Description
In this gathering, we reclaim the domain of our everyday lives as holy ground. By practicing a contemplative stance, the most mundane realities are rendered miraculous, brimming with layers of hidden beauty, meaning and power.
Four 90-minute pre-recorded webinars
Overview of Becoming an Everyday Mystic
Nestled at the center of your most ordinary moments, your inner mystic is poised for an intimate encounter with the divine. All you need to do is cultivate a gaze of wonder. The Presence of Love may reveal itself where you least expect it: in the middle of the dirty dishes and the spring snowfall, in the music you play on your daily commute and when you listen to the evening news. The Beloved is beckoning from the campfire in the quiet desert and in the hands of the clerk at the all-night convenience store, in childbirth and at the bedside of the dying, in breakups and reconciliations.
There is nothing that is not sacred.
In this gathering, we reclaim the domain of our everyday lives as holy ground. By practicing a contemplative stance, the most mundane realities are rendered miraculous, brimming with layers of hidden beauty, meaning and power. Mirabai will guide you through four stations of transformation: intention, attention, connection, and feeling. By entering each of these areas with consciousness and curiosity, they become access points for a direct experience of the divine, the very definition of a mystical life.
Becoming an Everyday Mystic
Lesson Plan
Class 1
Intention
The first step in reclaiming your birthright as a mystic is to set your intention to live a mystical life, forgoing a prescribed and conventional path in favor of a leap into radical authenticity. Use every available means – from timeless contemplative methods to the wild innovations of your own soul – to open your heart to the presence of the sacred in all things. Make yourself available to the luminosity embedded in the mundane moments. Bow to your own, unfinished, gloriously imperfect life as holy ground.
Class 2
Attention
Now that you have set your intention to liberate the holiness in your ordinary life, it’stime to tune all your faculties to perceive it. Pay attention to the moment, its sensory details, its contours and shadows. When you cultivate mindful awareness, contracted spaces open and tensions ease. To live a contemplative life is to be open to the presence of the sacred revealing itself in all things. This means slowing down enough to catch the magic that flashes from the heart of what is. To have a direct and intimate encounter with the divine, it’s necessary to dismantle your preconceptions, to pull on the loose thread of your belief systems and let them unravel. Allow yourself to be like a child, seeing the world through fresh eyes. Instead of trying to control life by making sense of it, embrace ambiguity and paradox as being the domain of the truest things.
Class 3
Connection
The era of the lone prophet and singular sage is passing. Ours is a time of collective awakening, reciprocity, and active participation in the web of interbeing. Each of us has something essential to contribute, inextricably bound with our individual quirks and gifts. Finding, building, and tending your tribe can be a path to healing, homecoming, and happiness. Lift each other up. See no separation between servant and served. Reframe your commitment to the healing of the world as a joyous privilege rather than a grim obligation. As it says in the Hopi prophecy, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
As an everyday mystic, you may find yourself turning to the power of books, music, and art to light you up and connect you to the sacred. Creative expression can be prophetic and transformative. It beckons us into communion.
Class 4
Feeling
Grief can be a crucible for alchemical transmutation. Recognize the many faces of loss: death, breakup, wellness, financial security, trust, innocence. When we choose to stay present in the fire of suffering, rather than turn away, self-medicate, or try to “fix” it through “spiritual bypassing” (using beliefs and practices to check out of reality), it can become a threshold to sacred space. Our broken hearts break us open to deeper love and intimacy with the divine, and compassion for all beings. Vanquish the demonization of emotions and embrace holy vulnerability. Discover the connection between grief and longing for the divine, the bridge between yearning and union. Develop a relationship with the mystic poets of all spiritual traditions and cultivate your own practice of writing mystical poetry.
About Mirabai Starr
Mirabai Starr is an award-winning author of creative non-fiction and contemporary translations of sacred literature. She taught Philosophy and World Religions at the University of New Mexico-Taos for 20 years and now teaches and speaks internationally on contemplative practice and inter-spiritual dialog. A certified bereavement counselor, Mirabai helps mourners harness the transformational power of loss.
Her latest book, WILD MERCY: Living the Fierce & Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, was named one of the “Best Books of 2019” by Spirituality & Practice. Mirabai is on the 2020 Watkins List of the “100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People of the World.” She lives with her extended family in the mountains of northern New Mexico.
Frequently Asked Questions
