Cynthia’s Eastertide Invitation: The Community Conversation Continues – Event Recording

On Easter morning 2022 Cynthia Bourgeault offered our Wisdom Community a compelling Eastertide invitation and practice challenge. She provides further reflections and responds to a number of questions in this Zoom conversation hosted by Wisdom Waypoints.

Here are the six main practices Cynthia suggested for the 40 day period of Eastertide:

  1. For these forty days, fast completely from the story of yourself. In the end, it’s mostly irrelevant anyway, and its heavy-handed, ploddingly linear causality steals the being-energy you need to stay present at this more subtle level of selfhood. To paraphrase my cellphone, it’s like an app constantly running in the background that winds up draining the battery.
  2. You will taste your more subtle, World 24 self directly as you learn to remain consistently within your atmosphere**. Don’t let yourself be drawn out of your atmosphere, not for a single breath. The place you will always be drawn back to is at best World 48. Usually lower.
  3. Rest from thinking, analyzing, strategizing—and above all, introspection. Put away the journal for forty days; it is a World 48 cul de sac. What you are to receive cannot be “understood”; it must be directly seen.
  4. Practice three-centered awareness every day, balancing out your life patterns to include all three centers in everything you do—i.e., not simply sequentially, like three hours of headwork followed by three hours in the garden, but three hours of headwork fully in the body followed.by three hours in the garden not zoning out.
  5. Pay attention to the movement of the subtle body within you—the kesdjan flow within your outer being body—by daily work with at least one of the Gurdjieff exercises: not ALL of them. Spiritual gluttony of any kind will drag you right back into your World 48 self, and that is exactly what we are trying to dissolve here (or at least, make it a bit more transparent, so as to see through it).
  6. As much as possible, fast from counting. Do not count breaths, do not count calories, do not count the days left in Ascensiontide. Counting is so, so World 48! It will drag you right back into the deficient mental structure. Do all that you do either through simple, unquantified obedience to the aim you have set, or (when and if it descends) in that rush of timeless spaciousness from that other intensity. But do it, one way or another.

Read Cynthia’s full Eastertide invitation and instructions, and find related resources here.  

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We are deeply grateful to Cynthia for so generously expanding on her initial invitation and responding to a range of thoughtful questions. The interest and enthusiasm in our Wisdom community to lean into Cynthia’s practice challenge through this Eastertide period is undeniable! Also our thanks to Jeanine Siler Jones and the WWP team for hosting and holding the field for this online Zoom event.

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For a description and map of the worlds, see Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm by Cynthia Bourgeault

You can find a guided recording of the Atmosphere Exercise here.

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We welcome your contributions towards our Zoom conversation with Cynthia. Any amount helps us continue our ongoing work and expand our Wisdom Waypoints offerings.

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