After a keynote I gave at a conference in Innsbruck, a woman approached me. She had been one of the volunteers during a routine about loss and recovery — a piece where something personal to the participant disappears and returns transformed. She was polite, measured, clearly not someone given to emotional displays with strangers. She said: “I do not know why, but that made me feel something I have been avoiding feeling for a long time.”
She did not elaborate. I did not ask her to. We shook hands and she walked away. But that moment changed something in how I think about what magic performance can do.
I had built that routine to be entertaining. The emotional dimension was there by design — I wanted the audience to feel something, not just be impressed — but I had thought of the emotion as a performance tool. Something to make the trick land harder. What this woman was describing was different. The routine had not just entertained her. It had reached something. It had opened a door she had been keeping shut.
I did not fully understand what had happened until months later, when I encountered an idea that reframed everything.
Stories as Medicine
In Cara Hamilton’s guide on storytelling for magicians, the professional storyteller Jumana Moon describes an ancient and nearly universal cultural concept: stories as medicine. Before psychology, before counselling, before therapy, Moon explains, there were stories woven by collective ancestral voices. Many cultures consider stories not as entertainment but as healing. Stories are powerful containers for difficult content — they are easier to digest than being told something directly.
That last sentence is the one I underlined. Stories are powerful containers for difficult content. They are easier to digest than being told something directly.
This is not mysticism. This is observable human psychology. When someone tells you “you need to let go of the past,” you resist. The direct instruction triggers defense mechanisms. You nod politely and change the subject. But when someone tells you a story about an object that disappears and returns changed — not the same as it was, but carrying something new — your defenses are not engaged. You are not being told anything. You are experiencing something. And the experience can reach places that direct instruction cannot.
The Container Effect
I think of this as the container effect. A story is a container. It holds meaning without forcing it on anyone. The audience can take from the container whatever they need and leave the rest. One person watches my loss-and-recovery routine and sees an entertaining piece of magic. Another person watches the same routine and feels something about a relationship that ended badly. A third person watches and thinks about a career change they have been afraid to make.
The routine does not dictate which meaning the audience takes. It provides a container — a narrative about loss, transformation, and return — and the audience fills that container with their own content. This is not something I control, and I would not want to control it. The power is precisely in the fact that each person’s experience is different, private, and self-directed.
This understanding fundamentally changes what it means to build a magic routine. If stories are containers, then the story you choose for a routine is not just a presentation choice. It is a choice about what kind of container you are offering the audience. A story about competition offers a container for competitive feelings. A story about vulnerability offers a container for unprocessed vulnerability. A story about wonder offers a container for the sense of awe that most adults have learned to suppress.
Why Magic Is an Unusually Powerful Container
Stories on their own are powerful. Stories combined with magic are something else entirely.
Here is why. A story told in a conventional way — in a novel, in a film, in a spoken narrative — operates entirely in the realm of the imagined. The audience imagines the events. They construct the world in their minds. This is powerful, but it is clearly fiction. The audience knows it is fiction. Their rational mind is fully engaged, monitoring the experience, keeping a safe distance.
Magic disrupts that monitoring. When something impossible happens in the middle of a story — when the lost object genuinely disappears, when the prediction genuinely matches, when the transformation happens in real time in the audience member’s own hands — the rational mind stutters. For a moment, the distance between the story and reality collapses. The story is not just being told. It is happening. In the room. Right now.
That collapse of distance makes the container more powerful. The emotional content of the story is not safely contained in the realm of fiction. It is bleeding into reality. And when that happens, the audience’s defenses against the emotional content of the story are lowered in a way that pure narrative cannot achieve.
This is not manipulation. I am not trying to make people feel things they do not want to feel. I am creating a container and an experience, and the audience’s own psychology determines what, if anything, that container holds for them. Some people feel nothing beyond entertainment. That is fine. But some people feel something they needed to feel, and the combination of story and impossible event was the vehicle that carried them there.
The Liminal Threshold
Moon describes another concept that I find deeply relevant: the liminal threshold. She points to the opening formulas of stories across cultures — “Once upon a time there once was and once was not” — as signals that we are crossing into a space where normal rules do not apply. Belief is suspended. Experience becomes surreal. And yet, within that surreal space, great truths are told.
Magic has its own liminal threshold. The moment the performance begins — the moment the performer picks up the cards, or asks a volunteer to step forward, or says the first words of the routine — the audience crosses into a space where impossible things can happen. They know, rationally, that what they are about to see is not real magic. But they are willing to suspend that knowledge. They are willing to cross the threshold.
Inside that threshold, the rules are different. Loss can be reversed. The future can be known. Choices can converge in ways that defy probability. The impossible is permitted. And because the impossible is permitted in the physical realm of the magic, the impossible is also permitted in the emotional realm of the story. Healing that seemed impossible. Transformation that seemed too late. Recovery from something that felt permanent.
The liminal space of the magic performance is where the medicine works.
What This Means for Routine Design
Understanding stories as medicine changes how I approach routine design. Not every routine needs to be medicine. Some routines can just be fun. Some routines can be impressive. Some routines can be funny. The audience does not need to be healed by every piece in a thirty-minute set.
But I now deliberately include at least one routine in every set that offers a deeper container. One piece where the story touches on something genuinely human — loss, hope, connection, the passage of time, the resilience of the spirit. One piece where the audience has the opportunity to feel something beyond amusement or amazement.
I build these pieces carefully. The story has to be honest. It cannot be saccharine or manipulative. It has to come from something real in my own experience or my own thinking. And it has to be embedded naturally in the performance, not bolted on like a sentimental afterthought.
One of my current routines is built around the theme of memory. I talk about how memory is not a recording but a reconstruction — something I learned from studying the psychology of magic, which is filled with research on how unreliable human memory actually is. The routine involves the audience collectively remembering details of an experience they just shared, and discovering that their memories have already diverged from what actually happened. The effect is surprising and entertaining. But the story — the container — is about the bittersweet nature of memory itself. About how the past is not fixed. About how every time we remember something, we change it slightly, and the thing we are remembering is no longer quite what happened.
For most of the audience, this is an interesting cognitive observation embedded in an entertaining performance. For some people — and I have heard this in conversations afterward — it touches something about a specific memory they have been carrying. A memory of a person they lost. A memory of a time that is gone. The routine does not tell them how to feel about that memory. It simply creates a space where they can feel.
The Responsibility of the Container
If stories are medicine, then the performer who uses them carries a responsibility. Medicine can heal, but it can also harm. A story about loss can be a container for processing grief, or it can be a container that reopens a wound without providing any support.
I think about this seriously. I do not build routines around trauma. I do not tell stories designed to make people cry. I am not a therapist, and a magic performance is not a therapy session. The containers I build are gentle — they touch universal human experiences rather than targeting specific pain. Loss. Change. The passage of time. The unreliability of certainty. These are broad enough to be meaningful without being invasive.
I also pay attention to how I close these routines. The closing is critical. If the container opens something, the closing needs to leave the audience in a place of warmth, not distress. The loss-and-recovery routine ends with recovery. The memory routine ends with the observation that if memory is reconstruction, then we are all, in a sense, artists of our own past. The closing reframes whatever the audience might have felt during the routine in terms of agency, wonder, or hope.
This is not the same as providing answers. As I wrote about in a previous post, I believe the best performances leave questions hanging in the air. But a routine that functions as a container for difficult content needs to leave the audience with a question that feels expansive, not constricting. “What does it mean that memory changes?” is expansive. “You will never really know what happened” is constricting. The difference matters.
What Nobody Talks About
In the magic community, we talk endlessly about methods. We talk about presentation. We talk about audience management and show structure and the business of performance. We almost never talk about this — about what the story embedded in a performance can actually do for the person watching it.
I understand why. It sounds pretentious. It sounds like a magician overestimating the significance of what is, at the end of the day, a trick. And for most performances, in most contexts, it would be an overestimation. Not every card trick needs to be therapy.
But I cannot ignore what I have seen. The woman in Innsbruck who felt something she had been avoiding. The executive in Vienna who pulled me aside after a keynote to say that a routine about choices had made him reconsider a decision he had been agonizing over. The couple at a private event who told me, months later, that a routine about impossible connections had become a kind of private joke between them — a shorthand for the inexplicable coincidences that marked their relationship.
These are not typical audience responses. They are rare. They happen when the routine is right, the story is honest, and the audience member is ready. But they happen. And when they happen, they suggest that magic performance — with the right story, the right container, the right threshold — can do something that goes beyond entertainment.
Muriel Rukeyser wrote that the universe is made of stories, not of atoms. I think that is true. And I think some of those stories, delivered in the right container, at the right moment, to the right person, are medicine.
Not a substitute for actual medicine, actual therapy, actual professional help when someone needs it. But a moment. A container. A small, impossible thing that makes someone feel something they needed to feel.
That is worth taking seriously. Even if nobody talks about it.