From Lev Grossman, the author of “The Magicians” that spawned the show on SYFY (I love that show):

“A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it.Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But you, my friends, you found another way: a way to use the pain. To burn it as fuel, for light and warmth. You have learned to break the world that has tried to break you.”

This is a wonderful statement. A magician is (hopefully) someone who looks at their pain and tries to feel it and understand it. The challenges we’ve been through in our past is part of what shapes our Will (the reason we are here) in the world. We’re not running away from hard times but validating them as lessons and as a way to know and love ourselves! Are you a magician?

“Magic is the highest, most absolute, and most divine knowledge of natural philosophy, advanced in its works and wonderful operations by a right understanding of the inward and occult virtue of things; so that true agents being applied to proper patients, strange and admirable effects will thereby be produced. Whence magicians are profound and diligent searchers into nature; they, because of their skill, know how to anticipate an effect, the which to the vulgar shall seem to be a miracle.”
– The Goetia of the Lemegeton of King Solomon