A Druid’s Guide to Enchantment

The world is really hard right now, as I wrote about two weeks ago. I feel that if all that we do is focus on the hard parts of the world, we are going to have difficulty making it through. As a druid, I recognize that one of the most important principles in the world and in my own life is balance.  We all need to balance the hard stuff (purpose, work, action, and the hard parts of striving in the world right now) with good stuff that helps restore us, heal us, and bring us joy.  I can think of no better thing to embrace right now than enchantment as a balm to the troubles of the world. It’s not that I’m saying – don’t pay attention to what is going on.  What I’m arguing here is that enchantment is part of a future-focused, care-oriented, and nature-centric future that many of us are bringing in.  And so today, we’ll be exploring this concept of enchantment and I’ll offer an elemental introduction to enchantment and a ton of potential core practices you can try out to bring some enchantment into your life!

Moving beyond disenchantment. I want to really briefly discuss how we got here, but if you want the core practices, skip this paragraph! Over the course of the last four centuries in the Western World, a set of ideologies came forth: that nature is another machine, that animals don’t feel and do not have souls, and that plants and animals aren’t sentient (I wrote a more detailed overview of this in the Bee and the Machine).  We can trace some of these ideas back to Descartes, in the 1600’s, who proposed that animals and all of nature are essentially mechanical automata, beings without souls, feelings, or pain. These ideas were quickly expanded to all sorts of life on this planet, and eventually was used to justify not only the exploitation of the biosphere but also the exploitation of people: genocide, colonialization, and slavery.  As Tyson Yunkaporta writes in Sand Talk, these ideas are the ultimate form of narcissism – “I am better than you” and he describes how the Aboriginal Australians believed narcissism was the most dangerous thing.  I agree.  In the 1920’s, Max Weber, the father of modern sociology, described what he called “the disenchantment of the world,” which is a combination of ascetic Protestantism (salvation through hard work), the modern capitalist system as an “iron cage”, as well as the rise of scientific objectivity and materialism.  We now have a culture that privileges greed, narcissism, and efficiency above all else–and we are quickly reaching the end game of those destructive ideas. These ideas–all rooted in narcissism and seeing the world as a resource to extract–are long past their expiration date.  This disenchantment, I believe, has led to so many of the problems we experience today: without magic, without a sense of sacredness, the world itself and all life in it, human or otherwise, are simply resources to be extracted.

One act of resistance begins right here, right now, where we can work to re-enchant the world around us and fully reject these old, and worn out ideas.  An enchanted world is one that is alive, magical, and spiritually responsive. When we embrace enchantment in our lives, it is a direct balm to the miasma of the collective insanity culture we are all living in.  So let’s get started!

What is Enchantment?

An enchanted world is one that is alive, spiritually responsive, and magical. To be clear–nature has always been enchanted.  It is only our own human conditioning and living in a time of profound disconnection and collective insanity that we have lost our enchantment.  In fact, the world outside of our door is full of natural intelligence and spirits of the land who are yearning to rekindle our ancient ancestral relationships. An enchanted world is the world of our spiritual ancestors, and this is the world that many of us strive to live in. But enchantment and joy can be hard to experience in today’s age–especially right now!

As we began to explore in my last post, however, we have a tremendous power to control our mindsets towards the world.  We set the tone. We can decide our mentality to the world–are we going to be apathetic and bitter? Are we going to be open and full of wonder? Are we going to recognize the wonder in everyday life? Are we going to speak to the trees, plants, and stones as our friends or see them as inanimate objects without souls?  If we choose to change our mindsets, we can do so! Enchantment is a choice, it is a state of being, and it is something we can actively cultivate!

Further, enchantment is being cultivated all over the place, even if it is not in the mainstream news. Movements in druidry, nature-based spirituality, neo-paganism, permaculture, urban farming, yoga/mindfulness, herbalism–so many things happening right now, that new system where the world is sacred, where nature is valued, where the land is an enchanted place is already being tested, expanded, and created in hundreds of thousands of places all over the globe.

Enchantment through the Elements

There are countless ways to bring in an enchanted worldview, life, and perspective.  I will share some of my favorite strategies using a seven-elemental framework.  This includes core practices in earth, air, fire, and water that are really focused on getting you out in nature and connecting to the land and her spirits as well as your own wild nature.  Then we turn to three practices tied to spirit: above, below, and within.  I would encourage you to do these activities with others–friends, family, and children!  I have kept this guide purposely not so wordy, so you can print it out and get at the core practices with brief instructions and text.

The Work of Air: Cultivating Curiosity, Wonder, and Intuition

We all can use a bit more wonder, intuition, and curiosity: these are some of the best qualities of our species, and some of the things that can help make the world a much more enchanted place.  I see curiosity as a balm to apathy, depression, and stagnation.

Core Practice: Intuitive Body Radar:  Body radar is a technique where you simply let your body—specifically your solar plexus—pull you in a direction when you open yourself to nature.

1) Go into a natural place and ask a sacred question. Any question, such as “Spirits of Nature, what message or wisdom do you have for me? works well. You can also ask specific questions as a form of divination. But I really like the open-ended question!
2) Close your eyes and simply feel where you are pulled—it will be like a gentle tug or strong sense you should go in a certain direction.
3) Let your body begin to be pulled.
4) Go where you are led. See what you experience!

Recognize that we are connected to all other things in our ecosystem by energetic threads and cords; the more time we spend with them, the more attuned we are to our connections and the more effective body radar will be!

Core Practice: Wandering and Wondering: Be open to the unexpected and allow your body radar and the spirits of nature to lead you.  Take your time to wander and embrace curiosity about the world.  Get down close to things, look at things from many angles, and slowly take in the wonder that is nature. Allow yourself to wander without any plan, express wonder and curiosity, and take in the wonder of nature.  Look for messages and wisdom from nature. Be open to anything and approach everything you encounter with a sense of curiosity.

Deepen Your Practice:

• Cultivate a natural curiosity about the world and embrace your inner child. Spend time with young children and model their curious and whimsical sense of wonder towards the world.
• Be in love with the world: share your care, gratitude, and joy with the living earth in any way you can. Write love letters to the land and leave them under stones.
• Use your body radar to help you find things in your house, like missing keys!  It can be so much fun to practice this skill and deepen it.

The Work of Earth: Sensing, Rooting and Earth Play

Returning to the earth is what it is all about–slowing down, learning to play, and learning to root in our everyday experience in living in this beautiful planet.

Core Practice: Sense meditation.  Go into a natural place and meditate by focusing one at a time on each of your senses. What do you feel? (take off your shoes, walk on the earth), what do you taste (taste the wind!), what do you see? What do you hear? (This practice is very useful for those who have difficulty with some forms of meditation; it can also be done as a walking meditation!)

Core Practice: Play, laugh, and get dirty.  Play outside, like a child.  Make mud pies, play in the stream, create in the dirt, build cabins, paint your face in berry juice, roll down hills, and spend hours doing nothing but having fun in nature (adults call this Bushcraft!) Invite children to do this with you if you can, as it will greatly enrich the experience.

Core practice: Earthing and Energizing

• Movement: Walk in natural places with bare feet (or minimal “earthing” shoes, which you can easily make yourself from recycled materials). Feel the energy of the earth coming up through your feet as you walk, and send your prayers back through the earth with each step. Frolic and dance, and bring an instrument if you have one.
• Stillness: Lay on the earth, connecting to the deep telluric energy of the earth.  Draw that energy up through you and let that energy fill you for a time. Then gently release. Smile and rest your mind, body, and spirit

Deepening Your Earth Enchantment Practices

• Create unstructured time to experience and connect to the earth.
• Invite children over to play in natural places and embrace the experience as a full participant.
• Find and follow animal trails, see where they lead. Release expectations.

The Work of Fire: Animal Movement and Rewilding

Fire is all about wild movement and animals–connecting with the sacred energy and movement of ourselves as wild animals and connecting with those other living beings (animals, fish, birds, insects, reptiles, and more!)

Core Practice: Wild Movement. Humans are also animals of the land, but sometimes we forget this. Our bodies are meant to move! Begin by allowing your body to move in whatever way you wish—feel your body, move in different patterns, laugh, sing, shout, and be joyful. Take off your shoes and some of your clothes if you feel led!  Play some music and dance, be free.  Feel how it feels to be in your body.  If you are stiff or uncomfortable, consider how you can strengthen your body for more wild movement (and build up slowly, many of us are so sedentary that it can take time for this practice to feel good–but it can feel good if we build up to it!)

Core Practice: Embodying an Animal of the Land: Choose an animal/bird/reptile/insect/amphibian that you are drawn to. Spend time taking on the qualities of this animal in a physical and embodied way. Move as they physically move. Make noises as they physically do. Eat what they eat. Feel the energy of this animal coming into you, bringing you strength and healing.

Deepening Your Practice:

• • Embrace Your Inner Animal. Learn more about their lifecycle, strengths, where they live, how they thrive.  Consider how you can bring this animal into your daily life—images, cultivating specific skills or energy, and meditate on their wisdom.  Take this animal as a sign of the qualities that you want to bring in and embody in the world.
  • Shapeshifting (Advanced Practice).
    • Practice 1: Envision your etheric body (the spirit body that is also located in this realm) shifting and taking on aspects or fully shapeshifting into this animal.  Visualize this as strongly as you can.
    • Practice II: Envision your astral body in your inner grove taking on this animal form.
    • Practice III: Commune with this animal in your inner grove and hear their wisdom. (Learn more about astral travel in this series of posts).
  • Rewilding is a practice to bring us closer to our primal, natural selves. Live by natural patterns, embrace wild spaces and wild growth, and recognize and cultivate your own inner wild nature.  Remember–you are part of nature too!  The wildness that exists outside can be cultivated within.

The Work of Water: Intuitive and Connected Bardic Expressions

The bardic arts are a wonderful way to connect to a deeper sense of enchantment through your own creations and your creative connection to the land around you.  Bring your inner fantasy to life.  Depict and share with others the world you want to see, rather than the world that is.

Core Practice: Channeling the Awen of Nature.  Go into the land and seek the inspiration of nature with an open heart, allowing messages and inspiration to come without expectation or judgment.

A) To begin, you can chant the Awen (the druid’s word for divine inspiration) to open the conduit for creative inspiration for nature

• • AH – draw the energy of the earth into you
  • OH – draw the energy of the sun down into you
  • EN – release the energy and/or channel it into a creative tool

Core practice: Catching Stories and Songs from the land.  Go out into nature with an open heart and bardic tools (paint, pen, instruments, your body).  See what comes and be inspired. Consider sharing in the community.  I have a post on this idea here!

Core practice: The Patterns of Nature.  Patterns in nature manifest in billions of different ways—and a bard can capture these and use them for inspiration. These may be waves, spirals, circles, pentacles, webs, and more. They may manifest visually, numerically, through sound, or even metaphysically.  Connect with these patterns and let the Awen flow!

Deepening Your Practice:

• Inspiration journal. Carry a small notebook or journal with you where you go and write down any inspirations you experience.  Recognize that Awen flows everywhere and be prepared to capture it!
• Create space for the land’s stories and songs. Nature and the spirits of nature have so many stories to share.  Make regular unstructured time to be present in nature with your bardic tools.
• Wild art and craft supplies: Create with supplies you find right on the land and minimal tools: wild instruments and noise, wild pigments, and wild creation!

The Work of Spirit Above: Animism and a Belief in Spirits

In order to engage in deeper enchantment, we have to recognize the spirit in all things and embrace an animistic philosophy about the world, just as all of our ancient ancestors have done!

Core Practice: Recognizing the Spirit and Sovereignty of All Beings.  An animistic philosophy, the kind held by all of our ancient ancestors, is a belief in spirits.  Animism acknowledges that spirit exists in all things in the world (animals, plants, rivers, stones, mountains but also human-created things like cars or paintbrushes as they too come from the earth).  Talk to these spirits, interact, and build relationships with them.  Recognize and honor their sovereignty. (For more details, see this post: animism).

Core practice: Cultivating Joyful Interactions with Spirits.  Develop friendships and relationships with all spirits, especially in unlikely places.  Say hello to the water fountain where you refill your bottle, build relationships with the soil in your garden, make friends with mushrooms, and get to know the building spirit at your work.  The more you do this, the more enchanted life becomes.

Deepening Spirit Practice:

• Practice metaphysical street smarts: Engage in daily protection rituals and use common sense when interacting with spirits. Don’t assume every spirit you encounter is friendly or has good intentions.
• Daily objects. Get to know the objects that you encounter every day on a new level—talk to them or use your other inner senses and see what you learn. This should include objects you encounter every day, like your favorite pen or your car!
• Big Nature Spirits. Begin to learn and honor the larger spirits of your land: spirits of mountains, rivers, oceans, or forests.  Offer due reverence, respect, and offerings to these beings.

The Work of Spirit Below: Spirit Council and Conversation with Plants

Our second aspect of spirit is connecting to the spirits of the land: specifically to plants and trees.  Learn their wisdom and seek their joy.

Core practice: Finding the Faces of the Plants and Trees. Begin by wandering in nature and looking for the faces of the plants and trees: When you find a face, see what energy it shares.  Find a welcoming face on a tree or plant.  Also, listen for any “talker” trees who rub against each other. Find a place to sit and converse with these friendly facing and talkative tree and plant spirits.

Core Practice: Inner Listening.  Nature can communicate through all of our inner senses: hearing, feeling, visuals, intuition.  Open yourself to the messages of your friendly tree or plant—take three breaths, quiet your mind, and start by saying “hello” in your mind. Listen and feel for a response. If you have trouble, use a simple divination tool like a pendulum to guide you, or see my writing here for more details.

Core Practice (Advanced): Create a Council of Allies: Plants, Trees, and Other Spirits. Visit with these in the physical or astral world and regularly seek their wisdom.  Create a council that you regularly connect with that includes plants, trees, other natural features (mountains, rivers, stones) as well as any guides or helpers.  Make it a point to check in with your council regularly and seek their wisdom. Hearing the wisdom of the plants, connecting with plants and plant allies for their medicine and support. Use divination, astral travel, or inner listening for this practice.

Deepening Spirit Below Practice:

• Deepening your work with specific plants through studying herbalism, using their physical and emotional medicine, and plant cultivation.
• Build Relationships with trees and plants. Apply everything you know to human relationships to cultivate relationships with trees. Make offerings and share gratitude.
• Plant dieta (advanced). Do a plant fast where you only consume water and a medicinal plant exclusively for 24 to 48 hours or longer for even deeper communion. Create a container for this practice and do it in a very intentional way. All plants can be connected in this way, but traditional plants that are connected to these kinds of practices are more potent teacher plants and mushrooms (cannabis) or strong plants connected to spirit (mugwort, elder)

Work of Spirit Within: Aligning Deeply with Nature’s Rhythms

Ultimately, bringing in the enchantment means that we have to throw off a lot of the cultural baggage that we are given and instead, return to the green.  To me, I place these practices at the center of everything because we can’t really do the rest without first making the space, time, and shifting consciously into the green.

Core practice: Ditch the Screen, Embrace the Green.  Technology demands our attention and changes our brain chemistry, making us more stressed, frenetic, and depressed.  By limiting how much technology we use and by leaving it behind when we enter the green, we can cultivate a more nature-centric and enchanted outlook!  

Core practice: Slow time.  Modern life is extremely fast-paced and requires our brains to be constantly on overload.  Find practices that encourage “slow time” so that you can align better with the seasons of nature and your own wild nature.  This can include:

• Candlelight evenings
• Slow food (harvest—preparation—enjoying the meal)
• Slow communication (letters, sitting, and drinking tea)
• Slow days where you create unstructured time (so you can explore any of these other areas to bring in enchantment!)

Deepening Spirit Within Practices: 

• Focus on the present moment.   Take the time not only to smell the roses but to stare into their spiraling petals, experiencing the wonder at the sacred geometry and medicine that they hold.
• Reconditioning the brain. Each choice we make conditions our bodies and minds. Much of this conditioning is external to us, where our cultures condition us in a variety of ways.  Pay attention to your automatic behaviors and start to be more mindful.   Pay attention to how you are conditioning your body and mind.
• Wheel of the Year.  Align your own life with the wheel of the year outside your door.  Consider the energy of the plants and animals (outward, inward, behaviors) and focus on bringing that energy in.  There should be times of high activity and times of fallow. And that is good.

Conclusion

There you have it–many ways of bringing in an enchanted worldview as a balm to the disenchantment and darkness of the present age.  Well, what are you waiting for?  Go and seek your enchantment! I’d love to hear more about how you bring enchantment into your life!

Announcements:

On the Spring Equinox, I will be presenting a workshop integrating some of these concepts at the OBOD’s Gulf Coast Gathering, which should be a great time!  Hopefully, I will see some of you there!

I am also happy to announce that my next book–which has a whole chapter on enchantment is going to be released in the United States on October 28, 2025 and internationally on January 28th, 2026.  If you are in the US, you can preorder here or from major booksellers.  I’ll share a link for the International books once they become available!