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Mary O'Malley's Personal Journey
 Nicknamed “sunshine” as a baby, Mary’s
life
journey has been at times so dark and dangerous
that her inner radiance was nearly extinguished.
As a little girl she attempted to soothe the
pain of parental abuse, neglect and divorce with
food. A chubby child, she became an overweight
teen. While her step-mother gave her diet pills
(speed) which made her paranoid and hyperactive,
her mother counter-medicated her with sleeping
pills and tranquilizers—a toxic and highly
addictive combination. When she turned
18, Mary turned to alcohol, and when she got to
college, she began using street drugs. At the age of
24 Mary felt like a total failure. And when a
doctor told her that her addictions would kill
her, she knew that she no longer wanted to
live.
After a long time in the most desperate of states,
Mary attended a weekend long Hatha Yoga seminar,
and without fully understanding why, found herself present and alive in ways she hadn't experienced in years. She began to feel curious rather than reactive,
compassionate rather than judgmental, and
trusting rather than fearing. The years of
living in deep despair now somehow made sense.
Though the old states still came back to visit, Mary was now able to
access this new state of
simply being more easily.
Fascinated with healing, she became
a massage therapist at a drug
rehab center. And as she listened to her
client’s stories, problems and complaints, an
innate wisdom began to flow from deep inside
her. The insights that she shared healed both
her clients and herself.
Since
her own awakening in 1971, Mary has studied
with many teachers; Ram Dass, Pir Vilayat,
Patricia Sun, Jean Klein, Karlfried Graf Von
Durckheim, Brian Swimme, Jack Kornfield and
others. Practicing Vipassana (Mindfulness)
meditation, she learned how to be curious about
whatever she was experiencing, and then Stephen
Levine taught her how to meet everything she
discovered through the vastness of her heart. It
was a true epiphany!
After
identifying and evolving her own specific threads of wisdom
from among those of
all the great teachers she had studied with, a
unique and powerful blueprint
for being fully alive has
unfolded that Mary calls
"Awakening."
Mary’s first book
Belonging to Life, The Journey of Awakening
is a treasury of practical wisdom and
profound insights, all pointing to one essential
Truth: how to awaken into present-moment
awareness and live in acceptance of what is.
Her next book,
The
Gift of Our Compulsions, A Revolutionary
Approach to Self Acceptance and Healing
teaches us that our compulsions are not simply
negative impulses to be controlled but our
allies and protectors. Mary knows from personal
experience that when we try to control our
compulsions we deny ourselves access to the
wisdom that compulsions reveal when we accept
and embrace them.
Her latest book, The
Magical Forest of Aliveness: A Tale of Awakening,
is an inspired and engaging allegory of our
journey from innocent aliveness into the village
of Mind where we learn to control the
"unacceptable" parts of ourselves, and our
gradual rediscovery of the possibility of
feeling safe again in the magical forest of our
aliveness.
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