Why this is the season of the witch with Ellen Vora

Ellen Vora is a board certified psychiatrist trained at Yale and Columbia and the author of The Anatomy of Anxiety. Her work has always challenged the idea that mental and physical health are separate, and her new book, Season of the Witch: A Psychiatrist’s Case for Magic, pushes that inquiry further, into what women lose when we privilege rationality over intuition.

I asked Ellen what led her to write this book, and she took me back to the sudden loss of her mother while she was six months pregnant, and the acupuncture session that changed everything for her. We talked about what it actually means to reclaim the word witch. To Ellen, it’s about reclaiming the intuitive, mystical, and embodied ways of knowing that our culture tries to shame and suppress. We also got into the science behind it, how differently the brain’s two hemispheres process the world, and why she believes women are uniquely positioned to bring forward the kind of holistic, collaborative knowing our culture needs right now. And we talked about menopause not as a loss, but as a liberation, a chance to stop performing for everyone else and finally step into what we already know to be true.

Connect with Ellen: Website | Instagram | Substack | Buy the Book

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