Embracing Mystical Life: Part One
Following Session 7: Embracing Mystical Life: Part One
April 14, 2026 — May 12, 2026
Synthesis Statement
This session explored what it means to remember ourselves as souls, and how modern life gradually conditions us to forget. We reflected on the ways indigenous cultures often lived closer to Spirit, and how contemporary life pulls us toward distraction, productivity, and separation from Being.
We looked at history, myths, and parables to better understand how we can be connected to a more Spirit-led existence and what that might look like. The Rainmaker from another country remembering what it was like to be in balance, the grail seeker who had to remember that the grail serves the Grail King, and how we might reconnect with that.
We were even called to write a poem about how modern culture helps us forget that we are souls and sets us on a journey away from Spirit. Five minutes. Go:
More. Better. Faster.
Play with your phone.
Dopamine hit.
Information overload.
Learn more. Be better.
Optimize.
Output means success. Not connectedness.
Connectedness is only immaterially valuable.
Do more today, so you can be better off tomorrow.
Finally, my favorite line from the day: Don’t just do something, sit there.
Report on Practice
Rooting in Balance
One of the stories we were to feel our way into this period was one of balance. The parable was that an area was suffering droughts. Crops were dying, people were going hungry. They called a rainmaker from a distant land to come and help. The rainmaker met with villagers, felt the spirit of the community, the energy of the place, and knew what he had to do. He went and sat on the cliffside, on his own for days. Eventually, the rains returned, the place was healed. The village elders asked what he did. He said, well, I come from a place that is in balance. This place was not. I just had to remember for this place what it feels like to be in balance.
One of our homework assignments this period is to spend time daily rooting ourselves in that ‘other country’. I love this metaphor for several reasons. The first two that stood out for me: 1) In somatic healing, one of the practices I learned about is that the body can hold trauma. While we may hurt initially from an acute injury, we may hurt later from a stored trauma. But when we are feeling that trauma manifest, say in one’s right leg, we can try to feel our left leg and how it feels healthy, and we can work to bring that healthy feeling back to our right leg. I have experienced this working on a number of occasions in my knees, my legs, and my back. So that lived experience makes it not entirely foreign that we could do something similar with rooting our Being overall in a balanced, healthy state, and that the more time we spend in that, the more natural it becomes, the more that state becomes our baseline. Very smart practice.
However, my limitation with this practice, as I suspect others will experience, is that I feel I have a bit of a blindspot on what that holistic healthy balanced self actually feels like. I do remember moments where I felt totally at peace, totally in the moment. I just need to work on recalling them more fully. Re-rooting myself there.
So I go back. What moments did I feel the most directly connected? I think in part this is why I liked mountain biking, as it was such an intense activity that if you did not hold your focus, especially on technical trails, you were likely to wreck. There were times when listening to music I was able to completely become absorbed into the moment and feel one with what was happening. I recall practicing a ‘Big Mind’ meditation, a sort of Internal Family Systems style dialog with various parts of yourself and eventually getting to ‘Big Mind’ where you are able to prompt yourself to drop your ego and become one with all there is.
All of those moved me into the kind of consciousness this practice seems to be inviting. But none of them persisted beyond the activity, and I think that is a key insight. The goal should be to find a way to access this rootedness such that you can bring it with you always. There was a time, a summer when I did a deeper dive into reading books on mindfulness, where while reading I would slip into a very present and mindful state. I would be sitting outside reading in the shade and look up from the book, and be totally quiet in my mind. Totally present. Birds could come and go, deer could walk by, bees pollinating on the flowers, an occasional breeze passing through the trees or the wind chimes, all of which could happen, all of which I could witness, and none of which took me out of that ever-present awareness state.
In that state I further realized the connectedness of all things. I realized just as the blank space around color in a work of art helped show that color, how the silence before a note helped give that note life, so too the space between me and an object was as sacred as the object itself. For how could that object be if it were not for the space before it.
And so as the time passed over the course of this practice period, as much as I could remember, I tried to put myself back in that state. I tried to remember the silence, the stillness, and the profundity of connection I had in that moment, that I know is available to me now, and in any moment. I only need to allow myself to remember.
Combination Lock Metaphor
When I was young, I recall looking down the barrel of a bike combination lock - the kind of lock that is integrated to the end of a cable, and as you turn all the numbers to the right combination, it allows the key, integrated to the other end of the cable, to slide into the lock. When the numbers are wrong, you can see how they block the frictionless entry of the key.
As I aged, I came to view this as a sort of metaphor for life. Once you got the variables into the right position - your health routine, your diet, your relationships, your income channels, your hobbies, etc. - your life would somehow just flow. I struggled for years, perhaps even decades to get the variables into the right position. Life has a knack for knocking things out of place. You get in a rhythm with exercise and get injured, or sick, or perhaps something goes awry in another category, so then you have to go try to fix that.
The ‘rooting in another country’ or ‘rooting in balance’ ideal really helped me shatter that combination lock ideal. Chasing that perfect combination was really a fool’s errand. There is no way to get to and maintain the combination perfectly. Life is too messy. But, the rootedness in Spirit, that perfect centeredness is available to all of us, always. We just have to remember to go there. We have to practice being there. And we have to get good at bringing it with us wherever we go.
Thinking vs. Reacting
Michael Pollan wrote a new book, A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, and is on his PR tour. I recently watched a conversation between him and Ezra Klein where they discussed relevant topics. One of the comments Pollan made was about how social media is not facilitating our own original thinking (in most cases). It’s our reacting to others’ content. This helped me see why it was wasteful to my own mind to spend it on social media rather than allowing my own observation of my mind to reveal my actual thoughts. I spent far less time this month on my phone, consciously choosing to put it down and sit in silence. I allowed my thoughts to arise. I allowed myself to witness what was arising in my own mind. I allowed myself to choose to think about certain topics more deeply rather than react to what was being put in front of me by an algorithm. When I upheld it, I noticed a meaningful shift in the quality of my attention. Solid reinforcement for ‘just sit there’.
Missing My Buddy
During this period I had the great fortune to travel a bit with my family. The disruption to my schedule was a welcome break to my typical routine. However, it also led to an unintentional disconnection from my spiritual practice and my regular check-ins with my New Story buddy. While I was so immersed in what I was doing at the time that I did not even notice that I was not checking in, by the time I got back, I felt deeply disconnected. It was somewhat surprising how much time I felt I had lost to not practicing. How far behind I felt for not being rooted in the other country, and for accidentally slipping back into looking at my phone rather than ‘just sitting there’.
While this realization was somewhat sad, it was also refreshingly clarifying. I hope I can carry forward the usefulness of accountability, the power of connection and community, and the depth of discipline within a practice.
Journey Away From Spirit?
Finally, in addition to our five minute poem, we were asked to draw our intuitive sense of what it is in modern western culture that quickens our journey from Spirit, and what Spirit is replaced by. I want to share a few reflections on this exercise. While I somewhat resisted it at first - I did not want to go sit down and draw something - I ended up appreciating the assignment deeply. The fact that we had to draw it forced me to sit in a different space, with different tools in hand. My default is sitting at my keyboard. To sit with an intent to draw, to try to conceive of what shapes to put on paper, what forms to create, required a different type of thinking, which forced me into a deeper form of meditation. I would arrive at an idea and force myself to try to go deeper. Is that really what it is? Is that what I should draw? Or is there something behind that? Something more? So content aside, the exercise, the change in medium itself, was powerful.
Now, the journey away from Spirit. This is really interesting. As my poem above indicates, my inclination was things like consumerism, productivity, technology, doing over being, all accelerate our drives and distract us. Initially, I was trying to figure out how to draw that. But I kept pondering, trying to go deeper, to see something more. Before there was this consumer culture, were we moving away from Spirit? Do all cultures do this? What cultures stay so centered? Is it even possible?
The image that next arose for me was an anecdote Bill has told a few times where he mentioned ‘the first light of creation’. How do we stay connected to that? But then I thought about what came after that first light of creation - the big bang. The universe exploded into existence, or so we think. Creation itself seems to move outward, expanding into multiplicity and distance from its original source. We are being propelled away from that first light. That is not a rejection of the first light, just a natural propulsion away from it.
The next image that came to me was of a mother and a child being born. As the child grows, it too eventually moves away from its mother. It takes on a life of its own and becomes its own person.
So, I guess I land at a place where I don’t think it unnatural or a violation of some divine natural order that we move away from Spirit as a part of our life journey. I think we somewhat naturally move in a direction of exploration away from our source. I do think it is easy to become distracted or caught up in so many of the things life has to offer, whatever they are. Other people, hobbies, vocations, etc. Moreover, I think previous generations struggle to teach new generations how to stay in touch with that source amongst all that is new for the new generations. The more things change in culture and society, the greater the disconnect we have between generations and the more challenging it is for one generation to speak in a way that resonates with the next generation. Just as the universe accelerates the farther it gets from its source, so too with our journey.
Thus, I’m less inclined to lay blame solely on modern culture than I initially was. Time, distance, novelty, and the nature of becoming itself all seem implicated. This recognition however changes the nature of the task at hand. It becomes our duty to remember and find a way to stay connected, ‘stay rooted’, even while we grow further. It is completely natural to grow away. But it would be unnatural, and certainly a bit sad, to deny connection. We are genetically connected to our mother. We are cosmically connected to the universe. We are wholly connected to the whole. The more we can find our way to remember that, the healthier we will be. The more we give space for that in our lives, and make space for that for others, the more rooted we all will be.
If this reflection has been of value, you’re welcome to support the time and care that go into this work.
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