A Spell for Flipping Tables

Why a Spell for Flipping Tables?

It’s a dramatic, self-honoring gesture,

for when you know that your situation HAS TO change.

You get to reclaim your agency and your ideas.

You get to see who and what you are truly aligned with.

It might be scary, but it is So Worth It.

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Mentioned:

Cauldron, my evolutionary, feminist blend of group, 1:1, and self-coaching. https://mindwitchery.com/cauldron

Make Magic:

A frustrating situation might be an opportunity

for you to declare where you are now,

and to get really, really clear about what you value

and all the ways you’ve grown.

Transcript: Another Spell for Flipping Tables

Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I'm your host, Natalie Miller, and I'm so glad you're here. 

Hello, my love. So happy that you are here today for a feisty spell. This one is feisty. 

Today’s episode is for a spell for flipping tables. We have the phrase, like, “turning tables,” right? “The tables are turned,” or “that turned the tables.” And that just basically means, like, going from a disadvantaged position to an advantage position, right? Like, taking a place where you have at least the illusion of less power and fewer choices and flipping it so that you actually have more power and more choices. 

I feel like, though, this spell is even more powerful than just turning the tables, and so I call it a spell for “flipping tables,” because I just want to emphasize the disruptiveness of it, the revolutionary spirit in it—in this spell for flipping tables. 

Okay, first of all, I will tell you in a turn of events that this spell actually was created by a woman in my group coaching program, Cauldron. She's amazing and badass. Let me tell you about the origin story. 

So, I had just returned to Cauldron after having gone to Mexico for a photo shoot, which was incredible, and beautiful, and, like, a dream come true in so many ways. And at the same time that it was so great, it also meant that I, in my 45-year-old body, was going to be photographed, including in bathing suits. 

Now, I fancy myself a body-positive person. I work a lot on loving and accepting my body. I am fully aware of how punishing and oppressive and unrealistic and ridiculous the standards are for bodies on this planet. And I was about to say, women's bodies, but it's actually everybody's bodies. We have an obsession with youth. We have an obsession with fitness. And as fat positive and body positive and feminist as I am, I am also at the same time a 45-year-old woman inundated with messages all the time about how unworthy my body is. 

So anyway, I was telling the Cauldron ladies about just my experience of being in Mexico, my experience of preparing for the shoot; and the days before the shoot, my sister actually came down with me to Mexico, and we spent a couple days together, and we just talked a lot about how incredibly narrow, what a tightrope there is for what's acceptable in our bodies. Meaning you can't be you can't be too chubby, but you can't be too thin. You should probably have some work done, but nobody should be able to tell that you have had any work done. You should definitely try to be sexy, but don't make it look like you are trying to be sexy. It's just an impossibly thin tightrope to walk. 

And of course, because I was there for a photo shoot, and because we were at a Mexican resort, meaning that, like, everyone was sort of scantily clad the entire time, that was just very alive for me—that pressure to conform to an impossible standard of youth and beauty. So, as I'm telling the Cauldron ladies this, I'm like, “Yeah, I mean, it's just this, no-win situation.” And understandably, it's really frustrating. And in that moment, my brilliant client said, “Mmm, or, it could be freeing.” And a spell was born. It was so fabulous, and now that is something that we that we say a lot. We we cast the spell a lot in Cauldron now, right? “Or it could be freeing.” 

So, the spell for flipping table, for reclaiming our power to choose, and our power to be who we are, is this: “Or, it could be freeing.” 

So look, in this situation, I am feeling oppressed by a standard of youth and beauty that is just impossible to meet, and I can find it frustrating, or I can say, “You know what? This is impossible to meet, and so let me be free of it. Let me just be who I am. Let me opt out of trying to conform to an unrealistic expectation. Let me opt out of trying to please, to meet a standard that is not meetable. Let me be free from it. Let me free myself from it.”

So, when can you use this spell for flipping tables? Really, wherever you are just so frustrated, so tired of being at a disadvantage. Wherever it is that you are really believing that you don't have any power. So, I came up with a couple of examples to sort of illustrate this, and I hope this will be helpful. 

So, let's imagine that someone works for you, and this person is just really problematic, and you need to give them feedback, and it's likely that they will not receive the feedback well. Let's just say this might happen. You might be in a place where you feel super frustrated, where you are really anxious about the conversation because you are believing, “I don't really have the power to make them hear me, or to make this go well,” right? So, that can be really frustrating.

Or, it could be freeing. 

It could be that you might say, “You know what? I am not going to be able to control their reaction, but I can go all-in on mine. I can use this opportunity to give deeply honest feedback, to build that muscle. I can use this opportunity to have a conversation in which I am fully frank about my position in this situation.” 

I might say, “You know, this is an opportunity to spend my energy being truthful rather than trying to please, or to soften the blow of the truth.” Yeah? So, you might be free to do that when you accept, “Yeah, I can't win here. So, if I can't win, then what do I want to do? What do I want to stand for? What do I want to expand my capacity for?”

Okay, here's another example. Let's say you have a new business or an initiative, and you are marketing it. And it's troublesome to you that your audience is rather small, right? So, you're kind of worried and discouraged by, like, a limited reach—like, “Ugh, I don't know if anyone's really seeing this, hearing me, watching.” That could be really discouraging.

Or, it could be freeing. 

It could be an opportunity to get more bold, more creative—to fuck around a lot more in your messaging. It could be an opportunity to experiment. If no one's watching, then fuck around. Have fun. Express yourself. Experiment. Play. Build the muscle of expressing yourself, of being willing to put yourself out there. And of course, you probably already know that when you do this, that is exactly what will attract people to you and your message and whatever it is that you're working on, right? 

I really love, sometimes, to look at some of the more popular TikTok creators, and I love to scroll way down their page, and I love to see what they were doing before they happened upon their particular hook, or their personality, or their, kind of like, winning formula. It's really fun to see that in the beginning, everyone is just fucking around and experimenting. I mean, it's not even just in the beginning; it's all the time, right? That's what we do. We play around. We see what works. 

And so, yeah, it could be frustrating that your audience is small, or it could be freeing. 

All right, here's another example. This one is kind of a version of the feedback one. So, let's imagine you are in a relationship that has really kind of shifted out of alignment, right? Where you and the person maybe have grown apart, maybe just aren't on the same page anymore or sharing the same values anymore, and the relationship just isn't working. That could be a relationship with a boss. It could be a relationship with a friend. It could be a relationship with a partner, right? One of those situations where you and this person are just [makes sound of grinding gears] the gears are not interlocking anymore. They're jamming. 

And so, maybe this means that there are more frustrations between you. Maybe this means that there's more distance or coldness between you. Maybe this means that you just don't communicate as easefully and freely as you used to, and it might be that you are really feeling stuck in this dis-integrated, no-longer-aligned relationship, right? And you might think like, “Ugh, no matter what I do, it just isn't enough for this person.” Or, “No matter what I do, like, this person just doesn't understand me or respect me even,” right? So, that can be really frustrating.

Or, it could be freeing. 

Because it might actually be an opportunity for you to declare where you are now. It might be an opportunity for you to get really, really clear about how you've grown, or what you value, what's important to you. It might be an opportunity, again, to have a very honest conversation with the other person—to say out loud, both for you and for them and for the relationship, “Hey, this is who I am now. This is what I need now. This is how I feel. This is what I want.” 

Or, it could also give you permission to loosen your grasp, and just let it go. Right? To stop struggling to maintain a relationship that just is no longer working. 

So, in each of these examples, and in my example, I'm saying, “Well, you know what? If there's no way for me to meet the misogynist, ableist, white-supremacist expectation of good-enough woman body, then let me free myself. Let me free myself to be who I am. Let me free myself to be a person moving through the world in a body that I am refusing to be ashamed of. Let me reclaim my power in this situation. Let me flip the tables.” Yeah? 

So, what is power here? Power is integrity—not pretending, not dissimulating, not trying to contort ourselves to fit something that just doesn't fit anymore. Power is remembering that we exist at choice. You exist at choice. You always have a choice. And of course, privileges, oppressions, accessibilities affect how many choices you have, so I don't pretend that those aren't factors. We do live on planet Earth and our societies are organized in ways that oppress choices, and/but at the same time, we—each of us, all of us—always have a choice.

So, think about: Where in your life do you feel stuck? Do you feel frustrated? Do you feel out of alignment, out of integrity? Do you feel like I just can't win here? And maybe, opt out of playing that game. 

Flip the tables. Exist at choice. 

And you know what? It will be scary. Oh my gosh. I mean, the time that I did this most intensely, most recently, is when I was in a leadership position in a company where the direction that we were going was so out of alignment with my own values, and I felt so frustrated. I felt like there was nothing I could do. I felt underappreciated. I felt disempowered. I felt really trapped. And I didn't yet know the spell for flipping tables, but it actually got so bad that I had to reclaim my power to choose and to reclaim my power to say, “No.” And I did, in three very frank conversations, and that did contribute to the end of my employment at this place. 

And was that terrifying? Yes, it was terrifying. It actually went worse than I would have imagined. It was a very brutal experience, and/but I was free. I was free from the bullshit, from the contortions, from the stress and pressure. Yeah, I got new stresses and pressures, right? But I was free from the no-win situation. And opting out of playing that game, reclaiming my power to choose, being more fully in integrity—I cannot tell you how much peace that brought me. 

And I will tell you, also, that when I was in that disempowered place, I was stuffing down out of my own sight so many ideas, including—including the idea for this very podcast. In the no-win situation, there was no room for things like this. And so I discovered when you flip the tables, you get to see all what's under them. You get to reclaim your creativity and your ideas. You get to see who you are truly aligned with. You get to see more of the underbelly of the situation, the true colors of the players involved. And that—that is empowering, too. 

So, in any case, it's just to say: Flipping tables—is it scary? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes, because you exist at choice, and remembering that is key, not only to your own fulfillment, your own freedom, your own pursuit of happiness, but also it is vital to our evolution because it enables you to bring more of yourself, more of your talents, more of your ideas, more of your own growth to relationships, to organizations, to the Internet, to life. 

All right, my loves, hope you enjoyed this one. They're all a little spicy coming up. We've got some spicy and invigorating spells for Spring, here on Mind Witchery. Thank you so much for listening. Bye, for now. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I'm offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday letter at MindWitchery.com. If today's episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world. Like all good things, this podcast is co-created by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammie D. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K. O. Myers, Executive Producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Til next time.

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