Marcy Young was my very first witchcraft teacher, and one of the things she taught eighteen-year-old me was that I always had permission to work magick for healing and for protection – as long as I did it in such a way as to not infringe on the free will of the person I was working the magick for. As a very young and inexperienced witch, I couldn’t understand why it was that someone wouldn’t want healing or protection worked on their behalf. It was a good thing I wasn’t much for actually practicing the Craft at that point or I might have gotten my ego and savior complex all over someone else’s learning experience or problem to solve. In fact, it took me years to understand that healing and protection are first and best worked by yourself for yourself, and only after you understood both healing and protection as the intimate and intricate concepts that they are should you dare to work those magicks for others.
Healing is each individual person’s right, a great magick that only they can truly work for themselves. That doesn’t mean that others can’t support them in that journey, but no person can heal someone else – it has to come from within the person in need of healing. That being said, it is also each individual person’s right to delay or refuse the healing quest in favor of other priorities. Some people are too busy surviving to heal. Others are not interested in breaking generational cycles or examining the effects of trauma on their life. Still others may desire healing but not be capable of embarking on that quest at this point in their lives. Then there are those who start the work of healing only to realize on some level that their wounds still serve them in some way.
Healing is a lifelong journey, and change is always affecting something in some way as we go along that journey. Whether the healing is physical or emotional, it’s more complex than simply ‘make sick person well again’. Especially in the case of severe or terminal illness, working magick for healing may in fact exacerbate the suffering a person is experiencing. It’s not for us to play God with the lives of others. The Dread Lord is perfectly capable of doing that for himself, and he has insights that we don’t have simply because he’s a more powerful and long-lived energetic being than we mere mortals are.
In the same regard, protection is also each individual’s right. And, again, it’s also deeply personal. Just like some Witches are offended if someone offers to pray for them, others are affronted at the idea of someone else casting protection magick for them. It could be that they have certain personal commitments to their own deities and spirits that preclude the interference of other deities and spirits in their lives. It could be the belief that one’s own borders and boundaries are best protected by the one residing within them. It could also be just as simple as preferring some types of protection over others. Not everyone, for example, believes in the sort of magick that reflects malicious intent back on the caster, seeing it as an act of harm which violates their moral code. Others heartily believe in aggressive protection magick and in the ethic of harm in the service of self-defense. It’s a very sticky situation to navigate, which is why – unless a person is in your magickal care – you don’t get to make decisions about how you think they should be protected.
So what can you do? First, see to your own healing and your own protection. Understand how you work best in these areas. Really immerse yourself in those two intentions for a while, see what feels comfortable to you, what feels uncomfortable, what feels off-limits. This is truly the best experience you can give yourself before you start working healing or protection for someone else. Then, when called upon by a person or by your own conscience to work healing or protection for someone else, you can raise a reservoir of energy for healing or protection, but do not attach it to any working of your own design. Simply let the person you’re interested in helping know that there is energy available to them to supplement their own workings toward healing or protection. That way, if they accept the offer of your energy, they can use your general intention of healing or protection to empower their own magick in the way they see fit.
There are some cautions to this. First, any time you’re connecting your intent to someone else’s, there’s the possibility that it could be hijacked into something that is still within your intent but against your personal moral code – for example, aggressive protections or the hastening of one’s own demise. One would hope that if you’re offering your energy to someone else, they know you enough and you trust them enough to not abuse the gift, but in any case, it’s good to shore up your own personal protections to avoid any magickal backspray. A simple declaration to your shields that you raised energy on behalf of someone else and what they do with that energy is their consequence will suffice in most cases. There are always consequences, in magick as in life, but drawing a boundary between your actions and someone else’s actions helps to deflect the consequences that you personally don’t need to worry with. So, for example, if you trusted someone to be benevolent with your protection energy and they used it for aggressive – if still protective – purposes, then the consequence to them is abusing the spirit of your gift and the consequence to you is reflecting on this new knowledge and making decisions that minimize the possibility of it happening again.
Let’s try another example, this one more closely aligned to healing. Let’s say your child is very ill. They’re your child; you have responsibility for their care until they can reasonably care for themselves. So you work magick to pull them back from the jaws of death. You work your will, which is your right as a practitioner of the Craft, to change reality. However, the consequences of that action may be your own physical and mental health, your own shortsightedness or lack of context for the greater picture, and your own inability to separate your life from your child’s life in the future. Death comes for all, even the young sometimes, and that’s a difficult thing to face. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t give life a fighting chance, but it does mean that sometimes the fighting chance is for quality, not quantity, of life. And by Goddess, that means modern medicine should be your first line of defense in cases of illness, injury, or disease. Many a life was saved by prayer and chemotherapy or by magick and antibiotics. For the love of Goddess, don’t throw your common sense out in favor of the woo. It does not end well.
In my own experience, the reservoir technique works well for both healing and protection. Some people accept the gift of energy. Others do not. In the latter case, you can simply pull that energy back into your own reserves or spin it into additional energy for your own healing or protection. Just remember, as a witch you are empowered to shape reality to your will. As a Wiccan, you are best served to not infringe on another’s free will unless that person is in your care and even then only to the smallest extent possible – because no matter how tempting it is to flex your magickal muscles and rescue somebody from unfortunate circumstances, doing so is ultimately a form of harm. When you deprive a person of their freedom to choose a path and see where that path leads, you are depriving them of all the lessons to be learned on that path. (Important side note: Does every struggle have some sort of mystical silver lining or higher significance to it? Fuck no. The universe is a force of nature, and just as cruel as it is kind, and bad things happen to good people every day. We as humans ascribe significance to suffering as a means of making sense of it for our own sanity and development. But that is a choice to be made by the individual suffering, not by the bystanders.)
As complex as the arts of healing and protection are, they are also two of the most essential practices in the Craft. By working on your own healing and protection, you can better learn how to help others with theirs when the need arises.