Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost: Chapter 7

Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost, Chapter 7 of Shot At Love, A Celebrity Photographer's Unfiltered Lens on Dating and Finding Love. A breakup can make even bright rooms feel dim, and mine turned everything gray—right down to the paint on my walls. I gave 50 shades of gray new meaning. I tried to muscle through with grit and lonely heart playlists, but it took an unexpected intervention from Red Sox legend Tim Wakefield to cut through the noise. Tim’s straight talk about self-respect, resilience, and moving on landed like a perfectly thrown knuckleball: unpredictable, undeniable, and exactly what I needed to hear. The over-under was that this was a very loud wake-up call from Wake, and I had to find self-love at bat.

From there, the path bent toward a different kind of ballgame—one of mantras, lineage, and sacred sound. I share how a puja led by a guru's wife reopened the door to Sanskrit practice, and how a medium delivered a message I couldn’t ignore: aham prema doesn’t just invite romantic love; it insists on self-love first. That reminder connected me back to my teacher, Namadeva, and to a daily practice of the —Gayatri before the mic, breath before reaction, compassion before compromise—that steadied the ground beneath my feet.

Daily practice of chanting and the discipline of rebuilding standards after heartbreak. Along the way, we honor two legacies that shaped this story—Tim Wakefield’s generosity and caring, and Namadeva’s mastery of mantras—whose dates now echo in my calendar like a quiet blessing. If you’ve ever felt stuck between surrender and survival, this chapter offers tools and testimony: boundaries that hold, mantras that heal, and a practical path to liking yourself enough to choose better. Listen, reflect, and if it resonates, share it with someone who could use a sign. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell me: what’s the one line you needed to hear today? If you want to find out more about the Shot At Love movement and community, join the mailing list to learn about upcoming Shot At Love Live events at www.shotatlovebook.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Wanderers, Mantras, and Heartbreak
• 2:45 Collapse After Rory Remington
• 6:30 A Mother’s Tough Love
• 12:00 Painting Through the Pain
• 18:10 Tim Wakefield’s Intervention

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:12

Chapter seven Not all those who wander are lost. Ahamprema is a mantra that is often translated I am divine love. It originates from Sanskrit Ahum meaning I am and prima meaning love. Are you there, God? It's me, Carrie. After the bloodbath breakup with Rory Remington, I had nothing left. My fighting spirit was gone as I searched for a spirit in the sky to save me. The light in my eyes had left the building, and the eye of the tiger I had played on repeat was replaced by love as a battlefield. It was visible to everyone how bad I was. I became withdrawn, dazed and confused, and spoke to no one. My mother, the toughest person on the planet, had enough of watching me be destroyed. She would start small giving me magnets for my fridge with sayings like Happiness is an attitude. We either make ourselves miserable or happy and strong. The amount of work is the same. Or the only way out is through, or God gives his hardest battles to his strongest soldiers. I stood on my parents' front steps as my daughter Morgan ran into the house. My mother looked at me disgusted and said, Carrie, you need to stop acting like this and get your act together. I screamed angrily, screw you, mum, don't you think I've tried? I've tried harder than anyone. I go to chant night, church, and pray to God. Then I burst into tears and said, Did you ever think God has forgotten me? Because he has, and I stormed off. I tried to collect myself in my charcoal grey Toyota Hallander, and I remember looking over at the door I had just slammed when I heard the words do the chant a hamprema. Not today, Satan. I wasn't doing any more chants. I was giving up Sanskrit entirely and needed a new sorcery. I was done with the Dalai Lama, Dharma, and dogma, all of it. I would find a new way to survive. I wasn't in victim mode. I had surrendered in a waving the white flag moment followed by the hashtag don't send an SOS. Didn't my mother understand that I was beyond hopeless? Why did people need to talk to me? And why couldn't everyone just let me die in peace? I knew I was in bad shape, and usually I could navigate through the pain because what choice did you have when you were the groundskeeper at Ground Zero? I used to pride myself that I was the Rocky Ballboer of Tinder, and no matter how bloodied or beaten I was, I'd come up swinging and swiping. This time was different. I was fighting with Mike Tyson and someone was losing an air. This was a turbulent time as I slipped into darkness or the gray abyss looking for ways to deal with the heartbreak of losing Rory. Rory was long gone, but he did leave behind his painter, Mac McCourt. Whether out of pity or a parting gift, he knew I still needed to sell my house. I figured diving into a creative project would help my cause, so I met with Mac to develop a color scheme for the remaining rooms that needed to be painted. Mac and I laughed our asses off when we decided to paint my house fifty shades of gray, inspired by the exotic romance novel. Christian Gray had long left Anastasia Steele, but she quickly found a new love interest with Benjamin Moore. I threw myself into creativity by becoming the foreman at Rory's abandoned housing site. I prepped and painted my way through the pane, creating a new landscape like Bob Ross. One day I accidentally gave Mac the wrong color of gray, and my bedroom looked like a baroness fortress. I didn't have the heart to tell Mac that we used the wrong shade of fifty gallons of paint, so on one particular Sunday I decided to repaint my bedroom like Pewter to lighten my mood and help heal my heart. It was Father's Day and my whole family was meeting at Burton's Grill at the Derby Street shops in Hingham. My plan was to use this painting project as an excuse for why I couldn't join, as I was avoiding people in general. My Irish guilt was killing me, and the thought of not showing up for my dad on Father's Day hurt more than my broken heart. I put the paintbrush down and decided to brunch with the Brett's. After the luncheon, I dashed to the door and my friend Tim Wakefield spotted me. The wandering soul and the socks player. Meet Tim Wakefield, a former American baseball player for the Boston Red Sox, who is the longest person to play on the team. When Tim retired, he was the oldest player in the league. Tim had been around third plate many times, and he knew it when he saw it. During his tenure on the mound, he could easily see weakness in a player, or in my case, a photographer. Out of all the Red Sox players I photographed for countless covers over the years, I connected the most with Tim. Tim also loved photography and we both had specialized talents and used our shared ADHD to do the things we did in our careers. Tim's talent was exceptional and incredibly unique. He was one of two knuckleball pitchers worldwide. He developed this skill all by himself when the Major League told him that he couldn't play first base any longer. So he taught himself to pitch. As I walked towards the exit, Tim yelled, Hey Carrie, are you gonna walk by without saying hi? I was all up in my head and not paying attention because showing up from my dad and pretending to be okay took everything I had. Tim sat smiling at me across from his beautiful wife Stacy, whom we met at the Charlie Horse in West Bridgewater decades ago. Tim instantly made fun of my latest spring training cover. He was not impressed with the new Red Sox recruit the improper Bostonian magazine had chosen as a featured talent. I answered Tim, I don't pick 'em, I just shoot 'em. Tim loves to call out the elephant in the room. With lightning speed and no time at all, he threw these words around like his famous knuckleball, which was directed right between my eyes. I listened to the words of wisdom from this world famous knuckleballer. You've got to stop choosing these knuckleheads. You deserve so much better, Tim continued. I can't stand to see you like this. The pain is written all over your face. I know a million guys who are just like your ex, and if they're gone, they're gone. You've got to move on. I've been telling you that you deserve more for years. If you can't find a way to like yourself enough to see that you deserve better, I don't know what to tell you. The Drifter catching the drift. I didn't need gloves, a catcher's mit, or even be behind home plate to catch what Tim was putting down. I caught it all right. I heard him loud and clear. I had to get back into the rotation, get back up at the plate, and get my head in the game. It was like he used the combination of his pitching arm, air resistance, and wind direction for this hall of famer to hit home. Apparently, I needed to hear this important message from the starting knuckler and have this wake up call from Wake to find a way to like myself. At that moment I knew I had to figure out how to love myself first before I could expect anyone else to. As I started my drive home, I thought about Tim and his career. I knew the struggles a person has with ADHD. Typically, people with ADHD have great gifts, but they don't believe in themselves because of the other challenges they battle. I wondered what it must have been like for Tim to be told he was no longer needed at first and if he couldn't learn to pitch, he no longer had a career. Tim had a long standing career of highs and lows. Like the ball he threw, his career was filled with twists and turns. No one trusted the unpredictability of the knuckleball, as it served as a second chance type of pitch. He knew all about being skipped over in rotation, being the odd man out, and he had more than his fair share of heartbreaking moments and bad outings. Tim didn't know what it was like to be divorced, but he knew what a curveball looked like. With his great ability to size people up, he instinctively knew the pressure I was under as a single mom with a high stress job and a daughter. The interesting piece about throwing the knuckleball is that all those knuckleball pitchers aren't the same. Each of the pitchers invented a way for their knuckleball spin to work. That's why the knuckleball pitch couldn't be taught. It had to be created out of thin air. Tim figured it out. He found a way to save himself to make it work. In that chance meeting at Burton's, everything had to line up for that impromptu intervention to happen. Even Stacy's mom had their kids. That allowed them to have that adult conversation with me. Tim was saying, figure it out as I did. You're a smart girl, be a winner and fight for yourself. It was time I started to care enough about myself for once in my life. My head was spinning as I wondered if Tim Wakefield was Kevin Costner in the movie Field of Dreams. Kevin Costner only hears if you build it, they will come. And all I was hearing was a humprema. If it wasn't enough to be spiritually woke by Wakefield, I decided I wasn't driving home, that I also needed to become spiritually enlightened. I left Wake to be awakened at a puja that's being held at a yoga studio called Balance, something I'm clearly not. Figure it out as I considered my bank account. I knew I didn't have enough money to attend this puja ceremony. However, it was important to me and was hosted by my friend Jill Jardine, my psychic healer. I devised a plan of writing a check that wouldn't cash but could pay Jill back after I got it together and sold my house. The Vagabond and the Vedas. Why is this puja so important to me? Because the person we are all coming out to be enlightened by is Namadeva's wife, Satya Bama. Namadeva was a Sanskrit guru who passed in 2010 and was my spiritual teacher. Meet Namadeva whose Western name is Thomas Ashley Ferand. Namadeva was the foremost authority on Vedic and Buddhist Sanskrit mantras, and his mastery of mantras is practiced all across India today. He's gathered more than 8,000 transliterated mantras, the most comprehensive body of sacred sound syllables in the English language. He's even received initiations and blessings from a number of renowned spiritual teachers, including the Dalai Lama and his guru, Sadguru Sant Keshivada, who transferred his spiritual authority to him on the banks of the Ganges before his passing. You couldn't get any higher up in the chanting chain than Namadeva. One of the greatest blessings in my life was meeting Namadeva at my first puja in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I had no idea what to expect, but I knew I was desperate. I knew mantras helped Tina Turner go rolling down the river to escape the likes of Ike Turner. Courtney Love said, I wish I knew how powerful mantras were because if I did, I would have named my band something better than whole. If mantras were good enough for the Beatles, they were good enough for me. I didn't have John Lennon, Ringo Star, or Jah Guru Deva, nothing's gonna save our world. But I did have Jah Guru Namadeva, who I hoped and prayed would make a change in my world. The Nomad Meets Namadeva On my way to this Canta Bridgian chant circle, I walked down a crowded hallway where everyone was in white. I hold tight to my mala beads and I am dressed head to toe in black. I'm so shocked when I see this man in a robe appear. Upon seeing me he stops, claps his prayer hands together, and with a big smile looks down and bows. The first words he said to me were, Oh, a power shakti. Dumbfounded, I laughed and said, I'm not a power shakti, whatever that was, thinking to myself. He said, Indeed you are. I smiled, trying not to laugh, then answered, No, I'm not. You are because I can tell. How can you tell? I asked. Because you have a Vaishnava line on your forehead. If a person has a Vishnava line, it means you're a spiritual teacher and a healer. This was already way too much, wondering just how I would Botox away this straight line in the middle of my forehead and why I hadn't realized it was so prominent. I really had no clue what was in store for me at that Puja and Cambridge, nor did I understand how notable Namadeva's teachings would be in my life. I knew one thing for sure that I had fallen in love with this guru and that I needed to see him whenever he came back to town. Namadeva took a liking to me. I became one of his star students, like I did with my mentor, Jeff Lubin. Namadeva even inducted me into the Gayatri, which was an insane honor. I sat nervously when he bestowed upon me this blessing. He told me, Carrie, use the Gaya tree around your creative gifts, because a Gaya tree enhances creativity. I was inducted with the long form version of the Gayatri, which takes me around fifteen minutes to chant a hundred and eight times. Faithfully, before every podcast episode I record for Shot at Love, I do the Gayatri right before I go live on the airwaves. Namadeva gave me lots of special mantras that changed my life. One of his favorite mantras was Omamo Bhagavate Vasuvaya. Every time he chanted it, he broke out into song and rose to his feet dancing, while the whole group of chanters would rise to dance around him too. He was the total embodiment of love. Years back I was struggling with having Giovanni at the time move in. Namadeva dug deep into his magic bag of mantras and said, I haven't given this mantra out in thirty years. That day I started this special Sanskrit mantra and nine days later my ex moved in. Namadeva died a few years later after we met at my first Puja. I credit my friend astrologer Jill Jardine, who is also a reverend in Sanskrit mantra and the keeper of his teachings and lineage. She had doubled down on mantras to help her dear friend cross over to the spiritual realm when he died on october first, twenty ten. Like most wise sage gurus, they know when their work is done on the physical plane and know when they can be more effective on the other side. I prayed to Namadeva often, and truly I missed him a lot. I looked for him in sunrises and sunsets, but so much was happening that I didn't think to look for an actual sign from him. All I knew was that after Tim Wakefield gave me my power back, I was going to this puja. I would write a fake check with the amount to cover the puja that I knew would bounce and head into the packed room. The puja had already started, and Jill Jardine, the holy high priestess, and the real power shakti was in all white and motioned for me to go left and head back to the room, where I found a place to sit. I sat on the floor holding a booklet of mantras and joined in chanting. It was so powerful I cried tears onto the paper. As the chanting continued, I honestly didn't care that I was shamelessly sobbing in broad daylight. It was time for a break and I just sat there, looking down at my drenched pamphlet in stillness. A woman who I never saw before sat down beside me. Are you Carrie Brett? she asked. Surprised, I looked up and said, Yes, I am. I remember you, she said. You came to this very room to photograph Namadeva years ago. Yes, I did. I'm sorry to just bring this on you, but I'm a medium. I sat there not really processing what she was saying. I work as a medium, and while you were chanting, Namadeva came through and he has a message for you. I looked at this complete stranger in disbelief. I said, Okay. Namadeva wants to know why you stopped chanting Ahamprema. I said, I don't know. I haven't been doing well. Ahamprehma was the first chant that I ever learned because it's so easy. It means love and it helps you find love. She said, You're wrong. Namadeva said it also means self-love. The definition of Ahamprema is translated as I am divine love. Self-love first to love yourself. I sat on the floor bawling. She continued, That's why Namadeva put that chant into your head this week in your car. He wants you to chant Aham Prema and love yourself, then you can find love. Then the medium closed our conversation with these words. By the way, Namadeva said God never forgot you. He's right here, and so is he. I couldn't even tell Jill not to add my check to her checking account because I ran out of the balance yoga studio screaming and crying. I mean, how many messages did I need to have in one day? My shamanic journey would continue, swiping and searching for love from Swingham. But now I had the power of mindfulness and knew the importance of loving yourself while remembering that all those who wander are not lost, that their GPS may be malfunctioning, and they haven't got to their destination yet. Remembering Tim Wakefield. Sadly, the last inning ended too soon as I learned the news that Tim Wakefield, the legendary Red Sox pitcher, died today, October 1st, 2023, of brain cancer at the age of 57. In the Boston Red Sox official statement, the first two words used to describe Tim was true goodness. Tim was an incredible baseball player, but an even better friend. His passion for the game and his kindness off the field left a lasting impact. The Boston Globes Dan Shaughnessy wrote Tim Wakefield was not only a great player, but also the most charitable in the league. His contributions and caring made a big difference in countless lives. I know he made a big difference in mine. I'm sad that I wasn't able to share this chapter with him. He would have had a good laugh and gotten a kick out of how I described him. I know he would have been proud that I was trying my best to help those who were hurting, as his dedication to helping others was truly remarkable. Tim will be remembered for his greatest skill, his big heart. I will remember two remarkable souls who left us with unique legacies on this day. Namadeva, a wise Western Vedic guru, and Tim, a beloved Boston Red Sox pitcher, both departed this world on the same day, october first. Something tells me they'll meet in heaven and share a few Fenway francs. Rest in peace, Wake. Looking for love, my brand new book, Shod It Love, is out now. You can grab your copy today on Amazon. If you'd like to stay connected, get exclusive updates, and be the first to hear about Shout It Love Live single events, join the mailing list at shotlovebook.com. Don't miss your chance to change the way you see love standards out.