“Stay present in the moment. Let your feet and your breath and your willingness return you to the moment. And remember that it’s at the moment of return that the real spiritual work is done.” Cynthia Bourgeault

The Portal of Awakening

“What they call the unitive or allegorical level, it stands for the heavenly Jerusalem, our own entry into the land beyond time and space, the land promised to the saints, the kingdom of heaven, which we don’t enter when we die, but rather when we wake up. And as a matter of fact, the great chance of life is that the portal into that kingdom is right here, in the moment of our awakening.” Cynthia Bourgeault, In the Wake of St. Brendan, 1:45 disc 3 track 11.

“As Jesus said in one of the early logia in the Gospel of Thomas, come to know what is right under your nose, and all that is hidden from you will be revealed. And that coming to know what is right under your nose is not, I think in Jesus’ take on it, a prerequisite for it. It’s in the moment that you wake up to what’s right under your nose that in that moment you get the whole thing. So the classic understanding in the traditions we’ve worked on is that wisdom is not hidden. Or if it is hidden, it’s hidden in plain sight.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 5:52 1.TuesEve.GWS14.

Staying Present Without Self-Reflexivity

“We’re using primarily our sensation as a tool for observing what’s going on. Getting to know the mechanism. How does it work? So that is the immediate domain for self-observation in the work. In self-observation, the time is always now. It’s in the moment. It’s what do I see now? It is not about free association of memories or other experiences, poetic flights of fancy. That’s not self-observation. That’s flying your kite in the land of fantasy. … Remember, we’re not going to live there anymore. We’re going for a deeper kind of awareness.

“Stay in the moment. The invitation is simply to see, not to interpret, analyze, or free associate anything that would pull you out of the now. Simply stay with the seeing in sensation. And your attitude is non-judgmental.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-Centered Knowing, 16:19 15-Thursday Morning Teaching.

“When you can be in touch with your body, actually sensing what’s happening in the moment, you won’t repress stuff anymore.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Boehme for Beginners, 0:50 disc 1 track 8

“The gift of total letting go into objectless awareness, that is the essence of centering prayer, somehow mysteriously undergirds a capacity for you to be more freely and more fully present when you, when you are present in the moment. Again, without getting distracted by that, by that, that that fatal turn into self-rumination and introspection, which is typically misidentified as self-awareness in our own culture, you know.

“Somehow the being able to let go of everything that doesn’t belong to the moment in centering prayer sharpens up the ability to carry that through in the world when you have to maintain consciousness at a slightly different place.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 20:00 14 Tuesday eve QA.

“The more you can do that and the less reliant you become on your story and your self-reflexively generated I as your go-to place, the more you’re able to move freely and graciously amidst these bandwidths of consciousness and call on what’s useful in the moment for hospitality, for service, for awakeness.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Silence As Presence Feb 2025, 46:36 05 Silence Sat pm teaching.

The Practice of Return

“You can’t maintain it. You can only return to it. And to try to maintain it is, I think, misplaced practice because it’s in the moment of return that’s the acknowledgement, when the relational feeling gets bigger.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2016 Three-Centered Knowing, 28:16 08-Wednesday Morning Teaching.

“We make our best game plan and then something else happens. So don’t waste your time in what next. You can collectively organize your stuff when it’s time really quickly. Stay present in the moment. Let your feet and your breath and your willingness return you to the moment. And remember that it’s at the moment of return that the real spiritual work is done.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga 2015, 1:13 Day 4.2a Morning Teaching Part 1 of 3

The Power of Naked Seeing

“Everybody underestimates the power of pure naked seeing to change things. And the change doesn’t happen, believe me, in the moment where you say, oh look at me, I’m running around. Slow down.

“That’s one way to affect things. But the change happens instantly in the moment that you see it. You know, something subtly shifts so that even if you’re busy, and even if you continue to be jerky, it’s not quite in the same way. … Mindfulness happens in time. Seeing happens in an instant.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Living Presence, 49:49 Chapter-6-The-Power-of-Being.

“In the moment where you don’t just give up and run off kicking and screaming into whatever is your favorite downwind position, something literally shifts energetically in the field of the universe.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Building 2nd Body June 2022, 22:00 4-alchemy-of-suffering

“One of the things you let go as you open to the moment in the open mind, open heart practice. I let go my desire to change the situation. Now, if you could even with a willing suspension of disbelief, put that in as part of your litany, your universe would turn 180 degrees instantly. Because almost all of us begin a spiritual practice or attention in the moment with a sense that there’s a problem we’ve got to fix and we’re going to do our spiritual practice in order to get the power to fix the broken situation.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Living Presence, 1:14:01 Chapter-5-Balancing-the-Outer-and-the-Inner.

Discerning the Genuine Prompt

“The honesty is that you’re paying attention in the moment, and in the moment you see the necessary prompt and scripting. It’s one of the reasons I’ve really gotten more firm and more clear nowadays in trying to start good habits from the start. And my senior wisdom students now are in outrage and shock that I’ve outlawed taking notes. I don’t put that on beginners, because there’s a time. But at a point you realize that when you’re taking notes, it becomes a crutch, and it helps for a while for some people because the kinesthetic thing gets it in your mind, but there’s a different quality of attention that’s called forth when you have to simply pay attention with the whole of your being, knowing that what you catch, you catch.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 28:39 20 Thurs am Teaching.

“You have to be shrewd enough with your instrument to tell the difference between what’s genuine opportunity, the situational do in the moment, what’s called upon to do, and what you’re simply taking on by an old habit.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holding Our Planet 2024, 39:30 20 Thurs am Teaching.

“It’s very easy to sit in a place and recycle lecture notes, things you’ve heard a teacher say, copy the behavior from outside, but there’s going to be no other way that you finally become a master in your moment than to see what’s there in the moment, what’s needed, and be able to instantly sort out whether what you’re getting is that absolutely laser-like understanding, yes, or whether it’s the impulse clone.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Holy Trinity and the Law of Three, 3:52 disc 9 track 2.

When the Seed Meets the Soil

“Every real signature work of wisdom I’ve ever seen has a surprising element to it. You didn’t think it was going to go that way. But alert the moment you find the missing piece that coincides with your inner preparation and planning. The seed falls into the prepared soil and springs forth in the moment. That’s how it works. So the action becomes decisive. It becomes clear. It has force. But it wasn’t planned, an event.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Guelph 2024, 47:38 14 – monday morning.

“This is the most thrilling thing. The real solutions in life always come out of third force, through left field, that every real signature work of wisdom I’ve ever seen has a sort of surprising element to it. You didn’t think it was gonna go that way. But alert the moment you find the missing piece that coincides with your inner preparation and planning. The seed falls into the prepared soil and springs forth in the moment. That’s how it works. So the action becomes decisive, it becomes clear, it has force. But it wasn’t planned.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Métis Teaching, p19

Energy Available for the Work

“There are extraordinary reserves of energy available to you to just be there, present in the moment, and do the work. No judgment, no self-evaluation, no puffing up of your throat before you crow. No humility. So I would say that is the work. And for many of us in the West, that will be the quadrant where the most astonishing and painful revelations come through.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga 2015, 1:06:30 Day 4.2a Morning Teaching Part 1 of 3

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Logion 5
Yeshua says…
Come to know the One in the presence before you,
and everything hidden from you will be revealed.
For there is nothing concealed that will not be revealed,
and nothing buried that will not be raised.

Logion 9
Yeshua says…
A farmer went out to plant,
scattering seed everywhere.
Some seeds fell on the surface of the road,
and the birds came and ate them.
Others fell on rocky ground
and could not take root in the earth,
and so never germinated.
Still other seed fell among the weeds and brambles,
which choked it out and insects devoured.
Some, however, fell onto fertile soil
which produced fruit of high quality,
yielding as much as sixty
and one-hundred and twenty percent.

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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)

Read the Impression introducing the Gospel of Thomas.

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