The Tension of Emergence: Thriving in a world that remakes, not breaks

"More than a Body": The Subtle Art of Cosmic Reciprocity with Cynthia Bourgeault

• Jennifer England • Season 3 • Episode 17

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Jennifer talks with modern-day mystic, Episcopal priest, author and teacher, Cynthia Bourgeault about how our global breakdown might be a breakthrough. Weaving together science, philosophy and spiritual traditions they talk about the evolution of human consciousness and how to nourish and feed the collective.  

In this episode they share- 

  • Our shift to an integral structure of consciousness 
  • How reciprocity works between the seen and unseen worlds
  • What is three-centered awareness and how to develop it
  • Why virtues are more than personality traits 

Tune in to this beautiful conversation to learn the subtle art of cosmic reciprocity and discover why we’re more resilient and creative than we think. 


Links & resources—


Gratitude for this show’s theme song Inside the House, composed by the talented Yukon musician, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Jordy Walker. Artwork by the imaginative writer, filmmaker and artist Jon Marro.

S3. Ep. 17 "More than a Body": The Subtle Art of Cosmic Reciprocity with Cynthia Bourgeault
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When you find yourself in the dark, what do you rely on to see or to know that you're safe? Do you find that you're comfortable when you can't see? When you have to allow your eyes to adjust so you can find your way through an unfamiliar room? And when we find ourselves in the dark, In life, or in our leadership, we often feel lost, and bewildered, sometimes fearful, and uncertain,

when we arrive into a place where there are no maps, where our eyes need to adjust. We need to rely on a wider source of intelligence so that we can find our way.

Or. be more comfortable being lost altogether. When I find myself in the dark or in territory where there are no maps.

There's a different quality of awakeness. And what I find in this moment of time, When so many things are falling apart is that I sense our collective awakening. It's imperfect. It's in different stages and we're all in different places, but there's something about paying attention with more than our mind that is already happening.

And there's this invitation in this glitchy movement in our evolution towards seeing and being with more of us. And to me this is, , the invitation to work with the more subtle dimensions of our intelligence and wisdom. And in sitting with the big, big questions of where we're at and how to be.

There's someone that I really trust and rely on for her perspective to help us orient in a fuller way. The conversation you're about to hear is a special one for me as we head into the final weeks of this season. I've been studying with Cynthia Bourgeault for many years, I was drawn to her because she's a modern day mystic and has an integral and evolutionary lens. She's interested in the biggest questions of who we are and how we're called to be. And just one of the most down to earth teachers I know. She sails a boat, she chops wood and fancies her time.

in a simple hermitage on the water combined with loads of outdoor work and meditation and a good dose of singing. I'm super grateful she's here with me today in about what it means to be more than a body on this planet at the stage of collapse of certain forms of consciousness and the birth of new forms.

She's an Episcopal priest, a writer, and an internationally known retreat leader and divides her time between Maine and a demanding schedule traveling globally to teach and spread the recovery of the Christian contemplative and wisdom path. She founded the Contemplative Society in Victoria, British Columbia, and is a core faculty emeritus at the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

She is the author of many incredible books, including Love is Stronger Than Death, The Eye of the Heart, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, Wisdom Jesus, Mystical Courage, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, The Corner of Fourth and Nondual, and The Heart of Centering Prayer. She continues to teach, mentor a new generation of wisdom seekers, 

and explore spiritual cutting edges as she also messes around with the boats. She was honored by the annual Watkins Review as one of the hundred most spiritually influential living people in 2021. So Join Cynthia and I as we talk about the subtle art of cosmic reciprocity, with the capacities we already have, those capacities that are more than a body, as we make our way through the dark. 

Jennifer: So Cynthia, I'd love to start with some good news, because there's so much heartbreak and disillusionment at this time, especially with the state of elections in the United States and the war in Gaza and the state of climate change. There's so much bad news. And you recently said that this state.

that we find ourselves in as a planetary human family, that we've got some good news. And I'd love you to kick us off there, if you would.

Cynthia: Well, it's good news for the tough minded and those that are willing to upend most everything they've thought about so far and really enter a new and much larger frame of reference. For those not willing to do that then it's the same usual bad news just recycling itself. But the good news is that there are larger maps coming to us, not only from the great.Perennial wisdom, traditions of the great spiritual traditions of the world, but also from some of the best thinkers the intellectual thinkers of our own time and maps that are corroborated by the findings of contemporary science. So there's a bigger picture that's awaiting us if we've got the wherewithal to step into it.

And, the bigger picture, while it doesn't, in some sense, take away the, white knuckleness situation we're in, it does place it in a context where it's not necessarily about failure, but it's about a really pivotal moment, a breakdown, breakthrough moment where we can go one way or we can go another.

And if we manage to go the other way, there are maps and resources flowing toward us that let us know the things that we actually can do to help and where resources are coming from. There's an encouragement that although this feels catastrophic, as we look at it that. Within the really, really big picture, you know, the great evolutionary arcs, both of human consciousness and of the planet, the geological era of the planet it's not an unusual crisis. It's it's more like a moment of opportunity where there's an opportunity to draw in some powerful new resources, but most of the the world is not aware of these not connecting with them and not acknowledging them. So it's, it really is abandoning a map, which is driving us crazy because it's gotten much too small to, to allow us to be our best selves in this time of crisis.

Jennifer: Well, I appreciate that perspective. And I want to get more into the map that's beckoning us the territory beyond our frame. But I appreciate that you're connecting that there's, there's. In this experience of the breakdown, there is a breakthrough, and that this in the broader arc of, human evolution, deep time, evolutionary time, that this moment is not unprecedented.

And yet it can feel like that to us.

Cynthia: Yeah.

Jennifer: So what is this new territory, that so many of us are, are maybe not aware of that gives us a new way to think about and be in relationship to this moment? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Cynthia: There are a few maps that are really, really helpful to help us trace a wider perspective. The first one, just simply for those that are. Are coming from a Christian or, biblical perspective is, the need to get out of the old flat earth cosmos of Adam and Eve and to start to work with a cosmos that has something of the shape and size that ours actually does.

And the work of trying to transpose Christianity toward the cosmos, the size of the universe story was begun by a wonderful fellow by the name of Teilhard de Chardin, who was also a paleontologist and a geologist, as well as a, Christian mystic. So He brought his his real resources to bear in the early 20th century to sort of try and tease Christian theology, the great secret traditions that are keeping the fate of human beings off of this.

It all began with Adam and Eve, and onto the 14 billion year universe story of which our Earth story occupies about 4. 5 billion years. And He was the one who plotted the course of the evolution too, against the great geological eras. So there are those maps then working just about concurrently a little later than Teilhard, another very brilliant European thinker, not a Jesuit or a monk a secular humanist by the name of Jean Gebser, Created his, his vast map of the eras, the great eras of human consciousness as it moves relentlessly towards evolution.

Teilhard had seen that, but Gebser filled in the pieces. So from those maps, plus what, what science is picking out and, and portraying to us, we're right now at a kind of perfect storm of the convergence of a couple of things. First of all, according to the Gebser map, we're on the edge of the cusp of the breakdown of what he calls the mental structure of consciousness, which has basically sort of been the, the Cosmovision, the way of making sense of reality that has been in operation for about.

3000 years. It awoke around the world about 500 B. C. and the great spiritual traditions all have a stare of it. With the Greeks, it's Pythagoras and the beginning of the great philosophers, Plato And with the Old Testament, it's the Old Testament prophets, with the Buddhists, well, with the Hindu tradition, we get the Buddha, we get Zoroaster, we get Lao Tse, we get these great thinkers that are ushering in a whole new way of seeing the world accompanied by apparently shifts in how the brain, the neurology of the brain is functioning.

So, that structure has been basically everything we've known 2500 years, 3,000 years, and the whole Western civilization has been built on it. And it's giving way at this point. And there's nothing to be alarmed about in that per se. All the great structures of consciousness give way. The mental structure of consciousness sort of pushed aside the mythical, structure that had preceded it, and the mythic structure had pushed aside the magic structure.

So the waters are parting around the mental structure, and what's pushing up evolution always seems to have some better game plan in place, is what is called the integral structure, which is a whole new capacity. It's like another dimension kicks on in the brain that allows us to see the world from it.

Like, it adds a whole perspective as different as going from 2D to 3D. At new capacity, there's strong sort of evidence that this is not just the rewiring of a brain, but involves brain heart connection involves the whole body in involves a shift in the actual structure of the frontal lobes. And so, once again, Humankind is moving towards the eclosion, this wonderful word Teilhard uses, the spring and forth like in the spring, of a new structure of consciousness.

But the problem is that all our tools, all our ways of computing ourselves, our basic sense of selfhood, are all founded in the operating system of the mental structure of consciousness. And so we're sort of in double jeopardy because It feels like our world is falling apart and in a way it, it is because the structures and the great cultural institutions that have been founded on the structure of consciousness are all in disarray.

Politics, education, nationalism you name it. religion across the board. They're getting shaken up. The new structure is moving in and it's not off the charts new because the mystics and all the great spiritual paths have been pointing toward it forever. But nowadays, it's like human beings have to make a huge leap to a whole new way of, of it has a neurophysiology to it.

It has an attitude towards it. It has a sense of selfhood towards it. It has a way of knowing toward it. That is completely different from anything that we've been taught. Had before as long as we're trying to use the old mental structure of consciousness to to get ourselves out of this predicament we've created through the mental structure of consciousness. We're just digging our grave deeper. But our resources don't really tell us how, you know, we're still using maps of human being, we're using truisms like let your anger be your motivator, we're using a sense of selfhood, we're using models of victimhood that don't allow us to really understand how this new structure works.

And of course, the educational systems don't acknowledge this other way of thinking because everything they are up to has been grouted in the earlier. So it is a collapse. And the only thing you can say is that this collapse has happened at least three times in the great history of, civilization before.

And it always has a period of intense destabilization through which it sometimes takes two or 300 years for the thing to break through. And at time you're in destabilization. I would say we're very much in that period. We're in game of the metal structure of consciousness, but this is coinciding now with the apparently the end of the Holocene era 

of the, great evolution, the paleontological history of the planet for, for 11, 000 years or more, we've had a period of relative climate stability, relative moderate, temperate settled climate. And this is now giving way. And, of course, I think it would be daft to say that human meddling hasn't been Thank you.

And influence in this. It certainly is a significant influence, but I don't think it's necessarily correct to say it's the driving influence because these great periods have happened before that climate itself sort of goes into sync and out of sync. I mean, 65, 000 years ago, all of a sudden we got these geological perturbations that split the continents shoved up.

Yeah. Whole new mountain chains in other words, the world is always shifting around. And when you look at the long picture, there's destabilizations and then restabilizations. So things are really dicey for us because we have two major destabilizations intertwined and perhaps inter causal.

I, I think. You could say fairly that human misdoings created by the fevered sort of final manifestations of the dying mental structure of consciousness, or the disintegrating have certainly created a kind of compulsive cleverness that has accelerated climate change and may have been a tipping point, but you get a little bit too tied up and overwrought.

If you say, well, we caused it. The planet has never, and the other thing that you, you realize taking the long view is that if the thing gets stripped right down to the geosphere, which is a possibility, it will recreate from there. And there's not a hell of a lot we human beings can do to turn it around or fix it.

It's, it's bigger than us. And its resilience and adaptiveness is far greater than us. So, to take it in stride and to understand, to position ourselves, I think, correctly, soberly and loosely, is saying that we are standing at a very, very major cusp, in which we bear a good deal of responsibility. But you really have to look at it in terms of larger time scales than we're used to using to be able to be calm and sober about this and do what it is that we're called to do without just panicking.

Jennifer: Yeah. That reminds me of the image of the , which with climate warming, you know, becomes more wobbly and you have these, intense, very quick shifts in weather, you know, all of a sudden, it's the jet streams, bringing Arctic air rate down into Florida and then really warm air up the Pacific.

And so it's just such a beautiful metaphor for what we're collectively feeling in terms of this destabilization on so many different levels in our lives. And so I'm curious, And maybe the shift into, you know, how are we called to be and this word wisdom that you've been so instrumental in revitalizing in the Christian community, but also in the broader community of spiritual seekers and those who are deeply heartbroken about how do I.

How can I orient to this time? How can I use my gifts in such a way so that I can know and be with this complexity and this destabilization without losing my center? And so could you talk about what is wisdom and why is wisdom so essential for how we work with the jet stream of our lives at this particular time?

Cynthia: Well, I have to throw in another map to do this. And even though we've just expanded the cosmos back to You know, 4. 5 billion year earth story, which is better certainly where it's a more accurate perspective than we've been using We still have a very flat earth Cosmology because wisdom and I'll get to defining that in a minute the great wisdom traditions Which are basically the deepest teachings of the sacred traditions all the sacred traditions, you know Aboriginal, Christian, Jewish, Sufi, Islam, Buddhist but the great traditions of sacred wisdom, which have always tended the questions, what are we here for?

And what are we to do? Always had. In them, up till very, very recently, and then, you know, the past 500 years or so, a beautiful roadmap that's been called the Great Chain of Being, which suggests that the world that we see the visible worlds, even if they're very vast, are not the other worlds, not the only worlds.

They're worlds of infinitely more subtle dimension of spirit. Of causality, of purpose, of love, of consciousness, that we human beings just happen to occupy a, a place on a great ray of creation where things move from invisible to visible and from all energetic to solid but the, great maps of the great chain of being.

All spoke of this deep, fiery, what you might call a spiritual Big Bang that accompanies and even as the prototype for the physical Big Bang that gave us planets. The spiritual Big Bang is that whatever the The Abyss, call it God, call it Divine Purpose, call it, Cosmic Intelligence, whatever it willed to manifest outwardly, that in order to complete itself and display itself and be its fullness, it willed to create its and the great, the great chain of being maps go from the most fiery inaccessible light of spirit through the causal realms and the logoic realms and the angelic realms something called the imaginal realm, which is the next realm out from us, us on the earth, and then down to the the sub lunar realms.

And so things emerge out of this great birthing into degrees of form and then returning. So it had originally been in great classic traditions, it had been a redshift map. In other words, every time something went out from the next highest level up, it lost energy and, and the earth is colder and coarser and denser than this next world out.

But In the spiritual teaching of a person I follow very deeply, G. I. Gurdjieff, the Russian mystic of about a century ago, he figured out how to develop the whole thing as a reciprocal feeding unit so that each Realm both receives and gives from another and the whole kind of receiving and giving back creates essentially an evolutionary or Counter entropic principle within the whole that keeps it in a dynamic equilibrium rather than winding down So that's a lot of theory, but I can say that it rings perfectly consistent with my take on where we are in life right now.

That the human being in these classical maps is assigned to the realm of being that's called mixtus, mixtus orbis, or the mixed realm. And the classic ways of describing it is we stand with one foot in the physical world and one foot in the spiritual and energetic world. And we pour back and forth between them.

And, I'm sure that this is an experience that many of us have that we don't know how to make sense of. That some of the spiritual teachers talk about the nostalgia for the infinite. We feel as we rattle around in our own consciousness that we're more than just our body, that we have something called a spirit, something that pulls us into The good, the true, the beautiful, the meaningful, that makes us ask the questions, what am I here for?

How can I help? The good news is these questions very much relate to and connect us to worlds higher than our own, from which help comes to us. And from which something is expected. They support and they expect something of us. They give. And we give. And in this giving, receiving, and giving back the meaning and purpose of human life is found.

And I believe also the real key, the Rosetta Stone to how we can help is found. The good news in all that is that there are worlds upon worlds upon worlds for whom Our fragile contingent world is terribly important in the whole great spiritual chain of being the creating down and the handing back up.

We human beings occupy a pivotal place on that whole chain. We receive from above spiritual energies. We receive love, blessing, support, strength, resilience. And we give back. The transformed fruits of our own labor as we give into the planet the virtues, the qualities of being that not only make life meaningful and are worthy of a human being, but actually warm and soften and gentle the atmosphere of the planet. our capacity and our unique capacity among all the fauna and flora and nature, we believe, because of the level of consciousness that we're at and the particular structure of our being we have the capacity to, nourished by things like, love, like attention. Like purpose, peace, like gentleness, like trust, like faith, these are nutrients to our being and nutrients to the world.

We have the capacity to transform them, to produce them, and to put them in the atmosphere of this planet. And one would say we not only have the capacity to do that, but we have the responsibility to do that. That's our cosmic place we transform the sheer biological elements of the planet, unlock the goodness, the virtue, the purpose, which was within it, make it real in life and hand it into the atmosphere as the energy of goodness, of wisdom.

Of forbearance. St. Paul talked about the, the fruit of the spirit and gentleness, peace, faithfulness stability, kindness, patience, joy, love. These things are not just nice, pleasant character traits. They're actual subtle, energetic nutrients. And we human beings are charged with producing them. And when we don't, there's a deterioration in the environment which is not only a deterioration in the sort of mental and emotional environment, but in the actual physiology and overall energetic balance of the body.

Of the planet. And you, we kind of know this. We kind of know this when we you know, when you live in an environment which is constantly harsh and toxic and filled with terror and filled with suspicion, you can find yourself withering. And everything becomes more insentient, and as soon as human beings become more insentient, the planet immediately follows suit, because the biosphere is so vulnerable to our human tending, not just the physical level, but at the energetic level.

Jennifer: So I love what you're saying, and it, brings me back to something you said at the beginning about we can either contract at this moment, or there can be this expansion and opening up. And that's what I hear you saying around this opening towards developing these subtle qualities, these energetic qualities, not just as virtues, but as actual food.

I love. I love that idea. And so how do you define wisdom and what does wisdom, the practice of it have to do with our capacity to nourish these qualities and this food as a, as an essential part of our giving.

Cynthia: Wisdom refers to the ancient spiritual traditions, the inner most deepest teachings on human purpose . And they are pragmatic and transformation minded in essence. They hover within the idea that human beings are self-developing organism, you know, we're, we don't come into the world of finished product.

We come in with at least one other complete evolution of consciousness necessary. And so wisdom is about transformation. It's about calling human beings to the higher sense of purpose and of teaching these ancient skills that have been all but forgotten in the dying, suspicious, and very constricted mental structure of consciousness of our time.

They've taught the metaphysics that I've just shared with you a little bit, and they also teach people proactively how to live their life virtuously, not just so you go to heaven. Because you die, but because the word virtue. If you look at the actual dictionary definitions, I go down two or three on the list from the old alchemical traditions, and the wisdom tradition is right in there with this, a virtue is not just a positive quality that makes you a better human being.

The virtue is the agency in something. It's a power to act. When the old alchemists used to talk about the virtue of lead or the virtue of sulfur or the virtue of gold they weren't just talking about how good it was. They were talking about the thing in it that is the active of principle That makes it work.

And so when we talk about the virtues, faith, hope, love, peace, gentleness, patience, forbearance, and call them virtues, these are action agents. They give us agency. They're the power to act. And human beings are required to be virtuous in order to act in the world in the way that great nature has appointed for us. And so that when we are being for example, compassionate, we are exercising the agency of compassion and through that exercise of this, we are putting that virtue, that, beautiful nutrient into the world, into the atmosphere, into the whole subtle structure

Jennifer: It reminds me of, my own experience of, you know, even the gesture of self compassion and that when we can be compassionate towards our small self, all their quirks and our foibles as being human, that softness and that love that comes through self compassion changes something in my whole being.

There's a softening and a relaxation. There's an acceptance and with that, there's a felt sense that something shifts in my own body and my heart, in my mind, my thought structure. And I think this is what you're speaking of. Because from then it's not, and it's not for me to hold, it's not for me to keep for me, for my sake of my own self transformation.

It's to be given. It's to be experienced and felt.

Cynthia: Exactly. We have to, you know, our quandary as human beings right now is that we have to get ourselves out of the inner contraction and constriction that everything in this perfect storm of, destructions of, disintegrations is causing us to constrict more and more.

And as we constrict and contract more and more we become more and more insentient and these virtues like, faith and compassion and love, love of neighbor, self love, just go out the window and we become little stones and nothing can happen because these virtues are needed and they're needed proactively.

They're like the oil that keeps the whole thing lubricated. You take them out and it's metal to metal.

Jennifer: Yeah. And as you speak to this, what's coming to me is that then there's the contracting more into that mental model where we want more certainty and this idea that our intellect or our will alone can solve and fix the problems before us. But you've also, shared with me a profound teaching of yours is that wisdom is knowing with more of it.

And, I think this is where you're gesturing, especially in the mystical traditions to the unseen world, as you speak to the great chain of being, but also into the intuitive, into the body, into different ways of knowing that should we expand our capacity to know with more of us, there is an ability to be with.

More of what's happening in this particular moment and to choose right action, depending on the situation. And so does, does that make sense in your view?

Cynthia: makes sense that we're, since the, certainly the past 500 years or so, but always the, mental structure of consciousness was kind of hierarchical and tyrannical, it thought it was the only game in town. For 3, 000 years now, the biggest shadow side of the mental structure of consciousness is that we've tended to just use the mind as the only way of Determining and solving all our problems. The great wisdom traditions have always said there are other centers of Awareness and Gurdjieff who I spoke of earlier You're taught very firmly that what is essential about a human being is that we are three centered Beings.

We have, yes, the mind with this wonderful center and ways of, understanding and knowing, but this is also complemented by the emotional center, the feelings, the capacity to perceive the world through sympathetic vibration. By being inside everything and vine by vibrationally coming into sync with it.

It's a whole structure of intelligence. And then there's the intelligence of the moving center, which we almost don't understand in the West anymore. We think it's the autonomic. nervous system or primitive guts. It's the intelligence that we know exploring the world through sensation and movement, rhythmic motion through, for example, it's the intelligence that lets you ski down a hill or master a foreign language or interpret A gesture, or express a gesture, like a religious gesture, or like that.

And it conveys tremendous meaning. And in the great wisdom traditions, all three centers had to be online and in communication in order for anything like consciousness to happen. So one of the problems with regard to why we're so stuck at this cusp between the dying middle, and the rising integral, is that the integral absolutely demands three centered awareness.

We're not going to get this different dimension until we, really understand that. We have to know with all of our knowing centers intact, and then that other dimension will pop in. Where we are right now is we're just really stuck because the more desperate we get, the more we enthrone the mind, and the more we get cut off from the real parts of ourselves that could help us not only settle down in our own body being as we find it now, but it's through particularly the inner working of having these three in balance and calm and synchronized that you begin to to gain verifiable access to the help that comes from the imaginal realm.

You begin to get so much sharper at realizing that there's an inner body within your outer body that is always in communion with an intelligence that's far higher than of this world. And I'm not talking about the traditional God stuff. I'm just talking about the deep wisdom that flows to us.

You won't pick it up with your mind, period. You have to have three centers in dialogue, calm, equalized, and then you can begin to become aware of the flow of vital, subtle energy through you. You can taste love as a nutrient in three centered awareness. You just can't do that in your head. It's a theory.

Jennifer: Yeah, beautiful. And so how do we do this? For those who are listening, some who may have a spiritual home that feels very familiar and, grounded. And some of us. It is a theoretical thing that feels very far away. And so how do we start to cultivate this three, Centered knowing to enable this more subtle and discerning capacity to be in relationship with something bigger than us.



Cynthia: Well, a lot of my teaching has been about that. And if there was a quick and dirty answer, I would have given it already. And it is a double whammy for a lot of modern people because so many people now, three generations ago, threw over religion massively and, you know, mess around a bit with being spiritual, but not religious.

But a lot of that is sort of secondhand and recycled and cliched material. The great traditions have been the traditional gateways through which you enter into this deeper known. And since we've devalued them and well, they've hung themselves by their own omissions and co missions. A lot of people don't know where to start because all we see around us is the, The middle structure of consciousness and meltdown and we don't know where to run. But the simplest thing to say is that in all the great traditions there is a greater attention to rhythm.

And to dividing the day into a rhythmic balance. The great Benedictine tradition of Christianity, which has been around since the 5th century, called it Ora et Labora, prayer and work. And when people came to become monks, they would find whatever they would be doing, they would be cycling around in the course of the day around a set of activities that would require them to work at all three centers.

You know, they would start their day with their silent prayer going deep into their inner center. They would move into the choir where they would chant Psalms and the chanting, really engages the feeling center, also the moving center because there's a lot of yoga involved in, singing, believe me. Then they'd go out in the fields and work, and then they come back in and do the whole thing in reverse order. So, in other words, the daily rhythm forced them to be a little bit in all three centers at once. And it's a good starting point for reclaiming your own balance. If you're one of these people that spends 12 hours a day in front of a computer or three computers do something to counterbalance that.

We all sort of sense this, but we, we basically call it working out. We call it or gym or, you know, but the idea of just bringing your day into a daily rhythm that has in it the components of intellectual work. physical work, and I really mean manual physical work that's rhythmic, balanced, outdoors, if at all. And whatever rings your bells when we talk about prayer, spirit, meditation whichever is your discipline of choice that brings out that, deeper yearning spirit.

To divide the day so that you've got some time in that, and, following the wisdom of the teachers of all, sing more and dance more. You know, sing in groups like we used to do, find choirs, sing in them you know, sacred dance or non sacred dance. But these are ancient and powerful, powerful human rituals and pathways for connecting the spirit.

We don't do any more of that anymore. I mean, you never hear people sing in together. Never, ever, you know, you go to rock concerts and have your eardrums blasted, so you get together and chant and we know it's satisfying when the Taizé monks, the little monastic community in France, developed the simple kind of chant that people could sing along without having a lot of books or having to, you pick it up by memory, and it leads you into a deep meditation and prayer and a deep kindling of the heart.

These are all ways that we bring ourself back into balance so that the next thing becomes possible. Next thing is that we understand that faith, hope, love, trust, resiliences are not reactions, you know, trust is not a reactive response to a world being trustworthy. You know, decontraction is not a reactive response to the world feeling safe.

The world is never going to feel trustworthy. The world is never going to feel safe. We have to learn how to do these proactively.

Not talking about spiritual bypassing or pretending that it's all lily white. I know things are hard. I know that this is desperate. I know that faith is not merited here, but faith is needed here. So I will produce it because I can, and it is my gift as a human being. I know that trust is not earned here, but trust will be given because trust is needed. It's the decision, the proactive decision to step forward and use your beautiful Three centered awareness and consciousness and heart to create these substances that are so desperately needed for the planetary survival because you're a human being.

Jennifer: I, I just love that. And I think that's for me, why. I so adore you as a teacher because I can feel your embodied and incarnate response that is so deeply genuine and is integrated this three centers. You know, your heart is online, your spirit, your intellect, and your body. And you are also a mother, you're a grandmother.

And there's something about this that the incarnation, the concept of incarnation Doesn't get us stuck into this. Let's escape into a spiritual monk cell or escape onto the mat. It is a radical yes to being human. And that's what you're encouraging us to, is to say radically yes to the proactive capacity to produce what is needed, even when it's

Cynthia: Yeah, whether we feel like it or not, you know, not as a response to a life going our way, but as a response to life needing our help. And we've, we've bought such a huge plate of of teaching that has told us we're fragile, we're victims, we're, you know, that we're all in trauma and we've bought it, and the more we feel fragile, the more we contract,

and the more we get desperate. And we have to say no, we have it.

You know, 14 billion years of evolutionary history and a planet and forebears and people coming after us that are counting on us. Unborn grandchildren that we require us to to be. The high watermark what human beings can be to not let it disappear from the planet because we're frightened and entitled.

We have to seed it into the ground, even when it looks like the snow will never stop.

Jennifer: Cynthia, what do you say to folks who are feeling so disheartened or disillusioned, you know, if one's experienced a lot of oppression or marginalization and feeling so exhausted. What I hear you saying is, We're not bypassing the real lived experience of oppression or trauma, but there's something that you're saying is that don't get caught in the limited story that that may contract you into.

Is that

Cynthia: Exactly. Exactly. And one of the features of the mental structure of consciousness is it runs on story. The kind of self we have is we like to tell the story of ourself. We even call it a spiritual journey. We are the hero of our own adventure in life. It's all a function of how the brain works in the mental structure of consciousness.

And it's telling us the story now of our woundedness, of our oppression, of our victimhood and, We can either rewrite the story, or we can step beyond the need for the storytelling capacity and the great meditative traditions, which have all without a hesitation said, stop your thinking, stop your story for the time of, you know, just be open your senses and be, and you know, be open to it.

In that space that opens up, that most people discover for the first time in a serious meditation practice, something shifts and there's a little bit of separation between yourself and your story. And into that separation pours this unfamiliar, but yet delicious strength. I'm not my story. I'm not limited by my story.

I'm not limited by the series of catastrophes that, came to me on earth. Consciousness is freer. Consciousness is always by its nature unboundaried. And to the extent that I can touch that place in myself, that is consciousness, that's free. That's unboundaried, that's not stuck in my story. I find there the strength to do this that I've said.

To proactively. forgive, to proactively trust. Because when push comes to shove, what's killing the planet is stories fighting against other stories. How are we ever going to disentangle Gaza until we get out of conflicting stories that, that both sides are using for, for their core sense of identity 

you just have to step Out of the whole piece, not by spiritually bypassing and trying to turn it into a happy ending or pretending it doesn't exist, but by seeking refuge, as the Buddhists would say, in consciousness itself, which is always flowing strong and always recreating. And and as Thomas Merton said in one of his best one liners doesn't understand imprisonment.

Jennifer: Yeah. Beautiful. And so this is this relationship that I think you're gesturing towards between the so called smaller self and the larger self.

The larger self is being. What we experience when we're emptied, or we do, as you say, the self emptying gesture

Cynthia: Yeah.

Jennifer: in this context with regard to centering prayer, which is what in part you teach, but that there's this relationship between the larger self and the smaller self that also has this exchange of love that's flowing back and forth.

Cynthia: there. And so much of classic spiritual practice really made a warfare between our smaller self and our larger self, you know, that we had to dismantle the false self, or we had to realize the illusion of our ego. Everyone had everyone had a different way of saying it. The Course in Miracles says it most starkly, the ego wants your death.

So it's, it's spiritual warfare, and you get the idea that you have to melt one part of you in order to get the other. But it's not like that. If we really are occupying as human beings, this crucial place where we're pouring from, receiving from spirit, and pouring into material, and receiving material, and giving back to spirit, we need both selves.

Thank you very much. And they are yoked in a symbiotic unity which is life giving and creative. Your larger self protects and defends your small self. You don't need your small self to go out and do things like organizing podcasts. And your, your smaller self needs to not be running the show. To look up to and trust the big self for its hope and its identity.

So it's not having to carry the weight of this scary world all on its own little shoulders. Only the small self is fragile. The big self isn't. So as the two take care of each other and help, there's a microcosm in yourself where you're, where you're smaller humanity and your larger humanity, you know, larger unboundary humanity divinity are in a deep harmonious caring relationship so it's, it's all good and we need to work through our metaphysical teaching to make this more clear. That it's not about spiritual warfare.

We've had enough warfare on this planet. And when you spoke earlier about being compassionate to your little self, this is not justifying your ego. This is your larger self. You know, bestowing what it can on your smaller self, tenderness and love and safety.

Jennifer: yeah, beautiful,

Cynthia: That's what allows your smaller self to relax and feel tender.

And that's what we need to do. We need to capitalize on the very twofoldness of our nature that we do live with a foot in both worlds to say, well, so be it. That's exactly the purpose for which we're created. So let's enjoy the hell out of it and do it. Do it with penache.

Jennifer: I love hearing this and it, feels like to what's coming to me is that there's also a larger planetary self, you know, there's the small world self. And there's this larger planetary self. And it's also an invitation to how can our imagination and our hearts expand to include you.

Yeah. This visionary possibility of what this larger whole has the potential to be and is, even while the collective global, participation in this mental model and this constriction and the polarization and the division, that's one way at it. But it seems to me what you're also inviting us always into is this isn't just about us as individuals.

This is about the collective.

Cynthia: It is, and it's a new kind of collective because from the middle structure of consciousness, a collective always seems like An aggregate of parts, you know, 10 individuals make one collective, but in the imaginal realm, and in modern science, we find it isn't that way at all. It's the other way that a collective is really a synergy. And it forms a new structure and has emergent properties that are not found in the parts.

And we draw in our own little individual pixels on the strength of that. That's what selfhood looks like in the new planetary mode. I think the younger kids are getting that naturally. I think my boomer generation is probably going to have to die out before the deck is really cleared. But more and more people are beginning to learn to think that way.

And understand that collectivity doesn't mean Marxism. It doesn't mean, you know It doesn't mean everybody walking in lockstep conformance. It means being able to form a larger autopoiesis. You know, as staggering as two hydrogen cells and one oxygen deciding to get together to make a new unit that is now water.

Jennifer: Yeah. Beautiful.

Cynthia: and has property. So we have to become the new water of the planet. And we're learning how to do this, but it's neck and neck. And, even as you watch some of the most heartbreaking situations in the world, like the, the U. S. election in Gaza, you see both sides, you see that the cage violent, vengeant defense.

Of the old way of doing things, the old stories, the old entitlements, the old nationalisms, the old polarisms, and yet you see in people's responses, they struggle and hang in with it. And, God, let's throw the Ukraine in too, because this has been a, an amazing journey for everybody. That something seems to be born out of the rubble that speaks of human resilience and maybe of kindness in a new sort of way of a larger vision.

And I can only hope that even as things shred, you know, and I'm, again, I'm no Pollyanna. I have no idea how the election is going to come out in the states. And I don't necessarily expect that God is going to come and save us all. And, we may be seeing the end of the American political system as we've known it.

And if you can't face this sort of stuff, you might as well just go back in your hobbit hole and hide. What the planet needs us to do is to stand and look at these sober truths. And the ending of an era is heartbreaking, and painful, and frightening.

Jennifer: Yeah. I appreciate just that honesty, that courage to look at what is with so much tenderness and truth telling at the same time and maybe just to end our conversation is something that you've said recently about longing. Our longing for something more, the longing for this oneness with the divine, the longing for a planet that is filled with care and love and trust, that the longing itself is the tether.

That even, if things don't go in a good way, that just the longing itself is the tether and maybe between the mental and the integral structures of consciousness, even between the mind and the heart.

Cynthia: exactly. And I think when we go back to talking about virtues as we've done it as agents, as the power to do, longing is the abiding virtue for our time, because it contains it at the agency that as we long for something we demonstrate and we live. It's reality, and we orient to it. So even to be long to be a human being, is to say we remember what it is, or at least we have some vague intuition of it, and we wish to go in that direction.

So let the longing be be the tether. That causes you finally not to give up hope, that we are, we are surrounded and being upheld in a web, in a history evolutionary rising stream of consciousness and compassion and intelligence. And if we could just break through our fear into touching it and tasting it. And if longing is the only place where we can begin to taste it, still we're tasting it. And that's good.

Jennifer: And I think there is part of me that, you know, longing that they're longing should lead to some sort of cessation of the ache. Like in me, I experience it as this deep ache, and it never goes away, and it's been there since I was a little girl,

Cynthia: No, you have to flip it around. That's what the monks always meant when they said the only real longing is for God. They don't mean for the big guy out of the sky. They mean the longing is itself infinite. It's not contained by any object in this realm. And it's the mark in us, the birthmark that shows we are joined umbilically to the infinite.

So trust that and act like you're infinite.

Jennifer: Oh, beautiful, leave it there. Thank you so much for your wisdom, for being such a special teacher in my life. So glad for your call on this earth to To be both a teacher and such a humble earth lover at the same time, I, I can't believe I get to have a teacher I get to chop wood with and carry water and be a mother alongside you in this journey.

So my deepest thanks to you.

Cynthia: Hold down the fort in those northern lands. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Jennifer: Yeah, thank you.

So here's the essence of what I'm taking from my conversation with Cynthia. I love that she reminds us that we're in precedented times, not unprecedented. She reminds us that we've been here as a human family many times before, as we have walked off the maps of old forms of consciousness, and birthed new ones.

She underscores that as we walk into an integral structure of consciousness, that we're really dethroning the precedence of the mind. The rational, the objective, and we're invited to build subtle capacities and be nourished by virtues like love, compassion, and forgiveness.

Where I really appreciate her point is that these are not just virtues that speak to our character, but they're actual subtle food.

They are a kind of subtle energetics that ripples out and makes a difference. And her point that We often hold these back until something external is guaranteed, this expectation of a particular transaction, and Cynthia 

challenges this relationship, and invites us into a far more transformational opportunity. That I can give trust even when a situation isn't trustworthy. I can offer forgiveness even if it's not warranted. And to me, this is where she is inviting us into the subtle capacities that are not just within the body, The body as one element of the three centered awareness that she speaks of but it's also the heart. It's also the mind. It's having an integration of all three centers that can support our capacity to grow wisdom, to become agents of transformation and to cultivate the quality of intelligence, the wider us that is already available as we walk into a new structure of consciousness on the planet. And I guess that's where I feel most relief is that We are just in an in between. We are in the dark, the messy middle, the bewildering time and place where we're not quite sure what to do.

And Cynthia doesn't have all the answers, nor does she pretend to have a Pollyanna understanding of everything's going to be okay if we just cultivate agency of our virtues, but it's a radical choice. We can either constrict, or we can walk into greater freedom responsibility and humility that asks us to break free of the smaller frame, we thought We knew.

You can find resources and links from this episode in the show notes to learn more about Cynthia's work, opportunities to take a retreat with her, to read her books, and to discover more about her incredible teaching. If you know someone who'd appreciate this conversation, please share this episode.

And if you've loved this season, and it's touched you in some way, and you haven't yet done so, I would be so grateful, if you could say thank you. by heading to Spotify or Apple today and leaving a brief review and maybe giving the show a squeeze of love. This really helps this labor of love, almost 20 episodes in season three to find its audience as we head into the final couple of weeks of this season.

And if you'd like to stay in touch with me, Jennifer, you can come sign up for my newsletter today at jenglund. substack. com. So that is all for now, my friend. Be sure to tune in this Friday for your next practice. I'm Jennifer England. Thank you so much for being with me here on the Tension of Emergence.