Potions Aren't Just Fairy Tales. They’re How Witches Heal.

When medicine failed us, magic whispered the way home.

Geillis Duncan, Outlander

We were never supposed to heal ourselves. That’s the story the old system told us:

“You’re broken.”

“You need fixing — by someone smarter, someone in a white coat, someone far away from the pulse of the Earth you were born from.”

This system — call it patriarchy, call it empire — was built on separation.

Separate us from our bodies.

Separate us from the land.

Separate us from our knowing.

Call us “crazy,” “hysterical,” “witch” if we remembered that we once healed with our hands, our breath, our plants, our prayers.

But here’s the truth:

The system is crumbling.

And beneath its ruins, we are remembering.

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Image by Alysia Moonrise

My Story: Healing Wasn’t Given to Me. I Had to Take It Back.

There are moments in life when everything slows down — not in a peaceful, meditative way, but in that heavy, breath-held kind of way. Moments when you realize the old ways of coping, fixing, or “getting by” just don’t work anymore.

For many of us, it starts with a health issue.

A chronic pain no one can explain.

A deep exhaustion that sleep won’t touch.

Or watching someone we love suffer, feeling helpless to make it better.

For me, it was all of these.

It was my own body sending up flares — dizziness, headaches, stomach pain — for years. It was the doctors telling me I was “fine,” when everything inside me said I was not. And it was sitting night after night by my daughter’s bedside, listening to her small body wracked by a cough that simply would not go away.

If you’ve been there — if you are there — you know the silent desperation that creeps in. The part of you that starts wondering if healing is even possible.

And yet, beneath all that fear, there was a quieter voice. One I had tried to ignore for years.

A voice that whispered:

There is more than this.

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Healing My Daughter: Medicine Failed, Magic Delivered

Everything is connected.

This truth found me not in a textbook or a polished seminar, but in the messy middle of real life — in the ache of my own body, in the tearful nights sitting by my daughter’s bedside, listening to her cough for what felt like the thousandth time.

Doctors offered their best guesses — allergies, asthma, maybe just a stubborn virus. But visit after visit, prescription after prescription, nothing helped her heal. Deep down, I felt it: we were chasing symptoms, not truth. We were trying to fix pieces when the real answer needed to address the whole.

Healing doesn’t happen when we treat the body as separate from the soul. It doesn’t come when we “power through,” deny, or numb our way forward.

Healing happens when we come home to ourselves.

To the body.

To the earth.

To the deep, unseen parts of us that have been quietly waiting for our return.

In those long nights with my daughter, I began remembering what I had always known but hadn’t trusted:

That the earth offers medicine.

That energy matters.

With a spark and a hope, I connected with an amazing woman who showed me the magic of herbs and essential oils. I started diffusing them in my daughter’s room each night — not just for the physical support, but with an energy of sacred tending.

I did my research. I trusted my intuition. I chose oils to heal her cough based on what I knew their properties to be: lemon for alkalinizing, and a purification mixture for healing.

I wove in prayers, small and fierce.

I spoke over her: You are strong. You are healing. You are whole.

And something began to shift.

Her cough, that stubborn companion, started to loosen its grip. Her sleep deepened. Her body softened. Her light returned. It wasn’t instant. It wasn’t perfect. It was real.

It was healing not just her breathing, but the unseen currents of trust between her body and her soul.

And in that process, something in me healed too, which helped me when my own symptoms began to flare up a few years later.

For much of my adult life, headaches and dizziness were just part of the background noise — something I thought I had to live with. Doctors shrugged, tests came back “normal,” but I knew something deeper was out of balance. It wasn’t until I slowed down enough to ground into my body that healing became possible.

Mother Earth’s medicines, the oils and herbs I had once seen as simple remedies, revealed themselves as ancient allies. True healing wasn’t about fixing what was broken. It was about remembering that my body was never broken to begin with — only waiting for me to come back home.

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Potions Were Just the Beginning

This was the true beginning of Moonrise Mystic Shop — though I didn’t know it at the time.

What began as making potions for my daughter, my family, and myself grew into a deeper practice: weaving the energies of earth and spirit, light and shadow, intention and embodiment.

Not just creating oils, but creating portals — spaces where the body and the soul could meet again.

Because here’s what I know now, and what I offer to you:

Healing isn’t about bypassing the darkness with forced positivity.

Healing is about honoring the dark, sitting with it, learning its language.

Being a practicing witch, for me, is not about labels, costumes, or aesthetics. It’s about radical embodiment. It’s about healing the darkness inside — not by rejecting it, but by walking straight into it with love. It’s about reconnecting with the magic that was always ours, buried beneath generations of fear, shame, and forgetting.

When I speak of activations, spells, potions — they are not gimmicks.

They are practices of remembrance.

They are invitations back to wholeness.

True magic doesn’t happen because we wish it. It happens because we become it. Embodiment — feeling safe in our skin, feeling alive in our senses, trusting the wisdom of our breath — is the spell.

This isn’t about floating above our lives. It’s about sinking fully into them. Feeling the pulse of the Earth beneath our feet and knowing: She is not separate from me. I am not separate from Her.

When I work with oils, herbs, words, breath — it is not a performance. It is a return. This is the work of the real witch — the one who knows healing is not a commodity. It is a birthright.

If you’re anything like me — if you’ve found yourself feeling disconnected from your body, your energy, your sense of magic — know this:

You’re not broken.

You don’t need to be “fixed.”

You are already whole — even if you’ve forgotten.

The dark seasons of our lives are not punishments. They are portals.

They invite us to slow down, to listen deeper, to tend to the parts of ourselves we were taught to ignore. They invite us to embody our healing — not just think it, or wish for it — but live it. When I work with oils now, when I blend a potion, I do so with this knowing in my bones. I infuse each potion with spells of sovereignty, remembrance, and deep, unconditional love.

Because the truth is, you already have everything you need within you. The earth, the oils, the activations — they are here simply to remind you.

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Embodiment: The Real Spell

If you feel the pull to walk this path of embodied healing, if you’re ready to reconnect with the sacred parts of yourself you thought were lost — I would love to invite you into the spaces I create.

At Moonrise Mystic Shop, you’ll find a variety of potions: essential oil blends infused with healing, prayer, and deep earth magic. Each potion comes with an activation — a short, powerful invocation you can speak aloud — not to manifest a shiny new life overnight, but to anchor yourself back into your truth.

These aren’t just products. They’re companions for your journey.

You can visit the shop here: Moonrise Mystic Shop on Etsy

And if you’re new here, welcome.

This Substack is a place where I share both the real and the mystical — my personal journey of living as a witch in the modern world, the darker edges of healing, and original dark fantasy fiction born from the very magic I practice.

Because our stories, too, are medicine.

The patriarchy cannot take them from us, no matter how they try.

And your story matters.

Thank you for being here — for choosing to return, again and again, to your cyclical nature.

Moonrise Mystic is the journey of a novelist connecting her love of story with her passion for the mystical into one moving, breathing prayer. It’s for those who love to read fantasy stories and intuitive writings that explore expanding through the initiations of life, death and rebirth, and transmuting shadow to light. Thank you for being here!