Lalita Hayes

Contributing Editor, Mysticism

Lalita Hayes writes about mysticism, the dharma traditions, and the sky. She is the author of Everyday Practices for a Magical Life and is interested in what contemplatives actually did, day to day, more than what was later said about them. Her pieces cover the mystics, the teachers who carried Eastern practice west, and the astronomy underneath astrology.

Stories by Lalita Hayes

• Mercury Retrograde: What Is Actually Happening Up There Three or four times a year, Mercury seems to stop and back up across the sky. It never does. The truth is geometry, and an ancient puzzle.
• Scorpio: The Scorpion Is One of the Oldest Signs in the Sky Babylonian astronomers named its burning sting some three thousand years ago. Since then it has been a Greek assassin, a dragon's tail and Māui's fishhook.
• Jung, Bill W. and the Origins of Alcoholics Anonymous A Swiss psychiatrist's verdict on one hopeless drinker started the chain that became AA. The outline is true. The dates Bill Wilson gave are not.
• Teresa of Ávila and the Interior Castle A Spanish nun who outlived her own dug grave mapped the soul as a castle of seven rooms. Then her body was scattered across Europe.
• Hildegard of Bingen: The Abbess Who Saw the Living Light She said heaven dictated her books. A pope agreed, a neurologist diagnosed migraine, and neither account quite covers what she left behind.
• Alice Coltrane's Turn Toward God After John Coltrane died in 1967, his widow went through an ordeal, found a guru, made two astonishing records and left the music business for an ashram.
• William James and the Four Marks of a Mystical Experience In 1902 a Harvard psychologist who never had a mystical experience defined one so well that researchers still use his terms.
• The Cloud of Unknowing: A Medieval Guide to Knowing Nothing An anonymous fourteenth-century English monk argued that God is reached by love and never by thought. Modern centering prayer took him at his word.