Am I Causing This, or Just Seeing It?


Someone wrote in with a question I want to answer publicly, because I guarantee you're not the only one sitting with it.

She said:

I have noticed that when I think of something, it is appearing in my reality the same day or at the very least within a week. It's freaking me out because I don’t understand how I am doing this and I don’t understand what this ability is called.

Here's my read, right up front:

She's not doing this. This is happening to her. Not the same thing.

I get why this freaks people out. If you're tuned in enough to catch the synchronicities of your own life with real accuracy, it is a very short leap to "oh god, am I causing this."

Especially if the thing that showed up wasn't good.

I know that leap personally. When I was a kid, some genuinely traumatic things went down in my family. And I had seen them coming. Not in some vague, could-mean-anything way. I'd had visions, and then those exact things happened in reality. That was terrifying, because I was young enough that the witches in my family hadn't yet sat me down for The Talk: seeing something before it happens does not mean you made it happen.

It means a reality was already so heavy, so loud, so obviously on its way, that a person who's attuned and energetically open could pick it up before the evidence for it had expressed itself on Earth.

That was a massive relief for me. Because it is so easy to feel guilty for having one "bad" thought and then watching it play out, like you cursed someone by accident. I don't want to cause shitty things. Especially not for the people I love, and not for myself.

But there's a real difference between visualizing something on purpose to help bring it into your life, and receiving a vision that's simply using you as a channel for something that was already going to happen anyway.

So when this person says "I don't understand how I am doing this," my answer is: you're not doing it. It's being done to you, or more accurately, it's moving through you. And if you've never been taught the ethics and the energetics of this work, if you don't have a framework for the ways of knowing that science hasn't caught up to yet, that experience will rattle you. Of course it will.

Here's the practice:

Pay attention to how you're feeling, how you're behaving, how you're thinking, and what you're experiencing in the moments around these hits.

Over time, that attention is what lets you tell the difference between receiving a premonition and actively co-creating a reality you're already visualizing into being.

Both are real, but they are not the same thing, and you can learn to tell the difference.

The spiritual path is a lifelong one. It's never too late to start walking it, and it's never too early either. What matters is that once you choose it, you don't put it down. Keep developing your intuition. Keep getting clearer about your own magical skills. And at the very least, stop being afraid of them.

What this person is dealing with is extremely common. That doesn't make it any less special. It can happen to anyone, and with practice, you get more say in it. You can even use it on purpose.

I hope this helps. Keep the questions coming. Answering the specific, real thing that's coming up in your practice is one of my favorite parts of this work.

Courage, truth, and infinite love,


I don’t believe in magic, but I know that it works!

Magic is not a belief system, it’s a practice that works. Don’t believe me? Come try it out. If it doesn’t work, you lose nothing. But if it does… your dream life is about to begin!


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Maritza Schafer

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