𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐥𝐞 𝐕𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐈𝐬 𝐓𝐨𝐨 Afraid 𝐭𝐨 𝐏𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡
I have struggled with suicidal ideation and self harm for most of my teen and adult life.
Thanks to a combination of Modern Mystery School Healings and Trainings (yes the trainings helped me) and Mental Health Services, today I no longer desire to do a single ounce of harm to myself or anyone else.
How is this possible??
I started cutting myself in high school. Sometimes, when I wonder why I became a Healer, I look at my scars. Arms, legs, just deep enough to feel something, not to open a vein.
I was depressed. Anxious, before anxiety became a trend. (Not a fad, a trend). I was a kid trying to navigate a painful existence.
Maybe that sounds emo to you, or pathetic, or ungrateful. Ok. That’s fine. I felt like a burden, like no matter what I did, the world was a worse place because I was in it.
That was not just in my head. I tried to tell people I felt that way and they shut me down. Told me I was thinking about things too much, that how I felt didn’t matter, that I should think about things from their perspective instead.
I see this happening today with kids in high school who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders because of what they can watch or read on the internet.
It has to stop.
I wanted to die. I contemplated suicide for many years. Many years. I wrestled with myself, going back and forth between “this is the coward’s way out” and “you’re too useless to follow through on it anyway”.
The thoughts got really bad in 2012.
I went to college in 2006. I was accepted to a top-tier engineering school. I couldn’t wait to leave the house. Go live in the dorms for a bit, be on my own. Get out of my parents hair for a while.
I felt terrible leaving my siblings behind when I did this.
I went away to school, and I was straight edge in high school. Didn’t do much, maybe tried some coconut rum that my friend had stolen from her parents basement once or twice.
I tried alcohol and marijuana for the first time during my summer before college. They say that the kids who don’t party in high school usually get out of control when they go away to school for the first time. I would agree with that statement, yes.
I dropped out of that school halfway through my Sophomore year. There was one incident where some kids in my dorm were partying. I had a whiteboard on my door where people could write messages to my roommate and I. I lived in a co-ed dorm, and as the school year went on it seemed like two main groups formed. They weren’t really friends with each other, but some people (like me) were cool with most people in each group.
One young man, someone I had considered a friend at the time, got too drunk one night and wrote on my white board “what’s 50 pounds overweight and should drop out of engineering?”
I came back to my room after a night of drinking with a different group of my friends to find the message on my door. I was crushed. You might say “oh, that’s not that bad. why would that bother you?”
It made me question why I was at that school. Was I worthy of my education? Did people really say things like this about me when I wasn’t around and then pal around and joke with me like it was nothing?
I had a roommate who didn’t like how messy I was. I am pretty messy. My stuff was everywhere, but I kept it to my side of the room. That bothered her. So one day, my roommate and another woman from our dorm asked if they could clean my space because it was bothering them so much.
My sister and her friend had come to visit me a few weeks before this happened. My sister had left me a note on the whiteboard inside my room. I wanted to keep it as something to remind me of her. I needed that note.
When I came back and the room was cleaned, I felt disturbed. One of them had decided that organizing my underwear drawer wasn’t too invasive. They also wiped my whiteboard clean, erasing my sister’s note.
I was livid. Devastated. I felt violated, and like they took something valuable away from me.
Again you might say “oh, that’s not a big deal. why would you care about that? just get over it.”
So 18 months into my college career, I drop out. Definitely made my parents proud with that one. Started going to the local community college part time and working.
I wanted to work in the world before I decided what a college degree would help me accomplish. What career, what industry, what kind of people did I want to work with and for?
I didn’t know. I had one job in high school working as a Rita’s Italian Ice server. I volunteered regularly at the hospital near my house. Neither of those were career paths I was considering pursuing, so what was I going to use the $100,000 degree that I was working for?
Especially in 2006.
What I heard the most was “Just get the degree, you can figure things out once you get it. You will be able to make so much money once you have a Master’s degree.” Right. But students were committing suicide and going insane from getting Master’s degrees. Doctorates. People who had gone to college and were in the workforce were telling everyone “I got a degree and I don’t work anywhere near the field that I got my degree in!” Was it really worth it for me to put myself through that?
No? That was just stupid! It made no financial sense for me to commit to get my Masters degree in Engineering, but everyone was telling me that it did.
So I made the wrong decision. I dropped out. Everyone thought I was crazy, stupid, wrong, but what could they do? Technically, I was an adult.
So I moved back home. My parents were thrilled about it. So proud of their drop out genius daughter who wasted God knows how much money in student loans just to give up.
I signed up for community college for the Spring semester in 2008. I went to school part time and worked full time. Usually more than one job at a time.
I worked in liquor stores, I worked in restaurants, cafes. I was an Office and Volunteer Coordinator for Habitat for Humanity. I worked on a farm. Honey Brook Organic Farm, a beautiful powerhouse organic CSA. The farmers grew all kinds of fruits, vegetables, herbs, flowers. The team of laborers were out there daily tending to the crops, planting new ones, weeding, harvesting, boxing up the fruits and vegetables so that twice a week members could come and pick their share.
On the days the farm stand was open, I managed the farm stand. They had multiple locations at the time, and I was at the one closer to me. I LOVED IT! I got to see people all day. Part of my job was taking heavy boxes off the back of a refrigerator truck or letting the guys know when I needed more because stock in the stand was running low. When the stand was closed, I was out in the fields doing whatever had to be done. I was getting a full body workout 5 days a week. I would come home dirty, sweaty, exhausted. It was the best time of my life, at the time. Maybe still to this day, if I’m honest. I loved it.
That was 2008 to 2012. I was working full time, 2-3 jobs at a time, going to school, getting my Associates degree. I kept hopping around trying to figure out “am I going to major in Psychology, Business, Engineering?” I kept changing, and eventually I settled on Engineering since it seemed doable.
During this time, I had an opportunity to move out of my parents house. One of my best friends had a roommate situation and he was looking for someone to move in with him at a condo that his mom owned. She had her own house, and he was living there with a friend and times were changing. He asked me to move in and I was ecstatic! Living with him was almost the most fun I have ever had living with roommates.
I think this was in 2008. While I was packing up my stuff to move into the condo with him, I kept asking myself this question. I had been studying in school, preparing for maybe a Psychology Associates Degree at the time, and I was taking an Eastern Philosophy class. One of the questions the Professor asked us to ask ourselves was “Do you believe in God, or do you believe that you are the center of the Universe and everything revolves around you?”
That question rocked me to my core. So I was packing my stuff up. I had a huge surge of energy and stayed up all night boxing things up. As I’m packing, I’m asking myself “Do I believe in God? Is God real?”
Mind you, I had been suffering with my mental health at the time, and now had a budding substance abuse problem from the drugs and alcohol I encountered at school.
And I’m asking myself these questions while I’m packing up. I get the urge to write down the question and all of a sudden it feels like I’m having this huge spiritual awakening.
I don’t know how to describe what it feels like when your mind or your awareness expand beyond what you thought was even possible, but that’s what happened. All of a sudden, I’m standing in front of my bedroom window, facing South East, watching the sun rise. I fall to my knees and hear this Big Booming Voice say “Yes. There is a God. You are God. We are all God.”
I was shooketh, to say the least. I had no fucking clue what to do about that. All I knew was that I believed it. I could feel it. It became a part of me that day in 2008.
And no one around me could help me understand. I was excited, I was scared. What was that?? How did that happen?
No one else had ever mentioned anything like that happening to them before. I didn’t know who to ask, who to turn to.
One of my other best friend’s father was really religious. Her parents were devout Christians, and I thought “maybe I should ask him for help.” Jesus was the only other person on the planet that I knew of who declared “I am God.” And I loved Jesus a lot. He was always helping people.
So I did something a little crazy. The big booming voice in my head made me do it. Just kidding. After I had this massive revelation about human beings in general, I started feeling these undeniable synchronistic urges. Like instructions from the beyond. I don’t know, I had a lot I was trying to figure out.
One of these little intuitive hits was to take my Dad’s car and go talk to my friend’s Dad. So, I did. In probably one of the weirdest ways possible.
I terrified everyone in my family while I tried to figure out what the hell was going with me.
I won’t get into the details here, maybe another time. The point is, I broke open. Keep that in mind for later.
So eventually I get through what I felt was a series of tests or assignments from the divine. I move in with my friend, we live together for a while, we have a good time. He was gay, so not the kind of fun you’re imagining. More like house parties and him helping me with what to wear. Painting our living room to look like people were trying to climb our walls. It was a great time.
He was actually one of the only people in my life who, when I would declare “I am God!” He didn’t judge me. He played along. We had fun with it for a long time. We made up our own rules about life and made it play.
I love him. I still do, even though we haven’t talked in a while.
So…back to the suicide piece. I wasn’t on constant vigilance against suicidal ideation. The urges would come and go. They started in high school when I was feeling like I wasn’t good enough. They came up every now and then over the years but nothing major. I stopped cutting after high school which was good. But then I turned to drugs and alcohol, which are even worse forms of self harm. I didn’t see that at the time, but I do now.
But then, things got really bad. My friend decided to move to Philadelphia. His cousin and her boyfriend were going to move into the condo. I had gotten behind on rent and owed him and his mom some money, so I understood. I moved back home with my parents. My mom ended up paying my debt after some time.
Moving back home, I felt devastated. I felt like a burden on my family. I felt like a failure. College drop out, living with my parents in my 20’s when I should be out with my own place. Not able to afford much because I’m working these low income jobs. I hated myself.
I hated myself. I wanted to die.
I could not stop fantasizing about death. I grew up in a time where we had the internet, we had MySpace, I could use Yahoo or Google to look for things. AIM, AOL, all the fun stuff. I would use those tools to look up ways to kill yourself sometimes.
I planned it all out. Pills would be the easiest way to die, but what if I threw them up, or I didn’t take enough and I just ended up braindead or with really terrible organ failure? I couldn’t shoot myself because I would probably miss. I was not going to stab myself in the stomach or cut a vein open, that would take too much commitment. Maybe I could kill myself by crashing my car into a median or driving it off a ditch. I was not going to tie bricks around my ankles and walk out into the ocean, that would never work.
I thought about death a lot.
In 2012, I reached a breaking point. I wanted to die. Life was not worth living. I was a failure. I was never going to make it to a place where I could live on my own. I was a burden to my family and the people in my life. Death was the only option that made sense for me as a worthless, terrible human being.
One day in 2012, I’m sitting in my bedroom, the same one I had grown up in as a child, the one I was never going to leave because I was too worthless of a human being to ever accomplish anything real. Fighting with myself to not let these harmful thoughts win. Not knowing if I could keep fighting with them or if the fighting would ever end.
And I hear this voice. “What if you just pretend you are going to kill yourself tomorrow? How would your life look today? What would you be doing differently right now?”
I do not know where the voice came from. But I heard it. And I listened. That is the key.
I listened to this insane voice inside my worthless mind and I thought “if I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I would just go live my life.”
THE CRAZIEST PART IS THAT IT WORKED
I DID. I was able to get up off the floor, start planning my suicide like it was going to happen tomorrow, and then plan what I wanted to do on my last day on Earth.
That technique has helped me every single time the suicidal thoughts come back.
Now, how does the Modern Mystery School play into all of this?
I will tell you.
After these awakenings, one to the reality that we are all God, and another to the fact that I am stronger than the dark, I felt inspired.
Up until that point I was doing research. Trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Where I wanted to serve, how I wanted to help people.
Jesus helped people. Jesus was cool. Jesus was a Healer. He has a whole book about how he helped people his entire life. He was intelligent. He ran away so he could study at 12 years old.
I wanted to be like Jesus. So I thought “how can I become a Healer? That sounds cool.”
I don’t know why I thought it was possible. Maybe I had encountered some things before. I was into astrology and tarot. My friends and I would play with them together. We liked new age stuff, it was pretty cool. I had been meditating, learning about spirituality and religion in school.
After that awakening in 2012, I started to get really curious. If I was going to die tomorrow, why was I wasting all this time right now? What did I want to do with it?
Also in 2012, another sad thing happened. My great Aunt passed away. She was loved and revered by everyone in our family. She was energetic, kind, warm, caring, nurturing. When she passed away it was a devastating loss to everyone around her. I was in this space where I was getting old enough to start seeing the world the way the adults in my family do, but still feeling like I didn’t know much because I had been a kid my whole life before that.
My cousin, one of her daughters, invited me to come live with them while I was there for in Boston for the funeral that year. I had wanted to move to Massachusetts for a while. My parents are from there, my whole family aside from us and a few cousins live in Massachusetts or New Hampshire. So I contemplated it. After the funeral I went home, had this massive awakening, and started to question what I was doing with my life in a hopeful way.
So December 2012, I looked up my college transcripts online. I had been majoring in Engineering at the time. I used the tools my school provided to assess what credentials were needed for each degree, and I realized I had already earned a Mathematics Associate. I was 2 classes away from my Engineering degree but I thought “I have to get the fuck out of New Jersey. Out of this house.” So I fucking did.
I moved to Massachusetts January 2013. Long story short after that, I found the Modern Mystery School Boston, where my Guide Jordan Bain was leading a Max Meditation System™ and talking about Healers Academy (I think). I missed the talk and ended up there on the break between the talk and meditation.
It was a really strange experience because I thought I was walking into a healing fair. I had imagined I was going to a convention center where lots of different spiritual healers would have tables set up talking about what they offered, and I would be able to talk to them, see what they were selling, see if there was a teacher or two I might want to learn from. I had been doing online courses to understand crystals and healing more, but I wanted something in the real world. Something tangible, someone I could talk to face to face.
So I walk in and it’s not a healing fair. It’s an intimate setting with a few people, on a break. I walk up to the door and the woman, who was working with Jordan at the time, said “Hello. Welcome. We’ve been expecting you. We have a seat for you.” And she did. Right there in the center of the room was a seat for me. I have no clue how she knew I was coming. I did hear about the event through Facebook – the greatest social media app on the planet since MySpace – but I don’t know if I rsvp’d or not.
How did she know I was coming? Why did I arrive at the perfect time to attend the meditation? And why was everyone being so nice to me? It was weird.
Really weird.
I loved the meditation. I had been meditating for a while before I found the Modern Mystery School. This meditation was different. Deeper, somehow. More relaxing. More soothing. Also more enlightening.
I spoke with Jordan after the event. I shared how I wanted to become a Healer. I wanted to make the world a better place. He said “great, I’ll see you for a Life Activation next week.” Not in those exact words, I had a choice to say yes if I wanted to book the session. He told me how much it costs. And I knew. I just knew that this was what I was searching for. For YEARS I was looking to find a place where I could learn how to do healings that would help people in real ways. Not make stuff up, or go out and do some rituals that I didn’t know how to do or what they were meant for or who created them. I wanted someone I could rely on to help me understand what I did not already know.
I found that and more at the Modern Mystery School.
I was Life Activated in June 2016.
I was initiated as an Adept through the Empower Thyself 2 day training and initiation on September 10th and 11th 2016.
My life was forever changed as a result of these alchemical tools.
I didn’t know what any of this stuff was. Where it came from. What I knew is that it didn’t kill me. It actually felt like a huge burden had been lifted off my shoulders. Especially Empower Thyself.
EMPOWER THYSELF IS WHERE MY SPIRITUAL AWAKENING WAS CONFIRMED AS AN ACT OF GOD AND NOT INSANITY
Empower Thyself was the first time ever that I heard “you are God”. I almost died.
WHAT????
I HAVE BEEN RIGHT THIS WHOLE ENTIRE TIME??
Everyone. EVERYONE. Had been acting like I was crazy.
I mean to be fair, I was acting crazy. I was Googling ways to kill myself for God’s sake. I was not well.
The rest is history from there. I still struggled with suicidal ideation for a while. After Life Activation, life was hard because I started to see where I was letting people mistreat me while I just smiled and acted like everything was ok. That is enough to make any sane person want to die.
It wasn’t the Life Activation’s fault that I wanted to die. I believe we have established that at this point, right? All the rational adults and even children can see that in my story.
The suicidal thoughts were already there. The Life Activation did not conjure them up. It raised my awareness to the level that I could see what was making me want to die and do something about it.
What did I do about it? I went to Empower Thyself. I thought of it as a little birthday treat for me.
I can go on and on about the benefits that I experience daily as a Life Activation Practitioner, Healer, Ritual Master in the Lineage of King Salomon. I do actually, I write a lot of it on my Facebook and Instagram every day at this point.
The greatest benefit in all of this is that I found a path to becoming like the Healer I admired – Jesus.
I am still waiting for the class where Founder Gudni or Sovereign Ipsissimus Dave teaches us to walk on water. I hope I haven’t missed it.
I got to become a Healer. I got to learn how to serve the way Christ serves humanity – from my Heart, not my head. Through my actions and my words, not judging everyone and then wondering why the world sucks.
𝐌𝐲 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐮𝐥, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐈 𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐥𝐬 𝐬𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐦𝐲 𝐛𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐧 𝐌𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐒𝐜𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐥 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐢𝐭 𝐬𝐨.
I guess not much has changed. I am still living at home with my mom. But I don’t want to kill myself anymore. The healings AND the teachings that we receive at the Modern Mystery School gave me the foundation to stop fighting suicidal thoughts and just live a life where I get to have fun again.
I have seen many therapists over the years too. In 2012, I didn’t have one. In 2016 I think I did. I think I started seeing a woman shortly after I moved to Boston. She was wonderful. We worked together for at least a year, but then things changed and I couldn’t see her anymore. While I was taking Kabbalah, I saw an amazing counselor at BARCC, the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center for free for several months until those sessions ran out. I was able to use the tools from Kabbalah to do inner child work with my therapist.
Even in 2021 or 2022 I was seeing a therapist. Best therapist ever. So kind, lovely, she listened to my stories with compassion. She laughed whenever I would get upset at my male coworkers for being idiots. She understood. She gave me tools to help me handle the extreme feelings of anger I had towards myself, my family, and the world. She left to have a baby, the company I was working with assigned me a new therapist and she helped me a lot too. Then she informed me I didn’t have health insurance anymore and that was news to me so I had to figure that out. I stopped seeing her.
I don’t need a therapist anymore anyway. I no longer want to die. I no longer want to harm myself. And you know how I know that’s true? How I know that the suicidal thoughts are gone for good? Because I laugh at the idea of putting a picture of myself on a Sun and turning it into a ridiculous meme. I make videos and content and I get to play with life again like I’m a little kid in a 30-something year old body. Why would I want to die? What is going to happen on the other side of whatever course of action I would choose to take to end my physical life? Why can’t I just do the thing that I think is waiting for me on the other side, now?
I do not in any way shape or form believe nor endorse that Modern Mystery School healings or classes are a replacement for modern psychotherapy, counseling work, mental health coaching, even physical health and wellness coaching, treatment, nutrition counseling, medical advice or treatment. We have consent forms that we sign before every program reminding us of this fact, that we agree to or else we cannot attend the class.
Now do some students use the work that way? Of course we do. Because we are looking for Light in every place we can. Light heals. Light makes the world a better place. It helps you see the world in a good way so you’re not so screwed up in the head every time you walk out the door.
Some of us have been taught to neglect our physical bodies and wellbeing in favor of spiritual pursuits. It doesn’t work that way though. We need to take care of the physical in order for the spiritual to have a healthy vessel. We have to take care of the spiritual, otherwise what is the point of the physical body?
The Modern Mystery School works in conjunction with mental and physical health services, not against them. We – me being a student of the school and certified practitioner, not a representative of the organization MMS INT at large – we work in harmony with these fields that support the overall health and wellbeing of humanity. We are not in opposition to any kind of true healthcare service.
Other spiritual healing services? That’s a different story. My aim as a Modern Mystery School Certified Life Activation Practitioner is to empower people so they understand the difference between real, life-saving, life giving medicine and new age garbage that actually does more harm to your health than good.
We need doctors. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, working professionals who invest a lot of time and money into their professions in order to save lives, to help people make it through the day to day so we can live. There would be no reason for me to be opposed to any of them. I want my clients, and myself, to be able to afford the best professionals in every industry. To pay them top dollar, treat them well, recognize and amplify their accomplishments so they can serve to make the whole world a better place for all.
Is that enough for you? At what point do you decide “maybe we were wrong about the Modern Mystery School?” “Maybe we are done encouraging desperate young YouTubers to spread slander and lies, to risk being sued by this massive corporation that gets bigger every second of the day, just so they can have their 20 milliseconds of infamy. We’re done telling them they are doing the right thing, because we were wrong. We are sorry, to everyone in the Modern Mystery School family, for smearing dirt on your names, dragging you through the mud, because we thought we were doing the right thing.” Or did you know you weren’t doing the right thing already?
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Melissa Reddick 