Leave Burnout Behind, Embrace the Enchantment of Now

Source: Trần Long / Pexels

I loved magic shows as a kid. The open-mouthed gasp as the magician produced an egg from my ear. How did she know I'd picked the queen of hearts?

Magic was real (or at least I was more than willing to suspend disbelief). I was drawn in, enchanted, caught (but somehow freed?) in a spell. Time fell away. So did worries about math, peer rejection, or getting caught by my mom watching Skinamax in my room at night. I was the magic, the verb of its enthralling unfolding, like the flourish of the magician's cape.

Now? I'm 52. Dad to two great kids. A busy suburban practicing clinical psychologist. COVID has left its disruptive scars in my life (as it has yours)—mortgage to pay. The kiddo needs braces. College savings to fret over. The news cycle? Forget it—the opposite of enchantment.

I bought the entire Harry Potter book collection so my kids and I could read them together—read about the spellcasting of curious, courageous kids—and what's happened? The books have sat unread, at least by me. Too busy, serious.

Ironically, I'm too caught up in my adulting fiction to remember the spellbound state's healing, empowering, liberating potential. I, and perhaps you, are overdue for a serious 100 m.g. (magicgram) poof of it.

What is Spellbound?

Spellbound is "bound by, or as by, a spell; fascinated, enchanted, entranced." You've known it best, not as a word, a concept, but as a visceral embrace of experience. I wrote recently about catching lightning bugs as a kid in rural Ohio—spellbound, for sure.

Other examples?

• I stood on stage in fifth grade, singing and dancing as the lead in our school play (despite the general pall of social anxiety in my daily life).
• My wife told me she loved me for the first time (whispered in French in my ear), and I had to go Google it.
• The births of my kids.
• The waterfall down the street from my office.
• The "of course" moment of stepping in dog poop in the backyard as my agenda-fixated mind "next" frantically through a weekend's errands.

None were limited fictions of mind. They were moments of vivid, full-bodied, raw experience. They were magic reminders of more in that moment than myself. Something far bigger, rich, and fascinating. Something I've needed but forgotten for far too long, particularly in recent years.

Perhaps you feel me on this one. Perhaps you have your list of spells you've encountered in assorted moments?

Spellbound Is the Fresh, Full Version of Mindfulness

Mindfulness—paying attention to the present moment, intentionally, without judgment—is likely not new to you, yet how much has it become a "concept?" A story whose moral has "should" embedded in it? It's a growing, multibillion-dollar industry. There are so many books popping up on an Amazon search that it says "10,000-plus results" (including a few of mine cluttering the algorithm). The state of mindfulness itself, the practice of it, is genuinely never stale, yet the concepts have been coopted and hacked up into soundbites and memes.

So often (particularly in the West), "mindfulness" seems to be a way to get somewhere, achieve something, become better, calm, destress, and radically accept our badassery. Some of it is great and helpful. Increasingly, the full, raw, spellbound, fascinating encounter with the present moment is less of it.

If we are using "it" to become something "other" than "what is," we may be sitting in a full lotus pose with our eyes closed, but we're not mindful, and we're certainly not enchanted by the vivid unfolding of the moment.

Our kids at play are perhaps "better" at mindfulness when they are crafting forts out of cardboard in the living room (what my son has been doing recently) than we are with our earbuds in and guided mindful "chatter" on one of the hundreds of mindfulness apps currently available. My son casts spells on the floor with packing tape, increasingly blunted scissors, and all the cardboard shipments to our house that Amazon can provide.

Zen master Suzuki Roshi called it "beginner's mind."

We need to remember how to cast such spells. There's a freshness, a full encountering of the present moment, even if it's uncomfortable (think dog poop). Paradoxically, we might do our darndest at destressing, creating, rejuvenating, connecting, and many other important verbs of daily life if we drop the stories and drop into each moment's available sparks for spellcasting.

Mindfulness Essential Reads

How to Encourage Our Kids to Eat Greens

Does Yoga Help Reduce Schizophrenia Symptoms?

The Spell? Let Go, Get it All

How, you ask? I'll be brief (because posts require it) and because there are no "steps." It's more a flow, a release, a remembering.

1. Permission. Throw your ego, your thinking, and your control-obsessed mind a bone and say, "Hey, thanks for all your non-stop yapping and predicting, and might I have a moment to notice the moment at hand more fully?" That's it. Easy peasy.

2. Let go. Your mind might allow you to pause because perhaps it thinks you'll be "productive" here. Cross off a to-do item of self-care. OK, thank it for that, and see if you might further let go into what's happening here and now. Your senses, all of them. Your mind's contents (words and mental pictures, all of them). I pick them up and put them down like produce at the grocery store. And you're very picky. It's not personal, not judgy. Just relentlessly notice-y. You're just all about the shapes, smells, the feel of the richness (pleasant or unpleasant) of this situation you're in.

3. Soak Until Saturated. Keep going. It hasn't been long. A few seconds, maybe a minute or so. You don't "have time;" you're timeless. You're awash in the now-deliciousness of this vivid experience, just as it is. The vivid poof of it seeps in such that—if you're still giving permission and letting go—there's no magician, no "you" just for a bit. There's just the magic of this moment. The raw unfolding possibility, the energy in and from every direction. The smell of color, the feel of words, and the dance of emotion.

Give permission for you and the magician to merge, to disappear—no mystical hocus pocus. No tricks. There are no gurus to believe. It's all real, and that's the point. You're spellbound with all that's real, all that's now. The destressing of the to-dos of improving will do itself.

Here's to my reading of the first Harry Potter tonight.