Magic is one of my favorite words. (Right alongside mystical, crazy-awesome and fuck.) I realize that for some it may feel like a cliched buzzword, but for me it is pure love.
It is everything. It is the truth of my heart, the essence of my life and the thread of my dreams.
My now 76-year-old Mema was one of the first people to teach me about magic. When I was a small girl, she would whisper magical truths into my ear over and over again. With the tenderness and ferocity of a momma-bear matriarch who had seen many a tough times in her life, she lovingly and purposefully programmed me with beliefs and messages that would ultimately weave into the very fabric of who I am.
Everything always works out for you.
You are special. You will do amazing things in this life.
If you have no one else in this life, you will always have your sister.
She believed in a future far greater than the present reality any of us were living in, and with methodical care she created a vision for a life that has unfolded in complete alignment with her sacred seeds.
Those tapes have played over and over in my mind and heart my entire life. They have lifted me out of tragedy into hope on countless occasions. And they have become the mantra for my life.
That is magic.
As I have grown from that small impressionable girl into this empowered mystical woman, I have come to understand that magic is more than just slight of hand or making rabbits appear out of hats. Magic is believing in the unseen. It is a hope that sprouts into faith, that then grows into belief, and ultimately blossoms into truth. It is both calculated and surrendered, and it is all about the long game.
When I first began studying spirituality and mysticism, I was desperately craving instant changes in my life. I wanted the kind of magic that would drop money out of the sky and wipe away years worth of pain and suffering. I wanted a miracle, and I wanted it right now.
But before the big miracles started to occur (and boy did they), there was this long unsettling period when I had to be purged of all doubt, of all rage, of all control. I had to writhe and push and fight and bitch so that I could finally surrender into the flow. Sure the doubt still trickles up, and the rage and the control stop in to say hello from time-to-time, but the current is too quick for them to hang around long. The flow of magic was unleashed, and its sacred rushing waters don't allow me to spend too much time floating with the old self.
I committed myself to the work, and I've never stopped doing it. I've sat with myself day in and day out taming the beasts and exorcising the demons so that I could catch those blinding glimpses of divine light within me. I've grown in understanding and appreciation of the God in me, in each of us, and I've reverently devoted myself to the practice of sitting still with that power so that I may understand how to best use it.
That's the biggest secret of all. We all have the power. If we only knew the immensity of the deep well of creative energy that lies within each of us. But we've become too distracted, too cynical, too skeptical to sit with is and simply read the manual.
Magic happens when we focus. When we quiet the noise both externally and internally. When we embrace the silence and simply observe.
Magic is in the spaces in between.
I don't doubt that are many ways to unlock the portal to magic, but for me it has been through meditation, through traveling between worlds into the spaces between. These days when I meditate I am almost instantaneously transported to another dimension. I experience my body and its many sensations in this heightened, vibrational way, and my brain begins to operate on a completely different level. Answers to questions are downloaded instantaneously, and I am capable of comprehending truth in ways my human mind could barely grasp.
In a moment I completely transform. Magic happens.
I used to be shy to tell people about the ease and flow in my life. Even recently I have observed myself playing up my "human" woes to make others feel more comfortable, perhaps to make myself feel more comfortable being in the world. But that's just not the truth of my life.
The truth is that I feel magical much more often than I feel human. I experience the mystical more regularly than the mundane. Flow rules over force, and I feel connected to every experience and every desire of my heart on a level so intimate and so deep that it makes me weep. I am connected to everything I have ever wanted, and the grace in that brings me to my knees.
Magic is very much real. For me it is total truth. When I close my eyes and I breathe into my heart and I spread my awareness to all the spaces in between, I not only feel magic, I become magic.
I am magic.