Mysticism has always been the living current beneath the surface of human spiritual life, the direct, personal encounter with something larger than the self that no single tradition has ever fully contained or explained. This is a site for people who sense that current and want to understand it better, and embrace it.
Each week, a community of writers, from the disciplines of astrology, meditation, comparative religion, and tarot readers etc., contribute articles, guides, and reflections across the full breadth of the mystical world. You will find deep dives into astrology and the meaning of planetary cycles, practical introductions to meditation and contemplative practice, explorations of New Age spirituality and its roots in Theosophy and perennial philosophy, and much more. Whether you are reading your first horoscope or have been keeping a dream journal for twenty years, there is something here written with your curiosity in mind. You will hear different voices and differnt perspectives on a wide range of subject areas.
Our categories span tarot, numerology, Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, dreams, symbolism, ritual and sacred practices, spiritual development, and the world's great religious traditions examined through their most interior and most mystically alive dimensions. The writers who contribute here bring academic rigour, personal spiritual experience, and genuine respect for the traditions they write about; no single path is privileged, and no question is too basic or too advanced to deserve a thoughtful answer.
Mysticism is not a belief system. It is a way of paying attention. If you have ever felt, even briefly, that the world is more connected and more meaningful than ordinary life usually allows you to notice, you are already part of the conversation this site exists to continue. Welcome!
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I teach meditation across a lot of traditions, I have certificates in mindfulness-based stress reduction, I trained for three years with a Tibetan Buddhist teacher in Santa Cruz, and I spent a semester sitting with a Zen community in the hills above Berkeley that remains one of the most formative experiences of my adult life. So when I encountered Hitbodedut, the Jewish contemplative practice of spontaneous spoken prayer and radical self-disclosure before the divine, I thought I knew what I was dealing with.
I moved from Boston to Maine several years ago, and there is a particular quality of August morning up here, the light already carrying the first hint of something cooler underneath the summer warmth, the angle of it changed just enough from July to notice, that always sends me back to Chinatown. To Harrison Avenue on a Sunday.
The word idol carries a weight of condemnation it has never entirely deserved. In its Greek original, eidolon, it simply means image or form. But somewhere in the long collision between monotheism and the religious practices it displaced, idol became a term of contempt
There is an uncomfortable scholarly truth at the heart of the Babushka legend that I feel obligated to address before we go any further, because I think it actually makes the story more interesting rather than less.
Scotland is one of those places I keep returning to in my research, not just because the landscape itself seems to demand a certain quality of attention, though it does, and anyone who has stood on the Orkney mainland at dawn and looked at the Ring of Brodgar rising from the mist knows exactly what I'm talking about, but because Scottish ritual practice sits at one of the most fascinating intersections I've encountered in thirty plus years of comparative work I've engaged in.
Of all the questions I get asked, and after years of working with dreams, I get asked a lot of them, the one that comes up most consistently, most urgently, and with the most visible mixture of embarrassment and genuine bewilderment, is this one, "Why am I dreaming about my ex?" We broke up years ago.
Every morning when I walk from my apartment to the synagogue, down through the Village, past the coffee shops just opening and the last of the night people still heading home, I think about the Garden of Eden. Not as a place. As a condition.
My first serious encounter with runes was in a graduate seminar on symbolic systems in pre-literate cultures, somewhere in the mid-nineties, in a classroom that smelled of old carpet and someone's lunch.
After twenty years sitting with people in my counselling practice, couples who can't stop fighting, individuals who can't stop choosing the wrong partners, people who love each other deeply and have somehow still managed to make a complete mess of things etc., I have become quietly convinced that the most useful relationship advice is very old.
I've been sitting with this topic for a while, the way I sit with most things that feel important, a little cross-legged on my back porch with tea going cold beside me and the the morning fog still sitting over the bay. Gender and sexuality.
There is a long tradition, considerably longer than the sceptical tradition I was trained in, that holds the opposite view with remarkable consistency across cultures and centuries. The Pythagoreans, and yes, we mean Pythagoras himself, the same man whose theorem you learned at school, working in southern Italy in the sixth century BCE, believed that numbers were not merely useful abstractions but the actual substance of reality.
I should say upfront that I came to this subject sideways, the way academics usually come to anything that matters. My formal training is in cognitive psychology and continental philosophy, and for the first fifteen years of my career I would have been politely dismissive of anything involving the phrase "third eye."
When I was in my twenties, long before I settled on the West Coast, I spent several years travelling through North Africa, Turkey, and parts of the Middle East. During that time, I had the privilege of sitting with Islamic scholars, teachers, and students who generously shared not only their knowledge but also their hospitality.
Over the years, my travels have taken me through Eastern Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, the Middle East, and across much of Western Europe. Along the way I became fascinated not simply by different religions, but by the symbolic languages people use to understand themselves.
When students ask me why tarot has endured for centuries despite enormous cultural and technological change, I often suggest that they begin by setting aside the idea that tarot exists primarily to predict the future.
Living in a small town on the coast of Maine has taught me that the changing seasons are more than entries on a calendar. Here, winter announces itself with quiet determination, spring arrives almost shyly, summer fills the forests with birdsong, and autumn transforms the landscape into brilliant shades of crimson and gold.
If there's one thing living in New York has taught me, it's that fear wears many different faces. Sometimes it's loud and obvious, the anxiety of losing a job, worrying about someone you love, or facing an unexpected diagnosis. Other times it's much quieter.