Protecting your energy can also mean saying no

And, curiously, they can be much harder to say than performing the entire ritual.

Imagine this.

You spend the night trying to free yourself from an energy that feels heavy.

You tidy up.

You clean.

You light a candle.

You open the windows.

You write down what you want to release.

Maybe you end up feeling different.

Calmer.

Clearer.

Lighter.

And the next day...

that person texts you again.

Asks you for exactly the same thing.

Crosses exactly the same boundary.

Speaks to you in exactly the same way.

And you say again:

"Yes."

Then maybe there's another question we should ask ourselves:

Am I trying to cleanse an energy I keep allowing back in the same way?

Contemporary psychology has studied rituals without needing to assume there's a supernatural force behind them.

An academic review by Nicholas Hobson and colleagues found that rituals can serve different psychological functions, including helping to regulate emotions, prepare performance-related states, and strengthen social connection.

That's important.

Because it means we don't have to choose between:

and

There's another possibility.

A ritual can help you psychologically mark a moment.

This was the end.

I don't want this anymore.

From here on, I want to relate differently.

It can give you space to think.

It can help you organize what you're feeling.

It can symbolically represent a decision.

But one question still remains:

What will happen when what you wanted to protect yourself from comes knocking again?

Therapist Nedra Glover Tawwab, author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, centers much of her work precisely on learning to identify our needs and communicate them clearly.

Her approach to boundaries has a part that I find especially important for this topic:

setting a boundary involves communication and action.

It's not enough to hope that someone else will intuitively figure out what bothers us.

We need to express what we accept, what we don't accept, and what we will do in the face of a given situation.

And that's where energy protection changes form.

Sometimes protecting yourself means saying:

It doesn't look like a ritual.

But maybe you're also protecting something.

Your time.

Your attention.

Your body.

Your peace.

Your money.

Your space.

Your ability to choose.

Because a boundary doesn't happen in a vacuum.

There's another person in front of you.

And that person might be disappointed.

Get upset.

Ask you why.

Insist.

Misinterpret it.

Maybe even accuse you of having changed.

That's why often we're not just afraid of saying "no."

We're afraid of what will happen after we say it.

Maybe we think:

"They'll think I'm selfish."

"They'll get angry."

"They won't love me anymore."

"I'll lose this relationship."

"I should help."

"What if I'm overreacting?"

"Maybe I should put up with it a little longer."

So we do something curious.

We protect ourselves spiritually from what we still don't feel emotionally capable of confronting.

Here it's also worth asking ourselves an uncomfortable question.

There are times when saying:

is exactly what we need.

Taking distance can be healthy.

Not every conversation deserves our participation.

Not every comment needs a response.

Not every relationship needs to continue.

But other times we use the expression to avoid something.

We don't respond.

We disappear.

We accumulate anger.

We hope the other person will figure it out on their own.

And months later we're still upset because they keep doing something we never clearly told them bothered us.

So maybe we should distinguish two things:

Distancing myself because I chose a boundary.

and

Distancing myself because I'm afraid to express the boundary.

They feel similar.

But they're not necessarily the same.

Something I find important is not treating assertiveness as if some people simply "were born with it."

It can be practiced.

A review published in Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice described assertiveness training as an intervention with accumulated support across different psychological problems and contexts.

And a meta-analysis published in 2026 that brought together 12 randomized trials with 503 participants found that assertiveness training had a moderate effect in reducing social anxiety. This doesn't mean that saying "no" cures all psychological problems; it does provide evidence that assertive communication can be trained and produce benefits in certain contexts.

In other words:

maybe you're not "bad at setting boundaries."

Maybe you haven't practiced how to do it.

And there's a huge difference between those two things.

Sometimes we imagine a boundary as a fight.

A confrontation.

A door slamming shut.

But it can be much simpler.

A boundary can sound like this:

Without a twenty-minute speech explaining why.

Without attacking the other person.

Without disappearing.

Without turning it into a war.

Without making up an excuse.

There's a big difference between aggression and assertiveness.

Assertiveness attempts to express our needs or rights without denying those of the other person.

That takes practice.

And sometimes it requires tolerating something even more difficult:

someone not being happy with our boundary.

This part changes a lot.

A boundary is not:

Because then our boundary still depends on someone else's approval.

Maybe you can explain it.

Listen.

Negotiate when appropriate.

Be kind.

But you can't completely control how another person will respond.

And protecting yourself may also mean stopping measuring the validity of a decision solely by how much it pleases others.

This is where we can return to the Moon.

In different currents of contemporary witchcraft and neopaganism, the waning phase is used symbolically for work related to releasing, reducing, banishing, or ending. We're not talking about a psychological effect scientifically caused by the Moon; we're talking about a correspondence within those spiritual practices.

And I like that symbolism for this topic.

Because "releasing" often sounds very abstract.

But maybe the more interesting question is:

What does releasing look like in terms of behavior?

Because maybe "releasing" means:

not answering that message at two in the morning anymore.

Stop lending money.

Stop accepting the same insult.

Cancel a commitment.

Stop explaining twenty times what you've already explained clearly.

Leave a group.

Not answer a personal question.

Say:

"That doesn't work for me."

The Moon can be the symbol.

The boundary is the action.

If you want to perform a protection practice, do it.

Light the candle.

Breathe.

Cleanse your space.

Take whatever symbolizes protection for you.

But before you finish, write down a question:

Then be specific.

Don't write:

Write:

Not:

But:

Not:

But:

Now comes the second question:

What concrete boundary could protect me from this?

And write one.

Just one.

Maybe you respond too quickly.

Your boundary could be:

Maybe you always end up solving other people's financial problems.

Maybe someone uses every conversation with you to unload everything they feel.

Suddenly protection stopped being just something you imagine around you.

Now it also exists in the real world.

Maintain it.

Because the first time you set a boundary, someone might test it.

And that's where we discover something.

Sometimes the problem was never finding the words.

It was bearing the guilt that appeared afterward.

Tawwab's workbook addresses precisely the discomfort and guilt that can accompany the establishment and maintenance of boundaries, in addition to practicing how to communicate them.

Maybe protecting your energy also means learning to tolerate someone being disappointed without immediately concluding you did something wrong.

We also need to look at the other side.

A healthy boundary doesn't mean:

Often it's more useful to think:

I can't control if someone yells.

But I can decide:

I can't control what someone posts.

But I can decide to stop following them.

I can't force a person to respect my time.

But I can stop being available every time they demand it.

That returns the boundary to the place where we have the greatest capacity to act:

our own behavior.

Maybe "energy" is a word we use for many different things.

Attention.

Time.

Patience.

Emotional availability.

Mental capacity.

Money.

Rest.

Presence.

And seen this way, protecting our energy stops being something mysterious.

It can also mean consciously deciding:

who has access to me,

when,

in what way,

and how far.

Not to build a wall around our life.

But to avoid living with all the doors permanently open.

You can wear your amulet.

And say no.

You can cleanse your house.

And stop inviting whoever always disturbs your peace.

You can do a ritual to release.

And block the number you know you'll answer again at two in the morning.

You can ask for protection.

And stop sharing intimate information with whoever always uses it against you.

You can ask for peace.

And have the conversation you've been avoiding for weeks.

One thing doesn't necessarily invalidate the other.

Maybe the ritual prepares the inner space.

And the boundary protects the outer space.

I want to propose something very simple.

Think of a situation you've recently described as:

"It drains my energy."

Now complete:

"To protect myself from this, I need to stop ______."

or

"To protect myself from this, I need to start saying ______."

You don't need to tell the whole story.

Just find the phrase.

Because maybe you've been trying to protect your energy for a while...

when part of that protection was waiting to become a word.

And that word might be:

I want MÍSTICO to be a place where we can keep our rituals, our symbols, and our relationship with the Moon without using the spiritual to escape from what we can also change.

That's why these articles start from mystery...

but try to end with something you can bring into your life.

If this text helped you put words to a boundary you needed, you can voluntarily support my work with a tip.

That support allows me to keep researching books, studies, traditions, and tools to create content like this.

And if you don't want to do that today, your comment or sharing the article also helps a lot.

If you decide to leave a tip, thank you.

Not because you owe me anything.

But because you're helping to sustain a space where we can remember something:

protection can also be a choice.