“Spiritual humility is the capacity for the exchange with your environment. … it’s the capacity for creative exchange with the now.” Cynthia Bourgeault 

The Heart’s Humility

“Organic humility … is not found in the head, but rather in the heart. Because it is there that the will-to-greatness has its origin and it is there from whence it takes hold of the head and makes it its instrument. This is why many thinkers and scientists want to think ‘without the heart’ in order to be objective—which is an illusion, because one can in no way think without the heart, the heart being the activating principle of thought; what one can do is to think with a humble and warm heart instead of with a pretentious and cold heart.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p111

A Gift from Above

“Humility, like charity, is not a natural quality of human nature. Its origins can in no way be found in the domain of natural evolution, since it is not possible to conceive of it as the fruit of the ‘struggle for existence’, i.e. natural selection and the survival of the fittest at the expense of the weak. Because the school of the struggle for existence does not produce humble people; it produces only strugglers and fighters of every kind. Spiritual humility is therefore a quality which must be due to the action of grace, i.e. it must be a gift from above.”  Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p163.

“Humility, being the law of spiritual health, implies consciousness of the difference and distance between the center of human consciousness and the center of divine consciousness” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p165.

The Gateway to Inspiration

“It is humility alone, due to poverty, obedience and chastity—the three universal and eternal vows-which renders us ‘inspirable’. It cannot be helped…the spiritual world is essentially moral. And inspiration is the fruit of humility in effort and of effort with humility. Ora et labora is therefore the key to the door of inspiration.” Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, p393.

Understanding the Scale

“True humility is actually born in us when we understand the scale of things.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2012 Gurdjieff for Christian Contemplatives, 1:20:00 14 Friday Morning Teaching.

“What [the author of the Cloud of Unknowing] calls perfect humility is the sense of meekness that’s created by just really truly and deeply sensing, grasping the scale of the thing. The scale of the love, the power, the profundity, the goodness, the majesty, the wonder of this divine mystery.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-centered Knowing, 20:31 25-Saturday Morning Discussion.

Beginner’s Mind

“Humility is fundamentally beginner’s mind. It’s the capacity to be teachable. It’s the capacity to begin to receive information and assistance from the planet.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-centered Knowing, 32:22 08-Wednesday Morning Teaching.

“Everything in the monastery comes back to what are you here for? You’re here at a monastery to learn a different kind of identity. And it’s in the light of that that the teachings that you’ll find in the rule of St. Benedict on humility make sense. It is a mistranslation of the word humility to think it means obsequiousness and groveling. What it actually means is something a lot closer to beginner’s mind. Humility is a flexibility that makes you teachable, that makes you low maintenance, because you’re free, because you’re not stuck to carrying around that heavy weight of your sense of who you are. So the monastery is constantly pushing people towards humility in the service of freedom” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga Nov 2015, 8:14 Day 3.2b Morning Teaching Part 2 of 4.

Freedom from Identification

“As you read the rule of St. Benedict, the most important thing to keep in mind as you grit your teeth through the seventh chapter is that the opposite of humility is, or the real meaning of humility, the goal of humility, is not shaming, but it’s freedom. Because we are led around like a nose ring by identification. And when you can do things without identification, you have so much more freedom. You can be anything. You can be, because you’ve come to realize that the external role you play does not define you.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Introductory Wisdom School May 2025, 11 Thurs am Humility 5-29-25.

“So many of the ancient spiritual practices have put such emphasis on surrender and humility. You know, humility, humility, humility. What they’re trying to do is free up the energy that gets siphoned off big time in trying to take this thing back to the story of our extremely high-maintenance, energy-consuming, egoic system of selfhood.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Imaginal Wisdom School 8-2020, 18:02 0819 IWS Wednesday AM Teaching.

Honest Self-Knowledge

“Humility, not understood as groveling, but humility understood as an honest and flexible self-knowledge. That you understand who you are and who you aren’t. You know your strengths, you know your weaknesses.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga Nov 2015, 5:08 Day 2.2b Morning Teaching Part 2 of 3.

A Perceptual Task

“Humility understood from the path of transformation is not a moral virtue. It’s a perceptual task that only when you are in humility can you see anything.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, Disc3 track18 Our nature is holy.

The Soil for Creative Exchange

“So that’s what humility is. It’s the soil in which something new can grow. But it has all these units of seeing. You see yourself interconnected with everybody. So spiritual humility is the capacity for the exchange with your environment. … it’s the capacity for creative exchange with the now. And if you lack humility, you will not be able to have that creative exchange. Humility? Surrender. Not as an act of capitulation, but as an absolute inner determination that no situation in life can drive you out of the presence which is God.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene and the Path of Conscious Love, 5:30 disc6 track7 Rest in the experience without judgment.

The Energy of Flexibility

“If you go to the world, tight and bounded and rushed and urgent, you’re going to be hitting obstacles all the way. And if you learn to relax and ease into it and carry yourself with flexibility and humility and gentleness, a different kind of world is going to come to meet you because the energy fields match.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga Nov 2015, 15:37 Day 5.2b Morning Final Teaching Part 2 of 2.

Freedom from Insistence

“As I’ve understood it in Benedictine life, the fruit of a mature and sincere life on this path is a kind of humility that has a very, very different flavor from it, from the kind of fake behavior adaptions that we think humility is about when we don’t have any. And you can actually taste it, some of the people that have worked with us all their life, what really is the essential ingredient there, which is freedom, freedom from their own insistence.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Rebuilding Trust Feb 2022, 57:00 Day1.3-Frut-of-Spirit.

Cultivating the Ground

“[A Monastic’s] whole spiritual practice is based on the cultivation of humility by such means as the practice of obedience, the examination of conscience and the reciprocal brotherly help of members of the community.” Meditations on the Tarot, p156.

A Lifelong Practice

“Our spiritual tradition, and particularly the Christian tradition, has emphasized humility as the starting gate for all work. The problem was they kept people on humility so long that they basically died of boredom and lack of stimulation before they ever got any force. And so the inner work tradition has traditionally tried to speed that up. So you don’t practice humility for 80 years. You practice humility for your whole life, but along the way you’re also beginning to learn focused attention.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Living Presence, 1:13:27 Chapter-7-Voluntary-Attention.

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Logion 4
Yeshua says… 
A person of advanced age must go immediately
and ask an infant born just seven days
about life’s source.
Such asking leads to life
when what is first becomes last.
United they become a single whole.

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“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire 
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
T.S.Eliot from East Coker, from The Four Quartets

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Quotations from the Gospel of Thomas are from Lynn C Bauman, Ward J Bauman, Cynthia Bourgeault, The Luminous Gospels (Praxis 2008)

Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, Jeremy Tarcher, 1985

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.