On Authenticity
You Become What You Repeatedly Practice
I recently began another series here called Through the Eyes of the Vampiress, which gives me a place to leave behind some of my thoughts and reflections on spirituality, magic, beauty, creativity, and whatever else I happen to find myself thinking deeply about. If that series is, in many ways, about how I think, then The Art of Ceremonial Living is much closer to how I live.
I have always been interested in the ways ordinary life can become more intentional. Not necessarily grander, more elaborate, or more aesthetically impressive, but more inhabited. I like being present enough in my own life to notice what actually brings me peace, what stimulates my creativity, what makes a space feel like mine, what brings me back into my body, and what allows spirituality to become something woven through my everyday existence rather than something I visit only when I am standing at an altar.
That is really what this series is going to explore. I want to talk about the rituals I return to, the environments I create around myself, the role beauty and pleasure play in my spiritual life, the practices that have become almost automatic through repetition, and the ways many of those things eventually find their way into the work I create through The Vampiress Glamour Co. I also want to share practical things along the way: baths, small rituals, spellwork, journal prompts, ways of working with the home and body, and little experiments you can take into your own life if they speak to you. I want this to become a journey of sorts for anyone who decides they would like to follow it from week to week.
I also want to say something about why I am choosing to share more of this now. Most people who know my work know me through the things I create. They see the products, the imagery, the concepts, the names, the rituals, the aesthetics, and from there they may gather whatever impression they have of me. What they have not seen nearly as much of is me positioning myself publicly as a teacher, a guru, a thought leader, or someone who believes everyone should be listening to me. That has never really been my nature. I am not especially vocal on social media, and for long stretches of time I have not even been particularly present there. I have always been much more comfortable creating, studying, practicing, researching, and allowing the work itself to speak.
That quietness should not be mistaken for a lack of background, knowledge, or experience. I have spent so many years studying and practicing the things I work with, and there are several areas in which I feel deeply qualified to speak from what I have learned, practiced, refined, and mastered through repetition and results. I simply never felt the need to announce myself as an authority before I felt naturally aligned with sharing more. I tend to do things when they feel right to me, when I feel called toward them, and when I feel spiritually guided to move in that direction. For a long time, I was perfectly content to remain more in the background. Now I feel differently. I want to share not only what I create, but why I create it, what I study, what has moved me, what has influenced my work, and the experiences that have shaped the way I understand these practices.
Even now, I am not interested in becoming anyone's fairy glamour-magic godmother, appointed leader, or person you are supposed to imitate. That is not the relationship I want to build here. There are people who feel genuinely called to stand at the front of a room and say, “Let me teach you.” There is nothing inherently wrong with that when it is grounded in real knowledge, experience, and responsibility. What has never appealed to me is the pursuit of authority simply for the sake of being seen as important, popular, or in charge. I have spent enough of my life preferring the background that attention itself has never been a particularly convincing reward for me.
What interests me far more is community. Sisterhood. A place where women with similar interests can think together, learn together, challenge themselves, exchange ideas, and continue becoming more fully themselves. I may be sharing from many years of study and personal practice, but I do not need to stand above anyone in order for that knowledge to be useful. I am still learning. I am still growing. I expect that to remain true for as long as I am alive.
So you do not need to agree with me, follow me, emulate me, or treat anything I write here as doctrine. If something I have learned helps you understand your own practice more clearly, inspires you to investigate something for yourself, or gives you language for an experience you were already having, then I am grateful to have been able to share it. I would much rather build that kind of relationship than be placed on a pedestal I never asked for.
But I want to make something clear from the beginning. I am not presenting my life as an instruction manual. I do not claim that my way of living is the way to live, or even the best way. It has simply proven to be a very good way for me. It has expanded my creativity, deepened my spiritual practice, brought me a tremendous amount of peace, and changed the relationship I have with my body, my home, my work, and myself. That makes it worth sharing, but sharing something is very different from prescribing it.
We live in a time when personal experience can become prescription remarkably quickly. Someone discovers a morning routine that works for them, and suddenly everyone needs to wake up at five in the morning. Someone changes the way they eat, meditate, manifest, exercise, pray, decorate, heal, or practice magic, and before long their personal discovery is being presented as the thing everyone else ought to be doing. I am much more interested in what happens when we learn from one another without surrendering our individuality in the process.
So I am not offering a blueprint. I am offering a lived example. Take what speaks to you. Adapt what fits you. Leave what does not. If you decide to create a ceremonial life of your own, eventually it should look like your life, not mine.
What I Mean by Ceremonial Living
There has been a great deal of conversation in recent years about romanticizing your life, and I actually think there is something lovely about that. Buy yourself the flowers. Use the beautiful glass. Put on the perfume even though you are not going anywhere. Make the meal look beautiful. Play the music. Wear the luxurious robe around the house if it makes you feel fabulous. Why not?
But as a spiritual woman and magical practitioner, I became interested in taking that idea somewhere deeper. Romanticizing a moment often asks, How can I make this moment beautiful? Ceremonial living asks another question alongside it: How can I make this moment sacred?
Those questions do not oppose one another. In my life, they are very often intertwined. The flowers can be beautiful and also become an offering. A luxurious bath can also become an intentional spell or spiritual cleansing. Perfume can smell gorgeous while carrying a designated glamour working. A cup of tea can be physically comforting while its ingredients hold spiritual associations that matter within my practice. A home can be aesthetically pleasing while also functioning as a spiritual environment that I consciously tend.
That is what I mean when I talk about ceremonial living. I am not talking about transforming every ordinary task into an elaborate production. I do not need seventeen candles, a bell, a silk robe, an invocation, and a planetary election before I wash a dish. The sacred does not disappear simply because I have dishes to wash. I am much more interested in what happens when ritual, intention, beauty, spirituality, pleasure, and presence become woven so naturally into ordinary life that the boundary between what we call sacred and what we call mundane begins to soften.
What happens when the sacred is no longer somewhere we visit? What happens when it simply becomes part of the way we live?
Rose water is probably one of the simplest examples I can give. There is nothing novel about using it, and I certainly did not invent the practice. Women have used roses in beauty, bathing, fragrance, and ritual for generations. What became personal was not the ingredient itself, but the relationship I developed with it through repetition.
Somewhere along the way, I noticed that spraying cold rose water over my face, breathing in the fragrance, and then using my hand fan while the air moved across my damp skin created this tiny interruption in the middle of whatever I was doing. For a few moments, I stopped rushing forward mentally. I could feel my skin. I could smell the roses. I noticed my breathing and the sensation of the air against my face. Instead of physically occupying one moment while mentally racing toward the next three, I was experiencing the moment I was actually in.
I was actually inside my life.
Eventually I began recognizing this little beauty practice as a reset. It reminded me of the feeling people sometimes describe after splashing themselves with cold water or stepping beneath a cold shower. There can be something about an abrupt sensory shift that interrupts one state and gives you the feeling of entering another. Naturally, being a spiritual practitioner, once I noticed that, I began wondering what else I could do with it.
If I already experienced this physically as a moment of interruption and renewal, could I intentionally work with that experience within my own practice? Could I use it when I wanted to step out of one energy and into another? Activate or deactivate a glamour? After an unpleasant interaction? Before returning to work? When I needed to remind myself that the last ten minutes did not have to dictate the next ten?
That is very often how ritual develops for me. Something ordinary catches my attention. I notice what it does for me. I experiment with it. I give it meaning within my own practice, and then I return to it. Eventually it becomes part of the language of the way I live.
Sometimes, much later, it becomes a product. My rose water existed in my own beauty practice before I decided to create my version of it for The Vampiress Glamour Co. It was not a matter of sitting down and asking myself, What can I sell people now? It was something I already used, valued, and held dear, and eventually I created my interpretation of that experience and invited other people into it.
Maybe rose water does absolutely nothing for you. That is perfectly fine. Your reset might be stepping outside into cold air, washing your hands, changing your clothes when you get home, making tea, brushing your hair, lighting incense, playing a particular song, opening the windows, standing barefoot outside, taking a shower, or sitting silently for five minutes. The point is not to recreate my ceremony. The point is to become curious enough about your own life to discover yours.
Authenticity, Repetition, and the Life We Practice
That brings me to the first subject I wanted to explore through this series: authenticity. I do not think authenticity is always something we simply discover buried somewhere inside ourselves, fully formed and waiting to be uncovered. Certainly, there are things about ourselves that feel instinctive. There are desires, curiosities, temperaments, preferences, and inclinations that seem to announce themselves very early. But I also believe parts of identity are developed through what we repeatedly choose, reinforce, explore, tolerate, abandon, and practice.
You become what you repeatedly practice.
When something is repeated long enough, it begins to feel natural. A repeated act can become a ritual, a ritual can become a habit, a habit can establish a standard, and standards gradually influence the way we understand ourselves. In that sense, ritual gives us an opportunity to rehearse the way we want to live until eventually we are no longer rehearsing.
If I repeatedly care for my body, I am practicing reverence for it. If I continually create peace within my environment, I am reinforcing the idea that peace belongs in my life. If I make private promises to myself and repeatedly keep them, I am learning that my own word matters even when nobody else knows a promise was made. If I allow myself beauty on ordinary days instead of reserving it for occasions when somebody else will see me, I am practicing the belief that my own experience of beauty is sufficient reason to enjoy it.
Of course, repetition works in the other direction as well. If I repeatedly abandon promises to myself, I am practicing that. I’ve been a practitioner for nearly two decades, yet there are still years within that time when I have to admit I fell short in my commitment to myself. Years when I allowed my sense of obligation to others to supersede the obligations I had to myself. Where, if you looked at the way I was moving, you would have thought I had no clue at all about the consequences and effects of self-abandonment.
I learned that if I continually neglect myself until somebody else requires something from me, I am practicing that. And eventually, that can lead other people to erroneously believe they matter more to me than I matter to myself.
Baby, ain’t no way I could live and let that slide.
I had to fix it. I had to recognize where I had allowed that pattern to develop and make damn sure I did not keep moving in that direction.
If I habitually make myself smaller so that other people remain comfortable, I am practicing that too. Not every ritual in our lives is one we consciously created. Some are simply behaviors we repeated until they began creating us.
I think this becomes interesting when we consider not only what we repeatedly do, but what we repeatedly consume. Think about how many of us begin the morning. Before we have really heard our own thoughts, we pick up the phone. If immediately scrolling through your phone genuinely contributes something wonderful to your morning, do your thing. But nine times out of ten, I do not think it is doing most of us any favors.
The moment I begin scrolling, I have opened the door and everybody gets to come in. Their thoughts, their fears, their outrage, their arguments, their insecurities, their opinions, their subjects. I could wake up listening to birds, and five minutes later somebody on my phone is discussing whether Black men like Black women, whether fat women can be good at glamour magic, whether candles are necessary for spellwork, whether some stranger's relationship is toxic, or whatever subject the internet has collectively decided we all need an opinion about that morning.
I was not thinking about any of that. Now I am.
And that is not because I cannot control my own thoughts. I can. The point is that I allowed the entry in the first place. Even if you have developed enough discipline to recognize a thought that does not belong to you, clear it, and return to whatever you were originally thinking about, it still entered. Now you have to exert some amount of energy getting it back out and returning yourself to the focus you had before you opened that door.
I feel much the same way about phone calls. I generally do not answer my phone unless I am already in a mood, space, or period of free time where I have decided I am willing to deal with whatever may be coming through on the other end. Obviously, if I think there is an emergency or it is one of my children, that is different. Otherwise, you can send me a text or leave me a voicemail, and I can decide whether I want to call you back.
I started doing that because I noticed how often people called carrying whatever had happened in their day. Some drama. Some gossip. He said this. She did that. This boyfriend did something. Somebody pissed somebody off. And girl, that is what you had going on in your day. That does not automatically mean I would like you to bring it into mine.
Friendship does not, for me, mean unlimited access to my attention at any given moment. Nor does it mean I have automatically given someone permission to offload whatever they are carrying onto me and potentially change the mood or mental space I was already in. We know conversations can affect us. Somebody can call you while you are having a perfectly peaceful afternoon, tell you something upsetting that has absolutely nothing to do with you, hang up feeling better because they got it off their chest, and now you are sitting there irritated about some shit you were not even aware of twenty minutes ago.
So this is another thing I practice. I pay attention not only to what I give my attention to, but when I allow other people access to it. That does not mean I never listen to a friend who needs me, never answer my phone, or never engage with anything unpleasant. It means I want some say in when I open that door. There is a difference between choosing to make space for someone and having whatever they are carrying deposited into your day simply because your phone rang.
I do not say that because I think social media is inherently terrible. Conversation inspires conversation. Someone raises a subject, another person responds, somebody else thinks about it differently, and an entirely new conversation grows from there. That is part of how human beings communicate, and it is certainly how social platforms function. But I do think there is something worth examining about how much space we leave between everybody else's thoughts and our own.
I notice this particularly within spiritual communities. One person makes a video about a subject, then somebody responds, then another person responds to the response, and suddenly everyone is talking about the same thing. Sometimes I find myself wondering whether all of these people woke up genuinely wanting to discuss this particular subject or whether somebody else simply handed them something to think about.
One of the questions I have found increasingly valuable is: What do I think about when nobody has given me something to think about? What fascinates me when nobody suggests a subject? What emerges organically from my own practice? Where does my mind wander when an algorithm has not handed me today's list of things to care about?
Ritual is not only about what I add to my life. Sometimes it is about protecting enough quiet for something genuinely mine to emerge. You become what you repeatedly practice, and that includes what you repeatedly allow to occupy your mind.
Learning the Language of Your Own Life
Perhaps developing an internal voice came somewhat naturally to me because I was an only child. I spent a great deal of time inside worlds of my own making, and I had a lot of room to discover what interested me without constantly negotiating those interests against a group of other children around me. I was also a performing arts kid. I danced, sang, created, imagined, developed interests, and tried things simply because they caught my attention.
I still do that. I have always had hobbies, and I am almost never bored. I can see something interesting and immediately think, I could do that, and then I go try it. Sometimes I discover something I will love for years. Sometimes I spend three weeks completely obsessed with something and then never touch it again. Neither outcome bothers me very much because the point was never to become the world's greatest practitioner of every hobby I encountered. The point was curiosity. Do I like this? Does this excite me? What happens if I try it? What else can I make? What else is in me?
I think we learn an enormous amount about ourselves this way, especially when we stop demanding that every curiosity become productive. Not every interest needs to become a business, a talent, a side hustle, a permanent identity, or something we become particularly good at. Sometimes trying something and discovering, This looked wonderful and I actually hate doing it, is useful information. You learned something about yourself. That matters too.
My own story began in Chicago, in a family whose history is connected to the Great Migration from the American South. My family’s roots run through Mississippi and Alabama, with previous generations making their way north, buying homes, raising families, working, and establishing themselves in Chicago. By the time I came along, I was growing up inside a family that was very much Black, very much connected to its Southern roots, but also made up of people with remarkably different personalities, beliefs, experiences, and ways of moving through the world.
My dear grandmother, who is still with me at 92 years old, was beautiful, and she knew it. She is fair-skinned, with very long hair and light eyes, and unfortunately, she came of age during a time when the ugliness of colorism was very much rampant and heavily influenced which Black women were considered conventionally beautiful. Those features meant she received a particular kind of attention. She bartended and made good money doing it, and she knew how to work a room. She had the kind of loud, social, extroverted personality that made people gravitate toward her.
My grandfather was loud and boisterous too, and that man could cuss. People tell me all the time that I look just like my grandmother, but I cuss like my granddaddy. I have tried to clean it up some over the years, but I got it honestly.
They were deeply social people and very connected to their community. On any given weekend, our house might be full of people playing cards, drinking, laughing, talking shit, and gambling. My grandfather was definitely a gambling man, and there were some serious card sharks sitting around those tables. As a child, I had a front-row seat to adults being adults. I watched how people interacted, how friendships worked, how community worked, and how these Southern Black people who had made their way north built lives for themselves once they had the stability of their own homes, careers, families, and neighborhoods.
There was also another side of my upbringing that could look completely different from those weekends around the card table. My grandmother was Catholic and attended Saint Sabina. Her children went through Catholic schools, and my mother and her siblings continued into private Catholic high schools. My mother eventually moved more toward Christianity outside of Catholicism, so I attended a private Christian academy. On my father’s side was yet another expression of Christianity: Church of God in Christ, sanctified church, women in skirts, no pants, the little covering on your head, and a completely different cultural atmosphere from Catholicism.
And somewhere inside all of that was me, taking dance classes, attending private school, involved in performing arts, while also sitting around listening to grown Black folks play cards, gamble, laugh, cuss, tell stories, and carry generations of Southern culture into a Chicago home. Education mattered. How I carried myself mattered. Creativity mattered. But so did knowing how to be around people, how to read a room, how to talk to anybody, and how to remain comfortable among my own people.
I grew up in what would now very easily be described as the inner city, although even that description needs context. When my family established itself there, it was a stable Black middle-class environment, and I think flattening every Black urban neighborhood into a single story about “the hood” erases quite a bit of history.
In fact, I was so busy and relatively sheltered that I barely knew many of the neighborhood children beyond the ones immediately around me. Everybody else went to the neighborhood schools together, rode their bikes several blocks over, and grew up knowing everybody in the area. I went to private school, came home, and then went off to whatever activity I had that day. Years later, after I had moved away and would come back home, I would meet people who had lived only a few blocks from me my entire childhood and they would ask, “Who are you? How did we never know you?” Meanwhile somebody else would be standing there saying, “Her grandparents live right there. She has always lived here.” Apparently I had been hidden in plain sight.
Not to bore you with my entire life story, but I give you some of this background because people who have followed my work for years occasionally tell me they wish they knew more about me. They ask me to post more of myself, talk more about my life, or let them see more of the woman behind the work. I generally don’t, because I do what I want to do. But I understand the curiosity. When somebody’s work has become meaningful to you, sometimes you naturally become curious about the person who created it. So before I move on, I will give you this little window.
My childhood was not without hardship. Far from it. My father was killed through gun violence in Chicago in front of my mother and me when I was very young. There are other experiences throughout my life that were incredibly difficult as well. So when I describe having a somewhat sheltered childhood, I do not mean I was sheltered from pain. I mean there was a family around me that worked to provide stability, education, opportunity, and safety despite the things they could not possibly protect me from. Both things are true. I experienced real hardship, and I was also a little Black girl going to private school and private dance academies, being exposed to art, beauty, creativity, education, and expectations about how I should carry myself.
Over the years, people have sometimes described parts of me as bougie. Other parts have been called alternative, weird, too girly, too dark, or even “white,” depending on what somebody happened to be looking at. I have always found that interesting because none of those descriptions ever managed to contain the whole person. I can move between dark, alternative, vampy femininity and something hyper-feminine, pink, soft, and girlish without either one feeling like a costume. Hell, maybe some of that sanctified church upbringing is still stuck to me, because to this day most of my wardrobe is dresses.
And as far as being alternative somehow making me less Black, I never spent much energy defending myself against that idea. Nothing about my life has ever suggested that I do not love being Black or want to distance myself from my people. I simply never accepted the idea that being Black required me to stay inside somebody else’s prescribed collection of interests. Blackness is not a personality type. It does not tell me what music I am allowed to enjoy, what clothes I can wear, what my home should look like, what art should interest me, or how much pink, black lace, leopard print, skulls, or Victorian furniture I am permitted to own. And quite often, if you bother tracing the history of things people casually dismiss as “white stuff,” you find Black people standing somewhere near the beginning anyway.
People have also joked that I somehow manage to be bougie and country at the same time. That one actually makes perfect sense to me. I was raised in Chicago by Southern people. Before I had ever even lived in the South, one of my elementary-school teachers nicknamed me Country. She gave every child a nickname and used it for years, and apparently that was mine. I had never even been to the South yet. I simply sounded like the Mississippi and Alabama people raising me.
So when I graduated from high school at sixteen and decided to move South, it did not feel like I was adopting some entirely new identity. I had always felt connected to the South. Atlanta was booming for Black people at the time, and that was where I wanted to go. More than half my life later, I consider myself a Southerner. If I’m being honest, I have probably always considered myself some version of a Southern belle.
All of those environments taught me something else that I still carry with me: how to move. Yes, I can cuss if I desire, but I can also express myself perfectly fine without it. Sure, I heavily use Ebonics and AAVE, but I also know when the setting and audience call for something different. Not better, just different. The important part is that I know when and where to activate different parts of myself. They are all authentic; they just are not all necessary in every moment.
I am not without flaws, nor do I behave identically in every environment, but I learned how to read a room. I learned how to talk to different kinds of people, how to mix and mingle, how to conduct myself, and how to understand what a particular environment requires without believing I have to stop being myself in order to meet it.
That is actually something that appears throughout the way I understand glamour magic now. Glamour is not always about changing yourself. Sometimes it is knowing how to move in the room you are already in. You have to know how to read the room, understand what is happening around you, and decide how you intend to move within it. What part of yourself belongs at the front here? What needs to be amplified? What needs to be quiet? You can remain entirely yourself while still understanding that every room does not call for the exact same expression of you. Knowing how to conduct yourself is not the same thing as becoming somebody else.
Perhaps that is also why authenticity has never meant fitting neatly into one category for me. I was formed among people who could share a family, a race, a neighborhood, and a history while still being distinctly themselves. Catholicism existed beside sanctified Christianity. Private academies existed beside weekend card games. Ballet existed beside gambling. Polished manners existed beside my granddaddy cussing up a storm. Alternative could exist beside hyper-feminine. Chicago could exist beside the South.
None of those things canceled the others out. They simply became part of the environment that formed me.
Over the years I have lived in all kinds of environments. I have lived in neighborhoods people would consider upper-class, and I have lived in neighborhoods people would very quickly describe as poor or rough. Yet one thing remained remarkably consistent: once you crossed my threshold, you entered my world.
I can remember people entering homes of mine in places where they had already formed an assumption about what the inside must look like based entirely on what they saw outside. Then they would come through the door and find a home that was heavily decorated, extremely clean, fragrant, cared for, and unmistakably mine. Whatever was happening outside did not get to dictate what happened once I crossed my own threshold. I have always had this instinct to build my world wherever I am.
Circumstance can describe where I am without being allowed to dictate the world I build inside it.
As my spiritual practice developed, I began recognizing that many things I had always valued were not entirely separate from it. Keeping my home clean mattered to me before I ever needed spiritual language to explain why. Creating beautiful spaces mattered. Caring for my belongings mattered. Making the environment I occupied pleasurable to inhabit mattered. Over time, physical care and spiritual care became increasingly intertwined within my practice.
Cleaning can be practical and also become cleansing. Tending a room physically can accompany tending its spiritual atmosphere. Opening windows, washing floors, clearing debris, changing water, refreshing altars, introducing fragrance, working with herbs or smoke, praying, and maintaining ritual spaces can all become part of one larger relationship with the home. Within my own spiritual framework, I am mindful of the consequences I associate with stagnation, neglect, and spiritually unclean environments, so I do not completely separate the way I tend my physical surroundings from the way I tend the spiritual atmosphere around me.
My body lives here. My mind lives here. My practice lives here. Why would I treat the environment holding all of those things as though it does not matter?
This is also why adornment of the home is not meaningless to me simply because something is decorative. If you have ever seen my home, you already know I have very particular tastes. I love tons of pink, leopard print, green, black, and gold. I love vintage influences with Black women at the forefront, Gothic things, girlish things, birds, skulls, florals, whimsical objects, and flowers galore, real and faux alike. If somebody has decided there is an age at which a woman is supposed to stop liking these things, unfortunately, I seem to have missed the meeting.
Sometimes my tastes overlap with something currently fashionable, and sometimes they absolutely do not. There are aesthetics currently circulating online that contain colors, patterns, or influences I have loved for years. That does not mean I was secretly following an aesthetic before somebody gave it a name, nor does it mean I need to reject it now because other people happen to like similar things. Human beings have been influencing one another for as long as we have been creating. There is very little value, at least for me, in trying to prove that nobody in human history has ever liked the same thing I like.
Authenticity does not require invention. It requires authorship.
The more interesting question is not always, Has anyone else done this? It is, How did I arrive here? Give ten women the same palette of pink, green, black, and leopard print and you can end up with ten completely different homes. One might make it modern, another tropical, another Art Deco, and I will wander in with a skull, a bird, some Victorian thing, some gorgeous Afrocentric art, flowers galore, and an object nobody else understands why I bought. The ingredients may overlap. The interpretation becomes mine.
One of the simplest tests I have found for myself is to ask: When everybody else stops doing it, will I still want it? That does not mean authenticity requires rigidity. My home can become lighter during summer, with more pink, white, and green, while winter pulls me toward black, purple, red, and deeper shades. My summer home and my winter home may not look identical, but I can still recognize myself in both. People can be much the same way. There is a difference between evolving from within yourself and continually reconstructing yourself according to whatever is receiving approval outside of you.
When the World You Build Becomes the Work You Create
I can see the same principle very clearly in The Vampiress Glamour Co. I am obviously not the only person who creates ritual oils. I am not the only person working with beauty magic or glamour magic, and I am certainly not the only business owner who likes pink packaging, beautiful bottles, ornate presentation, or elaborate details. I do, however, care very much about developing work that has a recognizable identity of its own.
I research the products, themes, names, and concepts that already exist within the spaces I work in because creativity matters to me. If something has been done repeatedly, I enjoy asking whether there is another doorway into the idea. I like creating unusual combinations, finding a different story, or approaching familiar magical concepts through the particular language of my own work. That does not mean I can guarantee that no two human beings will ever arrive at a similar idea. Originality is not the complete absence of influence or overlap. I do not need to invent every ingredient in order to create my own recipe.
The names, themes, concepts, photography, packaging, philosophies, and ways I present magic through The Vampiress Glamour Co. have developed through the same internal world that shapes everything else I create. In fact, one of the easiest ways I can explain it is to imagine taking one of my packages and placing it somewhere inside my house. It belongs there. The pink, leopard, gold, Victorian influence, southern gothic femininity, ornamentation, beauty, and little bit of excess all speak the same language because the package and the room came from the same woman.
The brand has an identity because the woman creating it has one.
I did not manufacture a personality for the business and then begin transforming myself to match it. The business became a natural extension of a world I was already living inside. I did not begin by asking what people wanted me to look like or what personality would be easiest to market. I created what I felt within myself and what I felt spiritually led to create, and thankfully, people responded to it.
That “thankfully” matters, because there was no guarantee anyone would. There was always the possibility that I could create this strange, beautiful little world of mine and nobody would show up. I still had to create it before I knew.
That becomes particularly relevant when the things you genuinely care about are things other people dismiss. I work extensively with beauty magic and glamour magic, and I am well aware that there are people who consider those practices frivolous, shallow, superficial, false, unserious, or somehow lesser than whatever forms of magic they personally consider worthy of respect. I know those opinions exist. I simply do not build according to them.
Beauty fascinates me. Glamour in the traditional sense as well as it’s magickal and spiritual application fascinates me. Adornment, embodiment, perception, ritual, the physical vessel, and the relationship between beauty and power fascinate me. This is my work, and I value it. It is one thing to discover what you love. It is another thing entirely to continue loving it when someone tells you that you should not.
The Vampiress Glamour Co. probably would not exist if my first questions had been: What will everybody approve of? What will make people take me seriously? What is everybody else doing? Who do I need to become in order for people to buy something from me? I created what I felt called to create, and people eventually came. They bought things. They returned. They wrote to me. They told me how receiving something made them feel. But their validation came after the creation. I had to be willing to build the world before I knew whether anyone wanted to enter it.
None of that means I do not care about the people receiving my work. Quite the opposite. I think deeply about customer experience. I want someone opening one of my packages to feel cared for. I want them to understand that I believe they are worth the details and the beauty. I want the experience of receiving the object to create an emotional response before they have even used what is inside. I want opening it to feel like the beginning of the ritual, and the messages I have received over the years tell me that at least some part of that intention is reaching people.
But there is a tremendous difference between asking, How can I care for the person receiving what I create? and asking, Who do I need to become so they will approve of me? Feedback can help me refine how I deliver something without requiring me to surrender the identity behind what I am delivering. I can care about an audience without allowing the audience to author me.
That principle extends far beyond business. Someone may think your home is too much, your clothes are strange, your spirituality is ridiculous, your hobbies are childish, your beauty rituals are frivolous, your ambitions are unrealistic, or your interests are weird. At some point the question cannot always be whether everyone else understands. Do you understand why it matters to you? Would you still want it if nobody applauded? Would you still love it when it stopped trending? Would you still practice it if nobody ever saw you doing it?
Inspiration, Expression, and Remaining Yourself
Authenticity does not require living in a sealed room without influence. I am inspired by people constantly. There are photographs in my home of Eartha Kitt, Dorothy Dandridge, Diahann Carroll, Aaliyah, Josephine Baker, Madam CJ Walker, and other women I admire. There are qualities in those women, whether beauty, artistry, presence, sensuality, courage, style, intelligence, individuality, or simply the way they moved through the world, that speak to something in me.
I can admire those qualities. I can study them. I can learn from them. I can even consciously work with certain archetypal qualities they represent to me without needing to become a reproduction of them. Admiration should not require self-erasure. If I admire another woman's sensuality, I can ask what sensuality looks like when it passes through me. If I admire elegance, courage, discipline, rebellion, softness, intelligence, artistry, glamour, or audacity, I can become curious about why that particular quality moves me and whether some version of it already exists within me waiting to be explored.
Eventually, whatever I gather from people, history, art, music, culture, books, spiritual traditions, aesthetics, and experience has to pass through the filter of my own identity. Otherwise I am not building Noelani's life. I am assembling a costume. There is a difference between being inspired by the world and asking the world to tell you who to be.
I feel the same way about archetypes. I can draw upon an archetype because there is something within it I want to explore, cultivate, strengthen, or understand, but I do not disappear so the archetype can exist. The archetype becomes interesting because of what happens when it meets me. Ten women can admire the same woman and recognize ten different qualities. One sees sensuality. Another sees independence. Another sees wit. Another sees glamour. Another sees courage. What we recognize can tell us something about ourselves.
There is also a distinction between authenticity and giving everyone unrestricted access to every part of your personality. I am an animated person. I was a performing arts kid. I do voices. I create characters. I can be completely ridiculous, and all of that is genuinely part of my personality. But if I walk into a bank to handle a serious financial matter, I am probably not going to conduct the conversation using one of my ridiculous voices. That does not make Bank Noelani fake. It means I know where the hell I am.
We naturally express different aspects of ourselves around our closest friends, our families, business associates, strangers, at home, in formal settings, and in public. Those expressions can all be authentic. Authenticity does not require complete access, nor does it require complete expression. I can reserve pieces of myself without rejecting them.
The distinction I care about is whether I am consciously deciding what another person has access to or whether I am changing who I am because I have learned that who I actually am is unacceptable.
If I am continually making myself quieter, less expressive, less ambitious, less beautiful, less intelligent, less sensual, less spiritual, less strange, or simply less me because another person prefers the diminished version, at some point I have to admit that I am not just deciding what parts of myself somebody gets access to. I am letting their comfort influence what I believe I am allowed to be.
At the same time, “being authentic” is not an excuse to behave terribly. We have all encountered some variation of I just keep it real, I say what I think, or This is just who I am. Sometimes you are not “keeping it real.” Sometimes you are just being an asshole.
Cruelty does not become authenticity because the cruel thought genuinely occurred to you. Tactlessness is not automatically integrity. Saying every thought that enters your mind without considering whether it is useful, necessary, appropriate, or needlessly hurtful does not prove that you are more authentic than everybody else. Every impulse I possess does not become sacred simply because it originated inside me.
I can be authentic and tactful. Authentic and kind. Authentic and discerning. I can have boundaries without cruelty and consider somebody else's feelings without abandoning myself. I can also grow without deciding that the person I was before must therefore have been fake. Maybe I am authentically impatient and decide to practice patience. Maybe I possess a genuinely sharp tongue and decide that I do not want to use it as a weapon. Maybe I struggle with boundaries and deliberately practice holding them. Growth does not erase authenticity. Growth is one of the ways we participate in who we are becoming.
And there it is again: repetition.
You become what you repeatedly practice.
Beginning Your Own Ceremonial Life
If there is one thing I hope you do not take from this first issue, it is the idea that creating a ceremonial life means copying mine. Please do not leave here believing you need rose water, leopard print, a hand fan, faux flowers, ritual oils, and a skull somewhere in your living room. Although I would personally have no complaints.
Begin by paying attention to the life you already have. What brings you into your body? What makes you feel cared for? What makes your home feel like yours? What makes you feel spiritually connected? What do you find beautiful when nobody else gets a vote? What are you saving for a special occasion even though using it would make an ordinary Tuesday better? What have you been denying yourself even though you know it improves your life? What are you repeatedly doing that you no longer want shaping you?
Creating ritual does not always begin by adding something. Sometimes it begins by noticing. Maybe you notice that the first twenty minutes of scrolling every morning leaves you agitated. Maybe you realize you never actually sit down while eating. Maybe you own beautiful perfume you refuse to wear unless somebody else is going to smell it. Maybe you keep postponing rest until you believe you have earned it. Maybe you continually promise yourself quiet time and then give it away to everybody else.
There is no need to judge the observation. It is simply information. Once you notice, you can experiment. Maybe the first fifteen minutes of your morning become phone-free. Maybe you begin setting an intention while stirring your coffee. Maybe you make tea with ingredients you enjoy physically and that also carry spiritual associations you want to work with. Maybe your shower becomes a place where you consciously release what you do not want to carry into the next part of your day. Maybe you choose your clothing according to the energy you want to embody. Maybe you wear the perfume at home, open the window, light the candle, say the prayer, take the walk, play the music, tend the altar, or finally use the beautiful thing you have been saving.
Not because any of those things are requirements for a spiritual life, but because you decided they belong in yours.
Then pay attention again. Did the practice actually enrich your life? Keep it. Did it become another chore you resent? Change it. Did it sound wonderful when somebody else described it but feel completely meaningless when you tried it? Let it go. That is information too.
Your ceremonial life is allowed to change because you are allowed to change. There will be mornings when my coffee is just coffee. There will be days when I am tired. There will be nights when an elaborate ritual sounds absolutely dreadful and lying my ass down is the most loving thing I can possibly do for myself. That does not make me less spiritual.
A ceremonial life should never become another perfectionist standard with which to beat yourself. One beautiful morning does not create a ceremonial life, and one difficult morning does not destroy one. The purpose is not perfection. The purpose is relationship.
The ceremony is supposed to serve the life.
I return to these practices because, in one way or another, they return me to myself. And if you decide to continue this series with me, that is what I hope we can explore together over time. Not how to make your life look more like mine, but how to become attentive enough to your own desires, habits, senses, spiritual instincts, curiosities, environments, and patterns that you begin recognizing the language of your own life.
A Ceremonial Practice: The Return to Self Bath
One thing I want to do with The Art of Ceremonial Living is leave you with something you can actually take into the week with you. I do not want this to only be a series where I talk at you for twenty minutes, you say, “Well, that was nice,” and then we all go on about our business. If you decide to follow this journey with me, I want us to actually do some things along the way.
Sometimes that may be a bath. Sometimes it may be a tea, a little spell, a beauty practice, something for your home, something involving your altar, or simply a question I want you to sit with for a few days. None of this is homework. I am not grading anybody. It is simply a way for us to take what we have been talking about and see what happens when we actually live with it for a little while.
So for our first week, because we are talking about authenticity, I want to start with a bath that is a little more shadowy. Not “shadow work” in the sense that we need to sit in a bathtub and uncover every traumatic thing that has ever happened to us before the water gets cold. I mean shadow in the sense of being willing to sit with yourself without immediately trying to make yourself look good, sound good, or come up with the answer you think you are supposed to have.
A Note Before You Begin: Any herbs, ingredients, or practices shared here are suggestions based on my personal spiritual practice and are not medical advice. Please do your own due diligence and determine whether an ingredient is appropriate for your body, including possible allergies, sensitivities, medications, or other contraindications. You are responsible for determining what you can safely use, apply, consume, or otherwise incorporate into a practice, and not every ingredient I discuss will be appropriate for every method of use. When in doubt, leave it out and consult an appropriate healthcare professional.
If these particular herbs do not correspond with the way you work within your own practice, or with the relationships and associations you have developed with certain herbs, choose something else that feels appropriate for this exercise. These are simply the herbs I would personally reach for and my suggestions based on the way I work with them.
For this one, I would use mugwort, rosemary, basil, pink Himalayan salt, and a little cosmetic-grade activated charcoal. I would make the herbs as a tea first, let them steep, strain them very well, and then pour that herbal water into the bath. Add a handful of pink Himalayan salt and just a little charcoal to darken the water.
And girl, I am telling you right now, this bath can be messy as hell.
The charcoal is going to make the water dark, and depending on your bathtub, grout, towels, and everything else you have going on in there, you may have some cleaning to do when you get out. Do not pour half the container in there trying to make yourself a spiritual swamp. A little goes a long way. Use cosmetic-grade activated charcoal, be mindful of staining, and if you have a tub or surface you are worried about, skip it. Please do not send me an email because your landlord wants to know why the bathtub is gray.
The bath still works as a practice without it.
Within my own spiritual practice, mugwort is something I associate with going inward, dreams, intuition, and exploring what may not immediately be sitting on the surface. Rosemary, for me, works beautifully with clarity and remembrance. Basil is one of those herbs I come back to again and again when I want clearing, restoration, or a shift in the atmosphere. I use the pink Himalayan salt here for cleansing and purification, particularly for clearing away what I do not want to carry with me while I turn my attention back toward myself.
The activated charcoal has a deeper purpose here as well. I work with charcoal for spiritual protection and for drawing away unwanted heaviness, negativity, and energetic residue. It is something I already use in other workings for that reason, including Baptist Sweet Shadows. In this bath, I want it to represent that clearing away of what has collected on you, especially what may have come from other people, environments, expectations, or experiences. Before I ask myself what is genuinely mine, I want to make some room to release what may not be.
And yes, it also gives the bath that wonderfully dark, shadowy appearance, which happens to fit the work perfectly. But the darkness is not there merely for aesthetics. We are clearing, protecting, and then going beneath the polished answer for a minute.
Set the bathroom up in whatever way actually allows you to get quiet. Maybe that means candles. Maybe you want music. Maybe you want complete silence. Maybe you want to turn the lights off and let one little candle do all the work. Maybe you want to pray first. Maybe you want to sit there with absolutely nothing happening except you and that black water.
And please do not worry about whether it looks beautiful enough to photograph. Nobody needs to see this bath. Matter of fact, that is part of the assignment.
Once you are in the water, start thinking about all of the different versions of yourself that show up for other people. The woman who knows how to be agreeable. The one who knows how to be impressive. The strong one. The pretty one. The spiritual one. The professional one. The one who knows exactly what everybody around her expects and sometimes adjusts herself before anybody even has to ask.
I am not saying those versions of you are fake. That is important. We contain a lot of different things, and they can all be real. I just want to know what is left when nobody needs anything from you for a minute.
When you do not have to impress anybody, explain yourself, make yourself easier to understand, be desirable, be useful, be inspirational, be the good daughter, the good mother, the good friend, the good partner, the good witch, the good anything.
Who are you then?
Who am I when nobody is watching?
And do not rush to give yourself some beautiful spiritual answer either. You might realize you know exactly who you are. You might realize there are parts of yourself you have been ignoring. You might realize you have been doing something for so long that you do not even know whether you actually like it anymore. You might sit there and think, “Girl, I have no idea.” That counts too.
The point this week is not to solve yourself. It is to start listening.
Journal Prompt for the Week
I am only giving you one because we have plenty of weeks ahead of us, and I would rather you really sit with one question than speed through twelve of them like a BuzzFeed personality test.
How much of the life I am currently living comes from my own inner voice, and how much of it has been shaped by what I believe other people will approve of?
And really think about it. Your clothes. Your home. Your relationships. Your work. Your spirituality. The things you say you like. The things you have stopped doing. The things you would love to try but somehow keep talking yourself out of. The way you present yourself. Even your definition of success.
You do not have to change anything this week. Just notice where your own voice is loud, where it has gotten quiet, and where you may have been answering other people's expectations before they even asked the question.
Until Next Time
If you decide to continue this journey with me from week to week, I hope that is really what The Art of Ceremonial Living becomes: an opportunity to pay closer attention to your own life. Not an attempt to turn yourself into me, or anybody else for that matter, but a chance to become more curious about who you already are, what makes you tick, what brings you peace, what makes you feel powerful, what feels sacred to you, and what kind of life actually feels good for you to inhabit.
I will continue sharing pieces of my own practices along the way: the things I have studied, the rituals I have developed, the things I have tried and kept, the things I have tried and decided were not for me, and the experiences that have shaped the way I live now. Some of it may resonate deeply with you. Some of it may inspire you to go research something completely different. Some of it may not be for you at all. That is perfectly fine. I do not need you to become a student of Noelani Noire. I would much rather you become a better student of yourself.
Because that is really where authenticity begins for me. It is not about constructing the most interesting version of yourself for other people to observe. It is about having enough relationship with yourself that you know what belongs to you, what does not, what you want to keep, what you have outgrown, and what you may still want to explore.
And that relationship is going to keep changing. We are going to keep learning. We are going to discover things about ourselves that surprise us, revisit things we thought we had figured out, change our minds, develop new interests, and probably laugh at a few versions of ourselves along the way. Good. We are alive. We are supposed to move.
What matters to me is that the movement continues to come from somewhere inside of us rather than being entirely dictated by whatever the world happens to be rewarding at the moment.
Perhaps authenticity is not only something we uncover. Perhaps some of it is something we practice into existence. We keep our promises to ourselves. We make room for our own thoughts. We allow beauty without requiring an occasion. We protect our peace. We care for our bodies and our environments. We explore our curiosities. We try things. We change our minds. We stop shrinking every part of ourselves that somebody else may not understand.
And slowly, through all of that repetition, the life outside begins to resemble the world inside.
Eventually, I do not have to constantly think about stepping into the woman I want to be. I have practiced knowing her, caring for her, listening to her, and making room for her long enough that I simply wake up as her. Not because I have perfected myself, and certainly not because I have figured everything out, but because I have built a life in which I have actually had the opportunity to know myself.
The goal is not to occasionally perform a beautiful, intentional, magical life. It is to practice one until it becomes yours.
I did not find the way. I found a way that became mine. And if something I share here helps you discover a little more of yours, then I am honored to have you walking alongside me.
Until next time, keep listening to yourself.
With love,
Grand Dame Noelani Noire
The Art of Ceremonial Living
One beautiful life guided by Spirit. Lived with intention.
From the Maison
The rose water referenced in this issue is part of my own Beauty Magick practice and is also available through The Vampiress Glamour Co.