Material Girl, Mystical World: The Now-Age Guide for Chic Seekers and Modern Mystics

This is a work of non-fiction. The events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as remembered by the author, to the best of her ability. Some names have been changed in order to protect the privacy of individuals involved. The information provided in this book is for reference purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis or treatment that can be provided by your own medical or mental health provider. Neither the authors nor the publisher are providing health care, medical or mental health services, or attempting to diagnose, treat, prevent or cure in any manner any physical, mental or emotional issue, disease or condition. If you have or suspect that you have a medical or mental health problem, contact your medical or mental health provider promptly. Also, before beginning any physical activity suggested in or inspired by this book, it is recommended that you seek medical advice from your personal physician.

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First published in the US by HarperElixir, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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FIRST EDITION

Text © Ruby Warrington 2017

Illustrations © Ina Stanimirova Tontcheva 2017

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‘Material Girl, Mystical World makes the mystical accessible and cool, and reminds us all that to truly thrive we must learn to embrace our capacity for wonder and spirituality, and engage with something larger than ourselves. With this book, Ruby Warrington is helping to redefine success for the 21st century.’

Arianna Huffington

‘I love Ruby’s book! She writes about meditation in the context of spiritual activism in a way that makes it accessible and fun. The deeper message of Material Girl, Mystical World is one the world sorely needs in 2017 and beyond.’

Bob Roth

CEO, David Lynch Foundation

‘Ruby Warrington is the Malcolm Gladwell of the mystic scene! Material Girl, Mystical World is a bible for young women lusting after a deep and meaningful antidote to modern life, without disappearing from society.’

Jasmine Hemsley

bestselling author and wellness expert

‘I’m a massive fan of Ruby Warrington and her fabulous book Material Girl, Mystical World. It’s a down to earth, current, relatable, and at times hilariously funny take on what it means to awaken in these times, also proving that you don’t have to choose between the altar of Mother Mary or Chanel. Today you can actually worship at both.’

Rebecca Campbell

bestselling author of Light Is The New Black and Rise Sister Rise

‘I am a super fan of all Ruby does, and have been a follower of The Numinous since day one. I loved reading about her journey in Material Girl, Mystical World, which both inspired me and made me laugh out loud!’

Henry Holland

fashion designer

‘For thousands of years, the “Spiritual Journey”, East or West, has been followed according to a rigid tradition. But now that we’re in the Aquarian Age – and yes, it’s for real – with its accompanying freedoms, each student is responsible for mapping their own journey. Consequently, Ruby’s is unique to her. However, she details its joys, agonies and miraculous moments with such poignant detail that it will serve as both inspiration and a guide for those who are eager to learn about spirituality or, possibly, follow that path themselves.’

Shelley von Strunckel

astrologer and spiritual teacher

‘Ruby Warrington’s intrepid exploration of the mystical realm is sharp and refreshing. Material Girl, Mystical World is a stylishly spiritual book for people who are seeking more than just the obvious explanations about life.’

Ophira and Tali Edut

The AstroTwins, astrologers for US ELLE magazine

DEDICATION

For my Pisces

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction: Coming Out of the Spiritual Closet

Part I: The New Age, but Now

1. Astrology as Basic Life Skill

2. Interpreting the Tarot the Now Age Way

3. “You Know You’re Psychic If You Have a Body”

4. Do Your Dharma, Fix Your Karma

Part II: Health & Well-Being

5. Confessions of a Reluctant Yogi

6. Highly Meditated

7. You, the Shaman

Part III: Love, Sex & Relationships

8. Calling in Number One (On Self-Love)

9. Your Period as Sacred Goddess Code

10. The Universal Mother

11. Finding My Divine Feminine

Part IV: Fashion & Beauty

12. Spiritual Style Icons (A Numinous Best-Dressed List)

13. The Inner Beauty v. Botox Debate

14. Get Your Rocks On: Crystals as Wearable Healing

Part V: People & Parties

15. Healing Is the New Nightlife

16. Feeling the Plant Medicine Peer Pressure

17. Lost and Found at Burning Man

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Glossary of Now Age Terminology

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

COMING OUT OF THE SPIRITUAL CLOSET

Brooklyn, NY. October 31, 2013.

So what exactly do you wear to a séance? It’s Halloween; my friend, the psychic Betsy LeFae, has invited me to a “Dinner with the Dead” at her apartment in Williamsburg, and I’m having a wardrobe crisis. On Facebook, my feed is filling up with people dressed as sexy nuns. But if Halloween fancy dress is about laughing in the face of death, I’ll hopefully (gulp, really?) be spending my evening looking death in the face and asking who it thinks it is. Instead of a “meet the parents” outfit, I need a look to potentially meet and greet my dearly departed ancestors.

My instinct is to play it superwitchy and dress head to toe in black, even though I know it’s considered more high vibe among spiritual circles to wear white. Apparently it raises your “auric radiance.” In the end I settle on a long black Agnes B skirt I picked up at a consignment store in the East Village (just witchy enough), and I pair it with a sleeveless white silk blouse. A mouth of MAC’s bright red Lady Danger lipstick completes the look. It’s what I always wear when I want to feel properly pulled together. It’s the same shade Alexa Chung wears (she told me when I interviewed her once), and I think it makes me look like a lady. A dangerously smart, sexy, and pulled-together lady.

In the street outside I can already hear the sounds of the impending zombie apocalypse as my fellow New Yorkers congregate outside the bars to smoke and flirt. Getting wasted and fornicating in the face of death is the other big theme of the evening, after all. Meanwhile, I think about all the spirits I won’t be drinking but will instead be inviting to deliver their spine-tingling messages tonight, and I pick up the tray of tamari-roasted vegetables I’m taking as my dish for the potluck supper we’ll be eating in silence after the séance. The idea is we’ll be dining with any deceased ancestors who’ve decided to join us.

All of which, if I’m honest, has become a pretty standard Friday night for me.

Seriously, you should hear some of the conversations I have with my girlfriends these days. Women like Madeline, who used to work at Nylon magazine but left to go to psychic school in L.A. and is convinced she’s a reincarnated mermaid. Raquel, a former fashion stylist who’s devised a spiritual detox program to open your third eye and cleanse your chakras along with your colon. Or Marika, a financier turned modern shamanic practitioner who mainly wears Isabel Marant and introduced me to my spirit animal last summer.

And no, I didn’t meet these women on some mind-bending plant medicine retreat in Peru. Although that’s probably on their vacation wish list, along with swimming with dolphins, a trip to Burning Man, and a ten-day silent meditation Vipassana. Nor do my friends and I waft around in purple caftans (unless they’re by Mara Hoffman), grow out our armpit hair, and imbibe only homegrown kombucha. Rather, the women I have been known to refer to as my coven are the hip, switched-on denizens of New York, L.A., and London, cities fast embracing the dawning of what I like to call the Now Age. As in New Age … but given a totally modern upgrade for NOW. And I connected with many of them after I launched my website, The Numinous, an online magazine where Material Girl meets Mystical World.

The by-way-of-intro e-mail often goes something like: “OMG at last. A platform that speaks to my twin passions—fashion and astrology!” And then we get into how a fascination with all things esoteric has opened up whole new worlds of inquiry about what it means to be thriving as a twenty-first-century woman.

Because from Ayurveda to the tarot and Tantric healing, on any given evening in Brooklyn, Venice Beach, Shoreditch, Sydney, or Berlin, Now Age curious seekers are flocking to workshops to waken our Divine Feminine, sitting in ceremony to welcome the New Moon, experimenting with shamanism, and getting seriously high on the vibes, man. The night I attended a pranayama breathwork session in a tepee in a park in Williamsburg last summer, I didn’t come down for days.

Which sounds pretty woo-woo, I guess. But if embracing the New Age in the 1960s meant changing your name to Echo, rejecting your traditional upbringing, and running away to live on an ashram, in the Now Age, choosing to check out a more spiritual worldview is no longer seen as incompatible with an appreciation for fashion. If anything, the fact that we’ve evolved into such an exaggeratedly material, hypervisual, and device-dependent world has given these ancient human technologies a newfound allure. If social media, for example, has created what some people are calling a “disconnection epidemic,” then esoteric practices like astrology and meditation become a (necessary) way to reconnect—sure, to each other, but not least to ourselves.

And on the flip side, spending half our lives in the alternate reality we casually refer to as the Internet (I mean, let’s take a step back for a minute; everything being “online” now, and existing somewhere in the Cloud, is actually seriously sci-fi) means we also get to investigate these Now Age practices from the comfort of our own living rooms. Not to mention the freedom it’s given us to totally blur the lines when it comes to what a person who identifies as “spiritual” should look like. Um, have you checked out Miley Cyrus’s IG feed lately? #GODDESS. The week I’m writing this, even Khloé Kardashian had penned an essay on her spiritual leanings for Lena Dunham’s “Lenny” newsletter.

Enter mass meditations that devolve into networking events, spiritual speed-dating, and my friends and I discovering the joys of the “healing hang date.” Also celebrities like Russell Brand (God bless that man) discovering yoga and going from Hollywood wannabe and recovering addict to total Now Age pinup. Oh, and his ex, Katy Perry, telling a reporter for GQ magazine, “I see everything through a spiritual lens. I believe in a lot of astrology. I believe in aliens. I look up into the stars and I imagine: How self-important are we to think that we are the only life-form?”

Well, I could not agree with you more, Katy, and astrology was my gateway drug into the Mystical World, too. I must have been about three years old when I discovered I’d been born in the Chinese year of the Dragon. Result! Most people got normal animals, like pigs or dogs, but lucky me had obviously been singled out for some pretty special cosmic treatment (not that astrology is for narcissists or anything. No, really, it isn’t—as I’ll explain in detail later on!).

Anyway, there followed a period of about six months where I’d scrunch my features into a “scary” dragon face and do this heavy breathing thing through my bared teeth, to show everybody how the mythical beast lived in me. And then my brother was born (year of the Sheep, yawn), and people stopped paying attention.

I also grew up knowing that my mum had my full astrology chart done by a family friend when I was born. I was an Aries, which meant I was “confident and extroverted, and sometimes quite bossy.” Beyond the home environment I was definitely more on the shy side, though, and I was desperate to know what else the astrologer had said. But Mum was always frustratingly vague about it. “Ummm, you have a lot of planets in Cancer …” she’d murmur, balancing my baby brother on one hip while stirring a pot of buckwheat noodles.

If you haven’t already guessed, she was kind of hippieish, and we ate mainly macrobiotic when I was a kid. I think mostly because John and Yoko did. The other families in the rural country village where I grew up were the same, a tight little clique of “alternatives” who embraced natural remedies, grew most of their own vegetables, and wore a lot of cheesecloth.

It wasn’t until I started at the tiny village school that I realized there was anything strange about my mum taking my brother to see the fierce Dr. Singha, an Ayurvedic practitioner who cured his recurring ear infections by banning him from eating dairy, or us spending weekends at music festivals where I got pink henna streaks in my hair. But my flask of homemade adzuki bean stew felt decidedly unsexy next to my friends’ pizza and fries at lunch, and even aged five I was acutely aware that my home-stitched smock dresses were no match for Claire Maplethorpe’s shop-bought tutus. To my five-year-old eyes, not only did pizza and tutus look waaaay cool—it was also evident that without them in my world, I would always be on the outside looking in.

Up until that point I’d been completely satisfied with my social life too, which consisted mainly of hanging out with the fairies at the end of our garden, making mud pies, and tumbling down the rabbit holes in my imagination to explore magical, underground kingdoms. But now I wanted a Barbie. My fairies were mysterious and mischievous and very stylish in their own ephemeral way, but Barbie had long blond hair, an extremely covetable wardrobe, and a boyfriend called Ken, just like an actual princess. And I’d consumed enough fairy tales by this stage to know that princesses, even more so than little girls born in the year of the Dragon, got all the luck.

So what’s this got to do with my adult interest in all things Now Age? Allow me to explain. If you think back, you’ll remember there was a lot of talk about how 2012 was going to mean “The End of the World” as we knew it, due to it being the final year to be represented in the ancient Mayan calendar. And this was certainly the case for me. I want you to keep this deadline in mind as we fast-forward to a few months before D-day, when I was working as features editor at the UK’s Sunday Times Style magazine.

I’d obviously decided at some point that the most direct route to getting my hands on a wardrobe like Barbie’s and achieving as close to princess status as an outsider like me could really hope for was to pursue a career in fashion. I fell in love with magazines in my teens, which—by now the only “poor kid” (relatively speaking) in a progressive North London private school—found me grappling with the mother of all identity crises. And in shuffles a lineup of the usual teen rebellion suspects—early experimentation with drugs and alcohol, an eating disorder, and a six-year relationship with a much older, sexually domineering man (whom I’ll be referring to as the Capricorn), who also managed to completely rob me of my sense of identity.

Magazines, and the glossily perfect world they represented to me, became an escape. And by the time I’d mustered the courage to leave the Capricorn and rebuild my life in the image of my own choosing, I became hellbent on pursuing a career as a fashion and lifestyle journalist. But after twelve years in the industry, I was dismayed to find that I was bored out of my mind.

Perhaps it was because landing a job on Style magazine pretty much represented the apex of my ambitions at the time. After all, a lot of the anger and frustration that lay in wait just beyond my tedium on the job was directed at myself for not being utterly satisfied with a position I’d worked so hard the past decade to achieve.

A lot of my friends were experiencing the sense of fulfillment I realized I was craving by having kids, but I’d decided long ago that I didn’t want to be a mother (more, oh-so-much more, on this subject later). Whereas I had become increasingly aware that I was essentially trying to fill the creative Source energy, second-chakra-shaped void (the seat of our creative energy) that had appeared in my life with copious amounts of cocktails, designer clothes, and … cocaine. Yes, over the past decade I’d also morphed into the quintessential work-hard-play-hard party girl. In the beginning, it was a world that fueled my post-Capricorn desire to fill myself up with all the FUN I felt I’d been denied in my teens and early twenties—but lately, it felt less hedonistic, more like a way to numb my existential angst.

Sure, my “on paper” life was pretty fabulous—great job, great relationship (I’d since married the love of my life), great, generally heavily discounted, wardrobe. Loads of holidays, loads of freebies, and a home of my own on one of the most desirable streets in one of the most desirable parts of London. #Blessed. So why was it all tinged with the underlying sense of unease that something MAJOR was missing? Like, something fundamental to the purpose of me taking up space on the planet. Was writing about what T-shirt some celebrity was wearing or getting them to “open up” about the state of their relationship in an interview really all I had to contribute to the world?

I don’t blame the drinking or the drugs, although they had become part of the problem. The morning after a binge, the anxiety and the despair, the anger and the frustration came on ten times worse. But essentially the nonstop party was just a way of distracting myself from the little voice that kept insisting, It’s not enough. It’s NOT ENOUGH. Because how dare I? This was what “having it all” looked like, wasn’t it? How much more, exactly, did I want? No, the real problem was that as the months went by, and my anxiety reached a level that I actually sought professional help with a therapist, I continued to ignore the Voice. And well, 2012 was the year kismet decided to intervene.

I’ve since, thanks to my adventures in the Now Age, been able to understand exactly how dis(self)respectful it is to blatantly blow off the Voice (a.k.a. your intuition, your soul, your higher Self, the Universe, um … God), and I’m actually beginning to believe (more on this later too) that if each and every individual was in a position to truly honor this Voice, we might have the blueprint for world peace, right there.

Luckily for me, my soul wasn’t going to give up that easily—instead, it led me back to astrology. Like: Okay, why not learn astrology. Like properly, so you can read people’s charts and stuff, it said, while I was lying on Salinas beach in Ibiza, mojito in hand, pretty pissed off that I’d spent so much money on a new Missoni bikini that had begun to dissolve the first time I wore it in the sea. You’ve always been into astrology, and it sounds like what you need is a passion project. Because if my life was lacking anything, it was passion.

My childhood interest in astrology had bloomed over the years, and even my colleagues referred to me as Mystic Ruby, since I was the girl who always knew when Mercury was going retrograde (and all our writers were going to miss their deadlines and our photo shoots would fall through). Maybe our in-house astrologer, the eminent Shelley von Strunckel, would deign to teach me a thing or two?

Turns out she would, and soon I was being invited for dinners at her loft in Kings Cross where this grande dame of mystical glamour began filling my mind with stories of ancient spiritual folklore over bottles of biodynamic red wine. All the stuff that had been swirling in the background in my childhood, but which I’d locked away in a box marked “crazy, crunchy, and NOT VERY COOL”—along with the adzuki bean stew. Now Shelley was taking me back.

I was instantly in awe of her being so worldly and so well read—and not just in astrology but all things mystical! Shelley had traveled the world and experienced the magic of the Universe firsthand, and my heart thrilled at her vision. It was as if her stories were the missing link, as if she’d opened the door to a whole new world, which, conversely, I realized I’d been seeking all along—a Narnia she described as “the numinous.”

“It means ‘that which is unknown or unknowable,’” she explained … and I felt my soul swoon. Not even the hypnotic allure of a new pair of Miu Miu shoes could have inspired such tingles in me as the web of intrigue the word numinous wove in my mind. Having been raised atheist (I once had to walk out of a midnight mass in case I started yelling “cult!” at the top of my voice), it was kind of like getting the whole concept of, um, God, for the first time. (In fact, sometimes when people ask me what the word means, I have been known to reply: “basically ‘awesome’—but in a biblical sense.”)