Practical Magic
When magic strikes, I’m learning to bear witness with every scintillating cell of my body, when connection happens in different ways, with different beings each day, i arch my body to lean in. My form is changed, I am ebb and flow, melting lava and bad ass basalt. I feel the smoke of cinders from my blazing fire, I feel the ash of what lived briefly and is no more. I dig thru, sifting for more till i am far underground with only a pinpoint of light that touches my skin. And then, I listen deeply to my souls song, I sing, I write, and witness my transformation. For my way of being and all that i know shifts with every thought. I am edging on allowing everything to happen to me or nothing at all. Bathing vulnerably in the beauty of gratitude for this life i am, with need for no other, yet open to all. I am my own witness. I am my own judge. I am my own magician.
I was listening yesterday to a talk by Esther Hicks. It caused me to reflect on whether I am truly committed to this path of magic. Or better yet, what i like to call, Practical Magic.
The way to applying Practical Magic in your life goes as follows:
Recipe: Practical Magic
Open your heart and listen. Through Meditation, through a walk in nature, through dancing wildly. Whatever gets you attune with your senses and deepest sense of ‘yes’. Do that.
Listen and Witness the next ‘Yes’. Where your chest eases and your breath deepens. Where you find relief and excitement, not tension and ‘shoulds’. Sometimes the things that vibrate us wildly do not make sense to the head. Dare i say, often they don’t. Even then, Do that.
Trust and move toward that magical feeling. No matter what it tells you to do. Even if your head tries to reason with you. (and please notice the tightness in your chest when it tries to do so!). Take Action toward the very thing you know in that moment. Even if it’s just a small step. It’s an offering to the universe that you are indeed all in. That you do believe. And that you are willing to do the work behind it to make it so. Do that.
Pause. Watch. Wait. and most importantly, fully trust. Wait for the next knowing, the next sign, the next rush, and repeat.
This is the recipe for Practical Magic. I do not mean to follow every whim, every idea. I mean those ideas that you know with your whole being. The ones that create excitement (maybe misread as fear) but also when you think of moving toward that there is a sense of calm and relief. It’s how to follow the magic in your life by still walking it with practical feet. It requires ground work and it requires a connection to those higher realms of yourself that just know and do not need to be convinced or need to prove. It is the way that your whole being can be involved in creating the life you want, instead of just parts of yourself at the helm, in control.
The trust part can be tricky. For me, trusting my own intuitive sense of things after years of school and rule followings, living up to my parents and then partners expectations, yielding to the judgements and nudgings of societies’ needs, well, it was impossible, to say the least. My own voice was just a whisper beneath the repressing sheets of what I thought were my own making. And the truth was, I was quite cozy there, thank you very much. It was warm and comfortable and I could stay as long as I want and not have to remake the bed. It was easy to get lazy and go back to sleep.
Don't go back to sleep. -Rumi
But laying all day in bed, windows unopened, can become quite stifling after sometime. Your muscles long to stretch, to see the sunlight, to walk barefoot on the soft needles in the woods. You miss the smells of life and death, of sunlight opening a field of lilies and rain decaying stumps riverside.
And so you get up and face the the fact that it is going to be uncomfortable to change, to push towards a life YOU know is right for you. Because what really is the other option? To build a life made of others’ dreams? Trusting oneself is both scary and empowering. Because you are the director of your own life. You are responsible for its shining moments and the ugly muck of demise when things do not go quite so well. But in that process, you learn the art of coming back into alignment with what it true for you and you alone. You learn the subtlety of your yes’ and you refine the needle with which you sew your life together in moments, in choice. The goal of course is to operate and navigate from a sense of the whole self. A settled knowing veil casting over you, guiding your every movement.
All there is now is to be mindful, to be present to what is right now. Do that.
