Witches give advice on how to reconnect with your body

Visit the Dutch town of Oudewater and you can step onto the oversized scales of its historical witches’ weighing house. From the 16th century onwards, accused witches travelled there to be weighed and, if heavy enough, leave with a certificate proclaiming their innocence. Witches could fly, it was believed, so the logic went that they must be supernaturally light

Amid the witch hunts that swept through Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries, women’s bodies became evidence; weighing was among the milder tests. Other women were stripped, shaved and pricked in search of a witch’s mark. Centuries later, the policing and scrutiny of women’s bodies remains familiar. “Until governments and religions stop policing women’s bodies, how can we be fully free and at ease within our bodies?” asks Kristen J. Sollée, a witch, feminist and author of several books on witchcraft.

The witch’s scale never really left – women have continued to be scrutinised, measured and judged for their weight. In today’s peak optimisation culture, it’s easy to forget what witches and wise women have long practised: treating the body as something to inhabit, rather than tech to be constantly optimised. I’m guilty of chasing my Oura ring’s readiness score. Maybe your Strava turns every run into a ranking, or a salon’s face-scan told you your skin is 32 and it’s time for Botox. “We’ve become obsessed with these numbers. We’re not actually enjoying what we’re doing, and it takes the point away from the exercise or the sleep,” says Seren Hawley-Plows, a hedgewitch and author of The Ancient Ways.

So how do you connect with your body without the data? We asked contemporary witches, herbalists and wise women how they do it – and how you can too.

Not every witchy ritual involves naked dancing under a full moon or using your period blood for potions. “Sometimes it’s just about understanding that some of the rituals and practices we still do today are born from older traditions,” says Seren. Many of these traditions marked changes in nature, back when those shifts more directly shaped daily life. An earlier sunset meant earlier bedtime. You ate what the harvest gave you. Halloween has its roots in Samhain, a festival marking the end of the harvest season and beginning of winter. The point is that ritual made seasonal change something you could feel and participate in. Chances are you already have a few rituals of your own.

“We are a part of nature. We’ve lost our way a bit,” says Seren. Reconnecting can be as simple as stepping barefoot onto grass or going for a walk without turning it into another metric. Forest walks have been linked to lowered cortisol and heart rates. Seren recommends meandering, meditative walks that aren’t about getting your steps in while catching up on the latest podcast, but noticing what’s actually around you. No phone. No headphones. “What’s left on the trees at the moment? How are the leaves turning? How does the earth smell?” Instead, take your cues from what’s happening outside: more energy in summer, more rest in winter. “All we need to do is look at the natural world around us and almost mirror it.”

“As children, we are deeply connected to our bodies. It’s what feels the most natural. At some point, all of us become disconnected for many reasons,” says Donette Lowe, the clinical herbalist behind Black Alchemy School of Holistic Herbalism. Try reconnecting not only with the childhood version of yourself – before to-do lists and societal expectations – but with knowledge passed down, or interrupted, through generations. For Black and Indigenous women, Donette points out, that rupture runs deep. “They’ve had their connection to their cultural and familial knowledge taken, redistributed and invalidated. So herbalism, this deeply ancient practice that women have historically been at the helm of, immediately provides a route for us to claim agency over our bodies and health.”

Juju Bae is an Osun priestess and Hoodoo practitioner whose work explores the magic, medicine and healing practices of enslaved African Americans and their descendants. She’s directly descended from herbalist midwives. In today’s individualised, algorithm-driven world, we increasingly turn to apps for knowledge that might once have been shared between people. Join a local foraging walk. Ditch Claude and turn to a wise acquaintance for home remedies. “Witchcraft is a full-body practice for me and all of the witches I know,” says Kristen. “It’s so easy to become dissociated from yourself and your environment; I continually look at other practitioners for new ways to connect with my body.”

When asked for a ritual to try at home, none of the practitioners we spoke to tried to sell us a cauldron. Instead, they pointed to things we already do every day. “In the sacredness of the mundane, you find the most magic,” says Donette. Before her beauty routine, she takes off her Oura ring and starts with a body scan: “How am I feeling?” Then she chooses products according to what she actually wants or needs that day. “If this doesn’t resonate, try ritualising a body-centric routine you already have. That is where the magic is.”

For Juju, spirituality is physical. “In the Orisha practice, there’s a saying: dance for your blessings. So we dance, we drum, we sing, we move, and that calls spirits for us.” She also recommends putting cool water on your head as a way of connecting with your Orí, which she describes as “the part of your body that knows”.

Kristen recommends something simpler still: “Put down your phone. Use each of your five senses to notice something about your surroundings,” before going inward. “Slowly move your focus from the soles of your feet up through the crown of your head. When you’re done, see if you can sense your internal and external environment at the same time.”

This is all to say you don’t necessarily need to ritually burn your wearable tech. Donette has an Oura ring. Seren tracks her steps. Juju uses period apps. “Although I am someone who values ancient, Indigenous knowledge systems, I’m still a 21st-century woman,” she says. Technology can be useful, particularly when it gives people evidence about bodies whose symptoms are routinely dismissed. “Not much has changed since being accused of witchcraft: women are still not believed,” says Donette, who observes that health tech “can provide data that supports women’s stories about their bodies that doctors dismiss regularly.”

Fio Gede Parma, a witch who has been practising since they were 12, notes that these tools can “help people track what they need… in capitalist, colonialist systems of living that demand so much of our attention.” But they add: “what we gain is also what we lose: knowledge.” Use the data when it serves you, but don’t let it become the only way you know what your own body is telling you. Now close this tab and go outside.