Practical Magic: Quick Spells I Do For My Business At The Beginning of Every Month
clearing, cleansing, claiming
This is part of a series where I share the rituals, spells, and everyday practices that help you experience Practical Magic. These explorations focus on approachable and accessible ways to bring more intentionality, ritual, and magic into your everyday life. Subscribe and follow along for more.
I see magic in everything. Your coffee can be a spell, your skincare a ritual. When you’re intentional and connected to yourself and present to the moments around you—magic lives there. You are magic.
And I have a strong desire to share the simplest, easiest, most accessible ways to tap into that magic more and more in your everyday. To help you weave a tapestry of intention that helps you feel both grounded and expanded.
Since arriving in Spain last summer, time has felt different. Days whiz by, weekends morph into weekdays, months feel both impossibly long but somehow also strangely short. We’ve been here 142 days which feels both accurate and completely illogical. When we walk through the neighborhood we first stayed in, it feels as distant as my first rental in Charleston, ten years ago. It’s disorienting to say the least.
And in that, I’ve really started to recognize how important it is to mark time. To tap into each day, each moment—to notice the weather changing, or the light shifting as the sun moves position in the sky. To notice time passing, versus getting swept up in the current of it all.
So while I’ve long-since had monthly (and quarterly/weekly/daily) routines for my business, I’ve become more dedicated to a few monthly rituals and spells that help me recognize the transitional moments. These moments help me find my footing and reconnect with my intentions. They help me orient to time. They’re not about being productive or getting ahead or any of that, they’re literally to help me ground and reconnect.
These are the three spells I’ve been leaning on and why they matter, just in case you want to try any on for yourself.
Digital Clutter Purge (Clearing)
I don’t do well with clutter of any sort. Blame my Virgo moon, or whatever. But I also seem to accumulate clutter, digital clutter, specifically—a pile of half-formed thoughts in my Notes app, an assortment of who-even-knows-what in my ‘downloads’ folders, and random emails that I’ll ‘read later’ (no, I probably won’t).
So now, when I step into the clean, new energy of a month—I take a moment to clear those out. Releasing whatever energy they were carrying, letting the things of the past go. I would say the most ceremonial of these is my Notes app—filled with content ideas, random little moments of whimsy, lists of things to do or figure out. And while I run a tight ship over on Notion, my Notes app is a little more… alive. Active. With me. In the moment.
The late night wonderings or early morning musings, the half-formed grocery lists, the song lyric that stood out to me, you get it.
So it’s not just control-A delete all. I take a moment with these—do any of these content ideas need to find a more permanent home? Do any of these random ‘things to think about’ deserve real space or time now? Is that song lyric actually ‘the web webbing’ and something to pay attention to?
Or are they keeping me tied to a past that doesn’t exist and was never coming into my future anyway?
And once that is cleared up, I then very ceremoniously delete them all. Whew. Fresh start. Clean energy. So much space for newness to drop in.
There’s a metaphor here, a rather obvious one, about how we have to be willing to release the confines of the past to step into something new. We have to trust what falls away and be willing to make space for what’s to come. This is the spell I’m really weaving in this otherwise mundane task. Releasing what’s no longer for me and so I can open up to all that is.
A Smoke Cleanse (Cleansing)
This is something I actually do for our whole home, but for purposes of this essay, I’ll focus on my office space. You can use a multitude of herbs for this, I am currently using the rest of my (ethically sourced) sage for now, but you can use other herbs—rosemary, thyme, lavender… If you’re interested, explore what these various herbs represent and see what calls to you in any season.
The intention is—clear stagnation. Move out the old energy. Again, release. There’s so much weight attached to things—the energy of a launch, or of that tough decision. The weight of the stress of that thing you moved through. The pressure you unintentionally fell into. It lives and breathes in the spaces we felt that, and so I find a smoke cleanse a nice way to reset.
I love the act and the sensory nature of it. The smell, the sight—it just feels powerful and magical. And I find that it naturally invites me to slow down, to breathe more deeply—as much as clearing for my space as it is for my mental and emotional load.
Future-Casting (Claiming)
And finally, I take a moment to future-cast near the top of each month. I do this as part of my regular journaling practice, but I take a moment to reflect on the month as if it already happened and I’m just sharing an update.
It’s not so much accomplishment-based (I resist the urge to get granular with details like, I sold X of this offer or made X dollars). Rather I focus on who I was, how I carried myself, the choices I made in the day-to-day. I focus on how I felt, and what I did to cultivate those feelings.
This helps me to recognize who I want to be this month.
Sometimes it ends up dictating certain decisions or directions, but my focus is more on the smallest actions I can take daily. That’s how we become integrated and embodied. So I try to keep grounded in that structure—less “I publish 10 Substacks” and more “I love how I spent time writing every day.”
Why This Matters
These small monthly practices are what keep me connected to myself and open to possibility. They’re how I slow down enough to notice what’s shifting before I get swept up in ‘the doing’ of it all. As intentional and thoughtful as I am—or try to be—if I’m not paying attention I can get pulled in too many directions and off my own center.
So these spells, simple as they are, are there to help me stay grounded and oriented on ‘my true north’ and resourced to be able to meet whatever lies ahead.
If one of these spells resonates, here’s your invitation to try it. Or maybe make up your own. Simply ask yourself what do you need to feel grounded and open? What do you need to feel like ‘you’ve arrived’ to the day or the week or the month?
And the perpetual reminder to let them be small, simple, and easy to reach for—so that you actually will reach for them.
I’d love to hear if you try any of these out, or anything else you do at the start of your month in the comments.
