13 Tips For Being the Best Witch You Can Be

1. Cultivate “don’t-know” mind. I mean really cultivate it. Don’t give lip service to “I don’t know” because it makes you sound enlightened; really, really embrace not knowing. To paraphrase a Buddhist saying: if you meet the Goddess, kill her.

2. Challenge all dogma, including (especially) that espoused by those whose practices look the most like yours. Explore heresies. What makes an idea threatening? Whom does it threaten? Whom does it empower? Break open the ideas that have become calcified; step into the places that others claim are forbidden. You don’t have to love what you find. But how will you ever know what’s there unless you take a peek?

3. Talk to your plants. At least try it once. Never scoff at something you haven’t tried.

4. Try to find a day job you like at least a little. I know it’s not always possible. But you don’t want to put too much pressure on your Witchcraft to make up for the hours you lose at your crummy job, because your Witchcraft will not always be wonderful and important and life-changing and fun.

5. See the moon as the face of the Goddess or the cosmic egg or Diana’s bow if those images speak to you, but make sure you also see the object orbiting the Earth 238,900 miles away. That reality is just as breathtaking as the reality of myth.

6. When you sit down to dinner, thank your dinner. You can thank a deity too, but always thank the dinner. The spinach, the soybean, the chicken, the wheat. Thank them.

7. Spend at least a little time around children. Help out when a friend has a newborn. Babysit once in awhile. Understand your connection to the generations to come.

8. When you see the emperor wearing no clothes, call that shit out. Because if you don’t, who will? This job falls to the Witch.

9. Make friends with ugliness and discomfort. Don’t shy away from beauty and bliss.

10. The moment you try to convince people that something unseen is “real,” you’ve completely lost the point of the unseen. Trying to force people to see what you see in the way that you see it is like trying to recite a Shakespearean sonnet in a game of charades. The results will only ever be hilarious.

11. Learn how to make a nice cup of herbal tea, but also learn how to make a good strong cup of coffee.

12. Keep an eye out for paradoxes–they’re often where the most sacred truths lie. If your practice insists that something can never be one thing because it is another thing, then that practice is shallow and rife with wasted potential.

13. Don’t believe everything you read on some blog. After all, what do I know? I’m just another Witch.

Isn’t that a liberating thought?