Watch a kung fu master. There's no effort in it.
I honestly don't know when it started. Ancient armies, industrial factories, corporate productivity culture — somewhere along the way we settled on the idea that power is force, that if it didn't take effort it didn't count. It's so baked in that the alternative seems almost counterintuitive. But watch a kung fu master. You’ll see that their power doesn’t come from thumping someone with their brute strength – there's no effort in it.
Magick is the same. Many magicians are obsessed with building power. There are many ways and means to do that – some more wholesome, some less so – but I’d argue they’re missing the point. If you’re coming from a place of ‘me against the world, having to accumulate more and more power to win/dominate/execute my will’, well, you’re never going to have enough and you’re always going to be swimming against the current.
In our lives, and in our magick, we’re most in our power, in our agency, and in our capacity to positively collaborate with the world when we’re in resonance with it. This way of operating isn’t driven by the mind, but by the heart – by following our innate authenticity and vitality wherever it naturally flows. When we come from this place, we find that the current naturally flows our way, and we’re part of the the whole ecosystem of ‘how things want to work out’ which means we can ride the waves to whichever common destination or outcome we’re looking to manifest. We’re all on the same team. Whether your magick is in how you run your business or in some more esoteric format, it’s the same. By orientating towards resonance, you’re bringing the amplifying potential of this force to whatever you’re looking to create.
Heart Resonance
Coherence
The heart is, in a very literal sense, a resonant instrument. It doesn't just pump — it oscillates, and the whole cardiovascular system has a natural rhythm it wants to fall into. When you slow your breathing to about five or six breaths a minute, or when you settle into a sustained feeling of appreciation or compassion, something measurable happens: your heart rate, your breathing, and your blood pressure all lock together into one smooth, rhythmic pattern. Researchers call this state coherence. It's not relaxation — your heart rate isn't necessarily slower — it's order. The noise falls away and one clean rhythm takes over. Your emotional state is the dial. Calm, engaged, genuinely-felt emotion pulls you into it. Stress and fragmentation pull you out.
Not just about you
And here's where it stops being a metaphor. The heart generates the strongest rhythmic electromagnetic field in the human body — hundreds of times stronger than the brain's — and that field extends well outside the body, measurable several feet away with sensitive instruments. More importantly, it interacts with other fields. Studies using SQUID magnetometers have shown that when two people are in a state of coherence and are in close proximity, their heart fields begin to synchronize — they entrain to each other, the way two tuning forks of the same pitch do when struck in the same room. The heart isn't a sealed system. It's a resonator that's in relationship with every other resonator around it.
This is the whole principle in miniature. The heart doesn't impose its rhythm on the world. It tunes into the world, and the world tunes back. That's not a force relationship. That's a resonance relationship. And it's the same relationship we can use in magick — just at a different scale, with different correspondents.
Head vs. heart
This also directly contradicts the assumption that the ‘force’ model is the ‘natural way things are’. We like to assume the head is in charge — that you think a thought, form a plan, and the body executes. But the anatomy says otherwise. The heart has its own dense web of roughly 40,000 neurons — enough to be called a peripheral brain — and the nerve connecting it to the head is overwhelmingly a one-way street: about 90% of the fibers carry signals up, from heart to brain. The head gets more information from the heart than it sends back. The heart's rhythm is not a readout of what you're thinking. It's an input that shapes what you can think, how you process emotion, how well your prefrontal cortex integrates information.
That’s not to ‘punish’ the head in any way. In coherence, the head actually works better — only not because it's doing more, but because it's finally getting a clean signal to work with. The head in a state of force — grinding, controlling, white-knuckling — is like a radio receiver trying to pick up a station while someone's slamming a fist on the speaker. The heart in coherence is the station, broadcasting clearly. The head's job isn't to overpower the signal. It's to receive it well.
So when I say magick is driven by the heart, I’m not making some fluffy ‘feel your way around vaguely’ kind of statement. I mean the most powerful resonant system you have is the one that leads, and the one that tries to force things is the one that follows. That's not mysticism. That's just what the wiring does.
Resonance in Practice
What this also means is that there’s an inherent cosmic ethic built in to magick, which the daoists have articulated best as being ‘in line with the dao’. While the Chinese State corrupted and distorted a lot of it along the way, they still based their entire spiritual, military and medical system inspired by this. It’s also where Jackie Chan gets his superhuman kicks from.
It’s not about ‘doing good things to be nice’ for some altruistic or noble reason, it’s about being in alignment with how things are because it’s practical. It’s good for you. It’s good for the world. It just makes sense. And ‘the way things are’ seems to embody some kind of inherent cosmic ethical principles that may or may not match up with the ten commandments depending on the context but certainly aren’t dictated by any human laws. It’s an important point for magicians, because it shows the exact mechanism why the temptations of gaining ‘force’ power through black magic is a counterproductive move. When aligned with the heart in this way, magick becomes an inherently safe, beneficial, and empowering force. And indeed, it becomes a reflection of your own inner power at its highest potential.
That covers intention and alignment, the cornerstones of effective magick. But there’s more that can be applied to magickal practice, and to how you ‘make shit happen’ in your life. When you begin to look you can see examples of resonance everywhere, and it’s what Western magicians are tapping into whenever they work with the system of correspondences. Working to the lunar cycles, planetary transits, and other astrological events and systems, for example – help you channel the power of a whole set of planets to help amplify the wave. Similarly, colours, crystals, symbols, beings, and elements can all be harnessed for their energetic qualities to build a resonant field for your work. Something as simple as creating the right kind of environment for the kind of goal you’re looking to manifest makes all the difference. If you’re trying to build a calm wellness brand while someone’s drilling outside your window that’s going to have a negative impact through the sine wave system somehow or another.
How do you know if you’re in resonance? Listen to your body. Look at your life. If something’s off and you’re resisting it, it’s an invitation to come back into the cosmic flow and, chaotic as that might be at first, it will ultimately bring you into greater agency as well.
