Emotional Release · “Die to Be Reborn”
Charge It With Emotion
Make the felt emotion — not the words, tools, or ingredients — the fuel of a working: deliberately summon the real feeling tied to the aim, let it build to a genuine peak, pour it into the act, and then release it cleanly.
Charge it with emotion: Get honest about the real feeling under your aim. Summon it deliberately and let it build to a genuine peak. At the peak, pour that feeling into the act — candle, petition, gesture — holding the goal in mind. Then release it completely and ground. The feeling is the fuel, not the props. Read honestly: emotion tags the intention and gives felt power, the release discharges it — your state changes, not the world directly. Never raise an emotion you can’t put down.
What it is
Where other teachers speak of “raising energy” through chanting or muscle-tensing, Dorothy Morrison is blunt about what actually drives a working: emotion.
In her results-oriented, full-spectrum approach — most frankly in Utterly Wicked — a working is “directed and powered by the emotional state of the practitioner.” The candle, the herb, the words are aids; the engine is the feeling you put into them.
The practice is therefore to deliberately summon the genuine emotion that matches your aim — fierce love, hot anger, aching want, joyful certainty — let it rise to a real peak, pour that feeling into the act, and then let it go.
Read honestly, this is an emotional-engagement and discharge ritual: you stop performing a working coolly and instead make it a deliberate, fully-felt emotional event, which is precisely what makes an intention stick — and then you release the charge so it doesn’t curdle into rumination.
The Method
A representative Morrison-style emotional charging:
- Get honest about the feeling under the aim. What do you actually feel about this goal — longing, fear, fury, devotion? (Pair this with.) Name the real emotion, not the polite one.
- Summon it deliberately. Don’t wait to feel it — call it up. Recall the situation vividly, dwell on what’s at stake, use memory, music, or imagery until the emotion is genuinely present and rising in the body (The Inner Creates the Outer).
- Let it build to a real peak. Allow the feeling to grow strong and full — not faked, not white-knuckled, but actually felt. This felt intensity, focused on the goal, is the “charge.”
- Pour it into the act. At the peak, direct the emotion into the working — the candle, the written petition, the gesture, the spoken word — holding the desired outcome in mind as you discharge the feeling into it (The Inner Creates the Outer).
- Release it completely. Let the emotion go with the act — exhale, drop the shoulders, send it off. Do not keep cycling the feeling afterwards; the working is the container you hand it to (The Inner Creates the Outer).
- Ground and re-regulate. Come back to ordinary calm — breathe, touch something solid, get a glass of water — especially after rousing heavy emotion. Then act in the world toward the aim. (Sourcing note: a faithful summary of Morrison’s core principle that a working is powered by the practitioner’s emotional state, with deliberate raising and release. Specific spells in Utterly Wicked are hers; the raise-pour-release sequence above is representative.)
Source & Lineage
Dorothy Morrison (b. 1955), an elder of the Georgian tradition of Wicca and a practitioner since the early 1970s, is unusually direct about the role of raw feeling in magic.
Utterly Wicked (2007) addresses baneful work — hexes and curses — frankly, and in doing so it foregrounds the uncomfortable truth that strong, genuine emotion is the active fuel of a working and that the practitioner must own that emotion.
The same emotion-first pragmatism runs through her teaching text The Craft (2001). → originator node.
The Traditions' versions
The move — deliberately rouse a strong genuine emotion and use its energy — recurs across traditions; Morrison’s version is distinctive for naming emotion (rather than abstract “energy”) as the explicit fuel and for being honest about the full spectrum, including anger:
- Feeling is the force (Neville-lineage) — generating the feeling of the wish fulfilled as the operative power.,
- RavenWolf / Cunningham raising “energy” — the same charge framed as bodily arousal via chant or muscle-tensing rather than named emotion.,
- Feeling the feeling fully (Jayem) / welcoming (Sedona) — letting an emotion be completely felt and then released.,
- Reich — letting emotion move — the somatic discharge of held feeling.
- Besht — joyful fervent prayer — devotion powered by deliberately kindled emotional fervour.
Common refinements
Faking the feeling. A performed, hollow emotion does nothing; the charge must be genuine.
- Raising what you can’t put down. Whipping up rage or grief without the release step leaves you flooded and worse off — the discharge is not optional.
- Cycling the emotion afterwards. Re-stoking the feeling for days reintroduces rumination; charge, release, ground, move on (The Inner Creates the Outer).
- Mistaking the tools for the fuel. The candle and words are containers; the feeling is the engine. Don’t fuss the props and skip the feeling.
- Skipping the grounding. Always re-regulate after heavy emotional work, especially baneful work.