Hey Tribe! 😃
Can we just talk about that last Lunar Eclipse for a moment?? Oh mama, was it intense! Ugh… I am still waiting for the dust to settle. HBU?
Grandmother Moon was especially loud that night! I’ve heard from several people, they experienced the same inability to sleep and inexplicable pull to her. I was even inspired to write a quick poem about her at 1 am:
I’m having trouble sleeping,
Because the Moon is calling.
Her bright beams beckon me out of bed.
She wants to speak of the darkness she’s seen,
But her bold light betrays her story.
But her true gift arrived when I woke the following morning with a new truth reverberating through my soul:
Wanting reciprocity for the energy I expend caring for others – IS NOT WRONG.
It sounds almost embarrassingly simple when I type it out, but it’s a profound shift from how I believed my entire life. This was a new understanding on a cellular level. I could feel the difference! I simply know it now.
I have spent SO MUCH of my life believing that being a loving and giving human – meant giving without expectation.
That service meant giving. That devotion meant giving. That being a good friend, a good minister, a good human being meant giving what I had, and often what I didn’t have, without expecting anything back.
There was something noble in needing nothing. In disappearing.
And now?
F..u..c..k..t..h..a..t!!! 😉
Years ago, during the time when I gave nearly all of my energy work away for free, Spirit showed me something I have never forgotten:
Reciprocity strengthens the energetic signature of the work.
Something happens when the person receiving an offering, participates in the exchange. The energy doesn’t simply pour from one person into another and stop there. There needs to be movement between them. Giving and receiving are a part of the same energetic circuit!
I understood that about healing work, but what I didn’t understand until recently, was how deeply I needed to apply to the rest of my life:
Reciprocity as an energetic principle.
Energy is meant to move.To circulate. When something is given and received, and something moves back through genuine acknowledgment, gratitude, care, relationship, money, or another form of exchange, the circuit is completed.
There is flow. 🌊
Somewhere along the way, our society has been conditioned to have some very strange ideas about which kinds of energy are allowed to be reciprocated. We live in a world where money (lets be honest: colored bits of paper, really – or empty digits on a screen) is our primary form of demonstrating what we value and what we are willing to materially sustain.
And when the work is spiritual, fuhgeddaboudit! That’s a whole other layer altogether!
There is this persistent idea that sacred gifts should simply be given. That if something comes through Spirit, asking for reciprocity somehow diminishes its sacredness. That spiritual gifts are more pure when the human being carrying them – disappears.
But I’ve come to understand that the sacredness of an offering does not exempt it from the energetic principle of reciprocity.
If anything, it asks us to pay closer attention to the value we place on it.
But money isn’t the only way an energetic circuit is completed. Some of the most beautiful reciprocity I have experienced, never involved material currency at all.
I have been profoundly sustained by genuine gratitude, friendship, care, and respect. By someone remembering to ask how I am. By another human being looking at what I have given and simply acknowledging: ‘This mattered to me. Thank you.’
There are people I have worked with, who have met what I’ve given them with such genuine kindness, gratitude, care, friendship, and respect that I have never once wondered whether the exchange was balanced. I could feel that it was.
Acknowledgment is reciprocity.
Gratitude is reciprocity.
Care is reciprocity.
Money – can be – reciprocity. The form matters less than the movement. Something was given. Something was received. Something returned.
The energy moved. The circuit completed.
But I am no longer willing to romanticize energy moving endlessly in one direction, and calling it service.
Listen, I know the universe doesn’t owe me an equal exchange for every ounce I give, but I’ve stopped confusing depletion with devotion.
I have a big beautiful, open heart and I give enormously. I choose to and I will continue to do so.
And…
I am also allowed to create spaces where the value of what I contribute, is honored.
Much of the work I do in the world is, and will remain, freely offered. (Most of my work, in fact, happens outside of Substack.)
🌎 I am the Director of a Nonprofit. An earth-based, interfaith, spiritual community. I lead free monthly Reiki shares, meditations, and other offerings each month – because I believe in the importance of spaces like these existing. This is where my work is to be of service.
🔥Through Energy Alchemy Arts, I work one-on-one with clients and students around energy, shadow-work, embodiment, lunar cycles, and the places these energies are moving through their own lives.
Substack has always served a different purpose for me. I came here to write, create, use my voice, and heal my relationship with having one.💙 Sometimes, I come here carrying wisdom that’s been given to me through the natural world. When an animal brings a message, I feel a responsibility to let its voice be heard. That really matters to me.
I value this space enormously. I love coming here to write and share. I love catching up with the people I’ve come to know. I love cheering one another on, in this strange experience of being human.
But life calls me outside of this space.
I don’t want to build a life inside Substack, but I do want Substack to have a meaningful place inside the life I’m already living. And I think part of making that possible is allowing this space to become reciprocal, too.
So I’m making some changes to the way I hold my work here. I’m becoming more intentional about what lives within the paid side of Energy Alchemist.
🖤 A Shadow Work Story has always been part of my paid work here. These pieces explore the shadows that can surface within each astrological season and offer journal prompts for taking that exploration into your own life.
🔥 Embodied Wisdom will continue to live within the paid archive as well—a growing collection of reflections and practices for taking spiritual wisdom beyond something we understand intellectually and into something we live and embody.
And now I’m bringing Listening to Luna into that body of work.
🌙 Listening to Luna actually grew out of the way I work with my students and clients. I love helping people understand how to work with the current energy of the sky in relationship to their own birth chart. Those articles became a way for me to share an introduction to that practice more broadly: lunar reflections, energetic insights, and journal prompts that invite you into your own conversation with the cosmos.
I’m also retiring Mini Moon Rituals as an ongoing offering. The rituals I’ve already created will remain available in the archive.
Paid subscribers will have access to these bodies of work and the growing archive behind them, along with 10% off Energy Alchemy Arts sessions, classes, circles, and workshops.
I am deeply aware that choosing to financially support someone’s work is a privilege. I know the times we’re living in. I know that for many of us, a paid subscription is a luxury. I don’t take the decision lightly, when you choose to spend some of what you have – to support what I create.🖤 It means more to me then you know.
I want to honor that reciprocity, too.
So as I make these changes, I’m also lowering the cost of a paid Energy Alchemist subscription to $8 a month or $80 a year.
And for those of you who have already been supporting my work financially, I want to thank you for the love you’ve already shown me.
✨My existing annual subscribers will receive an additional year of paid access at no cost, and my existing monthly subscribers will receive an additional three months at no cost.
And to celebrate this new chapter, I’m offering an annual subscription to Energy Alchemist for $70 through the Full Moon on September 26. After that, paid subscriptions will remain $8 a month or $80 a year.
And if a paid subscription isn’t something that fits into your life right now, there will still be plenty for you here. This isn’t about putting a price on everything I give. But I am going to begin allowing myself to receive for some of it, because thank-the-fucking-moon🌙 I finally see that what I contribute – has value.
🖤🔥🖤
I’m honored to have you along on this journey!!
💗Big Love & Many Blessings🌸
~Amanda
Energy Alchemist • Priestess • Ceremonial Guide • Community Weaver
© 09/2026 Amanda • All Rights Reserved
If you’d like to continue reading my work, you can join me at Energy Alchemist on Substack. Paid subscriptions are also a meaningful way to support the continuation of my writing and shared work.