Send to Kindle

Magic is one of the most amazing things in the worlds.  As a shaman, I find that I am constantly working within the arena of magic, but as is ‘par for the course’ most people neither see, nor understand what magic is.

When I try to explain, people are dumbfounded at how tangible magic can be for everyone.  I would like you to acknowledge now that the words “Hocus Pocus”* and “Abra Cadabra”** (themselves) have nothing to do with magic.  Magic can be most strongly manipulated by changing yourself, and affecting the world around you.

For example: Today, I made a comment about an interaction with someone.  I later realized that I would be mortified if the person involved had heard it.  It would only make them feel bad about a situation they could not control, and perpetuated a larger and darker feeling that they must be holding because of that same situation.  I realized that this statement was not about them, it was about me. (This is something I often do: When I have a hard feeling about someone or some action, it is a response to something in myself I find lacking.)  The comment was about someone monopolizing a conversation. So, I asked myself, what about myself is true, that makes me put that on them.  And I realized that I have concern and issues about longing for a connection with another person that is often hard to make tangible.  Acknowledging that the action that caused me to make my comment, really was an emotion within myself that derived from my own self consciousness about connection to others.

Think about that… By acknowledging something that I felt bad about, thinking about what it means to me, around something I can control. I was able to tell myself about a shadow that I carry, that affects making connections with people.  It is a concern, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But being brave enough, to be introspective, and acknowledging that I can do work on myself, I have changed my own perspective of the world around me, and allowed myself to improve the connections around me.  I am doing something intangible to others, that drastically changes the world around me.  Introspection is a form of Magic.

Hocus Pocus*: Before the protestant reformation, there was a lot of mystery around the priests work of the Catholic faith. There were inner buildings within churches, and basically, your rank within the church would dictate how far into these buildings you could go. (AKA the highest level priest would be the only one to go into the inner most building. ~ I learned this in a world religion class at EMU.~ Some of the more peasants would try to listen into these buildings so they could recreate the magic of the priests. And from a distance and through a wall, they interpreted, Habeas corpus  (Latin for “you [shall] have the body”) to be Hocus Pocus.

Abracadabra**: This was actually a phrase that is first documented as part of a amulet prescribed by a doctor (or what was equivalent to a doctor of the time) to get rid of any diseases.  The triangular amulet looked like this: