There are plenty of blogs, videos and interviews that always ask “what are your best tips for beginners?” Every time I hear it, I want to burst through the wall like the cool-aid guy and say “OH NO!” Not because I hate beginners—we all were once—but because the advice that usually follows is feel-good motivational garbage that leaves practitioners as perpetual beginners. Worse, no one has properly defined what a beginner and non-beginner actually are.
To suggest a beginner is someone who has no knowledge and experience in magic and an advanced practitioner is someone who supposedly has all the experience and knowledge in magic, leaves a massive amount of middleground and much to be desired from their descriptions. It is lazy thinking dressed up as wisdom and it keeps people stuck in cycles that never build real power.
Here I will give you a roadmap of how to go from Beginner to Advanced using tangible principles instead of motivational “rah-rah” and a list of techniques that have you punching at air.
The Beginner Practitioner: Learning to See Differently
A beginner practitioner is a person learning to grasp a magical and spiritual worldview in order to expand and better their lives. They approach magical theory in the broadest sense possible. They are exploring, experimenting and figuring out what this whole thing even means. Most importantly, they do not have command over their psychic faculties in a way that can compel results—even if they have raw potential screaming beneath the surface.
This is not an insult. This is simply where everyone starts. You don’t know what you don’t know yet. Your third eye might crack open during meditation one day and slam shut the next. Your energy work feels inconsistent. Your first ritual worked and your second, third and fourth were duds and you have no idea why. You are building the foundation, which means you are also building in the dark.
Pitfalls at the Beginner Stage
The biggest trap beginners fall into is expecting results quickly. Magic is not a microwave. It is not an app you download that instantly optimizes your life. It is a skillset and like any skillset, it requires repetition, failure, adjustment and more repetition. If you approach magic expecting instant manifestation because some TikTok witch told you that you are a powerful creator, you are setting yourself up for disappointment and burnout.
The second pitfall is getting over the cultural stereotypes of magic while not breaking away from religious dogma. You might be drawn to magic because it feels rebellious, but if you are still carrying around guilt from your Catholic upbringing or fear of damnation from your evangelical roots, you are going to sabotage yourself. Magic requires you to shift your cosmology entirely. You cannot have one foot in the church pew and one foot in the ritual chamber and expect either to work properly (see my article “Born Into Brujeria” for what I mean by this).
What Beginners Should Actually Do
Find ways to get safe and repeatable repetitions, then do a ton of repetitions over and over again to get better. It is called a practice for a reason.
This is not sexy advice. This is not Instagram-worthy. But it is the truth. If you want to develop clairvoyance, you need to practice visualization exercises every single day until your inner vision becomes sharp and stable. If you want to do energy work, you need to practice moving energy through your body a lot. I say a lot because you do not have to master anything at this stage but you do have to get somewhat comfortable with performing these skills. If you want to cast effective spells, you need to cast spells—lots of them—and track your results to some degree so you can see what moves the needle.
Stop chasing the next shiny technique. But do research broadly to get an OVERALL picture of magic, manifestation and the occult. Pick simple techniques, do them consistently and build competence. Competence creates confidence. Confidence creates results.
The Intermediate Practitioner: The Sampler Phase
An intermediate practitioner is a person who has developed a working proficiency with their fundamental psychic faculties (even if they are not flawless) and has now started branching out into various modalities of magic. This ranges from everything—forms of spirit magic, energetic magic, sympathetic magic and different cultural interpretations of magic. They may experiment with Vedic meditation while also spending separate time with grimoires or Quimbanda. They may smudge sage one day while doing Tarot and Runes another day. There are a multitude of ways this could go.
This is the sampler phase where practitioners acquire basic experience from an array of skills and traditions. You have moved beyond the beginner stage because you can actually do things now. Your rituals produce results. Your energy work is consistent. Your divination is accurate more often than not. You have proven to yourself that magic is real and now you want to explore the full buffet of what is available.
This stage is intoxicating. You feel powerful because you are powerful—at least compared to where you were. You can walk into a metaphysical shop and actually understand what half the products are for. You can hold your own in conversations with other practitioners. You have stories to tell about spirits you have worked with, spells that manifested and synchronicities that knocked you on your ass.
Pitfalls at the Intermediate Stage
The trap at this stage is thinking “more is better.” Many intermediate practitioners mistake a broad range of techniques done at a mediocre level as adepthood. They collect systems like Pokemon cards. They brag about how many traditions they have studied, how many spirits they have called, how many modalities they have tried. But breadth without depth is just spiritual tourism.
CLICHÉ ALERT: A lack of focus leads to being a jack of all trades but master of none. Many people get stuck here because they think these are signs of mastery and they are better than beginners—which they are—but it is really being a big fish in a small pond. You might be impressive to beginners, but you are not an adept. Not yet.
What Intermediate Practitioners Should Actually Do
Find out what you like and are good at, then double down and focus on that.
You may be “okay” at several things, but the things you are genuinely good at need further sharpening and that can only happen when you make the choice to commit and specialize for the highest leverage techniques that work for you. The whole point of the intermediate stage is to sample a bunch of different approaches in order to find out what you want to commit to.
Pay attention to what comes naturally. Pay attention to what produces consistent results. Pay attention to what excites you enough that you want to practice it even when you are tired, even when you are busy, even when you are not getting immediate results. That is your signal. That is the thread you pull.
Specialization is not limiting yourself. Specialization is sharpening the blade. A sword that tries to be a hammer, a spear and a shield all at once is useless. A sword that is honed to perfection can cut through damn near anything.
The Advanced Practitioner: The Systems Specialist
An advanced practitioner is a person who has become a systems specialist, meaning they have a go-to system of magic that can reliably manifest results ranging from small to big matters. System specialization can come in a variety of ways.
It can mean being highly advanced at energy work that crosses cultures, such as performing reliably with both Chakra and Reiki systems or simply getting really good at just one of them. It could mean being really good with only one grimoire such as the Greater Key of Solomon but never pursuing the other books within the Solomonic canon. Or it could mean committing to the entire paradigm of Solomonic Magic, tying together the continuity and techniques of all the appropriate material. A person may be an expert medium or channeler instead of formally evoking massive spirits. A practitioner might specialize in rootwork and hoodoo to the exclusion of all other traditions and that specialization makes them devastatingly effective.
For example, there are many forms of Mayan magic—I typically recognize ten different types. But I focused my energy on two: Deity work and Cosmology, for the longest time and in dire situations. They are my specialties amongst the other forms of Mayan magic. I now have a pro-level of performance in the others, but for a prolonged period of time I focused on the aforementioned to develop my advanced skills. Even today when it matters, when the stakes are high, I return to preferred weapons of choice so-to-speak.
Advanced practitioners have moved beyond experimenting. They have a framework that works, and they have refined that framework through hundreds or thousands of repetitions. They know their system intimately. They know its strengths, its limitations, its quirks and its edges. They can troubleshoot when something goes wrong. They can improvise within the structure because they understand the principles at a deep level.
Pitfalls at the Advanced Stage
Due to reliable results, it is common for advanced practitioners to develop a thought pattern that their preferred system is the best. Their judgment is informed from trying several forms of magic in the intermediate stage and comparing the results of their preferred system to others and seeing a clear advantage. It can also come from the lore, hype and zeitgeist surrounding a system (looking at you, ceremonial bros) as justification for having the ultimate magical formula.
What they fail to realize is that they have had significantly better results with their preferred system over others because of several cohesive reasons specific to them. Without enough cross-training with different kinds of practitioners, they fail to see that different people respond to different stimuli much like how different athletes have different talents that may or may not cross over well to other sports.
While I will agree some forms of magic have a higher ceiling or a higher base amount of power, that does not mean those levels are accessible at any given time or condition. A well-seasoned energy practitioner can outperform a massive spirit evocation at times. This is because energy work is more readily deployable than the average spirit relationship. In this example, volume and precision can beat out the more complicated spirit relationship. High performance should not be evaluated simply in a vacuum.
Magic is contextual. What works for you might not work for someone else with the same level of skill and dedication. What works in one situation might be overkill or underpowered in another. Advanced practitioners who recognize this remain effective and continue to grow. Advanced practitioners who do not recognize this become dogmatic, rigid and eventually stagnant.
What Advanced Practitioners Should Actually Do
Accept that different practitioners can leverage different systems better than others, therefore no system is absolutely better than the others. This is the time to seek out others for meaningful cross-training and comparative analysis.
Talk to practitioners in other traditions. Compare notes. Ask questions. Be willing to admit when someone else’s approach is more elegant or effective for a particular problem. This is not weakness. This is mastery recognizing mastery or “real recognizing real,” as the kids like to say. The advanced practitioner who isolates themselves in their own system becomes brittle. The advanced practitioner who remains curious and collaborative continues to evolve.
You do not need to adopt every technique you encounter, but you should understand why other practitioners get results with methods that are different from yours. This deepens your comprehension of magic as a whole and prevents you from falling into the trap of thinking your way is the only way.
The Path Forward
I do believe there are definable levels above Advanced, but I will leave that for another time. For now, if you are a beginner, focus on building competence through relentless repetitions. If you are intermediate, stop collecting and start specializing. If you are advanced, stay humble and stay curious.
This roadmap is not meant to rush you. You will spend years at each stage if you are doing it right. But it will keep you from spinning your wheels, chasing trends and falling for advice that sounds good but leaves you exactly where you started.
Magic is real. It works. But it works through discipline, focus and honest self-assessment. Not through motivation, not through collecting techniques and not through pretending you are more advanced than you actually are.
Do the work. Track your results. Be honest about where you are. And keep moving forward.
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