There’s Magic in Discovering You Were Wrong
You Are Probably Wrong About Something Right Now (Congratulations)
You know that little jolt you get when you find out the thing you’ve believed for years just… isn’t true? Maybe it’s small, like discovering you’ve been mispronouncing “quinoa” since 2014 (it’s not “kwin-OH-ah,” it’s “KEEN-wah” and yes, it can trigger a whole identity crisis).
Or maybe it’s bigger. Maybe it’s the belief that you’re too much, too weird, too late, or simply too you to ever get the magical life you keep casting circles for.
This morning, my Matrix Reimprinting teacher sent me an article about the joy of discovering you’re wrong, and it landed in my inbox at exactly the right moment (the universe loves synchronicity).
The whole piece got me thinking about how often we treat our beliefs like sacred relics instead of what they actually are—old spells we cast on ourselves and then forgot we were casting.
A Belief Is Just a Spell You Stopped Noticing
Here’s the thing nobody tells you in beginner witchcraft class: you’ve been doing magic your whole life, whether you meant to or not.
Every time you repeated “I’m not the kind of person things work out for,” you were casting. Every time you decided “manifestation works for everyone except me,” that was spell working too—just in a sloppy way, cast in the dark, with zero candles and a lot of conviction.
The trouble is, a belief held long enough stops feeling like a belief. It starts feeling like reality. Just how things are. And once something feels like reality, you stop questioning it—you just follow that tangled path into the mire.
Borrowing a Trick from the Cauldron of Inquiry
There’s a well known practice, popularized by the author Byron Katie, that boils down to four deceptively simple questions you can ask any stressful belief:
- Is it true?
- Can you absolutely know it’s true?
3. How do you react—what happens—when you believe that thought?
4. Who would you be without the thought?
You don’t need her permission or mine to use it. Faeries have basically been running this exact diagnostic on humans for centuries, just with better lighting and more moss.
Try it on your favorite limiting belief tonight. Light a candle if you’re feeling fancy. Ask the belief who it thinks it is. Most of the time it gets oddly quiet, like a houseguest who’s just realized they overstayed by about a decade.
Magic Isn’t Lying to Yourself, It’s Catching Yourself Mid-Lie
People sometimes worry that magic is just pretending. It’s quite the opposite.
The actual sneaky pretending happened years ago, when you first agreed to believe something untrue about yourself or reality—about money, about love, about whether the New Earth could possibly include someone like you.
Magic is just you finally catching the lie red-handed and showing it the door (politely, with herbal tea, because we’re witches, not barbarians).
The Apocalypse Is Doing You a Favor
I love that the word apocalypse originally just meant an unveiling, a lifting of the curtain, not the dramatic end-of-everything we’ve been trained to picture.
Every time an old belief gets exposed as false, that’s a tiny personal apocalypse, and it’s wonderful news. It means the truth has more room to breathe.
It means you get to see what was actually underneath the story the whole time, which—spoiler—is usually something a great deal more magical than the story.
Five Tiny Magic Tricks for Falling Out of Love With a False Belief
1. Say the belief out loud, then immediately ask, “wouldn’t it be wonderful if I were wrong about this?” Notice if your shoulders drop half an inch.
2. Write the belief on paper, then write what’s actually, provably true underneath it. Burn the first one if you’re into a little theater (I always am).
3. Ask your higher self, power animal, spirit guide, angel, or neighborhood tree spirit whether the belief is even yours, or whether you picked it up secondhand somewhere (parents, teachers, ministers, doctors, friends, Instagram, CBS news…)
4. For one full day, act exactly as you would if the belief simply weren’t true. See what shows up.
Whenever you catch yourself insisting you’re right about something painful, get curious instead of defensive. Curiosity is the actual gateway, not certainty.
Somewhere out past the oaks tonight, the moon is doing its potent work of pulling tides and turning old stories loose (and I’m posting this on the full moon, so the timing is perfect—of course).
You don’t have to fix every belief by morning. You just have to be willing, for one small moment, to love the idea of being wrong.
And if you’re curious about my teacher’s article that inspired this one, you can read it here: https://tappingthematrix.com/being-wrong/
And if your inner reflection shows you something that feels too big to untangle alone, that’s what I’m here for.
My Magical-Life Coaching work is built exactly for moments like this one—when the veil moves and you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at yet, but you know something has to change. We work with the beliefs, the energy, the whole tangled spell, and we do it with a lot of curiosity and (usually) a fair amount of laughter. You can find out more at magical-lifecoaching.com.
For Paid Subscribers Only: The Unveiling Spell
Here’s a little spell I didn’t put in the free version (some magic has to earn its keep).