Miranda Macpherson on Living the Embodiment of Grace

Interview with Miranda Macpherson by Phil Bolsta
 

Watch Miranda Macpherson’s interview:

Welcome, Miranda. Thank you for joining us today.

You're welcome Phil. It's good to be here with you.
 

Allow me to introduce you. Miranda Macpherson is a spiritual teacher and author of The Way of Grace, which will be published in October. 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.

Miranda, you say that the cornerstone of a feminine approach to spirituality is surrender, a word that is often misunderstood. Many think that surrendering to the divine means sacrificing your free will or diminishing your capacity to reason and act. What does the word "surrender" mean to you?

Well, it's really about yielding. Firstly, I want to speak a bit about the confusions about what surrender is. So often we hear that word used in various different spiritual traditions because actually it really is the quintessence of what all paths are asking for us: "Will you please get out of the way?" Only our ego can't do surrender. The whole problem is that our ordinary awareness is identified in a consciousness that thinks, I'm separate, I am contained within the boundaries of this body, and is identified with thoughts-streams, and memories — and that's what we think of as "me."

As we deepen spiritually on the path, what's asked of us is to relax, which is really what surrender actually is, is to yield, to let go. It's not an amputating of that which we think shouldn't be there, or the patterns that we believe we should be past. It's really a learning to yield to a deeper presence, a primordial presence that's actually always been what's been causing us to draw breath and be here at all. Anyway…

So it's really getting ourself back to the origin of our being, and learning to rest in that unified condition, which is where we get to realize that we are in and part of something so much deeper than our opinions, and our thoughts, and our mind.
 

Well, what does it look like to live more gracefully and to embrace the ordinariness of life?

Good question. Well, a lot actually, because at first, no matter who you are on the path, whether you're in a masculine or in a feminine body, we all have to deal with these pretty big forces of our ego-consciousness that have to do with fear, control pushing, judgment, these dense forces that live in a soul. We can easily get caught in them without even being aware that we're being caught in them. And these are the forces that make us more dense. They prevent us from being more fluid, more free, more present, more naturally responsive, to flow with the deeper intelligence.

So first, we always have to deal with those forces in ourself. And dealing with those forces isn't just trying to get over them, or pretend they're not there, or push past them, but it really means going towards the parts of ourself where we're caught in fear, where we're caught in some pattern of control that we can't seem to let go of, when we find ourself judging ourself, judging others harshly without heart, and yet we can't seem to put down that knife.

So my approach, it's always going towards these parts of ourself that seem tricky and difficult from the perspective of love, wanting to contact them, understand them, really meet those forces. And as we meet those forces, whether they come forth in us as sort of tense energy in the body, hardness or closure in the heart, and fixed positions of the mind, we just really have to be there to contact those forces themself and not commentate or judge or presume. Just be there.

And as we be there, surrender happens. As we be there, with love, but with the desire to really see what's true, transformation takes place. The living presence of grace comes forward and helps to melt that density.

So that's mostly where we all need to start, and that can help us then to begin to start coming into a more receptive condition, where we can open to see more deeply what really is here. When we relax, we can learn to trust more by perceiving the fact of love, by perceiving the goodness that's inherent to life.

Just giving you an example of that... Most people are so looking to receive love, to receive holding, to perceive goodness, from the level of personality. Now, as we all know, human beings are divinely imperfect, and that means that there's not always consistency on the human realm. That doesn't mean that the love, that the presence of love isn't always here.

For example, if we open up to consider the possibility that every breath we take is literally a gift of love, it is literally a product of the trees and the plant kingdom, that is sucking in our carbon dioxide always and pumping out clean life-giving air to all of us without having an opinion of any one of us all the time. And this is true whether you had a very difficult history and whether you received very little love, or whether you had a very positive history. it's what's true in the present.

So we become more graceful the more we bring our awareness out of the past and into the present, to open and receive and perceive the fact of love's presence that helps us to yield even further, that helps us to become more humble, to dissolve the puffiness of our subtle pride that we tend not to see, and to think, "I am me and you are you, and the world is how I think it is." And we often don't question our presumptions, or even see them. So humility helps us.

It's all these virtues that have been given through all the great spiritual traditions that we are kind of used to hearing about, like humility, and patience, and trust, and joy, and compassion — but we often really don't quite know how to really open into them.

So a big part of what I'm really teaching is how to actually open into these virtues that refine our consciousness, uplift us, help us receive the fulfilling presence of grace that makes us very grateful to be here, makes us have more reverence for life. And that helps us to deal with more challenging things, the stuff we're all dealing with in the collective field, the challenges of our environmental climate change, the challenges of living in a culture that so often feels very disgraceful, the challenges of situations in our community that might not have an easy answer.

So learning to be graceful with all of that is a big ask that calls us to grow more compassionate, more forgiving, calls us to open through and beyond our primary presumptions and identifications, helps us to take a deeper seat in Being, so that we can be responsive rather than reactive, and to move therefore into a more graceful way of being that can lead us to take right action where it's needed, and to be able to discriminate right action from subtle delusion and fanciful thinking. There's a lot more to it.
 

It's very thorough, thank you. And you mentioned humility, which is an often overlooked virtue when it comes to living a spiritual life. Can you speak more to the importance of humility?

I'd love to. I think humility is one of the virtues that most powerfully opens us to grace. But on first glance, we can look at it and go, "I'm not necessarily arrogant." We could think of many more people we know that are a lot more puffed up than we might be. However, at the deepest level, when we presume, "I know," or "I should know," there's a certain lack of humility in that, when we really explore it, because humility is really a posture of being in the bowed position, of being in a place of reverence and openness that isn't presumptive.

For example, if we consider something that most of us would think, "Oh, I know what a hand is"... When you really question that for a moment and you ask yourself, "Okay, I've been looking at this all my life. I think I know what it is. I think I know what it's for," but when we really look at the presumption of, "I know what a hand is," you'll notice that so many layers are there in that presumption that are all based on the past, that have something to do with what others have told us about what a hand is, and what it's for, and what you do with it, or what you don't do with it. And this is how it is for all of us.

I mean, pretty much everything in our ordinary world, someone very patiently and kindly helped us to go, "This is this and that's that." So there's always collective agreements on what things are, and once we have a label for things, it tends to get integrated into the network of our consciousness in a way that we think, "Okay. That's that and now I move on." But the deeper we go spiritually, the more it asks us to question everything, and to really approach every moment, every person, every part of ourself, all that life brings, fresh from presumption. In Zen, they call that "the beginner's mind."

This is a huge thing, because what it shows us is that there's a deep deconstruction that is asked of us if we want to really open to whole other levels and dimensions of grace. They are possible and available, but they require that much humility, they require that deeper yield from this self who thinks they know.

But most people that I've spoken to over the years didn't have the kind of upbringing where it was okay to say "I don't know" beyond a certain age. So we tend to educate our young in a way that is about rote learning — "This is what this is," and you have to absorb it and repeat it. And that's great for ordinary, basic functioning in the world, but it's quite limited if what you're wanting is to become a mystic and to explore freshly and exponentially what you and I and life really is and could be.

This requires a level of deep vulnerability, to sit in the place of, "While I might know this, there's plenty I don't know," and to really allow space for, "I don't know. I don't know what this hand really is. I know my presumptions, I know how it's conditioned to relate to a hand, but do I really know it? Do I really even know who I am? Do I really know what the world is? Do I really know what God is? Do I really know what you are?"

You see, in my own experience, when I really get intimate with those kinds of questions, where it takes me is into a place of awe and reverence at the mystery of all that is, all that I am, all that you are, and that leads me into a much more sensitive reverential and beautiful encounter with this moment in a fresh way. So that's incredible because what it does is it really takes the plug off our crown chakra so that we find ourselves entering into a much more receptive state, where we could receive really quite directly from all sorts of subtle dimensions that our mind can't even really conceptualize.

So this is also possible in meditation, but it's a way we can live our life that brings a lot more beauty and a lot more receptivity, and it challenges the pride of "I know" or "I should know," and instead invites us to ask and listen, and not presume, and to learn to live our life from that place, which from my own experience is actually a lot more eloquent and practical and useful than trying to do it the other way.
 

By living this way, by surrendering with trust, humility, and reverence, are you essentially devoting your life to serving as a pure loving instrument of the divine?

Yeah. I mean, isn't that what your body actually is? Isn't that what your mind is? I mean, truly, our human vehicle can be like a grace delivery device.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

 
The Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan said that the sensitive human instrument is like a radio receiver through which the voice of the universe can be transmitted. And we've seen examples of this in every great tradition. We've seen examples of very pure souls. And we notice we feel moved just by looking at them.
 

	The Dalai Lama

 
For example, you or I might never meet the Dalai Lama in person, but it's obvious when you just behold a photograph. It's obvious. The beauty of a human being who's that open and transparent and yielded and not caught in their ego is very beautiful.
 

Ramana Maharshi

 
Many people I know have been similarly touched by a photograph of Ramana Maharshi, who has been a deep inspiration of mine. You look at his face and that's it. You can feel the purity of a being that's completely devoid of ego pride. So we can somehow recognize when we encounter even an image of it what's possible for us all.
 

 
You had briefly mentioned dealing with difficult emotions. How can living to please God and God alone free you from everyday worries and negative emotions?

Well, there's a lot in that question that I'd like to address. When you really understand the depth of absolutely everything, there is only God, that even when you're in a difficult emotion such as anger or fear, it's actually God forgetting itself and getting lost, experiencing anger or fear.

When we understand that, which is the deep nondual framework, it helps us more to really be skillful and wise with these emotions that we can get overidentified with or swept up in that definitely cause trouble and unnecessary suffering.

So when we understand that in the same way that a hard chunk of ice might be frozen and dense, it is still water. It's not in its fluid or free state; it can't spiritually hydrate others because it's frozen and dense. However, it is still water. And the same way that when you or I are in an ego fixation that's manifesting as troublesome, difficult, seemingly negative emotions, the substance of the one who's caught in that emotion is still God.

That gives us a basis to learn how to practice with those emotions, firstly by bringing our awareness into the present. And the best, simplest, most direct way I know of that is just to wiggle our toes and butterfly our knees a little bit and sense our lower body, because it brings us into the immediacy of here, now, this. And then to let ourself experience what is happening in the moment, not to justify a total indulgence, but just to contact it and see what is this really.

Sometimes, when we think we're angry, we're actually upset. And sometimes in that upset there's a truth for something important that we need to see, that might be inviting us to take a different action or to speak something that needs to be spoken. So when we just dismiss a wave of anger as a negative emotion, that doesn't necessarily help us to be wise, so I don't tend to do that.

I understand, "Oh, this is still God." Yes, anger is arising. We don't want to act out the anger. We don't want to indulge it, we don't want to suppress it, but we do want to see what is this really, and is there any truth here.

So when our dedication to God manifests as love of the truth, then the result will always be something beautiful. The result will always lead to freedom. It will look different each time.
 

Wonderful. I like that very much. You mentioned receptivity a couple of times, and it seems there's a virtuous circle at work here. Surrendering means fully accepting God's unconditional love, which requires unconditional receptivity, which requires unconditional surrender. It sounds like a nice loop to be part of. What is your own experience of living this way?

Well, part of my ongoing day in, day out practice, in addition to formal meditation, which for me takes the form of just sitting in deep silence... I've been meditating for many decades, so it's not difficult for me — that just dropping into stillness. But what has really been very helpful in bringing this into the ordinariness of moment-to-moment life, is to remember to not make decisions based on my ordinary mind as much as possible.

I have a few little prayerful questions that I've been working with, such as, What's needed now? If there's many priorities and a lot is going on, lots on my to-do list, I might just pray, What's the priority? And sometimes what comes is surprising. Sometimes, I don't necessarily hear a voice, but sometimes the phone will ring or an email will ping in, and it will be something that relates to something that I already knew but I wasn't thinking of doing it that day. Or sometimes it's just a knowing of this way, not that.

And of course that's been a part of my practice for many, many years, of learning to ask what is the way, as a way to train myself out of leading from "me" and "my." And to me that's what surrender actually means, is I'm not surrendering to a God that's separate from myself. Once you start realizing that there's nothing but God, it's not subject-object anymore. It's just, that is the foundation, when you can only kind of go to sleep on the truth of that foundation.

So surrender really is just continuing to come back to the origin of your being, and rest in that origin, and let that move you, and recognize it is what's moving you anyway. But when you feel love for that truth, then you're more interested in what is the way rather than what's my way or what's your way.

So surrender really is just continuing to come back to the origin of your being, and rest in that origin, and let that move you, and recognize it is what's moving you anyway. But when you feel love for that truth, then you're more interested in what is the way rather than what's my way or what's your way.

So the way always includes what's optimal, what's for the best, because we understand that divine will or divine mind is a unified mind. It's not separate, it's not interested in your agenda or my agenda, it's only interested in what's optimizing for the whole... what is the most elegant, skillful, beneficial thing to have happen here?

This all dovetails with the virtue of trust, because the more you experience that the more you learn to trust it. The more you start to feel its logic, the more you start to feel its goodness, the easier it is to live that way, and it feels so beautiful to live that way. You're happier, you're more at peace, there's more natural harmony, there's more elegance in the way you move. And once you start getting a feel for that, it's just a lot more interesting than that clunky old me and my way, as opposed to you and your way. That just creates a lot of strife we don't need anymore.
 

That's great. I couldn't agree more. We spoke of trust, love and humility, as far as surrender goes, but in The Bhagavad Gita, the holiest of ancient Hindu scriptures, devotion is referred to as shraddha, the natural inclination of the heart to turn towards its source in faith and surrender. Can you speak more to what role devotion plays in your teachings?

Absolutely. Well firstly, love of the truth is devotion. And the real motivation for any spiritual practice really is devotion. At first, and I was no different, most of us get on the path because we're suffering and we need to find some resolution to our suffering, we're looking for answers. We're hoping that some teaching, or practice, or path is going to help us get out of our suffering. And of course it does ultimately, but at a certain point, if we're just practicing to deal with our suffering, our practice runs the risk of becoming a narcissistic endeavor, because it's still "me" and "my," trying to get over "me" and "my suffering."

What has to take fire in the heart is love itself, devotion itself. Devotion for reality, devotion for the truth, devotion for the way, or for God if you like to use that language. And the more we get a taste for it, the more we love it, the more we say God's name, the more we recognize that's what we love. That's always been what we loved, that's what brings us back to ourself, that's what brings us back to what's real and true and meaningful about everything and everyone. That's all that really matters. So devotion is the way we really marinade and circulate in the truth of the heart, that is love itself.
 

Along those lines, Caroline Myss said, "To replace human order with divine chaos in a trusting way is called surrender." Do you agree with this? And can you speak more to the relationship between trust and grace?

Well, I don't know about... you have to say Caroline Myss' quote again for me to comment on it. Can you say that again?
 

Sure. "To replace human order with divine chaos in a trusting way is called surrender."

It doesn't really ring my bell. I mean, it sounds good, but it's not something that I particularly kind of go, "Wow," about myself. I feel more that trust emerges the more we perceive the love and goodness that underlies our life.

So if you go back to the early philosophers, Dante particularly, he was speaking about the goodness. He called it "the good." He said, "The loving goodness has such wide arms, it opens to whatever turns to it." And the more we come out of our mind, our commentating mind that's always judging, and comparing, and oriented to what we don't have, the more we come into the present and we open our eyes. We take in all the evidence of life. We see that even though very difficult things happen in our world — natural disasters happen, super-storms happen — ultimately, the pulse of life itself is beneficent.

I'm someone who's gone through a lot of really intense challenges in my life, and the fact that I feel that way, and that that realization came to me when I was a 13-year-old girl having a breakdown, hospitalized in an adult psychiatric unit, is kind of interesting... that I was woken up to that realization of the truth of boundless love as the underlying goodness that is here and that we're part of, and that is always here independent of the challenges in our world, and our human life and relationships. It's interesting.

So when we connect to that, it gives us the musculature to be able to trust, to be able to step forward into what we don't know yet, into those unknown spaces, and to open rather than close, even though we can't see the bigger picture. We only are invited to take the next step, and the next step beyond our defensive mechanisms, into something that's more vulnerable.

Given that in order to open to really come into more refined states of grace, the ticket price is surrender, is letting go of everything you think you know and you think you are. Really. That's not even possible without deep trust. It's literally that the deeper our trust in the loving goodness underlying our life, the more possibility there is for a whole new way of being, because grace always requires space.

That's the relationship with surrender, because surrender is always a yielding, a letting go and allowing space, allowing the emptying out. The more we can allow the emptying out, the more that the fresh life-giving, clear, pure, more refined true can come online. It's always there, but it comes online as we get space.

To give space, we must trust. I know this is tough. A lot of people need help with this. What I've seen about trust is that usually our difficulties with trusting have a lot to do with our very, very early memories of infancy, because our first experience of being here in the world in a human condition has to do… we all came through a mother and a father, but instinctively it's the mothering figure whose body we came out of. It's her that we are biologically wired to look to for food, and comfort, and regulation, whose survival we are dependent on, who we absolutely need to intuit and respond lovingly and kindly to our every need. That's really profound. So our capacity to trust usually is influenced by how that went for us with our mothering figure before we could even speak.

What often limits our capacity to grow in trust is these moments where we were so vulnerable, and it felt like our needs weren't understood, or attuned to, or responded to. And it doesn't necessarily mean that we didn't have a good mother, or that she didn't love us. If you are a parent, then you know full well just what a huge task, an impossible task it is to get it absolutely right all the time for your little one. But that is the wild ride of being human.

This is part of how we all come in, and how when there are difficulties in that process, this misattunement, or the mother isn't very open, or responsive, or her consciousness is quite dense, so she's not naturally sensitized to respond, or she's just stressed, or going through bereavement, or doesn't have enough support, or there's financial... there are so many factors that can give rise to insufficient mother transmission... basically, the Divine Mother transmitting through a woman to her newborn, which is completely natural. And it is the Divine Mother that transmits through the body, the touch, the eyes, the sound... and when that's interrupted for various reasons, we contract. Our body contracts and our mind starts to sort of lay down foundations about how safe or not we are.

And of course all that comes up in the process of deeper spiritual surrender. All of it. So often it needs to be met. Often people need to meet those incredibly vulnerable layers of just sort of feeling so young, and helpless, and needy, and tender, and so in need of love, and not quite knowing why it's not coming, and it's so tender.

And this is why I insist on the need to include that psychodynamic work in a spiritual awakening process, because if we don't we just won't get very far. You can't transcend this stuff. You have to open through it and include it.
 

Well, as the father of a wonderful daughter, I can relate. The moment she was born I just felt more maternal than I ever had before. Divine Mother resonates with me as well. I did want to ask, when you had that realization about boundless love in the hospital, when you were a teen, did that trigger an immediate shift for you that brought calmness back to your mind?

Oh, yeah. Well, I was clinically depressed, and very withdrawn, and completely unreachable. And when that came online in my experience, I felt literally as if like a thousand angels had exploded within my heart. And all of a sudden I felt positive, I felt hopeful about life. I kind of understood, Oh, this is the deeper truth; beyond all appearances, this is the truth for me and for everyone, and that the purpose in life is to remove all that blocks the awareness of this being lived.

I felt like I had been connected into something I knew absolutely was real and true. Had no idea how to live it, but I'd had the connection, I felt like I was hooked back up into the mains. And I went straight back into the same environment that had been so difficult, that had taken me out before... difficulties at home, difficulties with my peers in my school where I was being bullied, difficulties that had definitely contributed to me being in that state... I could be in them. Doesn't mean they were easy, but they didn't take me out because inside I was connected to something I knew absolutely was real and true.

And in a way, it just put me on the path in an earlier stage in life, for which I'm incredibly grateful. I look back on that now, while it was very difficult at the time, I feel that was such profound grace, such profound grace.
 

So, is it fair to say that surrendering essentially means that you trust that the divine has a better plan for your life than you do, and that omniscient Spirit sees far beyond the finite vision of your ego?

Totally. All the time. Completely. Yes.
 

Well, does living in the embodiment of grace give you more clarity about your life's purpose?

I think so, because living the embodiment of grace... and that's interestingly the chunk of the book that I'm just completing the writing of right now, and the chapters that I'm writing about are all about cultivating our equanimity, which is about how to really ground in the unchanging awareness that is never rocked and doesn't change, while we open our heart to greet all that changes and moves and arises, both within ourself — our changing emotions and thoughts and perceptions and bodies — and all that changes and moves in the world that, let's face it, can be very difficult to remain in equanimity about, given what's going on, but we need to remain and find a deeper center with; otherwise we're not capable of responding wisely.

Living the embodiment of grace helps us to take a deeper seat in equanimity, so that we can explore what is the right action. And for right action, we first have to deal with our reactivity, settle and get past our reactivity, so that we can really come to prayer deeply. And then notice, discriminate the responses to our prayer, and to be able to understand the difference between the way ego will softly delude the voice of truth, and how to tell when guidance really is coming from the unified consciousness, and therefore is useful. And to actually live it, to take action where action needs to be taken. Let our gifts and qualities and capacities be put to good use in the service of the propagation of the truth, and the betterment and the evolution of our world.

And for that there's a lot we need to befriend and work with — a lot of forces, not just about divinity, but our animal humanity. We have to recognize all aspects of our nature and include them rather than suppress and transcend.

And this is where what I have to share is quite different than the classical Eastern path, because I feel that you can't take a tradition out of its cultural context and just apply it totally. You have to allow it to be integrated into this time, the complexity of our world as it is now, and the culture that we are in here in the West. And this is a very complex culture and very complex time.

So I feel that that calls for a more integrated approach to the way we walk the path, that demands that we embrace these very human, greedy parts of our being, because if we don't, we'll just become another casualty that we've seen far too many of, like great realized beings acting inappropriately sexually with their students, or being greedy monetarily, or just running in spiritual materialism, which is rampant in this day and age… people having some awakening and then just becoming a spiritual entrepreneur. That can be okay, but often it's not. So this really requires a deeper maturity and an ongoing maturity.

I think that we need a lot of support for that. We need to join together with others of like mind, and not just to share our feelings and give encouragement to, but to really help hold our feet to the fire with one another, so that we can really challenge ourselves to be more pure in the way that we live this, and help one another in that process.

There's something in A Course In Miracles that I love deeply. There's a line there which says, "We will come home together or not at all." And I think it's really speaking for me something that I think is intrinsically a feminine perspective on awakening, which is the power and the importance of human relationship, and how much we need human relationship to flush out the shadow, see ourself more accurately, encourage, give feedback, help us to dissolve the untrue barriers, help us evolve beyond self-centeredness, and collaborate together in a way that serves us all in our own spiritual path, but serves us to let the fruits of our inner awakening come forth in beautiful ways that service all.

 
You spoke of the need to embrace the gritty aspects of our humanity. At the same time, you are saying that the more tightly your arms are wrapped around your ego, the less authentically you can serve Spirit. Correct?

Yes and no. I mean, the way you're framing the question is to me a bit "old paradigm," because where I'm coming from is that... coming back to the analogy of the block of ice, your ego is still part of God. It's just frozen and dense and distorted and caught in patterns. So why we need to bring loving awareness to it is that as we bring a loving awareness to any part of ourself that's frozen and dense and clunky — as our ego is when we're caught in fear and judgment and control and so forth — it's just like ice will melt naturally in the warmth of the sun.

To me, a lot of the masculine dominant approaches to spiritual awakening that we've inherited have been the ego is something "other." Separate it out, get rid of it, transcend it, suppress it, put it over here, get over it. While I haven't found that has worked very well, and I've spent a lot of time in ashrams, and I've seen people who could meditate deeply and have all sorts of beautiful spiritual realization, but then they come home and they behave terribly with their wife and kids. That doesn't work for me. I feel that that's a very transcendent-only approach to awakening, that is more coming out of a monastic kind of way of viewing the path.

Well, most people I'm sure, who are listening to this, are living ordinary lives with families, they're working in the world. We're all busier than is good for us. Our culture's adapting rapidly, so I'm more interested in what actually really helps us. And one of the things I've noticed is that if I don't say, "Oh, that's ego, that's bad, I should just transcend that," then it's so much easier for me to get really real and go towards it and say, "What is this exactly? What is this really? Oh, there's an impression here of hurt and anger to do with my father, and it's like a four-year-old consciousness. Oh I can see that that's the part of my consciousness that's frozen in some suffering." What does suffering always need? Love. It will always relax when it gets love. The ice will melt when it is touched by the warmth of the sun.

To me, a lot of the masculine dominant approaches to spiritual awakening that we've inherited have been the ego is something “other.” Separate it out, get rid of it, transcend it, suppress it, put it over here, get over it. While I haven't found that has worked very well, and I've spent a lot of time in ashrams, and I've seen people who could meditate deeply and have all sorts of beautiful spiritual realization, but then they come home and they behave terribly with their wife and kids. That doesn't work for me. I feel that that's a very transcendent-only approach to awakening, that is more coming out of a monastic kind of way of viewing the path.

Well, most people I'm sure, who are listening to this, are living ordinary lives with families, they're working in the world. We're all busier than is good for us. Our culture's adapting rapidly, so I'm more interested in what actually really helps us. And one of the things I've noticed is that if I don't say, "Oh, that's ego, that's bad, I should just transcend that," then it's so much easier for me to get really real and go towards it and say, "What is this exactly? What is this really? Oh, there's an impression here of hurt and anger to do with my father, and it's like a four-year-old consciousness. Oh I can see that that's the part of my consciousness that's frozen in some suffering." What does suffering always need? Love. It will always relax when it gets love. The ice will melt when it is touched by the warmth of the sun.

So frankly, this is not only a more loving way of working with the difficult forces of our nature, it's far more efficient, and it helps us not to transcend our humanity but integrate and heal it. And our ego actually needs some healing before we can really open into refined possibilities and expansive states, which everybody wants. But before that's possible, you have to relax and deal with some of your traumas. You have to get real about your psychodynamic material, and see where you're behaving like a five-year-old, and understand, "Oh, that five-year-old's really hurt and angry." Okay, that needs love, but it needs presence, right? Doesn't mean we act like a hurt five-year-old in our life at work, because we'd likely get fired. But it is how we work within ourself that matters.

And then that brings naturally so much more compassion and wisdom when other people are kind of behaving a little weirdly. We have more of an insight as to, "Oh, there's something up for them that's really hard for them." That actually leads us to practically being a lot more skillful, rather than just being tough with them, to ask good questions and invite them to talk and get real. I don't know whether that makes sense to you.
 

Yes. I appreciate the distinction. One of the core terms you use is "ego relaxation" when talking about a feminine approach to spirituality. How does that compare to a masculine approach to spirituality?

It's basically what I've just been talking about. Ego relaxation is meeting any part of our ego, and instead of trying to transcend it, fix it, get rid of it, rearrange it, we just be there with love. We do nothing, but we don't defend, we don't repress, we don't judge, we just be there.

So it's when we actually be fully here with any part of our ego, it either reveals deeper levels of our ego that helps in the unwinding melting process, or it just curls up like a kind of a settled pet on your lap and ceases to be so problematic.

So what happens is we relax out of the fixations of our personality. Doesn't mean that there will be no ego at all, because I'm not sure whether that's actually even possible while we're in a human body, because an ego really is some kind of identity, is part of the vehicle of a human life. But what we can do is relax out of the personality fixations. So ego relaxation really helps us with that. It's actually the how of surrender in a real way.
 

When you said you just need to be there, it can be difficult living in this hyper-masculine culture. How do you create the space for a more graceful way of living? Can you offer some practical advice on how to do that?

Sure. Well, I think most listeners probably already know that half an hour of meditation a day is always very useful; it is, there's no question about it. Having some kind of formal practice where you consciously dedicate yourself to quieting the mind, concentrating your energy, grounding, stilling your consciousness is very, very important and beneficial. It's a little bit like, how could you be expected to run for your life when a wild tiger is chasing you if you haven't been doing any exercise regularly? It's going to be unlikely.

I think that's a really important thing given our day and age, where there's so much stimuli, everything's moving faster, that we really prioritize some time in our day for meditation.

And often people will say, "I don't have time," but I always say, "Well, do you have time to take a shower in the morning?" Most of us wouldn't dream of going to work without taking a shower. So we need to really challenge ourself about how we lay out the structure of our day, even if we have children. I know plenty of people that have children and they figure out a way of giving... it might not be half an hour, but they give themself 10 or 15 minutes. And those 10 or 15 minutes where we deliberately and consciously marinade in deeper reality is essential; otherwise we don't really have a foundation.

From that place, what's required often is to have what I call "Resting in God minutes." So we all have one of these cell phones. We all do now. And they can be a real challenge to our spiritual practice, or they can also be an aid, because we can easily set ourself a reminder for three "Resting in God minutes" punctuating the day.

And what's really interesting is that when I've given this assignment to my students is how often they've said, "That's great," and they've set their reminder, and then when the reminder pings, "Rest in God a few minutes," even though they've got good intentions, they're saying, "Okay. I'm just going to lie on the floor. I'm just going to let myself be nothing, do nothing, get nothing, become nothing, seek for nothing, relinquish nothing. Be who you are, rest in God. Just going to just be," how often people just hit the "Complete" button, how often they tell themself, "I don't have time." Well, if you have time to go to the bathroom, you have time to take a few minutes.

And if you do challenge yourself to actually do that, you will notice that it's like a reset, and then you can come back to the activity, to that email, to that important presentation you're working on, but you're coming back with more grace. There's more presence as you respond. You're less caught in those false beliefs that think the world's going to end if you don't get it absolutely right by 5pm today, which is never true.
 

It's amazing what one minute can do to reboot and bring you back, as you said, with more presence and grace. You teach a feminine approach to spirituality. What has your experience been with teaching this approach to men?

Well, I'm about the only spiritual teacher that I know, where in my regular sangha, about 50 percent of the group are men. Heterosexual men, I might add. And what I have found is that the true feminine isn't just for women. The emergence of the deep feminine is for humanity, is to bring forth the values and the transmission of love, integration, embodiment, compassion, attunement, deep listening, a capacity to be more yielded, not just for people with a vagina, but for all beings, to remind us of those virtues that we have pushed past in the name of enlightenment and in our culture that are absolutely essential if we are to evolve now.

So I'm very passionate about this. And why I've chosen at a certain juncture in my teaching life eight years ago when I was asked to really take the reins of the Feminine Wisdom School that was a gender-specific mystery school, it became very clear to me that this work is from the feminine but for humanity, for all beings.
 

Beautiful. Well, Miranda, thank you so much for sharing so much time with us today.

You're welcome. I hope it's been a benefit to those who are listening.
 

Oh, I'm absolutely sure. I know your teachings are helping many people in many important ways, so thanks again for a beautiful interview.

You're welcome.
 

Miranda Macpherson is a contemporary spiritual teacher, counselor, and author of the spiritual guidebook, Boundless Love. Her newest book is The Way of Grace: The Transforming Power of Ego Relaxation.

Miranda, who has been teaching internationally since 1995, 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.

Click here to visit Miranda’s website and to sign up for her free newsletter. You will then be alerted when The Way of Grace is published.

You will also find a virtual “sanctuary” on Miranda’s website where you can access an abundance of audio meditations as well as audio and video teachings.