Pinkies, please welcome back our Pink Spiritual guru, Miranda MacPherson, the founder of The Interfaith Seminary. I'd like to share with you a post Miranda wrote a while back, because I believe this kind of wisdom is timeless.

The last six months has been a powerful time of journeying into new
dimensions of The Absolute, letting new depth and wisdom integrate
through. The deeper I dive, the more willing I am to tolerate the
empty unknown spaces. The more defenseless I can be in the face of
my own ego, the more of Reality reveals itself, and more grace flows
through for others.

Times Are Changing
I sense in the collective a new spiritual impetus emerging that seems
to be calling for a spirituality that includes and transmutes the
denser aspects of life, rather than trying so hard to transcend them. I
feel this mostly impacting the way we work with our humanness – our
personal sense of self, the animal soul with its instincts and urges.
The spirituality of this time wants to utterly include all aspects of
life so as to liberate and elevate it.

EMBODIED NON-DUALITY: living ‘be still and know…’
Those who have worked with me recently know that there has been a
radical change in the content and form of what I offer since that
initial cracking open in Ramana Maharshi’s cave in 05. That opening
into no-mind, into boundless being took me inside the living silence
at the core of all, and this has been opening and fleshing itself out
ever since. In the last six months I have been landing in new clarity
around what truly helps us in the process of both direct realization
of our essence, and the actualizing of that throughout all the
dimensions of life. I am calling it ‘embodied non-duality’.
My work today is directed less towards teaching about God and more
towards guiding people into direct experience of God-Self, which I
have come to see is always very close at hand, if we are willing to
step out from under the grip of our mental concepts and sit in
not-knowing.

GET OUT OF THE WAY
Essentially, deep spiritual opening boils down to the paradox of
surrender, and that’s the rub. The ego lens through which all
human beings operate, is centered in an identification of itself as a
separate self. This sense of separation is what births fear,
selfishness, greed, anger, attack and all that we grapple with both
inside ourselves, in our relational lives, and in the way we operate as
a society. Our ego wants to defend itself, stay in control and direct
the show. It even wants to be the one that surrenders, which of course
is actually impossible.

This paradox is why spiritual awakening can feel so hard – because
what is asked is essentially for the ego to soften its controlling
grip – so that a dropping into a deeper Self can occur. This feels to
the ego like a submission, a death even. More accurately, is simply
getting out of the way so that what always is can have space to
emerge. That can be terrifying to the ego self, and is why most of us
are helped by a good teacher or guide who knows this delicate
territory and can hold and navigate us into allowing that egoic
framework to soften so that something deeper may be contacted.

The essence of my work is directed towards sitting as deeply as
possible in boundless love while holding space for others to dive in
and meet themselves nakedly, and discover directly their own spiritual
core. Its my way of bridging the separation experience: sitting with
another, welcoming what appears to divide us from love, truth,
freedom, and peace until the unreality of our perception reveals itself,
and we see for ourselves what always is. It is the deepest privilege I
know.

Synthesis of the SPIRITUAL, PSYCOLOGICAL & ENERGETIC
When I work with people I find that this holding occurs naturally on
three primary dimensions: spiritually, psychologically and
energetically. I can see that working with these three dimensions of
our being simultaneously enables the realization to land in a deeper,
more visceral way. Our cells begin to vibrate with deeper clarity as
though new pathways open up within our system. We begin to feel Truth
living dynamically in our bones.

Simple practices have been emerging that invite the capacities of
heart, mind and body towards openness, defenselessness, surrender, and
through that, welcome of deeper nature. It is such a thrill to guide
people experientially through egoic encasement into greater truth, AND
to actually show practical ways of diving into soul depth on their
own. In gatherings over the coming months I will be sharing practices
that help unwind the story, self-inquire into your deepest essence,
develop trust, foster surrender, open us into boundless love and
boundless space. These practices are a unique synthesis of three
primary soul dimensions that are rarely integrated together:
self-inquiry, devotion and kinaesthetic sensing.

SELF-INQUIRY: employing mind to undo the mind……
I see how this new embodied spirituality that is emerging asks us to
use all our faculties towards a deeper and more holistic liberation.
The mind, when directed honestly towards truth, is a beautiful tool
into God. We can use the power of mind to help us dive into the vast
open emptiness, via cultivating curiosity, asking questions that act
as doorways through which to loosen the ego grip and help us see more
clearly what is actually going on within. This is the method of
self-inquiry, which begins firstly with helping us get more real with
what is being experienced, the driving forces behind our experience.
Then when we have peeled back the surface layers, self-inquiry takes
us organically into the perennial spiritual question: "who am I?" That
question, when entered into with sincerity when having sifted through
more of the surface activity, becomes a door into the vast open
spaciousness. Self-inquiry questions such as this are a bit like zen
koans: not to be understood and answered by the intellect but act as
gateways into the loosening of the ‘I’ from every concept or idea –
into direct experience of boundless being.

DEVOTION: leaning into the boundless love:
We can also use the power of our heart – of longing and feeling and
relating, to help us awaken. This is the great tradition of Bhakta –
or devotion. The heart’s need to relate and love has often been
confused with a child-like dependency towards a teacher or deity,
falsely believing that the guru or deity will take care of the work of
liberation as long as the aspirant is devoted enough. The true purpose
of cultivating devotion is to liberate the heart via turning one’s
emotional energies towards something much greater than our own ego.
Cultivating devotion, whether through prayer, chanting or mantra, helps
lean our heart into The Absolute, fostering a sense of being held and
supported. This is extremely powerful in helping us lean into new
depths. Calling on spiritual giants within the collective that have
realized God-nature before us, helps us develop courage to dive deeper
when we want to pull away into the known. Calling on deities whether
they be historical figures of the past or archetypal forces in the
unseen dimensions is profound in enabling our more fearful aspects to
trust and open when tempted to close and control. Furthermore,
cultivating devotion helps us just lean our heart into what it really
wants and loves: truth.

SENSING THROUGH THE SUBTLE BODY:
Seen mystically, the body is a great mechanism of communication; and
tends to store and reflect aspects of our unconscious back to us as
very direct feedback. Far from being an impediment to spiritual
realization, the body is a great ally if we learn to listen to its
subtleties. If you want to know where you are really at, learning to
sense into your physical, energetic experience will tell you. Just to
scan through the sensory experience in the moment and see- where is
there closure, openness, holding? With such a tangible reflector, we
can open and soften into what is here, and meet what is arising
without by-passing or rejecting anything. I have been exploring
breath, attention and conscious inner intent to help open into what’s
here rather than protect against it. This has been developing into a
practice of sensory defenselessness.

This is incredibly helpful as a starting point to getting in closer
contact with what is actually happening. Including the body in our
inner inquiry of soul allows energetic places of stuckness to unfurl,
and in turn, this supports more light to flow through the human system.
When we draw together the pathways of self-inquiry, devotion and
sensing with which to dive through the tendencies to control and
contract, and continue opening into the unbounded spaces within our
own core, God, truth and real love begins to live in us in more direct
ways. Self-deception becomes harder, and we come to know ourselves as
intrinsically part of the infinite whole.

With Boundless love,
Miranda MacPherson

PS. Lissa's note: Doesn't she rock, Pinkies? For more from Miranda, check out her book Boundless Love. And for more thoughts on surrender, check out this blog post a Pinkie just turned me onto by Sophie Lhoste about How To Surrender. Thank you, Miranda!