Hygieia — The Rebrand and The Witch Wound | ST S2 Ep.8

Spontaneous Transmission: The Archetype  of Hygieia for Cleansing The Temple of Soul and Psyche | Pluto Retrograde | Where Psychology Meets Sacred 

Letting go of a beloved name can feel like losing a home and sometimes it’s the only way to finally live inside the truth. Today I’m recording in real time with snow falling outside and Pluto stationing retrograde in Aquarius overhead, a transit tied to platforms, community, and the shadow work of how we show up in public. What follows is a vulnerable rebrand reckoning: why I’m releasing “coven” from the subtitle, what I’m grieving, and why authenticity sometimes means doing less until the foundation is real.

From there, I introduce Hygieia, the goddess of hygiene, prevention, and maintenance. We expand “hygiene” beyond showers and toothbrushes into spiritual hygiene and mental hygiene: clearing what you pick up from clients, conversations, the news, and social media, and learning to spot which thoughts are actually yours. This is nervous-system-friendly, sustainable work that supports somatic healing and helps you stop burning out from carrying what was never meant to be carried.

I also name the witch wound and priestess wound: the embodied fear of being too visible, too integrated, too hard to categorize when you’re both a therapist and a priestess in the same breath. We talk Human Design (the 3-5 profile, trial-and-error wisdom, and projection fields), and why I’m moving from Patreon to Substack to prioritize long-form, evergreen spiritual psychoeducation that you can actually sit with. We close with a simple guided cleansing practice you can return to anytime.

If this kind of psychology plus the sacred feels like home, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review. Then come find me on Substack!

Transcript

Welcome And A Live Transmission

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to Priestess Initiations, the Goddess Coven. I'm Casey Dunn, educator, priestess, and professional somatic therapist. In April 2025, I went through a Priestess Initiation of Old and launched the Priestess Initiations podcast six months later. Whatever brought you here today, I invite you to drop into the spiral with me. Let's begin. Welcome back to Priestess Initiations. I'm Casey, and today's episode is a spontaneous transmission, which means there's no weekly transits, just me following what wants to come through. It also means, as usual with these spontaneous transmissions, that this episode has been arriving in real time. Last night and actually through this morning. It's snowing in Colorado today, and I found some inspiration in that.

Pluto Retrograde And The Turn Inward

SPEAKER_01 1:08

And I just want to name about astrology for a moment. That astrology lives in this podcast the way it lives in my life. That's how I want it to live in this podcast. And that's woven into the process. Present when it's relevant, and not delivered as a report. And today it's relevant. And so this episode is dropping on the day that Pluto stations retrograde in Aquarius, the sign of platforms, communities, and how we show up collectively. Pluto retrograde, and remember Pluto is Hades, but Pluto retrograde is an invitation to turn inward, right? To view our shadow, to really look. Pluto's already shadow work. Retrograde always means turning inward. And so this is asking us to review, to cleanse before the next forward movement. The cosmos is doing publicly what I'm doing personally today. And so what wants to come through today is something I've been studying with for a while. And I didn't get a lot of clarity, right? If you remember over the last few weeks, we just started getting clarity. So I just started getting some clarity of this over the last few weeks. And it's something that's been quietly reshaping itself behind the scenes, and something I want to talk about directly.

Grief And Letting Go Of Coven

SPEAKER_01 2:45

And so you might have noticed that the subtitle changed of the show. And now the subtitle is shifting as I shift. And so as you started this episode, you might have noticed that the intro music is still the same. That's my dad's work, and it's staying until he and I have time to rework it together, which will happen. But for now, um, you're getting the same gorgeous music, new official subtitle. And before I explain any of my reasoning, I want to just name that there's grief in this. Real grief. Letting go of the word coven, even just in a subtitle, even when it's the right thing, that means something. And the coven was a vision that I held with a lot of love. It still lives in me, it doesn't disappear because it's leaving the name. But grief is allowed to exist alongside growth. And I think it would be too dishonest and inauthentic to skip past it to get to the explanation.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

So I'm gonna sit here in this grief with you for a moment first.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

In the grief, I notice fear, fear of perception, fear of the potential of losing followers. And also losing followers matters less to me than showing up as my whole self. Letting go of the word coven and this idea of the goddess coven doesn't change who I am. It doesn't change who listens to this podcast, it doesn't change my witchiness. I'm not hiding, I'm not shying away from the word witch. You are gonna hear me talk about the witch wound in this episode, I'm sure, and in many others to come. But I'm in a place where I need to talk about where I actually am in life. And that leads to why I can't build community right now. And the honesty of that. But that's the line three doing what the line three does. Learning through lived experience, through contact, through sometimes running into the wall and having to pause to reckon with what just happened. Right. And I do still want to build community eventually. That is still a goal for me. I believe in it. But I want to do it when I have the foundation underneath me to actually tend it, not just name it and hope I have the capacity to hold it. Authenticity is one of my words for the year. And authenticity sometimes means admitting you're not ready for something yet. It means doing less instead of more. It means cleaning away what isn't working so that what is true has room to breathe. And my other word of the year is nourishment. And I wasn't being nourished by the stretch of trying to hold more than I could hold. Naming that as part of the cleansing.

Meet Hygiea And Spiritual Hygiene

SPEAKER_01 7:26

And so this episode, I want to talk about a goddess I haven't mentioned before. Her name is Hygia. And I've been feeling pulled toward Hygiea over the last few weeks more strongly than I have in a while. More clearly, I think I've had moments in my life when I've been pulled toward Hygia, but I haven't known that that's what it was. And this last few weeks, it's been really clear to me that she is calling. So if you don't know her, she's the daughter of the god of medicine. But where her father heals after the illness has already taken, hygia comes before. Hygiene's domain is prevention, it's maintenance, it's tending the vessel so the wound doesn't have to deepen before you pay attention to it. Her name is literally the root of the word hygiene. And I've been sitting with that, with what hygiene actually means beyond the physical, because you know, we've been taught to think of hygiene as bodily, as brushing your teeth and showering regularly, as the maintenance of the physical container. And that's true, but hygiene as medicine is so much broader than that. She asks us to think about what spiritual hygiene looks like? What does it mean to actually clear what you've picked up that isn't yours to carry? Maybe it was in a session with a client, a difficult conversation, maybe something stuck to you when you were scrolling through the news or social media. Something that kind of you can picture it like dirt getting on you, in a day that took more than it gave. And so Heidi is asking: what does it mean to tend your energetic body with the same consistency and care that you tend your physical one? Not as a dramatic ritual of purification. Yes, you can sage and smudge your whole house. Um, don't use white sage, it's protected. But you can smudge your whole house if you want. That's a dramatic purification ritual worth doing on occasion. But Hai J is asking us, what does spiritual hygiene look like as a daily ordinary practice? As devotion in the small moments. She also asks us, what does mental hygiene look like? Noticing which thoughts are actually yours and which ones you absorbed from someone else. In psychology, um, we call this like introjection when you absorb someone else's stuff. You can have an introjection of them in your mind. It's kind of like if you have a voice that isn't yours, it belongs to your very judgmental aunt, for instance. That voice isn't yours. And so mental hygiene means noticing that, naming it, calling that voice out as not mine, releasing the narratives that you've been carrying that were never yours to carry. And keeping your inner landscape clean enough that you can actually hear yourself, your own instincts, your own knowing, your own know. This work is about sustainability, right? And sustainability is what makes it possible to do this work, any of this work. And right now, this work is necessary to even just surviving. But how do we do that long term without burning out or losing the thread of yourself in the doing of it? Hygie is not glamorous, she doesn't arrive in a flash of lightning. She's the one who shows up every morning and tends the thing. She's the practice of maintenance as devotion. And Hygia lives in my chart at 4 degrees Sagittarius in the 11th house. And she's conjunct Kali at the exact same degree. I love that. It's so cool. So Hygia and Kali side by side in the house of public work and collective mission. And this is pretty close to my north node. My north node's technically in the 10th house. Um, but four degree Sagittarius is pretty close still. So I consider Hygia and Kali a few of my north node goddesses. Kali clears what needs to go. Fiercely, completely, without sentimentality. She is the goddess of cord cutting. She's not officially, but the way I work with her, um, that's often what it feels like. It has a similar feeling of that. And it's to free you. Kali is freedom. And Hygia, Hygia tends what remains. She moves into that cleared space and asks, okay, now how do we keep this clean? How do we maintain this? How do we make sure the tending is built into the structure so that we don't end up back here again? And Kali, conjunct hygia, at that same degree, she cuts the chains that are invisible but felt. The ones you didn't even recognize you were wearing mentally. But when they were gone, you realized how much you'd been holding them physically. This feels exactly like where I am. Kali did her work. She cut a lot away over the last few weeks. And hygiene is arriving now. And nourishment, my one of my words of the year, is a hygiene word. What actually feeds you? What actually sustains you? Not what performs wellness, not what it looks like self-care from the outside, but what genuinely replenishes the thing that does the work. That's the question I'm living inside right now. And

Witch Wound And Integrated Work

SPEAKER_01 14:30

this rebrand is part of the answer. And there's something else I want to name, and it's a little more vulnerable than the rest of this. Um, but I caught myself at times not fully showing up, not fully saying what I think, softening edges that didn't need to be softened. And when I got honest with myself about why, it was fear. Fear of what happens when you are fully a therapist and fully a priestess in the same breath in public without compartmentalizing one to protect the other. Fear of being seen too clearly, fear of the professional consequences of being a witch. Fear of what gets projected onto you when you don't fit neatly into a category. And that fear has a name. It's the witch wound, it's the priestess wound, it's the cellular memory of what happened when women like us were too visible, too outspoken, too uncontainable. And it lives in the body long after the specific threat has passed. It shapes the decisions we make, what we say, what we hold back, what names we give to our work, what rooms we let ourselves fully inhabit, where we let ourselves take up space. And there's an intergenerational component to the witch wound, too, an ancestral trauma component. So part of this rebrand is me making a decision to stop letting that wound be in charge. And it's in layers because I feel like I've made this decision a hundred times already. And yet each time, each time I make it and I step in, I realize there's another layer. But I want my full clinical self to exist here. And I want my full spiritual self to exist here. Not as separate tracks that politely coexist in different little sections of my episode, but as one integrated thing, because that's actually who I am. And hiding parts of myself to stay safe has a cost. That cost is burnout, and I'm done paying it.

Human Design 3-5 Projections

SPEAKER_01 17:10

And earlier I mentioned that I'm a three-five in human design. So in human design, I'm a three-five manifesting generator, and I want to talk about what that means for a minute, not just for me, but because if you're a three-five or if someone, you know, close to you in your life is a three-five, this might actually land somewhere useful. Or if you have either of these lines. So in human design, you have two lines, and it's possible you might have a three or a five, but not be a three-five. So I'll talk about each line individually. But the three line learns through trial and error, through doing, trying, sometimes breaking, and extracting the wisdom from what happened. It's not a flaw. It's the entire design. The three line is meant to be the one who has lived it, who has the embodied knowledge that comes only from contact with reality, not from theorizing about it from a distance. So what you've witnessed since this podcast launched is exactly that. It started fully in the spiritual space. I was afraid to name my therapist identity here, afraid of what it would cost to bring the clinical and the sacred into the same room out loud. And then I started naming it, showing up more fully without really changing the container to match. And now I'm completing the cycle. The name and the whole container, which I'll talk about in a minute, is finally catching up to what and who I have actually been all along. That's the three-line. That's the teaching. You can't theorize your way into that kind of knowing. You have to live it first. And sometimes that sucks. And the three-five also carries what's called a projection field, and that's about the five line. And so people will have strong feelings about you: intense positive feelings, intense negative feelings that often have less to do with you than what you represent to them. And so the line five is called the heretic. It's the stranger on the hill, the one who people project their hopes and fears onto. And learning to hold that, to have boundaries with that, to not collapse under the weight of being someone's projection, and also not perform for it, is some of the central work of this profile. That's true for any 3-5 out there or anyone with a five line. And um there are some other changes coming, which I'll talk about in a second. But before I move on, I'm just noticing the snow

Snow Poem And Rest As Truth

SPEAKER_01 20:18

again right now as I'm recording this. And I wasn't sure if I was gonna share this, but this morning I woke up and I do have a mini coven. It's for somatic therapist friends of mine. And we went to grad school together and we're all a little witchy in very different ways. And I was watching the snow this morning and I just wanted to write a poem for them. And so I did. And it doesn't have a title because the title was a snowflake emoji, but I um posted it on Substack for y'all just now. I shouldn't be multitasking, um, but um, I'll read it for you. It says snow falls in cozy blankets upon our laps, where tea in hand we breathe steam, releasing like a kettle who's finally off the stovetop, old patterns dissolve. A reason to tend our inner nest, nature's cleansing of overgrown self-extension, snowfalls. In a final moment of turning inward. A reason to rest is always within our truth, no matter the season. Nourishment dawns on the horizon, unseen through the layers of snow. Audible in the silence.

Leaving Patreon For Substack

SPEAKER_01 22:06

And so I just mentioned it, but early on in this podcast, um, for those of you who were here from the beginning, I talked about why I'm not on social media. There's the dopamine loop, the endless scroll, the way that short form video content that's reels, aka reels, um, is engineered to be addictive rather than nourishing. Even if it's talking about nourishment. And so Patreon, I'm moving off Patreon onto Substack. And at the beginning of last week, Patreon let me know that they recently launched a feature called Quips. And when I encountered it, I felt the same energy I feel when I think about reels and shorts. That same pull towards something that moves fast and hooks rather than something that goes deep and lands. And Patreons trying to do it differently. They're trying to support their creators, and I respect that. I respect them trying to support independent creators. They've built something real, and I have real gratitude for the time I spent there. But it's not where I'm going. For long-form thought, for essays that take their time, for content that you sit with rather than scroll past. And so Patreon is moving to Substack. My Patreon was unpublished last week, meaning new people weren't able to find it. And some of you might have noticed that. I launched a few weeks ago, but you'll notice older posts in there, which are from me importing my old therapist blog. And so I want to name what Priestess Initiations actually is at this point. I'm getting off track again. But Priestess Initiations is more than a podcast. So what was the Goddess Coven LLC is now doing business as, and I do have a DBA, Priestess Initiations. I was working on this last week. And Priestess Initiations is my spiritual psychoeducation platform. And I'm, I don't know if that's already a term or not, but it's what feels the most authentic to me: spiritual psychoeducation. It's not a therapy practice that lives separately. And it's not a religious organization. And that's part of the name change, is there was some confusion in that. Priestess Initiations is a platform where psychology and the sacred get to exist together without apologizing for either. That's what this has always been trying to be. Now it has a name that says so. And so what's on Substack now is a beginning, a foundation. Like I mentioned, articles from my old therapy blog, which is a different tone than what you might be used to from this podcast. It's a little more clinical. Some of those articles are earlier in my voice. I think they even go back to 2024, maybe 2023. Um, but they're still completely me. And those articles are free to anyone who finds their way there. They're psychoeducational, feminist, archetypal, the kind of content that exists because I believe people deserve access to this framework regardless of whether or not they can pay for it. And there is a subscriber option on Substack, and subscriber content will grow over time. Um, things like wheel of the year posts, if you liked last week's episode on Beltane, combining Beltane with the window of tolerance for joy. That's the kind of stuff I'm excited to write about. There might still be ritual practice because this is when the astrology calls for it. And occasional bonus content from the podcast. I'm not going to promise you a posting schedule because this is a living thing and I'm tending it as I go. What I can promise is that what ends up there will be real and it'll be mine and it'll be worth your time. And astrology is still a part of this, but these episodes are also meant to be evergreen. And I want someone to find this episode years from now in the middle of their own witch wound reckoning and have it still land completely. So you might notice that I'm being a little more intentional moving forward about when the transits are central to the teaching and when the teaching can stand on its own. But Pluto retrograde in Aquarius is in philosophy terms, the macrocosm reflecting the microcosm. Pluto stationed retrograde in Aquarius today, this morning. And Aquarius rules the collective and the question of how we organize together and what we build in public. And Pluto retrograde in any sign is an invitation to pause, go inward, and tend what's underneath before moving forward again. It's an internal review process. So it's reviewing what you thought you were building and asking whether it's actually true. That's exactly what this episode is. My personal Hygia moment landing on the same day, the collective is being asked to do the same work. The 11th house in my chart, where Hygia and Kali live, is the Aquarian house. Community, public mission, collective contribution. So the sky and the chart and this moment are all saying the same thing. So what's staying? What's staying is the work, the podcast, the goddesses, the soma, the psychology, the sacred, the witchiness, and hopefully you. None of that's going anywhere. This is the same spiral. It's just a cleaner container.

Guided Hygiene Cleansing Practice

SPEAKER_01 28:46

And so for our closing practice today, I want to do a little hygiene cleansing. And so I invite you to find a comfortable position, seated, lying down, wherever you are. Maybe get cozy, grab a blanket. Pause this if you need to. And then take a few breaths to arrive.

SPEAKER_00 29:15

Let your body settle.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

And bring to mind a color. One that feels cleansing, healing, nourishing to you. For me, me right now, that color is kind of a blue-green. The color of sea glass, of something ancient. I want to invite you to visualize that color as light. Beginning at the crown of the head.

SPEAKER_00 30:01

Coming from above.

SPEAKER_01 30:06

Just letting this color of light wash over you. From the top of your head, letting it move slowly over and through the body. Not forcing, just allowing. Allowing it to fall like slow water.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Imagining this light, filling the spaces that feel heavy or tired or overdue for tending.

SPEAKER_01 30:50

Anywhere you feel residue from the weak, from old stories, from what you've been carrying. Let the light move through it.

SPEAKER_00 31:02

Breathe.

SPEAKER_01 31:10

Breathe and let the light move through you. Steadily.

SPEAKER_00 31:19

The way water moves through stone over time.

SPEAKER_01 31:31

And then let the light radiate outward through the skin into the field around you. Until you are held inside it rather than just filled with it.

SPEAKER_00 31:48

Stay as long as you need and come back slowly.

SPEAKER_01 31:57

This is Hygia's medicine. Simple, daily, and in your power. Hygiene is symbol is a snake and a bull. Venom and medicine held in the same hands. The thing that could harm you and the thing that heals you are often the same substance in different doses with different intention. And I think that's true of a lot of what we do here. The witch wound and the wisdom. The grief of letting something go, and the relief of finally telling the truth. The burning down tower moments and the tending of what grows back from the ashes.

Same Work, New Home, Closing

SPEAKER_01 32:51

This is still the same work. I'm still the same priestess, still the same therapist, though not your therapist. Still the same witch. The subtitle has just caught up with the truth of that. And so if you've been here since the Goddess Coven and you're still here now, thank you. Genuinely. Thank you for staying with me through the changes, through the cleansing, through the trial and error. The three-five path is not always a graceful one. But I wouldn't trade the knowing that comes from living it. Same spiral, cleaner container. And if this landed for you, if the psychoeducation, the archetypes, the integration of the clinical and the sacred feels like home, come find me on Substack. The link is in the show notes. Free content is there for anyone. And if you want to go deeper, subscriber content is coming for you soon. I would love to keep tending this with you there. I'll see you in the next one. Subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss an episode. Trust the spiral. This podcast offers spiritual and psychological education and priestess wisdom. This is not therapy, counseling, or mental health treatment. If you need mental health support, please contact a licensed provider and in a mental health emergency in the U.S., call 988.