“As we develop these simple physical embodiment practices that allow us to endure within our own skins and within our own atmosphere, we discover that we are met and accompanied.” Cynthia Bourgeault

The Foundation: Reclaiming the Body’s Holiness

“Christianity has been far more influenced by Plato than by Jesus Christ, so we lost our nerve in the face of embodiment and made all these compromises, but as we regain it we discover that this is exactly what Christianity potentially has to deliver back to the great family of world religions as we struggle together into the 21st century. If it can renew its own relationship with embodiment and really see the message at the heart of this is that matter is in and of itself not the problem, it’s holy it’s a perfectly legitimate vessel for the full expression of divine love.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 3b.Thursam.TeachingConsciousGWS14

“It’s the body that has to be mastered, or if not mastered, at least overridden before we can have any hope of spiritual attainment. That’s an ancient, ancient kind of orientation in the culture. And I think one of the things that we’re beginning to see nowadays is that it simply isn’t correct. And that one of the things that’s been rising to meet us already in the second half of the 20th century. And I think it is going to be one of the real challenges in workplaces for those of you that are shaping 21st century Christianity, if the term itself isn’t an oxymoron, is that we’re going to have to go back and look at theology, look at our spiritual practice from the point of view of embodiment rather than disembodiment. And I think this is going to be terrific because that’s where it belonged all along. So it opens up the possibility of making Christianity finally coherent and consistent.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Kanuga 2015, 6:08 Day 1.2b Morning Teaching 2 of 4 The Moving Center

“I think that as we move into the next generation, we’re going to see more and more awareness of the crucial importance of embodiment to carry our thing after 2000 years as an incarnational religion.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer – Knowing Without Knowing, 3:42 disc3 track13

The Portal: Entering Through Sensation

“It all begins with sensation which is why we’re in wisdom school, because we have to know how to access the body when we start when we just treat it like a thing and an object out there it’s gonna turn into a rock and sink. But when we learn how to enter through a different portal then we discover the mystery and the language of embodiment, and I think when we bring that back we’ll catch the language of the holiness of it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2014 Jacob Boehme, 3b.Thursam.TeachingConsciousGWS14

“We don’t go off into some spiritual heaven and get enlightened. We’re in our flesh. So the real question is, how do we ask the body with all its wisdom to participate in sitting meditation and undergird us from the strength of its stable rootedness, in earth and stardust and time from before time. How do we ask it to come along with the journey of the head and heart, to be here present? So I think we need, and we are already paying much more attention to embodiment as a new generation of practitioners move forward, making the body not only neutral, but positively in with the program.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer – Knowing Without Knowing, 1:41 disc3 track13

The Body as Intelligence System

“Become aware that there’s a whole different system of intelligence that floats around emotional, sympathetic vibration that interpenetrates and interfuses. The Asian traditions, the Ayurvedic traditions, the great embodiment traditions of all the world say it’s more than that. Don’t forget the sexual organs. Don’t forget the whole subtle nervous system that flows through. These are not just things that support your physical body. These are centers and systems of intelligence.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Guelph 2024, 49:56 02 – thursday morning

“The mind is phobic to presence. The mind cannot be present. It takes something deeper than that, mind being the brain mind. It takes the body. It takes the subtle body, I believe, to hold the structure present. It’s not just a matter of embodiment anyway. It’s not just a matter of going out in the garden and feeling your feet in the mud. It’s the matter that the physical body, the mental body, and the emotional body together generate and sustain the emergence of the subtle quality of aliveness, which is presence. And it can stay put.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2021, 1:05:49 01 Tuesday Morning Session Mystery of Death

The Womb: Nurturing the Inner Body

“Your outer body is your womb for your inner body. It feeds you, it nurtures you, it protects you, it shelters you as this little baby called your Kesdjan body takes form within you. And we have not ever acknowledged that in the West apart from in the Gurdjieffian mind.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Claymont 2023 March, 45:00 04 sunday afternoon teaching

“Virtually all spiritual traditions have some teaching about inner bodies, more subtle forms of embodiment that lie within, coiled within our outer body. … these inner bodies are not just energies to be harnessed for our own gain, but they correspond to whole worlds. Worlds being whole realms and dimensions of divine manifestation.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2022 Holy Isle, 42:00 mystery of death day 3 sunday afternoon

Embodiment as Container for Mystery

“In the Sufi tradition there are people sitting there in the midst of worlds within worlds of bliss who are behind their bread counter quietly counting out the change and giving you your loaf of bread without missing a beat because they’ve learned to contain the worlds within themselves. In order to do that you need three components:

“First embodiment, because your mind won’t hold it, and your emotions can’t hold it. You need your whole body. You need your feet on the ground. You need all the work you do in yoga or whatever path you work on for embodiment to let your whole body bear the mystery, not just your head and heart and from here up. And the feet on the ground which can return it to the earth.

“You need the vision of servanthood that your goal in the world is not to express yourself, but to communicate love. To communicate what’s needed in a situation. And the more you can do that without expressing yourself, the cleaner it will be. Monks learn that. The Benedict tradition teaches that very, very well. So what God wants us to do is communicate love through our actions, through our presence, not through telling these great rambling stories of how we’ve had a great experience with God. It’s quiet, silent.

“And the third: collected recollection, which doesn’t mean thinking back to Christ or thinking ahead. It means an intense, grounded centeredness in your being. And to the extent that you can learn to do this, which basically means to deflate, to undervalue the mystical experience you’ve just had. I like to say every day is normal for God.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2021, 2:26:23 06 Thursday afternoon session Mystery of Death

The Practice: Direct Reception

“The embodiment practice comes a lot out of the Gurdjieff tradition, which I’ve found has been particularly important in blending with the straight up Christian contemplative tradition to put embodiment and guts and an alert inner attention to what we’re doing. As we begin to work more and more directly with sensation in our body at a subtle level, we cut through all the fantasies and pieties of our mind. We give up on whether we’re a beautiful person having a beautiful experience with God. Who gives a damn.

“Just begin to receive the information, the intelligence, the assistance that flows in so simply from the act of being fully present to your own embodiment. It’s hard to say because we mostly have positioned it in our culture nowadays as get your body in tune, get relaxed … we’ve positioned it as a therapeutic tool for over kinked Westerners. But what it is, is the gateway to the actual truthful perception and exchange of more subtle energies.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sept 2022, 1:15:20 RT 01 Sunday eve 9:25

“Most of what I’ve learned about subtle embodiment comes out of the Gurdjieff tradition. And it’s marvelous. I still think he does it better than anybody else because it’s not a technology, it’s a relationship. But I want to begin to give us all one of the two foundational exercises for beginning to develop this subtle body awareness in a feeling sense. And to be able to use it to draw sustenance directly from the cosmos. So it’s very, very simple. Like all of these exercises in the Gurdjieff tradition, the chief operative is attention, your voluntary practice.

“So you’re going to find that it’s different from the muscles you use in centering prayer. We’re not going to be surrendering, surrendering, surrendering, letting go of thoughts. We’re going to be keeping our attention acutely focused in the areas we direct. But the two pieces that he uses as his tools for navigating into this deeper inner aliveness are both clearly rooted in orthodox spirituality, and in particularly two prayers. The first, the Lord have mercy prayer. The second, the Trisagion. Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal one, have mercy on us. It all comes down to have mercy on us.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Secret Embrace Holy Isle 2025, 29:52 05 Day 2 Afternoon – Unity Consciousness

“These are wonderful preliminary steps towards being able to understand that at those more subtle bandwidths, we actually are receiving divine assistance, communion, strength. The only reason it feels like God is absent is we can’t pick them up yet because we’re so tuned to the signal of our psychological self. But as we develop these simple physical embodiment practices that allow us to endure within our own skins and within our own atmosphere, we discover that we are met and accompanied.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Silence as Presence Feb 2025, 1:05:00 04 Silence Sat am teaching

Embodiment as Participation

“Some of us during the pandemic had the opportunity to take a deep dive into exercises and work that taught us more about subtle embodiment in all our body. And particularly once you stop telling yourself the story of yourself, to begin to understand how beautifully and intricately our bodies already channel and wield what you might call subtle Christic energy. We already do this. And what we really need is force and direction and intentionality to place it and to believe in it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2021, 1:28:41 Rebooting Jesus

“[Ladislaus] Boros elaborates that when all comes down to it, our contacts with Christ in this world are always some form of touch. We’re touched, it’s not just some sort of a vision or a theory, there’s a deep sense of embodiment that runs through the cosmos if we’re open to find it.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2022 Holy Isle, 52:00 mystery of death day 4 monday afternoon

Embodied Incarnation: Living the Archetypal

“Are you an embodiment of the feminine? What would it be in your own life and marriage if that’s true? Somebody asked me about the unitive level of Scripture, and it’s basically that. It’s when you realize that the two are one, and that each of us in our own minute particularity is living the archetypal story, and giving it flesh and blood, so that the goddess and the godman, fully divine and fully human, are being incarnated in each one of you, and that your story is a little sliver of the history of the great story.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene & the Path of Conscious Love, 6:07 disc2 track3

“Mary [Magdalene] grows right along with you. And as you grow up, you find out that she’s already there. Because she’s cosmogonically the embodiment of that force that goes out to the world, holding, reconciling the suffering in a feminine and tender way.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Integral Light Dec 2021, 1:01:11 3.2 Vigilance

The Soul’s Attraction to Form

“What makes a soul a soul is not what a soul is, but what a soul does. And what a soul does is the place of the overflowing into form, the embodiment in physical manifestation of the ineffable and invisible, the subtle. So that it will always be reaching out to form a body or to attract a body or to be in relationship with embodiment. That’s precisely what makes it soul. It’s attraction to embodiment.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2021, 1:00:24 02 Tuesday Afternoon Session Mystery of Death

Honoring the Body’s Wisdom

“There’s something in you, in your embodiment, that wants to keep you alive, safe, comfortable, and free from hurt. And it’s, I think, frankly monstrous to label that the false self. There’s nothing false about it. Bruno [Barnhart], my teacher, used to say, well, the false self will always be with you, and it’s your oldest friend. And I know that my own false self is real good, that it grew up, and was formed by something deep in my own body, hoping to live, to be on the planet, not be defeated by the blows and the betrayals and the cruelties that were overwhelming my system when I was a little kid that I couldn’t understand. Something fiercest, I’ll be it. And so you develop a persona to house your will to live and to protect it. And I don’t see anything false about that. I see something heroic.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystery of Death 2021, 1:44:38 05 Thursday Morning Session Mystery of Death

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Logion 29
Yeshua says…

If flesh came into existence for the sake of spirit,
it is a wonder,
but if spirit exists for the sake of flesh,
it is a wonder of wonders.
I am truly astonished
at how such richness
came to dwell in such poverty.

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This post pairs well with the Impression on Sensation

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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