Callanish standing stones, Isle of Lewis, Scotland. Summer 2015

About Mary Angelon Young

Welcome, and thanks for visiting. My website is a reflection of the perspectives I’ve gained over the course of my life’s journey, tempered in the alchemy of life’s joys and sorrows.

The fact is that we are all on a journey, and we could say that every created being and all of nature is on a path of becoming. That process is not a straight line. It’s more chaotic and creative, somewhat like a bee on a hot summer day, in search of blossoms on a helter skelter flight through a vast garden. If you’ve found your way here, you know what I mean.

Coming of age in the 1960s, like many of my generation I struggled with the war, oppression, and religious hypocrisy that I experienced in the world around me. By 1970 I had dropped out of the university to find my way, eventually, to the remote Ozark Mountains, where I lived with a small group of iconoclasts and heretics in a remote commune. We raised children, gardened, played music, and built cabins. We were off-grid pioneers, living without electricity, cooking and heating with wood, growing our food organically. It was a time of high idealism based on a vision for living in harmony with the earth.

Then the eighties arrived, and I began to realize that the spiritual path involved a good deal of healing from wounds of many kinds—of collective humanity, the personal psyche, and the soul. I went back to school, where I developed a passion for the work of C.G. Jung and a view of the healing process both eclectic and ultimately spiritual. Earning a master’s degree, I honed my love of mythology, trained in psychotherapy, and fell in love with the goddess in all her forms. From the late eighties to the mid-nineties I taught courses on Jungian studies, dreamwork, mythology, and transpersonal psychology at Prescott College in Arizona and at Avalon Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

In 1987 I met my spiritual teacher, Khepa Lee Lozowick, in an unexpected turning point that threw me onto the Baul path of tantra merged with traditional bhakti. Over two decades during Lee’s life, I took shelter and practiced under the graceful wings of my guru and his master, the beloved saint, Yogi Ramsuratkumar. I’m still deeply connected to my lineage and the Bauls of Bengal; you’ll read more about them in this website. In countless adventures with Lee during his lifetime, I had the opportunity to travel around the world. Pilgrimage as a way of personal transformation became a way of life for me. Along the way I met and was enriched by contemporary practitioners and teachers from widely diverse paths—from Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and Christianity to shamanism and transpersonal psychology.

There are many methods and means that can help us walk the path of inner transformation. The truest of those will expand our awareness and ask us to embrace the fullness of life. Everyone is a “work in progress.” In my experience, the more aware we become, the more responsible we become, and the more conscious we become of suffering—our own and others. We begin to care deeply about the condition of humanity and the world at large.

I love the discovery of study and ongoing learning. “Beginner’s mind,” as Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi once counseled, or the power of the “blank page” is the ground of creativity. Life has a way of teaching us this, if we are paying attention. We need to return to not knowing, trusting the mystery, and offering an empty cup, again and again. Waiting, listening, trusting the divine movements within my own being, I can allow myself to be moved freely in a positive and transformative direction.

Over time the diamond-like, spontaneous innate nature of the self, which the Bauls call sahaja, begins to shine. But at the beginning, we don’t even know what it is! Sahaja is ever-present, and yet we don’t notice it. It’s too obvious in its simplicity. It’s the ground of everything that arises. My teacher called it “organic innocence” and “the primacy of natural ecstasy.” Maybe we can never fully know it, because sahaja is, in essence, living deep within us as the mysterious uncatchable bird of Baul lore—the elusive beloved of the heart.

My quest for beauty and divinity has included travel as a rich and deep school of life, in which I’ve made sacred journeys to the temples and sanctuaries of India and the great cathedrals, basilicas, shrines, and standing stones (dolmen, menirs) of Europe. Years ago I experienced an unmistakable pull to explore my familial heritage in the Celtic world of Scotland, England, Ireland and Bretagne in France. You’ll find some of those journeys in these pages as well.

So, welcome to the reflections of one traveler on the journey of life—a story or narrative that leads to vistas on a road that, eventually, we may begin to experience as an infinite, mysterious process of becoming. Along the way, I’ve learned that we come here to experience change so that we are transformed. It’s most definitely not always easy. When the demands of change rattle the bars of my personal cage, however golden they may be, I still weep and struggle, just like everyone else.

Spiritual growth is about cultivating the awareness, self-knowledge, and clarity that opens the doors to the innate wisdom of sahaja (maybe deeply buried but still there!) that exists within each one of us as a given fact of existence. For most of us this is a greater challenge than we can know in our first tentative or wildly enthusiastic steps on the Path. The wisdom of the ages tells us that there is nothing to attain, gain, or realize. It’s already within us. Sounds simple and it is. But we exist in a world of vast and overwhelming complexity, where there are countless forces, both natural and manmade, at play in every day of our lives. In our modern times, the question becomes: What is Real? And how do we get to live with it? It’s an inquiry that I return to in my blog many times.

For every one of us, the observer, the watcher at the gate, the doer, the “I” will inevitably land at the crossroad, make decisions, go in a different direction than planned, and encounter external forces or other people that exert amazing influences upon us. Unexpected events occur which change everything forever. One simple decision, one moment, one birth or one death, changes an entire picture of reality as we have previously understood it. If the flex of a butterfly’s wings can change the weather thousands of miles away, imagine what a cataclysmic event such as a birth or a death engenders within our beings!

For me, the spiritual quest has led me to seek that which is ultimately real, true, unequivocal, innate and enduring. What is it that moves you? How do you hear the call, the quiet lure of the soul?

Writing and Creativity Coaching

After many years of “purposeful wandering,” today I still travel, give workshops, and write, but the mode of my writing has shifted dramatically. Rather than biography and essays on the essentials of the spiritual path, I am drawn to telling stories. I’ve turned toward historical fiction, bringing into play my avid interest in history and its mysteries, blended with storytelling, the perennial truths, enduring myths and archetypes that come to life in characters and events within the narrative. Writing fiction is wildly creative because it offers such an extraordinary open pallet upon which the writer may explore the imagination. The result is a rich feast that feeds heart and soul—both for the writer and the reader. This alchemy of the written word continues as a vital path of transformation and inner yoga for me.

The wordsmith’s art has been an important way for me to “re-source”—to access deeply healing and wise parts of myself. In my workshops in the U.S. and Europe, I share my enthusiasm for this particular form of creativity, drawing on personal experience—seven published books of memoir, biography and Indian philosophy, as well as three children's books.

I love having the opportunity to encourage others to plunge fearlessly into writing as an essential tool for personal ransformation. For the past ten years I’ve individually coached and given extensive workshops on writing for healing and spiritual practice. My workshops include storytelling (retellings of the great world myths both East and West), singing sacred songs (bhajans) and mantra, and engaging with teachings from the bhakti and tantric traditions of India. Some of my workshops over the past few years include (for more details click here):

Braving the Blank Page
An exploration of writing
with Regina Sara Ryan and Christina Sell at Yoga Oasis, Tuscon, Arizona

Art as Inner Path—the Way of Sahajiya
(Writing and Sacred Songs) A five-day retreat in La Drome, France
with friend and musician Saraswati (Marion Zammarchi)

At the Heart of the Baul Way: Chanting & Writing
Three-day retreat with Saraswati, Angles sur l’Anglin, France

Dream Yoga: The Path to Self Knowledge
San Marcos School of Yoga, Texas

The Transforming Power of Myths and Stories
Garden Street Yoga, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho

The Divine Feminine
San Marcos School of Yoga, Texas

Myths & Stories: How They Can Transform Us
San Marcos School of Yoga, Texas

Meditation and Mantra
Garden Street Yoga, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho
with Thomas Rafael Bormann.

Dream Yoga: The Path to Self Knowledge
Freiburg, Germany

The Divine Feminine in Daily Life
with Regina Sara Ryan, in Mexico City

Writing to the Heart of the Matter
with Regina Sara Ryan, Prescott, Arizona

Igniting Creative Fires Within
Comreich Sanctuary, Argyall, Scotland, with Suekali Stubbs.

The Divine Feminine in Spiritual Practice
Freiburg, Germany and in Mexico City, with Regina Sara Ryan

Maturing in Wisdom & Grace Spirituality for the Second Half of Life
with Regina Sara Ryan, Prescott, Arizona

Cultivating the Creative Inner Life
Comreich, Argyll, Scotland, with Suekali

The Sahaj Path: the Natural Way of Transformation
San Marcos School of Yoga, with Christina Sell, Austin, Texas

Cultivating Sanity and Sanctuary
Comreich, Argyll, Scotland, with Sharana Lhaksham

On Cultivating Happiness
with Sharana Lhaksham, Mexico City

Books

My foray into writing fiction came to life with my historical novel, Krishna's Heretic Lovers. Published in 2014, KHL is the true story of fourteenth century Bengali poet Chandidas and his lifetime, low-caste lover, Rami. It’s a great read, replete with ancient cultures, great characters and descriptions of nature, places, and people, love, sex, death, good guys and bad guys. I recommend it highly!

My ebook, On the Road to Enlightened Duality, combines spiritual adventuring, travel, and dharma in an original and unique literary offering. Under the Punnai Tree, my biography of the south Indian saint Yogi Ramsuratkumar, is a personal favorite. Traveling in India over the years I had the good fortune to meet and sit in the company of this revered sage many times between 1993 and 2001, when he passed into the “great bliss” or mahasamadhi. He continues to be a great inspiration in my life

A trilogy of historical fiction spanning over 1500 years at Glastonbury in the Summer Country of England—the mythic location of Avalon in the ancient Celtic world as well as the most sacred land in Britain where the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey and the Chalice Well can still be visited today—is my current work-in-progress. Also in the works: a volume of poetry. For more information on books, click here.

Love of the Natural World

The panoramic display of Mother Nature—the awesome, wondrous beauty of planet Earth alive in a vast and teeming cosmos—never fails to teach and kindle a heartfelt gratitude for life’s many gifts. Living in the high desert mountains of Arizona, I’ve learned how to cherish the small things in life—the alchemy of sun and rain, the raw earth of dusty mountain paths that wind below the endless blue of vast skies, summer rainbows, the secret beauty of the desert. Often we human beings are like that—full of hidden treasures that can be discovered if we are willing to make the journey within.

Nature has taught me much about beginnings and endings, and birth, growth, death and rebirth. The seasons themselves have something vital to tell us about the cycles and patterns of life. Sometimes it is in pure simplicity—finding the Sacred in the moment at hand—or in the greatest moment of travail and sorrow, like the forest fires that rage each year in the Southwest, when we have an unexpected and powerful unfolding of divine inspiration. For more on this theme, go to my blog.