Over our lifetime we’re in a consistent state of learning and evolving, constantly growing in ways that mature and heal us, or at the least, that is the possibility. Our life’s purpose isn’t about being well-known, well-connected, or wealthy, I think there’s much more to this human experience than fame, popularity, and fortune.
I can’t imagine that our sole purpose is to see how much money we can add to our bank accounts, or how many people think we’re special.
I’m hopeful that we will collectively and culturally realize that becoming more loving, patient, and kind versions of ourselves is monumentally more important than external measures of success. Could it be possible that being able to expand our awareness, to see the fascinating ways that we’re connected to each other in an energetic way, is what creates our well-being. All the effort we take to create separation from others, the wars we establish between people/businesses/governments, the inability to listen to someone, to see someone’s pain, our habit of taking things personally only disconnects us from ourselves and each other.
Mystical experiences occur when there’s a willingness to see and experience things differently. The Oxford dictionary defines mystical as ‘inspiring a sense of spiritual mystery, awe, and fascination.’
A mystic is often perceived as someone who’s disconnected from reality. Not someone who is part of reality. Is it possible that our lack of connection to the mystical is what creates the lack of connection to each other, our communities, and is what creates a massive rise in mental health issues? Is it possible that our lack of connectivity to the divine, to understanding that there are greater forces at work, is what is producing so much pain in the world.
The inability to connect to those experiences has been taught, out of fear. It’s been propagated by the belief that there’s only one true power, and that we can only access it through those who’ve been anointed to teach us.
It’s a ‘power-over’ move, it says that you have to connect to someone outside of yourself to access the mysteries of life, in many religious theologies we’ve given over our independence by being reverent to someone else’s ideas. It’s not that all religious theologies hold those beliefs, but many have. Church is a powerful connector, it’s where we come together to experience ourselves with others. It can be a huge support system, but we should be mindful of giving our power to others. It’s led to a world of creating a hierarchy for those whose gifts have made them famous. We pedestal them, give them copious amounts of attention and money, which imbues this idea that they’re special and we aren’t.
If we understand that whatever you connect to; God, Brahma, the Divine, Allah, the Universe travels through each and every one of us, that’s empowering, it’s not limiting.
I feel like it’s all the ways our life deconstructs us, breaks us down, is what helps connect us to our visions, it’s deconstructing our worn out ideals, beliefs, and emotional responses that invokes the wisdom of the mystical.
When you move slower you feel more, when things slow down there’s more clarity, breathing becomes fluid and present, our eyes soften, our awareness expands.
The difficult experiences in our lives, not the ones we perceive as challenging – such as a rude table beside you at a restaurant, or the person at work that didn’t show up, which created a lot of work. I’m speaking to the experiences that were agonizing, deeply painful and that changed us. In those experiences, we access the mystic, being able to tether to both the pain and the beauty, being able to be in the force of both experiences at the same time – the beautiful and the pain.
Our wounds help us access those places in the universe, in the mythical world, the places we can’t fully understand or explain. I don’t mean that our wounds are mythic places, I mean the healing that comes from those wounds transform our psyche. They teach us how to trust in something bigger than ourselves.
We’re unable to access those teachings and mystical parts of the human experience when we’re desperate for control. When holding is normal, then letting go feels scary. We need to trust in the things we don’t have answers for, such as what happens when we let go, what might happen that isn’t scary? What might our fear teach us? When we allow life to take us with the currents, when we stop holding on so tight and trying to control the things around us, of wisdom instead of trying to row ourselves upstream.
In order to trust in the things we can’t explain or what brings us into states of fear, we must release the need to understand, or believe we alone need to figure out what all-of-life is about. There’s a necessity to be in community and communion with the language of the wind, soil and trees. One must believe in flight, in being taken away to other places while still understanding that we intrinsically know how to find it, that if we work on letting go of our certainty and remain curious we will find mystical places. We also will intuitively know how to land back in the embodied life. Connecting to the mystical isn’t about disassociating from life, it might be the very opposite, it might be the thing that connects us to life. The very thing so many people are desperately trying to figure out.
Thoughts?
With love, Noelle