Archives: Submitted Stories

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in mid-forties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  39

I am grateful to have grown up with an amazing family, strong faith, and a community of support; despite these blessings, I suffered from anxiety disorder, which led to situational depression by the age of 27. Thankfully, the staff psychologist at the high school where I taught English and theater referred me to an amazing psychologist and nurse practitioner, who was able to treat my disorders with therapy and medication. She also encouraged me to begin a mediation practice for years, but I insisted that my intense energy left me “incapable” of meditating.

I continued to manage my anxiety with therapy, medication and exercise as the years passed. At the age of 28, I married the love of my life, had three children and continued my work as an educator part-time as an aerobics teacher at our local YMCA. When my daughter discovered a passion for the performing arts, I rekindled my own love of theater and became Education Director of our town’s community theater.

In August of 2013, my extended family traveled to a beautiful vacation home on The Chesapeake Bay, where we began a week-long celebration of my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary. By the afternoon of our arrival, I started to feel terrible, and climbed into bed with fever and chills. After two days and no improvement, I was so weak that my husband carried me to the car; we rushed to the ER, where a chest x-ray revealed I had pneumonia.

After receiving IV fluids and starting antibiotics, I returned to the vacation house to convalesce. I felt well enough to read a book about gratitude. The book urged its readers to end each day by stating three things they were grateful for. In this month of gratitude, readers were instructed to find a stone that they would hold each night as they expressed their gratitude. Two nights later, I experienced an encounter with the divine.

I remember waking up some time after 2am and finding two of my children in bed with me. As I was still recovering, I decided to leave the kids to sleep and find an empty bed in the huge vacation house. I crept to the third floor and found a bedroom with many bunk beds…that was completely empty. I sank happily into a bunk and closed my eyes.

My mystical encounter began sometime between entering this bed and the early morning sunrise…I was not dreaming… dreams are vague and forgotten soon after waking, while this experience has stayed with me over the past 8 years.

A voice, presence, Holy Spirit, spoke to me, but it wasn’t through words. Suddenly, I came to understand in those early morning hours a very simple, yet profound message,

“You never have to worry or be anxious again, Sarajane…

Because what is happening RIGHT NOW, is what is supposed to happen.

If you can live in this place of knowing, all will be well.”

I remember being saturated with a complete sense of peace for the first time in my life. I believed, rather, I knew, that this was the “peace of God that surpasses all understanding.” I sat in stillness until the sunrise, bathed in serenity and joy.

When day broke, I put on my running sneakers and went outside to process what had occurred. As I was still recovering, I walked rather than ran. I prayed, “God, if what I experienced is real, send me a sign.” As I continued my walk that summer morning, I heard a buzzing sound in my ear. I saw no sign of the bee whose buzzing had interrupted my walk, but began to run away.

After I stopped, I resumed walking, and then heard the same buzzing. Once again, I began to run…this cycle continued until I returned to the vacation home. My husband met me at the door and expressed concern that I was up and about. He didn’t want me to relapse. I assured him that I hadn’t felt this calm and centered before. He didn’t understand what had happened to me and I didn’t have the words to tell him at this point.

My then 6-year-old daughter appeared and was covered in sunscreen (which she had tried to apply herself). I scooped her up and brought her to the shower. After I toweled her off, she reached down and picked up a small, smooth stone.

“Mommy, I found this rock this morning. It is going to be our special rock from now on.”

Remembering the book I had read yesterday that had urged readers to find a “gratitude rock,” I was overcome by the “signs” that my experience was real… and filled again with joy and peace.

For the next days, weeks and several months, I continued to see the world through new eyes. It was as if my vision were crisper than it was before my experience. I saw the beauty of nature from a shaper lens; at my niece and Goddaughter’s baptism the following week, which was held in my parent’s back yard, everything was bathed in a radiant light; I was so present in the moment during the days following my experience that I was able to see the beauty and joy in things that I had been too busy, anxious or preoccupied to see before. It made me sad to see my sister so worried and stressed about the baptismal ceremony and celebration. I realized that I had spent so much of my life in this state of anxiety – which had left me unable to be PRESENT to the divine that I now saw in everything around me.

Instead of feeling angry and resentful that my husband’s job kept him away from our family so much, I felt an empathy for how difficult it must be for him to be missing time with the kids and me.

I made different decisions about what was important to me based upon my experience. I wanted to understand what had happened to me. I wish I had known about your organization at the time! I voraciously devoured books about spirituality and mysticism in my quest to make sense of what had happened to me that night. I told my mom’s dear friend Donna about my experience and she said, “You’ve had an epiphany. I have had a few myself. You should read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now.” I recalled that I had tried to read years ago at the suggestion of my therapist, but put down quickly, as the words didn’t resonate with me.  After my mystical experience words that meant nothing to me in the past were now insights that helped me develop and grow on the spiritual path.

As the years passed since my encounter with the Divine in 2012, I experienced many joys in addition to several life-changing challenges. When I learned I was “unexpectedly” expecting my fourth child in the summer of 2013, I was not filled with the joy that had accompanied my other “planned” pregnancies. But after my sweet John Michael, Jack, was born in January of 2014, I was, of course, beyond thrilled. Unfortunately, as I nursed my newborn son on the week he came home from the hospital, I fell asleep and the baby slipped out of my arms and fell on the hard wood floor. Imagine the guilt and self-condemnation I felt when my sweet baby had to have emergency surgery due to a fractured skull and subdural hematoma. After the worst moments of my life, God answered my prayer and the surgical team saved my son’s life. Because of my mystical experience, I was able to view this horrific incident from a different perspective.

I saw that God’s message was clear: “Be present, be grateful for all the blessings of your life. Know that everything that is happening is here to teach you something on the spiritual path.”

So I let go of guilt and stopped blaming myself; by the grace of God, I finally began a daily practice of Centering Prayer, which I had recently discovered was the Christian form of meditation; also called contemplation, I discovered the mystics, such as St. Teresa of Avilla and John the Cross, who spent years cultivating a union with the Divine though this incredible practice.

And now, almost 8 years after my experience, I continue to spend time each day cultivating a relationship with God and continuing on the life long journey that is the spiritual path. One of the greatest insights I have gleaned from this rewarding yet often challenging roads is summed up beautifully in an excerpt from an essay written by spiritual teacher, Barbara DeAngelis.

After working on my own for so many years, I have finally found a spiritual teacher who has helped awaken my inner flame, as the ancients say. This awakening created a radical shift in my being. Now, a consistent part of my awareness is conscious of my Self. I don’t have to find my way back anymore. Instead, I simply have to notice that my attention has shifted in the wrong direction, away from God consciousness within me and onto something that is creating suffering. Rather than feeling that I’m lost in a forest and have to find my way out, I remember that there is a beautiful and sacred clearing in which I can live, and if I ever wander off, I know exactly how to find my way back.”

My mystical encounter and the spiritual journey that followed has taught me how to recognize when I am separating myself from God; thanks to many years of study and practice, I have a toolbox full of resources that can bring me back to that beautiful clearing that Barbara DeAngelis describes.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early fifties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  30

Prior to this particular experience, I had been practicing meditation for around 15 years. In the weeks before, I had been coming up against a lot of physical discomforts after about 30 minutes of meditation. One day, I resolved to stick it out, staying with it for as long as it took to get through the pain. After 45 minutes or so I had broken through the physical distractions.

Within the meditation, the idea of working through all personal attachments came to me. I visualized everyone I had personally known in my life. One at a time I held them in my awareness until I felt no hold or pull toward or from the person. This took some time. I would now call the state I eventually reached when this was done to be one of equanimity.

After enjoying this state for a bit, I then intently focused my attention toward the smallest particle of matter I could imagine. Going further and further, then faster and faster into this single point.

I was then unexpectedly overtaken by a white light that seemed to originate from within my body. The light shot up through the center of my body and out the top of my head in a single column, taking my awareness with it. There was a sensation of movement and traveling up and out of the body and even this reality. There were many visual impressions along the way. And then, there was nothing; no objects, no center, no perspective, no thought, no self, no darkness, no light, no source. The best I can describe this experience is that it was one of just beingness in of a vast infinite clear illumination of awareness. But it was not my awareness, as there was no individuation.

This was not the first or last mystical experience that I have had. There have been other experiences I have that could be referred to as the void, emptiness, no-self, non-dual or pure awareness. But this experience was somehow different and felt beyond all that.

In reflection on the experience, If I were to say there was anything there at all it would be that there was an invisible presence that permeated infinity. While there was nothing that could be observed, there is also a sense that there was nothing that was not included.

Any qualities that I use to describe this experience feel like a projection after the fact. Yes, it was love in the sense that all was at one. It was profound, there was clarity, it was boundless, it was pure and complete. But all of that was just known and not observed in the moment.

Since the experience felt timeless, I have no idea how long this it lasted.  The last thing I remember was the faintest suggestion of a feeling or thought of astonishment. And then, I was pulled back into my body before that thought could even be formed.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in mid-forties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  Not provided

I am having great difficulty finding a most significant experience to describe.  I’ve written many essays and poems on their collective feel.  The excerpt below probably best captures the detail.

I cannot say that anything disappeared.  On the contrary, a veil was taken away from my eyes and I saw a different reality, an unfiltered one for which my mind did not hold the capacity.  Suddenly I knew something that was not there before – it was not that something was gone, but rather something new was there.  As if I became part of something that had always been there, and that feeling was new to me. 

It was somehow related to vision and sound, as opposed to smell, taste, or touch, although I did not have obvious hallucinations and did not hear sounds or words that I can imitate.  Sometimes it was like music without sound, simply the feeling it instills, a repeated pattern: beating fingers on a guitar, strumming up and down.  But not the sound of it.  Only the feeling, the way it passes from the mind and vibrates in the chest. 

I believe sometimes that I saw a song; the scene before me took on a rhythm.  I could not see the scene move, but I knew it wanted to and had the potential.  That perhaps captures it best – that I saw not only the things before me, but what they hoped to be and could be if someone would let them.  It was the view of the world in the perfect way, unified, accurate, precise, beautiful, unfathomable and large, yet welcoming and close.  It washed me over with a feeling of certainty.  The scene took on an utter absence of doubt.

But, at the same time that it was something new, it was also a memory, a déjà vu.  I knew that each thought I was to have over the next few minutes would be simultaneous with the thoughts I just had.  Not just a memory, but a co-occurrence, collapsed time.  It was the difference between the first conversation with a person and the second.  It was the difference between riding the number ten bus to downtown Portland on Monday and riding the same bus on Tuesday. 

The light was different or an object was out of place.  The river under the bridge had not really changed, but the water that had been under there the first day was now down toward the sea.  I knew something and yet the very same thing I did not know.  The chance seems small that I could take this thing that I don’t even know and tell you so that you will know it. 

Imagine you live through your life seeing only two dimensions and then wake one morning perceiving depth.  It is simply a new, vivid reality.  It makes you a little sick to your stomach.  I wish I could capture the moment and give it to you.

One of my most vivid experiences was during college when I went with a friend to the library to work on a poem while he read about art.  At one point, he whispered for me to look at a passage in an art book, a small caption under a photo of a Japanese clay vessel.  It explained that the sound of the word Fuyo is identical to that of a word meaning unnecessary or useless; Fuyo implies that nothing can add to the beauty of an object, because its beauty is already unsurpassable. 

For example, he told me, a flower cannot enhance the beauty of a well-made clay vessel, which is already perfect in form.  I was amazed by this description, which was precisely the quality of my mystical experiences that I was trying to put down in a poem.  The word captured the quality that made things so clearly and purely perfect to me, this thing I had always wanted to write about, and I adopted the word immediately as a part of my personal vocabulary.  At the time, I did not know what mysticism was or that my experiences were just that.  I just knew that things had the qualities of perfection, unity, and reality that I was helpless to convey.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in late forties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  17

I read Ram Dass’s Journey of Awakening and meditated daily with discipline for 30-45 minutes. My motivation other than enlightenment was to alleviate my anxiety, and it helped tremendously. I used the mantra “Love” and “Light” on the in and out breaths.

I visualized light within spreading out into the world. I had an intense awakening experience of all-encompassing love, oneness, and deep feelings of wellbeing and bliss for several months. I have had glimpses of this state since but not as long lasting nor as profound as that one time.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-fifties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  47

I am a runner and run all year round in the early AM.  My first and most significant experience was after finishing a long run and while walking at about 5:30 AM.  While walking, it was extremely cold, but the sky and moon were extremely bright.  As I walked and cleared my head, I began feeling an incredible sense of unity… and like everything just pulled into me (visually, feeling…). 

As I walked, the trees and moon moved like I was covered in a ball of energy, and the energy was pushing everything away from me.  Like my movement was impacting my environment.  There was a tremendous amount of unity – clarity – very hard to explain. The feeling was around connection-belonging-bliss-unity.

I do not recall specifically what happened after, but recall a sense of “what was that?”

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in late sixties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  43

I woke up one morning feeling different. I don’t remember if it was immediate or not. At this point, since it was around 25 years ago, I can’t give any specifics. During a three-day period, I felt almost joyful, feeling that somehow I knew ‘everything’, but yet, I can’t remember any specifics, except that I knew without a doubt that the world was perfect as it is, we are all connected, and life has no beginning or ending… which was good news because I had a fear of death because of my being so overexposed to illness and old age as a nurse, and death as a child.

The fear of death was gone. I remember feeling like I was standing on a mountain top looking down and could see ‘everything’. It’s not that the world was actually perfect, but was perfect in its imperfection. Everything was just how it was supposed to be. In a way, I felt great joy, but also felt great sadness, because I knew this perfection included so much hardship. I previously had had a belief in reincarnation and this belief was enhanced.

This was the major event, and there were two minor events, well, minor compared to that one… of receiving only what I can call ‘downloads’. These happened within a year or so, while I was driving no less. I had to pull over to the side of the road and laugh. It was so ridiculous. I felt like all the knowledge of the world was being poured into me, wondering ‘why me’ and laughing even more.

After the first event, I found a Jungian therapist because I thought I had lost my mind… after all, I would think anyone who claimed to know ‘everything’ was nuts. The therapist was great, assured me I wasn’t crazy, and gave me suggestions on books to read. This was the beginning of a reading habit that continues to this day.

I have read many books trying to decide what these episodes were all about. Ken Wilber and his Integral theory was helpful… I spun off into Spiral Dynamics, read Plato, Maslow, Jung… neurology, developmental psychology, Darwin, James, philosophy… a little bit of this and that. I started meditating and studying Buddhism, which was very helpful.

After ten or so years of study, I was able to plug the experience more or less into the dhamma. The mind map I carry is Buddhist, but I don’t claim to be a Buddhist. Every religion is the same. After all, there can only be one truth. To me, everything is a dhamma gate and Buddhism is just life. What’s there to practice? We are doing it…

After that initial experience, my entire life changed. I used to be an extrovert, loved to be the center of attention. Headed committees, liked being in charge… now my goal is to fly under the radar. I’m very introverted. Can’t lie worth a damn. When it first happened, lies wouldn’t come out of my mouth. I would try to cover my butt in some way, but the words physically got stuck in my mouth. It’s kinda awful. I’m still guilty of sins of omission, but I do have to operate in this world and this world does not seem to value honesty.

It’s like after the event, I had a different mind. I didn’t even have the thoughts I used to have. I was known for a quick wit that included much sarcasm and cynicism. If I’m around this type of person now, I start having some cynical thoughts myself, so I avoid people like that.

I recently divorced my husband of 45 years because I could no longer tolerate his dishonesty, negativity and self-serving ways. I tried, did the Metta prayer constantly, to survive with him, and realized it was nothing more than spiritual bypassing. I needed out of the marriage. I no longer drink, smoke, or eat meat, but I do use profanity. A well-placed “f**k” gets people’s attention, especially when you are dealing with people who don’t expect that sort of thing out of you. I see this as skillful speech, but it’s really no more than a common case of potty mouth, but I own it.

I like to write, paint and create really mediocre poetry. I was a hospice nurse for years and a pretty decent one. I’m not a perfect person any more than you are… but I embrace my imperfections as I accept the imperfections of those around me. I don’t try to change people… well, the kids a bit, but I’m working on that.

These experiences totally reshaped my life… I know it. It’s not that I was on the road to hell with the life I was leading, but I know things would have been different….

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in late forties
Current location:  United Kingdom
Age at time of experience:  47

Profound stillness, stillness stiller than stillness. Feeling of slight pressure that feels similar to magnetism in the middle of the forehead. Objects emitting their own luminosity. Stillness that feels like gravity as if there is a singularity inside similar to a black hole. Peace that passeth understanding.

Feeling that love and gravity are the same thing. Feeling that the substratum of the cosmos is love. Luminosity everywhere. Occasionally feeling that my guru Yogiraj Satgurunath is looking out through my eyes.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in early forties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  39

I am a Veteran and was getting my Ketamine treatment at the VA hospital. I did some progressive muscle relaxation and deep breathing, and during my treatment (it’s hard to remember it exactly), I remember seeing a white light and was overcome with emotion like I was in the presence of god… like an experience that I had been searching for my entire life. I felt engulfed in love.

I remember after thinking it was a million times more profound than any experience I ever had. It was way more than a reaction to drugs. I had had ketamine treatment at least forty times and have had lots of psychedelic experiences, but no experience has ever come close to that. It’s by far the most significant experience of my life.

Mystical Experiencer:  Female in late forties
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  49

I had been beaten and raped and had a horrible boat accident within a short period of time. After I healed, I went inward for two years and read the Bible, spiritual books, books on human behavior. Did a lot of self-realization, pondering my strengths and weaknesses, the purpose of life, etc.

After healing from the accident, I had erected a wall around me. I didn’t trust the human race. Hence my reason of going inward for two years to heal myself emotionally. I had always loved people, everybody, and my essence had been stripped from me. I wasn’t myself and knew I needed to emotionally heal…

I didn’t know this (i.e., the mystical experience) was an actual phenomenon until I woke up one morning in pure bliss.  My whole system had what I can only describe as an intense energy in it.  I went and sat on the porch and just stared up at the sky.  I felt so content and at peace and had this very intense feeling of love and felt at one with God.  I didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t really care. 

As I was sitting on the porch in bliss, feeling this overwhelming feeling of love, I had this clarity of why things in my life happened the way they did.  It was clear as day… things like, oh, that person taught me more tolerance and understanding, and that person taught me unconditional love.  I realized the boat accident had to happen, and it was a blessing in disguise.

I had to work during this time.  I take depositions in legal proceedings and it requires deep concentration.  They were short, maybe an hour to an hour and a half.  I did fine.  But during the over two days, I spent as much time on the porch as possible just feeling in awe with life.  By the end of the second day, the energy was very strong, almost too much.

Mystical Experiencer:  Male in mid-seventies
Current location:  U.S.A.
Age at time of experience:  40

Waiting in my car while daughter at music lesson. Warm, sunny day, some clouds. Suddenly felt an absence of my sense of self. No sense of separation from anything. Everything just was, I just was. Profound feeling of peace, oneness. Duration not clear, but ended before music lesson did.

Finally began to feel sense of self. I was sitting in my car, gripping the steering wheel. I said to myself, “God is in the steering wheel!” Did not discuss with anyone for some months, but continually thought about it.