Have you been hearing year after year about how magical and special the holiday season is supposed to be? How well have you managed to make YOUR holidays measure up to that ideal?

What if it were easier than you imagined to turn this season and its usual stresses into something really magical instead?

A great place to start is with taking a look at what real magic is. Dr. Dain Heer of Access Consciousness has quite a different definition from those you may have heard: “Magic is when what you would like to have in your life actually shows up and you are willing to have it.”

How do you move from the hamster wheel of trying to make your holiday season have the magic it’s supposed to have to having a life of “those moments when everything fell into place with such ease that it’s like living as magic?”

Dr. Heer has a number of tools that can assist you with this.
The first step in getting off the hamster wheel is to recognize that you’re much more psychic than you know!

What does he mean? Have you had one psychic experience of any kind in your life? Things as simple as when the phone rings, and you know who it is before you answer. If your answer is yes, then you ARE psychic whether you’ve been recognizing it in your daily life or not, says Access Consciousness founder Gary Douglas.

Although this season is supposed to be the most joyful, magical, celebratory season of the year, is that what really occurs for many or most people? Or does that expectation create huge stresses which most people have to measure up to, twisting themselves into pretzels so their lives appear like the romantic life they see in the movies when they’re really living in a sea of judgment, disappointment, sadness, and frustration?

One way that psychic ability has been showing up without your knowing it is in your picking up the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of everyone around you. At least 98% of your thoughts, feelings and emotions are not yours, says Douglas. In a year of such major economic and other challenges as this one, there’s an excellent chance those thoughts feelings and emotions you’re picking up this holiday season are not exactly light and airy bundles of joy. What if 98% of all that stress, unhappiness, frustration and worry didn’t belong to you?

You have been functioning like a psychic sponge bob, picking up the psychic debris of everyone around you. Since no one ever taught you how to differentiate between what you perceive from others and what’s yours, you have most likely been buying all of it as yours for your whole life.

Fortunately, there is a different way to look at things, and some easy tools you can use to step out of this hamster race. The first step is to recognize there is a huge difference between perceiving feelings and actually having them. When you walk into a room where people have been having a vehement argument, for example, you can easily sense that something uncomfortable has just occurred, even if you didn’t overhear a single word and everyone involved has since left the room.

We create much confusion for ourselves when we perceive that energy and emotion, but we say, “I feel …” Sometimes that “feeling” is a bodily sensation like nauseousness, a lump in the throat, a knot in the stomach. That is perceiving the energy in the room. Our mistake is that we do not differentiate between what we perceive and what is actually ours. The moment we say “I feel…” we just bought it as ours. Every time we say, “I feel yucky” in an experience like that described above, our body hears, “feel yucky” as a command and it does its best to comply. Voila! You feel yucky even if the argument occurred between people you never met, before you even came into the room.

A practical tool you could use is to be aware now of the difference between feeling and perceiving, and to use the word that really fits what is occurring. Much more often than not, you will be perceiving rather than feeling. Instead of saying, “I feel yucky,” ask a question like, “What’s the awareness I am having here?” or “What am I really perceiving?”

What else is possible? One very easy method you could try is to ask yet another question, “Who does that belong to?” Whenever you ask, “Who does this belong to?” and the feeling immediately gets lighter, whatever you’ve been feeling isn’t yours. It is something you are perceiving and you can ask it to return to sender. Fortunately, you do NOT have to know who the sender is in order for this to work – though you may find out when you say it. In either case, just send it home, and get on with your life, free of that psychic debris.

If the feeling or emotion isn’t yours, you have essentially been buying a lie to believe it is. Buying something as you when it isn’t will always make you feel heavy. Asking the question “who does this belong to” allows you to recognize that it isn’t yours, thus freeing you of it, which immediately makes everything feel lighter.

These two tools, being aware of the difference between perceiving and feeling and being aware that the vast majority of what you’ve believed you felt all your life wasn’t even yours, can go a long way to clearing up major sources of misery during the holidays (not to mention the other 11 months of the year)!

Once you’ve cleared away a lot of the junk that’s been gunking up your holiday experiences, how about stepping into the magic? According to Douglas and Heer, magic is really about being willing to receive. As an infinite being, you have the ability to receive infinitely – which allows for lots of magic to show up in your life.

One of the reasons people think they don’t have magic in their lives is that they tend to discount it when it happens. They ask for something, it shows up “just like magic,” and then they say, “it was coincidence,” or “it was serendipity.” When you do that, you are denying the magic that you are and that you create – and you make it that much harder for the universe to show you the magic that you are next time.

You can easily get in touch with this magical ability that you have by making a list of all the times in your life when you’ve asked for something and it showed up. Then acknowledge that every single item on your list is something you created. It was you that allowed you to have it in your life. Acknowledge what a cool magician you already are, and ask what else is possible?

Douglas and Heer have a set of guidelines they recommend following to create magic in your life. Get the feeling of what it would be like to have what you’re looking for first. Then lightly state your desire. Ask for the universe’s help in sending it to you. Don’t be vested in the outcome.

What does “lightly” stating your desire mean? It goes hand in hand with not being vested in the outcome. You ask for what you would like, and then you release it to the universe. It can take the universe a little time to get things arranged for you. So be a little patient and be willing to live as the question. It doesn’t work when you’re vested in what it looks like, or when it occurs by, or how it has to look exactly. All of these expectations and demands will cancel the magic. Conclusions, like “it didn’t work!” when things didn’t happen exactly when and how you demanded them, also cancel the magic.

What magic can you create this holiday season? Part of the magic could be asking that very question and finding out what shows up!