MY STORY

I was raised Catholic and had a very active and faith-filled prayer life as a child. I believed in God. I lived out of my heart. I believed in something greater than me. I believed in magic, miracles, and that if I had the faith of a mustard seed, I could move mountains. I believed the stories in the Bible. The spirit world was real. And the material world around me was animated with that spirit. I believed that if I could put my whole heart and belief into something, it would come true. I believed in the underdog — that a person with nothing but a true heart could win the day.

But somewhere I lost those feelings. I started to trust my mind more than my heart. Instead of relying on my faith, trusting the universe and keeping my heart open, I became skeptical and relied on logic, rationality, and science as my primary guideposts for decision making. As I grew older and became more "educated," I began to doubt the existence of this spiritual world where God, miracles, and magic existed. In fact, the more I learned in school, the weaker my faith became until I came to believe that it was simply irrational to believe in a spiritual realm of reality. I began to explain away religion as an opiate of the masses, a creative-coping mechanism, a psychological crutch. I focused on the negative side of religion. As such, I ran away from it and I threw the baby out with the bathwater. I couldn't differentiate between the baby and the bathwater. I thought it must all be bad. I started living out of my head and not my heart.

My logical mind came to think that believing in God or a spirit world was stupid and foolish. As a result, life became desolate, having all the magic, miracles and mystery removed from it. I arrived at that dark place because of my desire to figure everything out with my head but also, and perhaps more importantly, because my heart had been broken, and I didn't know how to mend it. My early romantic relationships didn't work out and I was deeply hurt by a friend — normal things that happen in life and especially during the adolescent years. But my reaction to it made it worse. Somehow, I subconsciously thought that living out of my mind instead of my heart would keep the hurt at bay and make me happier. I closed my heart so no one could hurt me. What I didn't understand was that closing my heart also kept beauty, love, and God at bay. As a consequence, I became depressed, clinically depressed, and I didn't know how to heal or help myself. I lost hope. I became so depressed that I considered suicide.

I was nineteen, lost, and heartbroken. I didn't know where to turn. In my depression, I started praying. I asked for help. For months, I prayed for help and guidance. And the God of my childhood came to save me. At the moment I seriously considered suicide, a voice gently said, "My precious, precious child, it's now that I'm carrying you." I was instantly overcome with an intense feeling of unconditional love. Immediately I knew I was forgiven and deeply and passionately loved. It remains one of the most magical, transformational, and powerful experiences of my life. At that moment, my life changed. I was redeemed. And ever since, I have had a passionate belief in something bigger than me that is incredibly loving, something I call God. Magic, miracles, and mystery swept back into my life.

This experience of God occurred in my heart. It was a feeling. It was not a thought. It was feeling the presence of love — deep, abiding, and forgiving love. It was instantaneous and powerful. Hearing the voice was a peak experience — it was a spiritual high. It was moment of comfort, a moment without effort or doubt. It was a moment of union with God, when I felt that there was nowhere else to be and nothing else to do. It was like reaching the top of a mountain. And it stayed with me for a long time. It was an intoxicating feeling of bliss. The feeling of the being in the presence of God did not stay with me permanently though. I did not forget it, but I couldn't feel it all the time.

I wanted to feel it again. So I went on a journey to find God again. That journey led me around the world. And I found God everywhere. I found him, that is, I felt the same sense of pervading love, in many religious traditions. I found him in Japan at a Shinto Shrine as I watched people deeply in prayer. I found God in Hong Kong as I felt the peace of people doing Tai Chi. But most of all, I found him in India in his fierce form as the destroyer Shiva.

Before leaving the US, I was carrying guilt. I felt guilty for many of the choices I had made and I didn't know how to forgive myself. I had translated most of my religious training into a list of rights and wrongs. I was very clear that my actions were less than they should have been. I also knew, based on the experience of the voice, that God loved me. Hearing the voice alleviated a lot of the feelings of guilt and unworthiness, but those wounds were deep. A line from a song spoke to me, though I didn't know why:

Oh Mount Kailas, uncover me; Come my restoration, wash my body clean I've been walking along a crooked path Where the walls have fallen and broken me in half

These were the days before internet searches and I lived in rural America. I didn't know what Mt. Kailas was. I asked my religious studies professors and consulted my dictionary of religious terms, but did not find any reference to Mt. Kailas. Then, while praying to my Christian God in the library of a ship headed to India, I found a reference to Mt. Kailash. It is the mythological home of the Hindu God Shiva. The book went on to explain that Shiva is one of three primary Gods in Hinduism. There is a creator, a sustainer, and a destroyer. Shiva is revered as a destroyer. And destruction, death, and endings are viewed within the context of time as spiral — not linear. This was powerful to me. Although the same spiritual truth exists in the death and resurrection of Christ in the Christian tradition, at twenty I couldn't see that. I had to see the divine power of destruction, death, and endings from another perspective.

The divine continued to lead me in India. I wanted desperately to see the Taj Mahal, but I couldn't make it happen. I didn't have enough money. So I settled for a pre-planned group trip in...