I Went Looking for Peace. The Universe Had a Different Idea.
A lifetime ago, I took Intro to Buddhism in college to fill an elective requirement. I honestly don't know why I chose it. Maybe I didn't. Maybe it chose me. Either way, I can still picture the classroom: chairs pushed to the edges, fluorescent lights humming overhead, and a single dot drawn at the front of the room, where the professor would say, focus your gaze on the dot, let your mind be free. That is where I first learned to be still. Well, still(ish).
I never meditated again after that class. Years passed. A career. A marriage. Motherhood. A whole life built and lived and loved. And then, two of those pillars began to crumble at the same time: a workplace that had grown toxic and cold, and a sixteen-year marriage painfully coming undone. I was holding so much. It was more than I knew how to carry.
So, what do you do when you're life is falling apart? You go see a psychic medium, of course. Even then, long before I understood where any of this was leading, I had always had a quiet love for getting a reading. There was something about it that always kept me curious. So I drove about thirty minutes from my house to a little spiritual town in Florida called Cassadaga, one of those places that seems to exist slightly outside of ordinary time. The town was a little run down, a little touristy, but I was desperate. I needed something beyond a therapist's chair, something faster than my patience. And there, I met the man who would become my spiritual mentor and teacher.
The reading was profound, and not at all what I expected. He didn't linger on my failing marriage or my chaotic job, the two things that were completely consuming every corner of my mind. Instead, he went somewhere deeper. He spoke about my childhood. About the quiet, formative things that had shaped me in ways I'd never paused to examine. Parts of my story I hadn't thought to bring into the room. And somehow, he knew them.
Before I left, he invited me to join him for a group meditation that coming Saturday. Without hesitation, I said yes. That Saturday happened to take place inside one of Cassadaga's famously haunted hotel rooms. Whether it was the location, the energy of the group, the teacher himself, or simply the alchemy of all of it together, I honestly couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is what I felt. Something in that room was undeniable. A presence, warm and familiar, standing just behind me. The awareness of my father, who had passed away only months before, close and real, as though he had simply walked in and taken his place beside me. I wasn't afraid. I was curious. Deeply, completely, irrevocably curious. And that curiosity became the spark that lit everything.
I came back to meditation not because I had answers, but because that day had given me a question I couldn't let go of. So, I sat with myself. And I kept sitting. What no one tells you, what I couldn't have imagined, is that the stillness was a door.
Things began to happen that I had no framework for. Visions. Presences. A felt sense of energy moving around me and through me, as real as sunlight through a window. People have told me they've only touched something like that through plant medicine or psychedelics. I wasn't seeking any of that. I was just a woman sitting quietly, trying to survive a hard season with her heart still intact. But the door kept opening. And eventually I understood. It had been mine all along.
What waited on the other side was an awakening. More truthfully, a reawakening. A return to something that had always lived in me, something ancient and patient that had simply been waiting for the noise to settle. My mediumship and the start of a journey to discover my true self. The capacity to feel beyond what's visible, to witness time in ways that don't follow a straight line. And woven through all of it, the most tender and surprising discovery of all: me. Who I really am. What I'm here for.
I didn't go looking for any of this. I went looking for peace. And somehow, in that search, I found everything.