Leaning into MYSTERY

Well, hasn’t it been a minute?

In August of 2024 I completed the master’s portion of my doctoral program at Pacifica Graduate Institute, and in August of 2025 I completed the three years of monthly traveling back and forth to California for coursework.

When I returned home, I began to have a sense that I needed a break before embarking on writing my dissertation—the final step of the PhD that will likely take two to five years. I could write about navigating the grief from the end of my program and saying farewell to my eight classmates whom I adored as we dispersed into normal life again. Or I could write about the lessons I am learning around balance and rest and how I came to decide that taking a term off was essential (despite my Virgo placements screaming at me to forge onward).

The Soul’s Return to Source and The Telepathy Tapes

Instead, I am going to write about the thing that exploded into my consciousness and truly changed my life in 2025 in the most magical ways: The Telepathy Tapes podcast.

If you have not had the pleasure of listening to The Telepathy Tapes yet, let this be your sign to go forth and listen. The first four episodes are composed of many of the scientific experiments that define the validity of Ky Dickens’s subsequent episodes, but if you hang in there, it gets progressively more abstract and deliciously mysterious.

Backing up just a bit, I worked on the first chapter of my dissertation from April to July. My working title became The Soul’s Return to Source: Subjective Mysticism as Nexus Between Depth Psychology and Religion and much of those months were spent banging my head against a wall trying to figure out a linear, clear way of putting into words what my intuition has been trying to grasp and sort out about psychotherapy.

To remove the academic jargon from my title, what I can tell you is that my dissertation will be about psychotherapy not as a science as modernity has co-opted, but as a mysterious and mystical art form that ultimately is not about “fixing” clients but returning them to source. When I say source, I simply mean the pure consciousness from which we all originate. Some may define it as God, but my psychic/mediumship practice increasingly tells me that what these thousands of religions call “God” is the same pure consciousness, no matter what proper noun we assign it.

How This Relates to Being a Psychotherapist

Over the last few years of being a psychotherapist, I have found myself bearing the weight of the aforementioned societal pressure to “fix.” Words like “evidence-based” are used to inform clients about the superiority and speed at which a therapist will fix your symptoms and have you back out the door to normal life again, feeling flawless.

Except, if you look around at humanity and pause to reflect on your own emotional state, I suspect that a quick-fix, evidence-based psychotherapy is not putting much of a dent in tending the soul of an aching world. Certainly, these practices have an important place when it comes to acute mental health emergencies, but then what? Research shows us that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy does well to eliminate acute symptoms of anxiety and depression, but it does not address the reason why anxiety and depression exist in the first place. Thus, we can mitigate symptoms, but they will return again and again until we stop to wonder why.

I used to believe—because this is what they teach you in school—that most of these symptoms were purely psychological: a result of relational trauma with family members, grief from sudden death and loss, car accidents, or unforeseen life chaos. There is no doubt that these psychological factors contribute, and yet, after being a therapist for over a decade, I cannot shake the feeling that there is something more going on.

There Is Something More

After listening to The Telepathy Tapes, and taking a myriad of classes on mythology and religion for my PhD, I now believe that the “something more” is an inborn human design, curiosity, and longing to seek out and return to that source—the pure consciousness that we are all descendants of. While much of our suffering does stem from the trials of our worldly existence, it is then deafeningly amplified when both the therapist and client are left to “fix” problems without acknowledging the presence of that higher consciousness and its role or absence in our lives.

This poses a problem in the psychotherapy room where only two entities are welcomed, when, in fact, three exist. The therapist is seen as the problem-solver and the client is seen as the problem-to-be-solved. In reality, the therapist is akin to a medium whose job is to serve as a conduit between the client (soul) and source (pure consciousness). As a therapist, my work is not to fix, but to become the bridge between soul and pure consciousness until the client can build a bridge themselves. This means my work is holy and not scientific (though I thoroughly believe that while science has not caught up to consciousness yet, it will someday). A therapist’s work is an art that our ancestors practiced and understood long before modern-day insurance bought us all up and undersold our holy practice.

Leaning Into the Mystery

The more I defined this for myself and my work, the more I felt a desire to lean away from the evidence-based techniques that leave me depleted, and lean towards the mystery. I gave myself permission to play and embrace my pre-existing curiosities about mediumship and psychic abilities.

As long as I can remember, I have had pre-cognitive dreams. Recently, I experienced a series of synchronicities and saw a phenomenal local medium, Erika Anderson, who forever changed my life and work. With her classes and mentorship, and with the new season of The Telepathy Tapes, I am learning to discern the consciousness that has always, always, always been a part of my work. Even when it was only a whisper that scared me, or the nagging sense that I ignored because, in therapy school, they sure as shit don’t teach you that your intuition is connected to that consciousness. In school, we are taught that intuition is psychological and not mystical. I am reclaiming my intuition as the mysticism that has always been my compass, and it feels damn good.

Making Sense of It All

In truth, I write to share what has been on my heart in hopes of creating ripples of change, as much as I write to make sense of my life. And boy howdy, has there been a lot to make sense of!

Even as I write this with all my eagerness to tell you everything that has unfolded, I can hear Spirit reminding me, “One thing at a time.”

So, for now, one thing at a time.