 Hello everybody, welcome to part five C in our Magdalene series, where we are going through the book. Mary Magdalene revealed the first apostle for feminine gospel and the Christianity we haven't tried yet by Megan Waterson. If you have not seen the parts before part five C, those links will be down in the description box below. In fact, the whole playlist for this Magdalene series is down in the description box below. Today we're gonna be starting with the chapter, no one was there to witness the witness. And desire said, I did not see you go down, yet now I see you go up. So why do you lie since you belong to me? The soul answered, I saw you. You did not see me, nor did you know me. You mistook the garment I wore for my true self and you did not recognize me. The gospel of Mary chapter nine verses two through six. I want to return to the resurrection again. It is so much more significant than we have ever given it credit for, that Mary and Christ were together first when he resurrected, that he came back to her for her or this is how I see it. Mary Magdalene exclaims in Hebrew Rabbani or teacher according to John 2016. After he calls out to her after she recognizes him by hearing her name and his voice, this is an intimate exchange. She is his witness, not by accident. She is there because she is part of the story of how and why he was able to rise. And then Christ says the line that has confused so many for so long. No, Lee, me, ten jury, Latin for as many have translated it do not touch me. A more apt translation is do not cling to me. And this is what makes sense in the trajectory of his ministry. He was all about sitting with outcast, eating with untouchables and drinking from the well with a Samaritan woman. It just makes zero sense that suddenly once no longer incarnate, he would get squeamish over a woman's touch, a woman he loved the most. This has been misinterpreted to emphasize Christ's purity and chastity and also women's power to defile the holy. And it's been held up to further proof of Mary's sinful status as a penanted prostitute. The idea is that Christ is telling her essentially, don't touch me because I haven't ascended to God yet. Meaning you might mess with my ascension. Artist's depictions of this moment, for example, Italian Renaissance artist, no Lee, me, ten jury placed Christ above Mary, who was usually below him on her knees or at his feet. Christ one hand is pointed up indicating his ascension in the other hand as well giving Mary the hand. He's depicted as walking her from coming near him. But there is a different translation of this moment that has to do with spiritual path. He has mastered and that he had led Mary Magdalene through to completion, the conotic path, a spiritual path of self-emptying love. The core practice of this path is to not cling to anything, not even to her own beloved Christ. It's to disengage the egoic operation system and upgrade consciousness by descending into the heart. In Christian theology, canosis is the Greek word for the act of emptying. It is the act of releasing the ego's idea or will and allowing the divine will to act through us. But how do we do this? When we are gripped by something or someone, the ego's desires, how do we practice this path? We are missing so much of Christ's response to Mary's question of how a person perceives a vision through what aptitude with what spiritual facility. We are missing four pages of his answer and also presumably his instruction in how we then practice or use the spiritual capacity to perceive with the no, with the inner heart. Mary could be speaking about what stage Christ led her soul through. And here we are at the third desire when the gospel starts back up again at Mary 9 too. The egoic desire or craving thinks that the soul belongs to it. And because of this, the ego cannot recognize the soul. It has always haunted me when the soul says, I saw you, you did not see me. The soul can see the ego, but the ego can't recognize the soul. You mistook the garment I wore for my true self and you did not recognize me. The soul is saying here to the ego's desire, I am not this body, not essentially. I am what exists before the body and after, but if you are only focusing on the body, on the egoic garment, I am wearing a soul, you will not recognize me. So Catherine, Edward and I literally just did a huge copy talk over the confusion of the soul with the true self that links back to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjalene, especially Sutra 6 of the second Pada, the Sadhana Pada, where Patanjalene talks about how the self's true identity is often confused by the ego. The ego is the false sense of self, the projection of fear from the mortality of the body instead of the eternal life of the soul. What this means to me happens actually every day. It's very ordinary. It's referring to those moments when we get so caught up in what we want, we can't see the bigger picture. We cling to the outcome like a lemur. And if you're like me, we obsess about it. We go around and around, blind as a bat, missing out on a present moment because we're so clutched to this idea of what we think we want. And what Mary's gospel is saying in this passage is that the key to becoming unattached, to try not to touch and cling, to release our little lemur hands from around the desired object and trust that it will greater than our ego has things covered for us in ways that we can hardly imagine. There will be seven demons or powers that test the soul and try to bind the soul to the ego. The way the soul moves through this power of desire and all the climates of ego is simply to let go of all attachments, all judgments we might have. This immediately frees the soul for that moment. I've always been a little suspicious of what Christ said to Mary and John 2017 because after all, Mary not only was the first to witness the resurrection but was also the only one there. No one was there to witness the witness. No one actually heard Christ say to Mary, noly me, Tanjiri. I love the translation of this moment in a New Testament. Christ says to Mary, do not hold on to me. The idea that this is in response to Mary trying to touch Christ or to reach for him is actually an interpretation. It's not stated within scripture that she did. Do not hold on to me feels like a comet to reinforce this path of self-emptying love. Noly me, Tanjiri is Christ's reminder to Mary that there's no need to reach for his physical form. He's not outside of her. Appearing before her in the gardens by the empty tomb, he's still where he's always been and will never leave inside the walls of her own mystic heart. Noly me, Tanjiri, beloved, there is no need to touch me, to cling to me, to hold on to my physical form. I am with you from within you. This brings us to the next section called the power to judge. The soul came to the third power, which is called ignorance. It examined the soul closely saying, where are you going? You were bound by wickedness. And the soul said, why do you judge me since I have not passed judgment? The Gospel of Mary chapter nine, verses eight through 13. In the Gospel of Mary, Mary nine, eight, ignorance calls the soul bound by wickedness, which always makes me laugh. It's what makes ignorance ignorant. It calls out in others what it can't see in itself. Ignorance is the power or the frame of mind we all enter into when we have so aligned with the ego that we think we are in a place to judge. And most often if we are judging someone else, we are doing a number on ourselves also. We're quietly pouring corrosives into our heart with words that judge where we are on this path that leads back to the heart. Another word for ignorance is unconsciousness. And that is what can be so tricky about ignorance. We are unaware, unconscious of what we are doing when we judge others in ourselves. And the more we do it, the more we cling to us, judge and we are judged. The Canicle Gospels emphasized the importance of releasing judgment. In Luke 637, do not judge and you will not be judged. Do not condemn and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven. And in Matthew 7, one through two, do not judge and you will not be judged. For just as you judge others, you yourself will be judged and the standard that you use will be used for you. In the Gospel of Mary, the soul makes it clear that judgment is the only real obstacle that keeps us from returning to consciousness, to love. The soul continues to move through these powers or to face these inner demons by refusing to judge. The soul refuses to pass judgment because judgment is what binds us then to what power that demon, that thought or that fear. Why does this matter and how is this relevant to you? It matters because we oppress ourselves or we continue the work of the oppressor if we've been terrorized or traumatized into silence. We silence ourselves from within before we even dare to speak. And there's no judgment for how long each of us needs to stay silent. It has taken me years to write about Mary Magdalene because I constantly judge everything I wrote as not good enough. This power to judge keeps us in our place, keeps us small and bottled up, keeps us contained, restricted to the same pathways that have existed before. This is what silence is us from within, this power to judge if it remains unrecognized is what keeps us from ever really experiencing the truth of who we are. The next section is called the red spring. I have been bound, but I have not found anything. They did not recognize me, but I have recognized that universe is to be dissolved, both things of earth and those of heaven. The gospel of Mary chapter nine versus 14 through 15. If I could give you an aerial view like a drone that starts slightly above our little eco hut, so you could see how close we are to the tour peak in Glastonbury, it would look as if we were at the base of it. And as the view draws closer to the huge windows that line the living room and look out over the stunningly verdant English countryside, you'd see three people all facing the window and workout gear barely holding it together as they tried to keep up with the Beyonce themed workout blaring from an iPad propped up on the table in front of them, modern pilgrims at their best. Christine, let me borrow one of her cashmere sweaters the next morning. It was far colder than I had thought it would be in September. Her book, Goddesses Never Age, and my book had a love yourself and sometimes other people had both just come out. So we had flown over to London together for events and Kyle, my Scottish soulmate had picked us up and taken us to Glastonbury. It was so picturesque, I felt like I was on a photo shoot of town and country. Little gorgeous, white as snow, sheep dotted the impossibly bright green hillside. We started our hike up the tour. Christine and I just kind of taking it all in with a stroll and Kyle bounding up before us with his boundless energy. We can hear him screaming once he had reached the top even though we still had far to go. We locked eyes and started laughing. The tour in Glastonbury is supposedly where the red and the white spring originate. Avalon, the sacred isle or the isle of the blessed is thought of as representing a symbolic world center with the tour as the Axis Mundi, the world Axis that joins the ordinary world with the regions above and below. The red spring represents the goddess or the divine feminine and the white spring represents the Godhead or the divine masculine. The red spring emerges as in a well that has been surrounded and protected by a garden since the 1950s. And the white spring is in the cave of the white spring trust, a group of devoted residents who tend to it and keep the candles lit around the cauldron where the bright spring emerges. Celtic ledging relates a sacred relationship between the wells and the cauldrons. And the alchemists produce red and white elixirs and alchemy in their attempt to produce the alchemic wedding, the union of opposites. This the alchemist believe created the philosopher stone, the holy grail, the waters of everlasting life. The goal of the alchemist was to take base metals and through a process of purification transform them into unalloyed goal. This of course is a perfect metaphor for taking the base emotions of the ego like envy and rage and transforming them into the singular awareness of the soul. Gold was a metaphor to discovering the true spiritual nobility of the soul while still embodied. The ultimate objective is to restore the bond between matter and spirit, between earth and heaven, between masculine and feminine, between all those opposites that create this illusion of separateness, the ultimate objective is union. Legend relates that Joseph of Armafia, a relative of Christ, traveled to Glastonbury from Palestine through Southern France carrying with him two small crutes in the cup that Christ used at the Last Supper. Supposedly these depicted as red and white carried the blood in the water that came from Christ's wounds at his crucifixion. Joseph built the first church in Avalon and buried the cup in the two crutes somewhere between the red springs and the white springs. So although the springs are separate, red and white, they rise from the same source from the axis between the worlds, the tour. There is a seven tiered labyrinth that surrounds the tour to represent the seven fold process of transformation. The last phase is the alchemy or rendering referring to the union of opposites restored the royal marriage achieved from within the heart. The lunar goddess queen and the solar king remembered as one. We talked about this in a lot of the yoga stuff that chronic energy is represented by the sun, solar, and that's masculine. And then the moon is the uponnig or the downward flowing energy that is represented by the female. And so the same thing is being stated here. We descended from tour and Kyle took us into the town to explore. As we walked along a narrow street, Kyle spotted a storefront that said aura photography and immediately insisted that we all get one done. Christine's was so surreal. We marveled at the other worldly colors hues of the most luminous periwinkle. Her photo looked like several gorgeous purple angels were sitting on her lap. Kyle's was a full on rainbow. He gave it one look and nodded his head, of course. In my photo just showed layer and after layer of the most crimson and scarlet reds I'd ever seen. The aura man felt sorry for me and started explaining the baseness of the color red how it represents anger and attachments to desire and worldly things. Kyle just snapped in silent. Nope, this is a Mary Magdalene thing. Before visiting the Red Spring, Kyle wanted to take us to a little chapel down the street called Magdalene Way. Built in 1070, St. Margaret's Chapel was originally a hospital and alms house for the poor. It had a sweet little rose garden walled on either side behind it. And it had those precious small wooden doors arched at the top like a little hobbit's house. We opened the doors and found the chapel empty. Christine went so still and solemn as she entered. She was practically floating towards the altar. Kyle, which is why I love him so much, barreled in like a bull in a china shop. He is always in all circumstances equal parts pure angel and pure human. I entered last. I was getting that warm honey feeling and my heart suddenly feels like beehives. Then there's electricity coursing through me. I knew something crazy was about to happen. Christine and Kyle took seats close to each other on the side of the chapel. I followed my body's lead and went to go down on my knees in the front of the altar. I closed my eyes. I got still. My legs turned lead. I felt statuesque. The heaviness and the stillness let me drop straight inward like an anchor. I took a deep breath and all of a sudden I could see something I had never noticed before. I got this tingling sensation as if a sudden effervescence flooded me like my blood was now carbonated. Something was happening for real. Something was releasing through my pores. A belief of misunderstanding and ancient fear that I am safer if I am silenced by myself. That my soul voice is dangerous. That I am safer if I just hold it here, bound within me. I have been bound, but I have not bound anything. The Soul in Mary 9.14 is telling us what happens to us from a metaphysical perspective. The soul is bound by the egoic operating system by the powers that make us human. Fear in all of its many form folds. The soul in turns binds nothing. There is no construction when it comes to the soul. Or if the soul is a stretch for you, then let's just say it comes from love. Only fear binds. The way that love responds or the way we can know love is from a sense of expansion, a sense of release. There's a secret here in this passage that the soul reveals to us. The soul says that it isn't recognized by the powers of the ego. This is the ego's ignorance and the binding of our forgetfulness. But the soul recognizes the seven powers of the ego and here's the way through the dissolution of both heaven and earth. What in the world is the soul talking about here? We must dissolve our ideas of heaven and our ideas of earth. We must dissolve the ideas that keep them separate so that heaven is already here on earth, so that the earth is a heaven we defend and protect so that we no longer wait, projecting an idea of what's to come elsewhere in death when what is to come is already here. We just haven't recognized it yet. As we entered the chalice well in Glastonbury where the red spring is protected in a walled garden, we walked over a mosaic of the vesica pieces made of beautiful white polished stones. This ancient symbol of sacred geometry represents the third that's created from the integrating two opposite forces, two seemingly irreconcilable opposites. It's funny in yoga we often talk about opposing forces using the friction and the resistance of opposing forces. There are two circles of equal size and identical shape and where they overlap creates the most ancient symbol of the divine feminine. It's an oval or an X shape. It's a shape that surrounds Christ in most images and icons of him. It is also on the lid of the well itself. We circled it together into the soul family photo like pilgrims we were. It's one of my favorite photos ever. We were all lit up like lighthouses. I look at this photo of us and I remember it all. The light that's beaming from our faces tells the story of what love does, how it disarms us and unbinds us from the chains we've placed there ourselves. This brings us to the next section called like a same sex divine feminine Noah's Ark. I am what anyone can hear, but no one can say. The thunder perfect mind chapter four verse 23. She reached out both of her arms across our small table in a dimly lit restaurant in Brooklyn. I took Inanna in my hands first and the ancient goddess of heaven and earth. She spans the length of Kate's entire forearm. I told her to tell me the story again of how she felt initiated when she was having the tattoo done. She felt this warmth, a natural numbing sensation every time the tattoo artist touched her forearm to slowly dye her skin with the image of Inanna. There was a tiny candle on our table so I turned her arm towards the light to catch more of the glint of gold in the goddess's eyes. Then I reached for her other forearm and held it with both my hands. I took in the beauty of this tattoo, which also spanned the length of her forearm. She told me the name of the woman or the priestess who adorned this arm, but it didn't seek in. I mean, I heard her say the name, but it seemed to slide through my mind like oil and water. We had met to talk about an event we were putting together with Eve Ensler, founder of V-Day, just titled Just Love. Which was a day to heal, gather, and rise together as survivors of sex. So the name of Kate's second arm tattoo was lost to me as we dove right into the details. Years later, I was writing the entry for Inanna in the guidebook, The Divine Feminine Oracle, when I suddenly saw a flash of the tattoo Kate has on her arm opposite to the Inanna. I texted her, who was the other lady on your forearm? Within minutes, my cell phone dinged, and I'm probably gonna say this name wrong, and who Diana? I stared at it. I had to squint to try to figure out how to pronounce it, and then I Googled it and nearly found out my chair. She's the human embodiment of the goddess Inanna, the first high priestess, the first known author in all human history. So let me start again. Long before the spiritual concept of monotheism arrived in the scene, there were many deities, especially female deities that were celebrated and honored. The goddess Inanna from the Akkadian Empire, roughly 4,500 BC, was worshiped by recreating the Herios Gammos, or sacred marriage between the divine feminine and the divine masculine. Inanna's priestess would choose a consort to reenact the sacred marriage between Inanna and Dumisi, her male counterpart. The priestess would ritually make love to their consorts, merging heaven and earth and their bodies, consciously, ritualistically, joining the opposites within them as an act of embodying their wholeness. This is really interesting because if you guys caught an episode that we did regarding, I asked the question about what marriage is gonna look like in the new world, the new earth, we're getting it's kind of like a binding ceremony because we know the marriage that we have now is more matrixy, we'll say. And it literally was what she's describing here is basically you ritualistically make love to your male counterpart or if you're a male, your female counterpart or whatever, and then you're bound in marriage, that that act, that friction of that act is what actually creates the spiritual bond between the two people. And Tutiana is an actual historical woman who lived in roughly 4,200 BC. This was considered an ancient Mesopotamia, the pinnacle of Inanna's worship, temples dedicated to Inanna and the priestess who honored her with their rituals flourished at this time. And Houdiana was the daughter of King Akkad and she was both spiritually and politically very powerful. She was considered to have reached a semi-divine status in her lifetime. She is most remembered for her temple hymns to Inanna, hymns that influenced the cadence and poetry of the Psalms in the Old Testament in the Homeric epics. And Houdiana is the first author known in all human history. In her work, the exaltation of Inanna has more copies or inscriptions than the inscriptions of kings. This is basically the ancient Mesopotamian version of hitting the New York Times bestseller list. What's significant here to realize is that in some fundamental way, and Houdiana was able to embody the essence of Inanna, which is a force of uniting the light and the darkness, the human and the divine, merging with shadows deep beneath the surface of everyday life. Inanna descended to the underworld or to the unconscious to merge with her sister or twin shadow self chained there in the depths to the wall. At each gate, an article of clothing was demanded at her entrance until at the seventh gate, she was stripped bare, entirely exposed and vulnerable. This is when she meets with her sister, frees her from the underworld and rises with her more powerful than she has ever been before. Two things hit me like a ton of bricks. First, we are responsible for our own education. History is deeply subjective. There is no master version of history that tells for all of us all the stories we need to hear. The second thing that hit me was a vision that had been sitting on the preferee of my awareness for years, just waving at me, wanting me to see it, but I just wasn't ready. So here's what happened. Because it was very visual and very visceral. Like a same-sex divine effeminate Noah's Ark, I started seeing these divine beings pair up hand in hand, these actual human women who lived and breathed and tried their messy best to be their divine counterpart embodied while alive. Here's what I mean. Suddenly, I saw Inanna naked as all get out, take the hand of the first writer ever in human history and who Deanna, Inanna's embodiment. They came together first, I guess, because they felt like the oldest, the first recorded divine human duo. Then I saw the Egyptian goddess Isis and Mary Magdalene meet together like Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man before the game begins. First, they were face to face and then facing the same direction they clasped hands and walked off into the sunset. Next, I saw the Buddhist goddess Kwan-Yen and the Chinese princess Miao-Shun bow to each other and then walk off together, pinkies linked. I saw the Tibetan Bhattistaba, Vajrayogini, loop arms around her reincarnation, Yasi Tosal. I saw the Celtic goddess of dawn, Brigid, whistle at and a side eye, the Catholic saint, Brigid, and on and on. The divine hooking up with the human. What hit me was the clarity. I could see that humanity is meant to be more the divine story forward. Let's go back to Isis as an example. The Egyptian goddess Isis dates back to 2500 BCE and was known for her healing, even resurrecting powers. It's a long story and it has to do with a snake and the sun god Ra. But in brief, Isis secures the power to regenerate life. She's associated with sexual energy, the life force that exists within us all and that can be cultivated through meditation and breath work to promote healing and abundance in our lives. Like Mary Magdalene, Isis has a partner or consort that is not altogether human, Osiris. The Egyptian god of the afterlife and the dead. And like Christ, Osiris is murdered and his body goes missing. Isis revises his body once it's remembered. She resurrects him. Just as Mary is the only person there at the tomb, maybe because she had more to do with his ability to come back to life than we have ever imagined. Maybe because Mary Magdalene is meant to move the story of what it needs to be human ford. Or put another way, her story is meant to move a more ancient story of the power of the goddess ford into the modern world. A story of a human woman, a woman in love. A woman who works miracles by bringing love itself back to life. What I felt like I was witnessing in this divine feminine Noah's Ark was a pairing up of the self with the soul. What we can in a sense die to the individual self and merge with the soul, the love that remains after death. We can become both. So that Isis isn't a goddess in heaven, but an energy of love that works miracles here in the human heart. And it's interesting because we now know that Mary Magdalene as well as the mother Mary as well as Mary Magdalene's mother were all high up in the priestess hood of Isis. So it's interesting she's bringing up Isis and Osiris. Now we know that a lot of the story of Isis and Osiris have been manipulated by the dark cult, but they're actually very much interlinked with the Christian story or what Christianity is supposed to be, not the myth racism that it turned into. This brings us to the next section called a religion everybody belongs to. When the soul had brought the third power to naught, it went upward and solved the fourth power. It had seven forms. The gospel of Mary chapter nine verses 16 through 17. In France in 1310, an author named Magarite Portier was burned to the stake along with a copy of her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls. She was condemned as a relapsed heretic and as a free spirit, someone who believed that human beings could achieve the union with the divine without the mediation of the church. Free spirits believe that God is love and that love, being God, alone could lead the soul to union from within them. The Mirror of the Simple Soul lived on and continued to be translated into other language and circulated throughout the world. In some ecclesiastical centers, it was considered to be a near-canicle piece of theology, though Magarite's name had been removed from it. It existed as an anonymous spiritual work until 1946 when Ramona Garnier identified Latin manuscripts of the Mirror and the Vatican. Magarite Portier's name returned to her book in 1965 when it was published for the first time. We know very little about Magarite, except that she was a Bajuan. Bajuans were women who lived in spiritual communities together to live in alignment with Christ's love. They weren't nuns, they never took formal vows, they were always free to come and go, but they lived together with shared intention to emulate the kind of self-emptying love that Christ mastered. Historians believe she wrote the Mirror in Old French sometime between 1296 and 1306. She was deemed a relapse heretic because she was asked by church authorities several times to recant the words she wrote in the Mirror, but she refused. Her words were her truth. The book is structured as a discourse between love and all that is not loved. It's aimed at reaching at a state that's indistinguishable from the love that is God. Magarite leads the leader through the seven stages that her soul ascends through in order to experience the state of union. And this is what made her work so dangerous. She didn't need the direction of the church or any external spiritual authority, but rather just the voice of love that existed within her. Magarite writes in the Mirror, I am God says love, for love is God and God is love. And this soul is God by the condition of love. Magarite refers to the liberated soul, the soul that has made it through the seven stages as a phoenix. This is precisely what her words in the Mirror became. They rose from the ashes and took on an immortal life the church could never have anticipated. Roughly 200 years later in Spain, Teresa of Avila at the age of 44 began to have a series of vision that convinced her that Christ appeared to her and physical bodily formed, but remained invisible to the eye. The sight she had acquired was spiritual. Teresa had devoted herself to the interior life from an early age. Her childhood was marked by frequent illnesses that confined her to her bed. She read everything she could about spiritual exploration and contemplative prayer. Since she could not move or explore the world around her, she went inward. She began to become fluid in languages she heard within her heart, the language of the soul, which includes visions and states of not being ordinarily experienced. Sounds like she also probably found her light language as we say now. Her visions of Christ lasted for two years and would inform all of her subsequent books, especially her spiritual masterpiece, the interior castle. Similar to the Mirror, the interior castle charts the ascent of the soul as an inward journey through the seven mansions or states of being that exist within us. Teresa wanted to share with the other sisters in her Carmelite order, the spiritual perception that can be acquired by entering into the seventh mansion where the divine dwells within the soul. She reveals that in the actual moment of the union with the divine, the soul feels nothing, but the divine removes the scales from its eyes so that the soul can at last see the dazzling cloud of light within the heart. What's so fascinating to me is that each of these mystics arrives living in different countries in different centuries at the same truth, that if we do the spiritual work or allow our soul to pass through the seven stages that exist within us as part of the human condition, the soul merges with divine love and the soul is free. The Gospel of Mary was laid very deep in the Egyptian desert and hidden in an urn inside a cave for both Marguerite and Teresa's lifetimes. They would have never been exposed to the truth it also conveys, that there are seven powers or climates, the soul must move through to unbind itself from the ego. Collectively, they compromise the gravitational field of what the contemporary spiritual teacher, Thomas Keating has termed the false sense of self. They came to it on their own. If we connect them, if we leak them like a forgotten chain from Mary Magdalene to Marguerite to Teresa, we see a legacy of love being left for us, a trilogy of love stories. And all of them are led by divine love through the seven stages, as if seven is a spiritual truth that exists intrinsically within and coded in us like a religion every body belongs to. The next section is called Why I Am Proud to Be Part Impala. The first form is darkness, the second is desire, the third is ignorance, the fourth is zeal for death, the fifth is the realm of the flesh, the sixth is the foolish wisdom of the flesh, and the seventh is the wisdom of the wrathful person. These are the seven powers of wrath. The Gospel of Mary chapter nine, verses 18 through 25. The definition of a pilgrimage is simply a journey to a sacred place as a demonstration of devotion. What compels us to become so devoted is that we're willing to leave home for weeks, even months at a time, and travel halfway around the world away from family and loved ones in order to reach the sacred place that is more of a complex mystery. All I can say is that I wish it wasn't compulsory, but it is or it has been for me. And this has posed immense challenges because I have the constitution of a cloistered nun. I don't travel well. Okay, that's a massive understatement. I am one of the world's worst travelers. I am anxious, sweaty, ugly, crying mess next to you when the plane hits turbulence. I'm the backseat driver pointing out the sharp curves in the road ahead to the bus driver. I can't relax on anything that moves. I was asked to speak at an event in the South of France, which then I meant I could definitely visit Mary Magdalene's Cave. And I was asked to give a workshop based on my first book, Reveal, in Devon, England, which then meant I could visit Glastonbury again and the Red and White Spring. So even though, as always, I just wanted to remain in my cozy apartment, take care of my sweet little man and stay the hell still, I said yes. I said yes because I heard a yes, if you know what I mean. I didn't think about it or listen to the way my ego took off and started panicking. I felt the yes. I was sitting, it was sitting there inside of me like it'd be only grown up in a room filled with toddlers. Moving home to Cleveland meant that I no longer had to keep moving. I didn't have to be subject to the whims and greed of landlords raising rent beyond my needs. I could own my apartment. I could make a new beginning as an indie mom, a life that looked a lot more like thriving rather than just surviving. But moving home to Cleveland also meant coming face to face with all the reasons why it never felt like home to me. The assault I experienced as a little girl to friend's house and the inability to sleep for years after or feel safe at night or fly without sheer panic and dread. It was all still there waiting for me when I returned. And with those memories came a panic disorder because the body never lies and the body never forgets. I had already talked my way through the years of therapy and I was grateful for the clarity it gave me. But this return demonstrated to me that I had never healed all the way down and all the way through. I had managed. I'd found ways to cope with the anxiety and the fear that coursed through me most of the time, every day. I practiced the soul voice meditation. I did yoga or walked or danced or hula hooped. I found my way every day to express the excess energy so that it wasn't a harnished for a panic attack. And I chanted the prayer of the heart that Penny had taught me. Whenever the panic started to course through my veins in a way that made me center, I was about to leave my body altogether. I chanted from an inner calm in my heart, Lord Jesus Christ's Son of God have mercy on me. I think anybody who has panic disorders like myself, I have PTSD as well understands what she's saying here. Mary 9 18's full list of seven powers that exist within us for me is both the most humbling and most helpful for being human. It reads like an ingredients label of the ego. It's not suggesting that we all contain each of these elements of equal measure. But if we can understand it, it gives us an informative list of the powers of the ego that can potentially for hours, days and years at time, hold us captive. The first is darkness. I experienced this heaviness, depression, the feeling of being trapped or constricted, the sensation that things suck and they will always suck. That there isn't a light at the end of the tunnel. There's just more tunnel. Helpless, hopeless. And I'm thinking I'm alone. The second is desire or craving. For me, desire or craving is clinging. Wishing things could be different. I get seduced by this power frequently. Same, absolutely same. Attachment to what I think I want, which is usually light years away from what I actually need. This is essentially wanting to be where I am not. The third is ignorance. This comes in the form of my lack of awareness. This is when I'm unconscious about something and sometimes we need to be more unconscious. It's important to make clear that this ignorance isn't an indication of a deficit of character or intelligence. It can actually be integral to healing. We can only see so much at once. We sometimes need to open our awareness about an aspect of ourselves or an event that happened in our lives and increments. And this is actually wise. The ignorance Mary is talking about is different. It's about an unconscious state. We can fall into and then act from. The fourth is zeal for death or the craving for death. This sounds exceptionally odd. It later becomes within Christianity seven deadly sins, the sin of gluttony. Also a strange and rarely used word but easier to understand. It's about making choices in our lives that endanger our health and impair our longevity. Eating, drinking, having sex in ways that neglect and harm the body. So to be clear, it's not that attending to the body or indulging in anything gives us pleasure as a sin or power of the ego. There is no such thing as sin. It's when we do this to an extreme that actually harms the body. It's the human tendency in us to become destructive towards the body, to take our pain out on the least deserving possible thing, our own body. This is where the ego can take us if we're lost in this power and we've completely forgotten the soul. The fifth is the realm of the flesh or enslavement to the physical body. This to me is where we entirely identify with being a body and only a body. It's a power that's later defined as lust but I think it's important to distinguish something. Lustful people are my favorite humans to encounter. I feel more alive around them. I had a boyfriend who could eat a meal in a way that made me jealous of everything on his plate. He lusted after his food. He lusted after my body in the same passionate way and it was bliss. Lust for me at least isn't the issue. It's our relationship to it. Does it derail us almost entirely from our work or does it fuel and inspire us? Does it harm the people we love or does it light them up? Like my boyfriend's lust lit me up. For me as a woman, as a survivor, it's triumph to be lustful, to be present in my body during sex. It's an uncelebrated victory where the fifth power can trip us up when we forget that we are also a soul, not just this passionate body with its fiery needs. And it most explicitly applies to when that lust includes sacrilegious transgressions of forcing our physical needs on someone who does not consent to them. The sixth is the foolish wisdom of the flesh or the false peace of the flesh. This power later comes to be referred to as sloth. This one took me the longest to unpack. First of all, I'm insanely in love with sloths, actual sloths. My son and I watched nonstop animal planet videos on baby sloths doing just about anything and we melt. We've even perfected the baby sloth cry. So sloth does nothing for me in terms of understanding the power of the ego. And then second, this original description of Mary's gospel as the foolish wisdom of the flesh, this trips me up as well. I think it is taking us a long time to understand that the body is wise. The body has been manipulated and vilified for millennia as the scapegoat for our own vices. It has taken the sexual revolution and the feminist movement to reclaim the body, to understand that we can trust the body to take us to realms of pleasure and joy that don't have to be separate from our spirituality or our religion. That we can trust the body when it comes to nutrition and craving foods that we need or just bring us to pleasure when we are not in the cycle of addiction. That we can trust the body when it comes from alerting us to dangerous situations or people. That we can trust the body to make us aware of needing to slow down or decrease our stress levels. We can trust the body to heal. That we can trust the body is more than just a machine to use and misuse as the ego's whim. That we can trust the body has wisdom, the intellect can never grasp like the way a woman's body forms another body within her even as she sleeps. We can trust the body to tell us who we feel at home with. If we know how to listen, the body has wisdom, blood memory that reaches back through the centuries and carries the echoes of our ancestors. What this sixth power has come to mean to me is that there is resistance to change. A reluctant to do what we know is best for us and we can fill this viscerally in the body. There's a sluggishness, a tendency towards inertia. If we are headed to the couch the second we get home from work, the routine will become arduous and break. The body becomes easily habitual, meaning the routines we create can become ingrained in us. The body is so loyal and if we develop patterns of inaction, we will have to contend with a body that doesn't really want to do anything. The seventh power is the power we all probably understand and know most intimately. The seventh power in the gospel of Mary is the wisdom of the wrathful person or the compulsion of rage. It almost sounds like Christ or Mary since Christ is the one who originally gave this list to Mary is being sardonic, right? If this is the power of the ego, a power that keeps us from knowing our true self then how could a wrathful person be wise? For me, similar to the power of lust or the realm of the flesh, anger is healing to feel and express my anger feels healthy. Anger creates appropriate boundaries with people who aren't supporting us or who aren't good for us to be around. Anger can flood the system with a sense of clarity and purpose. We sometimes know what we stand for and what we care most about from the presence of anger. Anger protects us and often protects others we love and those who can't defend themselves. Anger for anyone who has been silenced or made to feel insignificant is a declaration they actually matter, that their voices matter, that they are not to be silenced ever again. Anger in these situations is holy. Anger in the face of injustice is an act of love. It's a statement of unifying ourselves with a stranger and saying, I won't let you be treated as I would not want to be treated myself. Anger can be motivating and unifying as the mystic William Blake relates the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God. And also anger can devour us from the inside out. Anger can divide. It's so compelling. It can derail and distract many of us for most of our lives. And this is how I think we can best understand the destructive side of anger. It's simply when we get overcome by it. We can live in anger or we can act on our anger in ways that we will regret then for the rest of our lives. As with all the powers, it isn't the power itself that's harmful. It's the presence of the power and the absence of the soul. It's forgetting entirely that we are not just ego, that this subject to the power. So even as we are more enraged than we have been for been, even if we have every right to be and it's healthy and normal for us to be angry, if we forget that there's equally significant part of us that is calm, still water beneath it all, then we will inflect our rage onto someone else. And whether that person is undeserving of that rage or in our eyes deserving of it, all it does is bind us to that person and perpetuate the cycle of rage. As the brilliant comedian Hannah Gadsby relates in the net, I have a right to be angry, but not to spread it. We know that hurt people hurt people. And this is the source of compassion we can access when we need relief from our anger. But ultimately this seventh power is about the responsibility we need to take for the rage that can compel us to treat ourselves and others in ways that we can hardly believe we are capable of. I think it's the seventh because it's the hardest to come to terms with. How do we responsibly express our rage? How do we let anger motivate and mobilize us without burning us out or burning the house down? And this anger is the seventh I think also because it's often the reason we become so vulnerable to the other six powers of ego. We're angry at the person who has harmed us and so we fall into a depression. Are we cling obsessively to what we could have been? Are we harm ourselves physically by overeating or drinking or taking drugs in an effect to deal with the rage? And it's just a tangled, gritty mess and we feel trapped. So on the one hand, it's daunting to take in all seven powers at once. Holy crap, look at what we have to contend with. Look at all the derailing powers that we contain. And yet on the other hand, it feels like such relief. Like welcome to being human. This is normal. You binge watching Netflix to forget your pain. You drink red wine like it's a secret elixir for all fears. You sobbing over a divorce that happened seven years ago. You angry at what happened to you as a little girl and enraged any time you ever hear of it happening to anyone else. You human being, you welcome. You're not alone. You're not odd or strange or actually different at all. You're meant to feel these things. And none of these feelings, this powers make you less holy. They connect you, they make you you. And this is part of the whole point of being here to feel these horrible and hard derailing things and to find your way back to love. So this time when the anxiety disorder comes back, I was armed with a roadmap of my own humanity that Mary's gospel had given me. It gave me the perspective to notice these powers reared up and get louder. And to know that there are nothing to be ashamed of or afraid of or to judge. I can be depressed and angry. I can. I am human. And I can choose to use the presence of each of these powers as an opportunity to learn, to strengthen my capacity to return to love. A close friend of mine suggested EMDR, eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing. She had recently remembered a childhood section and found that this form of therapy was powerful because it released the trauma that was still trapped there in the body. I found a therapist and began to work three months before my pilgrimage to Mary Magdalene. I have done EMDR therapy and it literally changed my life. EMDR therapy is absolutely amazing in my opinion. Trauma lives in the body and present tense and many, many illnesses stem from that truth because the body, our most faithful warrior will hold for us what we cannot face ourselves until we live into the strength to go all the way back and experience it for the first time long after it actually happened. My body had waited for me for all these years to return now that I'm filled with a fierce love that flows through me as much as often as I can remember that it does. Now that I'm home in my body, my beloved body can give me back what it has held for me for all these years. During a particularly powerful session, my therapist told me a story and his stories were always medicine told with intention. It went something like this. A cheetah is stalking a herd of impala as if one unified an entirely connected mass, the herd senses the cheetah at the same moment and begins to flee at top speed. A young impala falters and gets delayed just for a split second. That's enough time for the cheetah to pounce. At the moment of contact, the impala falls to the ground as it instantly struck dead, but it isn't. And it isn't pretending to be dead either. It has fallen into an instinctive and involuntary altered state of consciousness shared by all mammals when the death appears imminent. Physiologists call this state the immobility state or the freezing response. I have major freeze response. The other two responses to extreme situations of impending doom are fight and flight. These two stages are very well known in research, but the third state is less known and little is understood about these altered state of immobility, but nature has developed it for two reasons. First, it serves as a last ditch effort to survive. The impala and its altered state is dragged back to the tree in the shade. And thinking the impala is dead, the cheetah is not on the alert. So with its guard down, while turning its back, the impala can leap up, shake off the effects of the immobility response and escape. The second reason is that while this is an altered state, the impala can't feel any pain. It's a prehistoric function developed in our last moments we died before we're even killed. It's not under our conscious control. It's about the energy in the nervous system. Humans and animals share the same capacity to play possum. The differences the impala can simply shake off the experience to release the energy of the trauma without a storyline or a subsequent symptoms. Humans though, especially with this third response to trauma can develop PTSD and anxiety disorders from energy of the death being trapped in the body. Trauma expert Peter Levine in Waking the Tiger explains that this residue energy does not simply go away. It persists in the body and often forces the formation of a wide variety of symptoms. I've actually read Waking the Tiger. It's a book. I have it in my trunk in India. It's not with me. It's in India. But I read it last time I was in India after I've gone through EMDR therapy and it's true. I get the shakes a lot. Like whenever I'm traumatized or I get stressed my body starts to shake. And that's the response to the nervous system from trauma that I've experienced in the past. So whenever that trauma is ignited again my nervous system reacts to that trauma. And it's important from what I understand from reading that book and what my therapist my trauma therapist told me it's important to let your body shake because it's your nerves working it out. Just like the impala would get up and shake it off. You too have to get up and shake it off. I had always thought of fight or flight or at least doing something. A third option freeze had always felt like a failure to me. Freezing felt passive or worse. It felt cowardly. I had tears streaming down my face. It was all beginning to make sense because I was beginning to understand what was keeping me from healing all the way back and all the way through. I had never been able to reconcile the feisty brave and precocious girl I was before the assault. And then the fact that I didn't fight didn't scream didn't even move. I wept as my therapist reached for the tissues and set them gently beside me. I had been haunted by this unease of not knowing why I didn't protect myself. There was a part of me that never trusted myself in the same way again with the same level of ease and love. I had lost a lot that night. The greatest of which was this unfaltering belief in myself. Now I understood I did fight back. I froze. I froze because I ardently believed I wouldn't survive the assault. I died before I could be killed. I froze because the animal instinct in me kicked in and it saved me from having to experience the pain. I did exactly what I was supposed to do. I hadn't failed. I'd saved my own life. How the Long Island medium answered my prayers. They interrogated the soul. Where are you coming from human killer? And where are you going space conqueror? The Gospel of Mary chapter nine verse 26. Remember when princes Fiona and Shrek finally gets her true love kiss? She lifts into the air a mystical fog of radiant light ray shooting out of the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. We assume that when the fog clears she's placed back down on the ground of the cathedral. She will be the life Fiona she was in the daylight. We trust that love morphed her permanently into a physical form she loved most. So at first we feel shocked along with her as she takes in the still huge green hands and her bulky org feet. But then she locks eyes with Shrek and she sees his expression shipped from surprise to wonder and then pure melted light. We see that she gets it. She gets that the real transformation comes in letting love reach within her where it hasn't been before. It doesn't come from turning into a form that her ego wants or that others might have preferred for her to be. It's not about making more sense from the outside. It's about bringing what she had kept hidden. What she only revealed at night, what she kept secret that the thing that was the most hideous to her and returning it to the light. When I had a three day panic attack from trying to book my flights to Europe for the pilgrimage, I felt a lot like Fiona. I was shocked and not a little bit horrified to see that this level of fear still lived in me. I thought I'd overcome my fear of flying. I was flying, not comfortably, not without grabbing the hand of whoever happened to be next to me and leaving red marks from the strength of the grip. I needed not to lose it during takeoff, turbulence and landing, basically the whole flight. I was flying but not without a glass of red wine and sometimes a sedative and sometimes both. I meditated after the fear returned until my back was sore. I lastened my soul to tell me something reassuring. I sobbed and at the end of it all, I finally asked for guidance. I seemed to only reach spiritual surrender via exhaustion. So I went inward. I took a deep breath to descend into the heart. I took a second deeper breath once there and felt a calm come over me. I asked, what is this anxiety wanting me to see? What do I still need to learn from this panic disorder? I heard, saw and felt absolutely nothing. I blamed the level of anxiety I was experiencing. I waited, I asked again, why has this anxiety returned? Again, crickets. But I've been meditating for long now and that silence doesn't upset me. I rested in it for a while and then took a third deep intentional breath and let me open my eyes again now from a place more rooted back in my heart. As I walked into the living room the next morning, my son had somehow queued up the episode of the Long Island Medium and resumed where I had been paused just as I sat down next to him. I inhaled the smell of his hair. I held his adorable form, gathering as much of him and his long legs as I could in my arms and I whispered good morning, loved of. He shushed me and pointed at the TV. Teresa Caputo was describing how her phobias used to keep her confined to her house. Her fear of being in a car or just even leaving the house became so great that at one point her family had to help her with her grocery shopping. She was agoraphobic at the height of her anxiety, not able to go anywhere. I got that weird warm feeling as she spoke as if my heart was suddenly pumping honey. I listened really closely then as if my ears were turning up their capacity to receive sound. As if they could zero in like Superman to hear a pin drop three stories down. The Long Island Medium went on to explain that the panic attacks were actually moments when spirit was trying to reach through her but she wasn't listening. The anxiety was like spirit banging pots and pans trying to get her attention. Once she began to listen inward to receive messages the anxiety lifted. I teared up. First, because this clearly was the answer to the question I had hastened my heart and second, my son had been the one to gift it to me. I understood then that I was judging the panic attack as if it was a bad thing, as if it was a step back, as if it wasn't just more light trying to reach through me as if healing is ever linear. I understood the opportunity I had in this moment. I could treat this fear with love I never gave it in the past. I could judge it. I was ashamed of it. I tried to hide it and medicated it. I treated myself as special, meaning broken. I felt damaged because of it. I called it names, as the threat and ego always does whenever we try to free ourselves. Human killer, space conqueror. In this moment though, I understood the fear as a form of communication. As a message that there's so much more support I can receive. I understood it as a chance to be compassionate to this place in me that's so terrified to fly. I could let love reach where it hasn't been before. I could let love marry the org and the princess inside of me. That's how I ended up on a boat to Europe for my pilgrimage to Mary, Magdalene. A boat named Queen Mary, of course. Sometimes the most loving thing to do doesn't appear to be the bravest. It's not about pushing through our overpowering fear. Sometimes we just need to be where we are terrified and not ask the terror to leave or change, but dare to become the one who can hold it in a love that didn't exist before. A love that grew and expanded in order to meet it. This brings us to the fourth power, craving for death. A ship without sails. Number one, take a selfie during the fire drill. There's a mandatory fire drill before leaving the port and everyone on board has to take part in it. That's everyone. All 2,000 passengers and 1,000 officers and staff. You'll be divided into muster stations, which means just the place where you go if there's a fire as we're crossing the ocean. You'll have to be in your life jacket. It's very large, very orange, and you'll most likely be sweating. You'll be crammed into an odd room like the cafeteria or the casino, and one of the officers will be explaining what happens if the worst happens. Sort of like a flight attendant as the plane is taxing down the runway towards takeoff. You'll be a bit green. If like me, you get dizzy from being on rocking objects surrounded by more people than most people can manage to be around. And all the while wearing a life jacket that keeps reminding you that you're about to be out where there is no land in any direction for seven days. Take a selfie just before you go into full blown panic attack. And obviously never show it to anyone. This is a photo you will cherish for the rest of your life. It's that priceless. Number two, never cross the ocean alone. No one does. And I'm not being dramatic. This is a fact. No one signs up to cross the ocean by boat for seven days completely on her own. That is except me. Or let me say this another way. If you cross the ocean alone, just be forewarned that everyone does everything in pairs. And everyone on board expects you to be with a partner or your family or at least your elderly mother. No one will be able to comprehend what the hell you're doing all along crossing the ocean on a boat. So just prepare yourself for the stares, the awkward moments of silence and the incomprehension as people you meet try to take in that you're actually single and solo on the ship. Number three, bring a battery operated candle and keep it lit. Because guess what? That path that ship takes to cross the Atlantic from New York to South Hampton, England passes over the mass grave of Titanic. Yep, and it's the most bone haunting moment you'll ever witness. And yep, it happens in the middle of the night. And you'll know about it ahead of time. You'll know to stay up terrified until the ship has passed over it because everyone on board will be talking about it. And by everyone, I mean the people you're assigned to eat with for every meal. They are your lifeline. That is if you didn't heed any advice and you find yourself alone on the Queen Mary. Your dining crew and your candle, these are your tethers to staying calm. They staying calm, I just mean appearing normal. Keep that candle lit at all times, even during the day. It infuses it with the supernatural powers to be the steady light, this one constant. As the days pass and the sea swells become the new ground beneath you, it's there with you. Like Wilson was there for Tom Hanks character and cast away. And listen, don't panic if it switches off when the ship passes over a final resting place of the Titanic as it did for me. Just calmly switch it back on and say a prayer for the sudden humility you feel being so small and helpless and human, aware of the phantoms extending out beneath you. Number four, pay close attention to your dreams. You know how when you visited the ocean slept near it or spent some time walking alongside it, letting the waves race over your feet or taking time to look out over the horizon, letting your mind try to imagine if there's anything more beautiful, more anxious and endless. Letting yourself feel the pure expansion from just taking in a deeper and deeper breaths of that briny air than when you dream like a lunatic. Well, just imagine how amped up your dreaming gets if you're not sleeping next to the ocean, but on it. Like an experiment in being human, to be out there where no human can actually exist for very long without fresh water or something to float on. You are yourself, your body at an intersection. You're between landmass, you're out there beyond your depths at the mercy of the sea. And this ships that the length of the Empire State Building. So trust me, even if you haven't dreamed in years or even if you're someone who wakes up and sort of vaguely remembers a few details but then loses it all as soon as you got out of bed, even if you don't have interest in dreams and what they tell us, pay close attention to them. Write them down, you'll have time and save it. Like the selfie at your muster station before the ship left port, keep it like a pearl the sea gave you. Don't share it with anyone, not if you don't want to. Number five, you will have a wild crush on the captain. It will not be rational. It will not be something you tell anyone at your dining table, but you will have a wild crush on the captain. No matter how old he is and no matter your sexual orientation, he will become that God you always said never existed, the one that has the beard and speaks to you in this Old Testament disembodied voice and you will trust and believe absolutely everything he says which will be at noon exactly every day at the crossing. You'll look forward to his daily updates like the faithful await the Sunday sermon. You will even hush the people around you who are somehow unaware that God is on the intercom. He will let you know precisely in longitude where you are in the crazy blue that stretches in every direction as far as you can see. He'll let you know where you are on that particular day. The nearest landmass is which will feel both comforting and terrifying at the exact same time. He will give you odd bits of maritime history or other worldly comments about the sea like how at the very moment you're passing over a mountain range and even after he signs off for the day, you'll remember in the very spot you were standing or sitting when he begins his daily talk letting the visual overpower you in all your senses taking in this reality that only the alchemists reach as above so below. You'll see the whole of the ship and let your mind travel for leagues until you see them the tips of the mountain range, the peaks that miraculously exist down there. Number six, cross yourself incessantly. Personally, I can never remember if I'm supposed to go to the left or to the right first after touching the third eye area before head. I fumble it up every time. So if you know how to cross yourself and it's something that works for you, lean into it. If you don't or if you're like me and you get your wires crossed when you try to employ it, just do something, anything that lets you bless yourself when you feel something fortunate happening when you're at sea. Some examples. I don't know what the chances would be slim to non-existence that I would never know anyone on board unless of course I invited them. But not only did I know someone on board, I was seated right next to him at my assigned dining table, table number one. He's one of the best friends of my best friend Donna. We had met without remembering it seven years before when I gave the blessing at Donna's wedding. He was crossing with his mother for the milestone birthday. Every time we talked about writing, he's an author. Or every time he came to my defense when the three fates would cross examine me, I'll talk about them next. I wanted to cross myself. So I said the prayer of the heart instead. Or when Jane Eyre came on in French to my relief when I couldn't sleep after my little candle went off right as we crossed the mass grade of the Titanic, I went straight into the prayer of the heart on repeat. Or when the quiet middle-aged man from Devon sitting with his wife to the other side of me at the dining table suddenly cut off the table's conversation to tell us all about a program he saw on Mary Magdalene. And we all stared at him. Like at first, he might be possessed or having some sort of out-of-body experience because he rarely spoke, much less commanded the attention of the entire table. And then he told us how he had termed up the volume on the telly, love that word. When he realized the program about Mary Magdalene was focused on the debate about whether or not she was really a prostitute. I asked him what he thought of it. He shook his head and said he had fallen asleep halfway through it. But it stuck with him, the debate about who she was. I recited the prayer of the heart again because in that moment he was talking about Mary. And while we were all held and wrapped, I knew why I was away from my little man, why despite my fear of the return flight, I knew I was doing what I had to do. I had to visit Mary Magdalene's cave. I was exactly where I was supposed to be and that felt like a blessing. Number seven. If fate asks you for a drink, say yes. At first fate didn't know what to make of me. What was a single mom doing out on a holiday by herself? In other clearer words, what kind of selfish shit mom is this? This is the judgment and the line of questioning that my writer friend would help me deflect from fate every evening when I had to face them. They will cross the sea with you so just be prepared to meet with them. They are destiny, they are destiny personified. They are three of them and they're all from Surrey. They've known each other for their entire lives and can practically speak an eyebrow. They know each other's thoughts before they can each think them. They're intimidating and hysterical to be around and if they ask you out for a drink, just say yes. I said no every night mostly because you can take the hermit out of her cozy apartment but you can't take the hermit out of the hermit even if you throw her out to sea. And also because I had misinterpreted the theme of death and kept creeping up in my pretty much everything I tried to do. For example, the Shakespeare theater company from London was performing all the death scenes from the classics throughout the crossing. And the only music I happened to hear when I forced myself to go do something other than stare at the sea and all turned out to be the funeral march from New Orleans. It was the music of death as a celebration, a victory even. Death as the one thing we've actually never needed to fear. So I was mistaken in sort of taking heed because of this death theme on board with us. I should have known that it was about Mary Magdalene, that there is a love that's stronger than death and this is what I had made myself a pilgrim to know. So I didn't go out with them and told the last night. It was the middle of the masquerade in the queen's room. Gillian Jackie and Lily were dressed to the nights. Set for mingling with the decadence and gluttony. We had an issue with finding the right table. We stared at one in the back of the room but Lily felt we needed to be closer to the dance floor to get chosen. She loves to pull the other two fates told me while I'm laughing. Pull is a British for attracting men, I think. So we went to a large table with a velvet booth towards the front of the ballroom. An elderly couple was already sitting there giving us the stink eye as we joined them. Lily somehow knocked the table as she was trying to sit down and spilled a heavy splash of the elderly man's lager right into his lap. The man's wife was immediately outraged and started yelling at Gillian who didn't even realize what Lily had done. Gillian took the brunt of it though and got it out of tissue, a used one she later told me. The couple was absolutely incest and unforgiving. The elderly life was so worked up she finally shouted, just leave. The three fates looked at each other than at me and we all broke into hysterics. So we left and we slowly made our way back to the table in the corner where we had started. I couldn't stop laughing. Lily pulled and I laughed again as she looked back to us just before she reached the dance floor with this smile of sheer triumph. It felt so good to laugh at everything like it was a superpower. The three fates were reminding me up that I had forgotten. Laugh at the absurd they whispered, everything passes all the details they fade. But what fate or destiny and the ocean have in common is the surrender that's offered to you. When water is all you could see on the horizon in all direction for seven days the soul seeds itself in it. The soul feels recognized. It is as vast as it is. This is the acute awareness that the soul is the presence of love within and that no matter what this is what can never be lost. The only death is the one of who you had been before. The one you thought you were. And you realize now that this is a blessing to get to die while still living.