Rising Rooted

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I didn’t study psychology to conjure wonder.

I studied it to diagnose my damage.

I wanted a map of what was broken—something clinical, clean. Something that would finally explain why I was so strange, so intense, so… off.

I thought if I could name the pathology, I could fix it.

I wanted answers. A shape for the ache I couldn’t name. Some tidy diagnostic framework to make me easier to live with. I thought maybe if I understood enough—read enough, analyzed enough—I could finally stop feeling like too much.

Psychology handed me systems and language—clinical, codified, neatly bound in manuals. And for a while, I tried to shrink myself to fit those frameworks.

But none of them held the whole of me. I started to notice that these tidy systems were built to sand the edges off human beings.

I came out the other side of my master’s degree burnt out and barely breathing. All theory, no lifeforce.

What I needed wasn’t more analysis. I needed mystery.

I needed the parts of me I’d exiled in the name of becoming “normal.”

So I began to follow what actually stirred something in me. Jung. Energy psych. Somatics. Trauma and the mind-body connection.

I wasn’t looking for magic.

But that’s what I found.

Jung, the Academic Witch

Carl Jung was the gateway drug. A Swiss psychiatrist who wrote like a closet mystic and thought like a mythographer.

To me, Jung read like a man trying to smuggle the sacred through customs.

His writing wasn’t about fixing people. It was about speaking with the things we’d buried. He talked of archetypes, dreams, alchemy, the collective unconscious—concepts so saturated in symbol they felt more like poetry than theory.

He practiced active imagination—what some might call journeying. He worked with symbols and stories and synchronicity. I sometimes wonder if he kept tarot cards in his sock drawer.

Jung opened a door I didn’t know I was looking for.

Not a path back to being good or functional—but toward being whole.

The Neuroscience of Spellwork

Then there were mirror neurons.

Little bundles in our brains that fire when we see someone else feeling something—grief, joy, fear. It’s how we know someone’s about to cry before their first tear falls. How we flinch when we see someone get hurt.

It’s empathy, energetically contagious.

Call it science if you want. But it sounds a lot like reading auras to me.

And then there’s placebo: the most consistent and baffling effect in all of medicine. People heal because they believe they’re being healed.

Expectation alters biology. Meaning rearranges molecules. We like to treat placebo as a flaw in the research. But maybe it’s a clue. Maybe it’s not a problem to eliminate—but evidence of a force we don’t yet understand. And maybe that force is… magic.

Not wands and sparkles—but the raw power of belief, connection, imagination.

Even with the explanation, something mysterious remains. And I trust it more than I ever trusted the textbooks.

The Field Between Us

Here’s something else that rarely makes it into textbooks: The most powerful predictor of therapeutic success isn’t the method or the model.

It’s the relationship.

That fragile, invisible field between client and therapist. That strange electric space where trust lives. Where silence holds more than words ever could.

You can call it rapport. You can measure it in empathy scores. But what happens in the relational field often defies measurement.

It’s where something happens—something unspoken and catalytic. Like ritual. Like recognition. Like a spell cast with the intention of care and compassion.

Tell me that’s not magic.

The Body is the Wild

Eco-psychology was the next breadcrumb.

It said: your psyche isn’t just in your head—it’s in the forest, in the weather, in the cycles of death and decay you’ve been taught to fear.

You’re not separate from the earth. You are earth.

That hit something deep.

But it was somatic psychology that landed it in my bones.

The body—this messy, intuitive, animal self—IS nature. It doesn’t speak in paragraphs. It speaks in pulse, breath, sensation.

In my Somatic Experiencing training, I came face-to-face with the untranslatable. A tremble. A release. A wave of heat that came out of nowhere. No clear reason. No insight. Just… something moved.

I stopped needing to explain everything. I started letting things work without knowing why. That, too, was a kind of magic. Not the performance. Not the spellcasting. Just the quiet trust that something unseen is doing its work beneath the surface. The wisdom that sensation, symbol, and movement are languages worth listening to. That healing doesn’t always arrive with insight.

Sometimes, the body speaks in metaphor. Sometimes it just speaks. And sometimes, what it says rearranges everything.

Naming Isn’t Always Knowing

Sometimes, names give form to the shapeless. Other times, they sterilize what should remain wild.

I’ve seen magic die under a diagnosis. I’ve also seen people reborn when they realize their strangeness was never a symptom—it was a gift, misnamed.

Jung knew this. He danced with the unknown rather than dissecting it.

In many ways, he felt like a Chiron figure to me—half-wild, half-wise. A wounded healer with one foot in the clinical world and one foot in the mythic.

Chiron, the centaur who could heal everyone but himself. Wounded by a poison that couldn’t be cured, he became a guide for others—a teacher, a mentor, a soul-shepherd.

His pain didn’t disappear. It became his power.

That’s the real inheritance of this work.

Not fixing.

Not escaping pain—but turning toward it with enough love to transform it into medicine.

A Quiet Kind of Rebellion

Returning to belief—to imagination, intuition, soul—isn’t just personal.

It’s collective healing.

In a culture that worships certainty and productivity, choosing to trust what you feel is a radical act.

Choosing to believe in what you’ve experienced, even when it can’t be measured, is a form of resistance.

This isn’t about abandoning science.

It’s about refusing to abandon the parts of ourselves that science hasn’t learned how to see yet.

The Invitation

Psychology brought me back to magic not by denying the real, but by making space for the more—the mystery, the myth, the felt but unnamed.

So I’ll leave you with this:

What truths live in the spaces you haven’t tried to explain?

What spells are still working on you, long after you stopped calling them that?

Maybe you haven’t lost your magic.

Maybe it’s just been waiting for you to believe it again.

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If this spoke to something in you, there are a few paths you can follow from here:

Each door leads somewhere different. It is my hope that all of them lead back to you.

<3 Rachel