Well•come, kin. Pause, and take a deep, calming breath with me. In... and out... As you breathe, remind yourself of your innate wisdom and wholeness. With each breath—be here. Fully present, as we embark on this journey together.

LaShaun Here to help you feel good & function well in the most meaningful areas of your life. Because being stressed, striving and stuck in survival mode was never the goal. ​ #whensciencefeelslikemagic

Leonard Cohen once wrote it, and then every ambitious person on the internet pinned it to a board and missed the point entirely: “do not be a magician. be magic.”

Here's what we hear: be more impressive. Level up. Ascend. Vibrate at a frequency so elevated that mere mortals spontaneously applaud.

Here's what he meant: disappear.

A magician has a stage. A magician has a trick, a misdirection, a small elegant lie that what you're seeing is real. A magician says watch this and whatever astonishment follows, it funnels back toward a center. Someone performing the extraordinary, and someone watching the extraordinary get performed. The whole exchange requires an audience. The applause points back at them: wow, so clever.

Magic doesn't work that way.

You're walking through the kitchen and the light hits the countertop in a way that makes you stop moving. Not because the light is performing. Not because the countertop got dressed up for the occasion. Something just... caught.
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That's magic. It touches you.

Perhaps you already know this in your body; the taxonomy of it. An inherited gesture: when you catch yourself making your mother's exact hand motion mid-sentence, and she got it from her mother, that came from her mother and that woman carried it from a kitchen or a church or a front porch that no one living ever got to see. Nobody taught it to you. It arrived muscularly, below the level of instruction, a physical echo of your lineage still moving through the living.
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The goose pimples that prickle your forearms during a piece of music or a dance or a photo so striking it bypasses your thinking entirely and rearranges something cellular.
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The suspended half-second before someone you're talking to gets it and you both know the conversation just became a different conversation.
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Deja vu.
The turn of fall leaves.
Bioluminescence.
The full-body eureka when a good idea shows up.

And that's the distinction Cohen drew. Magician and magic. It’s the same root but an entirely different species. Magic says nothing. You just suddenly notice you're crying, or your skin is electric, or you understand something you didn't understand thirty seconds ago. It touches you. It transforms things.
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There's an exhaustion tax the magician pays that nobody talks about. Every trick requires concealment. You can't let them see the wires, the rehearsal, the mechanism behind the manufactured awe. So you stay alert. You manage the angles. You perform to exhaustion. One thing slips and the whole illusion folds and you're the wizard trying to pull the curtain and still pull levels at the same time. The magician's deepest fear isn't failure. It's exposure.

Magic can't be found out because there's nothing hidden. Magic has nothing to protect. It comes from the part of you that stopped pretending (which is harder to reach and impossible to fake) but also the only place where you're not exhausted by your own act.

He wasn't saying become a better performer. He was saying stop being the act. Get out of the way so the thing that doesn't need you can move through you.
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This is, if we're honest, the hardest possible assignment for anyone building a life with intention. The more precisely you try to engineer magic the more you guarantee its absence.
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A leader who manages well runs good meetings, hits targets, communicates clearly. That's the magician: impressive, competent, interesting to watch. The magic is when people around you start generating innovative ideas, solving problems you didn't assign, carrying a mission forward in ways that genuinely surprise you. You stopped being the source and became the condition.

A mother who follows the trending techniques: the enrichment, the schedules, the carefully researched everything is performing the trick. The magic is the moment a child feels inexplicably safe enough to be themselves. When they experience wonder because you are wonder-full. A household that feels a sense of aliveness.

Someone (you) designing their own life can architect a beautiful structure and still feel like they're living inside someone else's idea. The magic version is when the life design becomes so genuinely yours it stops feeling like design. It feels like inevitability.

Magic is already happening. All around you. In you. Constantly. It just falls below the threshold of your attention.
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What’s your magic, Reader? You gotta know it so you can be it.

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Your brain has a region (a network, really) called the default mode network. The DMN. Think of it as your internal narrator. The voice that plans, worries, compares, rehearses, and most insistently: self-references. How am I doing. How do I look. What do they think of me. Am I enough. It's the part of the brain responsible for the running monologue that constitutes your sense of self.

It's useful. You need it.

It also never shuts up.

In 2019, neuroscientist Michiel van Elk and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam put people inside an fMRI scanner and showed them awe-inducing videos: sweeping natural phenomena, the kind of footage that makes your chest expand. What they found was structural: awe quieted the default mode network. The brain regions responsible for self-referential processing went still. Participants reported feeling smaller. Their self-portraits, drawn afterward, were literally tinier on the page (van Elk et al., 2019; Human Brain Mapping, PMID: 31062899).

(Which is a very sophisticated way of saying: your brain's ego turned down the volume.)

This is the neurological architecture of what Cohen was describing. The magician keeps the DMN humming: the performance is self-referential by definition. Am I nailing this. Are they watching. Is this good enough. Magic bypasses that circuitry entirely. The self gets quiet, and what remains is immersion so complete that there's no room left for the narrator.

In 2022, Maria Monroy and Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley published a landmark review proposing that awe operates through five distinct processes that benefit health: shifts in neurophysiology, a diminished focus on the self, increased prosocial connection, greater social integration, and a heightened sense of meaning. Among their findings: of all positive emotions studied:joy, pride, compassion, contentment, love. Awe had the strongest association with lower levels of interleukin-6, a pro-inflammatory cytokine linked to depression, heart disease, and autoimmune disorders (Monroy & Keltner, 2022; Perspectives on Psychological Science, PMID: 35994778).

Said simply: the emotion you feel when magic moves you is measurably anti-inflammatory.

Then, in 2025, Monroy and Keltner's group went further. They ran a randomized controlled clinical trial, the gold standard, with participants living with long COVID, a population carrying persistent psychological distress. One group was asked to practice finding awe in everyday life at least three times a day. Not skydiving. Not gallivanting Machu Picchu. Everyday awe. The pattern on a leaf. The sound of wind. A fact that turned on their heartlights.

After three weeks, the awe group showed a 17% decrease in depressive symptoms, a 12% decrease in perceived stress, and a 16% increase in overall well-being. No medication. No structured therapy. Attention, redirected toward what was already there (Monroy et al., 2025; Scientific Reports, PMID: 40355653).

Magic doesn't require you to go find it. It requires you to stop walking past it.

The neuroscience tells us something Cohen intuited: the self is the obstacle. When the DMN quiets down, when you stop performing your own life and start witnessing what's already moving through it, your body responds. Inflammation drops. Stress recedes. Connection opens.
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You are, it turns out, built for awe.The only thing between you and the magic is the volume on your ego..

PRACTICE

remember your magic

You already have it. You've always had it. But you can't see it because you're inside it. Kinda like the way a lamp can't see its own light. This is your week of looking.

days 1–3: where you disappear. Every time you catch yourself having lost track of time this week, write down what you were doing. Not what you produced, what you were in. A great conversation that lingers on. The work that gets you in flow. The walk that went three blocks longer than you planned because, God, look around at the beauty. After three days, look at what you've collected. The things that consistently quiet your narrator are the things your magic already moves through.
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​day 4: what comes naturally to you. Sit with one question: what do I do that nobody taught me? The gesture. The way you comfort someone. The thing people describe about you that you never practiced or studied or read in a book. Trace it backward. That's magic that predates your memory of learning it. It’s what you come in with, your original medicine.

day 5: ask a witness. Ask one person you trust (just one) this question: when am I most like myself? Don't explain why. Don't try to guide their answer. What they describe will almost never be an accomplishment. It might be a quality. A moment when you were so fully there. You need a witness for this part because your own narrator can self-reference all day long and still miss your impact from the outside.

days 6–7: sit with it. You have the data now. Where you disappear. What moves through you. What someone else saw in you that you couldn't see from the inside. Sit with it.

You light is already here. You are awe-and-then-some.

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P.S. 17% reduction in depressive symptoms. no medication. just three weeks of noticing what was already there. Sometimes the research is magic, too, Reader.
#whensciencefeelslikemagic
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remember your magic.