Mormon to Mystic

Spirituality is a funny concept to me.

For most of my life, safety and comfort came wrapped inside belief and community—two things I didn’t know how to separate from each other, or from the institution that handed them to me. I grew up Mormon, so spirituality meant how much you were committed to God. Did you go to church every Sunday, attend your youth groups, pray and read your Scriptures daily, pay your 10% tithe, and follow all the rules? Did you try to have a relationship with God? It was an actual part of life that, honestly, was pretty all-consuming. In addition to the mental load, there was a very rigorous physical schedule—three hours of church on Sunday, one hour of youth groups on Wednesday, unless you have a calling, and then it will be closer to two or three hours. Seminary before school, Family Home Evening once a week, service projects, all on top of your normal life.

Church and your spirituality were the most important parts of your life. It determined everything and could be summed up by how good you were at checking off tasks on a list.

Say what you will about Mormonism, but they do raise very capable and accomplished people. The work ethic is crazy. The environment is safe, highly controlled, and it teaches you to operate in the same way. There’s an answer for everything to keep you calm: Everything happens for a reason. God has a plan for you. Your prayers will be answered—you just don’t know God’s plan yet. That was the deal. Belief and community are handed to you with a checklist. Safety–in exchange for never asking the wrong questions…

…unless you encounter uncontrollable things. Then it seems to fall apart.

And here’s the thing I don’t say often enough: I’m not actually mad about a lot of what I experienced growing up. Even though I felt like I didn’t fit in in a lot of ways, I loved knowing my neighbors. I loved having spiritual leaders in my life who knew my name and my family and my whole weird little trajectory. Those were valuable, beautiful relationships—and they are a part of that world I still miss. There is something beautiful about witnessing everyone just trying to do their best and sharing that.

It was an unbearable paradox for my brain to comprehend. The thing is, my OCD loves rules, and praying and tithing and following rules were essentially the compulsions I could fall back on whenever things were out of control. But I also couldn’t deny my lived experiences that were telling me those rules were harmful and inaccurate. This had been my problem my whole life. I was a witness to the sexism presented against my best friend—my mother—every day of our lives, but especially at church. Being in a theater program, I had a front-row seat to how various issues of expression and sexuality were handled in ways that I would describe as not legally big-A “Abusive,” but little-a abusive: a misuse of power coming from parents that was innately harmful but not technically “wrong,” especially not in LDS culture.

I don’t need to get into the nitty-gritty details of why I decided to leave the Mormon church. I’m sure you will see the conflicting beliefs over time and can create your own stories and narratives. So during college, I started questioning my beliefs…yada yada yada1…I was diagnosed with scrupulosity OCD (a form of OCD centered on moral and religious perfectionism, if you’re unfamiliar). Turns out, it’s not normal to spend your entire third-period class on the verge of a panic about the second coming of Christ.

So I took a hard left turn out of religion and spirituality altogether. And with it, I left behind the belief and the community that had kept me safe—before I fully understood those were the parts I actually needed.

I wish this were a more unique story, but it’s a pretty common Mormon story because scrupulosity is such a sought-after trait in the culture. I always say my mental illnesses are a perfect balance of nature and nurture—clearly, I have a genetic disposition that affects my brain chemistry. It runs in my family, but my environment and the things I was taught gave me the specific flavor and intensity of being consumed with ethical and moral behavior.

Because of this combo, I found that being agnostic was a masterful medicine for my specific brand of OCD symptoms. It took half of the equation away.

So let’s get into some OCD education, shall we?

First off, I have what some people call “pure O,” which means I really don’t have physical compulsions. They live mostly inside my head—in my thought processes. That’s also how it existed undiagnosed for so long. I felt like I lived two separate lives: the one I lived in the world and the one I lived in my head.

OCD also works by consistently doubting what your lived experience is and having you question your reality.

Common obsessions seen in scrupulosity include excessive concerns about: fear of committing blasphemy or offending/angering God; fear of having sinned; behaving overly morally; excessively striving for purity; fear of going to hell or being punished by God; fear of being possessed; fear of death; fear of the loss of impulse control and doubting what you truly believe or feel. Along with excessive worry about religious and moral issues, scrupulosity sufferers engage in mental and/or behavioral compulsions and avoidance of triggering situations.

This can often turn into magical thinking, which is where you believe that certain actions can lead to consequences that don’t line up in the physical world. In a physical compulsion that would look like “If I don’t check on my family when they get in the car to leave, something terrible will happen. So I have to touch the car before they leave to make sure they don’t die”.

Now that’s an intense version.

I’m lucky enough to have lived in what I would say is “moderate symptoms” of OCD even at my worst.

My thought processes typically looked like “Wow. Remember what you said to your friend earlier today?2 That was terrible. You’re a bad person who is hurting people and going to hell and its probably because you didn’t pray this morning and Satan got to you”.

The best course of treatment for magical-thinking OCD, like all types of OCD, is ERP therapy (exposure and response prevention therapy). In ERP therapy, the goal is to gradually face obsessive thoughts or fears without performing compulsions.

The best thing you can do when you have OCD is to acknowledge it and name it. If you can stop and recognize that this is a rumination or compulsion, you can reroute to behavior that actually aligns with your values. So when I would start to spiral, stopping and saying “I don’t believe in that and it actually doesn’t matter” was so fucking healing—and probably would have been enough if we didn’t live in hell.

The problem is that “I don’t know” only works as medicine if you can actually swallow it.

The day Roe v. Wade was overturned, I sat on my phone for approximately five hours straight. I took “PTO” (pretend time off, aka a remote day with no meetings) at work and scrolled TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, NPR, The Associated Press, BBC, back to TikTok, and cycled through again. I couldn’t stop trying to gather information to figure out how to solve this problem. My world opened up, and now I had the world’s philosophical problems opened up around me—but with no “God’s plan” to come back to, no right answer, nowhere to land. I couldn’t even dissociate properly anymore.

My OCD hadn’t gone anywhere. It had just traded scripture for politics and sin for oppression, and it was just as relentless as both. Agnosticism got me out of the church, which was an improvement. But it didn’t get me out of my own head.

Turns out, “I don’t know” isn’t a community. It isn’t a belief either. It’s a waiting room.

It became clear to me that my problem was not entirely a spiritual one, and I needed to work in some additional realms. I was already in therapy, working on my psychological health. I had a consistent exercise routine for my physical health. But my emotional health was just not doing well, no matter what I did. So I decided to get on antidepressants.

Life was great after that. No joke. I felt like sunshine and roses. I highly recommend it—Prozac is my girl. I was so content living just like this forever…

Until I got a box of tarot cards delivered with my underwear.

In an effort to continue to get my life together, I decided to order some new intimates based on the actual recommendations of replacing them every six months or so—I think I was going closer to a couple of years,3 and was told there was an optional gift with purchase. I love free things and hit accept without looking at what it was. Turns out, it was a branded Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck.

Now, you’d think after the whole OCD journey I just explained to you, I wouldn’t have given two seconds of thought to this experience. But you’d be oh so wrong—because I don’t believe in coincidences. And I believe in ghosts, fr. So if that’s a deal breaker for you, know that now.

Let me explain this counterintuitive nature:

Back when I was a kid, my dad and I had a ritual of reading a chapter of a book together every night. On Sundays, we typically had more time to read, so we made it a special session and always had some sort of treat to snack on while he read aloud—typically various sorts of M&Ms. I had a specific routine of dividing up the bag evenly. I would first sort them into colors, then divide each color group into two and add to my and my dad’s respective piles. Any odd ones out went to the outcast group. After all the colors were split, the outcast group was divided evenly. My dad grabbed at random from his pile while I ate them color by color, typically starting with brown (because BORING), and following whatever order my heart felt like that day.

I was about nine years old when we were reading a book called Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett. It was a mystery book that worked through an art heist using riddles and codes. In the book, the kids want to make a signal for when they encounter a coincidence and need to acknowledge and mark it. They decided they would use their favorite treat: blue M&Ms.

As we read this passage, I looked down and only had blue M&Ms left in my pile. The first one was in my hand. I looked over to my dad, and he had a startled look on his face. We both were following the code set in the book, entirely by coincidence.

We still talk about that to this day. Did it mean anything? No, it was just one of those odd times when things seem to align a little too perfectly and spook ya. I have encountered enough of those unexplainable spooky-ooky things that I have to leave room for the unknown, because the alternative is to deny my lived experience, which I just cannot do without sending myself into psychosis.

I had this conversation with my cousin the other day. We were both raised Mormon, but experienced very different versions of the religion. He moved around a lot—including internationally. I lived in the same house in Utah County for my whole childhood. Mormonism was his home and roots, but it was my entire world. Even though a lot of what we experienced was different, we shared the same sentiment. As much as I don’t believe in it now, as much as I dislike much of what I was raised to believe, there is something that happens when people get together with a belief that feels magical sometimes. Times when people come together and lay their hands on one another to help and heal. Times when the air seems to shift in the room and nothing short of miracles seems to happen. We cannot explain it.

Anyway, when I got the tarot cards, I was really intrigued. Especially since the occult was definitely a big no-no growing up, so the curiosity was morbid. Turns out, I loved it so much.

I started reading and researching the history of tarot cards, and it was fascinating. If you like history, geography, folklore, etc., this is a world rich with information. Tarot is what really opened up the world of astrology to me. They are pretty historically linked together, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck references zodiacal themes and signs throughout. At this point, I wasn’t practicing anything. I was just studying. It was a fun hobby for me.

Plus, it was really hitting an inner-child point for me as well. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the era of Facebook and BuzzFeed quizzes, house sortings, and “faction”-driven media, but playing in this world felt so validating. I was finding language to describe personality quirks or lived experiences in a new way that I never had, and by sharing it with others, we were finding ways to connect that we hadn’t envisioned before. 4

It’s all basically a “Which Percy Jackson Cabin Do You Belong In?” quiz (My planetary rulers are Saturn and Jupiter—Kronos and Zeus, respectively—so problems follow me around in ways that should be mythologically illegal). But outside of anything else, it was such a fun hobby and party trick to pull out. Whether or not people believe in it, they are all fascinated—and isn’t there a reason we all feel connected to groups and character identifications? Why do you want to know if your friends view themselves as Carries or Mirandas?5

It’s fun, and it makes us feel seen in a light-hearted, low-stakes way. We as humans have an innate need for understanding and community, and astrology opened up a shared language to do that.

What started as a fun hobby turned into a ritual for connection with my roommates and friends, then turned into more consistent check-ins, and finally settled as a ritual we would use together on full moons and solstices and when we needed a little bit more grounding or clarity than normal. And sometimes it’s just fun to be kinda witchy. I didn’t have the language for it yet, but I was rebuilding the thing Mormonism had actually given me—belief, and the community to hold it with—just in a shape my nervous system could finally live inside.

As I got better at practicing, I found that reading my birth chart and pulling cards was an incredibly helpful journaling practice. My brain is not to be trusted a lot of times—especially when I start to feel overwhelmed. My OCD likes to find meaning where there isn’t any, and my ADHD doesn’t like to sit still enough to recognize the patterns of behavior I actually need to notice and take action on. So by using a tarot spread to create a check-in that lives outside myself, I can take a breath and let my subconscious/intuition create the story that connects the cards together in a narrative I can process. Working with my therapist and incorporating our existing work with Internal Family Systems (IFS), and my personal yoga and meditation practices altogether gave me a new framework that guided my life with hope and clarity, rather than fear.

This structure also gave me a new replacement statement to return to in times of anxiety.

I work to live an aligned life, and I am guided by my virtues.

Back in college, I had to take a mandatory philosophy class for my general education. Turns out I actually loved it and aced the class. The concept of Aristotle’s golden mean really hit home with me. The idea that we all have virtues and should be working toward our version of balance. The thing that Aristotle left out is how to determine what values each individual should be focusing on—but that’s where astrology comes in.

What I eventually realized is that Aristotle, IFS, and astrology are all different modalities with the same goal, and when used together, they create a well-rounded and grounded approach for personal development. Three different languages, same method, which kind of creates a checks and balances system that keeps me feeling grounded and in control without obsessing.

The “spiritual world” often warns that when you start to get involved, you’ll start to notice “synchronicities”—things that line up and start showing up more often in your life. Repeating numbers, odd coincidences, etc. To a certain point, this makes sense. Our brains are really powerful and love pattern recognition. Everyone knows the experience of getting something new, like a car, and then, everywhere you go, you suddenly notice just how many other people have that same thing as you. You’ve brought attention to something, and now your brain wants you to notice it more.

But at a certain point, astrology and the woo were showing up in ways that felt like more than my brain finding random patterns—and the more I studied and paid attention, the more I realized the astrologers were right. My life was following the planetary patterns. I literally got fired the day Uranus went into retrograde and didn’t hear back from any other employers until the week it moved direct. Also, remember how I said it felt like I lived life inside my head. Astrology had a name for that. I have a 12th house stellium. Instantly, I had the language to find a community of people online who were able to validate and guide me in a way I had never experienced before.

What started as functional tools had, over time, started to resemble something that looks a bit more like religion, which I didn’t want and which started to scare me.

A conflict in and of itself, because I had prided myself and found safety in the “unknown.” Plus, just like before—when I had left the religion and was scared of what my community would think of my lack of belief in God—I started to worry about what my atheist and agnostic friends would think of my newfound belief in the mystic.

But here’s the thing: have you ever heard of mental checking? This is yet another OCD symptom where basically you are constantly evaluating yourself and your actions to make sure they are good enough. After being explained to what that was, I realized this is probably my biggest and most persistent compulsion. So the constant questioning of whether or not my beliefs and practices were acceptable to everyone was killing me.

Recently, I had a thought, though…who fucking cares?

Whether I want to blame Saturn for my life’s problems or have a psychologist psychoanalyze my childhood so I can do the same to my parents, the result is the same. The tools and the practices are the same.

Did you know that a lot of modern therapy techniques model Buddhist and Hindu practices from thousands of years ago? Quantum physics is confirming beliefs that used to be deemed magical and impossible.

I am not the person who is going to be diving into the specifics of why things work the way they do. I’ll leave that to the air signs and scientifically minded. I actually don’t care what the right answer is.

I know my answer, and I want to help others find theirs, because the overlap of what makes us human is much greater than the differences of how we experience them. The safety and comfort I was raised to look for in one specific God, inside one specific church, turned out to exist in the thing underneath it all: people choosing to believe something together. Mormonism didn’t own that. The mystic doesn’t either. It just happens to be where I found it again.

So if it isn’t to please God, what is it all for?

What is our spiritual guidance? Is it too much for it to be joy? For it to be peace?

Is that too simple? For every person to find what makes them happy—and to be able to pursue it?

What I long for is a world built around that same type of community—one that can gather together in a shared sense of spirituality that is entirely secular. Not a church. Not a God on the letterhead. Just people, showing up for each other with the same intention and tenderness I saw on a pew growing up.

I think about history, and the stories we’ve built from it. How often in the cultures we label “primitive”—indigenous cultures, older cultures—there is a heavy emphasis on both spiritual leaders and government leaders. Chiefs worked alongside shamans and healers. All of them were seen as community leaders. None is more important than another.

We’ve lost that balance.

We need spiritual leaders and spiritual systems—but not ones built on patriarchy and control. Not ones that end with children being shamed out of their homes, or wishing they were better off not here. We need ones that protect our Mother Earth and every living thing on this planet, because that is all we have, and it is all we know.

Because I am not a person who can exist entirely in the provable, physical world.6 I’ve experienced too many things—and listened to too many other people who have experienced things—that don’t line up with that. And if time has proven anything, it’s that a lot of what we used to call magic is just science we didn’t understand yet.

Turns out humans have been sitting with this same question forever—and a lot of it has been documented. By astrologers. Astrology is older than astronomy. In fact, astrologers were the ones who first told scientists that the things in the heavens were behaving in some kind of pattern. Scientists then started observing and measuring, and eventually built the mathematical equations that let us predict and review how everything in the cosmos operates.

Astrology isn’t telling us the future. It’s telling us what has happened in the past. Over thousands of years, we’ve noticed that people born in December (in the Western Hemisphere—I operate in Hellenistic astrology) tend to do xyz. Maybe it’s because it’s cold and wintery, and they had less exposure to sunlight as a child. Maybe it’s because they were born in Saturn’s jurisdiction. Either way, we have data that is showing us the correlation and offering some kind of guide for your life.

A guide that creates room for every kind of person, in every kind of situation, no matter how taboo. Because there is no moral code here. There is only action and consequence, values and decisions, and what we, as humans, decide to do with them.

Hell, we sent people to space this week. That’s magical.

Whether you want to believe we just need a shared understanding and belief system rooted in our physical world—the things we can touch, feel, see and prove—or you want to believe there is something greater out there with a purpose for all of us, it doesn’t really matter. All roads seem to align at one point or another.

Christina Koch, from the Artemis II mission, summed it up pretty well for me:

“A crew is a group that is in it, all the time, no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, that gives grace, that holds accountable. A crew has the same cares and the same needs, and a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked.”

Looking down at Earth from space, Koch said what struck her wasn’t just the planet itself but “all the blackness around it—Earth was just this lifeboat, hanging undisturbingly in the universe.”

“I know I haven’t learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me, but there’s one new thing I know, and that is: planet Earth, you are a crew.”

That’s what I’m reaching for. Belief in something bigger than myself. A community that will hold me to it. A shared sense that we are, all of us, on the same small lifeboat—and we may as well row in the same direction.

So TL;DR:

For the skeptical:

This is just a shared language that gives you enough key points to find a relation to your subconscious. Even if there is nothing that is “real” about astrology, we know ritual and introspection are helpful and that spirituality is a natural part of humanity that helps our mental state. It’s just a specific way for you to get out of your own head and move your ego out of the way so you can process your thoughts and emotions.

For the moderately whimsical, but scientifically grounded:

Are we not part of nature? Just like everything else in this modern world, we started as atoms that changed and evolved over billions of years. Our cells look like flowers, fungi and snowflakes, so who are we to say we’re not connected? Quantum physics is proving that the world is a bit more magical than we previously thought, so maybe there’s a world where dimensions overlap, and people have sensitivities to different energies. I don’t know. But I like to believe.

For the witches:

I am god and god is Earth, and energy is power is life is woman. IYKYK.