The Magic Behind My First Book

I’ve just published my first book, Structure Magic. It teaches you how to use your mind in a set of structured ways to create the magic you want.

Structure–the way I teach it–cues the Universe to turbocharge your intention. It needn’t be a complex structure; simple is often better. Also easier to use.

That’s the magic of structure. You can explore it much more at this link. It costs just $11 to access everything I know and all the tools I use daily.

The magic behind this first book of mine is what I want to talk about now.

There is a simple structure that powered the writing of the book. You see it in the picture above. (I talk about this place in the book.) Do you know this place? It’s the National Gallery of Art‘s East Building. Specifically, it’s the Cascade Cafe’s “waterfall wall” designed by I.M. Pei into a concatenation of triangles. (Not unlike his “new” entrance to the Louvre in Paris. “New” is relative in France. The now-iconic pyramidal entrance was inaugurated in 1989; the old entrance was a couple of hundred years old.)

There is something so creative about a museum for me. Double that if there’s a cafe because a museum is one of my favorite places to write and think, and sitting with a drink and a treat I can sip and nibble at my leisure nourishes my creative spirit.

Most museums feel like temples to me. I come to worship actively–and I don’t mean the works on the walls. I come to commune with the works. I worship the Spirit animating the works–and find my own flow with that Spirit in a museum more easily than anywhere else but home and my favorite nearby quiet spa. (Water, for me, inspires creativity. Does it do that for you?)

I sat down to write Structure Magic one day five years ago when I had nothing else to do, nowhere else to be but right there, present to myself and inspired by those dynamic triangles of I.M. Pei’s. So dynamic they made their way into the book as illustrations of structure magic.

The exercises I teach in the book are ones I learned early, early on–in Paris in the early 1980s. I noticed I could remember things without even trying that had happened at certain Métro stations just by thinking of the name of the station. I began experimenting with using station names to evoke memories in readers of an open-ended novel I never did write. Oulipo was in the air, people who play relentlessly with language and math, for example, writing an entire novel without the letter “e” first in French, and in the English translation!

I notice that memory mapped to place. The idea is not new: Cicero is famous for having discussed it as a tool for remembering a long speech. Cicero got his ideas from somewhere–and he died in 43 BCE! So we are talking about an ancient discovery. I love this and teach a bit about it in my own book.

The cool thing I noticed as I began RAISING CLARITY, coaching and consulting, was that not only could I remember the past using places, I could remember the future. I could create places in my mind that evoked a future I wanted, and bring them into my own present. I could do this for myself, and for my clients, whom I call soul-colleagues.

For example, I have an elaborate structure that exists in a realm outside physical real estate where I bring clients to do work that somehow can’t be accomplished nearly so well or so fast in the physical realm. It’s a protected space for intuition, guidance, inspiration, and self-witnessing. It works…like a charm.

This is the majority of what I teach in the book. What I teach there is very simple so that you get the hang of the magic yourself, and then slightly more complex as you evolve with the book.

I’d love questions if you have any about the magical process of writing this helpful book, and about the book itself.

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