Relaxing into God – Miranda Macpherson

We begin our 14-week journey together by exploring the paradox of the spiritual path – while we are asked to surrender, the one who is often trying to surrender is the one in the way! How do you genuinely open to access the boundless love, peace, wisdom, clarity and liberating pure awareness that all great spiritual traditions promise is at the core of your being? How can you become receptive to God (Sacred Presence) as your inherent foundation? How do you take the inner “bunjee jump” into deeper dimensions of consciousness? Miranda will introduce and begin to unpack the central invitation of her feminine approach to non-dual realization – ego relaxation:

You will learn how to:

• Receive the transmission of ego relaxation that invites you to deeply rest in God right now: “Be nothing, do nothing, get nothing, become nothing, seek for nothing, relinquish nothing. Be as you are – Rest in God”
• Discriminate the subtle ways your ego interferes with grace through constant trying, seeking, proving and chasing after particular conditions we hope will bring us freedom and fulfilment, but keep us seeking but never finding
• Explore what exactly blocks you from deeper direct contact with God within. What is alive and ever-present in the space beyond this? How can you stretch into that space?
• Taste the possibility of truly being here, being still and, thus, receptive to a grace deeper than your mind
• Integrate the practice of holistic self-inquiry, with devotion and meditation, so that all parts of your being are completely welcomed and included on the journey home

Deepening on your spiritual path asks you to substantially “look within and let go.” It sounds simple, and on one level it is, yet we all meet powerful forces of defense that developed out of our survival instinct’s response to overwhelm and pain. Unless you gain awareness and capacity to work with your defenses, they will automatically bump you back to the surface of your ego, causing unnecessary limitations and frustrations in your practice. In order to gain deeper access to the jewel of your pure being, you must compassionately deal with your defenses and open through them.

In this class, you’ll be guided in:

• Understanding your primary habits of closure and defense. How these protect against your ego’s sense of deficiency: feeling separate from the love, strength, power, value, peace and joy of your true nature – and how the disconnection itself offers you a direct path back
• Learning how to stay present with everything that arises. Opening, softening and allowing your experience – without getting overwhelmed or taken out by it
• Appreciating your survival instinct’s orientation to avoid pain and chase after pleasure – through the activities of grasping, rejecting and checking out – and strengthening your spiritual resolve as you turn INTO your vulnerability
• Accepting the ticket price of realization – learning to feel everything. Understand how this depth of undefended presence allows absolutely every experience, from the most painful to the most beautiful, to become a gateway to deeper liberation
• Learning not to leave yourself as an act of your deepest love AND power

We cannot force surrender, but we can cultivate the virtues that make us spiritually mature, giving us the tools we need to harness everything as a gateway into deeper direct experience. Any one of the “pillars” has the power to take you all the way, and yet together they function as a supportive container that encourages a holistic awakening and integration of your realization, facilitating ego relaxation and helping prevent spiritual crisis.

In this class, Miranda will introduce the central role of TRUST. This virtue so powerfully determines our capacity to allow for the constant change and transformation that authentic spiritual awakening requires. Trust is the antidote to fear, and when it opens fully you know in your bones that you are held in an ocean of love and inseparably part of it. This makes you courageous and confident so that you can surrender into the mystery and know that even though you are not in control, that all is well.

This week, you’ll be guided in:

• Unpacking the challenges to deep trust: your personal history around loving that creates instinctual closure, doubt and fear
• Your soul’s need for the mother aspect, and letting your mother-wounding unwind in the arms of the Divine Mother, so your limitations to trust can melt in a deeper embrace of total compassion
• When it is wiser NOT to trust, and discerning trust from naivete
• Learning to trust yourself, AND opening to trust the grace of God as the underlying beneficent force of life
• Receiving the boundless holding that is independent of your history, through the practice of turning your attention to recognize present love

When trust opens up, it feels like being held in an infinite embrace of love. Truth cuts through our illusions to liberate deeper awareness. Together, trust and love blend to become devotion without an object. This love of the truth is the engine of inquiry, blending Bhakti with Jnana yoga. It births in us the true strength to face everything within ourselves and walk the path with dedication. Curiosity, the third “pillar,” opens your mind beyond fixed positions, opinions and preconceptions that keep your awareness bound in ego patterns.

During this module, we will:

• Contact the flame of your heart that loves Reality, God and Truth – and open it deeper through devotional practice, to become the guiding impetus of your life
• Inquire into your self-images – both idealized and shadow – that cause you to live out habitual unconscious reactions and pull you away from living your deep heart identity.
• Cut through your own self-betrayal, relishing honesty with yourself and others, and inquire beyond “your” truth and “my” truth, to open to Truth itself
• Learn how curiosity supports right use of mind and turns your awakening process into a joyful adventure – and discover what kinds of questions expand the horizons of your consciousness, bringing new depth and dimension
• Experience the dynamic power of holistic self-inquiry and open up to a deeper direct experience of God and your true nature

Since opening up deeper dimensions of God and our true nature asks us to go towards our vulnerability, it is vital that we cultivate deep compassion for our humanity so that our inner environment is a supportive one. Our ego is a huge call for love. Yet what blights the way of even the most sincere spiritual aspirants is superego judgment: the internalization of all the negative messages we absorbed in childhood from parents, teachers, spiritual authority figures, elder siblings, etc. These messages form the outer layer of your ego identity and serve to hold it in place – like a psychic condom over your ego structure. As you deepen beyond your familiar identity, this inner aggressive force gets stimulated – often manifesting as ego kickback reactions.

This module will help you to:

• Discover how to “drop the knife” you use against yourself
• Discriminate what your judgment revolves around, and its basic message to you
• Re-claim your heart’s true inner authority to say “NO” to the voice of self-attack and “YES” to the intrinsic compassion of your own deep heart
• Harness loving-kindness, humor, your vital aliveness and your true will to build an inner altar of protection for your own humanity
• “Drop the knife” you use on others and the world, and come to see everyone and everything through forgiving eyes that are no longer blinded with prejudices and divisiveness
• Rest in the presence of “unconditional allowing” that lets everyone and everything be as they are

This week, you will learn specific tools and techniques for deepening your sexual, romantic, emotional and spiritual connection to people who are good for you. Exciting research findings and current intimacy theory offer us tremendous opportunities for bringing greater passion, erotic joy, tenderness and humanity to the way we love.

You will:

• Discover and learn to embrace one of your essential sexual core gifts
• Learn the AHA technique – a powerful, simple technique to profoundly deepen intimacy in your romantic relationship, or any relationship at all
• Receive specific research-based techniques for developing and intensifying sexual and romantic connection with a partner
• Expand your capacity to work with attractions that threaten to knock you off-balance
• Learn the two most important questions for bringing deeper humanity, love and sexual depth into your relationship

“One’s dedication needs to be as equal to that of a person kept under water while trying to rise to the surface to breathe.” Willingness helps cultivate true dedication, through activating the power of our choice. It is the shift away from ego efforting; that stressful pushing for “my will be done,” to allowing a more genuine surrender into “Thy will.” Turning your personal will back to the origin of your being opens a whole universe of support for your life and path. This can feel like you are sitting within an immense mountain that gives you true stability in the ground of being itself.

Patience assists us in dealing with the pernicious trap of trying to push ourselves into some concept of an enlightened condition. It invites you beyond control, beyond practicing with some subtle agenda to be special, powerful or to fulfill some attachment. Patience is an aspect of love that supports a deeper surrender.

During this module, you will learn to:

• Discern between genuine willingness versus will-full-ness – and engage more deeply with your true desire to help you stay faithful to your practice
• Explore what causes you to feel alone and unsupported – and bring your beliefs and past experiences around support (typically linked to our father wounds), to the light of awareness for healing
• Harness the power of prayer and willingness to bring everything to the inner altar of Truth
• Turn your awareness to recognize and receive the infinite support of the universe – and be introduced to the “mountain of presence” meditation practice that helps you relax down into true universal support
• Cultivate patience and relinquish your ego bargaining

Each “pillar” offers a whole world of support for you to engage your heart’s deepest intention, and there is way more than you will have had the chance to cover so far. During this module, we will explore how the pillars function together, offering you a true container for the practice of “diving in and through” our direct experience and opening all the way into non-dual realization. Miranda will help you identify your areas of development and your weak spots, and give guidance on how to work with them so that you can safely progress into more explicit ego dissolving with balance and safety.

During this module, you will:

• Learn how to recognize where your spiritual musculature is strong and weak, and which practices to turn towards that support better balance
• Experience each “pillar,” not just as an orienting principle, but as an active PRESENCE you can recognize and access to support ego relaxation
• Gain greater precision in the practice of self-inquiry, including what is likely to derail you (given your individual spiritual musculature)
• Review and re-commit to your daily spiritual practice

In an atmosphere of real love, we will explore together the core structure of your ego to gain deeper understanding of your story of separation from your true nature – how it takes shape and is held in place. Miranda will lead you step-by-step through her powerful “diving in and through” process that has been likened by many mature practitioners as “unlocking the Rubik’s cube of your ego.”

Together, we will harness a persistent pattern in your life, and turn it into fuel for profound transformation. This process has the power to turn even your more stubborn patterns of suffering into deeper wisdom.

During this module, you will:

• Discover that whatever seems to be IN the way, IS the way – and how the inner challenge you might have been spending a lifetime trying to get rid of is actually your gateway home
• Inquire into the root of your ego deficiency: your personal experience of separation from the love, strength, support, joy, value and peace of your true nature
• See how your unconscious mind makes meaning from experiences that you don’t understand, turning ego experience into identity
• Let pure awareness pervade and permeate your assumptions of being “not good enough,” “flawed,” “nothing,” “bad” or “wrong”
• Learn to look deeper without fear at the very core of your sense of “me,” and, thus, up-root the patterns that cause unnecessary suffering in your life

Building upon our previous module, we will continue to explore the underpinnings of your ego identity. You will learn to let pure awareness and love’s presence penetrate through the foundations that pattern your life. During this module, we will continue working through the “diving in and through process,” to see the actions and projections we move toward that hold our suffering in place. Through these practices, you will learn to:

• Awaken through your more subtle defenses to see how you keep your deficient ego identity in place through the activities of grasping, rejecting and checking out
• Understand how projection works to keep you contracted and dis-empowered in your own story, and how to suspend all blame
• Discover your subtle attachments to your own suffering and what your core knowledge of suffering helps you avoid
• Feed what you truly want to feed now through your devotion

Now that you have seen the structure of your core ego identity and gained some clarity about the forces within you that generate pernicious patterns, you can harness this awareness to explore who you are more deeply. You access this not by jumping over anything, but engaging the practice ego relaxation in a more substantial way to support surrendering in and through the identity itself. Miranda will share with you the HOW, by taking you step-by-step through the principles of unwinding. Learning to accept the source of all love and compassion, we can meet the layers we have discovered and rest undefended with everything. We learn to contact everything without reaching for a single defense strategy, and instead, just let ourselves be, and see who we are afresh.

During this module, you will:

• Contact your core suffering in a compassionate embrace that allows you to open, soften and allow everything to come home
• Let grace penetrate all the way through your body, heart and mind
• Explore the space deeper than your history, deeper than any idea or imprint
• Learn how to meet absolutely everything from deeper ground of being
• Experientially explore the question that all spiritual practice ultimately leads back to in the end: “Who am I?”
• Welcome the whole world, everything and everyone to rest along with you

Everyone on the path encounters resistance and ego kick-backs at times. This can manifest in many ways: sometimes as distractions to engaging your practice consistently, despite sincere intentions. Sometimes it is like a detox reaction flushing up another level of your attachments and fears. Sometimes you just hit a glass ceiling, as if some hidden identity is saying ”go no further” and bumping you back up to the surface of our personality mechanisms. Understanding the primary dynamics of resistance, such as the “unholy trinity of sin-guilt and punishment,” fear of the void, loss of control, fear of not functioning, fears from your personal history. Miranda will share how to open to the presence of self-forgiveness that dissolves these obstacles. This is a perfect focus as we close the year 2014 and prepare for the new.

During this module, you will learn to:

• Recognize resistance and ego kickback reactions, and inquire into their causes
• Deal with your split desire: your hidden conflicts and fears of surrendering into what you say you love and want
• Dissolve the “unholy trinity of the ego” – the existential foundation of sin, guilt and punishment
• Open to the presence of self-forgiveness that liberates the cause of so much resistance
• Overcome your fear of no control

In this first module of the new year, we will explore the dance between emptiness and grace (boundless presence of all love, joy, beauty, power, etc.) that is the cosmic “Yab-Yum of Reality” – working through your fears of space, emptiness – and how it releases the blessings of existence to come forward from within you.

Whatever you leave empty, grace can fill. Now that we have opened through some of the more dense knots in our consciousness, we will not stop at just feeling a bit freer when there are whole universes of grace to abide in and embody into our world. This all becomes available to you when you are no longer afraid of the void. When you relish the silence, the empty spaces. Yet your ego tends to associate this with death, but nothing real can be threatened in truth. Only your self-image dies and this allows for a true life, where more of God takes up full residence as YOU.

During this module, we will:

• Explore our relationship with emptiness itself and learn to befriend it to support abiding in the innermost sanctuary of BEING
• Overcome the fear of the “void” – allowing death of the familiar as part of the natural liberation process
• Orient our day to support space to feel, receive, stop and BE
• Sense into the space in which everything arises….shifting your attention from a “someone” in the space, to just being the space – and abiding in and as That
• Recognize that there is nothing to be, do, get, become, seek for, relinquish – and learn to truly be as you are

On this final module of our journey together, we will explore what you need to ground your realization into the ordinary activities of daily life. We’ll look at how to turn absolutely everything you normally do – emails, working, cooking, making love, relating, listening, the activities we enjoy and the activities that are less joyful – into the path of awakening. We will explore:

• Practical pointers to help ground your realization into every corner of life
• What to do when you get lost, derailed from your practice or sidelined by some unexpected life event
• Working with the challenges to your embodiment and supports you can place in your life that are truly helpful
• Recognizing that in reality we are all grace delivery devices, profound manifestations of the deep mystery here to extend all love, beauty, creativity, brilliance, depth and much more, to support the liberation of everything and everyone – and how to regard yourself this way and greet everyone as this as well

In what promises to be a lively dialogue between Miranda and Gangaji, they will discuss their approaches to SURRENDER: the heart of the spiritual path, and the challenges of living from spiritual depth in daily life. How do you engage the perennial invitation to “be still” in our fast-paced world? They will also share what it’s like to be female spiritual leaders in a field that, until very recently, has been dominated by the masculine perspective.

Gangaji was born in Texas in 1942, and grew up in Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1964, she married and had a daughter. In 1972, she moved to San Francisco where she took Bodhisattva vows, practiced Zen and Vipassana meditation, helped run a Tibetan Buddhist Meditation Center, and had a career as an acupuncturist. Yet, despite her successes, she continued to experience a deep and persistent longing for fulfillment. In the wake of her disillusionment, she made a final prayer for true help. And in 1990, the answer to that prayer took her to India to the banks of the river Ganga, where she met Sri H.W.L. Poonja, also known as Papaji, who helped her to open the floodgates of self-recognition. Today, Gangaji is a teacher and author, who travels the world speaking to seekers from all walks of life about her own experience of awakening and that it is really possible to discover the truth of who you are and be true to that discovery.

In this series of extra teaching videos, Miranda shares important aspects of her integrated and feminine approach to spiritual realization. Speaking directly to you, she articulates how your soul inherently contains the intelligence to unfold out of ego structures into who you are, her holistic approach to self -inquiry that invites you to relax rather than try to kill off the ego, and how important spiritual practice is to living a rich and real life. Videos include:

• The Practice of Ego Relaxation
• Your Soul Knows the Way
• What Is Holistic Self-Inquiry
• Spirituality is Not a Side-Dish

The human heart is the axis point between heaven and Earth. Through breath and focused attention this 27-minute meditation, accompanied by lovely bells, helps loosen the cobwebs of closure within your heart so as to liberate the vast compassion, love, beauty and joy that is your essential heart. Opening up inner space, you are invited beyond ordinary mind to pure awareness, knowing and pristine clarity.

This is a powerfully transformative practice to harness your core knot of suffering as a gateway to deeper ground of being. Listen whenever you find yourself caught in any kind of ego reaction that disturbs your peace of mind. It begins by grounding you deeply in unconditional love and support, from which you can inquire in and through your sense of disconnection: the specific ways you lose yourself in a deficient self-image. Listen and be guided in meeting your history, feelings, beliefs, defenses and avoidances that typically bump you back up into your story, from undefended presence. Then you can inquire into who you are deeper than your personality, to abide in the indestructible pure presence prior to “Me.”

Music Composed and Produced by Gary Malkin.
Recorded, Mixed and Co-Produced by Timothy Surya Das.
“Om of the Goddess” Drone tracks used by permission, by Steve and Jody St. Clair.