There’s “real magic” in the air
We’re feeling it in the breath of spring that comes through the teeth of a nor’easter. We see it in the brave voices that speak up against the corporate lobbies and the brutal blindness of the status quo. It’s shimmering through my online conversations and through the Sovereign Writers Circle as we explore the way magic inflects and deepens our creative and professional work.
(The talk about creative magic begins with about how to describe the "real magic" of your work. You may want to read it first. As a healer and a creative, I believe that your power relies on your “real magic,” the unspeakable something that transforms lives. I think you’ll recognize your own unspoken powers in these ideas.)
What do we really mean by “magic”?
Now, it’s one thing to talk about magic. We can discuss Wrinkle in Time and trade unicorn memes and build fairy houses together. That is very, very good medicine that we all need in our overly-serious, tragically trivial world.
And it’s another thing to sense the magic. We need to admit that there’s something beyond the everyday human perception at work, both in the little domestic miracles and the glimmers of hope that spring up around the globe.
Then it’s a whole other matter to own your magic to the degree that you can describe it and actually lead with it.
My dream for you - and for everyone you help, heal, inspire, and love - is that you will believe, perceive, and work the magic you’ve got. And I pray that you’ll keep on seeking and deepening your connection to it too.
The magic we love… and fear
Before we go on, let’s settle on a working definition of magic. I look to the psychotherapist turned occultist and fantasy novelist Dion Fortune: “magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.”
As you’ve gathered, I’m a lover and a student of magic. Thanks to my own healing and mystery school studies and with all the writing and consulting work I have done for therapists, healers, and coaches, I’m also a student of transformation and evolution. I’ve watched all the ways I embrace and reject change. I've observed how I chase transformation and run from it too. I’ve seen my clients thrilled by the idea of the next chapter but still stand rooted in the same old story.
As a “transformation professional” yourself, you’ve witnessed your own process, your own game of hide and seek with transformation. You’ve seen it in client after client who is hungry for things to shift yet longs for life to stay the same.
There’s so much fear mixed into the fabulously intoxicating cocktail of change. And that’s a major reason we’re as enthralled by magic as we are repelled by it.
What if leaning into your magic means a freefall into change?
Your “real magic” ripples through all aspects of your personal, creative, and professional life, but let’s think about the work side of it here…
I sort of jumped and fell into entrepreneurship all at the same time. It felt like a choiceless choice. My mother died suddenly of a heart attack that no one saw coming. I had an eight month old baby and an academic job that drained my soul. If life was this short and unpredictable, who cares if it’s hard to pay the mortgage? I need to hold my baby, comfort my dad, and chase the joy now.
And since not working didn’t seem like an option, I cobbled together a business based on something I thought was necessary (and impossible): promoting holistic health practitioners.
In truth, I wanted to start my own energy healing business, but I was afraid I’d never clients. So, in the way that entrepreneurial illogic works, I started a business to help everyone else solve a problem I didn’t know how to solve for myself.
It was a crazy miserable journey for the first couple years. It’s probably best described as grief and motherhood with occasional bouts of freelancing. I was taking all the wrong jobs and chasing all the wrong possibilities and I was replicating the wasteland I’d experienced at my safe, salaried job with a new kind of discontent that included chronic insecurity and bizarre hours.
A wise friend who had been watching my process offered me a piece of brilliant advice: “You’ve been so unhappy doing the work you’re doing, and you’re not making the money you need and the money you’re worth. What if you tried doing what you love?”
It took years (an embarrassing number of years) to finally take that advice.
Back then, I was chronically dissatisfied and stressed and I really didn’t have much to lose since the bottom had dropped out of life. (Admittedly, in some key ways, I wasn’t completely without a foundation. I was still held by a supportive husband who made just enough to pay the basic bills - but I still made choices that made me feel empty every day.)
Why couldn’t I just make the change? Why couldn’t I make room for my magic and offer that instead of doing what I thought I “should” do?
That’s a whole other story, but I tell you about my “lost years” to let you know that I understand how radical it seems to ask you to lead with your magic if you’re actually doing pretty well, if you’re making a living at the career you trained for
What if leaning into your magic meant taking flight into transformation?
Sometimes the call to explore your “real magic” may mean quitting the soul-sucking agency job or ditching the “pays the bills” 9 to 5 in order to truly launch your soul-defining practice.
Sometimes, the real magic is being asked to be expressed within the current paradigm. It’s about tweaking the website copy to invite the clients you truly wish to work with and axing the language that sounds like it came with the graduate school materials.
Sometimes, it’s about remembering that the “real magic” is found in the project that you work on at the edges of each day. The memoir. The children’s book. The “I have no idea what it is but it comes from the caverns and mountains of my soul” project that you know will lead you somewhere.
My clients are doing all of these because just as there are countless expressions of magic there are countless ways to make it manifest.
Your magic will change you. It will change the world. That is both a promise and a warning.
In every case, you’ll need courage. And probably unicorn memes. And novels that transport you to another world from time to time. And chocolate. And movement that connects you to your body. And probably some more chocolate.
And you may find you need companions on the journey too.
The Sovereign Writers Circle is the place to connect with magical companions, the writer-healer-creatives who will journey beside you as you ride the tides of transformation. The last window on this month’s membership closes at midnight on Sunday March 4. We’ll reopen the doors to new writers on April 1.
The Sovereignty Sessions offer you the individualized support that helps you dissolve your fear of change and channel your creative magic. You can book these any time.