Spiritual Cleansing When Undergoing A Second Puberty
When children are in the home, a surge in psychic activity takes place as the child enters puberty. Puberty signifies a physical phase in which energy levels in the body change tremendously. These changes are necessary as they convert the child into an adult. These energy level changes are accompanied by a variation in the child's psychic patterning.
[...]The presence of indirect psychic energy causes an excessive amount of turbulence in the home. This energy will feed any thought forms present and most frequently builds on those that the child generates.
- "Spiritual Cleansing: Practical Ways to Rid Your Home, Office, and Self of Negative Energy" by Draja Mickharic
What Draja Mickharic doesn't go into (likely because he's not a doctor) is that a large party of puberty is the hormonal levels changing in the child as they go through growth. The process of hormonal replacement therapy (HRT) in trans people induces a similar change. This is why adult transgender people often refer to their medical transitions as "second puberties."
The second puberties brought on by HRT have similar effects to those that Mickaric describes above. If we were to take an elemental view as described by Aristotle, Agrippa, and many of those down the esoteric line, testosterone adds heat and moistness to a person where there was less before. I can say from experience that the process of your condition, body, and selfhood changing is almost as indescribable as it is chaotic. I am bigger, sweatier, and more libidinous than I was before. My emotions feel more contained, but I have periods of tiredness, irritability, and urges to self-isolate. I have been advised that the first few years of testosterone is equivalent to that of being like a teenaged boy.
I also entered into a new relationship about a month after starting HRT and since we are both allosexual, this has led to the well-known increase of sexual escapades. With all of these changes in my life, I attract and accumulate a lot more spiritual gunk. This can be frustrating because as someone with ADHD, I found it really hard to adhere to cleansing daily even before all of these changes.
So this is what I did, as shown in the featured image of this post. I keep a table in my bedroom mostly loaded with objects for spiritual cleansing. Because I like variety, I have given myself several options and tools:
- Two spray bottles, one filled with salt water and one filled with Florida water
- A container of locally and ethically grown white sage
- A rosemary smoke wand
- The lighter kept almost exclusively for these herbs
- A smudge wand I made at another local witch store
- My athame, named Sarai
The salt water is the one most used to spray down the bed and my body after relations because it causes the least amount of clean up and abrasion. It can easily be replaced by khernips. I tend to use the Florida water to spray my armpits, the backs of my knees, and my groin for stuff that accumulates in those areas. The Florida water I use currently is made by a local witch store, but given my herbalism journey I will probably soon switch it out for homemade Florida water that better suits my personal needs.
As for the herbs, I did not realize when I began on my witch journey that the spiritual cleansing process of burning is also an act of improving air quality. The point is to burn (or boil in a simmer pot, creating steam) herbs that are anti-microbial, which cleans the air.
Now, as a person that in the past almost never used salvia apiana or white sage when I lived back east due to the ethics involved, I have recently changed my opinion on this herb based on my locality. White sage is, in fact, native here and thrives when homegrown, which is the source of the leaves my friend gifted me for my birthday. There is a long history of the Kumeyaay people using white sage for cleansing, particularly for ceremonial purposes involving ancestors or death preparations (according to Kumeyaay Ethnobotany: Shared Heritage of the Californias by Michael Wilken-Robertson). I find that, unlike white sage bundles back east that were potentially sourced from individuals who harvested the plant without regard for its ability to regrow, my leaves here are incredibly effective at cleansing my area. The ethics of sustainability and ecology probably play a role, but I believe herbs that are natural to an environment or at least grow happily within it do better work whether its cleansing or other spiritual uses.
Rosemary is a herb that is both not native and does not grow easily in my area. I retain the dried bundle because it is a powerful cleanser and in the past, I would use her and dragonsblood to get a lot of cleansing done at once when I fell behind. But once this bundle is finished, I am going to revisit how often I want to ask rosemary to aid me in spiritual and medicinal endeavors, outside of haircare.
The smoke wand is the feathered tool I crafted at my favorite local metaphysical store. When the chosen herb is burning, the wand is waved to distribute the smoke around the room without having to walk around the full space and repeatedly re-light.
My athame Sarai is a multi-purpose tool, but lately she is used as an energetic scraping tool as described within Aidan Wachter's Six Ways. I take an abbreviated version of Aidan's exercise, since Sarai is close to me and knows well what to do by now, and I don't scrape often unless I am visiting new places in the astral. I found this exercise most useful after undergoing a succubus attack in which my pelvic region was left with a lot of painful spawn that needed scraping off.
I am quite proud of myself for creating a regimen that is so multifaceted and thorough because I am averse to necessary and basic cleaning never mind cleansing, which is easy to write off as optional. However, as I progress on my magical journey (now almost a decade long!) and my gender transition, it becomes evidently so needed. I'm also thrilled that my newer herbalism ventures have brought me so much attunement and enjoyable connection to the plants I ally with, becoming one of the many joyful parts of my second puberty growth.
