The Way of Grace Advanced Sangha by Miranda Macpherson

Grace is much more than a beautiful state that fills your heart with gratitude. Grace is the ground of your being; it’s the blessings that inspire and sustain your soul — bringing the gifts that help you on the path. Grace is the power that lifts your veils, transforming your wounds into wisdom through forgiveness, compassion, inquiry, devotion and meditation. Grace is also a more harmonious, spiritually mature, inspired way of being — beyond self centeredness — and extends its blessings through you, benefiting our world in transition.

All these dimensions of Grace come alive through a particular kind of surrender, and when you can genuinely open to them, you experience boundless love, peace, clarity wisdom and a liberating, pure awareness that all spiritual teachings promise is at the core of our being.

During this first month, you’ll discover the paradox of surrendering to Grace, which asks for deep dedication while simultaneously asking us to let go of the reigns — and even let go of our familiar way of knowing ourselves. You’ll explore ego-efforting and how this keeps you seeking but never truly finding, as well as how you can address the root of this spiritual conundrum and truly stop struggling to come into the flow of Divine Will.

This first month, you’ll explore:

• Your relationship with Grace in all 4 of its dimensions, taking a spiritual inventory of where you are on the path
• How Ego Relaxation addresses the primary block to Grace, which is the belief that I am the doer and it’s all up to me
• How Ego Relaxation is not the same as being passive, collapsing inward or bypassing inner or outer experiences
• Holistic Self-inquiry, which helps Ego Relaxation move into its more dynamic form, allowing you to open to everything that arises without manipulating your experiences
• How to take a deeper seat in your meditation practice through Ego Relaxation, alleviating challenges such as distractedness, sleepiness or simply forgetting!

Relaxing into the ground of Grace, receiving its blessings and allowing for deeper transformation is not a matter of merely transcending your inner material, but turning deeper in and through your direct experience of it. This is the key to Miranda’s feminine and integrated approach to non-dual realization that understands that our relative human experience is not separate from our transcendent depths.

During these 28 modules, you’ll explore the key ego tendencies that everyone on the path encounters — which not only show up as pernicious problems in your ordinary life, but also block your access to experiencing the living presence within you. These tendencies will be explored through an understanding of what Miranda calls the Pillars of Awakening.

Understanding the Pillars of Awakening will help you to cultivate the qualities that make Ego Relaxation NATURAL. They are Trust, Love of Truth, Curiosity, Non-Attack, Humility, Willingness and Patience. Each Pillar helps you to effectively deal with the grip of fear, self-deception, defensiveness, judgment, hatred, pride, control and pushiness, so you can work through the psychodynamic, energetic and spiritual density that inhibits Ego Relaxation.

The Way of Grace asks us not to attempt to bat away our ego like a bothersome fly, but to learn to relax its tendencies with kindness. Not only is this much more effective — helping us avoid the common trap of getting into an inner battle — it simultaneously cultivates in us a deeper humanity.

During these 28 modules, you’ll discover and explore:

• Trust and the Grace of Limitless Holding of the Divine Mother Presence — a dissolving of the roots of fear
• Love of the Truth — cutting through subtle deception to awaken the Grace of discrimination
• Curiosity — lifting closure, deadness and fixed positions and learning to journey your inner terrain IN body, heart and mind
• Non-Attack — dropping the knife of judgment and relaxing the Inner Commentator, so you can enter silent abiding
• Humility — melting subtle pride, embracing the power of not knowing, and entering the receptive state that allows you to bow into the Mystery
• Willingness and Patience — TRANSFORMING “my will” into “Thy Will” and the Gentle Effort THAT NEVER GOES TO WASTE
• How to work with the Pillars to help prevent spiritual crisis, collapsing or getting lost in unbalanced states
• How to reconnect with your essential qualities, AND CULTIVATE SPIRITUAL RESILIENCY and from which to navigate every stage of the path

Now that you have allowed some of the more dense aspects of your ego to relax and refine through the Pillars of Awakening, you’ll start to drink deeply of the subtle, “nonconceptual” living waters through devotional practice.

For the first time, Miranda will give a full teaching and induction into what’s considered the most powerful of all mantras — the Gayatri Mantra. This is considered the mantra that most optimizes the awakened condition. It includes full body movements and mudras, which help you to embody devotion into a full body practice. It’s an exceptionally nourishing and inspirational practice.

You’ll also explore prayer and the different forms it can take as you progress in your awakening process, including the journey TO Grace and the journey WITH Grace, as well as what prayer looks like when your sense of separation dissolves and you find yourself IN and PART of Grace (the non-dual condition).

AND you’ll discover a “Centering Prayer” you can use as a devotional entry into deep silent abiding, as well as address the ways you can pray for others — which has been medically proven to produce tangible, positive results, and can help prevent your path from subtly becoming a narcissistic endeavor.

During these 3 modules, you’ll discover:

• Induction and initiation into the Gayatri Mantra with its mudras and full body movements
• How mantra can help you to bathe in Grace throughout an ordinary day, return to center when you stray, and connect to your celestial qualities beyond your personality
• Prayer power on the journey To-With-As Grace
• How to find your way with prayer, wherever you are on the path — including how to pray with and for others
• Bathing in the Holy Name — finding your holy “word” that helps you to steep in Grace, receive blessings from realms beyond your mind, and return to center

By this stage of the journey, you’ll be sufficiently oriented in the practice of Ego Relaxation that enables authentic surrender of the grip of fear, judgment and control. You’ve also learned the Pillars of Awakening to stay present and open into your experience — letting it be. Now, you’re ready to unwind your core ego identity.

During this course segment, you’ll discover how to drop in and through your most challenging inner material — which typically limits even the most sincere of practitioners. Instead of relating to your ego as a problem — to be fixed or transcended — you’ll learn how to harness the energy of your suffering into a powerful gateway to a deep shift in your identity.

On the first level, you’ll explore your “me” construct, which most people feel as an underlying sense of being not good enough, insufficient, unlovable. This is how it feels when you fall from Grace into the state of separation and start to place a personal meaning on your experience. This becomes the “script” on which your familiar “story” is based.

In love’s presence, you’ll journey through the primary scaffolding of this construct to meet it all with love, see what is ready to dissolve, and see what Grace wants to show you in the deeper basement of your being. Be prepared to be pleasantly surprised. You might just find out you’re way more beautiful, free and luminous than you ever dreamed!

Every time we enter into a deeper dimension, we pass through a gate of some kind of emptiness, and so, together, we’ll learn how to relax with this, embrace it, not as a deficient state, but as an opening into the infinite spaciousness that is the birthing chamber of Grace.

During these 3 modules, you’ll discover how to:

• Let loving awareness discriminate and pervade the layers of your familiar identity — the defenses that keep it active — to truly see there are no flaws and nothing to be fixed
• Receive greater support vertically from devotional practice
• Explore how your sense of separation gets constellated in your earliest relationships and take a “dive” in and through your core wound of love
• Explore what it takes to experience a substantial shift in your core center of gravity, journeying deeply into the inquiry “Who am I?”
• Integrate powerful spiritual wisdom on how to disidentify from habits of mind to take you beyond the ego’s “me”
• Unwind your core wound of love, your primary object relation that keeps your separation from love alive
• Meet your deepest suffering with love and presence as you dissolve back into God
• Experience your True Nature as Loving Awareness, no-thing-ness

During this course segment, you’ll expand beyond your separate ego identity to get to know yourself AS boundless love and pure awareness: sat-chit-ananda. This requires that you befriend emptiness, not as a deficient state, but as the open space that is the birthplace of every dimension of Grace.

You’ll be invited to awaken OUT OF limiting patterns, fearful identifications, hurts and history and to delve more deeply INTO boundless love, awareness and unity. You’ll explore what else there is when you’re no longer fixated on your “problems.” And you’ll journey beyond your mind to learn to open into the empty space, which is the birthing chamber of all states of Grace.

Over these 2 modules, you’ll discover:

• The powerful teaching on Spiritual Obedience, which helps you to truly cherish deeper reality
• How to simply come back to your practice when you get derailed by the unexpected, including egoic reactions
• How to embrace space, letting the familiar separating boundaries of your mind fall away to come into greater intimacy with the Living Presence
• How to relax and open into emptiness, the freedom of “nothing”
• How to embrace everything as part of God and learn to see the One in everything — and greet it
• More advanced methods of inquiry and begin to blend together — into one stream — meditation practices, devotional practices and Holistic Inquiry

In this last segment of the course, you’ll explore what it takes to live gracefully, spiritually and connected to your essential qualities, grounded in your true nature, and forgiving of your ego glitches and those of others. More at home within, you can now turn your attention to being of benefit to our world in transition.

Together, we’ll explore what might help us most to actualize all that we have realized into our lives — our work in the world, our family life, our intimate relationships and how we deal with sickness, aging, loss and death.

During these 3 modules, you’ll explore:

• What can most help you stabilize your realizations, and how to come back to Grace, without drama, when you’ve been triggered into reactivity
• How you can be more spiritually elegant, responsive and mature amidst the dizzying pace of life
• How to move wisely with modern technology, harnessing it to propagate truth and beauty, while not getting caught up in its endless distractions and noise
• Cultivate equanimity in uncertain times to find deeper ground in the unchanging awareness, so you can greet all without getting overwhelmed
• Navigating relationship differences — including conflict and ruptures — with a wise and loving heart
• How to listen to inner wisdom and guidelines for discernment to help pull you away from subtle delusion