Names have always been a funny thing to me. Mine misfits me. Named Park Donghee at birth but it is not what people call me. Adoption has given me a new name: Sarah Donghee Heffner. 

Then, I gave myself a name: The Poet Witch.

What does it mean to call myself a witch? At the core I am a healer. Writing is medicine. Nature is too. I believe that nature corresponds to our intentions through energy. That we can use nature, the stars, crystals, sound, candles, and ritual to channel our energy into self-healing. I believe in magic. I believe it is practical.

Poetry healed me first. Poetry heals. Writing about my adoption, my birth mother, the unknown through poetry filled in my blanks. Writing about who and where I came from gave me a sense of self.

A self potentially that I could then attach: love, respect, worth, value, confidence. The craft of poetry is built to write about trauma in a way that protects the victim but also releases the shame.

A grad student at NYU, I wrote about my open wounds and in so doing they became scars—reminders but no longer painful. Except, I never got to finish that manuscript. It was disrupted by Pluto in Capricorn. It was disrupted by meeting my birth mother.

Everything I had written and imagined about my origins became a lie! And so, in 2011 I had an existential crisis on top of my already confused identity. Was I even a who?

So I moved to South Korea to find out what or who I was—but it wasn’t until 2013 that my wholistic healing journey began.

I was back visiting the States for a month. And, I went to a psychic in New York City with my best friend. The psychic read me first and said ‘‘chakra this’ and ‘this chakra is blocked’ and ‘your throat and your root— all blocked’. Chakra chakra chakra. Blocked Blocked Blocked.

I had never heard this word before. And certainly did not love the idea of being blocked. Then, my friend had her reading done and the woman hadn’t used the word chakra once! I knew this word was for me. 

And this all made sense: my root chakra blocked—umm hello adoptee in reunification living half way across the world to understand her roots. Blocked throat chakra—uh duh—don’t even speak Korean.

Of course, I needed to know how to unblock them. I read books and discovered Carol Tuttle and practiced some of these exercises that balanced chakras. She made me a believer, that we are made of vortexes: wheels of energy. I was convinced. But I still needed more healing.

In Korea, I found a reiki practitioner who spoke English. But was coerced into taking a workshop so I could perform reiki on myself rather than just have him provide it. Attuned, I have been practicing on myself and gifting it to others since then.

I found and practiced yoga, tarot, and most recently astrology. And have integrated them all into self-healing practices.

90 days of yoga and writing was a luminary experience. Fortifying for me that the body holds all the wisdom we need, except for our ability to transcribe its messages.

I’ve been collecting and studying and practicing and now a decade later, I share what I have learned, healed, and still have yet to heal through my newsletter.

Astrology is a language that my soul has spoken in many lifetimes before. I can’t prove that obviously but it feels true. Poetry and astrology are both figurative languages—they both allude to mythology and archetype. These are so useful when we are self-reflecting. Astrology and writing are the two totems on which I self-heal. Become a subscriber to the newsletter and join the community of other writers who want to heal with astrology. Become a poet witch!