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You never really know how or when your life is going to change, and that’s for the best. If someone had said to me, “Be on the lookout tonight, Caroline, because someone is going to experience a spontaneous healing in your audience,” how would I have reacted? And at whom would I have looked? Would I have cast my attention to the two people in wheelchairs? Would I have looked for a sick child, because that’s got a certain Madonna-and-Child quality to it? Would I have asked for a show of hands to count how many people were ill, just to see how many subjects were in the running? I don’t know what I would have done.
But a healing did happen that night while no one was looking.
"My listeners were craving an actual mystical experience"
The evening was part of a tour to promote my new book, Entering the Castle. It was planned as the usual type of tour event, at which I introduce the book, chat about it for a couple of hours, answer some questions, and then autograph copies. But that’s not what happened on this evening.
It started out that way, yet as I began to describe the “interior castle” — the image Saint Teresa of Ávila used to beautifully describe the inner soul — I could tell that my words were not communicating its power or mystical significance. The people in the audience were simply not relating to the seductive power of their souls through words, and it was obvious that all the metaphors and analogies and poetic descriptions would only continue to fall short. In fact, lecturing about the nature of soul grew more frustrating with each passing minute, as I could tell that for my audience, “soul” itself was just a mental concept, a word without an experience attached to it. How could anyone relate to a description of a mystical experience? How could I possibly tell these people to get enthusiastic about a place they had never experienced? Words cannot get you to experience Paris, can they?
I began to realize that my listeners were craving an actual mystical experience, or as close as they could come to one. They didn’t want me to talk about the interior castle; they wanted to enter their own interior castles. I looked at this audience of more than 800 people and thought, “How am I going to do this without prayer?” Teresa was clear in her writings that the only way into one’s interior castle is through prayer and inner devotion.
But my experience through the years had consistently been that although audiences were comfortable with meditation, guided imagery, moments of silence, and even terms like the Divine, the Goddess, and the Great Spirit, mention prayer or God and feathers got ruffled. “That’s too Catholic,” I have been told on more occasions than you can imagine — and though I’m not exactly a fan of the Vatican, I do come from a Catholic background. As a result, I had never introduced prayer into my workshops, not even moments of silence or meditation.
"The type of prayer that withdraws your attention from external distractions and from your five senses"
That evening I had to confront this ironclad policy. I knew that if I simply told my audience, “Close your eyes, sit back, and listen to my words as I lead you into your castle,” not only would I be dishonoring everything I knew about the mystical journey, but these eager people would also be denied an opportunity to experience something quite tranquil and authentic within them. I knew that the transformative link that drew a person “out of the mind” and into a altered state of consciousness, however slight and however brief, was prayer and that without prayer, the entire exercise into the castle — this metaphor of the soul — would be no more than a mental visualization. For me, that dishonored the very essence of the mystical experience.
To be clear, I differentiate between what I call a “mystical journey” and a “mystical experience.” A mystical journey is an inner exercise scripted with language that is specifically soul-focused. That is, instead of saying, “Relax and breathe into your energy,” as I might do in a different kind of guided meditation, I instruct people to “breathe into a field of grace.” I direct them into their “interior castle,” their inner soul, through prayer, not relaxation. I use the vocabulary of the soul and the sacred. A mystical experience, on the other hand, cannot be self-initiated. Rather, it is a spontaneous occurrence in which an individual is consumed into an altered state of divine consciousness.
So I told the audience that the journey into the interior castle required prayer and grace — not ordinary prayer, as in prayers of petition or repetition, but the type of prayer that withdraws your attention from external distractions and from your five senses. The audience was more than willing, and so, for the first time in my career, I led 800 people on their maiden journey into their interior castle.
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