Relaxing into God by 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 we genuinely open to access the boundless love, peace, wisdom, clarity and liberating pure awareness all great spiritual traditions promise is at the core of our being? How can we become receptive to God (Sacred Presence) as our inherent foundation? How do we 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 realisation – Ego Relaxation.

In this session, you will:

• 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, chasing after particular conditions you hope will bring you freedom and fulfilment. And learn how this keeps us seeking but never finding.
• Explore specifically what blocks you from deeper direct contact with God within? What is alive and ever-present in the space beyond this? How to stretch into that space.
• Taste the possibility of truly being here, being still, and thus receptive to a grace deeper than your mind.
• Learn the primary methodology that integrates the practice of holistic self-inquiry with devotion and meditation. How all parts of your being are completely welcomed and included on the journey home.

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

In this session, you will:

• Gain an understanding of your primary habits of closure and defence. How these protect against our ego’s sense of deficiency – feeling separate from the love, strength, power, value, peace and joy of your true nature – as well as how the disconnection itself offers us a direct path back.
• Learn how to stay present with everything that arises, opening, softening and allowing your experience, without getting overwhelmed or taken out by it.
• Learn to appreciate your survival instinct’s orientation to avoid pain and chase after pleasure, through the activities of grasping, rejecting and checking out. Strengthening your spiritual resolve as you turn INTO your vulnerability.
• Learn to accept the ticket price of realisation – to feel everything. 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.
• Learn not to leave yourself out as an act of the 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 us all the way, and yet together they function as a supportive container that encourage a holistic awakening, integration of our realisation, ego relaxation and the prevention of spiritual crisis.

In this class, Miranda will introduce the central role of TRUST. This virtue 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 we know in our bones that we are held in an ocean of love and inseparably part of it. This makes us courageous and confident that we can surrender into the mystery. Even though we are not in control, we feel that all is well.

In this session, you will:

• Learn to unpack the challenges to deep trust, including your personal history around loving that may create instinctual closure, doubt and fear.
• Discover your soul’s need for the mother aspect, 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.
• Discover when it is wiser NOT to trust, learning to discern trust from naivete.
• Learn to trust yourself AND open to trusting the grace of God as the underlying beneficent force of life.
• Learn to receive the boundless nature that is independent of your history through the practice of turning your attention to recognize the presence of 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 they 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 our mind beyond fixed positions, opinions and preconceptions that keep our awareness bound in ego patterns.

In this session, you will:

• Learn to 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 what pulls you away from living the truth of your deep heart, identifying your self-images – both the idealised images and the shadow images, that cause you to live out of habitual unconscious reactions.
• Cut through your own self-betrayal, relishing honesty with yourself and honesty with others. Deeper still, you’ll 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.
• Discover what kinds of questions expand the horizons of your consciousness, bringing new depth and dimension.
• Experience the dynamic power of holistic self-inquiry beginning to open up 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 super ego judgment: the internalisation 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 our ego identity and serve to hold it in place – like a psychic condom over our ego structure. As we deepen beyond our familiar identity, this inner aggressive force gets stimulated – often manifesting as ego kickback reactions.

In this session, you will:

• 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 true will to build an inner altar of protection for your own humanity.
• Learn to drop the knife you use on others and the world. Come to see everyone and everything through forgiving eyes that are no longer blinded with prejudices that divide.
• Rest in the presence of unconditional allowing that lets everyone and everything be as they are.

Since our true nature is boundless, to just cling to the realisations of our journey to date is to block God unfolding freshly in this moment. Yet all ego structures contain a degree of arrogance. Humility invites us to take the posture I do not know what anything is truly for. If we suspend all presumption – about ourselves, others and the world, we are open to the mystery and receptive to be penetrated by a grace deeper than our mind. This invites us into the void, which is not the scary annihilating force our ego thinks it is. Rather, it is the vast open space of consciousness itself in which the learned veils of personality can melt. Humility brings us into right relationship with the mystery. It means admitting we don’t know the way. It invites us to relax all attempts to try to direct the way and the notion that we are supposed to know.

In this session, you will:

• Dissolve the primary barrier to humility: your ego experience of humiliation arising out of pressure to get it right in your history.
• Learn to allow space for the mystery beyond all opinions, leaning into “I do not know” as if listening to the silence before the song, the dark before the dawn.
• Mine the inner gap between what you have discovered so far, and what you don’t know, learning not to close down at the edge of what you know.
• Learn to receive grace as if receiving a stream of light, wisdom, love, peace and guidance direct from the source.

Ramana Maharshi said that “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 our personal will back to the origin of our being opens a whole universe of support for our life and path. This can feel like we are sitting within an immense mountain that gives us true stability in the ground of being itself.

The blocks to true willingness often bring up anything that is not liberated around our fathering influence, which usually manifests as ego control. When our true will opens we feel steady, grounded and capable of embodying our true intention on the path.

Patience assists us to deal with the pernicious trap of trying to push ourselves into some concept of an enlightened condition. It invites us 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.

In this session, you will learn to:

• Discern between genuine willingness vs will-full-ness. Engage more deeply with your true desire to help you stay faithful to your practice.
• Explore what causes you to feel alone and unsupported. Bringing your beliefs and past experiences around support that typically link to our father wounds, to the light of awareness for healing.
• Harnessing the power of prayer and the “little willingness” to bring everything to the inner altar of Truth.
• Turning your awareness to recognize and receive the infinite support of the universe. Miranda will introduce the “mountain of presence” meditation practice that helps us relax down into true universal support.
• Cultivate patience and relinquishing your ego bargaining.

Each “Pillar” offers a whole world of support for us to engage our heart’s deepest intention, and there is way more than we will have had the chance to cover so far. During this module, we will explore how the pillars function together, offering us a true container for the practice of diving in and through our direct experience and opening all the way into non-dual realisation. 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.

In this session, you will learn to:

• Recognize where your spiritual musculature is strong and weak, and which practices to turn towards that support better balance.
• Experiencing 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 with 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.

In this session, you will:

• Discover that whatever seems to be IN the way, IS the way. 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 our 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,” “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. 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.

In this session, you will:

• Awaken through your more subtle defences 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 what your core knot of suffering helps you avoid; your subtle attachments to your own suffering.
• Feed through your devotion what it is you truly want to feed now.

Now that we have deeply seen the structure of our core ego identity and gained some clarity about the forces within us that generate pernicious patterns, we can harness this awareness to explore who we are deeper. We 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. Just contact everything without reaching for a single defence strategy. Just let ourselves be, and see who we are afresh.

In this session, 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 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 kickbacks at times. This can manifest in many ways: sometimes as distractions to engaging our practice consistently, despite sincere intentions. Sometimes it is like a detox reaction flushing up another level of our attachments and fears. Sometimes we just hit a glass ceiling, as if some hidden identity is saying “go no further” and bumping us 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 our personal history. Miranda will share how to open to the presence of self-forgiveness that dissolves these obstacles.

In this session, you will:

• Recognize resistance and ego kickback reactions, and inquiring 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.