The Medicine of Mystery: Why We Don’t Need to “Resolve” Everything
In the world of Western self-help and pop spirituality, there’s often an unspoken promise: that with enough healing, manifestation work, nervous system regulation, or spiritual insight, we can finally arrive at a place of certainty, calm, and control.
It’s an extremely seductive idea, don’t get me wrong—especially in a culture that fears chaos, worships productivity, and treats ambiguity like a pathology.
But what if that promise itself is part of the problem…
The (Dis)Illusion of Resolution
More than ever I’ve been seeing a surge of “regulate-your-nervous-system” routines as an answer for The Times. And its no wonder we’re often taught to approach discomfort like a problem to be solved. Or perhaps a more apt metaphor would be: a mole that needs whacking.
We are coached to breathe it away, journal it into submission, or raise our vibration above it. While these practices to help us cope with hardship have their place (I teach and train others in them myself!) YET when they’re misused, can become spiritualized control mechanisms. They become ways to sedate the unknown instead of meeting and witnessing what needs to be met and witnessed.
In this way, the self-help, healing and spiritual industries offer silver bullet solutions that mirrors Aldous Huxley’s vision of soma in the dystopian classic Brave New World: a clean, feel-good escape from discomfort that keeps the deeper questions at bay. It offers us bliss—but at the cost of true transformation. (And I don’t think the use of the word ‘soma’ given its etemology is coincidence either.)
Mystery as Medicine
The truth is the unknown is not something we graduate out of once we’re “healed.” It’s the very terrain of being human, the threshold where transformation happens.
Liminality—the space between identities, stories, seasons, and certainties—is not a problem to solve. It’s where we remember.
In ancient and esoteric traditions, from The Tao to the Tarot, paradox and not-knowing are not obstacles. It is raw material, or really the PRIMA MATERIA as the alchemists would say.
The alchemist and mystic won’t sell a comfy promise of airtight resolutions. They sit beside the fire of the unknowable and say: make yourself comfortable. And maybe then proceed to make you a warm cup of tea🫖
When I teach about divination in my course and my mentorship program, I try to remind students that they are here to work WITH the mystery: and the “trick” is to align and harmonize with it, not resist against it.
The power behind magic, synchronicity and divination? It’s learning how to work with chaos and speak its language.
The Power of Paradox
The ego wants certainty. It wants answers. It wants the quick fix, the get-rich-in-30-days schemes. Ego is not only predictable, it NEEDS predictability, and to always know where this is going, and how long until it gets there. It needs to unpack exactly what it means and then quantify it on a series of bar graphs.
Something magical happens when we can allow opposites to coexist:
Grief <-> Gratitude
Power <-> Surrender
Beauty <-> Decay
Chaos <-> Order
Paradox is weird.
It’s a both/and approach to everything has a way of making you question the nautre of existence. And at the same time it’s not about contradiction. In truly embracing one end of the spectrum, we give ourselves over to embracing its opposite. Sacred tensions are often depicted by artists of old and new. In stories of ancient and contemporary.
For example, artist Leonora Carrington showed in her surreal paintings, the feminine psyche is not linear or clean. It’s wild, unhinged, very VERY strange, fluid, and full of shape-shifting imagery. Artists like her (e.g. Yayoi Kusama and others) don’t offer definitive answers they make you wade in the beautiful sacred “WTF”.
Leonora Carrington’s work
The Threshold
In my own life, one of the most powerful threshold initiations for me on my journey, was leaving the church. When I left the Evangelicalism, the religion and community I'd been involved from my teens to early adulthood, I felt like I was gathering broken pieces of a shattered mirror. In leaving, I felt like it broke my sense of self into many parts that I had to slowly put back together. (And still doing so)
Looking back I can see how the disillusion cracked me open… and yet..
Yayoi Kusama’s Infinite Mirrors Exhibit
The Crack is How the Light Gets In
Darkness is never just one thing.. not just a test, not just a counterbalance to the light. It, for me, was a portal. To leave dogma and return to disbelief and nothingness was, the first time, when I really began to know “God”.
Turns out god wasn’t an insecure man-child the church had once personified, but a force that couldn’t be represented. A force that can only be understood through embodying love, and through surrendering to the journey of death and rebirth.
It was only when I left the church I think all the tenants of Christianty and the esoteric knowledge that Jesus imparted really became Real for me. I want to clarify, I don’t mean ‘real’ as in ‘certain with absolute facts’, but as ‘deep inner intuitive knowing’.
Years after leaving the church I’d come into one personal revelation after another and it would remind me: Ohh this is what Jesus meant when he said ____.
I’d come to know the gospel in a new, deeply mystical way that required me to step away from the institutions that supposedly represented it.
This shift allowed me to (re)discover the paradox
I am the resurrection and the life.
The one who believes in me will live, even though they die
There is a kind of healing that happens when we stop trying to believe any one dogma. I’ve found it’s much more powerful to hold what is unresolved with reverence.
Maybe that is what true worship is about. Worship of our place in the grand mystery—the everything and nothing, the everyone and no one at the same time.
An Invitation for Uncertainty - Q’s to Ask
What if I don’t need to resolve this?'
What if the discomfort is not a sign of failure, but of initiation?
What if I can stay here, in the in-between a little longer, where the alchemy and medicine is?
Let mystery be your teacher.
Let paradox be a prayer.
Let not-knowing be the doorway to everything Real.
Sending love for the journey🕊️
Christina