A Mystic's Journey to Mindfulness and Peace

By The Mystical One

Stuck in an abusive relationship, with nothing left to lose, The Mystical One commits to an 8-week Minfulness Based Stress Relief program with the intent to heal her emotional pain, overcome anger and fear, and live in manner worthy of the divine spirit that she's always known dwells within her.  Follow her journey as she recounts each week the practices learned and the painful memories that surfaced asking to be forgiven and healed.  At once humorous and poignant, this is a short collection of stories chronicling the overcoming of a lifetime of feeling isolated, lonely, ashamed and unworthy of being loved.  Through various meditations and yoga, The Mystical One discovers that the love and connections she sought were right here with her all along - that the disconnect was in her own mind and that through acceptance and forgiveness of herself and others she could finally be at peace.  Be inspired by her transformation from a guarded and fearful person who habitually but inadvertently invited struggle into her life, to a joyful person who seeks in each moment to love and appreciate all that is right here and right now (whether she likes it or not).  Learn more about The Mystical One on her blog.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Mystical One
• Release date: Jan 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393792079

Book preview

Prayer of The Mystical One

(a synthesis of the prayer of St. Francis, a guided meditation of Pema Chodron, and the Unity principles of affirmation, gratitude and manifestation)

Thank you for my positive thoughts

I watch negative thoughts pass like clouds.

Thank you for awakening me to eternal life.

I am an instrument of divine peace.

Thank you for my healthy body and mind.

I realize my true nature in every moment.

Thank you for my family, my friends and my acquaintances.

Thank you for my beautiful home and surroundings and for providing more than I need.

I look deeply into people and things and realize their true nature in every moment.

Thank you for every moment that I experience the fullness of joy.

I am open in every moment to receiving the peace and love of the Holy Spirit.

I enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.

I wish for and send to all sentient beings happiness and the root of happiness.

Thank you for blessing me so richly in this lifetime.

Make me a blessing to everyone and every situation I encounter on my journey.

Amen and So it is.

INTRODUCTION

What we are looking for is what is looking.  - St. Francis of Assisi

This is the story of how completing an 8-week secular (but heavily influenced by Buddhist teaching) Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Program transformed my life, deepening and maturing the mystical sense that I was born with and starting me on the path to freedom from the mental afflictions I’d developed despite my innate spiritual sensibilities.

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 to some degree or other.  It all began when I was a lonely child, and God spoke to me and showed me things other people didn’t see.  At age six my future stepmother took me to a Catholic church and for the first time I discovered there’s a name for those things no one around me seemed to see, and I’m not the only person who sees them.  I fell in love with the Catholic mass and the Blessed Mother.  But I’ve given every religion that’s presented itself to me at least a short trial period.

I might have once become Mormon, but when I asked someone why he converted to Mormonism many years ago, he said his (now) wife had someone explain it to him and, it made a lot of sense.  Which blew me away, because really, I can think of at least a dozen reasons why I might convert to Mormonism, but that it makes a lot of sense is definitely not one of them.  In fact, in the hierarchy of religions that make any sense whatsoever, that one has to be in the bottom ten.  Not to dis the Mormons – they’re good people for the most part, with some jerks mixed in, just like the rest of us - but making a lot of sense is just not usually the strong suit of organized religion.  I might have converted to any religion for a time, but I’ve had more of a tendency to half-join, chew them up and spit them out rather than convert.  More than several people who love me also consider me to be a bit flakey as a result.

During my life, I’ve been frequently being warned about my love of all things religious.  My mother saw my new quartz crystal in high school and warned me that a friend of her’s had lost her husband to those crystals and things.  And when I went on random Sundays to chant and dine with the Hare Krishnas, my college roommate would say, don’t eat or drink anything, and if you’re not home in three hours we’ll come get you.  But alas, their worry was for naught 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 every day?  Sit on the meditation cushion and think about nothing for how long?  I’d get bored just thinking about it.  When the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came to my college campus I sat at his feet and I don’t remember what transpired, but I do remember that I didn’t get to have a one-on-one meeting with him in which he would give me my own personal mantra because I just didn’t have the kind of cash required for that as a college student.  Which is just as well, I probably would have chanted it a few times and then forgotten it anyway.

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 life flashed before my eyes, and I finally understood why I’ve had such an interesting life (in the Chinese curse sense of the phrase).  But it’s actually been a really good life - despite all the bad things I’m about to write in this book, life is good, and on some level, I’ve always known that. 

It did finally dawn on me that sadly, the reason I’ve never been susceptible to joining a cult is because I just never had 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 a few 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 God tells me I’m a good girl and loved 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.  In keeping with my spiritual values, I will be grateful for the experience, but I’ve just never been one to get carried away.  Moderation – that’s a kind of discipline, isn’t it?

I do have two gorgeous sons, and I’m nineteen years into a life-long commitment to them.  Pretty impressive for me.  And I’ve given them a really great childhood, not perfect, and not singlehandedly, but great.  I at least had the discipline to see that their childhood was a million times easier and more peaceful than mine was, if nothing else.  So, I have proof of the benefits of discipline and commitment - the two greatest blessings of my life.  Of course, my mental afflictions were not absent during those years and if I didn’t now recognize regret as yet another mental affliction to let go, I would be filled with regret for the times I screamed at them, the degree to which I overprotected them, and for blowing up my nice and peaceful marriage to their dad.  But my life is more than half over, it’s been really good so far, and my kids are terrific, so maybe there’s no reason to lament my shortcomings – I’ve done ok in spite of them.  Maybe because of them – who knows, otherwise I may have spent the last thirty years chanting Hare Krishna in a cloistered ashram – and I’m really glad I didn’t.  Not that chanting isn’t amazing – it is – but so many other experiences are amazing too.

That’s the problem with commitment – if you commit to one thing, what about all the things you miss?  If I’m free to choose anything I want, after I choose something, I’m no longer free.  I’ve never understood how people give that up.  All of my life I’ve read many books on spirituality, conversed with God and angels out loud, sometimes in public, without embarrassment, and carried a free-spirited optimism and faith that everything works out in my favor – because I know I’m not alone.  And yet, none of that ever made me a good person, worthy of the divine that dwells within me, and while I had a happiness of sorts, I also held a lot of anger, resentment, numerous grudges and just a general lack of peace and feeling of connectedness with others.

I lost my stepmother to cancer when I was 42 years old.  I had barely acknowledged her existence for the previous fourteen years due to my extraordinary ability to hold an eternal grudge over the smallest slight. 

Thanks for the pictures, your father and I almost got a divorce because you eloped, she said on the telephone.

I don’t like to be the center of attention, I shrugged.

Your best friend really got fat didn’t she.

That’s the shameful truth of why I cut her, my father and my half-siblings from my life.  At some point I did see them again sporadically.  The first time we met again in my grandparents’ farmhouse after several years of no contact, she hugged me so tight.  Whatever I did I’m sorry, she said.

I didn’t even realize that I was the one who should be sorry, so entrenched in my indignant self-righteousness that had characterized all of my life.  And I saw her again a few times here and there but never let her have back the relationship we’d had from the time she took me in at six years old and loved me like her own daughter. 

Her house had been the polar opposite of my home with my mother.  Filled with messy crafts, cats, dogs, hamsters, parakeets – she was totally at ease in chaos, and anything I wanted, she saw that I got.  I ate as much dough as I wanted while we baked cookies, and every Saturday morning she took me to the store and bought me anything I wanted, a gift for my dad and McDonalds for lunch.  She never bought anything for herself except craft kits and necessities.  In her obituary one of her