Miranda Macpherson – Embodying Grace in Times of Challenge
$40.00$157.00 (-75%)
From there, you’ll stretch out and explore the spaciousness within — the pure freedom and possibility
Miranda Macpherson – Embodying Grace in Times of Challenge
Check it out: Miranda Macpherson – Embodying Grace in Times of Challenge
Turn within, relax into Unshakable Presence, and expand into deeper dimensions of consciousness — so you can embody your deepest love and transform fear without getting caught up in the mindstream of negative emotions.
As these complex, uncertain times continue on, we need the refuge that spiritual practice provides more than ever.
There’s a great need for more of us to not only find inner peace, but to stabilize our realization so that our way of being provides spiritual shelter for others.
We need all the help we can get.
We need one another — and we need Grace.
Grace is so much more than a beautiful state that fills your heart with gratitude. It’s direct experience of Divine Presence coming alive from within — reconnecting you to the Source of boundless love, peace, clarity, strength, and joy that are independent of external circumstances.
How does Grace come alive? Through surrender — which isn’t about giving up or submitting to an external authority. True spiritual surrender is an ongoing process of Ego Relaxation — learning to be present and undefended with what IS.
Or where it is all going.
What you need to recognize are the
Possibilities and the challenges
Offered by the present moment,
And to embrace them with courage, faith, and love.
The world is transparent
And the Divine is shining through all the time.
— Thomas Merton
Grace is available to help you navigate these challenging times with peace and inner calm — and help you harness your life situation as an opportunity for authentic transformation and constructive change.
Welcome a Renowned Spiritual Teacher & Modern Mystic as Your Mentor
Join us for a new 7-month advanced program with interfaith minister, modern mystic, and author Miranda Macpherson — and learn to respond to the Divine Invitations appearing in your life.
As your spiritual maturity deepens, you’ll evolve into the most noble version of yourself, which is what our world needs most right now.
With Miranda as your guide, you’ll turn more substantially within, recognizing the Mystery that birthed you into being — the one that’s known and loved you all the days of your life.
You’ll cultivate the courage to face whatever scares you, grow more spiritually resilient, and open to new depths of awareness and possibility…
You’ll come to truly embody your noble qualities in service to your loved ones, community, and our world in transition.
As you move through this advanced program, Miranda will share further nuances of her feminine, holistic approach to spiritual surrender based on the practice of Ego Relaxation.
Focus on What it Takes to Live in These Uncertain Times — While Remaining Spiritually Grounded & Strong
Expanding on the foundations in her book The Way of Grace: The Transforming Power of Ego Relaxation and her previous Shift courses, Miranda will share how to drink more substantially from the inner stream of nourishment that’s always flowing — even while we navigate COVID-19, racial injustice, and financial instability.
You CAN find shelter from the storm in the place where it can always be found — at the very core of your own being.
Join an international spiritual community with a teacher who’s passionately dedicated to loving you all the way home to the freedom and wholeness that is your birthright.
Miranda will provide you with a rich, potent, and integrated map of awakening. She’ll guide you to turn more deeply within, relax into the luminous presence at your core, open your heart to all you find — and expand into deeper dimensions of consciousness, so you can respond gracefully to the invitations of our times.
Move Deeper Into Your Spiritual Practice in This Timely 7-Month Online Sangha
Each session includes a rich teaching and transmission, with precise inquiry practices, nuanced meditations, and exquisite chanting.
If you’ve worked with Miranda before, this course will go deeper into chanting live (with a harmonium and Miranda’s own recordings) and leading guided meditations before each inquiry — including inspirational visuals and more nuanced instruction on the meditation practices and the mantras she’s shared in previous Shift courses.
And if you haven’t studied with Miranda before, this extended, holistic journey is the perfect place to begin — she’ll address the specific spiritual issues we’re all facing during these uncertain times…
In addition to the regular 30-minutes of live Q&A within each class, each of the six modules will include a 90-minute integration and expanded satsang session — where Miranda will work directly with your questions and reflections, modeling exactly how your obstacles can be transformed into wisdom.
As you learn to relax — stepping outside of the confines of your mind and into the Grace that’s always been here and is with you now and always — you’ll recognize that, even amidst these challenging times, you can always experience joy… and you are infinitely blessed.
Miranda designed this journey to help you harness these times as a Divine Invitation for a substantial shift in your way of being — inwardly, yes, but also in the way you live your daily life…
She’ll help you not only shelter in place but in GRACE, so you’ll emerge from these times as a truly graceful human being — one who remains present and open-hearted in chaotic and difficult circumstances.
During this 7-month journey, you’ll:
- Grow roots in a Presence that’s unshakable — and soothe your nerves, regenerate deeply, and receive the spiritual nourishment you need
- Cultivate the 3 qualities of your deep heart — courage, compassion, and curiosity — that give you the capacity to truly be with everything in your personal sphere, and also in our collective environment with Grace
- Explore how trust helps you open to the ways in which Loving Presence is always here, nourishing and sustaining you, now and always
- Learn how to open to the ordinariness of your day with joy and gratitude — receiving all of life loving you… and reminding you that even in moments of chaos, all is well
- Forgive yourself for your mistakes — and for all the ways in which your impact has been less than a blessing to others
- Allow the Grace of forgiveness to cleanse our collective shadows of systemic racism and the unconscious hatred at the root
- Cross over from the shore of me — your separate self that’s bound in historically based reactions and patterns — to pure freedom, the universal promised land for us all
- Discern the difference between trying to be graceful from within your ego structure, and remembering that your ego and its effort has never been the doer
- Integrate everything you’re learning much more deeply into your daily life — to share the blessings with your loved ones and community
What You’ll Discover in These 7 months
In this 7-month transformational intensive, Miranda will guide you through the fundamental body-mind-spirit skills and competencies you’ll need to live as a truly grace-filled human being who’s awake, present, grounded, and open.
The Power of Live Streaming Video
You’ll connect with Miranda and experience her teachings through live streaming video. This connection will be easy to use and will enhance the impact of Miranda’s transmissions. Or you can easily connect via audio-only if you choose — through your phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop.
(Can’t make it live? No worries! After each class, the video and audio recordings will be available for you to download or stream in high-quality format at your convenience.)
Course Sessions Wednesdays at Noon Pacific
This course will feature LIVE teachings, interactive training sessions, and experiential practices with Miranda. Each session will build harmoniously upon the previous ones, so you’ll develop a complete holistic understanding of the practices, tools, and principles you’ll need to turn within, relax into the luminous presence at your core, and expand into deeper dimensions of consciousness.
Module 1 — Grounding in Grace: Yielding to the Luminous Presence Within Through the Practice of Ego Relaxation (Sessions 1-4: August 19 & 26; September 2 & 9)
— A Course in Miracles manual for teachers
These uncertain times in which our “normal” routines have been powerfully interrupted presents many challenges…
However, it also presents us with an opportunity like never before to befriend this time of change as the Divine Invitation it really is — a chance to wake up out of everything that does not truly serve you, yield to a deeper intelligence that has always been running the show, and allow for positive change.
In this 4-week opening module, Miranda will share how to look upon these times as a collective birthing process — and as we know, birth is often intense, wild, and unpredictable.
If we’re wise, we learn to surrender INTO the process, and do our best to align with it and say “yes.” (The ego’s default is always NO!)
We must learn to wake up OUT OF ego fear, control, conditioning, and defenses… and wake up INTO our essential qualities and recognize our interconnectedness with everything in existence.
When we’re connected and unified from within, we naturally respond from a consciousness of love and clarity in daily life. As our world is being born anew, we can also be born into a new way of being that is powerfully loving, liberated, and wise.
How can we harness this situation to evolve into the most noble, graceful human beings we can possibly be? The Practice of Ego Relaxation is the “how” of Miranda’s methodology, and she’ll guide you to engage in it through holistic inquiry, meditation, and devotional practice. The underpinning principle is:
You don’t “do” spiritual transformation. Relax the resistance, and it finds you.
Miranda will introduce you to the four dimensions of Grace, and how we apply Ego Relaxation to the invitations that life is bringing to you in these times — so that it can come alive within you.
You’ll discover how to harness the precise circumstances you’re facing as a divine curriculum, and to take the attitude of the happy learner.
Miranda will show you how to discern the difference between authentic surrender and collapse.
Ego Relaxation does not ask you to be passive and not take appropriate actions in your life; rather, it asks for you to understand and learn to relax your ego activity, the ways we are so often getting in our own way through trying to bypass or push past our challenges.
You’ll learn to yield into what IS, which is the essence of the great Sanskrit liberation mantra “Om Nama Shivaya.” Such surrender brings us back into the receptive condition where we experience the Grace that is always present… as our very foundation, bubbling up from within to give us sustenance and support.
This provides us with an instantaneous oasis of calm inside. It is where we can rest in natural great peace, even though the outer world outside may be quaking. Learning to rest inwardly, you can respond in daily life from your deepest center.
This exhausted mind, beaten helplessly
By karma and neurotic thoughts,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.
Rest in natural great peace.
— Poem by Lama Padmasambhava (spoken in 800 A.D)
In this opening module, you’ll:
- Embrace your present life circumstances as a divine curriculum, and review specifically what you’re being asked to wake up out of — and what you are being called to wake up into
- Recognize the Grace that’s always present, and how your willingness to yield to what IS brings alive the love and support you need
- Discover how Ego Relaxation soothes your agitation, helps you settle, and transforms obstacles into wisdom, so you can flow gracefully to life’s invitations
- Cultivate a daily practice that sustains you as you learn to ground yourself in the Infinite
- Illuminate your defenses as you soften, open, and allow yourself to experience life with unconditional acceptance
- Learn how to practice Ego Relaxation as a form of meditation — and lean into the Om Nama Shivaya mantra to melt your resistance
Integration & Extended Satsang
In the final session of this 4-session module, Miranda will lead you in a special integration session…
You’ll move through chanting practices, meditation, and a review and deepening of the previous weeks’ sessions.
Miranda will then guide you through a full hour of satsang, where she’ll work more deeply with your questions, grapplings, and realizations.
The teachings will come vividly to life in response to the group field, as Miranda models how everything you experience can become a gateway into ever-deepening Grace.
Module 2 — The 3 C’s: Facing Your Challenges With Courage, Compassion & Curiosity (Sessions 5-8: September 16 (Pre-Recorded) & 23; October 7 & 14)
— Richard Rohr
Right now we’re all navigating the turmoil of the collective — trying our best to process the uncertainty of our future, and what our world will look like at the end of this tunnel.
While these times potentially can offer us expansive new possibilities, we must not bypass the human challenges.
The spirituality that our world needs now recognizes that human suffering must be met deeply with love.
In this module, Miranda will encourage you to ask, How can we harness these times of change and uncertainty in a way that comes from spiritual maturity — rather than fear and reactivity?
She’ll help you turn towards your challenging emotions of fear and anger — as well as unconscious self-centeredness and reactivity. While these responses are all-too-human and inevitable in these unsettling, intense times… you can instead meet these challenges with courage, compassion, and curiosity.
Together, you and your fellow participants will learn surrender — not through struggling to transcend your ego, but by opening in and through the authentic truth of your direct experience.
In this module, you’ll:
- Discover how to cultivate courage, compassion, and curiosity with your human emotions — and understand what causes you to react from ego rather than judging yourself for it
- Explore how to face what scares you, transforming fear into responsiveness
- Learn to stay present and meet your fears all the way so you can discern the difference between the mind stream of fear (anxiety) and your survival instinct, moving you into wise action
- Discover what’s always alive underneath your fear
- Face what enrages you — transforming anger into strength as you stay present with your fire rather than suppressing it or acting it out… harnessing the energy within anger to create constructive change
- Explore the difference between your good intentions and your actual impact on others
- Transform self-centeredness into empathy, moving from me to we
Integration & Extended Satsang
During the closing session of this second module, Miranda will lead you in a special integration session…
She’ll begin with a mantra (Om Tare Tutare Ture So Ha) and a Mountain of Presence meditation to help you stay present and meet everything with courage, compassion, and curiosity, as well as a review and deepening of the previous weeks’ sessions.
She’ll then once again move into an hour-long satsang, where she’ll work more deeply with your questions, grapplings, and realizations. The teachings will come vividly to life in response to the group field, as Miranda models how everything you experience can become a gateway into ever-deepening Grace.
Module 3 — Nurturing Spiritual Resilience: Receiving Deep Inner Nourishment (Sessions 9-13: October 28; November 4, 11 & 18; December 2)
— Ramakrishna
At this point on your journey, you’ll be awake to the Divine Invitations appearing within your life. You’ll understand how to practice ego relaxation, with the waves of emotion and energy coming up…
You’ll have removed the “sting” from the reactivity that’s inevitable when there’s great suffering in your midst. You’ll have deepened your capacity to stay present and undefended with what is — and gained deeper access to the Grace that is our inherent foundation.
In this pivotal third module, Miranda will guide you to receive deep inner nourishment, opening to the subtle, yet substantial forces that are available to help you regenerate.
She’ll introduce you to her powerful teaching, “Trusting the Mystery,” and how this pivotal virtue can be applied specifically to help us in these uncertain times.
Miranda will share the stages in the development of trust outlined in the A Course in Miracles manual for teachers, opening the possibility of trusting that all is well — even when outward circumstances don’t appear that way.
Miranda will share a teaching on “Taking Refuge” where you’ll make a connection with an enlightened being you’re drawn to — or work more deeply with a mantra you’ve explored in the previous module… to help you receive deep spiritual nourishment and vertical support.
In this beautiful, restorative, and nurturing part of the program, you’ll:
- Deepen your capacity to recognize and receive the loving goodness that’s always with you
- Receive a teaching of Ramana Maharshi who speaks of the power of “admitting your inability, and that you need a higher power to help you” in the process of surrender
- Relax your defense against love and vulnerability that’s rooted in the holding environment of early childhood — and allow Loving Presence to pervade your Being, and dissolve “you”
- Harness helplessness as a gateway to Grace — and explore how practicing Ego Relaxation makes you soft, open, and humble… ushering you into the exquisite celestial state of grace
- Open to a Divine Helping Hand so you can receive vertical support — and learn to drink light and nourishment just as a plant drinks the light of the sun
Integration & Extended Satsang
In the final week of this third module, Miranda will lead you in a special integration session…
You’ll learn the rejuvenating, enlightened Gayatri mantra — known as the mother of all Sanskrit mantras — including the body movements… as you’ll discover, it’s like taking a light bath each day.
Miranda will also share a Shower of Grace meditation, and review the previous weeks’ sessions.
You’ll conclude with an hour-long satsang in which Miranda will respond to your questions, aha! moments, and breakthroughs.
Module 4 — Heart of the Absolute: Transforming Ancient Hatred Into Present Love (Sessions 14-17: January 6, 13, 20 & 27)
— A Course in Miracles
By now you’ve opened to taking refuge in a depth of Grace beyond conceptual understanding. You’re learning to trust the mystery that’s unfolding…
In this module, you’ll enter the heart that’s deeper than emotion — the Heart of the Absolute.
The Absolute is the silent depth where everything is absorbed into a great silence. It’s the mystical womb of the universe, the place of the deepest rest — and the deepest resolution.
Having seen some of your subtle or not-so-subtle ego defenses, self-centeredness, and reactivity, you’ll likely be feeling quite humbled…
And so Miranda will guide you through the next step of becoming the graceful human being you want to be — facing yourself honestly and opening up to the correction of errors.
This isn’t a process of righting wrongs or judgment, but of understanding that true forgiveness requires Grace, based on the non-dual foundation that we’re all innocent in eternity, but not in the realm of time.
Over two sessions, you’ll explore Miranda’s teaching, Grace of True Forgiveness — one session will address the need for self-forgiveness, the other will address our need to let forgiveness cleanse us of our hate and demonization of the other... even when we feel sure we don’t have hatred within us.
Unfortunately, harboring hatred (even giving someone the cold shoulder without consciously realizing it) is very human, and it’s clearly a huge problem on our planet today.
Hate drives racism, and the ugliest forms of us vs. them mentality, preventing us from being graceful when confronted with different perspectives and values.
As you move past subtle hatred and experience the cleansing Grace of forgiveness, you’ll find joy and gratitude much more available to you.
In this module, you’ll explore:
- The meaning of the Absolute, where duality, division, and conflict — as well as parts of your personal experience and the collective sphere — can be dissolved
- A practice where you’ll open to the presence of forgiveness within the heart cave of Absolute Love, laying down on the inner altar all that needs cleansing
- How it feels to be cleansed by the living waters of Grace, restoring your innate goodness and innocence
- Miranda’s teaching on how you can find joy in each moment — even in these times of social distancing and limited connection with the places and activities we love most
- How gratitude, joy, and delight are natural qualities of your deep heart, and bubble up spontaneously when you stop grasping for stimuli and embrace your life exactly as it is
- The difference between forgiveness and reconciliation — and how forgiveness requires Grace
- How to allow differences without dehumanizing others
Integration & Extended Satsang
In this special integration session, Miranda will share her Awakening the Vast Heart meditation, and review the previous weeks’ teachings and takeaways…
You’ll also discover ways to awaken deep gratitude and joy by working with the powerful Maha Lakshmi mantra/visualization practice. This practice amplifies your sincere prayers and brings you into felt recognition of the goodness of life.
Miranda will wrap up this module with an hour-long satsang to respond to anything you’ve been wondering about, and support you in putting everything you’re learning into practice in your life.
Module 5 — Grace Beyond Your Story: Crossing Over Onto the Shore of Freedom (Sessions 18-22 — February 3, 10, 17 & 24; March 3)
— Ramana Maharshi
At the heart of spiritual transformation — and indeed, every life question we grapple with — is the perennial spiritual question… Who am I?
If you understand yourself to be your personality, the roles you play in life, the character of YOU — you’ll continue to be shaken by life’s ups and downs.
In this module, Miranda will guide you to address the bondage in your mind, unpack the layers of your ego identity, and open into the spaciousness and pure awareness that is I AM — who you truly are and always have been at every age and stage of life.
Uncovering the jewel of your true identity reveals that you are the love, peace, beauty, meaning, and freedom you’ve been seeking all along. This module is dedicated to helping you truly experience this, not just understand it conceptually.
You’ll work with Miranda’s powerful “unwinding your core ego identity” process, which unlocks the Rubik’s Cube of your familiar self and its patterns…
This work integrates psychological insight into how personality structures are constellated in our earliest childhood experiences — with spiritual understanding of the “fall from grace” that all human beings go through.
You’ll explore the curious phenomena of how the ego tends to re-constellate back to familiar stories, even after you’ve dropped through them to a deeper reality.
To determine whether a story binds you or serves you, you’ll learn to spot the difference between immediate direct experience and the meaning you give to the story. And you’ll learn to relax your attachment to adhering to this story as though it were true.
From there, you’ll stretch out and explore the spaciousness within — the pure freedom and possibility. You’ll discover there’s no beginning, middle, or end to what you are.
In
