Mary Angelon Young: Strengthening Our Connection To Spiritual Life
Manage episode 324949172 series 3312159
Mary Angelon Young is a writer, world traveler, and workshop leader whose journey on the spiritual path began in 1968, when she came of age at eighteen. She practiced and studied in the Baul path—a synthesis of bhakti and tantra originated by the heretical poet-bards of Bengal—for twenty years as an intimate companion of her guru, American Baul Khepa Lee Lozowick, in the lineage of the south Indian beggar saint Yogi Ramsuratkumar and his guru, Swami Ramdas, of Kerala.
For the past three decades Angelon has traveled extensively in India, Europe and North America with many pilgrimage forays to sacred sites. During her (pre-pandemic) traveling years, she has had unique opportunities to spend time in the rare company of her mahaguru, Yogi Ramsuratkumar, and to know and travel with Baul luminaries such as Sanatan Das Baul and his spiritual daughter, Parvathy Baul, Gour Khepa, and Purna Das Baul and family, as well as to know teachers and experienced practitioners of many different traditions.
Angelon has published over ten books of nonfiction about the spiritual path, including Under the Punnai Tree, a biography of Yogi Ramsuratkumar (2002). Her most recent book of non-fiction, The Art of Contemplation, was published in 2021 by Hohm Press and is available on Amazon and other sites. After the death of her guru in 2010, Angelon’s creative passion turned toward writing novels of historical fiction with spiritual underpinnings. Her first published title in that genre is Krishna’s Heretic Lovers, the true story of Bengali poet Chandidas and his lifelong love, Rami, in fourteenth century Baul.
Formally trained in Jungian studies, Angelon has a master’s degree in transpersonal psychology; as a psychotherapist, she taught mythology, dreamwork, and transpersonal psychology at Prescott College in Arizona. Her workshops in the U.S. and Europe offer a direct experience of art and creativity as inner path, specifically using writing, poetry, memoir, and devotional song as doorways to self-knowledge, innate wisdom (sahaja), and cultivating the contemplative life as a way of personal transformation.
Her life experience and love of storytelling, myth, and the language of symbols enrich her workshops and public talks with the rasa (nectar) of unexpected divine moods. A mother and grandmother, Angelon continues to write and teach from her off-grid home in the high desert mountains of Arizona, where she lives with her husband, Thomas Raffaele Young in the sanctuary of Triveni, her guru’s ashram.
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