Excerpt
Mundane Magic
Chapter 1Why Mundane Magic WorksHow exactly is Mundane Magic going to get you to actually clean your house? It works with your brain’s wiring and overcomes executive dysfunction by injecting boring tasks with a sense of novelty and fun. To begin, you need to understand the concept of Mundane Magic and why lowering the bar on your spiritual practice helps you experience more Magic in your life AND makes it easier to do the daily tasks you’ve been avoiding.
We create Mundane Magic by living and breathing three important maxims:
Two minutes a day is more effective than sixty minutes once a month.How you do anything is how you do everything.AndYou are the Magic.Ultimately, the goal of a Magical practice is to reduce the stress of daily life, not add to it. As a squiggly-brained person who struggles to keep up with ANY habit, these are maxims that I’ve lived by and taught to thousands of students around the world to ensure your Magical practice works FOR YOU, rather than against you.
We often think of Magic as involving big, elaborate rituals. But this puts a lot of pressure on the aesthetic of our spells, to the point where they can feel performative. At first, these rituals may feel exciting, but over time the charm wears off, especially for us neurodivergent folks. By lowering the bar on your Magical practice, you release the need to perform and instead connect deeper with yourself and your own needs. At the same time, this allows you to build a habit that serves you, rather than making Magic another thing to avoid on your to-do list.
Let’s dissect each of these maxims:
Maxim #1: Two minutes a day is more effective than sixty minutes once a month.When it comes to a Magical practice, many of us have this assumption that more is more, but I’m here to argue the opposite. Often practitioners get stuck in this cycle: life gets busy and they forget to reach for their Magic, so they feel like they’ve let themselves down and they decide to get back on the horse by doing a big, elaborate ritual. The problem with this all-or-nothing approach is what gets people into this cycle in the first place. When our practice requires time, energy, motivation, and fancy tools, we tend to divest ourselves from it when life gets stressful. But the fact is, the fuller your plate is, the more you need your Magical practice to support your life. I’m willing to bet your goal for your Magical practice isn’t to stress yourself out, so why make your practice one more thing on your already overflowing to-do list? The truth is, less is more when it comes to Magic. When you lower the bar on your Magical practice, you develop a sustainable practice that will truly lead to the results you’re looking for.
“The reminder about two minutes daily versus sixty minutes once a month has literally changed everything for me. It’s been the difference between building a sustainable, growing practice and having Magic be another interest that doesn’t see any follow-through. Keeping it simple and focusing on intentions, no matter what, has opened my mind, encouraged my imagination, and felt soooo empowering. I feel like I have permission to not be perfect and yet I know I can’t mess it up—I can use what I have and still create effective spells, I don’t have to choose between mundane responsibilities and exploring Magic. You foster the most brilliant blend and balance of both.”
—Rebecca Y.
To understand this maxim, you need to understand how your brain actually works, specifically when it comes to nervous system regulation, neural pathways, and how we form habits. When I worked with survivors of sexual violence, I was deeply entrenched in studying how the nervous system responds to stress. It was not only a part of our mandatory curriculum as advocates, but it also became a passion project for me—I’d sign up for every conference and training I could find related to it. I spent my free time listening to neuroscience podcasts and reading books about the science behind mindfulness. Understanding the wiring of your nervous system is imperative to understanding Magic—and regulating the nervous system IS the whole goal of a spiritual practice. So let’s geek out about the nervous system first . . .
You have two sides to your nervous system: your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight/flight/freeze response, or the stress response; and your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest/restore/heal response, or the relaxation response. This wiring is left over from our ancestors who were running from saber-toothed tigers all day long.
When your sympathetic nervous system is activated, all your resources go toward keeping you alive: Your memory, concentration, focus are all impaired. Your pain receptors are affected, leading to more pain, tension, and inflammation in the body. Your digestion slows down, your mouth creates less saliva, so it becomes harder to break down food. Your heart rate quickens and your breath gets shallow, moving within your chest rather than your diaphragm.
Often referred to as the
fight-or-flight response, this side of your nervous system also has a lesser-known reaction, called
freeze (or
tonic immobility, if you wanna get fancy!). Essentially, your brain, when faced with a “tiger,” quickly assesses the best course of action for survival: You can fight the tiger off, option one. If that doesn’t feel safe, you can flee or run away, option two. If running isn’t an option, or if our system gets overwhelmed, we then fall into the freeze response, option three. This comes from the evolutionary survival instinct of playing dead—essentially, doing nothing, pretending to be a rotten corpse that will make the tiger sick in hopes that it will move on to fresher prey.
This freeze response shows up more often than you’d expect—think of the last time you watched a scary movie and a creature popped out and you GASPED and were frozen in your seat! That’s your freeze response. Or if you’ve ever found yourself driving on ice and start skidding and can’t think clearly enough to steer or pump the brakes so you just do nothing and gaze wide-eyed out the windshield. Maybe you remember being called to the principal’s office because you rolled a snowball at recess and it hit Timmy in the head (even though Timmy was being a little jerk) and when asked what happened you just sat there like a deer in the headlights. Yep, the deer in the headlights is literally a deer assuming your headlights are a tiger and experiencing that freeze response as a result!
The thing is, though, your cute little brain doesn’t know the difference between spilling your morning coffee all over your lucky shirt before a big job interview or first date and a tiger chasing you—it responds as if you were being chased by a tiger regardless. Our sympathetic nervous system gets a lot of blame because if it stays active TOO long, it creates all kinds of issues for us: chronic pain, immune system dysfunction, digestive issues, etc. Now, most of us LIVE in tiger mode all damn day—think of all the things that have already stressed you out between waking up and right now. And it’s up to you to reassure your brain that you’re actually okay, lest you shift into that sympathetic response. But the sympathetic nervous system isn’t the enemy here—we NEED it. It’s the reason you’re not eating Tide Pods or walking in front of trains. It’s also the reason you feel motivated to chase your goals. However, it was designed for short-term activation. A tiger is chasing you, you fight, run, or freeze, and once you’re safe again, you shake it off and go back to relaxation. THAT is what you were wired to do. Most of us struggle to get out of that tiger mode once it’s activated.
Now, here’s a fun fact: there’s a ninety-second chemical reaction in your brain beginning when you experience stress. What you do in those ninety seconds MATTERS. It determines whether you stay in that sympathetic state or go back into parasympathetic mode, where all those resources utilized for survival can go back to finding balance in the body and mind again.
