Explore every episode of the podcast Salt & Sovereignty: Witchcraft, Hekate, Shadow Work & Spiritual Healing Podcast

Tomorrow I'm casting a friendship spell for me and my husband, and I'm recording this before I do it... so I have no idea yet whether it works.

On the drive home last Sunday we finally said it out loud: we don't have anybody where we live. My best friend is across the state. His is too. So I'm doing a three-night working with Hekate. A Deipnon clearing at the dark moon, three candles for three roads as the light comes back, and a sealing at the full moon.

But this one isn't really about the candles. When I sat down to write out who I was asking for, almost all of it came out as what I don't want. Not fake, not surface-level, not somebody half-assing their own life. A full page of nos. And reading it back, I found myself in it asking for a friend who's honest about money while I struggle to talk about mine, asking for someone who doesn't complain constantly while I get stuck doing exactly that.

In this episode: the history of Hekate's (Hecate's) Deipnon and why the ancient offering included the sweepings of your own house; why I'm keeping the words of the spell private; the ethics of asking for people without casting on anyone's will; and why the hardest part of a friendship working isn't magical at all.

New this week: Salt & Sovereignty is now in video on Spotify and YouTube.

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What happens when a relationship, a belief, or a version of yourself hasn't done anything wrong, but it's stopped adding anything to your life?

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ash sits with the guilt of outgrowing something you still love, the fear of becoming someone who abandons people, and the difference between fading away from a connection versus consciously closing the door on it. Drawing on Hekate as goddess of crossroads and thresholds, she talks honestly about why releasing doesn't require a villain, and why gratitude and grief can coexist in the same ending.

The episode closes with an original ritual, The Release at the Crossroads, a gentler alternative to traditional cord-cutting that works for people, practices, or old versions of yourself, and is written to adapt to any spiritual practice or none at all.

What makes a curse unethical, and who gets to decide? In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley explores curses, baneful magic, consent, protection, anger, justice, and personal responsibility through the complicated lens of witchcraft ethics.

Ashley begins with something she has never tried to hide or soften: she has cursed someone before, she believed the working was justified, and she still stands by that decision. From there, the conversation moves beyond whether curses are simply “good” or “bad” and into the much harder questions underneath magical ethics.

In this episode:

• Ashley shares the story of a mirror curse she performed and why she considers it both baneful and ultimately healing
• We explore the long history of curses, bindings, and defixiones in ancient Greek and Roman magical practice
• Ashley examines the Wiccan Rede, the Threefold Law, and why “harm none” is not a universal rule of witchcraft
• We look at consent, protection, revenge, justice, return-to-sender work, and the uncomfortable overlap between them
• Ashley reflects on anger, survivorhood, spiritual darkness, and the pressure to sanitize difficult emotions
• We question whether “light” magic is automatically ethical and whether “dark” magic deserves the assumptions placed upon it

This is not an argument that curses are good, or that everyone should practice baneful magic. It is a reflection on what happens when spiritual ethics collide with real human lives, where harm, consent, protection, intention, and consequence are rarely as simple as we want them to be.

If you have ever wondered where your magical ethics came from, what responsibility means inside your practice, or whether darkness and light are really useful moral categories at all, this episode is an invitation to become curious before becoming certain.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley shares her experience beginning Reiki through Brett Bevel’s self-attunement method after years of feeling unable to afford traditional Reiki training. She reflects on spiritual accessibility, the ethics of paid spiritual education, and the difference between receiving an attunement and truly integrating an energy healing practice. Ashley also explores how Reiki is beginning to coexist with her witchcraft, devotional practice, and relationship with Mother Earth, especially through a quiet morning walk using Choku Rei. This episode is a grounded reflection on Reiki, self-attunement, embodied spirituality, and learning to move slowly enough for a practice to become real.

What happens when fear of rejection, people pleasing, and overthinking turn every social interaction into a test someone is trying not to fail? In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ash explores the constant self-monitoring underneath her long-held belief that she hates small talk, and how old survival patterns can quietly shape the way a person sees themselves.

She unpacks social anxiety, fear of abandonment, emotional perfectionism, hypervigilance, fawning, and the pressure to perform the “correct” version of yourself around other people. She also explores how the same invisible test can show up in witchcraft, intuition, and spiritual discernment, especially when someone has learned to distrust their own instincts.

This episode isn’t about forcing yourself to become more social or pretending every limitation is simply a mindset problem. It’s about questioning the identities and thought patterns we can start treating as permanent truths, and asking how much of ourselves we may have held back while trying not to get the answer wrong.

What do we actually mean when we talk about masculine and feminine energy?

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ash explores a question that began with a simple conversation and quickly turned into one of the deepest spiritual rabbit holes she's encountered in years. Why do we call Hekate a goddess? What makes a deity masculine or feminine? Are divine beings gendered in the same way humans are, or are we describing something entirely different?

Together, we'll explore Hekate as a case study while unpacking some of the biggest questions surrounding the Divine Feminine, Divine Masculine, masculine and feminine energy, and modern witchcraft. Along the way, we'll examine ancient tradition, personal spiritual experience, the role of mythology, and whether concepts like intuition, strength, compassion, discipline, and wisdom truly belong to one energy over another.

This isn't an episode about proving who's right. It's an invitation to question assumptions, deepen your relationship with your spiritual practice, and explore what these ideas actually mean in your own life.

Whether you're a Hekate devotee, a practicing witch, a pagan, or simply someone interested in spirituality and consciousness, this conversation will leave you with new questions to carry into your next ritual and meditation.

A meditation beneath a copper pyramid led Ashley into a much larger question: how often do we mistake control for safety?

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley explores the relationship between trauma, surrender, spiritual practice, and the meaning of personal sovereignty. She reflects on the ways hypervigilance and control can begin as intelligent survival strategies, only to later limit our ability to experience joy, vulnerability, mystery, and trust.

That realization also changed the way she thinks about witchcraft and spellcraft. What if magic is not about controlling reality, but consciously participating in it? Through meditation, protection work, devotion to Hekate, and the metaphor of tending a garden, this episode examines the difference between fear-based control and intentional spiritual partnership.

She also explores why surrender is not the same as powerlessness, why healthy boundaries remain essential, and how true sovereignty may be less about domination and more about remaining rooted enough to meet whatever comes.

Labels can help us understand our identity, find community, and name our experiences, but they can also become cages when we mistake them for the whole truth.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley reflects on labels, trauma, identity, witchcraft, ADHD, religion, and spiritual practice. Beginning with an expansive meditation experience, Ashley explores why language can point toward an experience without ever fully containing it, and why the same is true of human beings.

She shares how the ADHD label became tangled with shame and self-worth, how religious trauma shaped her nervous system’s response to Christianity, and how curiosity helped transform her mother’s understanding of witchcraft. This is not an argument against labels. It is a personal reflection on using them as guides without allowing them to become laws.

In this episode:

• How labels shape identity and self-perception
• Why trauma can turn categories into protective assumptions
• Ashley’s experience with ADHD, shame, and changing health symptoms
• Religious trauma, Christianity, and nervous system awareness
• Labels within witchcraft, including “baby witch” and black magic
• The difference between assumption and genuine discernment

Trauma may teach us to survive through labels, but healing can give us enough space to look beyond them. This episode is an invitation to remain curious about ourselves, other people, and the identities no single word could ever fully contain.

This personal reflection explores Ashley’s evolving relationship with Hekate, from religious fear and spiritual anxiety to trust, devotion, historical curiosity, and a more sovereign spiritual practice.

When Ashley first encountered Hekate, she saw a dark and potentially dangerous goddess who might punish mistakes, demand obedience, or expose her to something unsafe. Over time, she began to recognize that many of those fears did not come from Hekate herself. They came from religious trauma, cultural portrayals of witchcraft, painful experiences with trust, and a nervous system shaped by abandonment and abuse.

Ashley also reflects on discernment, modern Hekatean practice, the Triple Goddess, Hekate’s Wheel, ancient traditions, personal signs, and the freedom to learn without treating every mistake as proof of spiritual failure.

This is not a guide to working with Hekate or a universal account of who she is. It is one person’s lived relationship with a goddess who once represented everything she feared and eventually became a source of trust, truth, protection, and belonging.

May this episode remind you that learning more does not invalidate the relationship you had before you knew more, and that tradition can ground your practice without becoming another source of fear.

Pronunciation note: Ashley did her best with the names and terms in this episode, but she may not have gotten every pronunciation quite right. Thank you for your grace!

In this episode, Ashley shares the deeply personal story behind the Salt & Sovereignty platform, a project that began as a simple podcast website and gradually became something much bigger: a spiritual home designed to make meaningful practice more accessible for everyone.

In this reflective episode, Ashley explores how three weeks of building led to a much larger realization about accessibility, spiritual practice, and what it means to create a place where people can belong without needing perfect circumstances.

In this episode:

• Why Salt & Sovereignty began as “just a website”
• The meditation with Hekate that changed Ashley’s perspective on the podcast
• How accessibility became the guiding philosophy behind every feature
• Why digital tools aren’t meant to replace physical spiritual practice
• The vision for a Living Library, digital Book of Shadows, and spiritual community
• Why success is measured by people, not download numbers

Whether you’re new to witchcraft, devoted to Hekate, navigating chronic illness, practicing in secret, or simply searching for an authentic spiritual path, this episode is an invitation to remember that meaningful practice doesn’t require perfect circumstances.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley reflects on doomscrolling, nervous system exhaustion, emotional overwhelm, and the grief of realizing she was never broken to begin with.

After months of constantly reaching for noise, distraction, podcasts, videos, and stimulation, Ashley shares what surfaced during a recent Brainspotting therapy session and how silence began revealing deeper layers of grief, trauma, self-blame, and emotional exhaustion.

This is not a productivity conversation or a “fix yourself” episode. It’s an honest reflection on chronic overstimulation, survival mode, emotional healing, and learning how to return to yourself gently instead of performatively.

In this episode:

• Doomscrolling and emotional avoidance
• Why silence started feeling unbearable
• Nervous system exhaustion and chronic fight-or-flight
• Grieving years of believing “I’m broken”
• Trauma, self-worth, and internalized shame
• Learning to sit with yourself without trying to fix yourself

This episode is for anyone who feels emotionally overwhelmed, disconnected from themselves, exhausted by constant stimulation, or afraid of what silence might bring up.

Maybe healing is not becoming someone new. Maybe it’s learning how to stop abandoning yourself when things get hard.

In this episode, Ashley reflects on creator burnout, visibility pressure, nervous system exhaustion, and the emotional cost of turning deeply personal work into online content.

What started as an effort to improve podcast SEO and discoverability slowly became a deeper reflection on performance, consistency, emotional honesty, and the pressure to stay visible online. Ashley explores the tension between devotion and optimization, especially within trauma-informed spiritual and healing work.

In this episode:

• The emotional impact of learning SEO and content strategy
• How visibility pressure can quietly become performance
• Burnout, nervous system exhaustion, and constant output culture
• The difference between emotionally honest work and optimized vulnerability
• Trauma, productivity wounds, and performance-based worth
• Why healing work does not always fit algorithm-driven systems

This is not a productivity episode or a creator strategy guide. It’s a personal reflection on what happens when meaningful work starts colliding with systems built for constant visibility and consumption.

If you’ve ever felt pressure to constantly produce, stay visible, or turn your life into content just to feel worthy, this conversation may resonate with you.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley shares her real-time experience navigating panic and fear when a wildfire threatened her childhood home and her best friend’s home.

As anxiety and helplessness rise, she reflects on what it means to face something you cannot control, and how returning to spiritual practice can shift you from panic into grounded response.

In this episode:

• Anxiety and panic during an emergency situation
• Feeling out of control and overwhelmed
• The nervous system response to fear and uncertainty
• Turning to spiritual practice and Hekate for grounding
• Creating a protection working as a response, not control

This is not about stopping what’s happening, but about how you choose to stand in the middle of it.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley shares her experience with years of misdiagnosis, chronic exhaustion, and being told she was “fine” while her body told a different story.

After over a decade of searching for answers, trying medications that didn’t work, and feeling dismissed by medical professionals, Ashley reflects on the moment everything finally made sense and what it means to rebuild trust in yourself.

In this episode:

• Years of misdiagnosis and being dismissed by doctors
• Chronic fatigue, inflammation, and unexplained symptoms
• The emotional impact of medical gaslighting
• Finally getting answers after years of doubt
• Reclaiming self-trust and listening to your body

This is an honest reflection on what happens when you realize you were right all along, and how to begin trusting yourself again.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley explores what it feels like to miss a ritual and immediately question your devotion, worth, and place within your spiritual practice.

After missing Deipnon, Ashley reflects on the internal pressure to be consistent, the belief that devotion must be proven through performance, and how quickly spirituality can begin to feel like a test instead of a relationship.

In this episode:

• Missing Deipnon and feeling like you failed
• Devotion vs performance in spiritual practice
• The pressure to be consistent and “do it right”
• How self-worth gets tied to ritual and routine
• Reframing devotion as relationship, not perfection

This is an invitation to pause, question the stories you attach to missed rituals, and reconnect with what devotion actually means to you.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley explores the fear of being seen and the internal conflict between wanting visibility and not feeling safe enough to fully express yourself.

Through reflections on therapy, spiritual practice, and intuitive work, Ashley shares how shame can shape identity and create resistance around being visible, even when there is a deep desire to be seen.

In this episode:

• Fear of being seen and feeling unsafe in visibility
• How shame impacts self-expression and identity
• The role of the nervous system in protection and resistance
• Exploring authenticity through spiritual practice
• Symbolism and meaning within personal rituals

This is an invitation to hold both the desire to be seen and the part of you that still feels unsafe, without forcing either one away.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley shares a deeply personal inner child healing ritual using poppet magic in devotion to Hekate.

Through a carefully designed, trauma-informed ritual, Ashley and her friend explore how to meet younger parts of themselves with safety, compassion, and intention. By creating and working with poppets, they engage in a symbolic practice that allows for connection without overwhelm.

In this episode:

• Inner child healing through ritual and symbolism
• How poppet magic can support emotional and trauma healing
• Creating a safe, embodied ritual practice
• Working with Hekate in healing and transformation
• Integrating personal experiences through dream work

This is an honest reflection on what it means to meet yourself with care, move at the pace of your nervous system, and build a healing practice that feels safe and supportive.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley explores the Deipnon and Noumenia as key points in the lunar cycle, sharing practical ways to cleanse, release, and set intentions in devotion to Hekate.

If you’re looking for a grounded, modern approach to lunar rituals, this episode walks through simple Deipnon cleansing practices and Noumenia intention setting to help you close one cycle and begin the next with clarity.

In this episode:

• What the Deipnon and Noumenia are in Hekatean and Hellenic practice
• How to perform a simple Deipnon cleansing ritual
• Ways to honor Hekate in a modern, accessible way
• Noumenia intention setting and planting seeds for the next cycle
• How to adapt traditional practices to your own path

This is an invitation to release what no longer serves you and step into the next lunar cycle with intention and purpose.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley shares her experience with a shadow work ritual from The Way of Hekate, exploring dream work, inner child healing, and deepening her connection with the goddess Hekate.

Through a guided “Dream of Descent” ritual, Ashley reflects on what it means to meet your shadow self, how the body and subconscious communicate through imagery, and how spiritual practice can lead to unexpected moments of clarity and integration.

In this episode:

• A personal shadow work ritual experience
• Dream work and connecting with the shadow self
• Inner child healing and self integration
• Working with Hekate in ritual practice
• How intention and tools (like herbs and crystals) shape outcomes

This is an honest reflection on what it feels like to step into deeper shadow work and trust what arises.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley shares her personal experience with Hekate, including the signs that led her to answer the call of the goddess and step more fully into her spiritual path.

If you’ve ever felt drawn to Hekate or wondered if a deity is reaching out to you, this episode explores what that can look like, from subtle signs to undeniable experiences.

Ashley reflects on her journey as a practicing witch, navigating imposter syndrome, fear, and self doubt, and what it means to build a relationship with Hekate and trust your intuition.

In this episode:

• What it feels like to connect with a deity
• Imposter syndrome in witchcraft and spirituality
• Trusting your intuition and spiritual experiences
• Answering your call to magic and self acceptance

This is an invitation to stop ignoring what’s been calling you and begin listening more deeply.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley explores betrayal trauma, childhood wounds, and how early experiences can shape self-hatred and self-worth.

Through a powerful Brainspotting therapy session, Ashley shares how the body stores trauma and how healing doesn’t always follow the path we expect. What begins as an exploration of betrayal in adult relationships reveals deeper layers rooted in childhood and inner child wounds.

In this episode:

• What betrayal trauma is and how it shows up
• How childhood experiences shape self-worth and self-hatred
• How the body stores trauma and emotional memory
• An inside look at Brainspotting therapy
• Why healing is not linear or predictable

This is a deeply personal reflection on how trauma lives in the body and what it means to meet yourself with compassion as those layers unfold.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley explores what it feels like to believe you’re failing in your spiritual practice, and the quiet pressure to “do it right.”

If you’ve ever felt inconsistent, disconnected, or like you’re not doing enough, this episode reflects on where those beliefs come from and how easily spirituality can shift from relationship into performance.

Ashley shares her personal experience navigating expectations, inconsistency, and the influence of spiritual teachings and social media, and what it looks like to begin letting go of perfection.

In this episode:

• Feeling like you’re failing spiritually
• The pressure to be consistent in your practice
• How spirituality can become performance
• Letting go of perfection and expectations
• Rebuilding an honest relationship with your path

This is an invitation to meet your spirituality with curiosity instead of pressure, and to explore what devotion looks like when it’s rooted in relationship rather than perfection.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley shares her experience with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and explores how seasonal changes can impact mood, energy, and mental health.

If you’ve ever struggled during the fall and winter months, this episode unpacks what SAD can feel like from the inside, along with the science behind it, including how light exposure, circadian rhythms, serotonin, and melatonin play a role.

Ashley reflects on her personal journey with seasonal depression, while also talking through different ways of navigating it, including light therapy, medication, therapy, and lifestyle support.

In this episode:

• What Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) is
• Common symptoms of seasonal depression
• Why winter can affect mood and energy levels
• The role of light, hormones, and the nervous system
• Support options and ways to cope

This is a reminder that struggling during certain seasons doesn’t mean you’re failing, it means your body is responding to real biological and environmental changes.

In this episode of Salt & Sovereignty, Ashley explores her experience with silence as a form of self care, reflection, and emotional healing.

If you’ve ever avoided silence or felt uncomfortable being alone with your thoughts, this episode dives into what can surface when everything gets quiet. Ashley reflects on her journey with meditation and stillness, and how sitting in silence began to reveal deeper emotions, patterns, and parts of herself she hadn’t fully faced.

In this episode:

• Why silence can feel uncomfortable or overwhelming
• What comes up when you stop distracting yourself
• Emotional processing through stillness
• The connection between silence and shadow work
• Learning to sit with yourself without needing to fix anything

This is not about doing silence perfectly, but about allowing yourself to be present with whatever comes up.