Permission to Make Magic. Permission to BE the Magic.

“I just need to get through these practical things so I can give myself permission to market the magical stuff.”

“I have to be able to appeal to the people who want the data and the outcomes, but really, I want the people I can talk magic to.”

“I was trained to be an academic, and I know how to do the intellectual side really well. Spirituality and magic are always at the core of everything, but I am afraid to let people see that.”

These lines from three separate conversations with three different healer-writer-seeker-mytics who are certified in different forms of coaching and psychotherapy.

Each one glows with her own remarkable sovereign wisdom and each one has the ability to make deep, lasting change in the lives of the folks they work with. 

They all might define “magic” a little differently, but it has something to do with the vast unseen, the sacred unknown, and the connections that flow between All That Is. They know that their work is sourced by something greater, some universal creative force that makes the body, mind, spirit, and all of creation come alive. 

They feel all these forces at work and know it’s at the core of all they do, and yet, they often can’t trust themselves to speak it loud and clear…

Why do we hide our unique brilliance and stop ourselves from saying what really matters?

These women, like me, like just about all of us, have been raised in a patriarchal society and trained by a capitalist system. 

We’ve internalized some version of: “Lead with the facts, with the measurable results, and with the stuff that appeals to the pain points established by the marketplace. All the feelings, stories, and (god)dess talk might work for some, but what really matters is the credentials, the quantifiable, the sale.”

They - we - all hide their magic for fear it will be diminished, misunderstood, and twisted by those who would dismiss their silly, ungrounded, uncontrollable “woo woo” ideas. It’s safer and easier to lead with the easily digested steps to success, the “click now” jargon, and the peer reviewed approaches.

What if we were unafraid to lead with our passion, our truth, and our magic?

Well, that’s the sorceress’s greatest question.

If healers, sovereignty seekers, and creatives found the courage to lead with their own authentic passion, truth, and magic, the whole world would change.

That change would start with the individual. When one person stands sovereign in her power and purpose and then offers it to her readers, her clients, her family, her community… Eventually a single act sends forth ripples that shift everything. It’s just like magic.

It all sounds pretty idyllic, right?

Name your magic.
Speak it aloud.
Call in the people who speak your language.
Transform one life and keep going til you’ve bettered the universe.

But tell me again, why aren’t we doing this wonderful thing all the time?

That same patriarchal capitalist world that chains us to the practical also conspires to silence the mystery. Plus, our own human fears of being vulnerable to ridicule and judgement tend to shut us down before we even begin to explore unknown territory.

And it’s not just the societal pressures and individual fears that seal our lips and stifle our stories. Magic spells have always been bound by secrets, only to be shared with the initiated, in a moment of great need, or when the stars and moon align.

It can feel downright wrong to share our magic in the marketplace.

Modern digital life has a way of commodifying hallowed ground, and we can feel like part of the problem when we stick a “for sale” sign on the intimate, sacred truths that ground our lives and spirits.

And yet, there are brave and brilliant writers and thinkers who manage to send their magic into the world in a way that doesn’t seem icky or opportunistic. They launch their words and ideas into the ethers and touch the hearts and minds of readers and Instagram scrollers. 

As a result, the folks in the audience receive those ideas and see themselves and their world in a new way. They share the insight and the new way of being with others, and that starts new conversations that can lead to action. And this goes on and on until we start seeing real change, whether it’s in de-stigmatizing mental health issues, exposing systemic racism, or respecting people’s pronouns.

That’s how magic is made real. 

Magic flows in moments of realization, in instances of connection, in the building of relationships. In the sense of, “YES! A new way is possible! Let’s try it!”

We still need to call on our own deep powers of discernment, to decide what’s too intimate and in fact too sacred to share, of course. That’s an important topic for another day, however.

Are you longing to lead with your magic and make it real?

Those comments at the start of this piece about longing to make their magic real are part of longer, broad-reaching conversations.

Each woman wants to offer her healing work to the world and tell stories that matter, and each is going it in her own way (of those clients I quoted above, one is seeking a sustainable, satisfying approach to marketing; one is developing her website and a new framework to teach her ideas; and another is writing a book).

Though those women are working on different projects and hoping to speak to very different people, the awareness of and desire for that real but ephemeral thing called magic is the common ingredient. 

I’m offering these individual clients specific support to get them closer to anchoring into their magic and making it real. Each one is blessed by the hard-won belief in her own magic, her own medicine, her own sense that she has something to share with the world.

(Check out my writing coaching and Story Illumination Sessions if you’re interested in working one-on-one!)

Their next step is to give themselves permission to embody that magic in a way that feels authentic, safe (but not too safe), and true to the work they wish to do in the world.

That permission comes through writing practice, through honest conversation, and through a recognition that the spiritual work and the magic making is every bit as necessary and practical as getting better at crafting sales copy.

What about you? Do you believe in magic? Do you believe in your OWN magic?

On June 1, the 7 Magic Words Challenge begins.

This free, weeklong online event will help you uncover and name your own magic. It’s open to all - whether your a creative entrepreneur, a healer or coach with a private practice, or a sovereign soul in search of a new way to see the word and express your own wisdom.

The Blessing and the Curse of “The Extraordinary”

What’s your relationship with the word “extraordinary”?

Whenever I’m feeling healthy and whole and fully sovereign in myself I would tell you that I wish to live an “extraordinary” life. 

Even in the midst of this terrible disrupted year when all we seem to have is the at-home routine, I believe I have still sought - and experienced - the extraordinary.

Does that sound like some kind of crazy humble brag? Let me tell you the story of what it took to embody and compassionately redefine the word and make “the extraordinary” into something that belongs in the everyday.

Expanding the Extraordinary In these Extra/Ordinary Times

When you look up “extraordinary” with our friends at Merriam Webster, they offer “going beyond what is usual, regular, or customary.”

This definition seems to explain a Valentine’s Day trip to Paris, graduating summa cum laude from an Ivy League school, or having quintuplets. It also can include pulling over the car to take in a particularly stunning sunset, leaving a love note in your beloved’s pocket on an average Tuesday, or taking time to ask neighbors if they need anything from the store when you make a run into town.

With this expanded definition, there are a hundred opportunities a day to go beyond the typical, even in an era when most of life is lived with a few miles of home. 

At this moment, I’m deeply grateful I’ve landed at an understanding of extraordinary that is at once more expansive and terrifically small. If I had been striving for an extraordinary life when I was twenty-one in the midst of Covid circumstances, I would have given up long ago.

“Someday, we’re going to be extraordinary.” 

In the spring of 2001, my college roommate directed Wendy Wasserstein’s play Uncommon Women and Others. The show was brilliant. To watch it in my last few weeks as an undergrad, full of all the fears of what the “real world” would bring was ridiculously (and understandably) emotional.

And, as we tend to do when absorbing good art (especially while ridiculously emotional), I pulled the show through my own prism and refracted it so it spoke directly to me.

I can still see the blond pixie girl put her arm around another actor at the end of the final act and proclaim “someday, we will be extraordinary!”

At twenty-one when the world was still wrapped in its pre-9/11 blanket, the greater part of me was all full of hope. We all had our entire rich, as-yet-to-be-written lives ahead of us. I was all about committing to this horizon reach to the extraordinary.

A hard-to-ignore part of me was also full of regret (and also the bagels and beer that had a gluten-intolerant me feeling bloody awful most of the time). Though I’d spent most of high school on the stage, I’d said goodbye to performing just as I’d said goodbye to writing fiction when I entered college. I had resigned myself to reading and commenting on other people’s words, watching other people’s plays, longing after other women’s boyfriends, and feeling generally uncomfortable in my own skin.

I had achieved so much in my four years, but I was still assigning the real goal, the extraordinary self who lived a life of passion and creativity, to that blessed someday.

The Long Dance With the (Extra)Ordinary

I held on to this line for most of the next two decades, constantly measuring whether I had achieved the almighty “extraordinary.” 

In 2008 I wrote a blog post about my quest for the “extraordinary” how I finally made some peace with that. (Eating like a grown up and no longer longing for a lover surely helped all that.)

And yet, it was still a “middle of the journey” moment. When I wrote that post at age 28, I joked about how I would be happy with myself even if I did not have my name on the spine of a book by the time I was 30. (The subtext, of course, was that I was kidding/not kidding. Without that wunderkind book on the shelf, I could be happy, but I was also aware I was not quite living up to extraordinary.)

Due to New Information, the Author Has Compelled to Alter the Story

When I started researching that book of mine that would come out earlier in 2020, right smack in the middle of my fortieth year, I finally got my hands on Wasserman’s play. The part I mis-remembered for all those years is in the very last line. Rita speaks: 

Timmy says when I get my head together, and if he gets the stocks, I’ll be able to do a little writing. I think if I make it to forty I can be pretty amazing. Holly, when we’re forty we can be pretty amazing. You too Muffy and Samantha, when we’re… forty-five we can be pretty fucking amazing.

Wait, what? I had spent all this time forcing myself to be extraordinary when all I had to do was be amazing?

And I hadn’t even remembered what would make the characters so amazing (or extraordinary): all they had to do was write. And make it to forty. 

Turns out, I nailed it. I even have four more years to land at the ultimate “pretty fucking amazing.”

And you know what that is? Extraordinary.

Extraordinary, Amazing, Magical, Sovereign, and the Power to Re-Define and Embody Those Words As We Go

Here we are in an extraordinary year that is anything but amazing (most of the time). In spite of it all, we are constantly surrounded by chances to stand sovereign in our own choices and to call in our own kind of magic when the usual ways of the world are inaccessible. 

We’re called redefine the words and rewrite the story and re-member all the pieces of life in a new way.

If I could go back and speak to my 21 year-old self about what a beautiful life might look like, I would leave extraordinary and amazing out of the conversation. Though I have come to love those words as I have lived them and re-defined them, there’s too much room for misinterpretation (and perfectionism and discontent).

Instead, I would tell me to go for magical and sovereign and trust all the rest to fall into place.

What is magic?

• Magic is having the power to seek and see wonder in the everyday.

• Magic is the ability to find hope in the shadows.

• Magic is realizing you've had the power to transform your world all along.

And what is sovereignty?

• To be sovereign in your own life is to have your feet lovingly rooted into the earth and your hair all spangled with stars as you love what is and reach for what is possible.

• To be sovereign is to know yourself and trust yourself in the midst of the ordinary and the extraordinary.

• To be sovereign is to know how to use your magic for your own highest good and for the good of all creation.

This December I have two ways for you to bring more Sovereignty and Magic into your life and redefine the way you use the words that shape your experience.

The #7MagicWords Challenge is our seasonal creativity project. This free week of prompts, community, and, of course, creative magic gives you a chance to play with and redefine the worlds that define your world.

A Sovereign Way 2021 is a half-day planning retreat for creative entrepreneurs and sovereign souls who want to envision and plan a year of personal and collective transformation.

Will you join me in the next adventure?

An October Story for the Children of the Moon and the Daughters of the Earth

On the Friday before what you and I might habitually call Columbus Day weekend, my fourth grader and I went for a hike down by the Mahicantuck. I’m quite certain you’d simply call this “river that flows two ways” the Hudson.

This river is tidal. It rises and falls twice in a day and the salt from the Atlantic can reach all the way to Poughkeepsie during drought conditions. I am an ocean girl, born and raised, and the Hudson Valley can seem so desperately land locked… I forget that the river is just a few miles from my front door. I certainly forget that it has salt in its hair and sand in its shoes.

If only my mermaid self could remember that she has always been at home here. Then, maybe I’d be able to put down roots that would help me better weather the storms - those in this New York sky and those that churn on the internet and in the ethers beyond.

My daughter was born in this place. She’s made of this river and its tributaries. She’s held by its ridges and mountains and she skips along the trail and navigates the uneven ground as naturally as a grown faun - or is she now a young doe?

She tells me what she learned about Indigenous Peoples’ Day, about the story of Taíno boy who had his doubts about the men who arrived in their great boats. We talk about the way the boy was right and how the explorers became colonizers who would destroy the native way of life. We talked about how complicated it was, to feel grateful we lived on such beautiful, sacred land while knowing that it meant the removal and destruction of those were here first.

Conversations with my daughter enliven and exhaust me sometimes, especially when we’re trying to sort through stories about our beautiful, brutal, complicated world. Trying to put things into words she can understand when I realize I don’t even have the words.... This is one more thing they forgot to teach us in parenting school.

I hadn’t had time for my morning meditation that day and was craving it, so, as we approached the river’s edge, I suggested we do a “sit spot,” a mindfulness practice she’d learned in her wilderness program.

The water was high. All this autumn rain was keeping the salt-kissed currents well south of us, but I swear I smelled the sea. Tucked between the trees and the underbrush, we found a clear boulder, a perfect place to rest, our feet dangling over the steadily moving river five feet below.

I was entwining myself with the elements, feeling the sun and the wind and filling myself with the splash of the wavelets. I needed this. I needed to arrive at a point in motherhood when my older child and I could enjoy a long moment of silence, when she could respect the dance of nature’s movement and stillness.

So much felt possible now that I had a daughter who could allow her mother some stillness. I’d spent so many years of going through the motions of mothering. I felt like I’d earned the pause.

As I let my mind fly with the gulls, my girl was quietly busy beside me, grinding a tiny stone against our rocky seat. She was making a fine pile of dust. I glanced over to see her dabbing it on the tip of her nose, her eyes crossed as she focused.

Perhaps it would have been nice to mediate a little longer, but this was a rare afternoon, just for the two of us - the first hike we’d taken alone since her sister was born four years ago.

I think it must have been her idea to paint me. I didn’t know if it crossed her mind that this is how kids have “played Indian” for hundreds of years, but I didn’t mention it because I was caught up in a different world of history and myth.

I’ve been rereading The Mists of Avalon and felt that old yearning to be amongst the priestesses with the blue crescents between their brows. This book had rewritten my relationship with the Catholicism that raised me back when I was not so much older than my daughter is now.  It was necessary to make that sacred sisterhood real in this moment with my girl, here at the rocky edge of a rushing river, so I asked her to draw the moon on my forehead. And then, with the last bit of powder, I did the same for her.

It felt necessary to put words to this sweet little act, so I suggested we speak a prayer to the moon and ask her for a blessing. My wise, huge-hearted daughter, who has been raised to see the Goddess in the earth and in the sky and question why many people think God lives only in a Church, suggested “peace and love.”

This was the end of the week when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Around the country, women in particular were holding their collective breath. We waited to see if that man would be confirmed and added the Supreme Court. I didn’t have any peace and light left in me, and the kind of love I had was the fierce kind that felt more like a hurricane than a mild October breeze.

Though I was filled with prayers that began something like “by the power of this mighty river, by this great mother earth, women must be believed,” I was doing all I could to just look like Mom on the outside. My daughter has been raised to call her a feminist and she’s more politically aware than most nine year-olds, but I’d barely mentioned the Supreme Court. She knew it as one more messy political thing that would inspire mommy and daddy to go to an event in support of our democratic congressional candidate that night.

And so, I was called to walk the edge between speaking the truth and protecting the last shreds of my daughter’s innocence yet again.  I couldn’t erase or disown my weary heart or my boiling blood - this was a prayer to the Goddess, after all, and I needed to be straight with her about what really needed on this earth right now.  

I tried to tilt the specifics of my rage and said I was thinking about justice and about protecting people who are less powerful than the guys who have been in charge for so long.

We threw stones into the water to seal our prayers. We walked back to the car with golden moon dust on our faces. Later in the day, I’d listen to Susan Collins’s long rambling speech in support of the lifetime appointee who showed himself to be anything but an impartial, even-tempered potential jurist.

And the river would keep flowing with moon blessed tides. The autumn would stretch to become more brilliant before the weather turned and the leaves would be stripped and laid winter bare.

My daughter would grow and her innocence would slip away with every conversation, newscast, and great big book.

I would hold this story in the treasure chest with those that make me a woman raising up children, a woman with her eyes widening further open day by day, a woman full of rage and hope, a woman trying to find her way home.

---

In honor of my daughter's ninth birthday, I invite anyone who loves this story to book a Story Healing Session for just $109 (offer valid through November 1, 2019).

You can get all the details on what’s included in this practical, magical offering here.

Book your one-on-one session with me to talk about the story you long to tell, the story that gets stuck in your throat and needs to be healed before it can be told.