Intention is everything. No matter what you start in witchcraft, you read ‘intention this’ and ‘intention that’ or even just ‘setting intention’.
What is intention?
It’s exactly like what it sounds like.
Intention, or intent, is what you want the spell to do for you. Each spell requires an intention to work. It’s like the battery for a toy. If you don’t put the right battery into the toy, it won’t work.
So how do you set intention? Well, that’s the hard part sometimes.
You have to know exactly what you want when you set an intention. If you’re working a spell for say, attracting money, then you have to be clear with what you want.
But this doesn’t answer the question, of what intention is. I know when I first starting diving in, every time intention came up in a spell, I would scratch my head and wonder what they were talking about.
From what I can gleam, intention is the energy you put into the spell itself. Of course, some spells need other energy to work, like celestial lighting or fire. But you have to put your own energy into the spell so that the universe knows who’s putting that energy out there.
So intention is just basically the energy you assign to a spell to make it work.
How do you actually set intention?
Depending on the spell, it’s easy enough to set intention. Most spells have incantations to set the intention (or the incantation is the spell itself).
Other times, when you cast the circle (which I’ll get to in a later post), you meditate and cast the energy from yourself for the spell. Which is the hard part. Because you really have to focus
Why is intention so important for witchcraft?
Intention is important because it’s the force behind an action. If you’ve taken a mindfulness course or have even just heard about mindfulness (the new craze), then you’ve heard about how just acting a certain way and putting certain thoughts into those actions can help you be more productive, more capable at handling stress, etc.
Witchcraft is the exact same thing as mindfulness but with a little more oomph behind it. Mindfulness itself has only been around for a couple years now, but witchcraft is eons old. Witchcraft intention is setting your thoughts and emotions on one track and using that energy to drive a reaction.
So how does the intention in a spell work?
Remember how I said intention is like the battery of a spell? The intention is the direction you move the spell. It’s the battery that moves the spell along.
And I can hear you, just like I myself said not long ago “that doesn’t make any sense! how does intention work! Like work-work!”
So hears the breakdown. Imagine that the spell is a train. The destination is the reason for the spell. For this example lets use a common money spell to attract wealth. The train is set towards Wealth. But the train can’t move down the track without fuel. Your intentions are the coal for the train to move (or steam or gas or whatever). You meditate on the feeling on wanting wealth, of attracting wealth, of being wealthy. You figuratively put that emotion on the train. The train now has fuel for the journey down the track. So how do you get the train moving? You do something like charge the spell with something else, like crystals or fire. Those are the engine to process the intention-fuel. Now the train can move down the track and take you to Wealth.
I know this is confusing and a strange topic. Believe me. As much as I love science, physics is not my forte and intention is reminiscent of physics. Just because you cannot see or measure the force, the force is still present. Like gravity. You may not have tools readily available to measure the force of gravity, but gravity is still a force acting on you, whether or not you can see or measure it. Same thing goes for intentions.
Just because you can’t see or actively feel the energy in intentions, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.