I’m sure we all had one of these awakening moments where we knew or saw magick working. When we knew there was more than the physical world in front of our faces.
Was there a specific moment when something shifted for you and coincidence just stopped feeling like a good explanation?
Any kind of experience is welcome. I’m curious what that turning point actually looked like in your own practice, the shape of it, the feel.
And if you’re comfortable sharing, I’d also love to hear what working you were doing at the time, whether it was candle, cord, divination or something else entirely.
For me, I’d stumbled into a book on Wicca (I can’t even remember which one it was at this point; my bookshelf has so many), and I tried a very simple ritual. It was a small tweak to something within the first couple of chapters of the book (I didn’t know you were supposed to write your own spells at the time). I didn’t really think anything would come of it but within the next couple of days things were… Well, my whole life changed. Very much for the better.
There wasn’t a flash or a bang, but I felt the energy as I completed the ritual, and my dreams that night didn’t feel like dreams; it was like I could see the outcome (that did come later that week).
I think a little bit of me inwardly had been hoping for a clash of thunder or a flash of energy or items in my room starting to levitate or something. It wasn’t Hollywood but it was real.
Ha, yeah, that Hollywood expectation is real. Most of us start out hoping for something dramatic and end up with something that wouldn’t look good on camera but usually rocks our world.
My first real ritual was a simple candle working. What convinced me wasn’t a vision or anything flashy, it was the temperature. A solid circle warms up noticeably while you’re in it. Then when you release it, the air cools down fast, like within seconds. That was the part that I knew it wasn’t just in my head. This was the middle of summer, and I couldn’t get that kind of temperature change even by blasting the AC.
The energy you felt at the end of your ritual sounds like the same thing. Some people get warmth, some get that pressure in the chest or a buzz in their arms. It’s subtle but unmistakable once you’ve felt it.
I’ve had the dreams too, but not on my first spell. Those rituals that bleed into sleep often feel heavier, like the work is still running in the background. I’ve had a few of those and they usually lined up with something that actually happened within a few days.
After a while you stop looking for fireworks. The quiet, specific shifts are what stick with you. Mine was back in '08 and I can still remember exactly how the room felt.
Prophetic dreams after a ritual are probably one of the clearest signs that something actually happened. They don’t fade like normal dreams. They stick with you. If you wake up the next morning and your immediate thought is your spell from the day before… that’s probably a good sign.
My first real working was a simple protection rite with herbs and a black candle. I went to bed thinking I’d probably just burned some stuff for no reason. That night I dreamed about the person I was worried about walking up to a door they couldn’t open. A week later they moved away for completely unrelated reasons. It played out exactly like the dream.
The craft tends to pull dreams in once you start practicing. If you don’t already, keep a notebook by the bed. The patterns show up fast. The quiet way it happened matters too. Yours came through as a feeling that led to a dream and then a real change. That’s pretty classic.
Mine was a road-opener spell. Took me about four days to stop trying to explain it away.
I had been stuck, job hunt going nowhere, apartment about to fall apart. Did a simple working with a key, a yellow candle, some oil I’d made the summer before. Nothing from a book, just bits I’d pulled together. When I finished, I didn’t feel anything special.
I think I probably felt a bit deflated. If I’m honest, I was probably expecting a flash of lightning across the sky or my windows being blown in. Yep, I watched Charmed as a kid.
Then things started stacking. I think I’d all but forgotten about the spell attempt because it all got so busy so quickly.
A recruiter messaged about a job I hadn’t applied for. The landlord called saying the issue was resolved. Ran into someone I hadn’t seen in three years who told me about a sublet that worked out. Five things in under a week, all pointing the same way. One coincidence you can brush off. By the fifth, I was laughing in my kitchen because there was no other explanation left.
Tweaking the spell is what makes the difference. It puts your own weight into it instead of borrowing someone else’s, which is why it usually works better than copying straight from a book. I think you also get a better sign that it’s worked at that point because you’re more in-tune with the working rather than just copying.
Since then.. I have had spells with much more obvious and immediate signs but this was my FIRST.
I think when you first start your practice, you get a lot more… surprise. You get a lot more excitement, but then you also try to convince yourself that it was a coincidence or wishful thinking. You keep managing bigger and bigger things and I think you somehow keep convincing yourself it was conincidence until.. your practice is just part of your life.
My grandmother always used to say, “when the spirits speak, you listen” but I think it does take a while for us to become really able to see spells working. Probably worse and worse in the modern day. People are soo out of tune with seeing any kind of spiritual work they just stare at their phones all day.
I don’t cast spells very often, not specific rituals for a specific outcome but every time I have (maybe once or twice a year on average), I see a visual result right away.
My spellwork has pretty much always been like that since I started 16 years ago, with clear intent and quick results. I don’t cast often, but when I do, things just move.
That moment when the spell actually works but not quite how you expected.
I know exactly what you mean. I tried a “kiss me” spell from some free spell site back in high school, red candle, lipstick, piece of paper, on a girl I couldn’t even talk to. The next day she froze when she saw me, walked straight over, and hugged me out of nowhere. We ended up close friends. Never dated though; I spelled myself right into the friend zone, apparently.
But that was it for me. Something happened. Been hooked ever since. Check out The Witch’s Shield by Christopher Penczak if you want to know more about why spells sometimes turn out differently than planned. He talks about intention versus outcome.
Am I the only one who didn’t start with a spell or ritual? For me it was just semi-passive manifestation and then I graduated on to spellwork far later but by then I’d already seen the effects.
Within a week of daily abundance work, I’d landed a new job that doubled my income with fewer hours, and fallen for my boss’s daughter. Still do them every day and they keep delivering.
My awakening moment was pure Aries energy, raw unfiltered rage directed straight at the moon after my dad passed. I was a preteen who’d tried everything with zero results. Then one drunk night at the graveyard in a suit I just started screaming at the sky. “Fuck you, fuck God, fuck all of this.”
And of course that’s when I saw a spell work. I think there’s something about emotion, whether it’s internal, like within you or external, like within a storm (for example), that makes it very easy to connect with nature or any kind of energy. I wonder if anyone else’s practice only clicked after they stopped being polite about it. Maybe the universe responds to that Mars-ruled directness more than carefully crafted rituals.
Two decades later my practice is way more chill but that breakthrough required me basically throwing a cosmic tantrum.
Oh, my experience was very different from other people’s it seems.
I was enthralled by witchcraft. I dove deep and read everything I could. It’s all I wanted to talk about, even though I never saw any of my rituals work at first. It’s weird because I don’t think I’m normally a very patient person, but I never grew impatient with this.
I just kept practicing. Kept learning. I got involved with a coven and that really helped but still took a while.
I had people in my life who were… let’s just say very far from supportive of my practice. Turns out the second I removed myself from that situation, I immediately saw my magick working. Basically the same day. Spells that used to take forever started landing within days once I stopped carrying all that doubt and old baggage around. Things move way faster when you’re not fighting your own energy the whole time.
Sometimes the land just does the work for you. Or at least that’s been my experience. I moved to Ireland for a bit and never cast a single spell, never did a ritual, nothing, but I felt it anyway. The magic was already there, in the ground, in the air, just present.
So I guess I had the opposite experience. By the time I actually tried to cast something with intention, I just… knew it was going to work. There wasn’t any doubt.
What I find odd is that when I do workings for myself, they rarely manifest, but when I do them for others, it works every time. I know that a lot of practices have rules for this but I’ve always wondered if that applies to everyone. I know people who resonate with chaos magick a lot and they seem to cast for their own benefit without problems.
My boyfriend was panicking over a massive tax bill from his employer’s mistake, and the morning after I wrote my intention on a bay leaf his accountant called to say he was actually getting a refund.
Ward. Mine was a ward, weirdly enough. Nothing happened… but that was kind of the whole point.
To be clear… my house had a lot of weird bumps and noises. There were some… weird experiences and it kept happening. I started researching how I could get a handle on the situation and that led me to the ward.
The first night it went down nothing happened. And I mean that in a good way! The activity (whatever it was) stopped.
My first unmistakable one was a lost-object working. Sounds tiny, I know, until you’re tearing the house apart for something sentimental, so it didn’t feel small at the time, and that led me to where I am now in my practice.
I used a pendulum over a rough floor plan and got pulled toward a room I had already checked twice (twice!), and there it was: my grandmother’s ring, tucked inside the lining of an old purse.
Now I’ve done a lot more with my practice and sometimes the results are a lot more… obvious but I’ll never forget finding that ring against all the odds.
(Hah! Yes, I did a locator spell to find a contact lens that had fallen out somewhere on a beach before. Imagine the odds!)
I think my first spellwork (it’s been a while now) was cord cutting. Black thread, scissors, pretty standard setup. When the thread snapped, I felt this pull in my stomach like something was actually being yanked out of me. I’d never felt anything like it.
Next morning the old messages just stopped coming through. Energy gone. Clean drop.
I still think about that tug sometimes when I do similar work.
I had a similar experience as a teenager. My dad’s roommate Stacy worked with Freya and wrote out exactly what she wanted in a cat. One showed up at her door, so I tried the same thing.
I wrote down the details and a few days later my boyfriend’s friend turned up with a female orange tabby kitten that matched what I’d described, right down to her personality. She became my familiar, with huge blue eyes and a thunderous purr. She loved sleeping on shoulders or curled up against me at night.
I never did that kind of working again after what happened to her. But Phoenix showed me the craft is real. She was only with me for a while, but she really did love sleeping on shoulders.
The smaller stuff like tarot readings coming to pass exactly as drawn feels less conclusive. When a binding spell manifests the very next day and someone who’d been harassing my loved one daily just vanishes from their life without explanation, that’s harder to dismiss.
A healing spell once lifted weeks of relentless foot pain from someone within minutes, and they had no idea I’d cast it.
Then I made a fertility spell jar after we’d been struggling to get pregnant through multiple losses. Tucked it into my pillow. Pregnant the next cycle. But I was terrified of losing another one, so I nested that whole jar inside a bigger one and packed it with pregnancy spell ingredients (every correspondence I could think of). After 8 losses in the past, that was finally the one that stuck.
That jar lives on my altar now. Eventually it will go in my son’s memory box.
The frustrating part is people from my husband’s church wanting to claim their prayers ‘made it happen’ for me. Bible Belt life… you know how it goes. But whatever is actually going on here, whatever the mechanism, there’s this whole world of potential out there I didn’t know existed.