About me
Isabel Abbott
My work lives at the crossroads of ritual, writing, embodiment, and relational practice. I am interested in how people come back into relationship with their own lives when urgency loosens and attention is given time to gather.
Slow Magic grew out of years of working with bodies at thresholds. Birth. Death. Sexuality. Illness. Grief. Creative undoing. I come from a lineage of full-spectrum doula work, embodiment work, ritual practice, and long-form listening. I have spent decades accompanying people through moments when familiar structures fall away and something unnamed begins to surface. This work is shaped as much by lived experience as by study, and more by staying than by technique.
I am the author of Salt + Honey: secular prayers for the human and hedonistic hearts, and my writing has appeared in literary and medical humanities journals. I have also worked for twenty years as a death worker and full-spectrum doula.
My magical practice is practical and relational. It is rooted in folk and ritual traditions that understand magic as something done with life rather than over it. Attention, repetition, timing, story, and tending are central. Ritual here is not performance or belief system. It is a way of marking change, keeping faith with what matters, and staying in relationship with body, time, place, and the unseen. Writing is one of the primary tools of this practice. Not to explain or improve, but to listen, to notice, and to let meaning take shape through use.
This work is welcoming to people whose ways of knowing are non-linear. Those who think in images, sensation, symbol, and story. Those whose lives or bodies have been shaped by illness, marginalization, religious harm, or long periods of adaptation. I am devoted to practices that do not pathologize complexity or ask people to conform to dominant narratives of wellness, productivity, or success.
I host Slow Magic Sanctuary Sessions, facilitate writing sanctuaries and group offerings, and create spell-based creative practices that invite people to tend their lives with care and precision. My writing weaves together myth, power, grief, agency, and the ethics of attention. Language matters to me. Structure matters. So does breath.
I live and work at the edges of institutional time, shaped by chronic pain, care work, and a long devotion to slowness as a necessary practice rather than a preference.
Slow Magic is not about transcendence. It is about staying. About learning how to live in ongoing relationship with a world that answers back when we are willing to listen.
