Expectation Violation and Prediction Error Magic
a trickster magical practice
Here’s a powerful magical practice: noticing where your predictions failed.
A little neuroscience: our brain is a prediction machine. It uses a catalog of implicit and associative memory from our past to make predictions about the future. If something in the present is unspooling or unfurling and if it is remotely resonant or familiar with something we experienced in the past, our brain will ASSUME it’s going to go EXACTLY as it has in the past.
On the one hand, this is great. Our brain does this to protect us. It is a survival mechanism meant to keep us safe and out of danger. It’s also a way to make our brain really fast and energy efficient. Imagine if we had to figure out every situation, every object FROM SCRATCH for the rest of our lives?! Have you seen the Bluey episode “Born Yesterday”? If not, watch it - we’d be stuck figuring simple stuff out over and over.
That being said, because of this very audacious prediction capacity and prioritization of efficiency, we actually give up accuracy and the ability to truly be with every detail around us as the present unfolds. We filter heavily. We prioritize noticing what matches our predictions, and we dismiss or don’t register details that would result in prediction errors or mismatches to our mental catalog of what’s supposed to happen.
This keeps us trapped in old patterns and in a very limited reality. Which is fine if we like our old patterns and limited reality.
But most of us have longings and desires. Dreams. Hopes. Most of us - be honest - want our future to look different in some way, shape, or form.
Most of us are unwilling to admit that a different future not only begins with, but is solely predicated upon, a different identity. A different way of looking at ourselves and at reality.
A different future is ONLY POSSIBLE if we update our patterns and expand our possibilities. If we are intentional with shaping and understanding our identity - both the edges that can shape-shift, and the bones that must be honored in their innateness.
This magical practice is simple, but insanely powerful. And humbling.
Because what you are doing is pointing out your own prediction errors to your own mind/brain. This is a practice of delighting in your own failures. Of being mistaken. This is a practice of assuming you’re wrong. Somewhere, somehow. That’s why it’s so trickster.
This can be an intentional, ritualized practice where you journal, or it can be something you just train your mind to notice and delight in.
Because anytime you pop your own matrix and actually register something outside your typical filters, it feels disconcerting.
It feels like - it IS - magic.
Questions to ask about any reality you are in, any experience you are in, any prediction you are living out:
Where did my predictions fail?
Where (and how) were things different than I expected (even if just a little bit)?
Where was *I* different than I expected? Where did I handle things or respond differently (even if just a little bit)?
Where did my real-life, present experience differ from my predictions/expectations?
Where do I need to update my predictions and my rules around myself and around reality?
More (advanced) questions:
In this particular case, how are my predictions limiting/hurting me?
In this particular case, what is the old rule or belief that I’m operating under, and what would the MOST helpful update to it be?
The most helpful update equation is: it has to still land as believable/realistic to your system even if it is a little stretchy (baby steps over big shifts any day) AND it has to be an update that recognizes and addresses the maladaptiveness and the limitedness of the old rule/belief.
If we can get really clear on identifying the patterns that are the most active around preventing us from experiencing or moving towards the life we want, we can focus more closely on shifting those specific patterns. So these last two questions are playing with pattern discernment.
I’m playing this game while I’m down in New Mexico at my parents house. Previous trips down have created some pretty specific and rigid expectations of how this will go.
Here’s some of my personal prediction errors and updates:
It’s going to be hot and uncomfortable. Sleeping here sucks. > It’s cooler than I expected. It’s actually cooler at night than in Denver. Sleeping is actually ok. I slept comfortably through the whole night.
I’m going to be grieving, angry, and so depleted/under-resourced the whole time. > Interesting. I think I’ve metabolized some of these feelings. This trip feels way more chill, more healed, my nervous system feels more resilient. I have more energy and I’m less mad at my parents.
Oh, interesting! This healing happened in large part when I stepped into my power and took responsibility for my experience. I ordered a cot to assuage sleeping arrangements that felt annoying, I pro-actively leaned on my community here, I am continually stepping in as a protector for myself and my children around my parents and that is feeling easier and less charged.
I’m going to have to monitor my children 24/7 so they don’t destroy this very fragile, aggressively not-childproof house. > My children are less destructive. They’re getting older, this whole parenting and being in not-child-friendly spaces thing is getting easier in small, subtle ways.
I’m going to be resentful and exhausted. > We’re more independent now. I don’t resent my parents for not helping because we need less help. I’m realizing how independent we’re becoming!
My kiddo is experiencing a medical issue. Previously, this would take me over the falls. I would succumb to extreme stress and anxiety, to the point of not being able to think clearly, and reach for a drastic, exaggerated solution that would just heap on way more unnecessary stress. > I’m able to notice how hooked in I get around their distress. I’m able to distance and think clearly. I’m no longer so carried away by their distress. That’s new.
I’m going to have to be an insanely aggressive activity planner. We’re going to have to aggressively occupy our time. I’m going to run out of ideas of what to do with them. It’s going to be unbearable if we have down time at my parent’s home. If a friend cancels on us, it will feel like life/death and be incredibly destabilizing. > Oh, down time actually feels easier than before. It feels safer to just BE in my parent’s home. Oh, THIS time the trip wasn’t this hyper-scheduled escape plan and it still went really well and felt good. Oh, maybe I don’t need to manage my children’s attention and time down to the second. I can trust them more, I can trust me more, I can trust my parents more.
Trips to New Mexico suck and I don’t like them and need to limit them. > It’s ok to keep taking trips here. In fact, they seem to be getting easier and more pleasurable. This is less emotionally and energetically intensive than I remember.
I get absolutely zero time to work when I’m traveling with kids. > Actually, I was able to write this post, take two classes, and do some other writing.
This is a REFLECTION practice. It means we take TIME out of our busy lives to reflect. We are able to just take a moment here and there to wonder.
It’s easier to register prediction errors (and therefore expand our identities and realities) if we’re not running on autopilot, scatterbrained, frenzied, rushing, too busy to stop.
If we’ve developed a sustainable practice of “witnessing mind.”
Understanding the importance of reflection and allowing space and time and the mental skill of reflection/witnessing/wondering is a type of magic as well. One that this culture of hyper-busy-ness will take from us, if we don’t take it back.
Mercury is a trickster god and it is astrological wisdom to do “re” practices during a Mercury retrograde (or honestly, anytime!). Mercury’s retrogrades are part of their trickster magic. RE practices are: revisit, reflect, restore, re-story, revise, reimagine…and so on. TO GO BACK. It is a revolutionary practice to intentionally GO BACK when the culture presses us relentlessly, too quickly, forward.
If you want more of me:
A container that is launching soon: I’m excited by what’s incubating: a mystical womb space for parents. To heal, to reparent, to step into parenting power. To be with our inner children. Stay tuned - this will be an asynchronous container co-facilitated by astrology, human design, tarot and trance.
Crescent moon wisdom: We will both risk and regulate. Expand and contract.
If you want big changes to your parenting journey and your parenting power, then, this. I’m bringing all of me, and everything I’ve learned and changed from being a scared and traumatized new mom to being the powerful jaguar mom I am today, with the most regulated nervous system in the room, confidently guiding myself and my children down the mystical winding river of a fully enchanted life.
