koreawitchcraftbos

[koreawitchcraftbos]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer | 6x03 - “After Life”

[koreawitchcraftbos]

I can't stop thinking about Empress Myeongseong. She is the Empress energy I want to channel. She followed 무당, Korean shamans, teachings. She believed in the power of our people. She saw the future.

There are parallels to the Hawai'i Queen Liliuokalani, who's people were stolen from her.

Empress Myeongseong is a symbol of power. She was persecuted for her beliefs and her for site. She saw what Westerners did to others, and didn't trust the Japanese. She wanted Korea to become a power house on its own terms.

Her story, her energy, brings me to tears as I imagine walking in her path. Taking up the mantle to protect our people. Losing a child. Her family slaughtered.

Yet she persisted.

They held a grand funeral in her honor with the remains they found after they burned her body to ashes. She was an obstacle to expansion in that area. Everyone she went to for help, saw it as an opportunity to seize power over the peninsula.

I'm so sorry for the ignorance of the elite, the Taewongun, the World. Now as I try to decolonize my thinking please know your sacrifice was not in vain. Your people persist. Korean ways are breaking through again, and a big shift is coming as your energy, once again, watches over your people.

Thank you for entering my life.

[koreawitchcraftbos]

Color magick : hair dye

Cleaning out the closet meant pulling out old journals from my teenage years. I decided to read the first one, from my fourteen year old self.

My handwriting is the same.

I thanked her for holding onto these. I thanked her for the insight into the pain I experienced growing up, as I work on unpacking my assimilation into western culture.

Dyeing my hair was forbidden during that time. Everything was to be pure. My natural hair was another product of envy meant to stifle my creativity and also, keep other people comfortable.

Could you imagine what they'd say in church if your daughter showed up with pink hair?

The thing about oppression is there are layers. Not to be super cliche but oppression is like an onion. A red onion.

When you chop a red onion, there are layers. The side of the layer is white, the side facing the outside is purple. The biggest layers, the outside ones, create a big mask with which we experience the world.

A lens.

Each layer holds different weight. As the oppression gets bigger the layers / masks do also. That's why conversations get confusing.

When it comes to my hair many of the layers activate, but they are different sizes. My oppression as a white passing wasian woman means the racism is a tiny inside layer surrounding stereotypes of Asian women with bright colored hair streaks.

This activates because while dyeing ones hair a color isn't necessarily an Asian owned thing, but as a white passing person I'm conscience of the fact that people may be triggered by it.

I'm also aware that Koreans need to call ourselves out for how we appropriate and exploit black people, especially when it comes to their hair.

Body autonomy is an age old battle, as a bisexual white/Korean American woman who practices witchcraft. Our indigenous practices attempted to be erased from history.

Again, we still have a lot of work do to, not only in recognizing the assimilation in ourselves, but also how we force it on our ethnic siblings through perpetuating colorist views.

Today, dying the hair holds so much meaning and power as an act of rebellion, and the more I dive into magick, the more gratitude I feel. As I read the struggles of my fourteen year old self, I remembered the burning urge to change colors.

This is how I found color magic. The ritual of changing my hair color. I decided to look up the colors of my hair, purple and brown.

Credit:

My hair already matches my intentions. Synchronicities like this put a smile on my face and butterflies in my stomach. It's crazy the amount of anxiety that comes up with magic. Such shitty learned behavior.

Also while doing dishes today my daughter told me she made a dishwashing potion by mixing soap and water and stirring clockwise. "So all the dishes get done." 😍

As I dye my hair today, I activate all my layers, and hold the powerful women who came before me. I activate it as an act of ownership, the intention of casting a spell on myself. A spell of confidence on my path as I carry the weight of my ancestors on my shoulders.

[koreawitchcraftbos]

Decolonization and reversing assimulation

We lived in United States. Here we spoke English. Mom needed to learn too. It'd be easier this way. Trust me.

It wasn't easier. Stripping me of the language of my heritage denied me a sense of self. I spoke it. I understood it. I couldn't speak it anymore. I can't speak it now. I was 4 when we moved back from Korea.

Examining things as an adult is a trippy experience. Looking back you see so much more. In an experience, you can see even greater. Accessing the memory is the hard part.

Our brain does so much to protect us, even locking away experiences so we can't remember them. Inner work means exploring those things that make you who you are today. For me, breaking down the masks of assimilation are paramount to finding my true identity core.

At Ignite Your Soul Summit, I tapped into a locked memory of a time I'd long forgotten.

I saw three year old me, in the arms of my mother, as she carried me away from the family I'd been with for over a year. From my house. My dog. My school. My driveway. My life.

In an instant it would fade away. When we landed, I was back in Korea. The place I was born. My entire life I held onto a story. A story written about my trauma being wrapped around abandonment. I was a child without my parents. The story that made sense? I missed them

It wasn't the story though. The trauma was wrapped around leaving my family, the ones I'd been with, who took care of me for the beginning of my life.

My view around the incident was always one sided. Me.

Three year old me never got an explanation. No one reminded her it wasn't her fault. No one explained to her that her parents were going through some shit at the time, and your mom made the best decisions she could.

They never told her that some people may know she's "different" and that there are systems in place to keep people from making true choices.

No one ever told her, yeah the system favors women in child care cases, except people of color and the browner you are the worse it is.

No one told her that being ripped from. Her family at the time, was a blessing in disguise and part of the plan. Because staying there would mean an erasure of heritage and ancestry. Staying there would have meant assimilation.

I owe it to that little girl to follow the path my ancestors lead me down. To walk with them and trust they knew what they were doing when they accepted my mission on this earth.

As I dive deeper into our history, I feel the pain of generations. Korean traditions are deeply tied to our indigenous spirituality practices. In fact, if you look at Korean worship, no matter the religion, there is always a reflection of our spiritual history.

Korean Buddhists incorporate the Old Gods into their rituals. Korean Christians are often deeply devoted, speaking in tongues, and rolling on floors. Dreams are also so important, which is ironic, since mugwort is a big part of Korean culture still today.

My point is this part of the inner work involves decolonizing my beliefs around myself. The blogging, procrastination, and avoidance of life is centered around avoiding my calling.

Why?

It's fucking uncomfortable.

Why?

Because it involves diving into which parts of yourself are you, and which parts are internalized by everything around you. I've spent my whole life restarting this project of diving into my roots, and every time I stop.

The gusto leaves and I no longer feel worthy enough of whatever path it was, because it all brings me back to the same place. Me.

So here are the things I want to do, as an adult Korean American re-centered on her path to enlightenment.

1. Recall Korean Language

I say recall because I fucking know it already. That's whats so frustrating. I can understand it, but speaking it was blocked by assimilation trauma.

2. Buy a hanbok on my own terms.

Sometimes white passing mix kids look to their parent of color as a gateway. I did. I need to shed this story that it is my mom's culture and not also my culture.

3. Invest in myself.

Point. Blank. Period.

Let's go.

[koreawitchcraftbos]

Rules to Live By

The purpose of this online space is to create a digital Book of Shadows. This Book of Shadows is dedicated to creating a place to compile my thoughts in an organized space, and create a cohesive practice enhancing my spirituality.  The reason for making this digital, and available to the public is because I do not see many East Asian pantheons represented, nor how to integrate my Korean identity, which has a closed practice, with my calling in this world to work with my ancestors.  My ethnicity combines indigenous Korean lines mixed with Gael Norse lineage creating a confusing whirlwind trying to navigate this space of witchcraft. For example, in the beginning of my spiritual journey, and being in a predominately white area, I tried using sage to cleanse spaces, with no results.  I didn’t feel any difference after using a sage smudge stick, and I threw it up to not being worthy, and left it behind. When the tug came for me again, I reached out to a mudang (Korean Shaman) for guidance who told me Koreans have always used mugwort and sandalwood for cleansing rituals.  That’s not saying one has to use the pantheon of their birth rite, since there are many reasons that cannot happen, and some practices are considered closed. However, it does go to show you how closed practices, such as smudging with sage, may not actually work for you even if you tried it. 

(if one enters a closed practice and it doesn’t work, consider oneself lucky.) However, my mission on this earth requires me to take on the path of working with ancestors, and I am learning how to navigate that space, while holding sacred the practices of my people, and others as well.  This place will be for my thoughts and for learning. If one questions something here, feel free to ask. If one feels the need to educate me, please do so respectfully, knowing full well that colonization has deeply impacted information in the witchcraft community, and this can effect whether I take one’s thoughts into consideration.  Thank you for being here, and I hope one finds the information useful.