A woman’s journey through madness and mysticism

(2018 – some of the links on this post are no longer good…I couldn’t find another source, sorry)

I’m posting this just to call attention to a blog I found that many of you, my readers, will find interesting. I found it beautiful and compelling too, I’m sharing this particular post as it is distinctly appropriate for Beyond Meds, but the whole blog is worth exploring. UPDATE: Here is another post I shared later today.

Part One: My Journey Through Madness & Mysticism

This blog is part one of my series, Holy Irreverence: Exploring the Dark Side of the Sacred (see important overview and framing for the series by clicking on the linked title).

I wanted to start by feeling into the subject of madness and it’s intimate connection to mystery and mysticism as it has shown up in my own life.

I choose this topic to begin the series because I myself was conceived in a womb of madness, and madness was the mother that nursed and raised me into this world. Thus, it seemed like the most appropriate starting point…

Before I knew how to speak; before I even had a concept of myself, I was shaped by the gaze of a mother struggling with the unpredictable currents of mystical opening and mind-numbing psychosis….

…Once I was admitted to the psychiatric ward, I started to sense into a longer timeline to my internal struggle with this dark energy. It wasn’t rational, nor did it feel wholly personal. It felt like a wounding and evil that cut much deeper than anything that could only be attributed to my trauma with my mother.

There was no way to prove it, but I felt that I had somehow opened the pandora’s box of perhaps lifetimes of a very deep primal trauma or wound, and that it was wanting release through me, whether I liked it or not.

The energy itself felt ancient, primordial, pre-verbal and archetypal. It felt collective, and yet intimately personal all at once. While in the psychiatric ward, I felt as though I was processing material that was deeply personal to my own traumas, but also material, imagery and content that I had no idea as to its origin. In many ways, I felt my own life experience had become a fertile karmic grounds on which a deeper collective trauma was attempting to work itself out, however imperfectly, through my being. (read more)