Oh, You Mean It's Like Magic?

I was in a salon yesterday explaining coherence and Applied Bioenergetic Medicine to someone, and after listening for a while, they said, "Oh, you mean it's like magic."

And I could only say, "Yes, exactly."

It made me smile, and it also got me thinking: what made it such an easy leap to go from something that could be a really daunting topic to the ease of magic?

I mean, the idea that every living system carries a pattern of its own, that your breath, your heartbeat, and your attention are constantly sending and receiving information with the world around you, can pose quite a conundrum, and send our minds scurrying for a box to put it in. "Medicine" feels like the wrong box, and "science" feels like it needs a lab coat, and so we reach for the oldest word we have for something we can feel before we can explain it. We call it magic.

We are so hungry for magic

What is it about magic that we love and, for some people, love to hate? We line up for the witchy movies, we light our candles, we lean in close whenever the conversation turns to spells and signs and synchronicities. We are hungry for it, and yet for some of us magic still carries a whiff of the forbidden, a leftover shiver from the days when it could get you burned. Science, on the other hand, can make our eyes glaze over, as though it belongs to someone else, somewhere behind a pane of glass, and we can't quite find a way to the other side of the glass.

And yet there I was, speaking in very real, very viable scientific terms about something happening in all of us all the time, and the moment it slipped into the realm of magic it became accessible and desirable and comfortable, something you could hold in your hands. I love that, because it is magic.

So what are we really hungry for when we say, "Oh, you mean like magic"? I believe we are longing for proof that the world is more alive than we've been told, that we belong to something that listens and responds, and that we have a hand in what happens next. Joseph Campbell said it beautifully, that what we are really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that we can feel "the rapture of being alive."

When magic was ordinary

There's another side to this story, though, because we haven't always feared magic either. For most of human history, it was simply woven into everyday life.

Many ancient cultures understood a person as layered, made of far more than flesh and bone. The Egyptians spoke of the ka, the vital life force, and the ba, the part of you that could travel beyond the body. In Hebrew, ruach, and in Aramaic, its cousin rucha, meant breath, wind, and spirit all at once, one word for the air moving through your lungs and the life moving through the world. In ancient Mesopotamia, the land of Sumer and Babylon, a sick person might be visited by two healers working side by side, the asû, who prepared the herbal remedies, and the āšipu, who chanted the incantations and tended the unseen. Much of what we're now exploring through the language of energy, fields, and coherence was part of the ordinary vocabulary of being human.

The ancient Greeks were downright casual about it, which I find delightful and unnerving at the same time. If a neighbor annoyed you, a rival was beating you in love or business, or your favorite charioteer needed a little help at the races, you could have a curse made. People scratched their wishes onto thin sheets of lead, folded them, pierced them with nails, and dropped them into wells or graves to carry the message below, and archaeologists have found well over a thousand of these little curse tablets across the

Greek and Roman world.

Some of the most interesting come from the Roman baths in Bath, England, where around 130 tablets ask the goddess Sulis Minerva to deal with whoever stole the writer's belongings while they were bathing, most often their clothing, and more than a few cloaks. Blessings and love charms traveled the very same roads, and magic was simply one of the ways ordinary people tended their lives and their relationships.

The ones who walked the line

The fear came later. The great European witch hunts unfolded mostly between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, and that same stretch of history is sprinkled with people who walked the line between magic and science, often without noticing there was a line at all.

Isaac Newton, the poster child for cool reasoning, spent years quietly tinkering with alchemy, so much that the economist John Maynard Keynes later called him the last of the magicians. Johannes Kepler was busy mapping the music of the planets when his mother, Katharina, a widow who worked with herbs and plant medicine, was accused of witchcraft, and he dropped everything to build her legal defense. Ouch.

The village herbwife steeping willow bark for aches and fevers was onto something too, because willow and meadowsweet gave us aspirin, and the "spirin" in its name still honors Spiraea, meadowsweet's old botanical name. The ancient Greeks didn't even bother separating the two, since their word pharmakon, the root of pharmacy, meant remedy, poison, and magic charm all at once.

And Einstein himself got a little spooked. When quantum theory suggested that two particles could stay mysteriously linked across any distance, he called it spooky action at a distance and hoped it would turn out to be a mistake. In 2022, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to the scientists who showed it was real. Physics found its own ghost, and the ghost won.

Again and again, what looked like magical thinking turned out to be someone paying very close attention to a pattern the rest of the world wasn't ready to see yet. And now here we are, circling back around into this curious, hungry relationship with magic, ready to remember some of what our ancestors simply took for granted.

So what do we really mean by magic?

The word magic comes from the magi, the ancient Persian priests and star-watchers who studied the heavens closely enough, and for long enough, to begin participating in their rhythms. At its root, magic is a way of paying attention, and that is exactly what coherence asks of us.

Coherence is what happens when the many rhythms of your living system begin moving in relationship with one another, your heartbeat with your breath, your breath with your attention, and your attention with the life around you, until all of your systems, Physical, Mental, Emotional, Soul, and Cosmic Bridge, are singing in the same key. The delicious part is that we influence the field around us, and the field influences us right back. Your coherence ripples out into your family, your work, your community, and the land beneath your feet, and theirs ripples back into you.

We can call it science or we can call it magic, whatever feels the most comfortable, but it is a real thing, and it is what we do and who we are and how we are. One of my students described her first encounter with it as "mind blowing and yet, so fundamentally empowering," and another said she felt "empowered and chill," which is the best description of everyday magic I've ever heard.

A little practical magic for Samhain

So, with the veil thinning and Samhain just around the corner, I'd love to invite you into a little practical magic. Steep a cup of rosemary, or any herb you know and love, and before you sip, wrap both hands around the warm mug and let the steam rise toward your face.

Take three slow breaths with it, receiving the plant on the inhale and offering something of yourself back on the exhale, a thank you, a wish, the name of someone you want to remember. Then sip, and notice how all of your systems respond, the warmth spreading through your chest, the shift in your thoughts and mood, and that subtle, shimmering sense of where you end and the world begins.

Call it chemistry, call it coherence, call it a spell, and then tell me, what feels a little more magical for you this season?