Season of the Witch: A Psychiatrist's Case for Magic - Hardcover

Vora MD, Ellen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593977580 ISBN 13: 9780593977583

Publisher: The Dial Press, 2026

Synopsis

A provocative call for women to reclaim the intuition, mystery, and transcendence that modern life has trained us to dismiss—from the author of The Anatomy of Anxiety

“Season of the Witch is a bridge between the scientific and the mystical, leading us to embrace the magic that surrounds us. This book will start a movement.”—Laura Lynne Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Signs

Witch: /wiCH/ noun: Any woman who has reclaimed the intuitive, mystical, and embodied ways of knowing that our culture tries to shame and suppress

We are caught in a crisis of disconnection. The cost of this shows up everywhere: in our bodies, which cry out with digestive issues and chronic conditions; in our relationships, where we’ve lost the communities that once held us; and in our day-to-day, where we feel rudderless, anxious, and incapable of navigating our lives without outsourced advice.

For years, Yale and Columbia-trained psychiatrist Ellen Vora has taken a holistic approach to helping her patients navigate these challenges. But when she herself experienced a shattering loss, she realized that true healing would require what her training had taught her to dismiss.

According to Vora, every woman possesses a natural connection to magic, but our culture teaches us to disavow it. From a young age, we understand the assignment—we learn to perform our rational, linear selves and quietly suppress our mystical side. In Season of the Witch, Vora names these forces and reveals the five practices that can help us reclaim the full spectrum of our intelligence: embodiment, presence, valuing the yin, being open to mystery, and serving the collective.

By engaging with these practices, we become witches: women who walk through the world with a quiet conviction, anchored in our own knowing, trusting that we are whole unto ourselves—women fully alive to mystery. This is what true witchiness looks like: not an escape from reality, but a deeper way of being in it.

About this title

About the Author

Ellen Vora, MD, is a holistic psychiatrist, acupuncturist, and yoga teacher, and the author of The Anatomy of Anxiety. She takes a functional medicine approach to mental health—considering the whole person and addressing imbalance at the root. Dr. Vora received her BA from Yale University and her medical degree from Columbia University, and she is board-certified in psychiatry and integrative holistic medicine. She lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

The Medicine of Magic

Your first act of rebellion is to see clearly. —Mya Zin, If You Can’t Break the Wall, Become the Grass That Grows Through Its Cracks

I’ve observed that patients who view the world as random, material, and devoid of divinity tend to slip more easily into demoralization and depression, especially when facing difficult circumstances like loneliness, moral injury, or loss. Those with a spiritual orientation, on the other hand, seem to be protected. This protective effect particularly shines in the face of challenge.

Dr. Lisa Miller, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, has pioneered groundbreaking studies on the relationship between spirituality and mental health. Her research reveals that individuals with a strong sense of spirituality—defined not as religious doctrine but as a personal connection to something greater than themselves—are 90 percent less likely to experience major depression compared to those who don’t consider spirituality important.

This kind of spirituality—sometimes called secular spirituality—doesn’t require adherence to any religion or dogma. It’s simply an openness to mystery, a sense that the universe holds meaning. Research consistently shows that this orientation correlates with increased happiness and lower rates of depression and suicide. What’s most fascinating is that this isn’t just psychological but also biological. Miller’s neuroimaging studies show that individuals with strong spiritual or religious commitment have measurably thicker cortical regions in areas associated with emotional regulation and resilience.

But this isn’t something you can force. You can’t fake your way into genuine belief, and I wouldn’t ask you to try. What I will invite you to consider is this: If you view spirituality with skepticism, is that skepticism truly yours, or have you internalized a cultural skepticism? Do you have an openness to mystery that’s buried beneath layers of social conditioning? Many of us carry a latent receptivity to magic that we’ve learned to suppress. And in suppressing it, we may be missing out on what spiritual openness has to offer. That was certainly my experience.

As the steward of many people’s mental health, I know the benefits and limitations of medication and therapy. I’ve come to appreciate that, no matter how well medicated and therapized we are, at some point we all must grapple with existence itself: What is happening here? Is the fabric of the universe purposeful or random, benevolent or cruel? Where we land on those questions has an outsized impact on daily mental health. In our quiet moments, do we trust that everything will be okay in the end? As the nineteenth-century thinker Frederic W. H. Myers recognized, the most important question we can ask may be: “Is the universe friendly?” Einstein grappled with this same fundamental question and arrived at his own conclusion: “Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.”

If we believe this world is random, that potential catastrophe lurks around every corner, how can we not live in a state of vigilance? This can foster anxiety, or even an overwhelming fear of death. A purely materialist outlook leaves little room for meaning in the unfoldings of our lives. Anytime something seemingly magical does occur, we force ourselves to sober up and explain it away. And grief can feel untenable when we believe that the end is the end, and that loss is senseless. An openness to magic holds us when life feels heavy, anchoring us to a more hopeful and trusting narrative. When we might otherwise despair, magic helps us find meaning in our challenges.

There are other ways a connection to magic shapes my practice, even if I don’t typically speak openly about them. Though I grew up in the suburbs of New York City rolling my eyes at country songs about Jesus, I now begin every patient session and speaking engagement with a silent prayer, asking to be a conduit for source (universal intelligence) to work through me in service of everyone’s highest good. Before writing, I light a candle and pray. These practices have been transformative. My writing pours forth more easily, I show up with more honesty in front of audiences, and insights arise with patients that feel beyond my training or intellect. I even weave energy work into clinical sessions alongside traditional dialogue. The more I practice this way, the better my work flows.

And this isn’t just about my work—it’s about allowing my witchiness to pervade all of me. No more walling off my witchy self from my doctor self, pretending I don’t pray to ancestors for wisdom. No more deflecting my connection to magic with self-deprecating jokes about crystals or astrology. No more fearing loss of credibility as punishment for speaking from my intuitive knowing. This book is, in essence, a coming out of the closet. These fractured parts can finally become one integrated whole.

But perhaps most importantly, I’ve learned that it’s not enough for me to believe in magic. What I ultimately want is to empower my patients and readers to discover and trust their own connection to the mystery—to become their own witches. I have seen that when they do, they walk through the world with a quiet conviction that wasn’t there before. They feel less easily shaken by life’s inevitable challenges, more anchored in their own knowing than swayed by external pressures—especially those that don’t have their best interests in mind. They develop the qualities that Brené Brown captures in her phrase “strong back, soft front, wild heart”—they move through the world resilient and empathetic, grounded yet open to change, fierce. Most importantly, they begin to trust that they are whole unto themselves.

The Five Practices of a Modern Witch

Women today are caught in a crisis of disconnection—from themselves, from one another, and from the deeper currents of meaning that could sustain them. We’ve absorbed a cultural script, performing a sanitized version of ourselves that prioritizes linear thinking while betraying our intuitive nature. The cost of this self-betrayal shows up everywhere: in our bodies, which cry out with digestive issues, painful periods, and autoimmune conditions as we force our cyclical feminine rhythms into rigid masculine structures; in our relationships, where we’ve lost the circles of sisterhood that once held us; and in our daily experience, where we feel rudderless and anxious. We outsource countless intimate decisions because we’ve learned to distrust our own inner knowing.

When loss inevitably comes, we’re left defenseless. We’re forced to navigate grief in a culture that offers little ritual or preparation for this underworld journey—a culture that cuts us off from an ongoing relationship with our loved ones that could transform our devastation.

The deeper wound is that we’ve internalized centuries of conditioning that tells us the witchy way of knowing—intuitive, holistic, embodied, ineffable—is inferior. Some of us are not even aware that there’s a problem. We have absorbed society’s value system so completely that we join the ranks who see “woo-woo” as a dirty word. Our feminine intelligence is so thoroughly suppressed, and we are proud to be the “right” way: rational and skeptical.

In our desperation to be taken seriously in a world that values only one narrow slice of intelligence, we’ve lost touch with our witchiness.

This conditioning stems from the belief that rationality is superior to intuition—that logical, linear thinking (characteristic of the left hemisphere of the brain) is intelligent, while intuitive knowing (more characteristic of the right hemisphere) is unreliable and untrustworthy. When logic became king, it shaped our culture from the inside out—privileging the material over the mysterious, the head over the heart.

To reclaim magic, we need strategies to push back against these biases. Through years of careful attention, I’ve developed five practices that serve as antidotes to our culture’s most limiting patterns. These practices took shape first through my work as a psychiatrist, as I noticed strikingly similar patterns in how women described feeling stuck and disconnected despite vastly different circumstances; then through my training across diverse healing modalities, from Chinese medicine and acupuncture to yoga. They crystallized through my own journey of chafing against cultural forces that felt hostile to my nature. But perhaps most importantly, they arose from the very orientation this book advocates: one of intuition and of listening for what wants to emerge. Each of these five practices counters a cultural bias that pulls us away from magic.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Dial Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593977580
• ISBN 13: 9780593977583
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 368