You Don't Have to Choose Between Neuroscience and Magic
Updated: Sep 1
I got an interesting question recently about the philosophy behind my work:
How can I call my tools neuroscience-informed and then, sometimes in the very same sentence, talk about magic?
How do neuroscience and magic sit beside each other without apology?
And I love this question because it gets right to the crux of what I do.
You don't have to choose between evidence-based tools and spirituality, magic, or ritual.
For me, these aren't opposing worlds.
They're different languages we can use to describe overlapping aspects of the whole human experience.
So what do I mean by magic?
Magic is the act of consciously participating in the creation of your life, in collaboration with the universe that you are a part of.
Neuroscience gives us a language for understanding how our brains shape the way we perceive, interpret, and respond to reality.
Magic, as I use the word, is our conscious participation in that process—combined with an openness to the parts of existence that remain mysterious.
Magic is conscious participation.
It's not control.
It's not certainty.
It's not bypassing reality.
It's moving from being unconscious of your patterns and your power into the center of yourself, where you have options and choices.
Not because you are all-powerful. Not because you can control everything that happens to you.
Almost the opposite.
There is a kind of ego dissolution in realizing how intricately connected you are to everything else.
There is awe there.
And reverence.
You don't have to split yourself in order to heal.
The people who find their way into my world have often bounced between therapy, neuroscience podcasts, spirituality, manifestation, religion, self-help, somatics and all kinds of other systems for understanding themselves.
And sometimes it can feel as though every new philosophy requires us to split ourselves again.
This part is rational.
That part is spiritual.
This experience is scientifically legitimate.
That experience is mystical.
My work is much more interested in bringing all of those pieces into one giant group hug.
Because that's also what I believe we're doing internally.
In order to survive, we learn to split off parts of ourselves.
Our anger.
Our sexuality.
Our sensitivity.
Our pleasure.
Our intuition.
Our too-muchness.
Our not-enoughness.
Our brains are extraordinary pattern-recognition machines. When we learn that some part of us threatens our access to love, safety, care or belonging, we learn to hide it, exile it, distort it or change it.
And then we grow up.
The threat may be gone.
But the part is still hiding.
Healing, to me, is not about finding the unacceptable parts of yourself and finally getting rid of them.
It's about bringing them back into relationship with the whole.
Science can describe the process. Mysticism can describe the experience.
This is one of the reasons I love hypnosis and parts work.
We can go inward and meet the parts of ourselves that have been holding patterns we consciously don't even want anymore.
Instead of immediately trying to eliminate the habit, reaction or feeling, we can get curious.
What are you doing?
What do you need?
What have you been trying to protect?
Why does this make sense to you?
We can bring what was hidden in the shadow back into the light and begin rearranging our inner landscape.
You can look at that process through the lens of the brain: patterns, learning, attention, perception and nervous-system responses.
Or you can look at it mystically and say:
These are parts of my soul that I am reclaiming.
To me, those descriptions don't have to fight.
The outer world changes the inner world, too.
We can see this relationship between inner and outer worlds in something as ordinary as our homes.
Walk into a room overflowing with clutter and notice what happens inside your body.
Now imagine arranging that same room intentionally. Creating space. Beauty. Order. An altar. A place where your attention can land.
You have changed the objects outside of yourself—and in doing so, changed something inside of yourself.
Ritual works with this relationship deliberately.
Sometimes we arrange the parts inside ourselves to create an effect on the world outside of us.
Sometimes we arrange the world outside of us to create an effect on the world within.
That, to me, is magic as a verb.
And maybe the most magical thing is that I don't know.
I am not a neuroscience expert.
I use hypnosis and other practices that are increasingly being studied through neuroscience, and I find neuroscience incredibly useful because it gives us language for understanding why some of these experiences can be so powerful.
I also don't believe our current scientific language contains everything there will ever be to know about consciousness, intuition, connection or human experience.
And I don't need to pretend that I know what we haven't figured out yet.
In fact, that's part of the magic.
The magic is: I don't know.
I can't know everything from inside this human brain.
I can remain curious.
I can use the tools we have.
I can care about evidence and accuracy while remaining open to mystery.
I can allow science to deepen my awe instead of requiring it to replace my awe.
And perhaps healing asks the same thing of us.
Not to choose one half of ourselves and exile the other.
But to keep gathering the pieces back in.
To become a little more whole.
To consciously participate in what happens next.
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