Maia Toll: Letting Magic In

Maia Toll is the award-winning author of Letting Magic In, The Night School, and the Wild Wisdom Series (including The Illustrated Herbiary). After pursuing an undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan and a master’s at New York University, Maia apprenticed with a traditional healer in Ireland. She spent extensive time studying the growing cycles of plants, the alchemy of medicine making, and the psycho-spiritual aspects of healing. Maia maps new pathways for seeing our lives, inspiring those who encounter her work to live with more purpose, intention, meaning, and, maybe, even more magic. She is the co-owner of the retail store Herbiary, with locations in Philadelphia, PA, and Asheville, NC, where she lives with her partner and three ridiculously spoiled dogs. Keep up with Maia’s writing on her Substack, Unkempt, and find her online at maiatoll.com

An Interview with Maia Toll: Letting Magic In

OMTIMES: What inspired you to write this memoir?

Letting the Magic In — Click the book cover to learn more!

Maia Toll: When I was thirty-three, I sold my house, quit my teaching job, and traipsed off to Ireland to study with an herbalist. That rather impetuous series of decisions became the generative experience that informed everything after opening an herb shop (then a second and a third!), teaching university-level classes in botanical medicine, getting my first book deal, and even meeting my partner.

The idea that we can change ourselves–shed our skins and become someone new–has always fascinated me. So I wrote Letting Magic In to share what I’ve learned. I wanted to leave a breadcrumb trail for others who feel dissatisfied or out of step with themselves or the culture that surrounds them. While the journey looks different for each of us, there are common markers that can guide all of us.

I originally thought the book would focus on my time in Ireland. But when I sat down to write about that very magical year, I found that none of it made sense–that I, as the protagonist, didn’t make sense–without giving the reader an understanding of the years that came before. Ireland, it turns out, was the finale, not the starting point. The real story was the slow work of changing how I saw and interacted with the world so I could become the kind of person who would take a chance to spend a year studying with an herbalist on the Emerald Isle.

Letting Magic In explores these changes. It’s about how I became the person I never intended to be but, perhaps, always was. My hope is that it gives readers both permission and a path into their own inner knowing, so they can discover missing pieces of themselves.

OMTIMES: That line: I became the person I never knew I wanted to be, but perhaps always stood out from the book’s introduction. What was most helpful on this journey? What advice do you have for others who are trying to find their calling?

Maia Toll: Your intuition will point you toward your calling. But don’t expect the going to be perfectly smooth! Sometimes your intuition leads to uncomfortable growth. That was how it was for me. Ireland was not a comfortable time. It was often lonely and difficult. Confronting this loneliness and learning from the challenges was what expanded me to grow into my calling. The idea that you can simply follow your bliss and land in your calling might sometimes work, but it’s not the only path.

We often confuse a calling with employment. A calling is your soul’s path. Employment is how you make your money and tend to your physical needs. Sometimes one begets the other, but there’s no rule that says your calling is intrinsically linked to how you make a living. You might pay the bills by working as a carpenter and feed your spirit by playing classical guitar. Or teach middle school during the year and nourish your soul by hiking the Appalachian trail every summer. If you can mentally uncouple your calling from your career, you might realize you’re already well on your way!

OMTIMES: One of the things you talk about in the book is body knowledge or somatic knowing. How do our bodies communicate important messages to us?

Maia Toll: Somehow, in our modern American culture, we’ve gotten the idea that knowledge happens only in our heads. Maybe we can blame Descartes: I think, therefore I am. But the way in which our bodies can read the world around us is truly wondrous. The trick is to convert this subtle wisdom into usable information. I wish there were a handbook for interpreting the body’s messages, but learning how to read the body is very individualized because we all interpret sensations differently.

I recommend people begin with simple noticing. That’s the trailhead for this type of work. Check-in with yourself three times a day, noting mental, emotional, and bodily sensations. Also, note what’s going on in your life and the world around you. Over a few weeks, you’ll begin to notice your own patterns, like you might get a headache when a storm is coming in, or your fingers might twitch before you get in a fight with your partner. You’ll start to catalog what sensations match up with various thought patterns. Like if you get a belly ache when you think about an event from your past. I find the body is often a more reliable source of wisdom than the mind, which can get caught up in anxiety or hung up on trying to be logical. Many of the answers we need fall outside of the realms of strict rationality.

OMTIMES: You assert that intuition is like a muscle. How do we strengthen it?

Maia Toll: The trick to strengthening your intuition is to work through the body instead of the mind. Use the internal check-ins I mentioned to train yourself to notice the information you’re taking in. Your intuition is always there; training yourself to both recognize it and pay attention to it is the hardest part!

If you find that working through the sensations of the body is difficult. So begin to pay attention to the stories your mind tells itself when it’s relaxed.

Let me illustrate:

When I was teaching plant medicine, instead of telling my students what each plant did, I would instead send them out to learn from the plants directly. I would give directions: go out and sit with a plant. Really look at it: where is it growing? What is it growing next to? How do you feel sitting with it? What colors or patterns are you seeing? Are you hearing anything?

Students would come back with all sorts of information, some of which was gleaned from close observation of the details of the plant and its surroundings. Some people would feel like the plant spoke to them, and others would have a vision or daydream that helped them understand the plant better.

But without fail, there were folks who came back baffled. They would tell me that they didn’t learn anything. I always focused first on the people who came back with nothing.

“So, what were you doing out there for the last 20 minutes?” I would ask.

“Nothing.” They would say. “Just thinking.”

“What were you thinking about?” I’d ask.

And this is where it would get good. They were always thinking about something that related to the plant… they just didn’t know it.

My favorite “nothing happened” story involves a guy in his early thirties who worked at a pharmaceutical company. When he came in from the garden, he told me he’d spent the 20 minutes he was sitting with the plant just thinking. So, I asked my usual question: what were you thinking about? He told a story about racing bikes with his brother on a long, steep hill. He’d flipped his bike, tore up his knees, and had bits of gravel stuck in his skin.

He was shocked to learn that the plant he’d been sitting with was applied topically to draw things out of the skin and was also used for cuts and scrapes.

We are all constantly taking in information from the world around us, information that our brain interprets in ways that we are comfortable with and can understand. Part of strengthening your intuition is figuring out how you personally access this energetic information. If you find it difficult to tune in through your body, try noticing the stories you tell yourself when your mind is relaxed.

OMTIMES: Is it possible to become “too intune?”

Maia Toll: While I don’t think you can be too intune, I do think you have to know where your brakes and switches are! Like anything else, there are times when you’ll want to be tuning in and times when you need to focus on more linear and rational pursuits. Intuition doesn’t do the dishes!

You also have to choose your filters. For a while, I was waking up panicked in the morning, having spent the night dreaming of disasters that were happening all over the globe. My husband and I would do a news search and find the small plane that crashed or the volcano that erupted. I called it being tuned to disaster radio. It did me, and the world, absolutely no good, so I changed the station!

OMTIMES: You were searching your entire life for Magic. Where and how did you finally find it?

Maia Toll: My search for Magic started in books. I have a learning disability and was slow to come to reading. One summer, a camp counselor read Lloyd Alexander’s The Book of Three to us. I was mesmerized and haven’t been without a book since! Though I came to mysticism and Magic through fiction, it took me a while to sort out what was real and possible in a nonfiction life. For me, I now find Magic in tuning into and flowing with the energy patterns of the natural world, feeling for the rhythms, and staying in sync.

OMTIMES: How can we find the Magic in our daily lives?

Maia Toll: Adding small rituals that help you find the natural rhythms is a lovely place to begin. Acknowledge the sunrise and the sunset. Track the phases of the moon. Celebrate the changing seasons. Then take it one step further: tune into these rhythms within your own body. After you find your flow, take advantage of the way the natural energy is moving within you. For example, during the waning moon, you might find that you have the desire to follow the moon’s example and see what you need to decrease in your own life: clutter in your closet, weeds in the garden, toxins in your body. Feeling in sync is its own kind of Magic, and there’s an ease to tapping into nature’s energy patterns and letting them support your own.

OMTIMES: As someone who trained as a clinical herbalist, is there a little-known tincture or herb that you feel would benefit most people?

Maia Toll: When you train in traditional medicine, the most important thing you learn is to treat people as individuals, not as a disease or diagnosis. The job of the healer is to observe, using all their senses closely. Once they begin to see the shape of the story of the person in front of them, they can reframe and retell that story in a way that helps the other person heal. Some of that reframing is moving the focus from the disease diagnosis to the patterns that underlie the condition. From there, it’s a process of matchmaking: what plant speaks to this particular person’s patterns?

It’s important to keep in mind that plants have well-rounded personalities. So you need to understand both the person and the plant.

For example, licorice root is lovely for gastrointestinal complaints, but it also causes the body to flush potassium which can raise blood pressure. This makes licorice a fabulous plant for someone with certain gastrointestinal concerns who also has chronically low BP but a poor choice for someone whose BP is high.

All this to say: There is no universal panacea, and if someone tells you there is, it’s a marketing tool!

OMTIMES: You wrote your first book at forty-eight and are now a bestselling author. What advice would you give to those whose dreams are still unrealized later in life?

Maia Toll: I remember being a teenager and having a to-do list of things I would achieve by my eighteenth birthday. I was a horseback rider and, at eighteen, would age out of the junior division. That was an external deadline. But I also had an internal drive: there was something in me that longed to be a prodigy, that thought I would be a failure if I didn’t accomplish something remarkable while young. After I aged out of junior, I quickly set a new age-related goal: I would write a novel by the age of twenty-five (this didn’t even come close to happening).

So many people set an age in their mind that’s the cut-off date for having a productive, inspiring, creative life. Once they’re past their personal and randomly chosen expiration date, they believe their lives will thereafter be average or even mediocre. It’s an easy trap to fall into, but it’s self-created. The good news is that if you make it, you can unmake it.

I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I’ve always been good at stringing words into lyrical sentences, but up until my Irish adventure, I didn’t have a larger tale to tell. The Ireland story gave me a starting point. Interestingly, though I started with Ireland, I’m now six books in and still have barely touched the Irish tale. Instead, I realized how much I had learned during that particular period of my life and allowed those lessons, and the desire to share them, to inform my writing.

Shelly Wilson: Healer of Hearts

As for advice? Make a beginning. You might not end up where you thought you were going, and that’s okay. Follow your own inspiration. When you set your intentions for a particular goal or destination, add the clause this or something better. Let life surprise you. Let you surprise you.

There are no deadlines. I’m in my fifties, and I still haven’t written that novel. There’s time.

OMTIMES: The book contains a number of excerpts from your past journals. Do you think writing has a role in helping us to discover who we are in the world?

Maia Toll: I think we discover who we are not once but over and over again. Journaling allows you to track yourself over time. Patterns emerge that you might not see from the trenches of daily life. I had five notebooks from the years written about in Letting Magic In. It was fascinating to read through my past entries. I could see myself experimenting, trying different ways of thinking, trying to figure out what was most comfortable for me.

On a more daily basis, I sometimes use writing as a way to chat with myself. If I feel lost or confused or need to understand my own emotions better, I’ll write a question at the top of a blank page. Sometimes I’ll set a timer and free write–that’s, writing anything that comes to mind–for ten minutes. It’s fascinating how often I find an answer in that free flow. Other times, I’ll pretend someone else is asking me the question and that I do actually know the answer. I’ll write the answer out like I’m an advice columnist responding to a stranger’s question.

OMTIMES: Do you have any favorite ways of celebrating the summer solstice?

Maia Toll: In Latin, the word solstice comes from two words: sol means “sun, and” sistere means “to stand still.” During the time of the solstice, the sun appears to stand still on the horizon. I take this as an invitation also to stand still, to rest, to pause.

Rituals of rest are often underrated: a nap, a bath, a walk in the woods. It doesn’t have to be fancy. Spring has a lot of outward-moving energy. It always feels like a bit of a push–the garden suddenly comes back to life and needs attention. There’s inevitably a book deadline, and my nieces and nephews finish school and come for their summer visit.

By the time we get to the summer solstice, I’m tired. I feel attenuated, stretched.

Taking a pause is important for my psyche. I remind myself that I don’t need to turn my rest into a project. There’s no need to go on a silent retreat or drive to some award-winning spa. Instead, I try to think of small ways I can break my usual patterns and add in a moment of stillness: a silent meal, a morning meditation, an afternoon lie in the sun.

I remind myself that the time when the sun appears to stand still is five days to either side of the moment of the solstice. That takes the pressure off.

I have a ten-day window in which to move a bit slower and sink back into myself. I pull out oracle or tarot cards to read with my morning tea, walk the labyrinth in the afternoon, and have a glass of wine with dinner. Social media puts a lot of pressure on us to be outwardly spiritual, to do something splashy for the solstice. Still, I find, during both the winter and summer solstices, that I tend to crave simplicity and solitude.

I gift myself both, using the time to reflect on the season that just passed. What did I accomplish? I note it down to remind myself of what I’ve done. What new people have come into my life? Who have I lost touch with? I reach out and say hi to friends. I look back at the season past and set my intentions for the one to come.

As the longest days stretch languidly into the night, the darkening trail beyond the house beckons. My partner and I walk into the woods and look for fireflies. The celebration of the season is in these small things, in the noticing, in taking the time to luxuriate in each moment.

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