As we move into 2025, many of us feel exhausted from rushing around to get everything ‘perfect’, making festivities as magical as possible. So much so, in fact, that we ‘sensitive’ ones may enter the fresh new year feeling burnt out instead of rejuvenated and excited for magical possibilities. Adding extra pressure, January has become a month of bombardment with very masculinised messages – push, force, hustle – telling us we should be driving goals and setting big resolutions. For so many sensitive, magical women this can bring a sense of dread, exhaustion and failure if we’ve not learnt how to heal underlying deeper causes of burn-out.
When we are here, and our bodies feel exhausted, we can feel so disconnected from the more feminine way of visioning our heart’s desires and what we long to manifest. We innocently feel compelled to push ourselves further, trying to create ‘more’ – running ourselves into the ground. If this is you, I feel your heart, because this has been me too.
The magical truth of burn-out
I have found that this patterning of push, force and hustle – more, more more – is especially compelling for sensitive women who have spent a lifetime trying to fit themselves into a mundane world they don’t fit into. My point of view is these are the magical women of the world, who were actually born to heal themselves and become healers for others.
Maybe there’s a mysterious draw to reiki or energy healing. Perhaps you’re drawn to herbs or homeopathy. Maybe you’re psychic, or drawn to moon magic. These are the women who tend to be magical healers – and these women, in particular, experience burn-out in our culture more than most.
Being a ‘magical one’ can show up as:
● Burning out and feeling exhausted – you are fed up of pushing hard and fast.
● Struggling with stress, anxiety or overwhelm, and perhaps panic attacks – you want to go back to bed and avoid life.
● Feeling depressed about living a dull, mundane and grey day-to-day.
● Suffering from mysterious symptoms that mainstream medicine can’t seem to explain – like chronic fatigue syndrome, ME, auto-immune disorders, IBS, or womb symptoms like endometriosis.
● Sensitivity – you may have needed to numb yourself to ‘get through’ festivities with all the noise, lights, and being surrounded by other people’s energies.
● Being highly empathic, with a longing to help others – often at your expense, creating resentment.
● Feeling lost, like there’s a deeper, more magical purpose that you’re here for – to be created from flow, rather than hustle.
If this is you, know that this is normal for all ‘magical’ women. Burn-out, and the symptoms above, can actually all be signs of being what I call a Secret Witch – a magical woman who is hiding her feminine, soft power and authentic, magical, full expression (often for fear of being burned at the stake for being herself).
If this is coming to a head this New Year, it’s a sign that, instead of setting hard, fast goals, you’re being called inwards to connect to your body and hear the signals it is sending via exhaustion.
The truth is that burn-out is a sign of being called to reclaim our inner witch (who is a symbol of feminine magic and power) and learn to harness our power to self-heal with our own inner apothecary of archetypal remedies. In other words, burn-out is an initiation into unsuppressing our hidden feminine magic and power to heal ourselves, reclaim our energy and live more unapologetically magical lives.
Burn-out and exhaustion is our body’s way of really calling us to listen to the wisdom of our sensations. It’s a call to learn to embrace self-healing via illumination of deeper underlying patterns that cause burn-out.
Archetypal remedies for burn-out
There are four main deeper energetic patterns underlying burn-out – and four archetypal remedies that can help us heal those – including:
- Shaming our sensitivity – the inner ‘Rosa’ archetypal remedy helps us reclaim our sensitivity.
- People-pleasing and trying to tame our wildness – the inner ‘She-Wolf’ archetypal remedy helps us reclaim our authenticity.
- Fear of not being perfect enough, or as if we might ‘fail’ – the inner ‘Gold’ archetypal remedy helps us reclaim our power.
- Fear of being our authentic, magical selves – the inner ‘Luna’ archetypal remedy helps us reclaim our magic.
These archetypal remedies hold mirrors for us to see energetic patterns we hold, acting as a lens for self-discovery. For example, the rose is a sensitive flower, the wolf is wild, gold is a symbol of power, and the moon is a symbol of shining our authentic, magical selves brightly. As we begin to illuminate our patterns, working with remedies as mirrors, we can reclaim lost aspects of ourselves that we have shamed – and that have likely contributed to burn-out. You may have been shaming your sensitivity, people-pleasing and masking your true self for a lifetime, fearing your feminine power and the possibility of failure, and doubting your magic. These deep wounds can leave us exhausted.
These are the wounds that have us saying ‘yes’ when we mean ‘no’, or pushing past our body’s signals to do ‘one more thing’, rather than meeting our needs. These are the wounds that have us hustling, pushing and forcing ourselves to fit into society’s expectations – the wounds that have us shame our authentic expression. It’s all a suppression of our true selves, and it takes so much energy to do.
Let burn-out and exhaustion be your wake-up calls this new year. They are initiations into our self- healing power, and a call towards our inner healer. Mysterious illnesses can be how our inner medicine woman calls us. It’s often the case that more mainstream health approaches haven’t worked, and you’re being called to a more magical way of healing.
I learnt this, age 10, when I had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and was unable to walk. I missed an entire year of school, and my mum took me to all the medicine women because the mainstream world simply saw me as ‘unhealable’. This was my initiation into learning to magically self-heal and trust feminine magic in a world where that felt taboo.
I know it can seem bold or even ‘weird’ to claim that burn-out is a calling to magic. I know it seems crazy – the inner witch will fear that – and even scary for the parts of us frightened to own our power. There are costs to owning our magic from the depths of our darkness. But the costs of not answering that call are staying burnt out, suppressing ourselves and living unfulfilling lives.
If you’re exhausted this season, the medicine woman’s invitation to you – instead of pushing and
forcing resolutions – is to begin to lovingly work with the deeper energetic patterns available to you
for your own self-healing.
Self-reflections
- Where do you relate to patterns illuminated around burn-out?
- Where have you been shaming your sensitivity, people-pleasing, fearing failure and fearing being your authentic self?
- Are these deeper patterns that you want to self-heal, so you can embrace a life full of energy and magic?
If the answer to the final question is ‘yes’ (please honour your ‘no’, as this is a powerful ritual), I invite you, under the light of the next full moon, to speak out a release, instead of setting more goals:
‘In this full moon, I release the need to (list one pattern you want to liberate) and embrace my inner witch and her apothecary for self-healing’
Let’s see what’s created from there. Go gently – this is real magical healing we are working with.
If you enjoyed this article you may also enjoy:
The Energy Alignment Method: Five Steps to Finding Flow. 
