My question now is - what do you do post spell work? Post ritual work - I usually chill with friends, but we don't usually do heavy ritual or workings. I'm curious to know what you all do, especially if you feel drained or otherwise unusual (or even just normal).
How insistent I am about some of these steps depends on how energetic the work was (more intense ritual work means doing all of them thoroughly.)
Very mild stuff - light ongoing workings - might mean very little aftercare or that each of these steps except the 'sit down and eat' may only take a minute or so. But I'm pulling them out separately because that might be handy.)
Same day: 1) End of ritual:
Close down the ritual space, using the opening of the circle as the first piece in stepping back into physical reality, ordinary flow of time and space.
In general centering and grounding is usually a part of the tail of the ritual.
2) Immediate needs: About 5 minutes.
Pause if necessary for something to drink, immediate physical needs (bathroom, meds, etc.) Give people a chance to write down any notes from the ritual they want to remember.
3) Libations and final ritual bits: About 5 minutes.
Take any libations that are going outside outside, and make them. If there were items on the altar for charging or in the center of the ritual space, or whatever, make sure those get taken and put with people's own stuff, or in the place where they're going.
4) Make it safe to leave the ritual space. 5-10 minutes.
If there is leftover bread, wine, or other food that needs to get eaten post ritual, make sure it gets to the other food. Rinse the chalice out. Make sure candles are out, cats can not put their tails in melted wax, that anything that might easily be knocked over is put somewhere it can't be, etc.
5) Food! Prep is usually 10 minutes, may overlap with #4 if there's enough people.
Do any final prep steps. Put food out, make sure there are serving utensils and plates and so on. Make sure people know where the rest of the ritual bread is.
Food is grounding. Food is good for social. For group rituals, we've generally done a potluck. (For very small group - 2 or 3 people - we've usually done a slightly more structured "I'll make X, you bring a side that goes with it, you bring dessert" type thing, with the person who's hosting usually doing the more entree dish because it's usually easier. But basically, whatever works.)
For very intense rituals (initiations) going out to a restaurant afterwards is a possible option: you get food, no one has to focus on cooking, and being in a mainstream non-ritual space also helps with the grounding.
6) Debrief, but with some specific limitations: 30-60 minutes or more
Normally we don't talk too much about specific magical workings of the ritual, or about things that did or didn't work in terms of ritual architecture / flow / more theoretical stuff. (This is where 'to keep silent' is a thing for me: it's important to give the working time to cook without poking at the results.)
We might talk about experiences, emotional responses people want to discuss, things that came up in ritual that are worth talking about, etc. Eventually, the conversation wanders to other topics. (as noted this stage basically runs until everyone is done with talking and food and/or has to go home.)
7) Check in on grounding / etc. About 5 minutes unless someone needs longer.
Basically, this is 'is the person safe to get home and not going to have big issues once they do' check. Especially important if there's been intense ritual work, or big emotional stuff coming up, but also worth being deliberate about checking for people who've just done a new ritual step or used a new skill, or done magical work they care about a lot, etc.
Rebalance : Rest of the evening.
Spend the rest of that day doing things that encourage grounding and rebalancing. Listening to trance-inducing music is enjoyable, but perhaps not optimal here. (Listening to NPR usually works well for me, or podcasts about interesting but not magical non-fiction topics). Some people find a little housecleaning works great, other people trance out doing the dishes.
In the next day Clean up and put away ritual items
Some people do this post-ritual. Some people leave this for a day (except for the stuff that really needs cleaning like cleaning out the chalice) which is usually me these days because stamina is an issue.
9) Personal notes on the ritual/magical work
My eyes only, but notes on what I think now I've slept on it. (I do notes when I wake up, if I remember a dream, which is very rare for me, but otherwise do notes sometime that day.)
Sometime more than 3 days after10) Any further analysis of ritual or methods
This is where the technical, critical, etc. conversation about "how did that thing we did work" - long enough after that immediate emotions have had time to settle, that we could sleep on it. (Sometimes things that felt weird at the time make a lot more sense after sleep, or it's easier to see why something went weird.)
Also, people are less emotionally tied up in their performance in the ritual with a little more space, so it's easier to do a "If you did X thing this other way next time, I think it would work better." more usefully.
Other later pointsFor really major rituals (initiations) or magical work, I make a point of checking in daily for a week (any notes about stuff going on), weekly through a month, and then try to remember to check back in 6 months and a year. Especially useful if I'm doing a big thing where I don't know what the long term effects might look like, like things that shift pieces of identity, long-term habits, etc.
I usually try to do some free-writing sort of journalling for these even if I don't really feel like it, or at least make sure I've got general daily stuff covered in my various online posts.