What I’ve Been Learning in Mystery School
I went back through the Mystery School notes I’ve taken over the last year, or at least the weeks when I actually took notes, and there is a lot there. Some of them are almost impossible for anyone but me to read because I was trying to capture what Maestro Hamilton was saying as quickly as I could while he was already moving on to the next thing. Some are things other people in the group shared, some are questions I asked, and some are my own reflections about how a teaching was showing up in my life. So I want to be clear that I am not presenting these ideas as things I came up with. Most of what I wrote down came from Maestro Hamilton’s teachings and the conversations in Mystery School, and what feels like mine is more the way I have been trying to understand them, test them against my actual life, and see what has changed in me over time.
Reading everything together was interesting because while we covered a lot of different subjects, I don’t think I was actually learning a bunch of disconnected things. There is a through line. We talked about success, fear, Sanctuary, safety, co-creation, framing, facts, healing, compassion, receiving, connection, spirit, the body, relationships and what it means to be alive, but somehow all of those things kept leading me back to similar questions. What is actually happening right now? What am I creating? What am I adding with my mind? What is mine to do, and what am I trying to control that is not mine to control? What changes when I remember that I am not doing any of this completely alone?
Redefining Success
We spent a lot of time early in the year talking about success, and I think I came into those conversations carrying a pretty conventional idea of what success was even though I would have said that I didn’t. Money, accomplishment, recognition, productivity, being good at something, having something to show for my effort, maybe being further along than I was the year before. I could also see how easily success becomes comparative. Someone is winning, someone is losing, someone has more, someone has less, somebody’s business is bigger, somebody makes more money, somebody seems to have figured out something I haven’t.
One of the things Maestro Hamilton kept coming back to was a much more fundamental view of success. We are alive. We got here. We have bodies. We are already participating in creation. We are already extremely successful at all kinds of things, including things we may not particularly like being successful at. I can be very successful at worrying. I can be successful at self-criticism. I can be successful at imagining what could go wrong. So the question becomes less about whether I am successful and more about what I am practicing and reinforcing, what I want to become better at, and what direction I want to keep moving in.
I started thinking about success much more in terms of little changes over time and whether my life actually feels like mine. I wrote that I am creating success with people who want to create with me and who consistently show up and engage with me, and reciprocity became a really important part of that. I don’t want to spend all of my energy trying to co-create with people who are not actually participating. I also started thinking about success as allowing more of me into my life instead of less: less holding back, less waiting for permission, less wondering whether what I have to offer is good enough, and more willingness to show up with my own particular way of doing things and see what happens.
At one point I wrote that one of my measures of success was that I was having more fun. I still really like that. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about earning money or doing good work or accomplishing things. I absolutely do. It just means I don’t want to keep postponing the feeling of being successful until some future version of my life finally earns it.
Fear Became a Much Bigger Subject Than I Expected
Then we spent months talking about fear, which was probably useful because I apparently have a lot to say about fear.
One of the things I started to understand more clearly is the difference between something dangerous actually happening and my mind producing fear about something that might happen. My mind is very capable of taking a small amount of information and going twenty steps into the future. Someone doesn’t call back, I don’t know the outcome of a test, I’m considering taking on a new responsibility, my parents are going through a difficult transition, and my brain can start constructing the entire future before I actually have the facts.
That doesn’t mean fear is stupid or that nothing bad ever happens. I kept asking some version of that question because I did not want “turn fear off” or “I am safe” to become a spiritual way of ignoring reality. There are real dangers. Bodies get sick. People die. People can hurt each other. We need discernment. We need boundaries. Sometimes we need actual protection. But most of the fear I experience on an ordinary day is not happening because a tiger is standing in front of me. It is my nervous system responding to possibility, uncertainty, memory, prediction, imagination or something my mind has decided could happen.
That became very clear when I was thinking about taking on more responsibility in Medicine Path. There were legitimate things I needed to understand, including what I would actually be responsible for and what the legal or practical implications might be. But I could also feel my mind creating scenario after scenario about how I might be judged, what somebody might expect from me, what I could do wrong, what could happen in the future, whether people might project onto me or criticize me. At some point the useful questions had been asked, and I was just creating more fear because I couldn’t have certainty.
I wrote in my notes that my mind can find the pros and cons of anything. That is definitely true.
Sanctuary Became Something I Could Use in Ordinary Life
This is where Sanctuary started becoming much more meaningful to me. I had thought of Sanctuary mostly as something connected to ceremony, but throughout the year Maestro Hamilton kept teaching it as something much bigger than that, a way of orienting and creating the space we are in. Instead of focusing all of my attention on trying to stop fear, the question became, what do I want to create instead?
If I am trying desperately not to be afraid, I am still completely focused on fear. If I am trying not to panic, I am thinking about panic. If I am trying not to think a certain thought, I am still in relationship with the thought. The teaching that made sense to me was not so much “defeat fear” as start creating something else: safety, peace, love, grounding, support, connection, Sanctuary.
I have found that helpful because it gives me something to do that is not arguing with my own mind. Sometimes I do not need to solve every thought. I can put my feet on the floor. I can get on the floor. I can breathe. I can notice what is actually in the room. I can feel my body. I can ask my brain to calm down instead of treating every thought it produces as an emergency. I can ask for help. I can look at the sky or a tree or feel the ground underneath me and remember that my mind is not the whole universe.
A lot of this is incredibly simple, which may be why it is easy for me to forget. I tend to think the solution should be complicated if the problem feels complicated, but sometimes the thing that changes my state is breathing more slowly, drinking some water, moving my body or getting out of my head long enough to notice that the present moment is not the disaster I was imagining.
Moving From Control to Co-Creation
Another huge theme for me has been control, and specifically the difference between control and co-creation. I like being prepared. I like knowing what is going on. I like researching. I like anticipating problems. I like fixing things before they become bigger things. None of that is inherently bad, and a lot of those qualities make me good at my work and useful to people I love, but I can also take them way too far.
I have spent a lot of energy acting as though if I just think hard enough, prepare enough, research enough, care enough or anticipate enough, I can somehow make everything turn out correctly. Mystery School has challenged that over and over. I have a role in what I am creating, but I am not creating alone. Other people have sovereignty. My body has its own processes. Time has its own processes. Spirit has a role. Circumstances I could not possibly anticipate will have a role. Sometimes there is no amount of thinking that will let me know something before I know it.
This has probably been most difficult and most important with my parents. There are so many things I wish I could fix. I would heal my mother’s body. I would take away her pain. I would make my father make choices that I think would help him. I would make moving into assisted living easy and comfortable for both of them. I would protect them from aging and illness and grief and all the losses that come with this stage of life. I cannot do those things.
I can help. I can advocate. I can research. I can show up. I can make phone calls and find resources and offer my opinion and sometimes solve a very real practical problem. But caring does not make me responsible for the outcome, and love does not give me control over another person’s life.
I had a smaller but meaningful experience of this when I hosted one of our pipe ceremonies while my mentor was away. I was anxious to begin and Maria, one of the elders, asked if we could wait a little longer for some people to join on Zoom. Then when I wanted to move forward again, she asked if we could take a few breaths and settle into presence first. There is a version of me who could have immediately translated that into, I am doing this wrong. I forgot something. She is correcting me because I don’t know what I am doing. Instead I was able to understand that she was simply asking for something she needed, and what she asked for helped all of us. I didn’t have to turn her request into a story about my competence.
That felt like a very real example of the thing I was supposedly learning.
Framing, Reframing and the Stories I Have Been Living Inside
Later in the year we spent a lot of time talking about framing and reframing, which I found really useful because it helped me see how many things I had accepted as reality that were actually a particular way of looking at reality.
One of my examples was kindness. When I was a kid, we made “I am kind” T-shirts at school, and because I take language pretty literally, I think I absorbed be kind as something close to an absolute instruction. Be kind to everyone. Be kind no matter what. It took me a very long time to understand that kindness can be one of my deepest values without requiring me to abandon discernment or exclude myself from receiving it.
So I don’t need to throw away the value of kindness. The frame just gets bigger. Kindness to myself is part of kindness.
I have also been thinking about framing constantly with my parents. Is assisted living a loss of independence, or is it gaining support? I don’t think there is one answer. My mother may experience it one way and my father another way. I may see things they do not see because I am standing somewhere different. They may see things I cannot see because it is their life and not mine.
I wrote “depende” in my notes, and that still makes me laugh because it became such an important word for me in learning Spanish. It depends. Reality is not always binary. Two things can be true at the same time. Something can be sad and right. Something can be supportive and still involve loss. Someone can love me and still not be able to give me what I want. I can feel disappointed without needing to decide that the whole thing was bad.
What Are the Actual Facts?
The framing work eventually became this whole conversation about facts, and this may be one of the things I have found most useful in daily life. What are the actual facts?
Not what do I think is happening. Not what am I afraid is happening. Not what did something remind me of. Not what am I predicting will happen next. What do I actually know?
I wrote down very simple facts: I am alive. I have a body. I have relatives. I am related to life. My body needs tending. My thoughts are my thoughts; they are not facts. Other people’s thoughts are their thoughts; they are not facts.
That last part is incredibly helpful for me. If someone does not call me back, the fact is that they did not call me back. My mind can immediately produce all kinds of additional information: maybe they are mad at me, maybe I said something wrong, maybe they are avoiding me, maybe I embarrassed myself, maybe the relationship changed, maybe they don’t care. I can imagine all of those possibilities, but imagination is not evidence.
Sometimes the fact is simply that I do not have enough information yet. I don’t particularly enjoy that fact, but manufacturing certainty does not make me more informed.
I think this is one of the places where the spiritual and practical parts of Mystery School have come together for me in a way that feels very grounded. I can have a spiritual framework and still ask, what do I actually know? I can believe in intuition and spirit and also recognize that my nervous system, memory, fears and desires all affect what I perceive. Discernment matters.
My Body Has to Come With Me
Another thing that shows up all through my notes is the body. Feel the body. Breathe. Ground. Touch the floor. Relax the brain. Eat. Drink water. Rest. Slow down.
I have spent a lot of my life trying to solve things almost entirely through thinking. I can understand something intellectually and assume that because I understand it, the rest of me should immediately cooperate. But that is not really how I work.
One of the teachings I wrote down was about integration and the mind sometimes understanding last, after transformation has already been happening through the body and through experience. That makes a lot of sense to me. I can know that somebody else’s behavior is not a verdict about my worth and still feel rejected. I can understand that I am safe in a particular moment and still feel my nervous system react. I can know that I do not have control over an outcome and still feel an enormous impulse to grab the steering wheel.
That does not necessarily mean I have failed to learn something. Maybe my body needs more experiences of the new thing. Maybe the nervous system needs repetition. Maybe knowing something once is different from living it.
That “little by little” teaching appears over and over in my notes, and I think I need it over and over too.
Healing Without Turning Against Myself
Compassion also became a much bigger part of how I think about healing. I don’t really believe anymore in the idea that I am going to heal something once and then it will never show up again. Healing does not seem to work that way for me.
I can understand a pattern and then discover another version of it. I can make progress and get triggered again. I can make a good choice and then make one I don’t like. I can feel incredibly wise on Sunday morning and be doing something completely familiar and ridiculous by Tuesday afternoon.
If healing is really an ongoing process, then attacking myself every time I discover that I am still human makes no sense.
I have started noticing how often I assume criticism will somehow make me improve. You should know better. Why did you do that? You are being ridiculous. You screwed this up. I would not want somebody else speaking to me that way, and it doesn’t magically become useful because the voice is inside my own head.
One phrase I wrote down was error de joven, the error of youth, and I loved the idea that “youth” could mean twenty years ago or five minutes ago. I was younger five minutes ago. I know something now that I did not know then. I can use that information without turning it into punishment.
Learning to Receive Instead of Only Asking
Receiving has also been a much bigger theme than I realized until I read all the notes together. I know how to ask for help while continuing to do everything myself. I know how to pray for support and then micromanage exactly how I think the support should appear. I know how to want to be held and helped and then feel uncomfortable when I am actually in a position where I need somebody.
One thing we talked about was the difference between asking and receiving. At some point, if I believe I have been heard, I have to stop asking long enough to notice whether anything is arriving.
Sometimes receiving means doing less. Sometimes it means letting somebody else know more than I do. Sometimes it means accepting money or assistance without immediately turning that into a story about what I should have been able to provide for myself. Sometimes it means receiving love in the form it is actually being offered instead of rejecting it because it is not the form I had imagined.
This connects with a lot of the conversations we had about independence, support and the stories our culture tells us about what it means to be successful. I have been very invested in being independent, and independence has served me in a lot of ways, but I don’t want independence to mean that I am unable to receive.
Connection Was Underneath Almost Everything
The biggest thread underneath all of this may be connection. Maestro Hamilton talked a lot about the illusion of separation, the way we experience ourselves as separate beings while also being completely part of the same universe, the same matter, the same creation. I am not sure I could explain all of that philosophically in a way I would want to defend in an argument, and I don’t really feel a need to.
What matters more to me is that I have started experiencing it differently.
I feel more connected to the earth. I feel more connected to ancestors and people I love who are no longer physically here. I feel more connected to plants, animals, stars, places and the people around me. I feel more willing to ask spirit for help without needing to perfectly define what spirit is first. I also feel more aware of the ways I can act as though I am completely alone even while believing intellectually that I am not.
One of my last notes from September says, “This is the connection. I am always connected to everything.” That feels almost absurdly simple compared with the hundreds of lines of notes that came before it.
It also made me realize how much the intentions I took to Peru this year grew directly out of Mystery School. I wanted to explore what it actually means to live from the understanding that love is already available to me. I wanted to stop organizing myself around being chosen. I wanted to love people deeply while continuing to belong to myself. I wanted to understand where I could ask for help, where I could co-create, where I could surrender, and where I was still trying to control outcomes because I did not trust that I would be okay without controlling them.
I don’t think I realized when I wrote those intentions how much of the year had already been preparing me to ask those questions.
What I Think I Am Taking With Me
When I look through all of the notes now, I don’t think Mystery School gave me a set of answers as much as it gave me a different way of questioning my own experience. What is actually happening? What are the facts? What story am I adding? What frame am I looking through? Is this fear responding to something in front of me or something I am imagining? What am I trying to stop, and what could I begin creating instead? What part is mine? What can I receive? Who is actually co-creating with me? What does my body need? Can two things be true? Can I have compassion for the version of myself who didn’t know what I know now?
I definitely do not live all of this perfectly. I can write my thoughts are not facts in my notebook and twenty minutes later believe one of my thoughts as if it were handed down on a stone tablet. I can understand co-creation beautifully and then find myself trying to control six things that are none of my business. I can know that support exists and forget to ask for it. I can understand that fear is not necessarily information and still get completely activated by something my mind made up.
But maybe that is part of what I have been learning too. I do not have to punish myself into becoming wiser. I do not have to force myself into transformation. I can notice what is happening, come back to my body, look at the facts, ask for help, reorient, make another choice and keep going.
Little by little, which apparently is how I learn almost everything.
