Mary Reilly Nichols: The Whole World Became White Light

Elizabeth Rovere:

Hello, and welcome to Wonderstruck. I am your host, Elizabeth Rovere. I’m a clinical psychologist, a yoga teacher, and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. I’m really curious about our experiences of wonder and awe, and how they transform us. My guest this time is Mary Reilly Nichols.

Mary has been teaching yoga for more than 40 years, and she’s the director of the yoga studies program at Nalanda Institute of Contemplative Science in New York City. After earning a degree in anthropology at Harvard, Mary completed five years of study in meditation ashrams in both India and the United States under the mentorship of Swami Muktananda.

Today, Mary teaches individual and group yoga, advises organizations on mindfulness and embodiment practices, and also teaches stress management in psychiatric settings at Bronxville Psychiatric Wellness Group in Westchester County. Mary’s journey into a life of wonder begins with an ecstatic experience that she was hardly prepared for, and one she was at first hesitant to embrace until it happened again and again.

What would you do if a white light suddenly told you that you would one day meet a great master? That’s what Mary had to confront. Mary’s story brings up fascinating questions like, how do we recognize a moment of awakening? Where can we find the courage to accept it? And what can we do with that awakening that will elevate consciousness and change lives? Stay tuned as Mary answers these questions as only she can.

In our discussion today with Mary, we have three themes that we’re looking at broadly covering. One is her extraordinary experience of greater consciousness, and we will see what that’s all about. The second is knowledge and knowing, and three is yoga as an embodied meditation.

So with that, I would like to start talking with you, Mary, and ask you, what happened to you your freshman year at Harvard?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Hi, Elizabeth. Well, I’ll launch right in then. The first thing that happened was I got there, it was freshman year. It’s a stressful thing to adjust and everything. But I had a friend from New York City who I knew in high school, and he came over and he meditated.

So he told me how great it is to meditate, and I thought it was really pretty stupid. And I smoked constantly, and I was like, this is pretty dumb. But anyway, he left. But just before he left, he placed his thumb on my third eye, on the space between the eyebrows. And I said, “Oh, well, whatever.” And I was doing laundry, but I was waiting for my laundry to dry. So I decided I’d sit down and try meditating, and I sat in a lotus posture. And about three minutes in I thought, this is the most boring, I’m never going to do this. This is stupid.

So I laid down on my bed at that time, and I found myself dozing. And then my body became incredibly stiff and rigid, and I started to fight against it to try to control the body. And then it started to spasm or seize, and I could hear the gasping for breath. And then I went through a tunnel.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, wow.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I know. So I went through the tunnel and I heard these beautiful wind chimes, and I found myself seated in a perfect lotus posture with a loin cloth in a man’s body, in a hut, in a grass hut. And I remember feeling just for a moment, I felt like I was God. That was the thought. So into the hut, there was a big storm going on outside. And into the hut came a young woman, and she was crying about the suffering of the world, really sobbing about it.

It was almost like I was almost annoyed, but I wanted to help her out. So I glanced at her, and out of the corner of my eye came a stream of music. And it was choral music. And in the song was the whole creation. And I saw all the humanity striving and longing and trying and suffering and hoping and doing things in this music.

And it was so beautiful. I often would, to describe it, say if the Ode to Joy is one degree, this is 365 degrees. It was just overwhelming. And I’m glancing the creation out of my eye, and I started to weep tears from how beautiful it was. And the tears hit the ground explosively, and then I found myself on my bed again.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wow.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I know. And I did this thing, which anytime I would have any kind of traumatic experiences, it’d be like, that didn’t happen. Walk around, pretend that didn’t happen.

But anyway, I was there to study ecstatic religion, non-ordinary experience, shamanism, I was just passionate about this.

Elizabeth Rovere:

So you were interested in that before this actually happened to you?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

But you still thought meditation was boring?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I did. Well, I didn’t think that was how you got it. I’d read the Carlos Castaneda books religiously when I was 16. They really turned me on, and I thought, well, you get it with drugs or shamanism, or you got to meet some sort of a teacher. But meanwhile, it was a really fascinating study and the department was fantastic.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wait, but you got to slow down for a second. So this happens to you just with some kind of a friend or person you meet in the laundry room that’s talking about meditation. And then you have this very powerful, pretty overwhelming experience. That would have to be scary.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

What did you do?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I tried to deny it and carry on with my day, that kind of thing. But more things started to happen then. And by the time junior year came along, it was other stuff like that was happening. So I did think that I might have epilepsy. And I did go to the health services three times, and the last time they said they got me an EEG.

And in those days, this is back in the 70s, you had to lie down and try to go to sleep, because sometimes these things happen in the period between sleeping and waking, there’s sleep paralysis. And then they would flash lights to see if they could stimulate a seizure.

And they also had static. And one or two times that I would have these things, there’d be static on the radio and it would set it off. So these kinds of things. So there was no definitive answer about whether I might have temporal lobe epilepsy, and just went on with my life. But I was trying to tamp it down, but I was having many spiritual experiences.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s really fascinating because it’s almost like you were interested in this before, and then someone pushes open the door a little bit and it starts happening. And it’s like you’re being called to do this kind of work or to study these kinds of things.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yeah. Although, I did think that maybe I had psychosis going on.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, I understand that.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I had a wonderful, smart roommate, and she was the smartest girl in math in the department. She was beautiful too. But she had a psychotic break, and her psychosis was math involved. I came home to see that she’d written math equations on the wall with lipstick.

Elizabeth Rovere:

No way.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

So I thought, oh, I’m going off the rails according to my study. But luckily I’ve been striving to appear normal ever since. And I’m trying very hard, and I think it’s working.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, I think one of the things that’s interesting to me as well as I think a lot of people, is that this is a kind of phenomenon that human beings are capable of having. And it is extraordinary and yet it is in the range of human experience.

As a psychologist, I’m a big fan of William James. And he studied these things, the varieties of religious experience, back in 1903, 1900. And said, why don’t we study this? This kind of thing happens to people and it’s the cause of great transformation. And we do ourselves a disservice by not looking at it. And so once you realized you weren’t having a psychotic break or a temporal lobe epilepsy, but yet it was part of almost your studies, I imagine that it was transformative and life changing for you.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yes, and so all these incidents happened. And then another major one happened when I decided to… In junior year we write a thesis. It’s our junior thesis, and that’s where I decided I would do it on ecstatic religious cults. And what I was seeing was that cult activity, and when I say cult, I think everything’s a cult. We are all in cults.

But some of them are very adaptive and useful, and a lot of people can thrive through these belief systems. And some of them are not that adaptive, in a way. So when cultures are breaking down, when the basic institutions of a culture start to break down, you see a lot of this activity. And what I was doing in this, and I’m writing my paper, and it was so exciting. I couldn’t even wait to get to the desk to start writing.

So social breakdown promotes, it’s the fertile ground of new cult behavior. Now, why? Well, it’s because the old institutions, the old paradigms, are not functioning in the new reality. What is the new reality? Well, there could be environmental change, but often what you can study in anthropology is the culture contact between Pacific Islanders and the Japanese Navy. So this contact completely blew apart the culture of the Pacific Islanders.

Their world, the hierarchy was who has the most pigs, and what other sort of attributes of prestige. They would go away. It would now be the young boy or girl who can communicate with these people. And that would become the new attribute of power. So the attributes of power change when the environment changes, and now you need new adaptive skills to thrive in the environment. So I’m saying, “Wow, man, this is so cool. I love it so much.”

And so I’m writing about it, and then I say, it’s one of these gramps with the light bulb above his head and Betty Boop. So I had the light bulb. It went, my goodness, it’s a very simple thought, but modern western civilization is now breaking down. We must be due for a spiritual transformation.

And the minute, or the moment, I had that thought, there was an explosion at the base of the spine. And this ridiculously strong energy wiggled up my spine. And I thought it felt, I always say like a fire hose, although I’ve never felt a fire hose, but it’s this power. And it went into the crown of my head. And then the whole world became white light, including myself.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Incredible.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

And the white light spoke to me, and said I was going to meet a great master and I would recognize him. And that’s what happened. And I came down. I came out of that. I remember jumping up and staring at my chair with accusation, like, what did you do to me? And as if the chair had started this thing. And then I ran into tell my roommate.

Elizabeth Rovere:

The mathematician?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

No, this was a different one. And she just thought I was smoking too much pot or something. I don’t know. So nobody understood. It was the beginning of seeing that I was not going to be… You’re not going to be able to communicate this without people thinking you’re crazy or lying. Which one do you prefer?

I don’t think I like either of them. And so, soon, that was in the spring of junior year. And in the summer of junior year, I ended up meeting Muktananda, and he was a Shaktipat guru who awakened Kundalini. And mine, it just went wild.

Elizabeth Rovere:

When you met him?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Literally right when you met him?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Well, I’ll tell you that story. Do you want to hear it?

Elizabeth Rovere:

How can we not? How can we not?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

So I had a very mystical uncle, and we’re all…

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wait, wait. You had a mystical uncle?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I did.

Elizabeth Rovere:

What does that mean?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Well, he was an actor, and he was wild and crazy. The whole family, the entire lineage, both sides, very wild, very crazy, very unconventional, a lot of actors. Tremendous amount of alcoholics too. And so he was highly mystical, but he wasn’t holy seeming. None of us is holy seeming. But he really was.

Anyway, he had had his own interaction with Muktananda, but he hadn’t told me about it. But he said we were going to go upstate. It was summer of 1976. We’re going to go upstate and meet, he called it a saint. He called [inaudible 00:14:13] saint. So I immediately was skeptical because I didn’t believe that… I thought you had to suffer a lot and be a martyr. I didn’t know what that was, really.

But we did go. I’m glad they didn’t say guru, because in those days I didn’t… Guru was associated to me with fake, you’re going to sell me something. I don’t know. Anyway, I get there, and just prior, a week or so before I met Muktananda, we went upstate. I had had this experience. And what it was was I was working in the dorms, the Harvard dorms, to clean them, which I used to do at the end of the year, minimum wage to get some money before I went home.

We’d have a couple of weeks of cleaning them with toothbrushes against the drains and everything. Just really clean. And so I was doing that. And then one day, one morning, I woke up to a sound. And the sound was so loud, and I could say that it was like a trumpet, but it was the loudest sound you’ve ever heard. And yet it didn’t hurt my ears. But as I looked out the window, I heard this sound. And I knew that the whole world was hearing it, and I decided it must be the end of the world, what’s happening? And out of the sky came this swirling, what I thought was a flying saucer, something, and it came zooming at me, and it went into my third eye.

And then I woke up. So this was this thing. And after that, I couldn’t get the sound out of my head because when I had heard it, this is the weirdest thing, but it didn’t have a beginning or an end like most sounds. Later on, I would learn that om is called the unstruck sound. And this is what I heard, but I didn’t know that at all. So anyway, I couldn’t get it out of my head.

I just couldn’t get it out of my head. So when we went up and met Muktananda, we pranaamed, because that’s what people were doing. They were bowing. He hit me with the peacock feathers. I went and sat down. He was very weird to me. I thought he was totally strange. And then he started talking about meditating on om. And then he pointed to me in the midst of several hundred people, and he said, “That’s what you’re doing now.”

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, wow.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I know, and I pretended I had no idea what he was talking about. So that was the moment.

Elizabeth Rovere:

So he could see that was happening to you?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Oh, yeah. It’s almost hard to describe the proof of omniscience that you got when you were living near him. I always say it was scary. People say, “No, you meant you were in awe. You’re wonderstruck.” Yeah, I was terrified.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, it’s interesting, because we had thought of the name also awestruck, because awe is like it’s awful or it’s scary. Because it is scary. It absolutely is. There’s no doubt to me.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Your hair stands on end and that’s the kind of thing you had a lot around. And basically being in the environment, you began to naturally monitor your thoughts because they’d manifest so potently and obviously. So the Shakti, the awakened Shakti.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I feel like people might not know what Shakti or Shaktipat means, what that is, and Muktananda was from… Was he from the Shaivite tradition or Hindu?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yes he was, although he knew all of the traditions of all the indic yogic traditions and mastered them all. But the creme de la creme of those philosophies is Shaivism or Kashmir Shaivism, which is tantric.

Elizabeth Rovere:

So it’s a Hindu tantra?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yes. And so Shakti, one way we might think of it is all hatha yoga, I’m going to say something that might surprise or make people mad, is Kundalini yoga. All of it is. All of these things people are doing with their body, the equilibration of right and left, forward and back is to promote the awakening of what we call in that tradition, Kundalini Shakti.

But it is the Holy Spirit. It’s energetic. It gives you a carrot and a stick. The carrot being, people wonder, how can I get my Shakti to awaken? Shall I do this, do that, do this? No, love people. It loves love. I can’t tell you why, but anything you do that has love in it is the thing that feeds the Shakti.

So you don’t have to be this incredibly serious yoga person. When you bought your coffee at Starbucks, if you sent love to the people around you, even the ones that you might normally not love, then the Shakti likes it. And it leaps and you can feel it.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Is there anything that you know in more of a Western framework that we could use to describe what that phenomenon is? I know you said the Holy Spirit, but even from our scientific Western paradigm.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Well, I could say that we don’t really understand the human nervous system that well, but it’s definitely a nervous system experience, which I guess all experiences are. But it is promoted by a certain kind of healthy flow of energy in the nervous system.

And I would describe it as you plug something into the wall. There’s two prongs, and you get a third thing which is this energy. And so those two prongs in the yogic system are considered the Ida and the Pingala which are the sun moon currents in the subtle body. We call them nadis. There’s 72,000 nadis, supposedly. But there’s these three important ones. And when the Ida and the Pingala are equilibrated, the central channel awakens. And I promote the idea of using your hatha yoga practices or whatever you do for this equilibration. But you can’t forget the love because people try “I’ll move my Shakti to this chakra.” You’re not going to tell the Shakti what to do. It is pure intelligence and it is awakened through love, just like The Sleeping Beauty. The Sleeping Beauty is like a paradigm. She’s awakened by the kiss of love.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Fascinating. Yeah.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

And so it’s not going to work if you try to… It makes me laugh when people, they’re going to do this thing, it’s not going to work because the Shakti thinks that’s funny, I think. You have to make love with it, really. And how do you do that? Well, I chant. I use my posture. Why? So if I extend the crown of my head up and the tailbone down because there’s a dynamic of the two polarities. I’m promoting the nice environment for the movement of Shakti. But we might just think that it’s nervous system energy. Well, what is the nervous system? The human nervous system is capable of the experience of God realization or sumati unitive experience, which everybody’s going to tell you, that’s the shizzle. And so we are capable of it, and we have ways to enter it. And as I said, just don’t forget the love part.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, I think of it as that feeling of something greater and even being really simplistic, but studies on altruism where people actually feel good when they’re doing something for someone else, that kind of thing. You actually feel a sense of inspiration. And so it’s the same kind of idea. And those kinds of positive feelings will affect your nervous system in wonderful ways.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Right. Exactly.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Some of the things that we’re talking about that sound kind of out there, or very esoteric, are more and more like, hey, yeah, this is going on. This is part of our human life. And they’re doing studies on ecstatic states and looking at how science is doing it. So how does it affect the body and the nervous system for wellbeing studies and how helpful it is.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yeah. That’s really true. Ecstasy is something that, what does it mean? Ecstasy means out of oneself, so you’re out of your ego. Sometimes we’ll use substances like alcohol or whatever, but it doesn’t work after a while. But we all need to get out of the egoic trap because it’s terribly scary to be identified only with this body and this story, obviously, because it’s not eternal. When you have ecstasy, you identify with the eternal, and your whole nervous system just gets completely bathed in the total cessation of stress and tension, which the awareness of your eternality brings.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Absolutely.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

It’s so good. And we have ways to get ecstasy. There’s the dancing, chanting, singing, but having a dinner party is a beautiful way to honor and bring about ecstasy in a way, I think, because you’re communing. I have this idea that the last supper where Jesus says, do this in remembrance of me, and everybody thinks you’re supposed to go with your head hung low to get a wafer. And I think he’s saying, have a dinner party.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, I love it. That’s great.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Love each other and enjoy one another, have wine and bread, and that’s how I want to be worshiped.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Ah, that’s beautiful. I love that.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I do too.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s fantastic. Yes. And it makes sense because that’s one of the things that’s interesting to me too about yoga and tantra, going back to these… They talk about the proto-religions and these mystery schools and practices that they were dancing around having bread and wine and perhaps doing the yoga postures. Was that part of it, do you think?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Well, I think moving the body is part of it. And if you see shamanic practices, a lot of times they’ll dance for three days like the Kung Bushmen, and they talk directly about the energy moving up the spine. They call it n/um, but they do it with a click. The click sound, or whatever, and they dance for a long time, and then they awaken that. I think that yoga practices are shamanic, and shamanism being a universal thing from all our root culture. So a human thing that we are all related to where our early ancestors, for one thing, they got a lot of energy and wisdom from animals. So the animal spirits is something that people… Obviously the bear clan, that’s probably a real thing. You’re watching bears and you identify that and you want the strength and the capability of a bear. So I think that when you do yoga postures, you’re going to animal shapes and you’re remembering your own evolution.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, that’s fascinating. Yeah. That’s interesting.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I think so.

Elizabeth Rovere:

On your website and just having known you and heard you speak a couple of times, there’s ways that you do all kinds of these beautiful parallels with images or symbols in Christianity, or even the writings in Christianity with Hinduism or I guess Vedanta or Shaivism. And for example, one is that you’ve got the gospel of Thomas quote with when the two become one, then you enter the kingdom.” And then there you go with the Hindu Shaivism and the Spanda and the heart, which would you be willing to talk about how those guys are connected and what that actually means? Because something about that aspect also of the heart and that sense of love, I find it very fascinating. I think people would find it really interesting.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

That beautiful piece from the gospel of Thomas. And that has a lot of really interesting things in it, the gospel of Thomas, and they seem tantric. And even what I mentioned about the dinner party idea, that’s very tantra. So tantra says, see the wonder and the amazement in having dinner with your friend. Yeah. It’s the constant practice of taking delight, Abhinavagupta says. It’s a practice.

Elizabeth Rovere:

What a great idea. What a great thing.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Isn’t that a good idea?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. Taking delight. Delight’s such a great word.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yes, and make sure you practice it. So if I get up… You can be dull and go get your coffee, same old, same old, or you can be appreciative, and it’s not that hard. I know you do it. I can see it in your face what kind of person you are. I read faces a lot.

So the heart is a very important concept, I suppose, in Shaivism, but also obviously Jesus and the sacred heart and all that. So in Shaivism, the heart has all these layers of meaning. And I would say that it is meaning itself, okay? So you could say, if your life doesn’t have a heart in it… And that was one of the Carlos Castaneda’s quotes for me, “there is only the path that has heart, any path that has heart, and there is where I travel, breathlessly.”

Elizabeth Rovere:

Beautiful.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

You remember that one? It’s from Don Juan, the teachings of Don Juan. And so if you don’t have that, you see that your life has no meaning. So meaning is a mystery in a way. So the heart is the meaning of things, so you could say love is the meaning. In Kashmir Shaivism, in the subtle body you have the heart chakra, which is called the anahata chakra, and that means the unstruck. So in the heart chakra is this constant vibration and you can tune yourself to listen to it. It’s a constant awe. Yeah, and it’s the beginning of om, but it’s just this awe. And it has no in breath or out breath, so it’s a continuous thing.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Can you hear it? Do you hear it?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yeah. You can attune to it anytime you want. It’s there. It’s there. All these things are there like your perfection, your purity is there. You’re not going to strive to be realized. You are realized. It’s all about calming the hell down and then just touching it. And then use the guidebook that says, hey Elizabeth, that experience you’re having, that’s the absolute. And they go, oh, now I appreciate it. Look, I tell you, I saw the Caravaggio and I didn’t think much of it. Then I read about it. I’m like, oh my God, I got to go get rich. That’s incredible. So it’s the appreciation of what is. And that is what the end of the day, it’s kind of like Dorothy, she was already home and she had to go through this whole harrowing thing to believe it.

Elizabeth Rovere:

But she had to find it for herself.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yes. Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Right.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

That’s such a great scripture is the Wizard of Oz, I think.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes, yes. That you’re already home. You just don’t quite know it.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yes. And what’s cool is she had the cowardly lion, the scarecrow, and the tin man, and that is yoga of action, the yoga of love and the yoga of knowledge. They need each other. You can’t be without any of them, really. And I loved it too because the Wicked Witch of the West is like Kali, the scary time because she turns over the hourglass and you’re terrified. And that’s the scariest thing you ever saw as that hourglass and that’s our condition.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes, right. Like when is our time up and what does that actually mean?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yeah, exactly. Flying monkeys.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Exactly. How have these kinds of awakening experiences affected how you see yourself, your life, and what this all means, this reality, so to speak?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Well, I think I see for one thing that… Here’s the thing. So I do and have had a lot of this non-ordinary stuff, and I’m like, why me? I can’t tell why. I don’t understand this. It’s kind of crazy. But when you confer with the angelic beings, they’re going, oh my God, you walked on the earth and you swam in the ocean and you fell in love. What was that like? We’ve been in our disembodied state forever, and this is the exciting moment here. And so know that this is the experience. You’ve been in the heavenly realms many, many times where you can do all kinds of stuff and hear om. This is the thing that’s amazing right here. To assume the limitations of this human life and to get on the battlefield. If you were an athlete, you’re in the game, man.

And that’s where all the angels are looking at you and envying that you get to have this experience. It’s scary. Of course when it’s over, it’s like Dorothy. You wake up, oh my God, that was all a dream. But for me, so I think I have these experiences so that I can teach effectively and because there’s a mission going on, I think, for this planet to step in at times of crisis and urge on the evolutionary leap beyond the dualism that we’re in. And so I feel like my job is to be able to help push along that process of evolution of consciousness and to the extent that I can. And it’s funny because you can be all those spiritual things, but your life is still going to have suffering and difficulty and all kinds of conditions. In America, we think if we suffer that we’re failing. It’s not true.

Elizabeth Rovere:

But that’s what I think too, is very interesting. Having an extraordinary experience or spiritual experience, practicing yoga isn’t going to stop the world from having… You’re not going to not have conflict or difficulties at times here and there. It’s not like you’ve suddenly… It’s not an escape.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Nope.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s part of human experience. And it’s a certain type of awareness which I think that you’re saying it helps you appreciate all of these kinds of phenomena as part of your own unique adventure.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

And you were saying earlier, too, having had that sense of something greater than ourselves or we’re a part of that thing that is greater than ourselves, I guess takes some of the fear or terror out of me and my body of however many years I have, right?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yes. Yes, it is. It’s a bio which means the fearless. And so what you do in meditation, and that’s another thing that I think I’m supposed to do. First of all, I feel like it’s the Irish in me. It’s like, oh my God, I teach people to breathe and I get paid for it. It’s incredible. It’s like, what a scam. But you can reach the source of all at the end of your breath, at the end of your exhalation, at the end of your inhalation. And you can leap into that, the arms of the absolute, every time you do breathe if you want to. And then you start to get a… It’s like you’re touching base. You know how a baby needs, well, some babies, my older son didn’t, he would just keep running. But some of them, they want to touch base. Mom’s still there. Okay. Now I can explore. So I do that with my breath centered meditation. I help people be able to access those experiences so they can touch the absolute, the eternal, and then explore.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. It’s interesting. I know you’ve also said before too, that the breath, you’ve talked about breath as spirit or inspiration, right? Respiration. It’s got spirit in it etymologically and breathing in spirit, breathing out and connecting. And then of course, when a person passes, that person’s last breath, and I think of it that way. It’s not that I still find myself, well, admittedly nervous about it. But when I think about it from a greater perspective in that way, I feel a little bit less afraid of it, of dying.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I have this knowledge that we’ve all died many, many, many times. The body has died many, many times. So you don’t have to be that scared. You could also think having a figurehead of God that you cozy up to, which I do, and it’s like, hey, buddy, you and me, right? That’s what I do because that also reduces fear. I feel that that’s another thing too. Since my fear is reduced, I can help other people. Fear is not… It has a lot of negative outcome if you do fear-based behavior. And you can see that we have to overcome it. Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. We have to overcome it if it’s certainly acting in a way that’s overtaking us.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Absolutely. Connecting that to the breath, Mary Oliver, the poet, has some kind of a phrase where it’s like… She says it much more eloquently and poetic than I’m going to say, but it’s something like, that little breath? That little breath you’re taking, and you’re calling it a life? Come on, deep breathe, get out there. Live your life.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Oh, wow.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. It’s actually a very good line.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I like that. I’m going to use that, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Go for it.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I’ve got to teach a breath centered thing next Monday, and I’m going to look for that.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

I love to bring poetry in.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, well, yeah. It was Niels Bohr said something like, the more we go further with what we’re doing with physics, we’re not going to be able to use regular language. We’re going to have to talk about it in poetry because there’s no other way to explain this.

So I am curious, it’s wonderful to talk to you because it’s like you’re so much at ease with talking about these kinds of things. And obviously because it’s been going on your whole life. It still happened. And there’s situations where people will have these kinds of experiences and still feel like, I have to pretend that I didn’t, or it’s not going to fit in my world because I am a medical doctor, or I’m a biologist, or I’m a school teacher. I can’t talk about this. And have you had interactions, or you’re married, you have kids, what do they think about all of this?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

It’s really funny because I never talk to my husband about this at all. I hope he doesn’t listen to… He might, but I don’t think he’ll pay much attention. It’s funny too, Elizabeth, not just that he isn’t interested, he doesn’t really… It’s not his favorite thing. So some people don’t like mysticism. That’s okay because it certainly helped to reduce taking pride because there are a lot of people that, they don’t dig it. So that’s okay because they don’t need to and I don’t talk about it.

And the only thing is that if I have friendships where I don’t talk about this stuff, it feels that I’m harboring an awful lot of myself that they don’t know about. There’s not all that much that is interesting about me. I have to tell you the truth. I’m not very skilled at anything, really.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Come on.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

It’s true. I tell you the truth. So in a way, you just find eventually, you figure out who you can talk to or want to talk about it, which is why I’m so happy to be here because you want to talk about it. And generally, I won’t talk about it when people aren’t interested at all.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. You don’t want to force it on somebody that’s like, what? Did you hear what she said?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

No.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, I can understand that. It’s really interesting. I meditate. Actually, one of my favorite types of meditation is transcendental meditation. There was a period of time where I was just doing my regular meditation, and then I had this vision of something and the same kind of experience. I was scared. Well, no, not exactly. I didn’t have the universe coming out of my eye, but I saw this mythical creature rising out of an ocean. And it’s like, oh my God.

And then I was like, am I okay? Am I okay? And I went to, at that time, talked to my therapist who was also a meditation person, and he was like, yeah, that’s okay. It sounds like that was a Naga or something that you saw coming out of the ocean. And I was like, oh. I was like, and so that’s cool? That’s okay? And he’s like, yeah, people have stuff like that when they meditate. Not a big deal. I’m not going to go send you to the psych ER. I was like, oh, okay.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

The Nagas, they’re snake deities and you’re wearing a snake.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I am.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

What is that snake that you’re wearing?

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s my good luck charm. You’re going to laugh. It says, fear eats the soul because I was nervous about today. I was like, I don’t want to be afraid. And then I have my little ring.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Okay, so you’ve got a snake ring. So I’m going to say that you have a spiritual heritage in that tradition, which is a very, very powerful Shakti tradition in India.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, wow. Cool.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Past lives is a thing that I experienced. That’s why I’m so relaxed about dying because I saw so many of them and I see them in other people.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, God, you don’t see mine, do you?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Well, the Naga thing…

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, the past lives are good, not my future.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

God forbid. Could we stop now? I’m done over here. Oh, God. But that thing about the universe coming out of my eye, so years later, 20 years later, I learned that in Shaivism, the glance of Shiva creates the universe through his glance. And he weeps because it’s so beautiful. And those tears are called the tears of Rudra, the Rudraksha. So I had this classic thing, but that Naga thing, I swear to God, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, it was cool. It was this snake-like thing with wings just rising up out of the ocean.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Oh my God. Quetzalcoatl is the winged serpent and if you look at the caduceus, it’s the two snakes and there’s wings on top. So that winged serpent you’re going to see it all throughout the world as a symbol of the awakened Kundalini.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, cool.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yeah. I love what you said because you connected this, the Naga awakening. I want you to start looking into the Naga tradition. It’s very interesting.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, it’s curious. I will.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Yeah, they’re real beings and they’re serpent beings.

Elizabeth Rovere:

There was one thing, I have to just say this because I thought it was so cool that you had said this. Can I repeat something that you said?

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Sure.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Which I just think is awesome. It’s about yoga. And given that you’ve spent 40 years doing yoga, well, so we were talking about this with yoga and yoga as I guess grounding the spirit in the body, awakening the spirit in the body, or awakening neuro physiologically. And you said that “yoga prepares the body for a deep somatic cognition of our infinitude”. That’s a great thing to say. That is amazing. So I don’t know, maybe if you have two words on that, and then I can just wrap this up.

Mary Reilly Nichols:

Well, and so not to make it seem like a far away thing, but anyone who’s done Savasana at the end of a class… What I think you’re doing when you do the yoga class, you’re taking the dog out for a walk. Otherwise, it’s going to be wanting to bringing the leash over. So you took the dog for a walk, now it’s ready to settle down. And so in the deep relaxation, you can perceive the subtle vibration. And back to the idea of spanda, which is in Kashmir Shaivism, there’s an understanding that the substrate of reality is vibratory. And the string theory thing also says that too. And so what you’re doing, so you’ve now made your body a tuning fork and you now can start resonating with the infinite. And you let it just sort of bathe you. And the infinite is experienced in the heart. It’s as if the heart is the sensory organ for the infinite because that’s why we… We call it love.

But love is the experience of infinitude. And we love that because it takes us away from the fear of death. And so when you do things with your hatha yoga bodies, you are removing deep tension, hopefully. You’re giving your body full expression. I don’t advocate, you’re trying to do things that look like yoga journal. I think that what you’re doing is exploring your own system, which has roots back to 3.5 billion years of evolution, that’s chanting in your DNA and that you’re connecting with it, and that’s what you’re doing. And so it should be a very deep sensuous experience, yoga, and you should love it. You should just dig into your practice with gusto.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That was Mary Reilly Nichols. Thank you so much, Mary.

To learn more about Mary’s work, check out www.meditationmary.com. Please come back next time on Wonderstruck, when I’ll be talking with Father Francis Tiso, a Catholic priest and a Tibetan Buddhist scholar, about a concept called the Rainbow Body. The phenomenon that when a person dies, they manifest as a radiant, colorful light.

Father Tiso’s extraordinary scholarship on the Rainbow Body and its relationship to the resurrection of Jesus Christ has broadened interfaith dialogues and the nature of reality. He’ll be joining me for a part one of a two-part conversation.

For more information about Wonderstruck, our guests, and some really exciting upcoming events, check out wonderstruck.org and please follow the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and subscribe on YouTube. We truly want to hear from you with your feedback, reviews, and ratings.

You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook at WonderstruckPod. Wonderstruck is produced by Wonderstruck Productions, along with the teams at Baillie Newman and FreeTime Media. Special thanks to Brian O’Kelley, Eliana Eleftheriou and Travis Reece. Thank you for listening. And remember, be open to the wonder in your own life.