Keeping a Record
The worst non-spell mistake in my practice has been my notorious bad habit of not keeping a record. I can't tell you how many times I've poured over my old notes looking for a recipe of something I have in a jar so I can reverse engineer what I did and figure out the energy and intent 100% behind it, because what I wrote on it was vague like, ‘protection’... Protection how, Dmitri? I just want to charge the dang thing, but now I have to rely on vague ‘protection' instead of what I actually put into it, or I want to give someone the recipe of something that worked well for me, and I can't. In these cases I almost always wind up muttering to myself that I should have written it down.
As I've gotten older and started making more complex concoctions, I've started writing things down more. The ideal place to write them down would be a notebook meant specifically for these magical recipes, dates, actions, etc., to keep that record. In real practice, though, I find myself keeping my notes in a notebook, in the notes app on my phone, in my witchcraft discord server, on Google docs, and yapping about it to other witches in my circles on social media.
On the one hand, its less rigid and more realistic to do it this way, making me feel less ashamed about not toting my notebook around all the time. On the other hand, it's hard to find anything because I don't know where I put it, and I usually just run across something instead of seeking it out. I am currently in the process of trying to compile everything into one location, all of my information about witchcraft goes in this document/book, and I have another that is just all of the spells that I do, ingredients that I gather, and sub information about all of that.
I'm not going to lie or sugarcoat it, keeping a well-informed comprehensive record of what you are doing is time consuming, tedious, boring, and sometimes feels like it is interrupting the flow of the work that you're trying to do. I find this to be a small price to pay in comparison to the frustration that I experience in just trying to find what the heck I used this mystery powder for, or what this mystery ingredient is that I feel like I've never seen before.
Some practitioners refuse to write down what they're doing in the middle of their practice finding that it disrupts their focus, attention, and energy far too much for them to feel like they are effectively performing the spell that they are trying to perform. They will either write down what they want to do at the beginning, or they'll write down what they did at the end, or some people will write it down at the beginning and then make annotations at the end about what they changed because it's also unrealistic to expect that it will never change from the outline. Things we don't expect to happen will happen all the time. Being incredibly rigid about what must be done in what specific order just doesn't work for me because of this. Some practitioners find it works for the , and they usually migrate to rigid, rule-heavy ceremonial practices like hermeticism or Solomonic magic.
If there is nothing else that you take away from this book, I only hope that you take away two things. 1. Continue to learn, all the things, even the stuff that you don't want to practice because having that information can drastically change how you do things and 2. Keep a record of what you do. Future you will appreciate it.
