Welcome to the Mystical One


    While I have always had faith, I’ve never had peace.  My whole life I felt a strong connection to a higher power greater than myself and simultaneously disconnected from other people.  I admired people who demonstrate perfect love toward others – people like Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day and Jesus.  But I wasn’t always a nice person.  I voraciously read about religious philosophies and practices and attended random religious ceremonies. Yet I never had the discipline to truly pray, fast or meditate.  In fact, I’ve never met a religion, pseudo-religion or generic spiritual path that I didn’t like.  I like some more than others, but I find them all fascinating and interesting.  It all began when I was a lonely child in a chaotic circumstance with no one but God to talk to.  
 
    From that I developed a preoccupation to reconcile my personal experiences of God with a spiritual tradition.  My friends and family did not appreciate this.  My mother warned me that a friend of her’s had lost her husband to those “crystals and things.”  And in college when I went on random Sundays to chant with the Hare Krishnas, my roommate said, “don’t eat or drink anything, and if you’re not home in three hours we’ll come get you.”  But alas, their fears were unfounded as there was no prescribed spirituality that I could stick to.  I have to go to church every Sunday morning?  Chant how many rounds of those beads daily?  Sit on the meditation cushion and think about nothing for how long?  I would get bored just thinking about it and look for something new.
 
    Lest you think I’m bragging – I’m not.  It’s a problem, and it has affected more than just my spiritual life.  When I was diagnosed with ADD at 44 years old my whole messy, flitting around life finally made sense!  It then dawned on me that sadly, the reason I’m not susceptible to joining a cult is because I just don’t have that kind of discipline or capacity for that kind of commitment.  I mean if you suggest I get up at 3 a.m. and take a cold shower and then perform chanting and breathing exercises for several hours in the name of enlightenment, I might give it a try to see what it’s like and how it goes.  But really, the odds that I’ll be willing to do it again tomorrow are just not that great.  Even if during the chanting the clouds part and the Blessed Virgin Mary, Herself, tells me I’m a good girl and she loves me the most of anybody and I experience total oneness with the universe and unspeakable bliss.  I still probably won’t get up and do it again tomorrow.  I will be eternally grateful for the experience, but I’m just not one to get carried away.  Moderation – that’s a kind of discipline, isn’t it?
 
    But something changed on April 27, 2016 (yes, I wrote down the date because I knew it was a pivotal moment).  The culmination of my poor life choices and mental afflictions came crashing down on me.  In 12 step programs they would say I hit rock bottom.  Pema Chodron perfectly captured my state of mind when she wrote about herself, “my world had become the size of a postage stamp.”  There was a disconnect between the person I wanted to be and believed myself to be and the person I was – between the life I knew I came here to live and the life I was living.  On that day I found my salvation.  It wasn’t instantaneous.  But I decided to try for myself the benefit of everyday spiritual practice.  I began the spiritual healing journey to the open heart, inner peace and quiet joy that I had always read about and longed for.
 

    I committed to completing a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course to see if it might help me find my way out of the hole I had dug myself into.  It was an 8-week non-religious program, each week with videos, readings and the introduction of a new mind training exercise.  I spent 30 minutes per day practicing the mind training exercise which consisted of various guided, sitting and moving meditations.  The programs offered articles and videos related to the mind training exercise of the week.  I was desperate to heal and started to feel better in certain ways so quickly that I devoted more like an hour to mindfulness training every day.  I tried the new practices while also continuing what I had learned the previous weeks.  At the end of the eight weeks, so amazed by the results, I continued to develop my practice.   And while I may not quite be the Buddha Master, my life is transformed.  I was so impressed that I wrote a book about it – you can read it here!

 

      As you read this, I know you’re trying to judge whether or not we’re compatible.  So I’ll sum up my philosophy inasmuch as that’s possible.  While I often refer to God as “he” or “the father” (as Jesus did) and talk to or about personalities like the Blessed Mother, Ganesha, the Buddha, angels, my dead family members who I know are here with me and so on, I don’t believe that any of those distinctions are ultimately real.  I believe that God is greater than a pronoun, a gender, and greater even than our ability to conceptualize all that God is.  Above all I believe in unity.  All that is seen and unseen proceeds from the vast, all-knowing, all-powerful, eternal love that some of us call God, and the distinctions we see are just illusions.   The ability to see the One and not just the many is the truth that sets us free.  I’m here to share my journey and unpack all of that, with humility and humor – may it be of benefit.

     Are you on a spiritual journey?  In the midst of a mystical awakening?  Share your story in the comments or contact me here.

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