If love is really all we need—in fact, all there is—why hasn't love ever been enough to make suffering go away? Viewed through the "mystical lens" we can discover startling new views of love and its connections to the origins of suffering within each of us. Mary Reed, who considers herself an "accidental" mystic, will show us a profoundly healing view inside Divine Love. This view brings us from the primordial state of pure Love, into creation and separation where a version of love developed which is the opposite of Divine Love—thus all the suffering. However, now she is seeing an acceleration back into the oneness of unitive BEing, also known as "Christ consciousness." Her experiences are both an invitation and a road map to returning to the Divine wisdom and love that already abide deep within us.

Reared in the Southwest with no religious or spiritual background, Mary spent most of her career directing global healthcare programs and creating nonprofit partnerships throughout America and Africa. However, eighteen years ago Mary's life was changed when an unexpected mystical journey began leading her to question the origins of existence and everything most people take for granted. The revelatory experiences which followed, combined with her miraculous recovery from a nearly fatal suicide attempt, led Mary to abandon an executive life in Washington, DC for a monastic life in the Himalayas. Mary's book, Unwitting Mystic: Evolution of the Message of Love, was a finalist in The Indie Spiritual Book Awards in 2015 and is currently in development as a feature film. Learn more about Mary by checking out some of her videos, click here..

We have all experienced loss—or will in the future. How has your spirituality been influenced or sustained you during times of loss? Rachel Blum is the author of The Doctor of Flowers, a collection of poems inspired by a spiritual journey influenced by strong interest in religion from childhood, an interfaith family, mothering and the death of her ten-year-old daughter to cancer.

Rachel is a longtime Reiki practitioner who has shared the practice privately and in the cancer center at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. We invite you to participate in a public conversation between Rachel Blum and Center Board member, Janet Mather. Rachel will offer a brief poetry reading following this conversation.

The Doctor of Flowers has been described as healing and accessible poetry that has comforted many grieving readers. "Rachel Blum’s poems bring grief and beauty into the same room, waiting for each to teach the other something that matters about the world, about our hearts, about what it means to love deeply. There is so much light in this book, and some of the things revealed in the light are heartbreaking, and some are gorgeous, and often they are the same thing." ~ RAYMOND BARFIELD, Pediatric Oncologist and Professor of Pediatrics at Duke University. "This is the book I needed during my daughter’s last week of life, in hospice." ~ GREG CORRELL, Father, Artist and Author.