Magic. Its not sleight of hand, massive shows or rabbits flying out of hats. Its not a card trick, a stunt or an earth-shattering illusion.
Magic is the ability to create your own reality.
I was in real magic last night at the Magic Castle. If you’ve never been to the castle in Los Angeles, its a wildly produced place of spooky fun, with shows everywhere and cocktail gowns and men in suits and everyone ready to get their mind blown.
It is people in search of magic. And people trying to figure out how magic works; the people who dismantle magic.
I was curiously enraptured, so I sat in the front of the Parlor show and held ropes (regular old rope that I closely inspected) that morphed before my eyes into knots, longer and shorter pieces, all kinds of things that defy the imagination. I pulled cards from a deck that everyone saw and that lept out of the deck shortly after to everyone’s big gasp. I saw things vanish. People vanished.
I was a Magician’s Assistant at the big show where I put Play Dough into my hand and made it into a big ball and then a scarf with my initials on it was pulled from it somehow, right in front of my eyes, in my hands.
I heard a few loud voices of people saying, ” I know how he did that.” But they didn’t know. They wanted to know because they wanted to crack the code and they wanted to feel safe that their reality was intact and no one could mess with what they thought was real. And if they thought they cracked the code, they still didn’t know how to execute the magic.
Magic is the ability to suspend what you “know” and to see things the way that they are most enchanting. When you are enchanted… more magic comes.
We got a private show because we wanted the magic: just my friends on a sofa with me watching quarters bend and fall into my palms, holding forks that turned into bended sculptures, listening to stories of amazing adventures.
It isn’t just at a castle that you can see the magic and generate much more of it.
* Magic comes when you can let go of what you know and let yourself dream without limits.
Magic isn’t going to find you when you are thinking within the lines of the rules other people taught you for life. Magic comes when you are making life look the way you want it to look. With every home I have helped to shift and load with people’s dreams come to life, I see the magic emerge. I let people see what is possible- everything is possible- and from there the magnetism starts. Dreams flourish. Perspective shifts. Old ways melt. Everything becomes energy.
I have found myself sitting in the middle of artists homes that I once mythologized, travelling around the world with my idols, seeing things that no one could dream of seeing. Old friends would tell me that I was delusional to think that this could be my life, but it was… until I fell into feeling that maybe their fears were true and this was not real. It was real… and I left it because I started to dismantle my magic life thinking there was virtue in being “normal.”
Normal is another way of saying “stuck.” Lesson learned by suffering to try to be “normal.” You don’t need to be stuck. You can have as much of your own reality as you are willing to claim for yourself.
* Magic is real when you can feel instead of thinking.
You can only think so much. Try to understand everything logically and you reduce life to a very flat and boring experience.
Feel more.
Spend time in nature.
Get in touch with your inner artist.
You can’t simultaneously be creative and be thinking at the same time. Betty Edwards, the famed creator of Drawing On The Right Side Of Your Brain explains that she can not talk and draw at the same time. Two different energy systems. Two different sides of your brain. To live in the infinity of making things, choose to be in that creative channel. To live in the world of limitation, choose to think and think and think.
* Magic finds you when you are expecting it.
I always smile when people say, ” You find love when you least expect it.”
I found love when I was deeply immersed in moving toward all the things I loved. I found love by insisting that I go to a house I always wanted to see in the middle of the night in Manhattan. I wasn’t on a dating site and I had no agenda, but I was looking for love: the life I loved. I was in it. And everything flowed from there.
Every day in New York I stepped on the street and absolutely expected magic. Its no wonder why my life was always a dreamland, yet very real.
* Magic dies with criticism and flourishes when it is embraced.
If you want to torch a magic trick, become that heckling cynic who thinks that they know it all. Suddenly, everyone around you will also leave the space of greatness and will move into critical thinking. Gone is the magic.
Critical thinking is mainly cynical thinking. If you want to be suspect, live in fear and keep things far away from you, stay critical.
A man once told me that he sat with his friends and “processed me.” His parents had assigned me a “number” from an enneagram system designed to do personality typing and explain who a person was with numbers that each has characteristics.
When I said I wasn’t a number, I was actually a person, he could not handle that. There was no room to be magic in that space.
Label things and people, put them in prescribed boxes and you will forever shut yourself out from magic in your need to be safe. Safe is limiting and stuck and small.
Criticize art and you can never really make it.
Magic brings things close and shows you how unique each person and every moment actually is if you can allow that to be.
* Magic is attracted to happiness.
The happiest times in my own life have been a time of incredible ease. Everything falls into place.
Have you been in that space?
I bet you have.
Its something to cultivate. Its something you can decide to do.
The higher on life you are the more magic you are. It is quite simple. Don’t allow it to be complicated!
You don’t need to train for years to be the creator of your own magic show. You are living it. Everything is as fantastic and as impossibly brilliant as you can conceive, and as capable of transforming as you will allow. You aren’t nuts to think you are a magician. In fact, its the sanest way to live.
I hope you do not decide to be a prisioner of reality impressed upon you. Instead: Expect magic. Live in it. Watch it flourish. And use it to change your world, along with everyone in it, for the better. xoxo Dana
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I love this post! I believe in magic and in you! It was great getting to spend the evening in the castle with you! Happy Birthday Dana!