intention — Jess Blog — Jessica Luibrand

Why create an altar?

We create altars for many reasons:

As a space for focus & meditation
To conjure something into our life - like peace, abundance, love, or protection
For manifestation
To honor something - like our ancestors or nature
For ritual
To help us release.

Note: There is no ‘right away’ to create an altar as it is a deeply intuitive and individual journey - here I will share with you my personal process.

Before we begin our altar creation it is a good idea to get clarity on your intentions + purpose.

cleanse space

When I am creating an altar I usually do it with a specific intention during a celestial event. My most recent altar I created for Beltane - the midway point between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice. I had a few people reach out and ask me about it and that inspired this blog.

I like to cleanse my space where I am building my altar through the sound of om, crystal bowls, koshi chimes OR with smoke, incense, and fire.

gather 5 elements + build altar

When I create an altar I like to have all five elements represented - earth, water, air, fire and aether (or plasma).

For earth I use: crystals, bones, pieces of wood, herbs, flowers and snake symbolism. I always have snake symbolism in my altar creation for the qualities snakes represent - shedding skin, transformation and wisdom. The earth aspect of my altar invokes feelings of grounding, support and symbolizes abundance, wealth and success.

For air I use a feather and say my intentions out loud, to be carried on the wind up into the heavens - much like the method of prayer flags. Honoring the air element symbolizes intellect, ideas, imagination.

For fire: I light a candle to conjure health, passion, enthusiasm, courage, adventure and life.

For water: I collect rainwater - if you are in a dry area you can take water and bless it with your hands or sacred sounds (chanting, om-ing, crystal bowls, etc). Water symbolizes emotion, intuition, psychic abilities and clairvoyance.

For aether or plasma I use a Lichtenberg figure which was a gift from a friend of mine. It is an acrylic ball shocked by electricity which creates a lightening fractal running through it.

Other things I’ll place on my altar:

Meaningful items like gifts or statues of deities
Actual physical money
Tokens, like a scarab from Egypt, or a protecting eye
Jewelry that I wear - to cleanse and to conjure
Pictures / names of people I want included
Items based on intentions, colors or seasons
Written Mantras, or spells

The way I build my altar is very intuitive, and it is my opinion that however you build your altar is best for you. All my altars are different but they follow a general idea.

Some crystals point in toward the center if they symbolize what I want to draw in - like citrine pulling in energy for abundance.
Some crystals point out to ground energy - like tourmaline or shunguuite.
Some crystals point up to release energy out and away - like quartz to create a ‘vent’ of energy, in my mind this creates a movement much like breathing.

You will notice when you create your altar and place significant items & crystals around it that some will ‘want’ to be turned in, out, up or down. This is part of the creative and intuitive process :)

CONJURE / manifest / pray

After I have built my altar it is time to sit with it. I thank the natural kingdom + cardinal directions and I focus on my intention. I meditate, allowing my mind to become blank fills it with solutions.

I pray saying thank you, I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, and I cast spells. I ask for guidance from my guides, I sit with the older and younger version of myself. I manifest the things I want in my life, I revisit my intentions and speak my affirmations.

Release ritual

It is my opinion that altars become conscious organisms with the proper intention & ingredients. So, when I am done with this whole process I use different stones to point/send any excess energy out an actual window. This way the process becomes self sufficient after I am finished; it completes whatever other intentions it has and then releases itself when it feels finished.

Simplified Steps to create your altar

Set intentions
Cleanse space with fire / smoke / incense /sound
Gather tokens / amulets / crystals / things from environment
Build altar
Pray / meditate / cast spells (it’s all the same magic ;)
Release ritual

Personal note: Let me know what you thought of this blog by messaging me! I would love to see a picture of your altar if you were open to sharing!

Thank you for asking, I would love to talk about this as it’s a question I get so often.

As a Cancerian girl growing up in Michigan around the Great Lakes, water, specifically rivers, lakes, and streams were an important part of my childhood AND I grew up with a creek behind my parent’s house. Every year my family camped on Lake Huron since I was 5 years old, we camped on the Canadian side so every night I watched the sun set over the water, Michigan invisible on the horizon.

As I’ve written about before, my dad blessed my childhood with divination tools like Tarot, Numerology and Astrology. I already had a curious mind about all things “woo” and mysterious so this found me traveling down different windy roads with topics like spiritualism, Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, quantum physics, and this eventually (as all things do) lead me to the subject of water.

I was a voracious reader and one fateful day I came upon Dr Emoto’s Hidden Messages in Water at 16 years old. Dr Emoto was a Japanese researcher who’s focus was intention and he wrote about different experiments in this book.

In one experiment they put 3 plants in a closet (in order to avoid sunlight as a variable). They watered these plants every day but for Plant 1 - the intention was to speak good things to it. For Plant 2 - the intention was to speak negative things to it and for Plant 3 - the intention was to ignore it.

Guess which plant died?

The plant that was ignored.

This blew my tiny teenage brain.

I learned an ancient truth: there is so much power in intention.

… The book carried on.

Dr Emoto and his team did experiments with water and intention where they would take water from the same source (to avoid variable) and poured the water in different glasses and taped a range of intentions to the different glasses. These intentions were across a spectrum, from “love” and “compassion” all the way to “hate” and “greed.” The researchers would freeze the water and image the crystals with microscopic photography.

What did they find?!

The researches found that the water in glasses with loving intentions taped to it formed beautiful crystals, and the glasses of water that had negative intentions taped to it had trouble forming crystals all together, they looked almost deformed.

Teenage Jess’s mind was blown again, and, as a creative person who had always used their outward appearance as their creative expression I had come to learn another truth.

If you have an intention and you wish it upon water, that water will hold and carry that intention.

My brain immediately linked “intention,” “ink,” and “water” to tattoos on the skin. ‘Maybe this is why our ancestors, who knew so much about the stars, and had rituals and ceremonies and walkabouts, maybe this is why they had been found, discovered and unburied with tattoos inked into their skin,’ teenage Jess pondered, creating the connection between tattoos and ancient civilizations. (Not surprisingly, I grew up with an interest in the mysteries of the world, like the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, Lemuria, Egypt; until growing up I realized all places are mysterious and magical, they’re just waiting for their magic to be rediscovered.)

Another fellow tattooed person, after hearing my reasoning, had a similar thought and said to me “When I started getting tattoos, it mostly felt like they were just being uncovered, rather than inked on.”

(continued after picture…)

I realized that maybe, just maybe, if I intended something… created an image of that intention, and that magic that intention contained… and inked it into my skin… could I actually change the frequency of my body, which is water and therefore holds memory?

If I ink something ancient, like the Flower of Life, the Sri Yantra, or perhaps the Unalome… does that match my frequency with the intention of that symbol, that has been revered, respected, for millenia?

Does that literally, metaphorically or even metaphysically invoke the power that the symbol has held for me and/or my life?

Can I literally harness the magic and power of the universe through intention, ink and water?

Teenage Jess cried “YES!” Twenty-year old Jess agreed and 30 something Jess still agrees, and not only that, but is so proud of Teenage Jess for making that discovery for herself and committing to it.

My life has always been magic, and will continue to be nothing less than magic; maybe it’s not necessarily because of the “ink,” but it’s definitely linked to “water,” and 100% because of “intention.”

Very special shout out to Janice Rodriguez for taking the time, one fateful night & stepping up to the task of counting all my tattoos - she counted 65, with room for error <3

How to build an altar