Miranda Macpherson – The Way Of Grace Advanced Sangha

If you want to stop striving, unwind your roots of suffering and access a limitless stream of spiritual nourishment with the expert guidance of a loving and compassionate teacher — who truly walks her talk — then this is the program for you.

What You’ll Discover in These 28 Modules
In this 28-part transformational training, Miranda will offer you an opportunity to finally cease your struggle to awaken and discover how to approach all of life’s challenges as a gateway to awakening and personal transformation.

Each contemplation and training 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 walk a true spiritual path of surrender that opens you to the abundant flow of Grace.

This program is divided into six sections, each with a specific emphasis:

“Opening to Grace Through the Practice of Ego Relaxation.”
Module 1 explores 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.

“Advanced Pillars of Awakening: Opening to the Principles & Presence That Resolve Primary Ego Challenges.”
Modules 2 and 3 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.

“Drinking From the Grace Stream: Prayer, Mantra & Devotional Practice.” Module 4 will include a full teaching and induction into what is considered the most powerful of all mantras — the Gayatri Mantra. It will also explore how prayer, mantra and devotional practice 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.

“Crossing Over Into Your True Identity.”
Module 5 explores how you can learn 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.

“Beyond Your Familiar Boundaries.”
Module 6 will help you to 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.

“Living Every Day as a Graceful Human Being.”
Module 7 will 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.

7 Integration & Deepening Sessions With Miranda
Woven in as part of the 28 teaching sessions, Miranda provides integration sessions where she begins with chanting, meditation and a review and deepening of the previous sessions. Then she moves into satsang, where she works more deeply with students’ questions, grapplings and realizations.

Module 1: Opening to Grace Through the Practice of Ego Relaxation

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!
Integration Session
Modules 2 & 3: Advanced Pillars of Awakening
Opening to the Principles & Presence That Resolve Primary Ego Challenges

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
Module 4: Drinking From the Grace Stream
Prayer, Mantra & Devotional Practice

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
Integration Session
Module 5: Crossing Over Into Your True Identity

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
Integration Session
Module 6: Beyond Your Familiar Boundaries

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
Integration Session
Module 7: Living Every Day as a Graceful Human Being

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
Final Integration Session: Being the Presence of Love
The Way of Grace Advanced Sangha Bonus Collection
In addition to Miranda’s transformative 28-part virtual course, you’ll receive these powerful training sessions. These bonus sessions complement the course — and promise to take your understanding and practice to a deeper level.

Opening, Softening & Allowing
Audio Dialogue With Terry Patten and Miranda Macpherson

Human beings almost universally, subtly and automatically tend to reject the “bad” parts of experience and ourselves, trying to move toward the “good.” But this divides our consciousness, and we project that division upon everything. Reaching for the light, we end up living in resistance to the dark. The simplest and most essential way to outgrow this universal tendency is to recognize all experience as an expression of the Mystery. We can keep relaxing our tendency to contract and resist, and instead we can open, soften and allow what is. Join spiritual teacher Miranda Macpherson as she shares with Terry this radiant, sublimely simple, essential, moment-to-moment practice.

Terry Patten is the founder of Bay Area Integral and a key voice in integral evolutionary spirituality, culture, leadership and activism. He co-developed Integral Life Practice with Ken Wilber and a core team at Integral Institute and was the senior writer and co-author of the book Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening. He hosts the acclaimed online teleseminar series, Beyond Awakening, where he has engaged leading-edge conversations with many of the world’s most renowned thinkers and teachers. He speaks, consults and coaches on four continents and via the web.

Gayatri Mantra
Video Teaching From Miranda Macpherson

The Gayatri is considered to be the “mother of all mantras” and the most powerful for optimizing the awakened condition. In this teaching video, Miranda initiates you into this ancient sanskrit mantra — explaining the true meaning within the syllables and how to work with them optimally. She also shares a specific sequence of body movements and mudras which turn this into a body prayer. Filmed in the Yuan Yin garden at Santa Sabina center, with a handful of her senior students, this is a rare and rich offering created especially for students of this advanced course.

Walking the Mystical Path With Depth & Substance
Audio Dialogue With Miranda Macpherson and Russ Hudson

Russ Hudson, revered Enneagram teacher, co-author of The Wisdom of the Enneagram and fellow Shift faculty, joins Miranda for a robust dialogue on what it truly means to walk the mystical path amidst the dizzying level of change and uncertainty of contemporary culture. They will explore the gifts and challenges of practicing beyond the structure of an established tradition, and how to avoid the pitfalls that limit the potential of the path to truly transform us into more graceful human beings. Discover how to discriminate whether or not your practice is truly supporting your awakening process. Miranda and Russ have been friends for over 15 years, and share a love for the mystical traditions while simultaneously being dedicated to living in the world, but not of it.

Russ Hudson is co-founder of The Enneagram Institute, and is one of the principal scholars and innovative thinkers in the Enneagram world today. He is also President of Enneagram Personality Types, Inc. He has been co-teaching the Enneagram Professional Training Programs since 1991, and is a founding director and former vice-president of the International Enneagram Association. Russ is also co-author of The Wisdom Of The Enneagram, Personality Types, Understanding the Enneagram, Discovering Your Personality Type and The Power Of The Enneagram. Russ also assisted Don Riso in writing Enneagram Transformations. He holds a degree in East Asian Studies from Columbia University in New York, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

Introduction to Holistic Self-inquiry
Video From Miranda Macpherson With Neal Rogin

In this video, Miranda demonstrates deepening into the self-inquiry process with Neal Rogin, longtime sangha member and assistant. All of the great mystical traditions ultimately say we are already one with the fabric of being; however, most of us don’t feel this in our everyday emotional experience. You’ll get an opportunity to taste your true nature and begin to learn to abide from unity consciousness and walk through this world in freedom. Self-inquiry is among the core practices Miranda suggests to help liberate us from the obstacles to direct experience of our true nature.

Neal Rogin is a multi-award-winning writer, filmmaker, humorist and social observer whose work has reached millions of people around the world. Throughout his career he has demonstrated a unique ability to conceive and communicate ideas that move people to action and change the way they think. He is a founding board member of The Pachamama Alliance and a member of the Turning Tide Coalition with Lynne Twist, John and Ocean Robbins and Vicki Robin, and the Transformational Leadership Council, a group founded by author Jack Canfield, and numbers among its members Marianne Williamson, John Gray and Michael Beckwith.

Mantras for Awakening
Set of 2 Audio Recordings From Miranda Macpherson

Sometimes ordinary language cannot accurately express the deepest dimensions of our being — the love for the sacred mystery that is boundless being and bliss. Yet we can contact our nonlinear depths through sound, silence and prayer. This is the way of devotion. It opens up courage, compassion, joy and supports true surrender. Sanskrit mantras are ancient syllables that exert precise positive effects on the body, heart and mind.

Lean into the mantras as you lean your head into the pillow at night. Dissolve into the mantra and it draws you back into the origin of your being. As you chant, feel into your own prayers — your truest yearnings for yourself and for the world. Intoning these ancient sounds, you join with all beings throughout time who have ever prayed these prayers. Now your prayers are part of a continuing stream of the awakening heart. May they become part of your daily life — supporting you to reside AS the heart of being.

In this special bonus, you’ll receive recordings of the following mantras:

Om Nama Shivaya Bliss
Be Still
Guided Meditations
Set of 2 Audio Meditations From Miranda Macpherson

These two powerful meditations will help you deepen your practice and support you to more fully awaken to the teachings of the course.

Mountain of Presence
In reality, you exist within a mountain of boundless support, powered by the life force that births everything you see into existence. This is a central concentration practice recommended as a powerful antidote to the multi-tasking distractedness of modern life. Listening daily will help you stabilize in presence, quieten your mind, settle your emotions, and dissolve into deep silence.
Music: Harmonium by Miranda Macpherson; Tamboura and bells by Richard Quinn.

Vast Heart, Vast Mind
The human heart is the axis point between heaven and earth. Through breath and focused attention this meditation, accompanied by lovely bells, helps loosen the cobwebs of closure within your heart so as to liberate the vast compassion, love, beauty and joy that is your essential heart. Opening up inner space, you are invited beyond ordinary mind to pure awareness, knowing and pristine clarity.

Landing in Grace
Video With Miranda Macpherson

Miranda gives a potent discourse on Grace as the direct experience of Boundless Love, that brings forth into our experience all the essential qualities of our true nature. She shares her map of how Grace comes alive, as four dimensions that include the non-dual Ground of Grace, the Blessings of Grace that bring nourishment that we need to thrive, the Transformative Power of Grace and the Invitation to Live Gracefully in the world but not of it. This video is a live recording of the opening talk at a retreat in California in 2015.

Here’s What You’ll Receive

Twenty-one 90-minute Recorded Teaching Sessions With Miranda Macpherson

Experience a rare opportunity to learn from one of the world’s leading spiritual teachers from the comfort of your own home. Each class session guides you to learn the specific skills and insights to awaken your spiritual potential.

Seven Integration Sessions With Miranda Macpherson

In these sessions, Miranda gives a review of the material covered in the course sessions followed by a full hour of working with people’s questions.

Twenty-eight PDF Transcripts of Class Sessions

In addition to the high-quality videos and MP3 audios, you’ll also receive the entire class transcription in PDF format. You can then review, print and highlight the most important insights and practices you were given.

Exercises and Questions for Each Lesson

After each lesson, you’ll have the option of completing related exercises, practicing new tools and answering questions to accelerate your learning.

The Way of Grace Advanced Sangha Bonus Collection

Opening, Softening & Allowing
Audio Dialogue With Terry Patten and Miranda Macpherson
Gayatri Mantra
Video Teaching From Miranda Macpherson
Walking the Mystical Path With Depth & Substance
Audio Dialogue With Miranda Macpherson and Russ Hudson
Introduction to Holistic Self-inquiry
Video From Miranda Macpherson With Neal Rogin
Mantras for Awakening
Set of 2 Audio Recordings From Miranda Macpherson
Guided Meditations
Set of 2 Audio Meditations From Miranda Macpherson
Landing in Grace
Video With Miranda Macpherson
An Unprecedented Opportunity to Join The Way of Grace Advanced Sangha Virtual Course
We feel honored that Miranda Macpherson has chosen to partner with The Shift Network to offer this exclusive online training. As you may know, this is a rare opportunity to learn directly from a renowned spiritual teacher whose methods marry an exquisite and piercing capacity for clear insight with an overflowing, loving heart that help you release your blocks and open to divine grace and boundless love.

Through this powerful online format, you’ll not only save time and money on workshop costs (plus travel, accommodations and meals — which would cost thousands of dollars), you’ll also benefit from Miranda’s powerful teachings and exercises from the comfort of your home — at your own pace!

About Miranda Macpherson

Miranda Macpherson is a contemporary spiritual teacher, counselor and author of the spiritual guidebook, Boundless Love. She has been teaching internationally since 1995, and is known for her depth of presence, clarity and refined capacity to guide people into direct experience of the sacred.

Miranda’s work is a synthesis of self-inquiry, spiritual psychology, devotion and meditation practice offered with feminine grace that embraces our everyday human experience as a gateway into the depths of our true nature. Through a blend of silent transmission and articulate teaching, she leads ongoing programs oriented to guiding people into direct spiritual experience while providing a practical map for actualizing our realization into daily life.

Drawing from the ancient lineages of Advaita and mystical Christianity, as well as from more recent wisdom teachings such as A Course In Miracles, Miranda leads from the ground of unconditional love and compassion for our humanity, emphasizing receptivity, discrimination and surrender.

Today Miranda leads the “Awakening Love and Wisdom” sangha in Marin and Sonoma counties, Northern California. She teaches retreats in the United States and Europe, and is working on a new book, The Way of Grace: The Transforming Power of Ego Relaxation.

Miranda has been teaching fulltime for over two decades, and founded the “OneSpirit Interfaith Foundation,” a training for interfaith ministers and spiritual counselors, in London. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, Bob Duchmann, a teacher of the Diamond Approach (A.H. Almaas’ Ridhwan School).