My first experience with a teacher

I've only worked with a couple of people as teachers during my magical practice. None of the experiences were positive enough for me to keep looking and I came to the conclusion that I was better suited to teach myself and better suited to understand what I needed to learn. I still feel that way to this day. My first teacher was a fellow student in my high school. He was learning Shamanism (whether self-taught or taught by someone else I can't recall). He was half native American, but he didn't seem to mind that I wanted to learn. I'd met him shortly after I started practicing. Our student-teacher relationship didn't last long...perhaps a week or two. He recommended a few books and taught me a couple of exercises. I diligently reported back to him and then...

He called me up one day and told me he couldn't teach me magic and I shouldn't practice magic at all. When I asked why, he told me (drum rolls please): You have no soul! I'm not making this up and to this day it still amuses me because it was such a teenager thing to say. At the time, I was stunned, and hung up and momentarily thought about giving up the magic. Then I came to the conclusion that he feel threatened by me, and that inspired me. If he felt so threatened, I'd just have to show him there was good reason for it. Plus anytime someone has told me not to do something I want to do, it just makes me determined to prove the person wrong. This was no exception. I also figured I still had a soul.

I began reading even more books and doing the exercises in them and just practicing everyday, determined to prove to this person I could do magic better than he. It was admittedly a juvenile reason to practice magic, but I was a teenager and that's what motivated me then. And before long I felt I had surpassed him. I was diligent in my studies and I did everything I could to apply magic to my life. He and I never talked about what he'd said, but I could tell he knew I was still practicing.

I learned a really important lesson from him. Don't believe what anyone tells you about yourself or your fitness to do anything, until you've tested it yourself. To this day, its still a lesson I live by and one I try to pass on to my readers and the occasional person I take on as a student.

Do you know why you're doing that magical process?

"In these endeavors we do not need to know HOW magic works, only that it does. We prove this by doing the work, recording the results and sharing our information with other magicians" -- Grant Morrison I have always found these two sentences to be contradictory. It seems to me that if you want to do the work, record results, and share information, you necessarily do need to know how magic works. If you don't know how it works, how can you really know if it worked at all? For that matter, I also think you need to know why you're doing a magical process, spell, or working.

Why?

From my own experience, it seems that when you understand your personal readings for doing any kind of activity, it makes it that much easier to do the activity consistently, as well as get results that you want from it. When you don't know why you're doing something, not all of you is fully behind doing it. If you don't understand the benefit of doing an activity, then even when you do it, you won't really know if it's actually gotten what you wanted from it.

Knowing why and how to do something is essential for understanding the value of it within your life. It's not enough to simply do it, if you don't understand where that activity fits into the living of your life.