I wondered how I might name this entry. There was just not going to be any easy way to do it. My first thought was “Mindfulness For The Mystic,” but I could feel people’s eyes rolling as I typed it. The one I chose, I fully realize, is not much better…

This is one of the hardest entries I have yet written, not because the writing itself is so hard but because it is one of those places, in my life as a writer, and a human being set on writing about my truth, my journey on this earth, where I realized I had to, and please pardon my crass language, “shit or get off the pot.” I had an experience so profound last night, born in a state of such incredible, intense vulnerability that it felt as though I was on the edge of sheer insanity, and yet allowing myself to fall, to open fully, to believe that what was about to happen would so completely, radically alter my life in such a way as never to be able to go back to what life was just a moment before was a decision that was mind-bogglingly huge. I thought for a split second, and I jumped. It was the exact moment that I found the crack is the cosmic egg, and knew I could find my way back to sanity.

In the 1980’s my husband and our small children and I sat at Unity Church in Roanoke, Virginia thrilled to meet and hear a writer that we greatly admired speak about a book that had shaped our decision to homeschool our children. The writer was Joseph Chilton Pearce, the book, Magical Child, hands down the most important book I have ever read about the way a child learns, and how our children’s natural, inherent magical gifts are squelched by the society they are born into. It is a big book and I cannot possibly do his treatise justice, but it is still, today, one of the most important books I have ever read.

At the same time I was able to speak to him, briefly, about another book that he had written that had blown me away, I came away that night changed in a way I have not been able to process for 30 years. The book is The Crack In The Cosmic Egg. In short — and there is no way to do justice to this concept briefly here, but his premise is that the culture that we are born into with it’s self-limiting beliefs creates the “cosmic egg” that we live in that becomes our reality, false or no, it’s what we learn. Pearce believes that we have a biological drive that creates a crack in this cosmic egg that is the opening through which we might find our way back to the pure consciousness of the child before the egg was formed and sealed [my words]. His book was about ways in which we might explore the crack, find our way through back to the place where we might begin again and create our own reality, the life we could have had had the cosmic egg not sealed around us.

Now, the above is my very messy, and I’m quite certain jumble of what the brilliant Pearce wrote about. I think it has been on my mind because  a new revised edition is about to come out, and while I don’t know anything about the new book it brought back to my mind all of those concepts of reality that I could not possibly have understood at the time were so relevant to my own life.

Fastforward  30 years. 2 a.m. A bi polar woman sitting alone in the dark with a small dog in her lap in a quiet house looking at the vast expanse of her life in both directions and realizing that what came before or what will come after had no relevance at all. I saw the crack, and I jumped.

It was, I think, like Alice going down the rabbit hole. I had been watching Doreen Virtue’s videos on angels on Gaiam t.v. which I have recently discovered and love, and I have been swept away. I have loved her work for some time. Raised Catholic, and having been on a profound spiritual pilgrimage for decades, angels are not new to me, they are my companions on the journey and absolutely as real to me, say, as the checkout lady at the grocery store might be to you. Virtue’s words helped me to realign with what I already knew to be true, but they were just what I needed to tap the egg in just the right place and watch it crack right under my hand. I gasped. I looked right, I looked left, I slid through.

I prayed, laying in the dark surrounded by pugs, my tiny Delilah snuggled close in the crook of my arm. I closed my eyes and slipped into what didn’t feel like sleep but an altered state of consciousness.

This is going to get a little out there for a lot of you, I know, I just had to warn you, but I promise you I am sitting here sane, and perfectly whole and well, and this experience was very real, life-changing, and I turned a page in the book of my life last night. I can never go back.

Something happened when I closed my eyes. I had not taken any medication to help me sleep, I had not had any alcohol or stimulants or depressants of any type, I was simply a woman who was very tired and crawled into bed, pausing to pray, to ask for guidance, and if it wouldn’t be too much trouble could I please be given an answer to something that was deeply troubling me. I asked that the angels be with me, and I thanked them. I snuggled Delilah, kissing her baby soft face, and started to drift off. That’s when the egg split, it was as if my soft body slipped out of my own shell and right through the crack into an unknown world.

Now I would like to make it clear that while I believe in angels, and while I pray to them, I have never seen one, not in any physical sense, but as I moved into something that felt like a place between the worlds, not awake, and not asleep, it was as though I were watching a movie on the inside of my eyelids, the part that goes against your eyeballs, not visible to the world, and I could not believe what I saw. There they were, the angels, and they danced, and they swirled about, and there was such an incredible sense of joy, of release, and then I was floating, flying, spinning, lighter than air, I was in a place that is weightless, timeless, where there is only the pure essence of joy and everything is perfection. For a long while I seemed to be as if swimming in a stream on the air currents, and then I entered the dream. It was, as dreams are, long, and complex, nonsensical, but when I woke up this morning perfectly understandable. It was an answer to a very painful, heart-wrenching question that I have had for seven years. And I woke up with such a sense of peace.

I know, as sure as I am sitting here, that it was not meant to be an easy journey to find this answer but that the angels made certain I was aware of their presence at the outset. They were with me, they showed me that I could swim, that I could fly, that I would not drown, that I could make it through to the other side of the answer that lay ahead, and indeed I did. In that moment I broke through the crack in the egg that has held me captive for 60 years. I was free.

I don’t expect anyone to understand or believe my story but that is not my business. I know that it was very real to me, I know it is what I was meant to see and feel and touch and taste and experience. I long ago learned the Shaman’s way, I am used to people not understanding or believing me, that doesn’t bother me. When I learned to believe in myself enough to follow the voice that called out to me from a place I could not see or hear in the way humans normally do I began to find my true purpose. Last night I crossed the threshold I have been on the precipice of for a very long time now. I have arrived. I am here.

Today I was very shaky. I cried. I paced and shook and felt like I might be crazy, and the thing is, I know that some people will be shaking their heads reading this — if they’ve even read this far — saying, “Ya think?” But what I know is that sometimes we have to touch down on insanity to push off and swim back into a place of greater sanity than we have ever known. I think most people have trouble finding their way because they won’t dive down to the bottom and risk it all. I have no choice. I did not choose this journey, but it is mine.

The thing about mindfulness is that it is the thing that I hold onto so I don’t lose my way. It is like the breadcrumbs we drop so that we can find our way back. I am okay in this moment. I am okay in this moment. I am okay in this moment, and on and on and on all the way to the bottom, and then we find our way back. Mindfulness is fluid, it is not static. We can be mindful and see angels, and swim deep into our subconscious where all the answers are, we can see God in a way that we can’t as we are bumbling about in our waking hours going hither and yon. Mindfulness is not sleeping, mindfulness is being more fully awake than we have ever been in our lives, and quieter, and more at peace. It is the place where we know everything we need to know and the place where we don’t need to know anything at all.

Last night I was vulnerable, and insane and sane and the egg cracked and I saw what I was meant to see. I am a mystic and I can say it now. I am ready to move forward.