Twenty-Four Years to Find the Framework

Cerissa Leese
May 6
6 min read

A witch's journey, and why I finally decided to teach what I know.

I have been asked, more times than I can count, how to do a specific spell. In my live streams, in my DMs, in comments... some version of the same question keeps coming up. How do I make this work? Can you walk me through it? I tried this spell and nothing happened. I followed the instructions exactly and it still didn't work.

Every time someone asks, I give the best answer I can in the moment. But for a long time I also thought: the question is not really about the spell. It is about not having a framework. Not having a way of understanding what you are actually doing and why.

So I built one. And this week, for the first time in twenty-four years of practice, I am teaching it.

But before I tell you about that, I want to tell you where I started. Because the beginning matters. And because I remember it in a way that still feels vivid.

The Book That Filled a Gap I Did Not Know I Had

I grew up Christian. Like a lot of people who look like me, who grew up where I grew up, Christianity was simply the water I swam in. I did not question the fact that the majority of the people I knew were also Christian, and not because I was not a questioner, but because for a long time I did not know there was anything to question.

But, I have always been a question asker. Why things work the way they do. Where belief systems come from. What the underlying structure is beneath the surface of things. Those questions were with me long before I knew they had anything to do with spirituality. I just thought I was curious.

When I got to college, a roommate of mine was Wiccan. I had never encountered anyone who practiced before. And to be honest, I didn't know there was much beyond Christianity and Judaism (I was very sheltered). She was kind and generous and genuinely welcoming about her practice, and at some point she invited me to observe a ritual — I believe it was Samhain, though I cannot say for certain anymore. I remember sitting with so many questions. Not skeptical questions. Genuine ones. Something in me was paying very close attention.

Afterward she handed me her copy of To Ride a Silver Broomstick by Silver RavenWolf. I read it cover to cover in a matter of days. And I remember the physical sensation of reading it; shaking my head, again and again. Yes. Yes. This is it. This is what I have been missing and did not know I was missing.

It filled a gap I had been carrying for years without understanding what the shape of it was.

Christianity had given me a framework, but it was a framework that demanded I stop asking questions at a certain point. That I accept rather than understand. That things just were the way they were and there was no point trying to change it. And I had never been built for that. The craft, as I was beginning to understand it, seemed to invite the questions in rather than shut them down. It seemed to say: look more closely. Pay attention. There is something here worth understanding.

I was nineteen years old when I cast my first ritual circle. And I felt something real.

The Trap I Walked Straight Into

And then I did what so many of us do.

I bought all the things. Every candle, every crystal, every herb. Amulets. Coordinating robe colors for different seasons. I followed the books faithfully, step by step, tool by tool, word by word. I was a struggling twenty-year-old who could not actually afford any of it, and I was spending money I did not have because the books told me these things were necessary. That if I had these things, and followed the ritual, that the money would come back to me.

And slowly, the questions started coming back. Why are these tools necessary? What specifically are they doing? If I use the wrong candle color, does the spell not work? Is there a governing body checking my herb selection? Who decided these were the rules, and on what basis? And of course, when will my money come back to me?

I started to recognize a familiar feeling. The same discomfort I had felt with organized religion was showing up here too. Not with the belief system itself; not with the magic, not with the relationship to the natural world, not with the understanding that there are forces moving through reality that can be consciously engaged with. That part still felt completely true to me. It was the organization of it. The this is the correct way and everything else is wrong that made me pull back.

I did not want another institution. I had just left one.

If I was not Christian and I was not Wiccan, what was I?

And I allowed myself to get a little lost. Which, looking back, was exactly the right thing to do.

Twenty-Four Years of Questions

What followed was not a straight line. It rarely is.

I read widely and deeply, across traditions, across cultures, across centuries of human spiritual thought. I studied the histories of belief systems, the origins of words, the ways that different peoples in different corners of the world had arrived at strikingly similar understandings of the divine, of energy, of the relationship between consciousness and reality. I followed the questions wherever they led, without requiring them to resolve into a tidy answer.

I came back to the craft. I fell away from it. I came back again, deeper each time. I worked with what resonated and set aside what did not. I kept asking why. I kept paying attention to what actually worked and what did not, and more importantly, why.

I studied the science. Quantum physics. Epigenetics. Neuroscience. Not because I was trying to prove anything, but because I genuinely wanted to understand the mechanism behind what I was experiencing. And what I found, that was consistent across disciplines, was that the science kept arriving at the same place the ancient traditions had been standing all along. Different language. Same truth.

I traced the word witch back through linguistic history and found what it had actually meant before it was repackaged as a slur: wise person. Wise woman. Someone who knew things. Someone who paid attention.

That is where I feel like I have arrived. Not at the end of the questions, those never stop, but at a place where I understand enough of the why to work with real precision. To build something that actually lands.

Science is not disproving what our ancestors knew. It is just finding a new language to describe it.

Every tradition I have studied, every culture, every belief system, every spiritual framework I have spent time inside, distills to the same thing at its core. Respect. For yourself. For other people. For other living beings. For the world you move through. The deities are different, the rituals are different, the tools are different. But underneath it all, the root is the same. It always has been.

Why It Took Twenty-Four Years

When I look back at that nineteen-year-old casting her first ritual circle, in her childhood bedroom, following a book step by step, I don't cringe. She was doing what we all do at the beginning. She was borrowing someone else's framework because she did not yet have her own.

But I also think about how many years I spent working with other people's formulas and wondering why they just didn't feel right in my hands. How many workings I did that produced nothing, or produced something sideways and unexpected, because I was applying force to a situation I didn't actually understand. How many times I attributed the miss to not having the right tools, the right moon phase, the right words, when the real issue was that I did not understand the mechanism at all.

It took me years to arrive at a diagnostic framework I trust. Years of understanding the history of where this practice comes from, and why that history matters for the work. Years of sitting with the science until it started to clarify rather than complicate. Years of developing the body awareness practice that lets me read a situation before I touch it, rather than casting into the dark and hoping.

Twenty-four years.

And I kept thinking: it should not take that long. It does not have to.

What I Am Teaching, and Why Now

The Science of Spellcraft is the most honest distillation of what I know about why this works that I have ever put together. It is four live sessions, beginning Friday May 8, 2026, and it covers everything: the history of magical practice traced across forty thousand years of human civilization, the science that explains the mechanism, the diagnostic framework I use in my own practice, and the construction of your own personalized working, built from your lineage, your body awareness, your specific situation.

Not a formula borrowed from someone else. A framework that is genuinely yours.

I built it because people kept asking how to do this. And because I remembered what it felt like to not know, and to spend years trying to figure it out alone.

Registration closes at midnight 5/7/26. There are seats remaining. If you have been sitting with this one, now is the time.