Several years ago, someone offered me a free reiki massage. I didn’t know what reiki was, but I loved massages, so I said yes.
When it was my turn, I walked into the room and climbed onto the table. The practitioner put her hands under my head, and I waited.
But she didn’t move her hands.
I was super confused. What kind of massage was this?
I had no idea, but I settled in to wait it out and use the time to relax.
And then maybe 10 minutes in, I felt what I can only describe as a current of electricity running through my body.
It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.
After, I shot up and asked her: What was that? What did you just do?
She talked about the chakras + energy + healing, and it all sounded like nonsense.
But it was something -- and one of the most magical somethings I’d experienced to that point.
The mystery is what made it magical. I had no explanation for what I’d just experienced.
And that mystery was a pretty beautiful place to be.
It was a place where I encountered something my mind couldn’t hold -- a happening that transcended the frames I had on hand.
I can think of other moments of magic + mystery that have happened in my life before + since: predictive + healing dreams, wild synchronicities, magic moments for which I have no explanation.
And each time, the mystery is where I felt the awe -- that feeling of not knowing, the experience of being catapulted into another world where things aren’t what they seem, an awareness that there’s more than I thought.
I’ve been thinking about mystery a lot lately, as we find ourselves right in the middle of it -- together with the uncertainty + chaos of this moment.
Mystery is really hard sometimes.
Sometimes not-knowing is terrifying + devastating + unbearable.
*And* (in my experience) there’s something holy in mystery always. Because mystery takes us into spaces bigger than we are -- space of More.
And that’s what I’m leaning on now.
I’m making mystery an ally.
An ally on the spiritual quest. A bridge into a new possibility. A portal into a deeper thing.
None of this is making everything okay or eliminating my bad days or dissipating my anxiety.
But it is reminding me that there are things I don’t know. There’s room to move + space to breathe. There’s unfolding that still needs to happen, and there’s possibility in that.
Mystery reminds me that things aren’t all-the-way fixed, decided, or locked into place, and that we can bring our agency + use our power to make something, shape the trajectory, and influence the outcome.
And that’s a sacred + alive + powerful thing -- and a beautiful place to be.