Magic

I remember clearly a conversation I had with a friend when I was living in Italy. She was talking about how she had to tell her kids how unicorns aren't real. She had been pretending with them that they exist, and when she felt they really wanted to know the truth she had to come clean. They were so hurt and wanted to know why she would have let them believe unicorns were real when she knew they weren't, and she said she just enjoyed that they were getting to experience that wondrous feeling that the universe is a magical world. She said, "I just wanted them to hold on to the feeling of wonder for a little while before they learned there is no magic in the world."

As a yogi, I found her sentiment of the world always being completely predictable a bit dry and out of step with my own feelings. Although I had only been on the yogic path for a little, I had been a seeker most of my life. I was always drawn to stories of mystical experiences. You want to share a near death experience? Tell me everything. Divine intervention? I'm all ears. Visions? Strange lights? Unseen forces? I'm your audience. I believe there is wonder and magic to behold if we remain open to more possibilities than those to which we are accustomed.

​My podcast partner, Alessandra, and I recently interviewed Gita Matlock - an episode which will be released Sep 12. Gita is a vibrant soul, full of life and light. She grew up in a yogic community, and in the conversation she talked about how special it was to grow up with yogis because they are so open to any possibility. In childhood, we hold space for anything to be the cause for something to happen. Thunder can be literally thought of as God bowling (this was what we explained to me, and I believed it), a rubber ball bounced as hard as it can by a four year old clearly went into space rather than coming down out of sight (holding up my hand again), toys coming to life when you leave the room is pretty likely, princes starting out as frogs, all of these are certainly within the realm of possibility with children. It was fun for Gita to grow up in an environment where the adults were open to many possibilities, and it was important to these adults to keep the possibilities open to children. As Gita put it, these yogic adults believed in magic!

Let's be clear about what I mean by magic. Magic is often experienced as being voluntarily tricked. You go to a magic show and you know what you are observing is a manipulation of perception. You don't believe the magician has the power to go beyond the limitations of natural law, but rather that he is able to give that illusion. That's not the type of magic to which I'm referring here. I'm talking about the mysteries which reveal themselves to individuals throughout time and the world over. These are things that defy explanation, which go beyond the boundary of ordinary circumstances. Unlike the magic produced by a magician, these are events which occur organically and without manipulation or trickery.

Examples of the magic which can be found in life are spontaneous healing, near death experiences, feeling directed by an unseen force (i.e. feeling you aren't to board a plane which later crashes), seeing the image or another sign from a deceased loved one, and many more - really the imagination is the limit! However, the more open we remain to life being mysterious, the more we see the magic in everyday life. Synchronicity is such an example - those little coincidences which line up unexpectedly. Receiving a text from the very person you are in the middle of typing a text to, say. Or, considering signing up for a class and then happening upon the topic a couple of times throughout the day. When those smaller things happen, we can brush them aside as coincidences if we want, or we can open ourselves to the possibility that the Universe is vying for our attention and showing us we are seen.

The truth is, there is magic around us. The world is very predictable when we are viewing everything from the intellect. But when we open up and start seeing the world around us through our heart, we become aware of the vibrancy of possibility in each moment. We start to see that things are happening behind what we can perceive with our five senses. If we can tune into that, we begin to experience the magic.

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