About Us — The Journey Behind Mysticryst
I was born on the night of the Spirit Festival, at the hour of midnight. There is a folk belief that those born at this threshold — when the boundary between worlds is at its thinnest — tend to be unusually sensitive to the energies around them. I don't know if that's why. But it fits.
I am a highly sensitive person. Not in the dramatic sense — not visions, not voices. In the quieter, more exhausting sense: I notice more than most people around me seem to notice, and I notice it before it becomes visible.
Someone's mood before they've said a word. The shift in a friendship before anything has been acknowledged. The specific texture of a room when someone in it is concealing something. The moment a decision has already been made, even though it hasn't been announced.
I observe these things early. I always have. For most of my life, I didn't have a framework for it.
The occult tradition gave me one. Not magic in the dramatic sense — but a serious, systematic body of knowledge about the relationship between the visible and the invisible. It is the framework that makes my soul quiet.
Some people find peace in not needing to know. I have often found the opposite: once I sense something, I need to understand it. If you are reading this and you recognize that feeling — you are in the right place.
The Journey Behind Mysticryst
Chapter I — The First Symbols
When I was in the second or third grade, my mother, busy with work, would buy me stacks of books to keep me occupied during holidays at my grandparents' house. It was there, immersed in the quiet afternoons, that I devoured fairy tales from around the world, ancient mythologies, biblical stories, and literary classics. Those early readings didn't just entertain me; they seeded my subconscious with the archetypes, heroes, and mystical narratives that cross all human cultures. I was learning the universal language of symbols long before I knew what to call it.
I was nine years old when I found a book about the twelve zodiac signs at a bookstore. I bought one volume because it seemed interesting. Then I went back and bought the other eleven.
At eleven, walking home from the library, I passed a shop selling tarot cards. I bought a deck. I started reading for my classmates.
I didn't know what I was doing. I just knew the symbols meant something — that they were pointing at something real, something underneath the surface of ordinary life. I didn't have a name for it yet. I just kept following it.
It wasn't until my university years that the pristine world of those early readings was challenged. I wasn't a literature major, but I used to crash their lectures and hang out with the students there. During one of our casual conversations, a friend opened my eyes: the fairy tales I had grown up with were heavily sanitized. The original folk versions were far more complex, raw, and steeped in stark psychological truths.
The archetypal 'Prince Charming' was never a romantic savior, but a figure tangled in shadow, mortal fixation, and power dynamics. The stepmothers reflected raw maternal shadows and ancestral jealousy, while the archaic trials confronted characters with the sobering reality of survival and human cost.
My first reaction was profound shock. But as I sat with these unfiltered mythic layers, something unexpected happened: I felt an immense sense of relief.
Suddenly, it all made sense. The sanitized, pastel-colored scripts had set us up for a lifetime of unrealistic expectations—making us search for external saviors who didn't exist, and making us feel broken when reality refused to conform to a fairy-tale script.
When I saw through the illusion of the flawless archetype, I laughed out loud. I thought: Well, if that's the ideal, I am incredibly lucky never to have met him.
This was my first real, embodied encounter with what Jungian psychology calls 'Shadow Work.' I realized that acknowledging the imperfect, unvarnished truths of human nature doesn't destroy you. It liberates you from the exhausting performance of false perfection. It was this realization that pushed me beyond mere curiosity about symbols, and into a serious search for systems that could explain the entire human condition—both the light and the shadow.
Chapter II — The Search for Wisdom
Years later, I was working at my desk one afternoon when I picked up a book someone had left nearby: Everything Is the Best Arrangement. I was a tightly wound person then. The book helped me breathe.
That was the beginning of a longer journey. I traveled to Seda, to the Buddhist academy there, and watched a sky burial. I went to Lhasa. I read everything I could find — Tibetan Buddhism, philosophy, the texts that don't translate easily.
I wasn't searching for peace. I was searching for a system that could hold everything I was already perceiving. Something rigorous enough to be trusted.
I didn't find it. It found me.
Chapter III — The World of Finance
I earned a Doctor of Business Administration. I obtained securities, futures, and investment analysis licenses and Responsible Officer qualifications across all nine license types. I built a department from nothing — no team, no clients, no infrastructure — into a profitable institutional operation managing billions in assets under management.
I was, by every conventional metric, succeeding.
I also understood, by then, that the mystical and the analytical are not opposites. They are the same impulse — the need to see what is actually there, beneath what is presented. Finance taught me to read systems. The occult tradition taught me to read the systems beneath the systems.
I thought of it like a vast set of financial statements — astrology, tarot, numerology, Hermetic philosophy — each one a different ledger, all of them reconciling to the same underlying truth.
Chapter IV — The Transformation
Then Pluto arrived.
In astrology, Pluto conjunct Midheaven is one of the rarest and most disruptive transits a person can experience. It targets the career, the public identity, the structure you've built your life around — and systematically dismantles it.
Mine did not arrive gently. Rules changed without warning and earnings I had built were clawed back through accounting methods that defied logic. A trusted friend absorbed project funds that never returned. A promising opportunity in Hong Kong turned out to be a trap. A relationship I had finally allowed myself to open to ended in betrayal. A tree fell on my car.
I am not exaggerating about the tree.
What I learned, slowly, was that Pluto doesn't take things that are truly yours. Every element of my career that collapsed had one thing in common: it depended on someone else's rules, someone else's goodwill, someone else's infrastructure. Pluto is ruthless about this distinction.
The transit forced a question I had been avoiding: what do I actually own?
Chapter V — The Creation of Mysticryst
I started writing. About crystals, ritual, the intersection of ancient practice and modern life. Content that belonged entirely to me — no employer could claw it back, no rule change could erase it, no institutional restructuring could reassign it.
I brought everything with me: the analytical frameworks from finance, the symbolic literacy from decades of occult study, the embodied knowledge from Seda and Lhasa, and that quiet child at her grandparents' house, devouring the mythologies of the world.
Mysticryst is what happens when all of that converges.
It is not a shop. It is not a content platform. It is a complete universe of mystical knowledge — built by someone who has spent a lifetime at the intersection of the rigorous and the sacred, and who believes, deeply, that these two things were never meant to be separate.
And those unbowdlerized fairy tales I discovered back in university? They eventually taught me the most empowering lesson of all. The original stories never let evil win. They simply depicted the brutal reality of the world—the scarcity, the selfishness, the darkness—to teach us one ultimate truth: victory comes from the awakening and decisiveness of your own inner power, not from a savior.
Gretel didn't wait for a woodsman; she shoved the witch into the oven herself. Cinderella didn't wait for a fairy godmother; she grew her own magic from her tears. The stories didn't promise rescue; they promised that you already possess the ruthlessness and the magic required to save yourself.
This is the philosophy behind everything I create here.
(To be completely honest, putting all this chaotic, dramatic, and slightly unhinged personal history out there... I don't even know why I wrote it. I just had no idea what else was supposed to go on an "About" page. Does anyone actually care to read all of this? ⚆_⚆)
About Nicole Lau（刘珊珊）
Nicole Lau is a UK certified Advanced Angel Healing Practitioner, PhD in Management, and published author. Her work draws from Hermeticism, Jungian psychology, astrology, Tibetan Buddhism, and the Western esoteric tradition to create tools that are both deeply rooted and immediately practical.
She believes the wisdom you seek already lives within you. Mysticism is not a destination — it's a way of remembering.
The Ritual Universe
Beyond books, Nicole curates a collection of ritual tools, sacred objects, and energetic instruments — each one designed to bring intention into the everyday:
- 50+ digital books spanning astrology, tarot, Hermeticism, Jungian psychology, chaos magic, and more
- Ambient audio meditations and guided mindfulness rituals
- Digital ritual guides and printable reflection kits
- Sacred geometry tools and spiritual activewear
- Zodiac-themed decor and ritual objects
Each piece is an invitation to make the ordinary sacred.
\"Magic is not chaos — it is design. Reality is not fixed — it is woven.\"
The Working Altar & Consecrated Creation
At Mystic Ryst, creation is itself a ritual practice. My writing desk sits directly beside an active working altar, and my workspace is surrounded by crystals that have anchored my esoteric work for years.
Every sigil, sacred geometric pattern, audio frequency, and ritual codex is birthed within this living energetic field — conceived with focused meditation and intentional blessings from its very first inception.
Because every piece is born within this consecrated environment, we do not engage in commercial gimmicks like \"individual blessings.\" In authentic esoteric wisdom, a sacred symbol is an energetic conduit: it carries the resonant frequency, but the spark that awakens it has always been, and will always be, your own conscious intention.
Whether you're a seasoned occultist, a curious seeker, or someone who simply feels there's more depth available in daily life — you're in the right place.
You don't need a perfect moment to begin. The power has always been yours.
