Whether it’s feeling like you can’t get enough money, feeling like your relationships are always a mess, feeling like you have terrible luck, or just not being able to fix the problems that crop up in your life, not being in control sucks. It’s no wonder that new witches want to have the power and experience to fix these problems now!

Unfortunately, this can lead to cutting corners in a new witch’s education. I’ve seen plenty of witches try to skip past learning foundational skills because they felt like they needed to be focusing on something more advanced. I mean, if you need to get good at money spells yesterday, then what good is learning grounding really going to do for you? Or if you want to focus on love magic, do you really need to learn how to banish a spirit? Today, we’re going to take a look at exactly how this kind of skipping ahead can impact your craft long term and discuss a few ways that you can approach your magical goals instead.

Skipping The Basics?

First things first, can you actually skip the basics? Well, technically the answer is yes. You can skip past all the foundational skills that are recommended for most witches and go straight for the big guns. Nobody is going to stop you! I can’t reach through the screen and force you to learn anything that you don’t want to learn. This is one of the first great lessons of witchcraft. You are fully in control of your practice and your journey as a witch. This is both wonderful because you can learn whatever sparks your interest, and a huge responsibility because if you don’t structure your craft and education correctly, you might end up in some serious trouble. If witchcraft is a method of claiming power and control over your life, the process of learning witchcraft is like having training wheels while claiming power and control over your spiritual growth. You get to call the shots, but you also have to live with the decisions that you make.

You can skip straight past learning things like grounding, warding, and cleansing because they’re simply boring and you don’t feel like you have any real use for them right now. In my experience, most students want to go straight for the flashy spells. The spells that have the kinds of results that really move the needle, things like money spells, job spells, love spells, luck spells, etc. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting those things! That’s why most of us come to the craft in the first place. We want a sense of control. We want to be able to have the power to draw good things into our lives. But going straight for these flashy spells without learning any of the foundational skills of witchcraft is like eating nothing but sweets and never bothering with veggies and then wondering why you feel like crap all the time. There’s nothing wrong with a little indulgence here and there and giving yourself a treat, but if you need to have a solid foundation of healthy habits first if you want to feel good most of the time.

The Dangers Of Not Having A Foundation

In reality, skipping past the foundational skills of witchcraft is dangerous and gets messy fast. You may not think you need certain skills, but we call them foundational for a reason. Foundational skills are those that create a solid base for you to build the rest of your craft on top of. These are the skills that help keep you safe, that help keep your craft healthy, and that help you respond to emergencies and unexpected situations. You may not think that you need to know how to ground before casting a love spell, but what if after casting that love spell you feel exhausted, irritable, and like you want to cry? Would you even know that grounding is how you fix spell drop? No! You’re going to think that something went horribly wrong with your spell, that it didn’t work, that it rebounded on you, or is going to end up cursing you, and rather than being able to fix the relatively simple problem of a small energy imbalance you’re going to be focusing all of your energy on freaking out about not knowing what happened to your spell. This is not an idle example either. I counsel witches in this exact situation pretty regularly.

Luckily, in most of the cases that I have coming to me, there’s nothing truly wrong and I’m able to put their fears to rest and simply guide them towards the foundational practices that they need. Not everyone is this lucky, however. It’s quite possible to get way in over your head without even realizing it. What happens if you skip past foundational skills and then wind up in a situation where a spell you’ve cast has attracted the attention of a malicious spirit? If you don’t know the basics of defensive magic, will you know how to recognize a partial possession? If you’ve never learned how to cleanse properly, will you be able to recognize when you pick up tools or items that have negative energies or spirits attached to them?

The answer is no. In most cases, when a witch skips the basic foundations of magic, it’s like they’re walking around blind. Imagine sending a second grader to college and expecting them to know how to manage any part of their experience there. It would be insane! They wouldn’t even know how to get to the right classroom, let alone how to understand any of the material that they’re expected to learn. When you first enter the world of magic and witchcraft, you are adding a completely new dimension to your life experience. Expecting yourself to be able to navigate this new dimension easily right off the bat is insanity. You don’t even know the basic rules of this new dimension yet! If you landed on an alien planet today, would you feel comfortable walking around and interacting with any life form that you find, having absolutely no idea what kind of dangers are lurking out there? Of course not! You would want to observe everything from afar, you would want to collect data, you would want to figure out what other people who had visited that planet had done to stay safe. You would take your time and baby step your way into that crazy new experience. You should approach witchcraft the same way.

If we’re being real, the major danger of skipping foundational practices in witchcraft is that you just don’t know what you don’t know. Entering into this new spiritual dimension leaves you with a giant blind spot. You may have never experienced any part of this world before, so there’s no way for you to know what’s safe and what’s dangerous, what you need to know and what’s extraneous. You’re flying blind. Learning your foundational skills first is like giving yourself the guide book before traveling to a new country. You’re able to familiarize yourself with the customs, the common pitfalls, and dangers, and how to react in any major situation. You’re also able to learn about cool things that you wouldn’t otherwise have known about! Foundational practices aren’t just a way to prevent bad things from happening to you. They’re also how we create magical practices that truly add to our lives, improve our levels of happiness, and lead us to deep spiritual insights.

Why Do You Want To Skip Ahead Anyway?

If you’re still on the fence when it comes to getting serious about learning your foundational basics, I want you to ask yourself, “why do I want to skip ahead?” Do you actually want to learn witchcraft? Or do you want a feeling of superiority and power? This is a serious question! Many people who come to the craft want the end result of magic but don’t want to put in the time and effort it takes to get good at witchcraft. They want quick results. They want the get-rich-quick scheme of the magical world.

The truth is, if you want effective magic that can create real change in your life without having to go through the process of learning witchcraft, that’s available to you! You can simply pay a reputable practitioner to cast spells for you. There is a long and well-esteemed tradition of witches, sorcerers, and rootworkers selling their magic. But know that if you go that route, your power and control over your life are predicated on someone else’s skills. If you were paying someone else to work magic for you, you can only create magical change in your life to the degree that you have money available to pay for it. This is a trade-off that many people are willing to make and there is absolutely nothing wrong with choosing that route if it’s the one that’s right for you, but I want you to consider how much fuller and deeper your empowerment in your life can go if you take the time and effort to learn the craft for yourself.

So why do you want to skip ahead and not bother with the basics of witchcraft? Do you just want the effects of a single spell and to change one thing in your life immediately? Or do you want to build a skill set that will allow you to change your life and claim your power in any way that you need to for the rest of your life?

Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Right

Let’s be real. If you’re going to commit yourself to learning witchcraft, it’s going to take a certain amount of time to do that and to do it well. Skipping ahead and not bothering to learn the basics does not make that process take any less time. It simply means that you are learning things out of order and are potentially creating new and unnecessary problems for yourself. This can actually make the process of learning witchcraft take longer! Yeah, you read that right. By skipping the foundational skills of witchcraft, you are creating problems for yourself in the future that will set you back and force you to spend even more time getting where you want to go.

What sounds like it takes less time? Haphazardly learning things and skipping around and ending up encountering magical problems that you have no idea how to handle so that you have to waste a bunch of time combing through resources, freaking out about the problem, and trying to find a solution when you’re not even really sure what the problem is exactly, or taking the time upfront to learn the necessary skills that you need to tackle problems quickly and efficiently when they arise? I know what I would prefer! This is why people like me do what we do. I have two decades of experience that I can resource to help new practitioners get their footing quickly. You don’t have to grope around in the dark and feel like you have no idea what you’re doing and figure out everything through first-hand experience because you have experienced practitioners who have done it all before and who are here to help. We have done it all, we have seen it all, and we can boil it down to the essentials so that you can start your craft with the exact toolbox that you need to be successful.

In next week’s blog post, we’re going to go to dive into the exact steps that a beginner witch should take to avoid these pitfalls and start their witchcraft journey on the right foot.

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Updated on August 19, 2023 by Avery Hart