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In this enlightening interview, energy and death worker Cassie Uhl chats to me about her new book, Craft Your Own Magic, which is all about cultivating personalized and ethical magical practices. Dive in now to hear about the transformative “tower moment” that prompted her to address cultural appropriation in her work and reconnect with her ancestral roots. Plus, learn Cassie’s insights on building meaningful relationships with nature and her guidance on developing discernment in intuitive practices. This interview is a must-read for anyone looking to embrace the mystery of spirit and craft their own unique magical practice with an ethical framework.
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Ashley Leavy: Hello and welcome. I am so deeply honored to be interviewing today my dear friend Cassie Uhl, who is the author of so many phenomenal books, decks and journals. Today we are discussing her brand new book, Craft Your Own Magic: Reawaken Your Intuition, Understand Magical Correspondences and Create a Meaningful Personal Practice. Cassie, thank you so much for being here with me today.
Cassie Uhl: Thank you, Ashley. I’m so happy to be here.
Ashley Leavy: You have been on the show before, but would you mind introducing yourself and a little bit about your work, for those who are new to learning about what you do, and also because your work has changed a good deal over the past few years.
Cassie Uhl: Yes, absolutely, it has so much in beautiful, beautiful ways. Um, yeah, I’m an energy worker. I’m a death worker. Those are two things that I’m really passionate about. As you mentioned, I’m an author, and those are the things that really inspire my work and my practice. And I’m a magic maker. Some might say a witch. That’s a word I use sometimes, but I like to be out in the land, working magic with trees and flowers and water. That’s also a big part of my my personal practice.
Ashley Leavy: And I think all of those things really weave together in the work that you do. You see it come out in all these different magical ways, and especially in your writing and in your art, where there’s this really deep expression of what you do. And I think the thing that struck me most about your newest book, Craft Your Own Magic is how deeply personal it is, and how vulnerable you are in those pages, and how much of yourself you share, but you do it in this way that is, I think, so different than what we often see in the healing space or the magic space. You’re not sharing these parts of yourself to be like, and this is how it’s done. You’re very much sharing from this, like I said, really vulnerable place to say this is one way that it can look like. And you’re often turning a question back on the reader and saying, ‘What does it look like for you?’ So I would love to know what inspired this approach to Craft Your Own Magic and what really got you started on the journey of creating and releasing this book?
“I already had a really strong relationship with my guides and some of my ancestors, and it almost felt like they were really pulling and calling me to create something of my own. And in that moment, in the tower moment of all of that, it felt awful. But now today, I can look back and think, ‘Wow, what a gift.'”
Cassie Uhl: Thank you. I love this question. Yeah, Craft Your Own Magic is so different from my other books. And when I tell people that this is my first big book, it’s my first book that’s really got more me in it. And it still is really important for me to share in a way that’s like, ‘This isn’t how you do it. This is how I did it.’ And what really started that journey for me was, I would call it a tower moment, referencing the Tarot, which I’m sure a lot of folks listening here know the Tarot. I had this moment of realizing that there was a lot of cultural appropriation alive in my practice and in my work, and how I was sharing my work with my audience and people who read my blogs. And there was a moment where I was just like, ‘okay, this has to stop’. I saw the violence in my cultural appropriation. And when I did that, I immediately was like, ‘okay, now I’ll turn and look to the practices where my ancestors are from, in Ireland, in England.’
And I realized, it’s not something I can just be like, ‘Okay. And now I’m this.’ And in that moment of realization, I’m so grateful, I was like, ‘Okay, now I’m the one.’ I already had a really strong relationship with my guides and some of my ancestors, and it almost felt like they were really pulling and calling me to create something of my own. And in that moment, in the tower moment of all of that, it felt awful. But now today, I can look back and think, ‘Wow, what a gift.’ I got to create something of my own. How beautiful. And so from there, I sort of had to recreate what my magical, spiritual practice is for me. At the level of where I start in Craft Your Own Magic with Earth, which is a focus on ethics and ancestry, what is important to me? What are my morals and how can I create a magical practice from a really sturdy foundation of ethics and ancestry, in a way that I’m not taking from the people who live on the lands that my ancestors came from. I can still look back to that. I can still incorporate it into my practice. But the truth is, I’m living here on stolen land in so-called Indiana, and those are really alive and real parts of my practice too. So I had to really be with the nuance of what was looking me right in the face when it comes to building an ethical, magical practice. So that was where that book really came from. And then I weave just what that process looked like for me, and invite the reader to really think about ways that it might work for them in their own way, with their own unique lived experience and histories and ancestries, because it’s so different for each of us.
Ashley Leavy: I want to reflect on something that you just said, because I literally got goosebumps when you said it like after you had this tower moment and and everything was sort of, you know, stripped down, and you really got sort of a raw, real look at what was going on. And it felt horrible going through that. And I know you and I have had lengthy conversations about this, personally. But then you, you said, What a gift. And that part is what gave me goosebumps. Because, wow, for you to be able to see sort of the beauty that came out of that very painful in a lot of ways, process of releasing and letting go and confrontation and all those things that sort of come with that. I’m curious how writing this book and getting real honest with yourself about all parts of that process, and being brave enough to share those out there – I wonder how that offered you any additional insight or clarity into what you went through?
“I, like so many, was raised in a dominant culture that told me it was not only okay, but preferred to steal, extract, and take things that weren’t mine. So to be able to really sit with the process that I went through and write ‘Craft Your Own Magic’, gave me so much self compassion that I hope folks who read the book can really feel for themselves too.”
Cassie Uhl: Yeah, Craft Your Own Magic offered a lot of insight and clarity. It was really healing for me to write Craft Your Own Magic, because I was able to see things and to go back and revisit parts of this journey and contextualize it a little bit more, and I was able to really be a lot more loving to myself, which is something that I really strive to share in the book too. These things like the cultural appropriation that were happening in my work, it wasn’t something that I needed to beat myself up for. Actually, in writing the book, I was able to say, ‘Oh, yeah. Of course, this happened.’ I, like so many, was raised in a dominant culture that told me it was not only okay, but preferred to steal, extract, and take things that weren’t mine. So to be able to really sit with the process that I went through and write Craft Your Own Magic, gave me so much self compassion that I hope folks who read the book can really feel for themselves too.
We live in a culture that really creates the environment for us to do things that can be really violent and harmful, and what a gift it is to realize that and be like, ‘Oh, actually, there’s there are other options. I can create my own magical practice, one that’s rooted in in my morals and values, and I don’t have to extract from other people, and I also don’t have to know everything my ancestors did and everything they practiced.’ That’s so amazing. And so I really hope that people who read it can feel the love and the compassion in my invitations, because that was such a meaningful part of it for me to go back and revisit some of those times that sometimes brought up shame, and to look at that with a fresh perspective, and be like, ‘Yeah, of course you did. And here’s another way to try it, like we’re okay.’
Ashley Leavy: I think so much of that does come through in Craft Your Own Magic. This is a book that helps you feel really held as you explore some of those things for yourself, as you ask those questions. And this topic actually really ties in well with my next question. Now, you mentioned earlier you started the book with the chapter of Earth, and all the different chapters tie into different elements, and they’re really well woven throughout. And so our loose main topic of discussion today is about de-entering the self in magic. And this is chapter six of Craft Your Own Magic, and it’s tied to the element of Spirit. And one of the things that you lean into really heavily in this chapter is the mystery of Spirit, and embracing the mystery of Spirit.
And you just said something that I thought really leaned into this idea, which is, when you started to explore some of the magical practices and healing practices of your ancestors, you realized you couldn’t just take those things either. And you said ‘I didn’t have to know all of those things. I didn’t have to know everything they did like and to me.’ That is a really big part of leaning into that mystery of spirit. And you talk about that – and I’m going to paraphrase probably poorly here, I’m going to do my best – that, part of what is helpful during this process is surrounding yourself with all these different guides and teachers, but that this is primarily founded on relationship building. So as you’re working on stepping into this period of of embracing the mystery of spirit, how did that show up for you in your life? How did your relationships with your spiritual teachers, with your guides, weave into this idea of embracing that mystery of spirit?
“And it all happened without any forcing on my end. It was just a matter of me listening to what the land was inviting, what the land was calling forward.”
Cassie Uhl: Yes, I love this question. So many examples. So when this really started to become alive for me was when I noticed and I realized that some of the I work deeply with trees. So I noticed that some of the the trees that I have relationships with they were calling me in to work magic in ways that were unfamiliar to me, things they were asking me to do, things that I didn’t I couldn’t find scripts for, or that I hadn’t read about before. For example, I work I love magnolia tree. And there’s a magnolia tree that lives outside my house. And for a long time, I was the type of person that was like, don’t work magic on eclipses, and I still think Eclipse portals like, they are to be respected. They are powerful, astrological events. So I do stand by the respect.
But I was called in early in the spring, the magnolia tree was like, we’re going to work together. And I was just like, okay, noted. And then it was a really slow process of like, okay, lilac tree is going to come in and work with you on this. Cedar tree is going to come in and work with you on this. And it was this beautiful, like symphony. This like orchestra building of I ended up creating a cord from the inner bark of a cedar tree, which I would have never like come up with on my own. But it was all guided by the cedar tree, by the magnolia tree, by the lilac tree, and I ended up, and I was again, I just knew the magnolia tree was like, we’re doing this on the Eclipse. It was a full lunar eclipse in Scorpio and and I was weaving this chord, and I was chanting, and I was making an essence. So I had water and flowers in the water while this was all happening. And it all happened without any forcing on my end. It was just a matter of me listening to what the land was inviting, what the land was calling forward. And it was a long process.
This happened over, I want to say, a three month period of feeling that nudge for magnolia tree that we’re going to work together to slowly weaving in all of these other elements, and the process of that, and the culmination of it in that Eclipse magic that we worked together, it changed me. It transformed me. I learned things from that experience that have changed the trajectory of my life, and I trust that. Those changes were felt by magnolia tree were felt by the lilac tree, were felt by the cedar tree, were felt by the land, and that they have rippled out and are continuing to ripple out. And that was one of the first experiences I had of really surrendering to a magical practice that de-centers myself and deeply trusts the magical allies that I work with most closely. And I want to say all that with the caveat that I had a strong foundation. I’m not saying to folks to go out and ask a tree in your yard what magic torch. There’s a foundation building process that I talk about in Craft Your Own Magic that goes along with this. And it and it requires a lot of discernment, and I did use and that’s why the time I really want to stretch this, like, stress this. It was a long process, because there was a lot of discernment in there. Like, I made missteps along the way too. There would be times where it’d be like, Oh, do I do this, or do I do this? And I would just be like, Okay, we’re just gonna wait. And then eventually it would become clear and be like, Okay, this is how we’re moving forward.
Ashley Leavy: I really appreciate you sharing that, because I feel like especially when we’re exploring things that are new to us and that are in some ways unique to us or deeply personal, at least, where we don’t have that explicit guidance that you would expect from the way that people normally talk about magic and healing work when we’re kind of out there just being present and doing things, I think it is easy to self critique, to hold judgment, to lack discernment. What helped you lean into that trust of your guides? Was it just the experience of kind of that relationship building over time? Was it the doing it slowly? Was it kind of like a mix of everything. Or what advice would you have to someone who is starting to explore their own magical path working and is is feeling that little bit of friction?
“…I think one of the most important things was getting really comfortable with understanding how intuition shows up in my body, which is really just a lot of consistency of showing up for my practice…”
Cassie Uhl: First, I would just say that that friction is really common, and that that friction doesn’t like, ever go away entirely. So first of all, would be like, Yeah, welcome that friction. That friction is like a messenger, and it’s there to tell you something. It’s there like, as an invitation to pause and, like, really feel into what’s happening. And for me, I think one of the most important things was getting really comfortable with understanding how intuition shows up in my body, which is really just a lot of consistency of showing up for my practice – consistently sitting with trees and understanding what it feels like in my body to have energetic, intuitive connection with a tree, with a flower.. And for some people, that might be a body of water, a God or a goddess, a stone. But allowing myself regular opportunities to be in relationship and energetic exchange with different energies and beings and trees and plants; that’s what really built that foundation. So when magnolia tree did give me that little tap on the shoulder, I felt it, I heard it, I knew it, and I trusted it to be true, because that’s a foundation that I’ve really honed and practiced in my own body, and it’s going to feel different for everybody, but the consistency of building those relationships is what really has helped and continues to help me the most.
Ashley Leavy: I think one of the keys to this that you touch on a little bit in this chapter is cultivating a deep respect for those guides that you’re working with, and you discuss at length the concept of human exceptionalism. Would you be able to sort of introduce that topic to everyone who’s watching or listening? Because this is something that I think a lot of us, we’re not aware of it until we are, and then once you are aware of it, it’s one of those things you have to continuously check in about. So would you mind introducing this idea of human exceptionalism and what that means, especially in relation to a magical practice?
“..so when I go for walks now, I tend to let the land guide me and and how I craft my magic.”
Cassie Uhl: Absolutely. Human exceptionalism is the idea, or the belief, that humans are the smartest, the best that this planet has to offer, and that because we’re the smartest and the best, we have all of the answers for how to make the world better, fix the world. Which I’m like, if we need to fix the world, maybe that’s something to look at, because the world was doing pretty good! So it’s this idea that humans are the best this planet has to offer. And I share this because it’s what my magical allies and my guides – especially the land, the trees, the plants, the flowers, and the animals – consistently invite me to do, which is to de-center myself and my magic. And that doesn’t mean that I don’t resource myself and take care of myself. It’s actually an invitation to imagine even bigger – that my needs can be met beyond what I believe as a human, that there are beings whose imagination is so much more vast and imaginative than mine.
And so when I allow myself to say, ‘Okay, I don’t know everything’, I can look around and be like humans are making kind of a mess, to put it lightly, and so perhaps it would behoove me, even in my magical practice, to sort of be like, Okay, how can I show up in service today? So when I go for walks now, I tend to let the land guide me and and how I craft my magic. I still work with clients, I work with people, and I’m working my magic in that way. But as far as spell work and crafting deep magic goes, for me right now, that’s pretty much exclusively guided by the land that I’m on and the plants and animals and trees that I work with. I wait for them to say, ‘Hey, we got something for you to help us with. Do you want to do that? And I’m like, Yeah, let’s do it.’
Ashley Leavy: So in Craft Your Own Magic you talk about how humility is work. And it sounds like, the default is almost to be humble and listen.
“There’s so much richness and imagination and vastness and bigger magic than I could ever come up with on my own.”
Cassie Uhl: Yes, absolutely. Thanks for reminding me of that. The humility is so important. And I think especially in magic, there can be a lot of rigidity around how it is supposed to be done. Especially when we talk about more ceremonial magic and ritual magic, you have all the things – you have your incantations, and you do these things at a certain time. And I gotta tell you, it has been amazing to let all that go and be like, actually, I’m gonna listen to the magnolia tree. That’s one of the oldest flowering trees that humans believe ever existed. There’s so much wisdom held in a magnolia tree. Yes, let me listen to that and and the flowers and the and the bodies of water that have been here. So it takes a lot of humility, but there’s just so much there. I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s so much richness and imagination and vastness and bigger magic than I could ever come up with on my own.
Ashley Leavy: Now you talked about earlier how that foundational piece is so important to this work. Because I imagine, for some folks who are listening, it probably sounds challenging, difficult, scary, or new to think, ‘Well, how do I connect with Magnolia or cedar or lilac and and ask for that guidance?’ Or, ‘how do I listen? How do I know if what I’m receiving is coming from those guides? Is it coming from me?’ Do you have any tips for discernment when people start to open up intuitively? To these guides, because I think you know this, this is kind of one of those places where humility gets woven in. So this is a two part question. First, do you have any tips for discernment? And then second, once we know that we’re receiving something from one of those guides, how do we receive that without crossing that line to speaking for them or speaking over them? So, once we’re certain of what we’re receiving, how do we make sure we’re maintaining that humility?
“.. a big, big piece of the discernment for me is pausing, waiting, and really sitting with the information that I’ve received before taking action.”
Cassie Uhl: So the discernment, I definitely speak to this in the Intuition chapter. And for me, I call it a discernment pie in Craft Your Own Magic. I have all of these different pieces of this pie that I use for my discernment. Everybody’s discernment pie is going to look different. But for me, it’s that I am checking in with my anti oppression. All of those teachers that I listen to as far as unhooking from white supremacy, because I know that as a white bodied European American, I have things within me. I have internal biases that are there and they’re going to come up. So it’s running it through everything I’ve learned from my anti oppression teachers. It’s sometimes running it by mentors and being like, ‘Hey, this is something that’s going on. What do you think?’ Or just even like sometimes sharing it with another person that I love and trust can be really helpful to have, like that sounding board. I run it by my ancestors and my my spiritual guides. So I have a lot of filters that I run it through, and I don’t have to run it through all of these discernment filters every time. Sometimes it’s an easier choice. But if it’s something where you really need to fly across the country and do this thing. If it’s something big where I’m getting this really big intuitive nudge to do something big, I’m gonna sit with this for some time, and I’m going to run it through all of my discernment filters.
I think that part for me, especially when going back to the anti-oppression and the white supremacy culture, urgency is a huge part of that. So for me, it’s become really important to halt any time I feel a sense of urgency. There are always going to be cases where that’s not true. You’re going to sometimes have a really strong intuitive nudge. ‘I need to do this right now. I need to get out of this space. This person is not safe.’ Those are different. That part of your discernment is going to be recognizing when those split second moments happen. But a lot of times, the urgency is not real. It is something that is just alive and well in the dominant culture that wants to make me believe that there’s a sense of urgency. So I’d say a big, big piece of the discernment for me is pausing, waiting and really sitting with the information that I’ve received before taking action. And I talk about this too.
So when you ask the second part of the question: how do I ensure that I’m basically maintaining the integrity of the connection? For me – and I talk about this in the process of creating the spell work – there are a lot of check ins that I have where I will pause before I do something, and I’ll just sort of check in. I call it my inner circle of my correspondences. So the elements, and the trees that I work with most closely. I check in and ask, ‘Okay, how does this feel again?’ I say feel because I’m very clearly sentient. Does everything check out and feel aligned in my body? Does it feel like I’m in alignment with my integrity, and this interaction, and this exchange of energy and what I’m sharing? So, pausing and checking in frequently. Because I am human, I am fallible, let’s give myself some grace here and move slowly and check in and make sure that I’m not causing harm.
Ashley Leavy: That’s been one of the biggest things in my own practice, too, that rejection of urgency. Because when we’re acting from the pressure of urgency, we’re often reacting. We’re acting out of fear. We’re acting out of places that are not usually fully in alignment with our values. And so this is such a good reminder that it is okay to go slow, and that most of the time that urgency is is completely artificial. And I think that serves a magical practice in so many ways, and it really allows us to also be so much more present and soak up the goodness that exists there waiting for us when we are in flow and we are connected. Cassie, thank you so much for this talk today. Is there anything else that you’d like to leave everyone with? Some final thoughts on de-centering the self from magic?
“We all have those gifts. We all have wise beings around us, whether they be stars, or animals, or plants or crystals. They’re there and they want to work with us. They really do, but they want us to work with them in deep integrity.”
Cassie Uhl: Yeah, what’s coming up for me is just the reminder that – and I already said this a little bit, but that things can be even more magical and even more beautiful than we can imagine. And I really truly
believe that if I continue to de -center myself and my magic and listen to the wise, wise beings all around me, that those connections are really going to lead us to somewhere even more magical and beautiful than I could ever imagine. And I think we all have those gifts. We all have wise beings around us, whether they be stars or animals or plants or crystals. They’re there and they want to work with us. They really do, but they want us to work with them in deep integrity.
Ashley Leavy: Thank you so much for leaving us with that, Cassie. So Cassie’s book, Craft Your
Own Magic is available everywhere books are sold. And Cassie, how can folks stay in touch with you and connect with the work that you do online?
Cassie Uhl: The best place is my website, which is just my name, cassieuhl.com and I’m also fairly active on Instagram, which is just @CassieUhl. And I have a newsletter, so if you want to hop on the newsletter, I do have a free guided meditation that you can grab if you join that. Those are the places that I
show up most frequently.
Ashley Leavy: If you’re watching or listening, you can find links to Cassie’s website and socials below this video. If you’re watching on YouTube or in the show notes on the blog over at LoveAndLightSchool.com. Cassie, thank you so much again for chatting with us today. I am so grateful for you. I’m so grateful for this book. And I hope everyone will go get a copy because it is seriously one of those works that I know
is gonna create the most magical ripples out in the universe. So thank you.
Cassie Uhl: Thank you so much, my friend. It was my pleasure.
Connect with Cassie:
Instagram: @CassieUhl
Website: cassieuhl.com
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