Miranda Macpherso – Restorative Practice of Ego Relaxation 2022

During this deeply transformative 8-module course, you’ll:

• Learn how to take a spontaneous vacation from the stress and struggle generated by your own mind — anytime, anywhere — as Miranda guides you through her transmission, Ego Relaxation… bringing you back time and again into a natural state of peace and joy
• Experience inquiry, meditation, and mantra practices to become more present with all that is… softening and allowing everything with an open heart
• Discover that Grace, the supreme spiritual nourishment, is always alive at the core of your being, and explore how to ignite it through the practice of Ego Relaxation
• Release tendencies to grasp, reject, defend, and re-create unnecessary suffering in your life
• Learn to settle agitation in your body and mind — neurologically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually
• Acquire a more holistic view of ego and essence, not in a dualistic framework that perceives one as bad and the other as good, but as the surface and depth of one divine ocean of consciousness that allows you to turn absolutely everything into a gateway home
• Let go of limiting patterns, beliefs, and self-judgment that have kept you from moving forward in your life in the way you most desire
• Learn how to cultivate qualities that support you to flourish inwardly — addressing the primary stumbling blocks on your spiritual path, while also making you deeper, wiser, kinder, and more resilient
• Relax into the loving holding of the universe to feel restored, while regaining your innate trust, optimism, and healthy responsiveness in changing times
• Recognize that, when you relax your ego and inevitably land in your own divinity, you are not separate from anyone or anything
• And more…

You don’t “do” spiritual transformation; relax the interference and Grace finds you.
— Miranda Macpherson

Many of the world’s wisdom traditions suggest that Grace comes alive through surrender, which is often misunderstood as trying to push past your ego limitations, bypassing important aspects of your humanity in the name of spiritual awakening.

True surrender, however, is really a matter of Ego Relaxation — compassionately understanding and relaxing your ego constructs and defenses. This is a kinder and surprisingly more effective approach than trying to battle yourself into spiritual shape.

In this opening module, Miranda will share how you can get out of your own way by learning to stay present, feel everything, and do nothing to change, fix, or rearrange your experience — even if just for a moment. Instead, you’ll learn to open, soften, and allow your direct experience to be exactly as it is. This advanced but simple practice of non-doing reverses the usually unconscious ego activity that disconnects you from the great peace, love, and joy of your divine nature.

One of the most important secrets of this path is that the gate to Grace is always, and only, right where you are. So, the practice of Ego Relaxation involves learning to fully open into what is here now — your felt, sensed experience — minus your judgment about whether your experience is good or bad, right or wrong, spiritual or unspiritual. That kind of everyday mental commentary, often going on in the background of your mind, is the very thing that interferes with Grace moving in and through you. Ego Relaxation enables you to see and meet the ways you block the flow of Grace — thereby melting away the dense patterns of your ego.

In this first session, you’ll:

• Discover or deepen your understanding of Ego Relaxation, which helps you fully accept your here-and-now experience
• Be guided in a meditation practice that moves you into a spontaneous vacation from the unnecessary stress and struggle generated by your own mind, and open to your natural, easeful state, through the transmission of Ego Relaxation
• Understand your particular brand of ego activity and the underlying forces driving the grasping, rejecting, and self-abandonment that bumps you back into the surface of your personality
• Open to a more holistic, game-changing view of ego and essence, not as bad or good, but as the surface and depth of a divine ocean of consciousness
• Learn that by opening in and through all parts of your experience, everything you grapple with can become a gateway to spiritual depth and a greater humanity

You do not need to know what is happening
Or where it is all going.
What you need to recognize are the
Possibilities and the challenges offered by the present moment,
And to embrace them with courage, faith, and love.
The world is transparent and the Divine
Is shining through all the time.
— Thomas Merton

Turning more substantially within and learning to relax your ego defenses requires great courage. Trust is the spiritual muscle that helps you let go and open into the new — whether opening to new dimensions of consciousness beyond your conceptual understanding, or allowing for changes in your life with less stress.

Trust helps resolve the ego issue of fear, enabling you to discriminate between authentic threats to your wellbeing (so you can take life-sustaining action), and the neurotic fears that can so easily have you spinning in anxiety and procrastination. The deeper your trust, the more your surrender can become total, granting you access to the deeper mysteries of the spiritual path, allowing you to be graceful even in the face of physical death.

Cultivating trust requires that you first meet your mistrust — the layers of contraction in your body and mind resulting from challenges you experienced in the first few years of your life. From those contractions, you may have developed foundational beliefs about who you are, how safe this world is (or isn’t), and how much you can relax and open.

You can heal from these early impressions and regain your natural trust as you learn to practice Ego Relaxation with all that’s caused you to contract. Your trust grows stronger as you learn to recognize and relax into the loving goodness that’s always here, regardless of your history.

In this module, Miranda will guide you into a practice to access the loving goodness that holds everything, even when the outside world is in utter turmoil. Trust invites you to remember that, even when you don’t understand why or how, Divine Grace is always trying to evolve you.

You’ll:

• Come to understand your mistrust by exploring your early environment and what caused you to contract… and how Ego Relaxation helps this heal
• Learn to trust in the loving goodness underlying all life, rather than your ego’s fearful view on reality
• Start to discriminate trust from naivete, and who and what not to trust
• Grow to appreciate your human need for divine mothering — and how to access the loving presence that’s always here, nourishing and supporting you to stay present and open with everything
• See how trust manifests in the 3 centers — belly, heart, and head — and the stages that support trust to become total
• Relax into the infinite holding of the universe, to be restored and resilient, and retrieve your innate optimism

Heaven Itself is reached with empty hands and open minds,
Which come with nothing to find everything
And claim it as their own.
We will attempt to reach this state today,
With self-deception laid aside, and with an honest willingness
To value but the truly valuable and the real.
— A Course in Miracles

Walking a true spiritual path asks that you learn to love the truth. Cultivating this muscle cuts through your ego’s inevitable self-deception — the ways you’re not fully authentic. At first this means becoming more honest with yourself and where you’re applying your precious life force (and why).

Most of us live out of a self-image that we call “me,” but is actually not who we really are. Trying to become the best version of ourselves often involves running from who we fear we are at the core, and chasing after some ideal we hope will bring us external validation, approval, or fulfillment.

As a result, we’ve lost touch with our holiness. Of everyone’s holiness. Trying to shore up a self-image enslaves you and prevents the possibility of living an authentic, meaningful life based on knowing who you really are (and always have been).

Loving the truth helps you disengage from the need for external approval, which, in turn, makes your unfolding infinite… freeing you up to be authentically and unapologetically yourself. Loving truth can bring crystal clarity and meaning to your life, and apply your life force, time, and energy to what really matters — graciously letting go of what doesn’t.

The deeper you learn to love the truth, the more you discover that reality is your deep heart’s beloved. It’s heavenly when you can open to experience what truly is, the Grace you exist within and are part of.

In this module, you’ll:

• Experience a mantra that activates your devotional heart, supporting you to live in truth
• Ignite the natural devotion of your deep heart and its love for what really is
• Cut through your tendency to betray yourself and give your precious life force to things that don’t really matter
• Illuminate what pulls you away from living authentically, and why
• Relax out of your self-image — who you try to be, or who you fear you are — and find the courage to be nakedly real
• Access the clarity of your divine nature, so you can live and relate meaningfully
• Live into your deepest values, becoming more impeccable

The Divine opened my spiritual eye
And showed me my soul in the middle of my heart,
And I saw the soul as wide as if it were
An infinite world, as if it were a blessed kingdom.
— Julian of Norwich

A key feature of all egos is the tendency to lock down into fixed positions that close you down to new insight, learning, and possibilities. This tendency boxes you in, making you heavier and duller, and limiting you from expanding inwardly.

Outwardly, it limits the possibility of harmonizing co-creatively with others who have different perspectives, which feeds the divisiveness of the us-versus-them mindset that has such a negative impact on our relationships and communities.

Curiosity is the antidote.

It brings the joy of discovery alive and evokes excitement. It makes you into a happy learner — happy to grow from all your experiences as you move through life.

Holistic curiosity invites you to cultivate not only open-mindedness, but an openness in the heart and senses also, supporting you to enter more fully into your own interior and discover infinite realms of Grace. It guides you into a much bigger perspective — that you exist because the Divine wants to expand itself and co-create new possibilities.

As you come to understand that your mind, heart, and body are vessels for learning and experience, you directly experience the limitlessness of your spiritual nature and its possibilities.

In this module, Miranda will inspire you to enter more fully into your immediate, direct experience and discover what Christian mystic Julian of Norwich described as “an infinite world, a blessed kingdom within.”

Miranda will help you:

• Illuminate your tendencies to lock down into a fixed position that blocks the flow of Grace, fresh learning, and co-creativity
• Discover what drives your attachments to the positions you hold in life about yourself, others, and how the world works
• Learn how to enter more fully into your direct experience, and, through feeling and sensing energy and presence, gain greater access to your unconscious and subtle depths
• Feel the wonder of discovering that there’s so much more to you and everyone
• Tap into to the infinite worlds within

In this module, you’ll learn to turn more substantially within and open to everything you find as exciting and vulnerable.

Miranda says that, as we relax out of our ego tendencies that are based in a sense of separation, we inevitably will meet the super-ego — the guardian for our familiar ego identity. This outer layer of our ego structure is made up of judgment, absorbed from the internalization of the rules and conditions of our childhood authority figures. Until we see and understand how to work with this aspect, it’s usually the single greatest block to the restorative Grace we seek. As we expand spiritually, these judgments can get loud and show up as kickback reactions, urging us to get back into our boxes.

Judgment is the instrument that reconstitutes separation, so it’s important to disengage from it. Ego Relaxation helps you do that.

In this module, Miranda will guide you to create a truly safe inner atmosphere for your continued journey of learning and growing… moving you beyond the need to judge yourself or others. You’ll come to understand why kickback reactions happen, and how to navigate them with Grace, so you can unhook from the entrainment of the past.

You’ll discover:

• How to stop habitually judging yourself
• Your inner judgment’s basic message to you
• The best way to unhook from the inner aggression of the super-ego
• Ways to reclaim your true inner authority… saying NO to the voice of self-attack, and YES to your basic human need and right to be treated with dignity and respect
• Harness humor, awareness, prayer, and choice to build an inner altar of protection for your vulnerability and your right to be perfectly imperfect

Ego consciousness represents not only our ignorance, but also our suffering. Suffering must be met with love. Every living being needs kindness in order to grow, unfold, thrive. We need loving-kindness like we need oxygen in every breath.

Sometimes, however, it can be difficult to treat ourselves and others with the degree of kindness we all need. All ego structures contain hatred, which is often disowned and buried, but commonly expresses itself in a lack of self-care, in self-sabotaging behaviors, in unreasonable expectations of ourselves and our loved ones, or in a tendency to override our genuine limitations when navigating sickness, aging, or challenging life circumstances. Hatred cuts us off from our tender heart as a way to protect against pain or a sense of powerlessness.

Loving-kindness is the presence that can kindly touch our most difficult, defensive material with tenderness, even for those unwanted parts of ourselves — the imperfections we don’t want to look at — with a presence that’s spacious, forgiving, and supremely compassionate.

Loving-kindness is the midwifing presence for the human soul that helps us be with all of our experience so even our deepest suffering can be transformed into wisdom.

In this module, you’ll:

• Learn a powerful practice that will serve you in navigating any difficult life passage with Grace
• Discover the 5-part practice of exponential loving-kindness based on Miranda’s version of the classical Metta prayer
• Illuminate where it’s hardest for you to practice loving-kindness and why — toward yourself, a loved one, a neutral person, a difficult person, groups of people, or everyone
• Discover the sheer power of prayer, even if you don’t consider yourself to be religious
• Let your heart and mind open to the Grace of true forgiveness that the loving-kindness practice nurtures
• Pour your loving-kindness deeper into this world that so needs it

Many great wisdom traditions acknowledge the importance of humility on the spiritual path. Humility purifies the soul so we can gain entry into the most beautiful and fulfilling possibilities. However, humility represents a great challenge to our ego with its inevitable sense of pride — thinking we know how things are and what should happen next. This pride makes us opaque to intimacy with the Divine and, therefore, unable to receive the exquisite gifts of Grace that are only available when we let go and open to mystery. Often this pride takes a less obvious form — the delusive presumption that we are separate.

Humility invites us to question all of our presumptions — about who we are, what the world is, and even what God is — and to be willing to empty ourselves of everything we think we know.

In this module, Miranda will help you accept that the self you take yourself to be is actually a network of adaptive mechanisms and constructs based on separation. You’ll learn that this self is limited, knows little, and can only repeat its limited repertoire. If you can befriend those places within you that honestly do NOT know the way, and relax there… then you become spontaneously available for a Grace deeper than your mind to find you. It’s in this state of sweet surrender that you find yourself at home WITHIN the Divine.

In this session, you’ll:

• Discover the difference between false humility (sycophantic behavior that imitates your spiritual heroes) and true humility that makes you spiritually receptive
• Make friends with your “I don’t knows” and accept yourself as fully human
• Empty out your presumptions of what you think you know, what you think you are, and your spiritual opinions
• Acknowledge that you need Grace… that your ego cannot lead the way home
• Experience the exquisite beauty that comes when you bow to the cause of your being, of all being

According to Miranda, what we need at every turn of the spiritual path is to cultivate the willingness to BE here. To open honestly and kindly to our experience with the curiosity to discover what is and what isn’t. The daily invitation of our lives in these complicated times is to open to the wise and compassionate response.

Becoming the most graceful human being you can requires that you continually yield your way for the way, just doing your best time and again. You’ll inevitably stumble in ignorance, and that’s okay, as long as you keep coming back.

Activating your personal will to ongoingly practice Ego Relaxation will help you live into all you’ve learned so far. Eventually, it will become so natural that you’ll find yourself abiding more in your divine nature, where the qualities of your deepest humanity are uppermost in all you think, say, and do.

Although this is a long-term process, it’s possible for anyone who’s patient and willing to persevere… to engage what Ramana Maharshi called the gentle effort.

In this closing module, you’ll:

• Cultivate what A Course in Miracles calls the little willingness, to remember reality and lean into your divine nature, rather than habitually acting from ego
• Discover simple prayers and on-the-spot practices that can nourish your resolve when you get activated in stress patterns
• Understand the difference between ego efforting (pushing from your ego) and the gentle effort that truly supports you to live Grace
• Open to a spiritual support always available to you in your ongoing practice of meditation, inquiry, and prayer
• Align with the will of the universe so you can flow with life’s invitations rather than push for your will to be done