From a Preacher’s Kid to a Mystic of Well-Being

The earliest memory is of the spoon. A tablespoon, enormous to a toddler strapped in her high chair, filled with cod liver oil. The taste was vile, but it wasn’t flavor that branded the moment into her nervous system. It was the sensation: strapped down, powerless, a metallic curve invading her mouth against her will.

Decades later, Rachel Bulkley would look back at that memory and call it perfect metaphor. Love disguised as violation. Care packaged as coercion.

Today, at 46, Rachel is a mother of two teenagers in Asheville, North Carolina, a writer, teacher, and the founder of The WellBeing Project. She is not trying to save souls or recruit disciples. She is teaching what she calls the steady practice of being fully human—habits, frameworks, conversations designed to anchor people when the world spins out. She arrives with the kind of clarity that only emerges from surviving fire.

Rachel was the fourth of six children born to a preacher who saw the world as battlefield. He thundered about coming judgment, railed against spirits of lust and rebellion, and moved his family through cycles of poverty and passion. At five, she was his “little colleague,” perched in the front seat of the car as he conducted deliverance sessions. At home she absorbed contradictions: fear tangled with admiration, daily declarations of love punctuated by sudden violence.

Once, in a moment of youthful rebellion, she admitted out loud what she felt: I don’t want to be good. Her father’s response was swift and physical—280 pounds of rage descending on a crying preteen. “Factually,” she would later write, “a massive, angry man pounded the head of a little girl. This man was also the one who told me every day that he loved me.”

It taught her to live in compartments. To read rooms before she read herself. To perfect survival skills that made her sound precociously wise to adults, while separating her from her own inner reality.

The contradictions of home found resolution in public arenas. At a youth convention called Acquire the Fire, Rachel discovered a new story: she could be cool and devout at once, part of a radical army with God on its side. By high school she had started Bible clubs, led classmates, and set her sights on missions.

Upon high school graduation, she moved from the gritty urban landscape of Bridgeport, Connecticut to a rural compound in East Texas. Teen Mania Ministries, where she interned in 1997–98, was more boot camp than Bible camp. Days began before dawn with scripture-chanting runs, accountability groups, fasting, and road-crew work. She and her peers considered themselves the “special forces of heaven.” Once, blindfolded, they were driven into the night, abandoned with only a wooden cross and a few coins. They we given thirty hours to return.

“I was more serious about my conviction than anyone I knew,” she recalls. “That was why I questioned so deeply. I could see holes in logic and inconsistencies of character. They called it rebellion. It was just perception.”

Her perception widened in Bosnia, where she saw the scars of civil war, churches and mosques both implicated. “I couldn’t ignore the gruesome absurdity of it all,” she says.

In her twenties, Rachel ricocheted between continents and callings. London gave her a circle of friends who matched her pace of conversation, her first taste of belonging. Melbourne brought a bizarre stint on reality television, followed by collapse and a nightclub prayer that tethered her not to church walls, but to love itself.

And then came grief—the untimely loss of a close friend. She doesn’t dwell on details, only that the loss nearly unmoored her. Ambition and despair whiplashed her daily. She learned just how thin the line between survival and collapse can be.

She steadied herself by building. She launched ventures, sketched frameworks, kept searching for a language that could hold both the mystical and the mundane.

Love arrived as recognition. He was a fellow alumnus of her radical world, fluent in the fervor she knew. Seventeen days after meeting, they married. For six weeks it felt miraculous. For five years, it was a classic cycle of devotion and devastation.

She describes it not only as abuse, but as a clash of warped blueprints. “We jumped into the marriage each carrying our own dysfunctional behaviors and illogical beliefs,” she says. “We feverishly built our life with those plans, and eventually it burst into flames.”

She remembers the train platform: two toddlers in a stroller, her knees buckling as she begged heaven for permission to be done. And then the revelation. God was not holding her hostage. She did not need permission. She had chosen. And she could unchoose.

What followed was brutal. Hoping for an amicable split, Rachel rented a room nearby. Instead, her husband filed abuse reports, emptied bank accounts, and hired a nanny to monitor her. A judge told her she didn’t stand a chance. For 18 months, her children lived primarily with him.

“Outside the courtroom I asked my lawyer, ‘Is it possible to lose custody, not because I’ve done something wrong, but because I can’t afford to prove my innocence?’ He said, ‘Absolutely. It happens all the time.’”

It was, she says, “a walking death.” And yet after months of desperate litigation, she prevailed. When the court's decision came out, the text from her ex was curt: You got them.

The win was more than maternal. It was existential. “Any shred of obligation to a religious institution was gone,” she says. “The most religious people in my life had been the most abusive. But I never doubted my connection to God. That was the only explanation I had for why I was still alive.”

The following years saw continued litigation. In a Hail Mary move, she petitioned for relocation. Against all known odds, a judge ruled it was in the children's best interest that they go far away.

If court stripped away illusions, jail rebuilt what remained. From 2018 to 2019, Rachel taught classes inside the Hamilton County Jail in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She walked through gates that clanged behind her, climbed to the fourth floor, and faced a room of men in jumpsuits.

“Well-being isn’t bliss or flawlessness,” she told them. “It’s understanding our real nature and enabling it to flourish.”

She did not go to redeem. She went to teach. To share tools that acknowledged human capacity for both good and harm, and to practice tending physical and psychological needs in the least glamorous of places. Inmates didn’t confess their crimes; they didn’t have to. Everyone in the room already knew.

“What struck me,” she says, “was that their exposure sometimes gave them more freedom than my pleasant neighbors on the outside.”

Rachel calls herself a mystic, though not in gauzy or esoteric terms. For her, mysticism is unconditional positive regard—God as therapist, best friend, cosmic trillionaire. Never issuing orders, always present. “Each human is the closest experience of God you can have,” she says. “Learning to love yourself is the act of loving God.”

But what exactly does she mean by mystic?

“To me, a mystic is someone driven by a deep need to understand the parts of life that aren’t easily articulated,” she explains. “Whatever lies beyond, or behind, or underneath all the goings and comings of our lives—the questions of meaning, purpose, why it matters how we live and what choices we make. Mystics don’t seek knowledge. They seek wisdom. And one of the first revelations is how much they’ll never know.”

Her own life bears out that definition. She describes her mystical experiences in practical detail: sometimes hearing a word or phrase—clairaudience; more often, receiving a download of knowing—claircognizance; at times, seeing images or feeling sensations. Always intimate, never directive.

Over time, the quest shifted. “The more you learn, the less certain you become. You realize everything is in constant expansion and evolution—questions, answers, paradigms, relationships. So the search changes from answers to experiences. I can never capture knowledge completely, but I can enter moments of connection that confirm I’m on the right track.”

That hunger, she admits, has often been isolating. Before “spiritual but not religious” was a cultural shorthand, she felt caught between worlds. With religious people, she spoke their language but feared being found out as a heretic. With secular people, she could present as articulate and rational, while concealing her intimacy with the divine. With New Agers, she kept her distance entirely—until she realized she was one of the freaks too.

She laughs at it now, calling herself a “spiritual polyglot.” Philosophy, biology, psychology, theology—whatever language opens the door, she can speak it. “The truth is, I was never codeswitching to deceive,” she says. “I was becoming.”

And her conclusion is stark: “Truth that isn’t found within isn’t truth. It’s just information. We aren’t transformed by information. We’re transformed by revelation. But revelation is always an inside job.”

Out of this fusion of mystical insight and hard-won pragmatism came The WellBeing Project. While teaching CPR for the Red Cross, she noticed: people were trained to save bodies in emergencies, but no one was trained to stabilize a being in crisis. The project became her answer.

It is not a movement, she insists. It is a framework: tending body and being, building daily rhythms, hosting conversations in small groups of seven. The focus is not on problem-solving but on steady practice. “Flourishing,” she says, “is not extraordinary privilege. It’s ordinary tending, done with intention.”

When her father died, Rachel wrote a memorial she was not permitted to read. In it, she acknowledged his contradictions: the preacher who thundered about judgment but looked at every face and saw redemption, who squandered money but invested in eternity. She named the sacrifices of both wives, the complexity of his shaping.

And she concluded with a line that has become the thesis of her own life:

“We do not love others because of who they are. We love them because of who we are.”

She didn’t cry when she heard the news. She cried later, holding her children close, when she glimpsed what he must be experiencing—crowds of unseen welcomers, the exuberant appreciation he never knew awaited him.

Rachel Bulkley has lived through cultish fervor, courtroom collapse, jailhouse classrooms, and the long work of rebuilding a self. She has seen how blind faith fuels nationalist politics, and she has chosen another way: consciousness, connection, practice.

Her life today, she writes, is a garden. “Joy blooms, pleasure blossoms. Tending never ceases. There is no forbidden fruit.”

Not Eden lost. Eden made—again and again, by hand, in the stubborn soil of a very human life.