For a while now, I’ve been sitting at the edge of a frozen lake.

Through its icy facade, I could see a glimpse of a large, majestic, ancient animal trapped in the unmoving water.

I’ve tried chipping away at the ice with my tools. I sat and meditated, emptying myself of desires, of ego for hours on end. I’ve engaged in deep conversations with wise teachers, excavating the hidden shapes of motives, attempting to trace the elusive flight of actions that inevitably emerges.

I learned a ton in the process. But I didn’t get anywhere close to melting the frozen lake.

I’ve seen the face of that beast before. It’s hard to place but I think we’ve met in dreams. 

Maybe my astral self is braver than my human self.

~

Recently, something shifted.

Maybe it’s the rising temperature. Maybe it’s the psychic accumulation of all those years being led and misled into what I believed were attempts to melt the lake.

I scrubbed my eyes. I thought I was dreaming.

But the lake actually melted.

At first I was elated.

Then I saw what the lake was made of.

Unshed tears of my 11 year old self, hated and made fun of for the tender rainbow threads that weaved the first layer of my epidermis.

Giant cobra of rage for the ways my ancestors’ agenda and defenses obscured my internal compass.

Black bellows of grief for the years I’ve spent proving to the ‘world’ that I’m worthy of existing by holding a job that was never meant for me.

For a brief moment, I panicked.

“I changed my mind! Put it back where it belongs! I want the medicine, not the poison!”

Then a gentle voice came blowing through the wind.

“Child, the medicine is the poison.”

The voice rang for days afterwards: “The medicine is the poison. The medicine is the poison. The medicine is the poison.”

~

Beyond the sometimes sickening circus of the self-help industries and the advice economies, a simple truth remains.

Listen. The answer is within.

Paradoxically, we didn’t come into this life with a user manual. We didn’t come into this life with a mirror to see ourselves clearly.

And from this essential separation from self, we are separated from the totality of The Divine, of God.

Mysticism is the puzzle of getting to know God.

Not to learn about God. Not to proselytize for or against God. Not to argue against or advocate for God. Not to pontificate about God. Not to whinny the shrill shrieks of ‘theology’ — as if there’s a logic to God.

But rather to know God.

To know God as a subtle vibration, crawling up your spine when you hear an opera singer in complete union with the aria.

To know God as the undying memory of the lines on your grandmother’s hands — the only person who had the depth to recognize your four year old self had depth beyond comprehension when everybody else treated you as an inconvenience to their ‘adult’ plans.

To know God as the emptiness of the void. Silent in the depth of your suffering. The seeming cruelty of withholding answers that hides the wisdom that no answers mean the door was always left unlocked.

Mysticism is the slow, long path to knowing the self as a portal to divine intelligence.

Mysticism is the spontaneous, ecstatic dance erupting out of sudden realization that the divine was here all along.

Mysticism is the yin path that has made sacred its slipperiness. In its ungraspable, ineffable nature, it remains untouched by dirty hands of men who know only to gain power by taking from others, only to establish authority by desecrating the sacredness of life.

Mysticism that can be understood is not mysticism worth pursuing.

So we begin there. Somewhere between the unknowability of The Divine and the infinite cycle of our own sufferings, continuing to recycle itself and to reappear in various guises, there is a crack.

It’s a crack somewhere in the middle of a giant dark cave. It’s an opening too subtle for the impatient. It’s a portal too big for the mind, too small for the body, just right for the heart.

There are many paths and many teachers in the cave. I don’t know if they all led to the same thing. After all, I only know my path. I only know the exact shape of the melted ice of my own lake.

But I know my path. And I know my teachers.

They show up in 7 different guises. I sometimes wonder if they’re all part of a larger face. They never showed me the answer.

They’ve been known throughout Time by different names. To me, they show up as The Planets.

This offering isn’t about learning astrology. At least not in the mechanical, “tell me my future” kind of way. It’s not about accumulating keywords, memorizing symbols, figuring out how to spot aspects — all incredible activities with their own merits.

This offering is about continuing to return the questions of “What is mysticism?” and “How do I allow my life to teach me mysticism?” over and over again.

It is a spiral, and we walk each layer of the spiral alongside one of the seven planets.

~

This offering is about un-learning.

Unlearning the ways you prolong your own winter by resisting the forces of spring.

Unlearning the strategies you’ve been taught to bury your own divinity.

Unlearning the belief that there was anything other than full surrender.