Into the Magic Shop Read online

  I ran into the bedroom and gave it to my mother. She opened the envelope and slowly counted the money. There was enough money to not only pay the rent for the next three months, but also to pay some bills and buy food.

  I couldn’t believe it. The magic had worked. It really worked.

  “I have to go!” I yelled at my mom.

  I got on my bike and rode as fast as I could back to the magic shop. Ruth was just walking out the door with Neil.

  “Ruth! Ruth!” I screamed.

  She and Neil both stopped on the sidewalk.

  “I’m glad you came back,” said Neil. “I meant to give you this earlier.” He handed me a bag from the store. “You can still come by, even without my mom here. Anytime.”

  I said thanks, and he walked over to the car to wait for Ruth.

  I looked into her eyes. “It really works,” I said. I had tears in my eyes. “The magic. It’s real.”

  She put her arms around me and hugged me while I sat on my bike. “I know, Jim, I know.” She stepped away and started toward the car, but then turned back. “You understand it now, don’t you? The power you have inside you? You were ready to learn, and I was privileged to teach you. Each of us has that power inside. We each just need to learn how to use it. But remember, the magic I have taught you is powerful. Powerful for good, but in the hands of someone who isn’t ready, it can also hurt and cause pain. And also remember, Jim, it is your thoughts that create reality. Others can create your reality only if you don’t create it yourself.”

  I watched her drive off. I thought I understood what she was saying in those last moments we had together, but I didn’t understand enough. Not nearly enough. There would come a time later in my life when I truly understood, but before that happened I had to experience what Ruth had meant about such power in the hands of someone who wasn’t ready. I was that someone.

  I looked into the bag Neil had given me. There was a plastic thumb tip and a few different decks of marked cards.

  I thought about Neil for a minute. I closed the bag up. I really liked his magic, but it didn’t compare to the magic Ruth taught me. I had something better. Something way more powerful. I was going to get what I wanted. And one thing I knew I didn’t want was to be poor or to be looked down upon by people who thought they were better than me because they had money and lived in nice houses and drove nice cars and had good jobs. I was going to have everything. No one was ever going to look down on me. I was going to be a doctor. Someone whom everyone looked up to. I was going to have a million dollars. I would be powerful. Successful. I knew how to do it. Ruth had taught me. This magic was greater than anything I had ever imagined. And all along it was sitting right there inside me. I just didn’t know it. I would train my mind. I would practice. I would work harder, do more—whatever was necessary. I knew I had it in me.

  We weren’t evicted. It was all the proof I needed. Ruth’s magic was real, and it was powerful. I crossed that off my list, and I knew I would cross the rest of it off too.

  • • •

  I HATED LANCASTER. Certainly, my family situation contributed a great deal to how I felt about the place, but if it weren’t for Lancaster, I wouldn’t have learned the magic that would allow me to accomplish extraordinary things. I am thankful that I was there, at that time, in that place, to meet the right person. The person who changed my brain with her magic.

  My reality before Ruth was that I felt lost and that life was an unfair place where some were lucky and some were not. I didn’t see any real possibility that I could become someone important or escape the small and miserable world that my parents lived in. After Ruth, I saw the world differently. I saw myself differently. I believed in a world of unlimited possibilities. I could create anything I wanted, and this gave me a sense of power and a sense of purpose. Ultimately, we all have the ability to learn the same magic. I had tapped into the power of my mind, and I was ready to use that power and not let anyone or anything stop me.

  Ruth’s Trick #4

  Clarifying Your Intent

  Sit in a quiet room and close your eyes.

  Think of a goal or something you wish to accomplish. It does not matter that the details of the vision are not fully formed. It is important that such a goal or vision is one that does not involve harm to another or bad intent. While this technique could help you accomplish such a goal, it will ultimately result in pain and suffering to yourself and make you unhappy.

  Relax your body completely (Ruth’s Trick #1).

  Once relaxed, focus on your breathing and try to empty your mind completely of all thoughts.

  When thoughts arise, guide your attention back to your breath.

  Continue to breathe in and out, completely emptying your mind.

  Now think of your goal or wish and see yourself as having accomplished it. Sit with the vision as you slowly breathe in and out.

  Feel the positive emotions associated with accomplishing your goal or having achieved your wish. Experience how good it feels to have taken a thought and turned it into reality. Sit with the positive feelings as you see yourself having accomplished your goal.

  Once you have seen yourself having accomplished the goal and have sat with the positive feelings, begin to add details to the vision. Exactly how do you look? Where are you? How are people responding to you? Add as much detail to the vision as possible.

  Repeat one to two times daily or more for ten to thirty minutes. Each time begin with the vision of yourself having accomplished your goal. Sit with the feelings. Each time as you look at the vision add more details. It will start fuzzy, but the more times you do the exercise, the more the vision will become clearer.

  With each time you do the exercise you will find you are refining the vision as your unconscious mind begins having clarity of the intent. You may be surprised what you discover and how you end up achieving your goal. What is important is the goal, not exactly how you get there.

  It is with clarity of intent that vision becomes a reality.

  *You can visit intothemagicshop.com to listen to an audio version of this exercise.

  PART TWO

  The Mysteries of the Brain

  SIX

  Apply Yourself

  If my life were a made-for-television movie—perhaps one of the ABC Afterschool Specials that began airing in the 1970s—life would have changed dramatically after Ruth’s magic kept us from getting evicted. My dad would have stopped drinking, my mother would have left the darkness of depression forever, money would have continued magically to appear on our doorstep, and we all would have lived happily ever after as the perfect, made-for-television, nuclear family. The Brady Bunch would have had nothing on the Doty family.

  But Ruth’s magic didn’t work that way. A genie hadn’t been let out of the bottle to grant my every wish in real time. My family was not magically transformed. My dad still drank. My brother still hid from the world. My mother still battled depression and a seizure disorder. I had been given the magic, yes, but it was up to me to practice it. Perfect it. And continue to believe that the impossible was now possible. I could try to create a new reality for myself, but I could not change the people I loved, no matter how much I might have intended it. They had to choose to change their reality and that did not happen. This is perhaps the most painful part of being a child. Our life is dependent on others and is beyond our control. Often the impact of others’ choices can be deeply wounding and leave lasting scars.

  I might not have been able to change anyone else’s reality, but I knew I could change my own. I knew every single thing on my list would come true, and soon after Ruth left, I had it memorized so thoroughly that I put it away into my special box with my Dale Carnegie book and my magic tricks from Neil. I also had the little notebook that I kept in the box with everything Ruth had taught me written down inside.

  I practiced every morning an
d every night, day after day, week after week, month after month. Just as athletes who visualize or imagine themselves performing a skill over and over again in their head—the perfect jump shot, the hole-in-one, a home run hit high past center field—are changing their physiology and creating neural patterns in their brain that actually enable their muscles to perform in new ways, I was using visual imagery to create new neural pathways in my own brain. The brain doesn’t distinguish between an experience that is intensely imagined and an experience that is real. I was training my mind to become a doctor long before I ever applied to college or medical school, simply by visualizing myself as a doctor. Another mystery of the brain is that it will always choose what is familiar over what is unfamiliar. By visualizing my own future success, I was making this success familiar to my brain. Intention is a funny thing, and whatever the brain puts its intention on is what it sees. Have you ever thought about buying a certain type of car and then it was as if you were suddenly seeing that exact type of car everywhere you went? Was it your intention that made the car magically appear or was it your brain’s focused attention that allowed you to finally see what was in front of you all the time? “You get what you expect” can be a simple idea delegated to a New Age, feel-good thought or a powerful example of neuroscience and brain plasticity. Attention is a powerful thing—it can literally change our brains, creating more grey matter in the very areas that help us learn, perform, and make our dreams come true. Ruth taught me to pay attention to what I expected in life. Did I expect to live in poverty? Did I expect my life not to matter because I was on public assistance or grew up in an alcoholic family? Did I expect my worth to not be as great because of where I lived or who my parents were?

  Ruth taught me to refocus my attention and intention from my identity as an impoverished child from a neglectful home and move it toward what my mind thought it wanted most. Money. Rolex. Success. Porsche. Doctor. These were my new familiars—these were the images I engraved onto the cells and within the synapses of my prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex controls our executive functions—planning, problem solving, judgment, reasoning, memory, decision making. It’s what helps us regulate our emotional responses, overcome a bad habit, or make a wise choice. It’s the place in our brain that allows us to consider our own mind—what Ruth had already begun to teach me to do. It’s also where we learn to feel empathy and connection to others. Ruth taught me the skills to get anything I wanted in life, and I focused my attention entirely on manifesting the future I dreamed about. I had no idea about any of the details that would help me get into college and medical school—in fact I was completely oblivious to the entire process. But intention setting is its own kind of magic, and since that summer in the magic shop, the universe has always seemed to conspire to get me exactly where I needed to be.

  Of course, when it came to surviving high school, the universe was nowhere to be found. In retrospect, maybe I should have set my intention more on succeeding at school and focused on one thing at a time, instead of only what life would look like when I was finally someone.

  • • •

  MY HIGH SCHOOL years passed by in a blur. In some areas I did very well, but in others I just passed. I didn’t yet have a clear image of what I needed to do to go to college or medical school. I also didn’t understand how to ask for help or guidance. Only later did I realize that many people will help if they are just asked. But at that time I still felt I was alone and didn’t know how to ask or even what to ask. As a child, not having mentors or people to turn to for advice or guidance has a huge impact on success in life. You can’t do it if you don’t know what it is. I had wanted to play sports in high school and I had made the cut for the football, basketball, and baseball teams as a freshman, but I soon found out that school sports required both money and parental involvement, and I had neither on a consistent basis. It’s hard to be a member of a team when you can’t get a ride to practice, or you’re unable to show up for a game because you have to stay home and babysit your mother or have to go to a bar on a Friday night and find your father. I liked the feeling of belonging I experienced when on a team—dressed in our uniforms we were all the same, and we shared a common purpose. I never lettered in a sport in high school, although I wanted to desperately, so during my junior year I took out my list of ten things and added this to it: Letter in a sport in college—get the jacket!

  Knowing I had my list tucked away helped me take life’s disappointments and seeming unfairness in stride, and relaxing my body and calming my mind every evening eased my anxiety about both school and home. I was living for the future that existed in my mind, and it was a far more enjoyable place to live than our small dingy apartment that smelled like mold and cigarette smoke. Unless I was practicing Ruth’s magic or sleeping, I tried not to be at home.

  It was this desire to be at home as little as possible that made me apply to Law Enforcement Exploring. In order to be a Law Enforcement Explorer Scout you had to be over the age of fifteen, have at least a 2.0 GPA in high school, and be of good moral character. Every Saturday for twelve weeks we went by bus to the Sheriff’s Academy in Los Angeles and learned about law enforcement. For eight hours we studied community policing, criminal procedures, self-defense, and gun safety and were drilled in physical fitness. All the Deputy Explorers wore the same khaki shirts and dark green pants. It wasn’t exactly like being on a sports team, but I still got to wear a uniform and be a part of something bigger than myself. It was also nice to have somewhere to go on Saturdays. Once we had graduated from the program we were official Explorers and participated in different roles in our local sheriff’s department, working side by side with a deputy. One day we might be on patrol, driving around the community and answering calls. Another time we might be in charge of crowd control at various events like parades, high school football games, and the annual Fourth of July fireworks show. Or we could work in the jail alongside the officers who processed and booked anyone who was arrested.

  One Saturday night my assignment was to work in the booking area at the sheriff’s station in Lancaster. I was helping the jailer and so was given a key. I hung the key proudly on the loop of my pants, and waited for a massive takedown of some criminal masterminds. I imagined the jail filled with prisoners, with me outside the cell, holding the key to their fate. I was powerful with that special key, but for most of the night there was no one around to see me in all my glory.

  I filed endless stacks of paper and reports, drank several Cokes from the vending machine, and basically sat around thinking this part of being in law enforcement was pretty boring. Just before my volunteer shift was over, I heard a patrol car pull up outside the booking area and saw a patrolman walk in with a disheveled, handcuffed man. I couldn’t see his face. He was obviously inebriated and his speech was slurred. I felt my heart begin to race. This was it. I would soon be putting this criminal behind bars. The patrolman walked past me with the criminal. His shoulders were hunched over, and I still couldn’t see his face, but he swayed and stumbled as he walked. I took out my key, knowing that after they fingerprinted and booked him, it would be time to lock him up. The criminal sat down at the desk and that’s when he lifted his head up and looked right at me.

  It was my father. He looked confused and angry and very, very drunk. I felt my stomach turn over. I quickly turned away from him and went back over to the filing cabinet. I was so ashamed. I had written an entire essay for my Deputy Explorer application about my high moral character. Now what were they going to think of me? I had answered the questions about my family in a very vague way, and had convinced myself that the deputies didn’t know how poor I was or that my father was an angry alcoholic who had been to jail many times. Part of the reason I had joined the Explorers was to prove just how different I was from my family.

  I opened the filing cabinet drawer and just stared at the rows of files inside. I wished I could use my special key to lock myself away from this place. Why did
it always seem that no matter where I went, I couldn’t escape who I was and where I was from?

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up to see my supervising deputy standing next to me.

  “I’m sorry this happened,” he said.

  I realized then that he must have known who my father was all along. I could feel the heat flush across my face, so I kept my head down. I wasn’t going to cry, but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Was I really going to have to lock up my own father?

  “I talked to the officer who brought him in. We’re not going to press charges. We’ll let him sober up and give him a ride home.”

  I nodded, and murmured, “Thanks.”

  I wanted to just disappear, but my supervisor was still standing there with his hand on my shoulder.

  “Jim,” he said quietly.

  I looked up and into his eyes, expecting to see judgment or, even worse, pity. But I didn’t see either. And in that moment, I remembered Ruth once telling me that just because something is broken doesn’t mean everything is broken. I had always assumed that people judged me because of my father, because of my poverty, because of all the things I didn’t have—but feeling that deputy’s hand on my shoulder, seeing his eyes full of kindness, I realized that this was how I judged myself. I was poor. My father was an alcoholic. But I wasn’t broken. Everything didn’t have to be broken just because something was broken. I didn’t have to be broken.

  “Yes, sir?” I said to the deputy.

  “Do you want to leave or finish your shift out?”

  “I’d like to finish it out.” And the minute I said this, I knew it was true. My father had his path, and I had my path.

  The deputy looked at me again. “You know, Jim, my father was an alcoholic too. I know how you’re feeling.” I felt one last squeeze on my shoulder and then the deputy turned away and walked back out the door.