not just trying to capitalize on a moment. But that you’re willing to be in the ebbs and flows of what is now, it seems like, an industry—but that’s very new that this was a real kind of like industry in the way that it is now.

We don’t know what kind of backlash we are going to see or when the backlash is going to occur. But we do know this, throughout time and throughout cultures, there is always a backlash to witches. There is always a backlash to astrologers. There is always a backlash to esoteric practitioners—practitioners who are spiritual in nature and practice outside of religious institutions. And I’m not saying that to frighten you; it’s just the reality of it. So are you willing to engage? Are you willing to build within that? Is that how you want to make your living, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer?

Nothing, of course, needs to be written in stone. Nothing, of course, needs to be permanent. However, once you engage on this path, and you take on other people’s wellness, it’s important that you understand your responsibility within that, your responsibility to yourself and to honoring the work of self-healing, accountability, and presence as much as it is important that you honor the work of showing up for others with integrity, with boundaries, and as much magic as you have to offer.