Hi, friends, happy new year. I'm Joya, and this is That Mystic Podcast. Today we are going to be talking about Mary Magdalene and this vision that I had of her holding a thread of love. And I'm going to explain what I mean by that. So, first I want to say that I'm reading this beautiful book that I've had my eye on for a while and I got it. So it's called The Luminous Gospels. And it is a beautiful interpretation of the Gospel of Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and Philip. It's talking about this alternate perception of Mary and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene because many people have interpreted it. And again, this is uh intuition, this is visions, this is ideas. There's no proof that this is true or fact. So use your own inner feelings, your own wisdom detector to see how you feel about this. But she says that she has this idea that Mary Magdalene was actually, and I'll read it to you exactly what it says. It says, The Wrath's Curious Salutation says, Where are you going, Manslayer, Space Conqueror? These terms derive from the mythic traditions of the hero's journey to the underworld. Space Conqueror, in fact, coincides precisely with the more familiar name, thanks to Star Wars, by which these conquerors were known in the Near Eastern shamanic traditions of the times. Skywalker. The details, of course, are open to fine-tuning. But if my basic intuition here is correct, then the Gospel of Mary Magdalene becomes an even more important text than we first imagined it to be. For its pages originally contained an eyewitness account of that pivotal moment when universal salvation poured forth from Yeshua's cosmological act of self-sacrifice. This moment is preserved in visionary form through the pure, unflinching noose N-O-U-S of Mary Magdalene. So she goes on to say which interpretation is true, and she says maybe they're both true, but on different levels. At any rate, they're compatible. For Mary Magdalene to be the bearer of such extraordinary vision, she and she says she had visions of Yeshua and she was talking with him, she would have had to have done her spiritual work. But to think that this text may originally have contained a visionary account of the epicenter of the paschal mystery is nothing short of awesome. And the very possibility that this might be so lifts the question of Mary Magdalene's central importance within Christian tradition, far beyond even the pressing contemporary issues around leaders, women's leadership, and the feminine dimension in the church. She's saying we're going beyond that, way beyond that. It catapults her to the very center of Christian mystery. She becomes the keeper of a timeless gate through which the pure essence of Yeshua's transfiguring mercy is always flowing. She's a threshold keeper. And so today we're going to explore this ancient role, one of humanity's most ancient roles. And this is the one who holds the thread while others descend into the underworld. That's how I visualized it. And we're looking at this through the lens, of course, of Mary Magdalene, whose role at the tomb of Yeshua reveals something far more profound than traditional interpretations have allowed us to see. And so my idea was that feels very true to me. Because we know that she anointed Yeshua's feet with Spikenard, which is the oil that ushers souls to the other side. So she was preparing him for this journey. And so what if she wasn't just a mourner at the tomb? What if she was actually performing one of the oldest and most sacred functions in human consciousness? And that is to serve as the anchor, the witness, the keeper of the threshold between the worlds. The descent into the underworld is one of the oldest psychological and spiritual pattern myths in human mythology, stories in human mythology. And we find it everywhere. We have Inanna's descent to the underworld where she visits her sister, and she is stripped of everything at each gate, and she winds up dying and hanging on a hook for three days, and then she's resurrected. We have Persephone's abduction into Hades and her mother who refuses to let the world bloom until her daughter returns. We have Orpheus descending to retrieve Eurydice, his lyre in hand and music as the thread connecting him to the upper world. We have, of course, Osiris. He was dismembered and scattered and reassembled by Isis after she resurrected him through her dedication and magic and reclaimed all of his parts. We have the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, who descended through seven gates, each requiring her to surrender another ornament, a piece of her identity. So why is this story so universal? And I think it's because it maps the territory of human transformation. Every deep healing, every true freaking initiation, every genuine rebirth requires a descent. You can't transform what you won't face. You can't resurrect what hasn't died yet. And the underworld is not just a place, it's the realm of everything that we ourselves have repressed, denied, and refused to feel. And it's where our unlived life is waiting. It's where the parts of us that we sacrificed to survive are suspended in time, waiting to be reclaimed. And in this beautiful book, in the Luminous Gospels, Mary becomes the keeper of the timeless gate through which the pure essence of Yeshua's transfiguring mercy is always flowing. So let's sit with that for a minute and feel her in that role, the importance of that role, the sacredness of that role. She's not passive, she's not secondary to this story. She is the keeper of the threshold. And through this threshold, mercy flows perpetually. What does it mean to be a threshold keeper? When Yeshua descended, whether you understand this literally or you take it metaphorically, someone had to hold the space topside. Someone had to maintain presence at the place of the greatest darkness. Someone had to be the anchor point that makes return possible. In shamanic traditions, when the healer journeys to non-ordinary reality, someone stays with the body. Someone drums, someone witnesses, someone holds a physical space while the consciousness travels. This is literally architecturally necessary. So Mary at the tomb is performing this very function. While the others have fled, while the other disciples have scattered in fear and confusion, she stays. She does not flinch. She does not turn away. She maintains vigil at the exact point where death and life meet. And here's what the threshold keeper provides. This is the vision that I saw. And I call it the thread, because the hero's journey must be taken alone. No one can do your underworld work for you. This descent is singular, it's non-transferable, it's utterly your own. But there is a profound difference between aloneness and loneliness. So we can envision we can visualize and think about all of these stories of the journey to the underworld that someone was above, handing somebody a thread. Theseus has the thread before he enters the labyrinth to face the Minotaur. The thread doesn't fight the monster for him, and it doesn't map the maze. It doesn't spare him the terror, but it lets him know the way back exists. It tells him someone is holding the other end. Someone knows you're in there. Someone is waiting for your return. Being seen, being witnessed, being held changes everything. When you descend into your own underworld, into the grief, into the trauma, into the dismantling of everything you thought you were and thought you knew. The thread is what reminds you that consciousness can survive this, that people have gone before you and have returned, that you're not lost forever, even when you can't see your way. The threshold keeper holds this knowing for you when you cannot, just by holding on to that string in your hand. Mary Magdalene's power is her unflinching noose, her divine intelligence, her spiritual perception that remains clear even in the face of catastrophe. Noose is not just belief, it's not hope, it's not wishing, it's not positive thinking, it's not even faith, as most people think of faith to mean, but it's a crystal clear awareness that sees reality and doesn't flinch. Most of us, when we encounter someone in deep suffering, we want to fix it. We want to help them, or we want to make it stop, we want to rescue them from it. And yeah, this comes from love, partly, but it also mostly comes from our own discomfort in our nervous system. We can't bear to witness what we are afraid to see ourselves, what we're afraid to feel ourselves. The threshold keeper has done their own descent. They know the territory, they've metabolized their own darkness, so that when they encounter yours, they don't need you to be different so they can self-regulate. They can hold presence for the full catastrophe without recoiling. This is what heals. Not the fixing, not the trying to heal others or trying to distract or trying to numb or trying to whatever, but the presence that you hold, the unwavering witness that says, I see you here in this, and I'm not leaving. So I want to talk about goodness, your inherent goodness. And I want to redefine goodness entirely because Mary Magdalene carried goodness and people were healed by it. She wasn't trying to do anything. She didn't offer tools or techniques or strategies or or any kind of anything to change who someone is, but her quality of being, that was the medicine. The same as Yeshua, that was the medicine. And this goodness isn't moral righteousness. Not talking about you better be good. It's not purity, it's not perfection, it's not virtue signaling. In fact, it doesn't even have to announce itself. It's your built-in ontological goodness, being so aligned with truth and so free of distortion that your presence creates conditions for healing simply by being present. And someone who carries this kind of goodness has usually walked through fire themselves because innocence is not being naive. It's innocence regained through integration. They know the underworld territory and they came back with something whole. And when you're in the presence of this kind of goodness, your nervous system can finally rest. Your armor can come down. You don't have to perform or prove or hide or shrink or puff up. And in that rest, what was frozen begins to thaw, and what was bound finally begins to uncoil and start to move. And here's a transmission that came through me this morning in my meditation. It said, light does not discriminate against darkness, it vanquishes it through the nature of its goodness. Fear cannot produce fear in the light of goodness. And this is super crucial because it's saying that light doesn't fight the darkness. It doesn't strategize against it. It just is what it is. And by its very nature, darkness cannot coexist with light. Fear propagates through fear. Trauma spreads through the nervous system like contagion. And this pattern perpetuates because fear meets fear and it amplifies. Someone's terror triggers your terror, which then triggers their terror and it triggers back your terror, and on and on it goes. But goodness, true goodness, doesn't match fear's frequency. It doesn't resonate at all with the pattern. So fear hits goodness and finds nothing to grip onto because nothing will reflect it back. There's nothing that's going to escalate it. It just cancels it out. So the cycle stops. And this is why a threshold keeper can hold steady. They've transmuted fear through their own descent. They've already faced what others are facing, and the fear no longer has reproductive capacity in their heart, in their system, or in their mind. And that's not to say that fear doesn't come up. The difference is that a person who's done their spiritual work, like it said, Mary Magdalene obviously did her spiritual work, they don't react to fear. They can feel fear and go, oh, I'm experiencing fear. I love that too. I can integrate that into my human experiences as well. It's just part of the human experience. And this transfiguring energy, this mercy that flows through Mary's threshold isn't soft. It doesn't look away from what's difficult. Mercy sees clearly and loves anyway. It sees the full catastrophe of human brokenness and says, this doesn't change your fundamental nature. Your goodness predates your wounding. This is what transfigures. It's not fixing a person or trans or trying to change them into something acceptable or get them to their next level of being, or even ascension is a wrong word. Becoming is the wrong word. If anything, it's taking off all of the things that are in the way of the flow of what's true. And it reveals what's always been true beneath any and all damage. When Yeshua emerged from the tomb, who was there? It was Mary, the one who held the threshold, the one whose unflinching presence had maintained the possibility of return. So if you recognize yourself in this description, if you're someone who holds space for others in their deepest, darkest passages of life, as I do, here's what you need to know. This is extremely sacred work, and it requires that you've done your own descent. You cannot hold the thread for others if you haven't mapped the underworld yourself. Your presence will then just be performative and not generative. Your thread might break. Your thread might tangle somebody up with you. So you must keep your own light on. And I was told to do this by following my goodness. And if it's true for me, it's true for you. Follow your goodness. Move toward what feels true and alive in you by noticing where life is still flowing, by deliberately placing your attention on beauty, meaning, connection. Or in the way of mastery, it tells us the good, the holy, and the beautiful. And it doesn't mean that you're bypassing life or that you're you're ignoring the ugly realities of life or the tr or the ugly parts of life, I should say, the fear that propagates itself in the darkness. Of course, you see the darkness, but you resource yourself as you do this work because you're not here to rescue anyone. And I hear this question a lot from empaths and from women who are called to do this kind of work and they feel like they don't know how to separate their energy from the person that they're working with. They're attached to the outcome. They're attached to the person's journey. And the only reason that that can be is because you need validation still of your own light, of your own goodness, of your own inherent work in the world. So this descent, this inner descent, must be taken alone. So know that when you're a threshold keeper, you're not fixing them. You're not preventing any sadness or any of the terror that one faces when they come face to face with these things that have taken on lives of their own inside of the ego. You're bearing witness. You're being the embodied proof that someone is holding consciousness for their journey. You're an anchor. Your presence is the medicine. It's not in your words, it's not in your techniques, it's not in your insights, it's not in how brilliant you are, it's not in how loving and caring you are. None of those. Those are helpful, of course, but the real healing happens through the quality of your being, through your capacity to remain present without flinching, through your own nervous system, showing their nervous system that it's possible to stay open even here. And we are living in a time now of collective dissent. We're witnessing systems crumbling, certainties dissolving. Many people are being forced into their own underworld, whether they chose it or not. And this world needs threshold keepers. We need people who have walked through the fire and can hold steady while others do the same. We need the anchors, we need the thread holders. Mary Magdalene's story is not just historical. It's archetypal and it is alive. The role she played at the tomb is a role that needs to be embodied in every generation, and especially this one. So maybe you're hearing this and you're recognizing yourself in it. Because you've always been the one people come to in a crisis, because you can hold space in darkness when others flee, because your own descent prepared you for this work. And if so, you're not imagining it. This is real work and it matters. And remember that even threshold keepers need threads held for them too. Even the anchor needs anchoring. Mary had her own witnesses, her own sources of strength. None of us do this alone. The thread between the worlds, the one that the threshkeeper holds, is made of love. And love is just not the right word. Because when we think of love, we think of possessive love, what I love, the people that I love. But that's not what love actually is. It's not conditional. It's literally cosmic. It is a cosmic law. It is a cosmic principle. Love is the force that holds reality together. Love is what remains when everything else has been stripped away. And I know that firsthand. This love doesn't prevent the crucifixion from happening. It doesn't spare the tomb, but it waits, it watches, and it Knows. And in that knowing is where resurrection becomes possible. And beloved Mary Magdalene knew this. She lived it. And those of us called to be threshold keepers are being asked to live it too. Hold that thread, keep your light on, and follow your goodness because the world needs what you carry. And this is the work that I am doing this year in the sister, where we discuss topics just like this, but way deeper. And then we do somatic practices to embody and become that which we are talking about. If you're interested in that, you can visit thatmystic.com and the link is right there. And we would love to have you in there as I really pour my heart and soul and focus into growing this community of threshold keepers, which is really what we are. Thank you for witnessing this exploration. May we all recognize the threshold keepers in our lives and may we each discover the ways that we are called to hold that thread for others. Sending you so much love. Bye.