DAY 4: Does Magic Exist?
Friday, January 20, 2023
WFIW of the Day: I’m feeling a growing urge to learn and practice this new life coach hypnosis stuff…
I’ve been wanting to start a new business for almost six months.
And I keep saying that I want it to have more “magic” than my calligraphy business did… especially towards the end.
Crooked Calligraphy started out feeling pretty magical. Calligraphy, itself, felt like a goddamn miracle.
I had been trying new things for so long, following my curiosity down different branching paths, pushing through even when those paths started to get a bit brambly and uncomfortable…
Learning calligraphy felt like running, arms wide, down a gently sloping hill. Effortless, inescapable even, like some gravitational pull was helping me along.
But when I turned calligraphy into a business, it felt like that downward slope slowly evened out, then started to climb ever so slightly upward, then upward, then upward, until I felt like I was pulling myself along by inches, gravity definitively AGAINST me, wondering all the while, “WHY DOES THIS FEEL SO HARD?”
I still can’t decide whether it was the good kind of hard or the bad kind of hard.
There’s no regret at all. Climbing that mountain gave me some badass muscles and the kind of confidence you really can’t earn any other way.
But should I have stopped sooner, as soon as it started to feel heavy and dreadful?
>>>>Is it more important to “follow your intuition” or to “push through it in order to grow”?
When I say I want more “magic” in my life and business, what I THINK I want is more effortless flow.
But is that really what I want? For my life to be FREE of EFFORT?
For me, EFFORT has always been the juiciest part of life. The part that challenges me and helps me grow. The part where I discover fascinating things about myself and the world. The part that brings delightful surprises and spectacular failures.
In fact, research shows that the brain state of FLOW doesn’t come out of a place of absolute comfort and inertia. It comes when something is just challenging enough to engage you and sweep you along that swiftly flowing river of concentration and discovery.
Maybe the magic I’m looking for are those moments when that river brings me around a bend and shows me something just on the edges of my imagination. A brand-new land, flora in astonishing colors, dangers & desires waiting to be discovered.
I’m taking a life coaching certification course right now. It’s called The Best Fucking Coaching Course Ever Created (seriously it is!) and it IS NOT what I expected.
The main teacher, Melissa Tiers, has been a HYPNOTIST for over 20 years and right away, we started learning ways to get ourselves and our clients into trance states, how to use the unconscious mind to map new emotions onto old memories, how to re-wire old neural pathways to break free of phobias and ingrained habits…
It’s wild stuff. I see it working on so many of the other students in the course.
AND I’VE BEEN SO SKEPTICAL.
I found myself thinking this morning: “I wanted magic. Not this neuro-plasticity brain stuff.”
When I hit “purchase” on this coaching course, I thought I was going to learn how to TALK to people and guide them slowly towards their goals.
Instead, I’m learning how to create change in MINUTES that people usually spend decades and tens of thousands of dollars on.
IT’S MAGIC STARING ME IN MY UNBELIEVING FACE.
And I’m like, “Nah, this isn’t the kind of magic I wanted…”
What in the actual fuck, Shinah.
Maybe it’s in the nature of magic that it NEVER looks the way we expected. You can’t have real magic without an element of surprise and subversion.
Maybe magic isn’t a cherubic fairy godmother. Maybe she’s a fuckin’ punk rocker rebel.
With Curiosity & Grit,
Shinah
P.S. - Writing each morning is starting to feel like a refuge.