My spiritual path has taken me many places over the decades.  I was not raised in any particular religious or spiritual tradition and was only passingly exposed to a spiritual life as I grew up.  The major exception was my mother’s interest in the divinatory arts, typically through use of a homemade Ouija board, or more often, Tarot cards.  As a dyed-in-the-wool San Francisco hippie, she shunned traditional institutions and had an open mind regarding more fringe areas of the spiritual world.

And so that was my introduction to the world of Spirit.  I liked the art on the Tarot deck that she used, the Aquarian Tarot, and when I was 17, I ordered my own set of the cards from a store in Houston called Lucia’s Garden.  It was the first pagan store I had ever been to, and I have never forgotten the way it felt energetically and the way it smelled, a heady mixture of dried herbs, scented candles, sweet incense, and the wisdom of the Ancients.

Thus began my Journey on a Path of learning the Old Ways of ancestors I didn’t yet know I had.  Over the next 6 years, I would dabble in solitary witchcraft, reading the works of Scott Cunningham like so many other budding witches and pagans in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  I did not seriously dedicate myself to that Path until my early 20s, however.  In Austin this time, at yet another pagan store, this one called Celebration, I picked up some local pagan publications and learned about various gatherings and classes.  Intrigued, I began writing away for more information (this was pre-internet, fuck I’m old 🤦‍♀️).

Within a year, I was taking a class on Sybilline witchcraft, sadly a now extant branch of The Craft, and was attending some of the local gatherings.  The first one was a relatively small group of women who met annually at a nearby state park at the Fall Equinox.  I enjoyed the energy enough to want to attend a much larger gathering the following month to mark the pagan holiday of Samhain (pronounced SAH-wen), which is essentially Celtic Halloween.  Numerous religions around the world celebrate this time of year as a time to honor our ancestors, and to many people, it is no less important than Easter, Hanukkah, or Ramadan.

Attending Samhain firmly entrenched my presence in the occult and pagan community of Central Texas, which I admit was not where I expected to find a large enclave of non-Christians (though perhaps that is the perfect place to find such people).  I attended gatherings at both Samhain and its springtime companion, Beltane, for several years.  I met my husband at Samhain in 1995, and we celebrated 30 years together last Autumn.  Unbeknownst to either person until later, both of us had done personal rituals before the gathering that year aimed at finding a companion.  It’s said that “success is your proof” when it comes to acts of magic.  I think over 30 years together is proof of success, particularly for me.  I do not come from a background that would suggest marital stability or even finding a kind and gentle man to be my companion.

Over the next several years, I would explore the various areas of the world of the occult, of which there are many.  In reality, much of what we call the occult arts and the pagan world is merely what existed before Christianity conquered and colonized so much of the world.  These traditions are now called occult, i.e. “hidden”, because their practitioners had to go underground to preserve those traditions.  For example, Druidism and other Celtic traditions survive today in the underpinnings of most forms of Wicca, a modern form of witchcraft.  They couldn’t burn all of the so-called witches, most of whom were merely women who dared to be independent and ask questions, and therefore presented a threat to the authority of the Church.  Some of us continue to carry the torch of Knowledge of the Old Ways, spiritually if not genetically.

Another area of occult studies I found fascinating was ceremonial magic, which has its roots in masonry, and later freemasonry, both of which have their own roots deeply set in a  variety of mystical traditions from around the world.  One of the systems I studied drew from multiple world sources, including Hinduism and Buddhism, giving me my first proper introduction to these religions.  Over the years, I would gradually incorporate more and more elements from these two religions into my own spiritual practices.  I slowly acquired quite the pantheon of Hindu deities and a rather impressive collection of Buddhas.

It was not until my Awakening in 2018, however, that I found myself thrust quite suddenly onto the Path of the Dharma of both Buddhism and Hinduism.  After my ten-day headlong flight into inner space, there were things of a spiritual, mystical, and philosophical nature that I just…knew, down in the marrow of my bones.  I had achieved a level of gnosis, a Greek word that is the root of the English word knowledge that means more than simple intellectual knowledge.  It’s the kind of knowledge that can only be acquired through mystical and spiritual means, if for no other reason than much of that Knowledge lies beyond word-based thought.  It can only be Experienced, never spoken.  This is why the Teacher and Student relationship in Buddhism speaks of ‘Dharma transmission’.  The Teacher can only point the way: the Student must walk the Path themselves until they discover the Dharma for themselves.

When I first found myself walking the Path of the Dharma, I simply followed the general precepts of Buddhism that are contained within all major schools of the religion.  As time went on, though, I found myself drawn more and more to Zen Buddhism, also called Ch’an Buddhism in its Chinese form.  Zen Buddhists talk a lot about simply letting one’s thoughts flow by and observing them without grasping at them or clinging to them.  As a person who thinks in images, my mind instantly turned this into a forest stream flowing by, with the water representing my thoughts.  Obstacles became boulders in the stream, and ugly, unwanted, or intrusive thoughts became stinking, dead fish.  I was able to attach an unwanted thought to the image of the dead fish and allow it to flow by in the stream, and if necessary, ‘wash’ my inner hands (my mind) clean of the dead fish. So far, it’s been a successful tactic in not allowing my mind to dwell on unwanted thoughts and to simply let them flow by.

There is another religion that relies heavily on the imagery of water to inform its underlying philosophy, and that’s Taoism.  The words ‘Dharma’ and ‘Tao’ both translate roughly to ‘The Way’, but how that ‘way’ is perceived and manifested differs between the two religions.  However, they dovetail perfectly to create a harmonious spiritual dyad.  Taoism speaks of a concept called wuwei: ‘the way of water’.  The idea is to approach one’s life as though one were water, which is one of the most powerful and transformative forces on the planet.  It has the power to both give life and take it away.  It also has the ability to be imminently flexible and patient.  Rarely is water completely blocked from flowing, and when it is, that’s a temporary state of affairs due to the sheer weight and pressure of water.

It should be easy to see the similarities between the Tao’s wuwei and Zen’s emphasis on observing the flow of thoughts in the mind.  I’ve also used both concepts of ‘The Way’ in my everyday life to tackle large projects in fairly short order that would otherwise take a great deal of time.  The ability to suspend judgment as taught by Buddhism and flow from moment to moment and task to task as taught by Taoism turned out to be an incredibly efficient method of dealing with these projects.

I’ve also used both Buddhism and Taoism to hone my intuition, which was too quiet to hear for a while.  During and after my Awakening, I noticed that at moments when I was tuned into my intuition and actually heeded it, I got a dopamine hit when I experienced something that resonated with my Experience and lit the Path forward.  Inside I would say, “Yes! This is what I was looking for.” I discovered over time that finding the right thing to guide me was just like the energy flow I tap into to create a painting, or rather, allow it to manifest.  It’s not something that can be forced, it just happens, and only because I allow it to happen.  It requires an openness to intuitive input and to being guided by the Universe towards what I really need.  As I opened myself to this energy, I would find myself stumbling seemingly accidentally over exactly the right thing that would give me that “yes!” feeling, whether it was a book or a website or a show or anything else.

As I mentioned, Hinduism was also an element of my burgeoning spiritual life.  As much as I cleaved heavily to Buddhism, its insistence that I don’t have a unique soul didn’t sit right with me.  I found myself switching back and forth between Buddhism and Hinduism, which only differ in their creeds regarding the soul and a Supreme Creator.  Hinduism believes in the atman, the individual soul, while Buddhism believes in anatman, the lack of a unique soul, as well as a lack of a Supreme Creator deity, another thing Hinduism does believe in.

After a time, I decided that the two faiths were not separate things, but two sides of the same proverbial coin.  Rather, they seem to function to one another in the manner of the yin and yang of Taoism, each dependent on the other and containing elements of the other within themselves.  In this way, my spiritual, mystical, and philosophical dyad became a trinity of Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism.  Hinduism also has the concept of rta, which is the ancestral idea of Universal order held by the Vedic sages before the idea of the Dharma superseded it.  It is similar, but not identical to, the Dharma and the Tao, and can also translate as ‘The Way’.

These practices were themselves informed by my genealogy studies, which I began when I was 30 when I was given the assignment to specifically write a religious family history for a class I was taking.  In writing the paper, I learned much about my ancestry that I never knew before, including the religions that my ancestors practiced and brought with them when they immigrated (or were dragged) to North America from Europe and Africa.

I had my first child a year or so after the writing of that paper, and my genealogy studies naturally fell by the wayside, as did most of my spiritual practices.  Later, when my children were older and I had more time, I picked up both practices again.  I submitted a DNA test to see my genetic ancestry as compared to my researched ancestry.  As the results were refined over the years, I was stunned to see a vast variety in my ethnic makeup.  At last count, I have 15 distinct ethnicities to my name.  To be sure, about 85% of it is very white European, but the regions from which my ancestors hailed all had rich traditions of folk tales and other practices that helped form the vivid cultural tapestry of Europe today. I discovered that I hail from ethnic Germanic tribes, Celtic tribes, Gaelic tribes, Vikings, and a handful of minor contributors to my ancestry, such as Amazigh, Sephardic Jew, Egyptian (!), and the Bantu Peoples of West Africa, amongst other West African peoples (no doubt some slaves, sadly).

Since I am not a member of the predominant religion in my country, which is Christianity, I have had to cherry-pick and cobble together my own spiritual path out of elements of the paths of my ancestors, combined with things I have learned on my own over the decades.  As such, that trinity of Zen-Hindu-Taoism is overlaid on an older, equally strong trinity of Earth-based Indigenous, ‘pagan’, and occult practices carried by my ancestors.  Within my Western Hemisphere Indigenous ancestors, which comprise about 10% of my ancestry, I have yet another trinity of the peoples and tribes from whom I hail: the Jicarilla Apache and Pueblo Peoples of the desert Southwest, and more distantly, the Aztecs of Meso-America.

This isn’t The Way, it is My Way.  I’m of the opinion that there are as many Faces of the Divine as there are human beings to perceive it, and as such, there are as many Paths to the Divine as there are people to walk it, even if we choose to identify as a member of a particular religion.  No two people will experience the Divine in the same way, and I am highly suspect whenever I see or hear someone say that there is only one way to do so.  My spiritual trinities inform yet another trinity, that of my spiritual, mystical, and philosophical ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.  Since I did not feel the presence of the Divine in any of my culture’s houses of worship, I have sought out my own Path in solitude.  In the process, I have woven a lovely magic tapestry of Divinity just for me that will take me just about anywhere in my inner space that I want or need it to.

God’s ground is my ground,
and my ground is God’s Ground

Meister Eckhart